New Book Fuels Debate Over Nazi ‘Hires’

Christopher Simpson, a 35-year-old native of Washington, is not a Jew, never attended college and never was trained as a historian. The bespectacled writer has spent most of his adult life working for trade magazines about computers and electronics.

While researching a story in the Silicon Valley on Soviet espionage in America, however, he adopted a new role for himself: He has become an unlikely Holocaust scholar, challenging the conduct of nothing less than the U. S. government over its postwar aid to some Nazis.

In his new book, “Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War” (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York: $19.95), Simpson says the CIA, the State Department and U.S. Army intelligence knew, or should have known of their crimes, but still hired thousands of Nazis and their collaborators after World War II.

The American employment of Nazis did the United States lasting harm, helping to perpetuate the Cold War. It also created unanticipated negatives, which intelligence agents long had dubbed “blowback,” he argues, based on three years of research in 25,000 pages of archival materials, including documents gained from more than 400 requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

The CIA, the State Department and U.S. Army intelligence have refused to comment on his book.

Justice Department Concession

But Simpson’s views received significant new support on June 16 when the Justice Department conceded that the United States had often hired top former Nazis as postwar informants and sometimes helped them avoid prosecution for war crimes.

The agency, in a 92-page report based on a two-year investigation, detailed the case of Robert Jan Verbelen, a one-time Nazi who now lives in Austria and cannot be extradited.

Verbelen was convicted by a Belgian court of murdering 101 people while commanding a Fascist, Flemish security corps in Austria. He worked as an American informant for a decade and “manipulated” U.S. Army intelligence into helping him avoid punishment for his crimes, the Justice Department said.

The agency said it had uncovered 13 other similar cases besides Verbelen’s, though details were not provided because of security regulations.

The latest Justice Department report was a major reversal in the agency’s last, 1983 position that the United States knowingly had protected only one Nazi criminal from prosecution after the war: Klaus Barbie, a Gestapo leader convicted in 1987 of “crimes against humanity” for his role in the deportation of several hundred Jews and members of the French Resistance to Nazi extermination camps.

But in his book, Simpson argues that some of America’s most influential officials--including George F. Kennan, the noted diplomat, and Allen Dulles, CIA director from 1953-61--had shaped a foreign policy that all but required the hiring of Nazi war criminals. They believed it was inevitable for America to go to war with the Soviet Union; they thought the Soviets could be defeated only with Nazi aid.

As a result, the United States “employed these men and women for their expertise in propaganda and psychological warfare, for work in American laboratories, and even as special guerrilla troops for deployment inside the U.S.S.R. in the midst of a nuclear war,” Simpson writes.

Reviewers such as Peter Grose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, have praised his book. In the Washington Post, Grose said the work is “the beginning of serious research” on the U.S. employment of Nazis “to serve American interests.” In Philadelphia, Nora Levin, author of “The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry,” said Simpson’s book was the first to detail U.S. complicity in aiding Nazi war criminals.

The work also was praised by Eli Rosenbaum, deputy director of the Office of Special Investigations, which investigates and prosecutes alleged Nazi criminals in the United States. He said Simpson “documents so carefully . . . what happened and why it happened and how it happened.”

Going Too Far?

But Serge Schmemann, New York Times Bonn bureau chief, while lauding Simpson for providing “ample new research” about U.S. hiring of Nazis, said the author goes too far in arguing that “the recruitment of East Europeans and other anti-Communists by the CIA after the war served to keep Washington on a Cold War track to this day.”

Simpson said his study shows that the Cold War was the chief impetus for hiring the Nazis. They proved to be unreliable operatives, and the U.S. government, by hiring them and using them throughout Eastern Europe, unwittingly offered them a means to create a new right-wing network, he said.

Though his background offers no compelling reason for him to research Nazis, the Holocaust and American foreign policy, Simpson said he found he was suited for the topic because his writing on computers and electronics had given him an interest in intelligence matters.

Through his Silicon Valley research on Soviet espionage, he was in the right place at the right time to learn of a Sacramento case that led to his book on the Nazis, he said.

Simpson said he was fascinated by reports on a federal trial in which the United States sought to deport “a German Nazi, Baron Otto von Bolschwing, who had been involved in a pogrom in Bucharest, Romania, which killed about 630 people. And his defense was, ‘You can’t deport me. The CIA brought me to America.’

“This caught my attention for obvious reasons, and when I started to look into it, I discovered there were a number of similar cases,” he said. He wrote a magazine article on the trial, then sold his book proposal.

Focus on Gustav Hilger

One of his focuses became Gustav Hilger, a diplomat and chief political officer for Eastern Front issues for the German Foreign Ministry. Hilger knew about mass killings of Jews on the front by the SS but “took no action to protest or to remove himself from the bureaucratic machinery of destruction in which he found himself entangled,” Simpson writes.

Later, Hilger “played a significant part in SS efforts to capture and exterminate Italian Jews” and led the German Foreign Office effort to persuade the Italians to force Jews into work camps, from which thousands were shipped to concentration and death camps, Simpson says.

Despite his heinous history, the U.S. granted Hilger asylum after the war, Simpson says, because of his “work in Germany’s political warfare program, along with his great expertise in Soviet affairs. For the next several years, Hilger shuttled back and forth between the United States and Germany under the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department.”

Hilger, who died in Munich in 1965, had an acknowledged influence on U.S. policy toward Germany and the Soviet Union.

Simpson said Hilger’s case was just one of many he uncovered and was troubled by: “What I found the most disturbing about all this is the success of denial--the extent to which we could ignore what we were doing and to continue the policy through . . . an intentional obfuscation of what was happening. . . .”

Worse things happened as a result of the U.S. employment of Nazis, said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, who requested the inquiry that prompted the recent Justice Department report.

America’s hiring of Nazis was “totally immoral, reprehensible and indefensible,” he said, adding, “There is no justification whatsoever for the U.S. government, after fighting a war for justice, freedom and democracy, to recruit experts in torture, murder, brutality. . . . Only a perverted sense of the national interest could bring people to recruit individuals of this nature.”