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Zenarchist,
As someone of Ashkenaz and Kalderash decent, I find it odd that I'm taking this position. There is an entire wing of my maternal ancestors that died in Dachau, and my stake, my entrenchment, in this remembrance is telling in that I study ethnic violence as a career.
Yes, America consistently turned away Jewish refugees prior to their entry into the war, by which time the borders were sufficiently locked down that noone could make it to America. This travesty is perhaps best presented by the book "The Ship of the Damned."
Nonetheless I would sincerely question whoever informed you of these "facts," as they have clearly been twisted by a more modern agenda of critique of the US government and the generalized "corporate." While the mechanical data may be accurate, the spaces left for interpretation have clearly been filled. The "importation" of scientists working for the Third Reich - operation Paperclip - is clearly documented. On the other hand, this assertion about SS men with "organizational skills" applied to the Final Solution, I have never heard before, in spite having spent the last four years up to my neck in primary sources. Most of the men along the train relays that made up the Final Solution were tried and executed, many committed suicide as part of their loyal attempt to destroy documentation. Nonetheless, some camp commanders and smaller bureaucrats slipped away, as well as the single man responsible for most of the organization process of the Shoah; Adolf Eichmann. If the records of those caught later by Israeli agents tell us a rather different story than their reappearance as captains of industry.
If one would care to track the efforts of the Moussad, Simon Weisenthal and his colleagues, you'd discover that many of these men who were higher up in the party found their way first to havens in South America, and a few to North America under false identification. The former tended to live high on the hog from appropriated cash from the Party vaults (it helps to have enough cash to bribe Juan and Evita Peron...btw, much of the gold they were paid in was taken from the teeth incinerated Jews and Gypsies....). Please recall the fashion in which Eichmann himself was forcibly extracted from Argentina, against all international law, and tried and executed in Israel.
The latter, though - the US-imigrated Nazis - tended to end up in small towns, running or working for small businesses, and generally lying very low. I would be interested to see documentation regarding this idea of the movement of SS men to specifically act as counterintelligence agents against "left" organizations. While I am skeptical, the looming shadow of J Egdar Hoover over US intelligence for decades to come less room for this possibility in my mind.
However, for the record: only the major war criminals of the Third Reich were tried and executed at Nuremburg...even many of these in absentia. Furthermore, and this may sound like the ultimate in apologetics, but you have to realize that the SS was an immense bureaucratic body, only a section of which was responsible, even aware, of the Shoah/Final Solution. Military intelligence officers of the Waffen SS, who were a body independent of the "Death's Head" regiments that executed the Final Solution, and hence not necessarily a part of the war crimes tribunal, barring specific record/reference to actions relating to the Final Solution.
Many ex-SS men actually found their way in to corporate business in Germany and the rest of Europe via the capital they stashed away in Argentina, not to mention Juan Peron's silent agreement to shelter escaped Nazi war criminals and help them conceal their identities. After a decade or so, with nothing to trace them bureaucratically to their past, they found it easy to become key players in the companies rebuilding the rest of the world. Nonetheless, the myth of corporate-Nazi connection has been blown out of proportion to encompass all corporate entities, which in fact are doing quite well at the eevil coldhearted thing all by themselves.
Much of the German High Command, particularly the military branch which were controlled by men not necessarily considered "Party loyal" were entirely unaware of the Shoah. The entire system was masterminded by a tiny cabal of Third Reich loyalists - Himmler, Heydrich, and Eichmann being the chain of command who ultimately put and kept things in motion, with all authority devolving from this triumverate. Indeed, Individuals who were not cleared to find out about this project were quieted and removed by the Abwehr (German secret police).
Indeed, the entire historical image of the Shoah as a smooth-running machine is somewhat dubious (read "The Twisted Road to Auschwitz"). While the effectiveness of the Final Solution cannot be doubted in efficiency terms, one can look at the paper trail that led up to and through it, and perceive the general disorganization of that portion of the Reich in attempting to make material their leaderships' wild ideological positions. The axial positions of Himmler and Eichmann (Heydrich died in a plane accident) in keeping the system running somewhat belies the image of smooth bureaucratic unity...Eichmann in particular put in a great deal of footwork and effort to make the trains run (his diary keeping was as meticulous as the rest of his life).
As to whether you've been lied to, I don't know. I didn't grow up on US education, but I can tell you that everywhere I've been "educated," people have manipulated the perception of the past to decrease the sense of culpability and the sheer gut horror of what went on, but at the same time iron to perfect clarity the sense of "right" and "wrong." In reality, history is a mess, and nothing is half so clear as the victors - or sometimes the vanquished - would make it out to be. |
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