16 November 2010

Safe Haven


(Arthur Rudolph, a senior NASA engineer, displays the Saturn Vb booser he designed to enable America to land men on the Moon. Rudolph was also a member of the Nazi party in Germany during WWII, according to a Justice Department report made public by the New York Times this week. Photo NASA via Wikipedia)

Just back from Reagan National Airport in the rain and dark. It has been an Interesting couple of days with a lot to think about. This particular moment in time has European officials increasingly concerned that the Continent’s debt crisis will spread. Portugal and Ireland are the problem children of the moment, and though governments in both countries are putting a bold face on things, there is growing unease in the markets that things could slide into the crapper.
 
Europe! Jeeze. I am heavily leveraged in European securities as a hedge against another melt down here.
 
Between the current mess and the last one- the one that was splashed all over the Times during the weekend, you get the feeling that no evil ever ends. The news of the revelations contained in the 600-page Justice Department Report on the American coddling of Nazi war criminals is unsettling in the extreme. If you didn’t see it, an appreciation of the report is contained at:
 
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40178937/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/

The account concludes that American intelligence provided “safe havens” in the United States for Nazis and collaborators after the war ended,. The report was kept secret for nearly four years and was only issued in redacted fashion. Naturally, someone leaked the full report to the Times to enhance their position on things, which I suppose, absent the context of the times, is that we are the bad guys.
 
I had to sigh. The report is very much like the controversy over the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian. Those who seek to hijack the past do so in order to promote their ideas of the future.
 
There are historians today who seek to promote the idea that the struggle in the Pacific was a colonial and racist jeremiad. It is absurd, of course, if one looks back at the conduct of the Imperial Japanese Army in China and the Philippines, among other places, but there is an agenda they are working earnestly to steal the valor of those who fought.
 
The Justice Department gumshoes have chosen to forget past unpleasant realities. The Cold War battle lines were hardening; Eastern Europe was under the boot of the Red Army, and both sides were scouring the zones of occupation for the Nazi wonder weapons that would provide advantage in the new Atomic Age.
 
In these pages we have taken a stroll through Operations OVERCAST and its successor PAPERCLIP, the Joint Service programs that brought, among others, Werner Von Braun and his earnest rocketeers to Huntsville, Alabama to work at the Redstone Arsenal, and provide us with intercontinental ballistic missiles and the means to travel to the Moon.
 
The Navy had a similar vacuum cleaner souring the former Reich for engineers who had worked on sophisticated electronics, missiles and exotic submarine propulsion systems.
 
The end of a war is a messy business, in some ways surpassing the messiness of conducting it. The cloud of confusion and secrecy that was created at the time in the haste to secure advantage is now nearly impossible to unravel, and hence the 600-page report tinged with indignation.
 
That is now. Then, it was clear that the War Criminals had to be punished; the weary public expected nothing less. But that expectation had to be balanced by the alarming  news of the wonder weapons that had still been in the German pipeline. The Russians had Peenemunde, home of the “V” rockets, one and two. They also had some of the scientists who had worked on the rocket programs.

Some of the scientists had been ardent Nazis. Others had been forced to go along with a criminal system. It was hard to tell the difference, and the scientists kept their thoughts to themselves. Von Braun went to Texas to work for the Army. Other Germans went to the Navy, and traveled to Long Island, to a castle on a promontory overlooking the Sound.

The Naval Reserve Intelligence Program, run out of the District Three Office in Manhattan was responsible for setting up the retreat.

In private life, the Naval Intelligence Officers were successful entrepreneurs and lawyers. In public service, their exploits inspired a Humphrey Bogart movie about patriotic Mafiosi who suppressed Nazi saboteurs on the docks. When not coordinating the efforts of the Mafia to make the docks safe from Nazi saboteurs, members served behind the lines in the invasion of Sicily. Bernard Baruch was attached to the unit; Charles Lindbergh was a consultant.

With the war over, and the docks secure, the District Office took over the care and feeding of the Germans who had information and skills of interest to the Navy. They were ensconced at Sand Point, on the shore of Long Island near New York.
 
The subject of membership in the Nazi Party was not a matter that seemed to have much relevance at the time, and more than it did in Moscow. It was a new world in a the making.
 
By mid-1945 a German V-2 rocket team was already in US custody, and not imprisoned but living in a Washington hotel, complaining about their per diem allowance.

The Navy realized that the most valuable reparation available from Germany could be the brains of its scientists. The various technical bureaus of the War Department began to show intense interest in acquiring the dedicated services of the German technical specialists.

Not surprisingly, the public was not ready for the idea that Nazi scientists were going to be working for Uncle Sam., but they did, and their expertise helped us get to the Moon, and eventually, over nearly fifty years, defeat the scourge of Communism.
 
So the Justice Department decided to fight the war again, absent the context of the times. It is the sort of thing that only a generation of those who were not there could really understand.
 
Certainly the Baby Boomer didn’t get it. How could we? We are about the most self-righteous bunch who ever came down the pike.
 

(General John Shakikashvilli, USA-Ret. Official Army Photo.)

I remembered the Clinton Administration’s blind spot on history vividly. The Administration appointed General John Shalikashvili as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to replace the legendary Colin Powell.  “Shali” was a competent officer with a fine record, one of only three foeign-born officers to make four stars.
 
He was also a man whose inclination was to go along with his civilian masters. It was a mark of how little the Clinton White House understood about their history, when they trumpeted the fact that Shali was of Georgian descent, the one on the Crimea.
 
There was a little problem with the story, though. Shali had indeed survived the arrival of the Red Army in Warsaw as a boy. But there was more. His father was an aristocrat, prince of a noble house going back to the middle ages, and an officer of the Czar before serving under the Bolsheviks.
 
In 1939, he fought against the German invasion of Poland, but was captured. His unit was later co-opted by the Nazis and incorporated into the SS-Waffengruppe Georgien and transferred to the Western front to fight the British and Americans.
 
So, the Chairman of the Joint Chief’s of Staff of the United States had a father who served as an SS Officer.
 
I have absolutely nothing against General Shalikashvili’s father. I am of the opinion that a person has to do what a person must do to survive calamities.
 
Unfortunately for the Justice Department, that goes for nation states as well. Everyone needs a safe haven.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
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