1. Difficulty in tracking and proving
The pursuit or repatriation of the Nazi's has not always been successful. There were not a few Nazi criminals who succeeded in hiding in secret hiding places, and some were explicitly protected by the countries of their residence, even though their identities were openly revealed.
Moreover, it was not easy to identify and prove criminals of crimes that occurred decades ago. Collecting enough evidence to prove guilty was "burdening, demanding time, money, and international cooperation." Victims were scattered around the world after the war, and even if criminals appeared, it was not easy to secure the testimony necessary to prove the crime.
In addition, the bias of witnesses, the sensitivity of witnesses easily affected by the surrounding environment, and the passage of time caused the greatest obstacle to identifying the same person by witnesses. As an alternative, photographic methods were used. In the Walus case, the U.S. government asked Israeli citizens to testify about the war crimes committed by a man named Walus, advertising his photos in newspapers. The validity of the testimony by the photograph was controversial as it was a photo long after the crime occurred and the quality of the photo was a problem. In the case of Kowalchuk, it was judged that the evidence presented by the U.S. government did not clearly prove that the defendant participated in the war crime.
The postwar Cold War between East and West caused a difficult situation even in the Nazi Church. In particular, the statements of the victims there had to be adopted as evidence for crimes committed in the eastern region. However, the trust of Soviet evidence was a problem in depriving the citizenship of Nazi criminals in the United States and other Western countries and convicting them in criminal trials. The testimony of Soviet citizens was the only evidence of many Nazi crimes. However, there was a problem of national interest between the Soviet Union and the United States in determining American citizens as Nazi criminals. In fact, in the Kungys case, the New Jersey District Court of the United States dismissed the claim for citizenship deprivation, saying it could not accept the evidence obtained under the cooperation of the Soviet government.
Above all, the biggest enemy of the execution of Nazi criminals was the years. As decades passed, witnesses' memories became blurred and confused time, place, and case. This confusion, which naturally appears after decades, used to lead to the innocence of the suspect by reducing the credibility of the testimony.
There have even been more cases of witnesses dying. People who spent years in concentration camps could not live up to normal life expectancy. It was very common for Nazi criminals to live longer than survivors of concentration camps.
2. Concealment and Utilization of Nazi War Crimes in the United States
From the beginning, there was a possibility that Nazi criminals disguised as refugees were hiding in the United States, which received the most refugees from Europe. Refugee camps established in Germany under the protection of the U.S. military included a number of Nazi collaborators, and it was reported that one-third of those from Baltic countries were Geshtapo or SS members. Nevertheless, the United States, which led the postwar order, was forced to accept refugees as much as possible. The United States initially introduced a quota system and issued preferential visas to the three Baltic countries or the Eastern Bloc merged by the Soviet Union. The U.S. Congress revised the Special Immigration Act of the DP Act in 1948 and the RR Act in 1953 to remove the existing immigration quota system and enable more immigration to flow in. These immigration-related laws, as well as any Nazi criminal who helped the abuse and punishment of civilians, were excluded.
Despite these regulations, Nazi criminals could easily migrate to the United States, hiding their identity and activities. Under the above Special Immigration Act, the Displaced Persons Commission was established and screening was carried out with the help of the CIC, but it was impossible to properly identify refugees from all over Europe. In particular, since there were few records of refugees from the eastern part of Germany, which accounted for a large proportion by the quota system, it was impossible to actually examine their identities. By 1952, when the DP law expired, 400,000 European refugees had flowed into the United States, of which about 10,000 were estimated to be war criminals. In other words, the United States was a "safe haven" for Nazi war criminals.
However, more specifically, it was because of the Klaus Barby incident that the United States hired Nazi war criminals as intelligence agents. While Barbie was repatriated from Bolivia to France in 1983 and tried, the U.S. government even made a formal apology to the French government after it was revealed by the U.S. intelligence agency CIC that he was a Nazi war criminal during his country from 1947 to 1951. CIC officials were not punished for such acts, such as transfer under the US Military Criminal Act (UCMJ), due to the expiration of the statute of limitations.
Just before the end of the war, the CIC of the United States separated and protected some Nazi intelligence officers belonging to the Nazi SS, SD, and Geshtapo from Germany and the occupation authorities. It was revealed that he even created what he called a "rat-line" to help wanted Nazi war criminals flee Europe. Some succeeded in obtaining U.S. citizenship with the help of U.S. intelligence agencies. At the same time as the war crimes trial was held in Nuremberg, the United States was siphoning off war criminals for its own national interest.
After that, with the intensification of the Cold War, the United States strengthened its resolution against terrorism rather than the will to track down and punish the Nazi, and used information officers who had experience in suppressing communists in the past as sources of anti-aircraft front. Moreover, there was fierce competition not only between countries that were deployed for the occupation of Germany but also between U.S. military units, so regardless of their experience during the war, their value as current intelligence agents was weighed. Barby's case was just one example of being hired as an intelligence agent in the past. They were very valuable to the US military, who had no knowledge of the local affairs, and some of Germany's intelligence officers were especially useful because they were familiar with the Communist Party, its members, and its activities under the influence of the Soviet Union. Some argue that there are at least 156 Nazi-related people used by U.S. intelligence agencies over the past decades.
In addition, 1,558 German and Austrian scientists migrated to the United States through an operation called Project Paperclip by the Ministry of Defense and the State Department. Most of them were members of the Nazi Party or SS. Famous scientists such as Werner von Braun, Theodor Zobe, and Herbert Axter belonged to the group. They moved to the United States, breaking away from the principle of de-Naziization policy and war crimes punishment, and worked for various organizations for the United States. And it is clear that many of the scientific achievements of the postwar era were achieved by Paperclip, but at the same time, the achievements also include formidable neurochemical weapons developed by the American people as experimental subjects. At least 20 of the cases dealt with by OSI were Nazi war criminals used by the U.S. government.
The United States refused several requests for repatriation of Nazi war criminals residing in the United States from various European countries. It was because the United States had not yet approved the country or because it could not believe the fairness of the trial. In the case of Yugoslavia, about 700 requests for repatriation were made, but the United States repatriated only about 20 cases to Yugoslavia. The protection and use of Nazi criminals in the United States revealed that the Soviet Union's accusation that "Western countries are holding Nazi war criminals in their arms and refusing to deport them" was partly grounded.
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