The Nazis Next Door Quotes

“Project Paperclip, the secret program that brought some sixteen hundred German scientists to the United States after the war.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“One critic put out a mocking notice in a magazine: “Memo to would-be war criminal: If you enjoy mass murder, but also treasure your skin, be a scientist, son. It’s the only way, nowadays, of getting away with murder.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Many thousands of the survivors did not leave the Allied camps; some not for months, some not for years, some not at all. Thousands died from disease and malnourishment even after Hitler’s defeat.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“The intelligence that most of America’s Nazi spies peddled to the government usually proved useless or, worse, flat-out wrong. But they were anti-Communist, and in the Cold War era, that was all that mattered.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals,” Patton wrote in his diary after learning of the scathing report to Truman”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Robert H. Jackson, Nuremberg prosecutor (1945)”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Dulles got what he wanted in the negotiations: Wolff and his men in Italy agreed to lay down their arms to the Allied troops. It was, at least on its face, a military and intelligence coup that proved a capstone in Dulles’s ascendant career, helping land him the job of CIA director eight years later, under President Eisenhower, side by side with his brother, John Foster Dulles, who was secretary of state. Viewed with any perspective, however, the early surrender did not hold up as the momentous occasion that Dulles had envisioned it. Coming just six days before the full surrender of Germany, its military impact was blunted. Lives were saved in Italy, to be sure, but most of them were likely Germans and Italians, not Americans.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“General Wolff—the right-hand man to Himmler—now had the Americans on his side.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“But he did make one small request. It seemed that the general, while commanding his Nazi troops in Italy, had managed to acquire some three million shares of equity in Italian companies. Whether these shares were looted from the Jews, Dulles did not say.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Guido Zimmer, “despite his membership of the SS, was a devout Catholic . . . Zimmer, somewhat of an aesthete and an intellectual, was moved by a desire to save the art and religious treasures of Italy” from ruin if the war continued, Dulles wrote. “Zimmer seemed to be a misfit in the SS . . . He was good-looking, clean-cut, not the way one pictures the typical SS officer.” Wolff sought no special protection from war crimes charges, Dulles insisted in his cable.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“ignored the many atrocities he had directed. “Wolff is [a] distinctive personality,” Dulles wrote, and “dynamic,” too. “Our reports and impressions indicate he represents more moderate element in Waffen SS, with mixture of romanticism.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“how impressed he was with the Nazi general,”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“It is all forgotten,” Jakob Reimer, the ex-SS officer in Queens, said when confronted with the details of his Nazi crimes in an American courtroom more than a half century later. “It’s all over.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“They were “a thousand little Führers,” as Robert Jackson, the Supreme Court justice turned Nazi prosecutor at Nuremberg, called Hitler’s helpers. And yet, despite their dark pasts, they had little difficulty camouflaging themselves among the refugees seeking a haven in America. Immigration screeners were too ill trained, or uninterested, to spot them.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Like Artukovic, many Nazi collaborators came from Eastern Europe. Hundreds of fugitives with Nazi ties came from Germany, but many more who wound up in America were collaborators from Nazi-controlled countries like Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Ukraine. American immigration policies made it easy for them to come. In the first few years after the war, fully 40 percent of all the visas granted by the United States were set aside for war refugees from the Baltics.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“To immigration officials, he was simply another visitor traveling to the United States from Europe.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Had he used his real name, or had immigration officials dug deeper, it might have been evident that Artukovic was a top cabinet minister in the Nazi puppet government in Croatia, or that he had reputedly ordered the murder and imprisonment of some 600,000 of his countrymen, or even that Yugoslavian war crimes investigators wanted to arrest the man known there as the Butcher of the Balkans.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Andrija Artukovic,”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Jakob Reimer, the SS officer turned potato chip salesman. They sneaked into America as reformed “refugees,”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Tom Soobzokov in New Jersey and Otto von Bolschwing in New York, they had been recruited by American intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the FBI, to help get information on the Soviets.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Whatever moral baggage they brought with them was outweighed, military officials believed, by the promise of technological breakthroughs.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“The most famous of these scientists was Wernher von Braun.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Even as the United States was casting blame on the Vatican for shepherding Hitler’s minions to freedom, it was doing much the same itself, creating a safe haven for the Nazis in America.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“An internal Justice Department report, The Office of Special Investigations: Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust, by Judy Feigin, which I first wrote about in the New York Times in 2010, provided the impetus for this book and proved an exhaustive resource. U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, by Richard Breitman, Norman J. W. Goda, Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe, was indispensable as well.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“In fact, there was plenty of evidence that the CIA was aware of his wartime activities. In the agency’s own files was evidence that Lileikis “was possibly connected with the shooting of Jews in Vilna,” that he worked “under the control of the Gestapo,” and that his Nazi ties got him rejected the first time he tried to come to America.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Now, the judge scoffed, “Lileikis is attempting to stand the classic Nuremberg defense on its head by arguing that ‘I was only issuing orders.’” Unimpressed, the judge stripped Lileikis of his American citizenship, saying he never should have been allowed in the country in the first place.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Again and again, the prosecutors asked Lileikis about his role in rounding up Jews for slaughter, and again and again, he refused to answer, with no hint of regret. The prosecutors could ask him whatever questions they wanted about Vilnius; he wasn’t talking.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Rosenbaum disagreed. The refrain that these men were too old to be prosecuted was heard so often that he had a stock response he delivered to anyone who raised it: There was no statute of limitations for the monstrous crimes that had made these men unworthy to call themselves Americans.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Ten long years passed. The Berlin Wall came down. The Baltic republics became free nations. And finally, Mike MacQueen found the canvas-bound notebook in the long-hidden archives. During those ten years, Lileikis lived quietly in Boston, hearing nothing from the Justice Department.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men