America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (28 page)

Some Byelorussians were picked up in a post-emigration check by the CIA’s more efficient cross-language indexing system and were referred to the FBI, but Wisner had arranged for prominent religious leaders in various ethnic groups to vouch for the émigrés as anti-communists who were being victimized by accusers of dubious backgrounds. These religious leaders, many of whom were themselves described in SS documents as key collaborators, played an important role in defeating the CIC screening system. Since few legitimate refugees, especially concentration camp survivors, had retained their birth certificates, the IRO permitted priests to issue substitute baptismal or marriage certificates.

Father Mikalaj Lapitski, an Orthodox priest mentioned favorably in Einsatzgruppen reports and a delegate to the Minsk congress in 1944, was a prolific producer of instant documentation for the Belarus network. The papers almost invariably listed a Polish birthplace, were translated to show a Polish variant of the Byelorussian surname and – at least for the younger collaborators – included a slight change in the date of birth so as to show that they had not been old enough for military service during the war. Lapitski’s forgeries appear in numerous immigration records, and his monument in the Belarus cemetery at South River, New Jersey, is equal in prominence to that of Otrowsky.
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Some of the Byelorussian Nazis, however, had become so notorious that merely withholding information from the CIC would not be enough. Kushel, for example, had already been described in the 1948 CIC Consolidated Orientation and Guidance Manual as the Byelorussian Minister of War, a member of the puppet government, and the leader of the Regensburg DP camp. It was one thing for the CIC to ignore General Clay’s favored Nazis while they were living in Germany; it would be another to defy Congress and clear them for visas.

Apparently acting on instructions, Kushel moved to another part of Germany, where he was less well known, and there applied for a visa to the United States. The local CIC investigator reported to the DP Commission that “Franzischak Kushel” was a high school teacher from 1936 to 1939 in Poland, worked on his parents’ farm at Dorey, in Poland, from 1939 to 1943, was employed by the AEG Company in Berlin from 1943 to 1944 (presumably as a slave laborer), and until the end of the war was a farm worker in Geissling, Germany.
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Not only had the spelling of Kushel’s name been changed, but his entire background had been forged.

In fact, central CIC files in Stuttgart contained several indexes for Kushel under various spellings, but which clearly established that he “controls the White Ruthenian Veterans League and was also the leading figure for the German SD” (USAIRR file No. XE198433-1181045) and was the same Kushel who “was in the 29th SS Grenadier Division, Russische No. 2” (which later became the Belarus Brigade of the 30th SS Division). Other CIC files connect Kushel’s “Veterans League” with reports of an anticommunist guerrilla force being recruited by Americans in the DP camps. The files also list Kushel as a former cabinet official in the Nazi puppet government of Byelorussia. Not only was this information withheld from immigration officials, but a cover story had been fabricated in its place. Kushel was issued a visa (No. 5291/73) at Munich on May 18, 1950. In New York, he established a front group for Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination. He then became an FBI informant and betrayed OPC’s plans to recruit Byelorussian ex-Nazis for paratroop operations behind Russian lines. Nice work for a former SS General.

Stankievich’s route to the United States was less direct. Having emerged unscathed from his denunciation by the Soviets in 1948, he had been put to work running an OPC-funded newspaper for Byelorussian émigré in the American-zone DP camps. Soon after the CIC rejected his first visa application, Stankievich moved to another region of Germany and applied again. And again, the CIC blocked the application. Stankievich filed an appeal to the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission, but before Clay’s staff could intervene, the CIC submitted a series of scathing reports to the DP Commission to the effect that:

Information on file at this headquarters reveals that Subject [Stankievich] made false statements on practically all major points in his Personal Data Form in an effort to hide his past history. The Personal Data Form of Ziniaide Stankievich, wife of Subject, has also been falsified.

The CIC report then went on to list chronologically every Nazi position held by Stankievich, including mayor of Borissow, national deputy of the Byelorussian Central Council, and finally, editor-in-chief of
Ranitsa
in Berlin just before the collapse of Nazi Germany.
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To make sure the DP Commission did not miss the point, the CIC noted that
Ranitsa
was “a pro-Nazi, anti-Allied paper printed in the White Ruthenian language under full control of the German authorities. Subject assigned many positions of trust in the German administration throughout the war.”

As a result of the Stankievich report and other documentation, the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission simply stopped considering visas from Byelorussian collaborators in 1950; anyone found to have been a member of the Ostrowsky government in any position from the lowest municipal official to national deputies was automatically rejected as a member of a “movement hostile” to the United States. As if to chide Wisner for the dubious backgrounds of the people he was recruiting, the CIC mentioned a secret file to the DP Commission that showed that Stankievich was a possible Soviet double agent:

Briefly, Subject worked first with the Soviets, then with the Nazis, then again for the Soviets. He appears to be an opportunist who will work for anyone who will pay him…. Subject is considered a security risk…. This should be sufficient to preclude [Stankievich’s] appeal beyond Amberg. However, we have additional information in our Secret files still more damning, which can be forwarded….

Even this did not keep Stankievich from trying to emigrate again. His “blue file” at Fort Meade contains four separate visa applications over the next ten years, all of which were rejected before he finally got to the United States in 1959. By that time OPC had penetrated CIA offices abroad and were circumventing the Parole Powers Act by issuing their own visas to foreigners recruited for intelligence purposes. The State Department urged the CIA to make these visas look “as normal as possible.” It was nothing less than treason against the US Constitution granting exclusive power to Congress on immigration matters.
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The American consulate in Stuttgart was the center of Wisner’s visa mill. As soon as news of the Displaced Persons Act reached the camps, the handful of American officials were besieged by refugees who wished to emigrate to the United States. Some of them were in a state of panic, fearing that there would not be enough visas for everyone. The wife of one consular official said that her husband was approached by a woman who offered to trade a handkerchief full of diamonds for visas.

Procedures established by the Displaced Persons Act that governed the issuance of visas were complex, and consular officials depended upon inquiries made by other agencies in determining eligibility. The system required American charities to obtain blank sponsorship forms for a certain number of refugees and then to receive lists of eligible applicants from the IRO. The IRO forwarded each individual refugee application and sponsorship form to the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission, along with a detailed questionnaire to make certain that the applicant met the IRO’s qualifications as a victim of Nazi oppression. The commission sent the paperwork to the CIC for a further background investigation. Making false statements on the form was a criminal offense, but many refugees altered their backgrounds to avoid repatriation to their Communist-occupied homelands. Neither the Army nor the Displaced Persons Commission could do much to detect such falsifications, for the Soviet Union refused to cooperate with the IRO in providing background information on the refugees.

Strong efforts were made by some to identify war criminals and Nazis attempting to flee to the United States and other Western countries, but the harassed officials had almost no investigative staff and were faced with a mountain of paperwork. With applications for visas piling up in Stuttgart, attempts were made to decentralize operations. Consular sub-offices were opened up in the larger DP camps, such as Regensburg, which was controlled by the Belarus Brigade, and the OPC used its agents to help subvert the system.
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Having short-circuited the CIC background checks, the Byelorussian Nazis had little trouble with the rest of the visa process. Most of the applicants sailed with their families to the United States from Bremerhaven on converted troopships. Passenger manifests show that many of the collaborators traveled in groups, an indication that their visas had been processed simultaneously. The voyage to America was supposed to give the CIA and the FBI sufficient time to run final background checks, since in the rush to help the starving refugees neither agency had been given enough advance warning to investigate before the visas were issued.
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As a result, the CIA frequently identified Byelorussian Nazis to the FBI only after they had arrived in America. Unlike the regular “quota” émigrés, the displaced persons were not subjected to long delays at Hackensack, Ellis Island, or the other immigration ports. They were expedited with the help of American charities, such as the World Church Service, which had provided initial sponsorship. [Allen Dulles’s brother, John Foster Dulles, was then a senior leader in the World Church Service.]Once the Nazis were in America, tracing them became difficult. They only had to register once a year, and the Immigration Service’s record-keeping was abysmal.

By the time the CIA’s objections reached the FBI, the Byelorussian Nazis were already settled in South River, Cleveland, Chicago, New York, or in numerous smaller communities in America. There they became part of the well-funded émigré apparatus. The Byelorussians had lawyers to defend them, politicians to endorse them, and, most important, trusted FBI informants to vouch for them as good anti-communists. The CIC’s denunciations had little effect, other than to help the FBI identify potential recruits for its network of informers. The FBI, after all, is part of the Department of Justice which had helped OPC design the illegal immigration system in the first place. By the end of 1949, most of the leading Byelorussian collaborators, with the active assistance of Wisner and the OPC, had either evaded the restrictions designed to keep them out of the United States or were on their way. Once the leaders had arrived, they arranged sponsors for their followers, and the pyramid of Nazi emigration was begun.

In one case, in 1951, a State Department official named Vedeler stumbled across evidence of Wisner’s recruiting efforts. Believing that the operation was being conducted by CIA, he was delighted to blow the whistle on a rival agency and sent a lengthy memorandum to the State Department. It was immediately given to Wisner. Vedeler’s memorandum and a cover letter are one of the few extant documents discussing OPC activities during this period. One of the interesting features of the Vedeler memorandum is the notation that the agent in charge of setting up one of the Baltic “governments-in-exile” was the same person previously employed by the Displaced Persons Commission to advise it on which Baltic Nazi collaborators should be granted or denied visas. Before working for the State Department, Vedeler had previously worked for Military Intelligence, and, according to his Army dossier, was something of an expert on the role of Baltic collaborators in the SS auxiliary police. Recently, the same agent, now retired, candidly admitted working on covert operations in the Baltics, but he denied the very information which I had obtained from his own reports to the Army. He was subsequently recruited by Richard Sullivan, my superior at OSI, as an advisor on other Nazi war crimes cases. If the Justice Department’s efforts to deport Nazis was bad, the Australian, Canadian, British and German efforts were an outright farce.

Wisner’s smuggling scheme did hit the occasional snag, however. Arendt Wagenaar, his man in the Stuttgart consulate, lacked a passion for anonymity, the hallmark of a good covert agent, and his erratic behavior focused an unwelcome spotlight on the OPC plan. A Dutchman who had worked for the OSS during the war, Wagenaar had been hired by the State Department as the chief visa investigator in the consulate. His true position became apparent after some of the consular officers complained to the consul general that he did no work. They were bluntly told to stay out of Wagenaar’s business, making it obvious to the entire staff that he was an intelligence agent. Wagenaar also attracted the attention of the CIC because his mistress had been secretary to the local Gestapo chief, and Wagenaar appeared to be selling visas to refugees. The CIC missed the mark by only a slight margin. Wagenaar was selling visas, but not for money. He exchanged them for information from Emanuel Jasiuk, one of the most important Byelorussian collaborators.

Jasiuk had a remarkable history. He was a native of Newish, Byelorussia, and had attended the University of Likge in Belgium. Following graduation, he and his wife attempted to make their living as schoolteachers during the harsh Polish occupation of Byelorussia. When the Soviet Union annexed his homeland in 1939, Jasiuk fled, along with many other anticommunist intellectuals, to German-held Warsaw. There he worked with other disgruntled teachers who formed the hard core of pro-Nazi nationalist agitators. He was among the first to join Byelorussian “self-help” committees sponsored by the SS in 1940-41.

When Dr. Six came to Warsaw to recruit guides for his Einsatzgruppen, Jasiuk was an early volunteer. He returned to Byelorussia soon after the invasion of the Soviet Union and was installed by the SS as mayor of Kletsk. With broad Slavic features almost always wreathed in smiles, Jasiuk was regarded as an amiable fellow. One of his main tasks was to draw up lists of Polish intellectuals and Communist sympathizers for the Germans. The Einsatzgruppen swept through Kletsk, rounded up hundreds of suspects at Jasiuk’s direction, and murdered them. In 1942, Jasiuk, now county chief, or “Kreisleiter,” was energetic in preparing the “final solution” of the Jews of Kletsk. Jasiuk’s police herded all the Jews in the area – thousands of men, women, and children – into a barbed-wire compound in the middle of the city. The usual pattern of extortions, threats, and increasing acts of violence followed, until Jasiuk arranged for the massacre of the entire ghetto.