[P-40]

"He is reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias 'Clemens' since 1952," authorities wrote.

That does not sound very definitive.

[spanalot]

"for fear he might expose undercover anticommunist efforts "

Too bad our efforts failed to prevent the Genocide of 40 million committed by the communists after WWII.

We should have let Patton take the last two nukes into Moscow and Stalingrad.

[VOA]

bump

[blau993]

I am not sure it would have advanced the Israeli investigation all that much if the CIA had passed them that information about Eichman in the first half of 1958. I will have to check the source (Isser Harel's great book,"The House on Garibaldi Street"), but I recollect that by mid-1958 or not long thereafter the Israelis had developed this information from other sources and were actively looking into it.

[tomzz]

The impression I have is that a lot of former nazis were allowed to move to South America unmolested as a price tag for making Germany governable.

[Gorobei]

So what exactly is the problem here? The Nazi regime was crushed, while Communism was on the rise. We needed to use whatever assets we had available at the time to combat that rise, and if it happened to be a former Nazi regime member, then so be it.

[RS]

"One obscure mention of Globke which Life omitting at our request," CIA Director Allen Dulles wrote ..."

Fat chance of anything like that happening today ...

[IronJack]

The Israelis seemed awfully concerned about hiding their plans to kidnap Eichmann, even from the Americans who were supposed to be their allies, and I've always wondered why.

[StJacques]

In many cases I can understand the decisions of the CIA not to make known the whereabouts of former Nazi war criminals for reasons of their utility to our cause in the Cold War. But not with Eichmann, who truly was one of the masterminds of the killing apparatus of the Holocaust. Simply put; Eichmann was "too big a fish" to conceal in my opinion.

And I do keep in mind that our conflict with the Soviet Union after WWII was a "life or death" struggle and the means employed to achieve the end goal of "life," were not always pretty. The Soviet Union was the greatest tyranny in world history and the nature of the threat it posed to the U.S. was quite real, in spite of what revisionist historians might attempt to tell us to the contrary. (God Bless You Ronald Reagan!) There are many instances in which we engaged in what can probably be described as "amoral behavior," in either forgiving or overlooking the Nazi pasts of some valuable individuals we made use of to our advantage in the struggle with the Soviets which I approve of, such as the coopting of the Peenemunde rocket scientists, several of whom had very questionable backgrounds. And I'm sure that there were many in the intelligence world who dealt with so-called "bad actors" to our advantage, that's the way the game of human intelligence is played.

But Eichmann was simply too high up in the Nazi hierarchy to get a pass in my opinion. He was directly resonsible for the deaths of millions.

And what a shame it is that we never held trials for "crimes against humanity" for those surviving members of the Soviet state who were responsible for mass murder on an even greater scale than that of the Nazis. Has anyone ever read Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko's The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny (1982)? It is one of the most impressive books I've ever seen. Even the out-in-left-field NYT journalist Harrison Salisbury gave it a magnificent review, and Antonov-Ovseyenko says that Stalin killed 100 million people. Why didn't we get to have those trials and why has the American media not pressed the post-Soviet Russian government to reveal more of these details? It's a rhetorical question, no need to answer it.

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.
Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking the keyword or topic Israel.

---------------------------

Having been hung, it doesn't matter much any more.