Duh, he saw russian tanks in the russian zone? Jeeze.
There is nothing in this article that discredits Arnold.
It's a smear.
Arnold did not say that he grew up with Soviets around on a regular basis. He was saying that the presence of the Soviets in his country was a psychological factor in his early life, that he was sometimes in the Soviet sector, and that it was terrifying. Nothing Mr. Noah says contradicts this.
As for the Soviets having a "legitimate reason" to arrest his father or uncle due to a Nazi background ... so what?
Having a family member arrested by the Soviets would have been terrifying because of what the Soviets were and how they operated. Arnold made a perfectly legitimate use of this story regardless of what an arrest might have been based on.
Mr. Noah, as a good liberal, is probably of the persuasion that anything done to Nazis or ex-Nazis by anyone, communists included, is justifiable. In my view, the Soviets had no moral right to punish anyone because in the end, the Stalinist regime was as bad as the Nazis.