Congress has acquired for itself a fair amount of ridicule for boldly cutting off Social Security benefits for four, count ‘em, four seriously aging dudes living outside the U.S. who may have committed war crimes in World War II. This bold action was the result of an article from the Associated Press saying that back in the Reagan era, 66 suspected war criminals were ushered out of the U.S. and deprived, at least in some cases, of the U.S. citizenship they had obtained, but allowed to keep their Social Security benefits.
That’s my summary, at least, obtained by reading through the lines, because most of the time it’s asserted, often in the article itself and always in recapitulations appearing in other publications, that all 66 were Nazi war criminals, who were inexplicably allowed to walk with cash. So let me explain.
First of all, to be a Nazi, one must actually be a Nazi—that is, a member of the Nazi Party. Most Germans during Hitler’s reign were not members. Furthermore, it’s actually possible to be—or to have been—a Nazi without being a war criminal. Surely there were a few Germans who joined the National Socialist Party back in the Twenties thinking that it would be about, you know, socialism, rather than racism, and left in disgust. Obviously, it’s also quite possible to have been a war criminal without being a Nazi.
It’s an obvious fact—though almost completely unremarked—that none of the 66 were proven to be Nazis or war criminals. If the first, they surely must have lied to get into the U.S. (unless they were useful Nazis, e.g., rocket scientists or the like) and could have been imprisoned or expelled on those grounds. If they were proven to be war criminals, then they could have been imprisoned, presuming the U.S. has a law that allows us to imprison people in the U.S. for crimes committed in other countries.
Obviously, this wasn’t the case. The government wanted to do something, but lacked the evidence to do anything official. Instead, they put unofficial pressure on these unfortunate/unattractive individuals—“Consent to leave the country and surrender your citizenship and we’ll allow you to keep your Social Security benefits and we won’t tell people that we suspect you of having committed war crimes.”
I think that’s what happened, but the AP, understandably not very worried about being sued for libel here, didn’t bother to keep its facts straight. And the rest of the press ran with the “lead”—“Nazi war criminals live high on Uncle Sam’s hog!”
Afterwords
The first three paragraphs of the original AP story is as follows:
Dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals and SS guards collected millions of dollars in U.S. Social Security benefits after being forced out of the United States, an Associated Press investigation has found.
The payments, underwritten by American taxpayers, flowed through a legal loophole that gave the U.S. Justice Department leverage to persuade Nazi suspects to leave the U.S. If they agreed to go, or simply fled before deportation, they could keep their Social Security, according to interviews and internal U.S. government records.
Among those receiving benefits were armed SS troops who guarded the network of Nazi camps where millions of Jews perished; a rocket scientist who used slave laborers to advance his research in the Third Reich; and a Nazi collaborator who engineered the arrest and execution of thousands of Jews in Poland.1
“A rocket scientist who used slave laborers to advance his research in the Third Reich”? That sounds a lot like Wernher von Braun, the brilliant scientist who had a great deal to do with the success of the U.S. space program back in the days when that sort of thing was important. Von Braun, who died in 1977, was a Nazi, an SS member, and worked extensively on the German V-2 rocket. Development, construction, and deployment of the V-2 relied heavily on slave labor. According to Wikipedia, “More people died building the V-2 rockets than were killed by it as a weapon.” In the early days of the U.S. space program, von Braun was virtually the face of the U.S. space effort, appearing on the cover of Time magazine, at that time the dream of every publicity seeker. As the full extent of his Nazi past emerged, he was slowly de-emphasized.
- Here, in this paragraph, I think it’s clear that the AP is presenting accusations as “fact.” It wouldn’t surprise me if the individuals implicitly identified here are all dead. The dead, fortunately or unfortunately, have no rights. ↩︎
