Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis, and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy

Paperback, 398 pages

English language

Published by Collier Books - Macmillan.

ISBN:
978-0-02-044995-9
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5 stars (1 review)

Even before the final shots of World War II were fired, another war began—a cold war that pitted the United States against its former ally, the Soviet Union. As the Soviets consolidated power in Eastern Europe, the CIA scrambled to gain the upper hand against new enemies worldwide. To this end, senior officials at the CIA, National Security Council, and other elements of the emerging US national security state turned to thousands of former Nazis, Waffen Secret Service, and Nazi collaborators for propaganda, psychological warfare, and military operations. Many new recruits were clearly responsible for the deaths of countless innocents as part of Adolph Hitler’s “Final Solution,” yet were whitewashed and claimed to be valuable intelligence assets. Unrepentant mass murderers were secretly accepted into the American fold, their crimes forgotten and forgiven with the willing complicity of the US government.

Blowback is the first thorough, scholarly study of the US …

1 edition

A sober approach to US use of former Nazi SS / SD & collaborators in the early Cold War & its consequences

5 stars

This book shows the work that Simpson did to dig through FOIA-available documentation of US security agencies, particularly the CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps) of the US Army during & after WWII, as well as the OSS & it's successor the CIA, conducting interviews with former agents and researching the whereabouts of former Waffen SS & SD and extremist anti-Communist (read usually fascist) agents who were hidden by the US security state after the war, were spirited out of Europe via Vatican ratlines, were armed and employed in Soviet-occupied parts of Eastern Europe. Simpson touches on parts of Operation Paperclip (the US operation to employ Nazi & Axis scientists, often helping them avoid international war crimes tribunal convictions, obfuscating their status as war criminals and giving them access to US citizenship by manipulating the rules set by US immigration), the Gehlen Organization (the ex-Nazi intelligence-staffed, US-funded post-war network that became the …

Subjects

  • wwii
  • worldwar2
  • nazi
  • espionage
  • intelligence
  • usa
  • oss
  • cia
  • ussr
  • cold war
  • gehlen
  • operation bloodstone