Schiessl's dissertation
Alleged Nazi Collaborators is based on Schiessl's 2009 doctoral dissertation:
Description 317 p. Note Advisor: John J. Bukowczyk. Thesis Thesis (Ph. D.) — Wayne State University, 2009 Summary Since the end of World War II, 1approximately 10,000 Nazi war criminals have entered the United States, mostly through the Displaced Persons Acts of 1948 and 1950 and the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) have investigated thousands of accusations against individuals residing in the United States, dealing with a variety of Nazi related war crimes, ranging from beatings and shootings of Jews and others by camp guards and policemen to planning and participating in brutal medical experiments on human beings. 2Most suspects were Ukrainian, Baltic, or ethnic German (so-called Volksdeutsche) collaborators, who immigrated to the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s. For decades, government authorities did little to locate and prosecute these individuals. Only in the 1970s did the federal government intensify its search for Nazi war criminals. First, in 1978, Congress passed an amendment to the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, which barred the entry of Nazi war criminals and made easier the prosecution of such individuals already in the United States. Second, in 1979, the U.S. government created the OSI, which for over thirty years has worked on trying to locate and then denaturalize and extradite or deport Nazi war criminals. Most Americans in the late 1940s and 1950s discussed and contemplated the issue of Nazi criminality in very specific ways. The dominant Cold War atmosphere surely played a role in this, as Nazi Germany seemed defeated and the Soviet Union emerged as the foe that was out to destroy the American way of life. Already at the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg the Holocaust was not front and center, and the number of Nazi war criminals imprisoned in Germany dwindled significantly in the early 1950s until almost all had been released by the late 1950s. In this atmosphere it is not surprising that thousands of Nazi collaborators could enter the United States via legal immigration channels. 3U.S. officials at best could not ascertain or at worst willfully ignored the questionable past of such individuals from the Baltic states, the Ukraine, and the many Volksdeutsche. The Eichmann trial in 1961, the series of Soviet trials of Nazi collaborators in the early 1960s, and the Arab-Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973 in particular changed the dynamic somewhat. Some individuals, like Simon Wiesenthal, started investigating. As a result, the first major case of a Nazi collaborator in the United States, that of camp guard Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, made the news in the 1960s. Finally, the 1970s saw an intensification of Holocaust discourse in general and a focus on Nazi war criminals in the United States in particular. 4Individual politicians like Elizabeth Holtzman (D-NY) pressured the U.S. government to act, which led to the formation of the OSI in 1979. The OSI has been responsible for the denaturalization and removal of over one hundred individuals. Since the passage of time will solve the issue of Nazi war criminals eventually, the OSI recently has taken on the task of locating, denaturalizing, and deporting all war criminals residing in the United States. Added Title Wayne State University thesis (Ph. D.): History. OCLC # 320086901 Permalink elibrary.wayne.edu/ record=b3623189~S47 [this page]
Besides his advisor, John J. Bukowczyk, the other members of Schiessl's dissertation committee were Melvin Small, Brad Roth, and Andrew Port. None lists the Holocaust as their field of study.
Cues
Bukowczyk, Schiessl's advisor, focuses on American immigration and ethnic history, primarily Polish. The issue of war criminals coming to the U.S., particularly in light of their alleged concentration among a narrow group of nationalities: Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, would certainly fall within his area of study. What would be dissertation's focus of analysis?
Historical facts are objective. Historical accounts, however, are written from a point of view. Several passages in the summary stand out as potential red flags.
Schiessl cites Alan A. Ryan, Jr.'s Quiet Neighbors for the 10,000:
[Ryan] based the number of 10,000 on the assumption that of the nearly 400,000 immigrants under the DP Acts about 2.5 percent had taken part in persecution during the Nazi era.1
Math, "2.5% of 400,000," obscures Ryan's true estimate — 40,000 — and implications. Ryan halved his estimate, then halved it again to avoid "being hysterical on this subject."2
Alternate math: if 20% of the refugees were "collaborator"-aged males, then half of all immigrant men were war criminals. The OSI's own review, notes Ryan's 10,000 "seems high", but "has enduring significance, however, because it has been widely reported"3 — as here.
Schiessl does touch on the list which Wiesenthal handed to U.S. authorities in 1973.4 In the case of Latvians, this was an amalgam of names of former Latvian officers in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps who had "escaped to Germany," per Wiesenthal's list published in 1949 in Aufbau, and names appearing in the KGB propaganda booklet Daugavas Vanagi, Who are They?, published in Latvian in 1962, published in English and German in 1963 and circulated in the West. Daugavas Vanagi, Who are They? was designed to discredit American Latvian émigré leadership by its naming of names, eventually verified to be propaganda by its author, Paulis Ducmanis. The Soviets similarly attacked the Canadian Ukrainian community with its The SS Werewolves (1982).
Daugavas Vanagi, Who are They? became the "Latvian Nazi"-hunter's bible, even introduced into evidence with other manufactured Soviet materials at deportation trials of accused collaborators. Infusion of propaganda into the hunt for Nazis turned the U.S. Department of Justice into a fifth column operating against the Baltic and Ukrainian ethnic communities — whose leadership the Kremlin sought to smear and discredit.
Indeed, U.S. authorities were unaware or ignored that Khrushchev ordered the Latvian KGB to set up a dedicated counter-intelligence unit, Пятое управление КГБ СССР, Fifth Directorate of the KGB of the USSR, to target the émigré community, partnering with the Liaison Committee for the Cultural Relations with Countrymen Abroad (LCCR) to disseminate anti-Latvian propaganda to the West.5
Those such as Hāzners were vetted while still abroad. Schiessl's allegation of willful ignorance lends credence to Nazis-among-us conspiracy theorists.
At the start of the hunt for Nazis, the CIA, for example, was alleged to have taken on 100's of Nazi collaborators to serve the Cold War anti-Soviet cause. A GAO investigation turned up some potential 20 individuals, such as Hāzners, alleged to be collaborators. The number of collaborators ultimately identified upon completion of investigation? One.
Volksdeutsche were ethnic Germans who had lived in central and eastern Europe for generations if not centuries before the war (in Königsberg and in Germany annexed to post-war Poland, in the Czechoslovak republic,...). They were innocent civilians fleeing or forcibly expelled from their homes. There is no impetus to label them Nazi collaborators other than post-war Eastern Bloc puppet governments assigning collective guilt: just being ethnic German meant you were a Nazi who supported Hitler.
At the time of the Vilis Hāzners deportation trial, Elizabeth Holtzman was heard to declare, "All Latvians are Nazis." Hāzners, who was a leader in the Latvian émigré community and a former Latvian Legion (Waffen-SS) officer, was the first Latvian the U.S. Justice Department attempted to deport for the alleged murder of Jews.
It is important to note that a deportation trial is an administrative, not court, proceeding, making hearsay admissible as evidence.
Hearsay evidence may be relied on, even if contradicted by direct evidence. Calhoun v. Bailar, 626 F.2d 145 (9th Cir. 1980).6
With warning signs apparent in the summary, we next examined what Schiessl writes regarding the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe.
| 1 | Schiessl, book, p. 63. |
| 2 | Feigin, Judith. The Office of Special Investigations: Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust. 2008, at www.justice.gov/ |
| 3 | Feigin (2008). |
| 4 | Schiessl, book, p. 118. |
| 5 | Ieva Zake. "Soviet Campaigns against 'Capitalist Ideological Subversives' during the Cold War: The Latvian Experience." Journal of Cold War Studies 2010; 12 (3): 91–114. p. 94-95. |
| 6 | Hearsay evidence, at U.S. Department of Justice, retrieved January 12, 2023. |