Alleged Nazi Collaborators in the United States after World War IIChristoph Schiessl

AssessmentMisleading, misinformed, mistaken

Our analysis and review focuses solely on Schiessl's treatment of the Holocaust specific to Latvia and on Vilis Hāzners's first such U.S. Latvian "Nazis among us" court case.

Reading Alleged Nazi Collaborators, we get the impression of a pre-Internet age scholar, busy researching, jotting down notes, photocopying book pages and newspaper articles, printing out microfiche and roll-film document copies, then without foreknowledge of the topic attempting to arrange hundreds of pieces of paper into a coherent narrative.

Upon reading Schiessl's Acknowledgments, we expected a major work on the topic. He thanks

• Holocaust scholars Richard Breitman, Martin C. Dean, and Jürgen Matthäus while he was a research fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.,
• Elizabeth White, chief historian of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI),
• archivists at
  • the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
  • the Holocaust Memorial Center in Detroit,
  • the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, and
  • the Immigration History Research Center in Minneapolis.

It is all the more disappointing, then, that Schiessl's account of the organization and progression of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Latvia is based on folklore and propaganda. Schiessl selects unreliable sources — for example, contending that Latvians ran amok for more than a month at the start of the Nazi occupation killing Jews before the Germans were able to step in to control and stop it. Moreover, in Schiessl's Nazi-occupied Latvia, every Latvian wearing a German uniform was a Holocaust collaborator.

Moving to Schiessl's central topic of individuals alleged to be Nazis or their collaborators who escaped to the U.S. after the war and examining the case of Vilis Hāzners, the first U.S. "Latvian Nazi" deportation action, Schiessl reports allegations against Hāzners at face value. He cites Christopher Simpson's politically motivated and historically corrupted Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, strewn with inaccuracies, to detail Hāzners's offenses and role at the center of an imaginary sinister anti-Soviet CIA–Latvian Holocaust perpetrator conspiracy. Only at the very end does Schiessl indicate that the Immigration and Naturalization Service's case against Hāzners failed. Even then, he falsely claims Hāzners escaped justice because of botched evidence, not that witness identifications failed to withstand scrutiny in court, a fact he could have readily ascertained from court documents. See Hāzners Case, Judicial Review and Denial of Motion to Appeal.

Schiessl's overview of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Latvia falsely portrays the Germans as Johnny-come-lately's (if at all) to a slaughter of Jews already well underway at the hands of an unfettered local population eager to continue in the blood-letting even after the Nazis eventually got themselves organized more than a month after occupying Latvia. Examining the Vilis Hāzners case as a litmus test, Schiessl scrap-books together sources with no understanding their significance, agendas, interrelationships, or accuracy. Only at the very end does he indicate the case against Hāzners was dismissed, yet still propagates the blatant lie that disallowed photographic evidence at his deportation trial let him escape justice.

No stars.

Schiessl naïvely trusted sources at face value to cobble together a grossly inaccurate and misleading account of events where they relate to the Holocaust in Latvia. But we do not fault Schiessl. Specific to Vilis Hāzners, Latvian Holocaust collaborators, and the Holocaust in Latvia, we fault Schiessl's dissertation committee for its demonstrable failure to competently advise and evaluate.

“Alleged Nazi Collaborators”Schiessl's thesisAlleged inter-regnum and "Germanless" HolocaustCIA recruits émigrésProblems with picturesLatvian perpetratorsAppraisalView all

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