Nazi Profiteers

"We must continue working to remember the tragedy of the Holocaust and hold those responsible accountable. One way to do that is by providing as much information to the public as possible. This report hopefully provides some clarity."
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. senior member, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee

"It's a travesty. The issue is the principle here -- do you sign deals with Nazis to get them out of the country?"
"The Department of Justice said yes, but who wants to think that taxpayer dollars went to people who served as guards in camps?"
Efraim Zuroff, head Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jerusalem

This 1943 file photo shows Nazi officers talking with citizens of the Warsaw ghetto in Poland. (Image source: AP Photo, File)

In the United States a special Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations was created within the Justice Department in 1979. Its creation resulted from the American public learning to its horror that an influx of Nazi persecutors numbering up to a thousand people had entered the United States as immigrants. To pass muster many had lied about their Nazi pasts. Of their numbers many became U.S. citizens.

In January of 2015 a new law named the No Social Security for Nazis Act became legal, which had the effect of ending retirement payments for a handful of beneficiaries. It became known that 133 suspected Nazi war criminals, SS guards and others suspected of having taken part in the Third Reich's atrocities received over $20-million in U.S. Social Security benefits, according to a report by the inspector general of the Social Security Administration.

The payments were sent out between February 1962 and January 2015. The Justice Department had persuaded people suspected of having a Nazi past to leave the U.S. in exchange for Social Security benefits. The benefits would continue to accrue to them once they agreed to leave voluntarily rather than being deported. For their part, the Justice Department has denied their use of Social Security payments as a lever to expel former Nazis.

Social Security payments totalling $1.5-million had been sent to 28 suspected Nazi criminals by March of 1999 according to Social Security Administration records, revealed by investigative journalists. Two former Nazis, Arthur Rudolph and John Avdzej signed agreements requiring them to exit the U.S. while ensuring their benefits would continue. According to Rep Maloney dozens of Nazis received Social Security payments while working to conceal their true identities from the government.

The report issued by the Inspector General claimed that $5.6-million was paid to 38 former Nazis before their deportation. Another 95 not deported were found or alleged to have participated in Nazi persecution, receiving $14.5-million in benefits. One woman, Elfriede Rinkel collected almost $120,000 before she was deported. She was stationed at the Ravensbrueck camp working with an attack dog trained by the SS.

After she immigrated to California she married a German-born Jew whose parents had died in the Holocaust. Despite 40 years of marriage she never divulged to her husband anything about her past as a concentration camp guard. He died before her background was revealed. She had agreed to leave the U.S. in 2006. After her departure she received widow benefits until the legal basis for stopping them occurred late last year.

Jakob Denzinger was another beneficiary who was a guard at several Nazi concentration camps, leaving the U.S. in 1989 when he was informed the Justice Department planned to strip his citizenship. He received almost $400,000 in Social Security until the new law went into effect. His son said his father now lives in Croatia, suffering from congestive heart failure and close to blindness. "He's never been convicted of anything", Thomas Denzinger said. His father was entitled to benefits having paid Social Security taxes for 33 years.

Who are we kidding about this fastidious distaste over the 'new' knowledge that former Nazis had infiltrated the United States of America? Directly post-war, the U.S. government had recruited former Nazi scientists -- engineers working on rockets for the Nazi war machine, who had come pretty close to perfecting rockets that Nazi Germany could use to bombard the United States -- to come to America and continue their rocketry pursuits there.

Wernher von Braun and his team in the fall of 1959. At the time, von Braun and his associates worked for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama. Those in the photograph have been identified as Ernst Stuhlinger, Frederick von Saurma, Fritz Mueller, Hermarn Weidner, Erich W. Neubert (partially hidden), W.A. Mrazek, Karl Heimburg, Arthur Rudolph, Otto Hoberg, von Braun, Oswald Lange, General Bruce Medaris, Helmut Hoelzer, Hans Maus, E.D. Geissler, Hans Hueter, and George Constan.