John Loftus's America's Nazi Secret could not have come at a more appropriate time. Just a few weeks ago a 600-page report was released concerning a secret history of the USA's government's involvement of the creation of a “safe haven” in the USA for hundreds of Nazis and their collaborators after World War II- a report which the Justice Department had attempted to keep secret for four years. Loftus's America's Nazi Secret is actually an updated, declassified and uncensored version of his original work, The Belarus Secret. Quite noteworthy is that the original manuscript of this latter book was censored by the US Government in 1981, 1982, and again in 1983, yet managed to be nominated for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as several other awards.

Loftus is a former a US government prosecutor and author or several books including The Belarus Secret: The Secret War Against the Jews; Unholy Trinity: How the Vatican's Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets; and Unholy Trinity; the Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Banks. He appears regularly as a media commentator on ABC National Radio and Fox News. As you can see, his books are certainly controversial and certainly would ruffle a few feathers. However, Loftus is not afraid to do just that, even though, as he states in his most recent book, his life and that of his family were in danger.

America's Nazi Secret was published by TrineDay and if you look to their web site they state that they are a small publishing house that arose as a response to the consistent refusal of the corporate press to publish many interesting, well-researched and well-written books with but one key “defect”: a challenge to official history that would tend to rock the boat of America’s corporate “culture.” TrineDay believes in our Constitution and our common right of Free Speech.

In 1979, Loftus joined the Office of Special Investigations, which was charged with the prosecution and deportation of Nazi war criminals in the US, and it is here where he encountered the devious behavior of certain members of the Justice Department concerning the sanitization of the files of hundreds of notorious Nazis, particularly those who came from Belarus, who collaborated with their masters in murdering thousands of Jews. Many of the vermin eventually found their way to the USA and elsewhere, living quietly until their deaths, never having been prosecuted for their hideous crimes.

One such collaborator that found refuge in Argentina was Radislaw Ostrowsky, a nationalist political activist and political leader, notably serving as president of the Belarusian Central a puppet Belarusian government under German administration in 1943-1944.

Others included Stanislau Stankevich, Jury Sobolewsky, Emanuel Jasiuk, and Franz Kushel. As Loftus states, every cabinet-level Byelorussian Nazi had been smuggled into America and had been issued visas in violation of federal law.

As for German Nazis, one that stands out is General Reinhard Gehlen. After the war, he was recruited by the USA military to establish a spy ring directed against the Soviet Union and this was known as the Gehlen Organization. Eventually, he became the head of the West German intelligence apparatus. Loftus devotes considerable space in describing the role of these individuals and their colleagues.

Loftus devotes much ink to a Wall Street attorney, Frank Wisner who after World War II had the job of planning an underground network of commando units to combat Communism in Europe. As a result, he had recruited former Nazi collaborators who had performed similar tasks for the Third Reich. One interesting foot note, and there are many, was the following: “During a series of interviews, former CIA officials conceded that nearly every American intelligence organization, including OPC, had utilized ex-Nazi émigrés for intelligence purposed in Europe during the Cold War. To do otherwise they insisted, would have been negligent, since there were few sources of information available with an expertise on Eastern Europe. All of them disavowed any knowledge that the Nazi émigrés were later assisted in entering the United States.”

As Loftus states, when the Displaced Person Act expired in 1952, there were over 400,000 immigrants that had come to the USA. Unfortunately, among them were hundreds if not thousands of important Nazi collaborators from Byelorussia, Ukraine, the Baltic States, and the Balkans, including the nucleus of Wisner's “Special Forces.”

Space and time does not permit me to write a more comprehensive review of this intriguing book, and furthermore nor do I profess to be an expert concerning many of Loftus's findings-I leave this up to the historians. Nonetheless, for those readers that wonder about what happened to the hundreds of Nazis that lived out their lives in the USA and elsewhere without being prosecuted, this book provides an excellent point of debarkation. One gripe I do have is that the book is in need of a good content editor. No doubt Loftus has done a great deal of research, as evidenced from the copious footnotes and end notes, however, he should have provided a separate bibliography, as well as a table at the beginning of the book listing all of the important characters that played a role in this hideous cover-up along with a short bio of each. This would have made the reading much more accessible. I also found it odd that the Introduction was fifty-three pages in length, followed by a Preface of sixteen pages and a five page Prologue. Nonetheless, the book is quite fascinating, although at times I would have preferred less rambling and much more reader-friendly content organization. ( )