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In 1950 the army convinced Congress to pass an unusual piece of cold war legislation, known as the Lodge Act, that permitted 2,500 alien nationals (later raised to 12,500) residing outside the United States to enlist in the U.S. Army. It guaranteed them U.S. citizenship if they successfully completed five years of service.
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The overwhelming majority of the Lodge Act recruits who volunteered over the following decade have proved themselves to be loyal citizens. Most are intensely patriotic, many have been decorated for heroism in battle, and some have given their lives in service to their adopted country. It is ironic, then, that the U.S. Army chose to mix Gestapo agents and Nazi collaborators with this group of decent men.

The Labor Service units, which were by that time officially accepting Waffen SS veterans, were identified as the “largest and logical source of alien recruits” for the Lodge Act, according to a 1951 army adjutant general report. Both before and after passage of the bill the military drew up detailed studies that evaluated the number of potential recruits, their health, military training, language skills, and even “political reliability.”

Stunning examples of the self-deception and ethnic discrimination that took place during the army's screening of Lodge Act volunteers may be found in the military's studies of the “political reliability” of émigrés during this period. One top secret army study, for example, determined that the
entire population
of displaced persons from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia meeting the age
and sex requirements
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(including, presumably, the thoroughly nazified Latvian officers discussed previously) were “politically acceptable” for enlistment in the U.S. Army.

The Adjutant General's Office, which was ultimately responsible for screening émigré recruits, also determined that such Baltic volunteers were “100 percent” reliable on political grounds. With backing like that, the Latvian Labor Service veterans had little difficulty entering the army and eventually obtaining U.S. citizenship. Other nationalities (Ukrainians and Yugoslavs, for example) were believed to require closer scrutiny. The army considered Jews at the bottom of the list; only “50%” of them were considered politically reliable, according to the adjutant general's study, and in practice Jews were generally excluded from entering the United States under the Lodge Act.
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The percentages of “politically reliable” foreign recruits in the Labor Service units were ranked by the army according to nationality, as follows.
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Ratings of “—100%” mean that something fewer than all the volunteers of that ethnic group were considered politically suitable, while a “+50%” listing means that only about one-half that nationality was believed to be reliable.

The first known group of Lodge Act recruits arrived by a military airlift at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, in October 1951. Most were Ukrainians and Poles, but virtually every Eastern European nationality was represented. After an initial orientation at the camp the army shipped these recruits, like most of those who followed, to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for eight to sixteen weeks of basic training. Others were sent directly to a special army intelligence Language
Qualification Unit at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. Following basic training, the recruits were dispersed across the United States and Europe. Substantial numbers were posted to the Defense Language School in Monterey, California; others to the unique Armed Forces Demonstration Unit at Fort Monroe, Virginia, where defectors from Eastern Europe taught Red Army tactics to U.S. strike force teams.

According to declassified orders now found in the National Archives, about 25 percent of the enlistees were channeled into a variety of especially confidential assignments, including slots as atomic, chemical, and biological warfare specialists. Others became translators of captured secret documents and instructors for U.S. intelligence analysts.
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Many of the remainder of the Lodge Act recruits underwent special guerrilla training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and became the nucleus of the present-day Green Berets. Indeed, the famous green beret itself is in part a legacy of the European military fatigues that so many of America's first Special Forces recruits had worn during their service prior to their arrival in this country. The commander of the program at Fort Bragg, interestingly enough, was Colonel Aaron Bank, an army paramilitary expert who only a few months previously had directed the CIC units responsible for running Klaus Barbie, Mykola Lebed, and similar intelligence assets in Germany.
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Colonel Charles M. Simpson, the unofficial historian of the Green Berets and a thirty-year army veteran, leaves little question about the training of army and CIA volunteers placed under Colonel Bank's care at Fort Bragg. The instruction, Simpson writes, began with selection of sites for clandestine airdrops of agents behind enemy lines, then went on to “raids and ambushes [and] guerrilla organization.” Particular attention was placed, he says, on “kidnap and assassination operations.”
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Unfortunately for the army, Lodge Act recruiting went more slowly than expected, and only 211 men (out of 5,272 applicants) had passed screening and actually enlisted by August 1952. Special Forces recruiters responded by easing the language and literacy requirements and by streamlining many of the security checks that had previously slowed the processing of volunteers.

Army Adjutant General Major General Edward Witsell ruled that the civilian immigration laws that barred ex-Nazis and collaborators from obtaining U.S. citizenship would
not
apply to the army's
Lodge Act recruits. “[I]dividuals enlisted under these regulations are not subject to exclusion from the United States under the provisions of the Internal Security Act or under the Immigration and Nationality Act …,” Witsell ordered, taking responsibility for screening émigrés out of the hands of civilian authorities altogether. True, “members … of any totalitarian party” were still barred from the United States under the army regulations, but
ex
-members of Fascist organizations were not, nor were veterans of armies that had made war on the United States.
³⁴
Witsell's unusual and probably unconstitutional decision seems to have gone entirely unnoticed at the time, perhaps because of the fact that the very existence of the ruling was withheld from the public under a classification of “Restricted—Security Information.”

One result of this policy was that certain racist perspectives bordering on Nazi-style anticommunism persisted in the early Green Berets. As Richard Harwood reported in the
Washington Post
some years later, “during those years, the Special Forces attracted recruits from Eastern Europe and old-line NCOs with single-minded views about ‘fighting Communism.' … ‘We had an awful lot of John Birch types then,' says an officer with several years of experience in the Special Forces,” Harwood writes. “‘They thought like Joe McCarthy.'”
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The fact that the army's Lodge Act decision encouraged scores of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators to obtain U.S. citizenship with the prior knowledge of U.S. officials can be clearly documented with the army's own records. The army's decision on where to send a recruit depended in part on the answers he gave in an interview at the time he arrived at Camp Kilmer. Each new enlistee was asked a series of simple questions about his background in police security work, guerrilla warfare, or resistance movements; his language skills; and his willingness to volunteer for guerrilla warfare or paratrooper operations on behalf of the United States. Summaries of several hundred of these interviews of Lodge Act recruits were discovered recently in secret files of army archives in Washington, D.C. One group of enlistees processed at Camp Kilmer in March 1954 is fairly typical. Of forty-four new enlistees processed that month, three admitted membership in the Wehrmacht between 1942 and 1945; another was a Gestapo veteran; two more were veterans of other Axis armies who had fought under Nazi leadership against Allied forces during the war. In short, about
14 percent of the recruits in this squad
admitted
past membership in organizations that might have otherwise barred them from obtaining U.S. citizenship.
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³⁶

As puzzling as it may seem today, there is no question that the American army officers who recruited former Nazis into the Special Forces were motivated primarily by a hatred of totalitarianism. As they saw it, the Special Forces units were something of a creative maverick within the hidebound army; its members disdained shiny boots, army protocol, and just about anything that smacked of brass. The Special Forces motto,
“De Oppresso Liber,”
which the Green Berets translate as “From Oppression We Will Liberate Them,” was not chosen for its public relations value; the slogan, like almost everything else about the forces, was generally kept secret in the early days. This catchphrase reflected the beliefs of the officers, or perhaps more accurately, it reflected what the officers thought that their beliefs were. In those simpler days the army staff could argue in complete seriousness that use of former Nazi collaborators as guerrillas behind Soviet lines would “prove … that our American way of life is approaching the ideal desired by all mankind.”
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In sum, the influx of former Nazis, Waffen SS veterans, and other Nazi collaborators into the United States during this period was not simply an oversight or an administrative glitch created by the inefficiencies of the INS. It was, rather, a central, though usually unacknowledged, aspect of U.S. immigration policy of the day, particularly as the program applied to refugees from the USSR and the Soviet-occupied states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. About 500,000 Eastern European exiles entered the United States under the Displaced Persons Act and the later Refugee Relief Act during this period, and it is obvious that relatively few of these immigrants were former Nazis or Waffen SS men and that of those who did fall into those categories, fewer still were war criminals. But even a small percentage of 500,000 people is a large number. Allan Ryan, the former director of the Justice Department's war criminal investigation unit, estimates that nearly
10,000
Nazi war criminals entered
the United States during this period, although he rejects the suggestion that U.S. intelligence agencies had anything to do with this.
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One of the most important characteristics of the war criminals who did come to the United States is that they did not arrive here as isolated individuals. As has been seen in the cases of the Croatian Ustachis, the Ukrainian OUN, and the Latvian Vanagis, to name only three, many of these immigrants were, in fact, part of experienced, highly organized groups with distinct political agendas that differed little from the Fascist programs they had promoted in their homelands. The anti-Communist paranoia of the McCarthy period gave these groups fertile soil in which to put down roots and to grow. In time they began to play a small but real role in the political life of this country.

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The CIA maintained at least a half dozen organizational assets involved in immigration of selected Eastern European refugees into the United States, although these groups obviously handled the entire range of exiles, not just former Nazi collaborators. One such group, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), became so intertwined with clandestine CIA affairs that it arguably operated as an adjunct of the agency.

According to Displaced Persons Commission records, the IRC specialized in handling refugee cases that had been recommended by the various “governments-in-exile” and “international organizations” funded by the Free Europe Committee. The favored groups included the International Peasant Union, International Federation of Free Journalists, and International Congress of Free Trade Unions.

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There was also a large program to import former Belorussian (White Russian) Nazis as political warfare operatives, says a former Justice Department Office of Special Investigations staff member, John Loftus. While questions about some aspects of the Belorussian story remain, Loftus has nonetheless used the Freedom of Information Act to bring to light several important records that he asserts establish a prima facie case for the existence of this operation. The Belorussian project is strikingly similar to the Latvian and Lithuanian Waffen SS immigration discussed above.

The first document is simply a chapter on Belorussian Nazis from the U.S. Army's top secret
Consolidated Orientation and Guidance Manual
, which was prepared by the 970th CIC unit in the U.S. zone of Germany in 1948. It shows that U.S. intelligence was well aware of the massacres and pogroms that took place in Belorussia during the war, and it lists scores of Belorussian collaborators then believed to have been involved in those crimes.

The second record is a secret sixteen-page letter from Belorussian Nazi collaborationist leader Radislaw Ostrowsky to Frank Wisner's OPC division of the CIA dated 1952. It details the history of the Belorussian quisling movement and bluntly proposes that the CIA finance and protect Ostrowsky's “government-in-exile” for clandestine operations against the USSR.