Historian of the Holocaust Says Two Former Nazis ‘of Major Rank’ Have Found Refuge in Buffalo

A historian of the Holocaust charged that this city had provided refuge for two accused Nazi war criminals who, he said, “may be considered of major rank.”

Charles Allen, Jr., who has been investigating and writing about Nazi war criminals in the United States since the 1960’s, told a conference of the Upper New York Region of Hadassah, that the Justice Department “had targeted a member of the medical facility at a Buffalo-area university for possible denaturalization proceedings for having allegedly concealed his complicities in the persecutions of Nazi Germany.”

According to Allen, charges against this professor of medicine, whom he declined to identify to avoid hampering the Justice Department’s investigation, “indicate his involvement in medical experiments carried out on inmates at a Nazi concentration camp.” The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), charged with prosecuting suspected Nazi war criminals in the U.S., has been working on the case for more than a year, Allen said.

BACKGROUND OF FINDINGS ON THE PROFESSOR

Allen, who was delivering an address titled “The Holocaust’s Legacy: Do Justice,” said he first came across the charges against the medical professor during his research on the world-renowned physiologist, Dr. Hubertus Strughold. In the mid-1970’s, Allen uncovered evidence that Strughold helped formulate some of the “scientific” concepts that were carried out by others in medical experiments against Russian POWs and Jewish prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp from 1941 to 1942.

Strughold, who came to the U.S. in 1947 and was naturalized in the early 1950’s, Allen said, became the chief medical scientist of the U.S. Air Force, a consultant to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the Apollo moon shots, and worked as an informant for the CIA.

Allen, who indicated that he would shortly publish his findings on the Buffalo medical professor, said the charges against him were made originally by professional colleagues in the medical field who alerted Allen to his activities in Buffalo.

IDENTIFIES ANOTHER FORMER NAZI

Allen also told the Hadassah conference that a long-time Buffalo resident, whom he identified as Walter Dornberger, had been a former Nazi Wehrmacht General and operational commander of the so-called “German rocket scientists” at the infamous slave labor tunnels of Dora-Nordhausen where the V-1 and V-2 missiles were built “under conditions which survivors called ‘a hell worse than Auschwitz’.”

Dornberger at first was considered a major war criminal by the British, according to Allen, but he was given over to the Americans under a program called Project Paperclip who brought the Nazi General to the United States along with Werner von Braun to create the U.S. rocket program for space travel. Allen said Dornberger came to the U.S. in 1949 and was naturalized in the early 1950’s.

Allen, who gave the Nazi Party, SA and SS affiliations of von Braun, contended that both he and Dornberger were “effectively war criminals in every respect” and that the “glamour” and “honors heaped on both Germans” were part of “the Cold War hype” that “enabled the United States to sue Nazi war criminals and collaborators to ‘fight Soviet Communism’.” Allen called such usage of Nazis “dangerous and sentimental nonsense.”

Dornberger, Allen pointed out, became “an affluent and influential member of the military-industrial complex,” noting his directorships in Bell Aircraft Company, Northrop, Lockheed and other defense corporations. “Dornberger and von Braun created the Nazi V-1 and V-2 programs on the backs of some 60,000 slave laborers, nearly 47,000 of whom were worked to death” in the projects created by these “‘men of science’,” Allen asserted.

WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING WAS ‘REVOLUTIONARY ACT’

Dealing with the tragedy of the Holocaust, Allen called the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising “a truly revolutionary act,” the first civilian uprising against the Nazi occupation of Europe, in which “an extraordinary coalition of Jewish fighters from the Communist left to the Bundist right” demonstrated what resistance could mean.

He took to task certain historians who perpetrated the myth that “the Jews of Europe went to their slaughter like sheep.” Not only the Warsaw Ghetto fighters but “many other Jewish-led partisans fought successfully in the guerrilla warfare of World War II,” Allen said.

He also emphasized that “commemoration of the Holocaust martyrs implied implementing the justice which they themselves consciously bequeathed us: racial and religious equality, human compassion and peace. If you honor the six million, then you must honor their everlasting moral instructions.”

Following Allen’s speech, a woman from Buffalo rose and said, to vigorous applause: “I was in the Warsaw Ghetto. We did fight back. Even after the uprising. Wherever we could. We survivors are not passive, not paralyzed by trauma as many say we are. We are activists, fighters and committed to life.”