by Christopher Simpson
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 Now It Can Be Told, 2008-01-11
Everyone who cares about the future of the world needs this book! It's the truth about where the right wing during and after World War Two and shows how that whole era of 'America's greatest Generation' is slightly tarnished.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
The Hobo Philosopher, 2007-08-18
This is one of the first books that I picked up on the American government connection with Nazism. I found it for a dime at a flea market or something. When I was finished reading it, I still didn't believe it. Since that time I have gotten interested in "Who Financed Adolf Hitler" and why. This book deals more with the "why" part of the above question. Now that I have been researching on this subject for a number of years, I have very little doubt about the accuracy of the information contained in this book. If anything the whole truth appears to be even worse. If you are interested in what the real "liberal" vs "conservative" battle is all about, this is a good place to start.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
 A Fascinating Look at the Early Cold War, 2006-02-13
Christopher Simpson's Blowback is a scrupulously researched work about how the United States government, contrary to its stated policies, deliberately recruited a veritable army of former Nazis and collaborators in the years immediately after World War II. Acting principally through the CIA, these ex-Nazis and sympathizers were then used in our developing cold war against the former USSR, mostly without success, but always behind a veil of secrecy. And that's the theme of his work: in the name of anti-communism, any new-found allies were OK, and whatever war crimes they had engaged in prior to swearing allegiance to us was ignored or erased.
Simpson carefully documents how US foreign policy personnel, who had clear knowledge that their new spy recruits had committed war crimes or crimes against humanity, ignored or hid their past, supposedly because these former Nazis had intelligence value.
There are many lessons worth learning from this valuable book: how easy and how routine it was for the OSS and its successors to subvert the laws and policies of the United States through deception. Whenever it was time to seek immigrant status for an ex-Nazi whose past would have disqualified him, the OSS or its successors simply doctored the files to delete the offending material. As the participants in these charades candidly acknowledge in his work, they thought they were acting in the country's best interests, and they weren't going to let mere nuisances like US laws stand in their way. All this took place at the very dawn of the Cold War, before the CIA had even been formally established. It's not a stretch to argue that the CIA's continuing mentality that it isn't bound by US law because it knows what's best for the country was born and nurtured by this large-scale deception.
As part of the CIA's anti-communist campaign, it also tried repeatedly to instigate armed insurrections against various communist states in the 1940s and 1950s, none of which were successful. It also funded and supported various assassination campaigns. Here we see a pattern of behavior that the CIA repeated again and again: it funded these operations "off the books," meaning Congress was largely kept in the dark about what the CIA was up to, and the CIA arrogated to itself the right to decide whether these proxy wars and assassination campaigns were proper US policies. And as Simpson notes, by using quislings and collaborators for these campaigns, people known in their communities and nations for their terrible deeds in World War II, the US unwittingly played into Soviet propaganda that the US was really no different than the Nazis themselves.
In addition, as Simpson make very clear, much of what these former Nazis fed the OSS and CIA as information on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe turned out to be baseless, and in many cases their spy networks turned out to have been deeply compromised by the USSR. The spy networks consistently overestimated the actual military threat posed by the USSR. But as Simpson points out, these CIA paid assets had ever incentive to overstate the danger. They were on the payroll, and as long as the Soviet menace appeared imminent, they would remain so. But start to say that there was no threat and the gravy train might come to an abrupt halt. Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, anyone?
Finally, because they fed the CIA, which admittedly had few Company assets on the ground in Eastern Europe after the war, a steadily hawkish line about the USSR and its intentions, they helped to contribute to the shrill political hysteria that emerged. I don't want to be misunderstood: the Soviet Union was evil, its methods vile and I don't weep any tears for its demise. But in our fear and in our ignorance, we made serious policy errors in those post-war years, and in doing so, we relied to a significant degree on people we should have known better than to trust: a group of ex-Nazis and collaborators who we knew were guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Further, as I have suggested here, we helped inculcate our national security apparatus with a view that the ends always justified the means, and that as intelligence gatekeepers, the CIA was not bound by US law or public policy, but merely by its own secret determination of what was in the country's best interests.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Wonderful insight for the start of the Cold War, 2004-07-27
I have to say that this is a great examination of the inadvertent effects in American policy and ideology following the recruitment of Nazi intelligence officers. This book should be read not only by those interested in the origins of the Cold War, but also by those who want to study Operation Paperclip, the recruitment of Nazi scientists by the American government. This is not revisionist history, and it is not one of those quasi-historical books that try to sell themselves on a controversial and speculative thesis. It is well documented, and a very worthy book for anyone interested in mid-20th century history.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Bring this book back in print!, 2004-06-03
It's a shame that Christopher Simpson's "Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War" has gone out of print. While portions of this book smack of revisionist history, the truth at the heart of it is nothing short of harrowing and infuriating. Most significantly, it's an important part of post-War American history that needs further discussion: the carte blanche treatment given to some of the Nazi party's worst war criminals in exchange for dubious (at best) information on the Russians. According to Simpson's exhaustive research, brutal mass murderers whose technical and/or espionage value saved them from the Nuremburg trials, were given new lives, lots of money, and immunity in America in order to aid in our fight against the communists. While it seems that some of the information they gave us tilted the Cold War in our favor, the fact remains that these men had the blood of countless concentration camp victims on their hands. The photos of the death camps, including a poignant photograph of four generations of Jewish women in their underwear, moments before their execution, underscores Simpson's outrage at the cheapness America placed on their lives. Lastly, I would point out that the subtitle is slightly misleading. While Simpson does discuss the effects these informants had on the Cold War, the subtext really has to do with the effects they had on American society. And it's not a pretty picture. I hope this book is brought back in print. Until then, picked up one of the used copies available here.
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