In this classic speech from the year 2000, author and researcher John Loftus talks about the shocking discoveries he found in top secret CIA files about collaboration w/ #Nazis.
This led to Congress passing the #Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998.
At 20 minutes, 45 seconds Loftus explains how the “Bush family fortune came from the Third Reich.”
Prescott Bush’s grandson, George W. Bush was running for president at the time.
Loftus’ book made the Bush campaign very uncomfortable 🥵 for a while… 📕
Loftus’ search into documents showing Nazi officers and sympathizers smuggled to the West as anti-communist informants led to his resignation from a federal Nazi-prosecution unit in 1981. That’s when he began his one-man probe into the government’s secret work w/ fugitive Nazis.
Loftus estimated that nearly 10,000 Nazi officers and sympathizers were brought into the United States through intelligence networks using the Displaced Person’s Act at the height of McCarthyism. Many were given citizenship and lived openly without recrimination until they died.
People see the Holocaust as a Jewish issue,” Loftus told the LA Times in 1988.
“I’m not a Nazi hunter now. I’m not a Simon Wiesenthal. I’m hunting those Western bureaucrats that recruited them, that handful of the ‘40s and ‘50s who made Nuremberg meaningless.”
In 1987, Loftus began a crusade of lobbying for a House resolution calling for full disclosure of postwar intelligence operations.
This eventually materialized as the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act — which took a decade to pass. It became law in 1998.
Read the 1988 L.A. Times interview with John Loftus about his thankless job of trying to find and prosecute Nazis for the US government:
latimes.com/archives/la-xp…
More info on the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in this thread, with links to declassified documents in the US National Archives. 🗄🗂🗃📂
Just think: had John Loftus simply walked out of that secret file storage room and kept his mouth shut about what he saw, we never would have had the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act now — and never would have known about any of this!
This CIA Draft Working Paper is 14 pages, all about John Loftus’ exposure of the Agency’s Nazi secrets after Loftus’ first book was published in 1982.
Ironically this document on Loftus was declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 2004!
cia.gov/readingroom/do…
As you can imagine, the charges John Loftus made created quite a public relations nightmare for the CIA in 1982.
Members of Congress were now talking about a full investigation and hearings into this, but the #ColdWar was still on — postponing any action for another decade.
Here it is, the full 60 Minutes investigation that started it all:
John Loftus with Mike Wallace, 1982’s “The Nazi Connection.”
This is why we have a Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. 👇🏽
It’s important that John Loftus gets due credit for his 40 years of tireless work, bringing these secrets to light — because unscrupulous fame-seekers are always trying to take credit that rightfully belongs to him:
amimagazine.org/2021/03/03/joh…
None of this has been easy for Loftus, and he deserves our respect.
He has been jumping hurdles with almost superhuman resolve ever since he started down this path more than 4 decades ago.
For example, “the Justice Department had directly threatened me with disbarment if I disclosed what I knew about any living Nazi working for US or British intelligence,” Loftus told journalist Russ Baker in 2011.
businessinsider.com/book-review-am…
If you enjoyed this thread, please help support my research.
Choose from this wishlist of historic books I’d like to read (and report on to YOU!)…
GiftApp.com/RealLoriSpencer
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.
