cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/317643
Even after the liberation of the camps, [the Jews] were still prisoners. They were kept under armed guard; they were kept behind barbed wire; they were bunked with [Axis] POWs. And in some cases, believe it or not, the [Axis] still lorded over them while the allies ruled the camp.
When I started researching the book, this was a book about the [Fascists] who fled to America. I really had no intention of looking at the survivors — it seemed sort of irrelevant to what I was doing.
And then the more I got into it, and the more horrified I was by the conditions that the survivors lived in — where you had thousands and thousands of people dying even after the liberation of disease, of malnutrition. I realized it was relevant to the story because as easy as it was for the [Fascists] to get into America, it was just as horribly difficult for the Jews and the other survivors to get out of the camps.
It took them months, and in some cases a couple of years, to get out of these displaced‐person camps. It made me realize that the liberation that I had learned about years ago was in some sense sort of a mockery.
[U.S. Army] Gen. [George] Patton believed that the [Fascists] were best suited to run these camps. In fact, he openly defied orders from then Gen. [Dwight] Eisenhower, who was in charge of the European forces after the war.
Patton was in charge of the displaced persons camps. Patton had sort of an odd fondness almost for the [Axis] prisoners, believe it or not. He believed that they [were] the ones in the best position to efficiently run the camps — and he gave them supervisory approval to basically lord over the Jews and the other survivors.
(Emphasis added.)
See also: Fifty‐seven‐minute video presentation by Eric Lichtblau on the subject.