As Mordechai Vanunu can testify being a whistleblower carries with it grave personal risks. But unlike Vanunu whose public revelations regarding Israel’s alleged nuclear weapons program placed Jewish security at great risk John Loftus a Roman Catholic took on this role in the pursuit of truth and justice for Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

In 1982 Loftus appeared on 60 Minutes the most acclaimed television news program of the time and revealed that following World War II both the Justice and State departments covertly admitted vast numbers of Nazi war criminals into the United States and naturalized many of them. For this 60 Minutes received an Emmy Award for outstanding investigative journalism while Loftus and his family received death threats.

In 1977 as a young attorney working for the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) Loftus was officially assigned to investigate Nazi war crimes cases from Byelorussia (known today as Belarus) but also covertly to determine who had fixed some of the Nuremberg trials and why.

Little did he know that within those darkened underground highly classified archives in Suitland Maryland he would come across a dusty box containing the diary of Sol Shnadow a Byelorussian Jewish survivor and Bielski partisan and that in doing so his life was about to take an irreversible turn.

What he read shocked him to the core. As he told Mishpacha: “Many saw that file and closed their eyes. But I understood that if I kept quiet about what I read someday my name would be listed on the declassified files as the last man who knew — and did nothing while the Nazis were still alive. Sol’s diary was the reason I went public.”

That 60 Minutes interview led to the 1982 publication of The Belarus Secret the Knopf Nominee for the Pulitzer Prize in history and the first of his many highly controversial works. It detailed who these Byelorussian Nazis were and identified the US agencies and individuals responsible for bringing them into America — all done behind Congress’s back. His latest book America’s Nazi Secret has just been released and includes details previously censored out from The Belarus Secret by the government.

“I can finally tell the whole story” he said.

These intricate details were made available to him when he worked as a special investigator for the OSI under the direction of former Nuremberg Trials prosecutor Walter J. Rockler. The OSI was established by Congress to investigate allegations of Nazi war criminals residing in the US. Loftus’s security clearance was upgraded from Top Secret to COSMIC (NATO) Q (nuclear weapons) and SCI (codeword).

“I might have been the first person in half a century with the authority to browse the US and NATO classified files at will.”

After leaving government he arranged permission with the CIA to conduct interviews under attorney/client privilege on the condition that this information would be cleared with the CIA. The CIA as well coordinated this clearance with the other intelligence agencies.

“As a result” he stated “I received a great deal of assistance from many good and honest people in the intelligence community who told me whatever I wanted to know as long as I kept my word and submitted my books to the CIA for censorship.”

Now thirty years later this CIA clearance is no longer necessary.

“It might be too late for justice but it is not too late for the truth” he said.

Although Loftus has many detractors he is determined to continue to put out the facts as he sees them. Loftus a resident of St. Petersburg Florida was in Montreal recently promoting America’s Nazi Secret. It was there in the offices of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR) where Mishpacha first caught up with him. In follow-up phone conversations and e-mail correspondence Loftus discussed his new book and its secrets; his detractors; US intelligence networks; and what he claims is the infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood into these agencies — particularly the FBI. His revelations — finally declassified — were shocking.

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