Expelled Nazis paid millions in Social Security

[mrclose]

I don't guess that we should be surprised.

(Just a snippet of a very long, very thorough article)

OSIJEK, Croatia (AP) — Former Auschwitz guard Jakob Denzinger lived the American dream.

His plastics company in the Rust Belt town of Akron, Ohio, thrived. By the late 1980s, he had acquired the trappings of success: a Cadillac DeVille and a Lincoln Town Car, a lakefront home, investments in oil and real estate.

Then the Nazi hunters showed up.

In 1989, as the U.S. government prepared to strip him of his citizenship, Denzinger packed a pair of suitcases and fled to Germany. Denzinger later settled in this pleasant town on the Drava River, where he lives comfortably, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. He collects a Social Security payment of about $1,500 each month, nearly twice the take-home pay of an average Croatian worker.

Denzinger, 90, is among dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals and SS guards who collected millions of dollars in Social Security payments after being forced out of the United States, an Associated Press investigation found.

The payments flowed through a legal loophole that has given the U.S. Justice Department leverage to persuade Nazi suspects to leave. If they agreed to go, or simply fled before deportation, they could keep their Social Security, according to interviews and internal government records.

Like Denzinger, many lied about their Nazi pasts to get into the U.S. following World War II, and eventually became American citizens.

Among those who benefited:

—armed SS troops who guarded the Nazi network of camps where millions of Jews perished.

—an SS guard who took part in the brutal liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland that killed as many as 13,000 Jews.

—a Nazi collaborator who engineered the arrest and execution of thousands of Jews in Poland.

—a German rocket scientist accused of using slave labor to build the V-2 rocket that pummeled London. He later won NASA's highest honor for helping to put a man on the moon.

The AP's findings are the result of more than two years of interviews, research and analysis of records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and other sources.

http://news.yahoo.com/expelled-nazis-paid-millions-social-security-010341906.html

[obumazombie]

There is redemption. But there is also justice. Justice should come first.

[Dori]

I remember something like this about illegals working here and paying in to SS.  They could claim benefits, even after they left and went back to their countries of origin.

[njpines]

My family left Germany around the turn of the 20th century so I don't get to participate in this ridiculousness and I'm glad of it.

[DumbAss Tanker]

They paid into it, or they wouldn't be getting it.  No matter how the writer wants to paint the characterization of the individuals (And some of those listed are real stretches on personal responsibility for any war crimes, except for one who was actually a guard at Auschwitz).   

The way Social Security works, unless you're convicted and incarcerated, you by and large get your benefits back out of it.  Since there's about four of them left alive and they're all at death's door, I can't really work up giving a hoot.

[obumazombie]

My understanding is that except for the people grandfathered into social security, no one will ever get out all that they put in (or more). It's just another democrat vote buying shell game.

[Ptarmigan]

I have noticed many Nazis who ended up in America, mostly live up North.