American spies roughed up Holocaust survivors to find Soviet infiltrators

It was part of an American intelligence program aimed at infiltrating groups that smuggled Jews to Palestine.

I did a bit more digging on William Yarborough’s time in postwar Austria and stumbled on a bizarre 1946 report from the Strategic Services Unit — an intelligence agency that existed briefly before it was absorbed into a newly created Central Intelligence Agency a year later.

The report described a raid conducted by the US Army and the Austrian police on Jewish displaced persons camps that housed survivors of the Holocaust. The objective: to search for black market goods and to smoke out Soviet agents.

It’s not clear how many camps were involved or how many Jews were actually arrested, but the raid seemed completely bonkers. Imagine treating survivors of genocide (who after the war lived in squalid conditions and lacked access to food and medicine) like common criminals — just because they might have “unauthorized” food and clothing?

It’s callous and brutal. But it’s not surprising.

As I explained before, the virulently antisemitic leadership of the US Army had little appreciation for what Jewish survivors had just gone through. Many straight-up agreed with the Nazis and viewed Jews as an inferior, degenerate race. So this little report seems to confirm that.

What’s interesting is that this action was part of an American intelligence program — codename SYMPHONY — aimed at infiltrating Zionist groups that were smuggling Jews out of DP camps in Europe and transporting them to Palestine.

American spies worried that these Jewish survivors were not anti-communist enough and were too easily swayed by commie propaganda. They also believed that the USSR was using Jewish migration channels to move Soviet agents into Palestine, where they feared the Reds were working to turn Jews against British rule. Some — and that included James Angleton, who would go on to become the hyper-paranoid head of counterintelligence at the CIA — believed that communists were even provoking post-war Jewish pogroms in Poland. Why? They thought it was part of complex and devious communist plot to force Polish Jewish survivors to flee Poland and go to Palestine, where they would be used to undermine the British. Judeo-Bolshevik wheels within wheels!

Treating Jewish Holocaust survivors like suspects and criminals because they were not anti-Soviet enough, all while recruiting Nazi collaborators as allies because they were diehard anti-communists? That pretty much encapsulates post-WWII America right there.

—Yasha Levine