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.)

‘As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.’ — Earl G. Harrison, August 1945

See also: Fifty‐seven‐minute video presentation by Eric Lichtblau on the subject.