About The Path of Lord Jaguar by Margaret Donnelly
How would you feel if I told you that your neighbor – here in the United States – could be a Nazi war criminal or his beneficiary? As surprising as it may sound, it’s a possible scenario. Before the Nuremberg trials, thousands of Nazi war criminals fled to new homes across the globe. The United States poached Nazi scientists, giving them permission to live in freedom in this country. Plus, documents declassified in 1999 reveal that the CIA actively engaged in covering up the whereabouts of former Nazi war criminals, opting instead to use them as agents and informants in West Germany following World War II.
In fact, the Red Cross and the Vatican played a part in helping Nazis relocate out of Germany. Gerald Steinacher, a research fellow at Harvard University, was given access to thousands of internal documents in the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The documents include Red Cross travel documents issued mistakenly to Nazis in the postwar chaos.
They throw light on how and why mass murderers such as Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele and Klaus Barbie and thousands of others evaded capture by the Allies.
By comparing lists of wanted war criminals to travel documents, Steinacher says Britain and Canada alone inadvertently took in around 8,000 former Waffen-SS members in 1947, many on the basis of valid documents issued mistakenly.
According to Steinacher, the Vatican Refugee Commission knowingly provided war criminals with false identities, but the archives remain closed and the Vatican has refused to comment. However, Steinacher believes the Vatican’s help was based on a hoped-for revival of European Christianity and dread of the Soviet Union.
Not only were some Nazis recruited to live here by our government and aided by prominent organizations, but even recently, they received financial rewards from the United States. That means your taxes have actually been used to line the pockets of Nazis and their offspring.
Dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals and SS guards collected millions of dollars in U.S. Social Security benefits after being forced out of the United States, an Associated Press investigation has found. The payments, underwritten by American taxpayers, flowed through a legal loophole that gave the U.S. Justice Department leverage to persuade Nazi suspects to leave the U.S. If they agreed to go, or simply fled before deportation, they could keep their Social Security, according to interviews and internal U.S. government records.
Among those receiving benefits were armed SS troops who guarded the network of Nazi camps where millions of Jews perished; a rocket scientist who used slave laborers to advance his research in the Third Reich; and a Nazi collaborator who engineered the arrest and execution of thousands of Jews in Poland.
There are at least four living beneficiaries. They include Martin Hartmann, a former SS guard at the Sachsenhausen camp in Germany, and Jakob Denzinger, who patrolled the grounds at the Auschwitz camp complex in Poland. Hartmann moved to Berlin in 2007 from Arizona just before being stripped of his U.S. citizenship. Denzinger fled to Germany from Ohio in 1989 after learning denaturalization proceedings against him were underway. He soon resettled in Croatia and now lives in a spacious apartment on the right bank of the Drava River in Osijek.
The deals allowed the Justice Department’s former Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations, to skirt lengthy deportation hearings and increased the number of Nazis it expelled from the U.S.
If you are shocked or intrigued by this information, I recommend that you read “The Path of Lord Jaguar” by Margaret Donnelly. This historical novel raises questions about the power and influence that Nazi beneficiaries were gifted through stolen treasure they inherited from the victims of the Holocaust. Donnelly’s book helps you to imagine how the presence of a wealthy Nazi family could have shaped the creation of dystopian American suburbs, sustained by racism and evil secrets.
For me, “Jaguar” raised questions about the ways that our family histories shape our current reality. For example, if your neighbor is the son of a war criminal who gained riches from Nazi activities, how have the values of his ancestor manifested in his life? How has he used the power that he gained through ill-gotten wealth to change your neighborhood, city or country? How does the presence of ancestral evil make it’s mark on your physical and energetic space?
By sparking thought-provoking questions such as these, “Jaguar” is an intellectual’s thrill ride. It takes you to spiritual heights and plunges you to moral depths, offering a roller coaster of emotions as Donnelly’s characters fight for humanity’s salvation. This novel exposes the strengths and the flaws in the human psyche, heart and society, inspiring readers to quest for justice and truth in the name of history’s victims.
