Why Were 10,000 Nazis Given Safe Haven in US? Kinda creepy, where are they now?

[Igel]

9. I volunteer taught ESL to Russian speakers.

The youngest was in her 60s.This was in 2002-04.

Some went weepy when they remembered Stalin.

Most were card-carrying members of the Communist Party. This got them in serious trouble when they applied for citizenship.

Only one had the temerity to say that she was a "kommunist"--and glared at the others when they just stared at her.

For her "communist" had to do with justice, and it was all about her. She refused to believe what had happened to others when she was a girl, if for no other fact than her family benefited from the Communist oppression of children who were, by any sane standard, innocents. She had to assume that those purged were really bad, because she benefited from the purges.

For her "communist" meant that she and her family got what they deserved and thought it was all unfairly taken away from her. She was pissed that she had worked and been promised a pension, and the younger generation didn't want to pay for it. She was a hero and was bitter because she wasn't honored. That she had sacrificed so much and, in the end, was told that her beliefs were mistaken. They couldn't be. If the purges and Stalin's "minor flaws" were seriously bad, if the system was corrupt, then she'd lived for a lie.

She even tried to say that we Americans were all still trying to dupe her. That Brighton, NY--a berg on the fringes of Rochester--was a model city, a Potyomkin village. She was a loon. But even then, she was a harmless delusional paranoid.

The other card-carrying communists were in the party often because it was all but required. Or they joined because it was the thing to do. Some said they were naive or duped and they believed in it when they were young.

I thought at the time it was unreasonable to say that Communist Party members who had basically abandoned their membership when it was no longer useful had to run into unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles. (This is different from abandoning the membership when it became harmful.)

Same for Nazis. Or any other society in which membership is essentially coerced.