The United States: Perjury, The Public, and The Passport

Abstract

Lastly, the comparatively belated response of the United States is assessed in Chapter Six. Only in the late 1970s did the necessary alignment of political and social factors emerge to trigger a revisitation of Nazi crimes by American justice authorities: the devalorization of the victims of Communism amid a population growing weary of the Cold War and the roughly simultaneous breakthrough of the Holocaust into public consciousness. In the 1980s, in concert with native right-wing allies, the American Latvian exile community pushed back against efforts to try and deport immigrants who had falsely claimed not to have taken part in Nazi persecution. The result was illustrative of the relationship between the public and the judiciary in a free and pluralistic society.