63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read - Jesse Ventura [13]
13 & 14 & 15
NAZI WAR CRIMES
More on U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis
Not long after the Justice Department’s 2006 report came out, along came another from the National Archives. This is based on 1.3 million Army files and another 1,110 CIA files. The New York Times had this to say about it: “After World War II, American counterintelligence recruited former Gestapo officers, SS veterans and Nazi collaborators to an even greater extent than had been previously disclosed and helped many of them avoid prosecution or looked the other way when they escaped…”
I’m including here the 100-page report’s introduction and conclusion, and sandwiched in between are three documents that caught my eye. One is an interview with a personal secretary to Hitler, who took his last will and testament, and who also related how the armored car carrying Martin Bormann was blown up. The second is about how the Germans supported a number of Arab leaders during the war, apparently based on expecting to later establish pro-German governments in the Middle East. And the third, signed by CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1952, shows the Agency looking to head off a criminal investigation into a Ukrainian nationalist leader that it wanted to keep using.
INTRODUCTION
At the end of World War II, Allied armies recovered a large portion of the written or filmed evidence of the Holocaust and other forms of Nazi persecution. Allied prosecutors used newly found records in numerous war crimes trials. Governments released many related documents regarding war criminals during the second half of the 20th century. A small segment of American-held documents from Nazi Germany or about Nazi officials and Nazi collaborators, however, remained classified into the 21st century because of government restrictions on the release of intelligence-related records.
Approximately 8 million pages of documents declassified in the United States under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act added significantly to our knowledge of wartime Nazi crimes and the postwar fate of suspected war criminals. A 2004 U.S. Government report by a team of independent historians working with the government’s Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), entitled U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, highlighted some of the new information; it appeared with revisions as a 2005 book.1 Our 2010 report serves as an addendum to U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis; it draws upon additional documents declassified since then.
The latest CIA and Army files have: evidence of war crimes and about the wartime activities of war criminals; postwar documents on the search for or prosecution of war criminals; documents about the escape of war criminals; documents about the Allied protection or use of Nazi war criminals; and documents about the postwar political activities of war criminals. None of the declassified documents conveys a complete story in itself; to make sense of this evidence, we have also drawn on older documents and published works.
The Timing of Declassification
Why did the most recent declassifications take so long? In 2005–07 the Central Intelligence Agency adopted a more liberal interpretation of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. As a result, CIA declassified and turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) additional documents from pre-existing files as well as entirely new CIA files, totaling more than 1,100 files in all. Taken together, there were several thousand pages of new CIA records that no one outside the CIA had seen previously.
A much larger collection came from the Army. In the early postwar years, the Army had the largest U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence organizations in Europe; it also led the search for Nazi war criminals. In 1946 Army intelligence (G-2) and the Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) had little competition—the CIA