The New York Times reported that the CIA is withholding thousands of documents relating to its works with Nazi war criminals and collaborators, violating the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. Some of the information is already known to historians:
Historians who have studied the documents made public so far have
said that at least five associates of the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann,
the architect of Hitler’s campaign to exterminate Jews, had worked for
the C.I.A. Eichmann, who was arrested by the Allies in 1945, escaped
and fled to Argentina. He was captured by Israeli agents in 1960, tried
and hanged. The records also indicate that the C.I.A. tried to recruit
two dozen more war criminals or Nazi collaborators.American
officials have defended the recruiting of former Nazis as having been
essential to gaining access to intelligence after World War II,
particularly about the Soviet Union and its cold war allies. Among
former Nazis who were given refuge in the United States was Wernher von
Braun, the German scientist who developed the V-2 rocket in World War
II for the Nazis and played a major role in the development of the
American space program.After World War II, the Allied powers
who occupied Germany defined war crimes broadly, declaring the Nazi SS
to be a criminal organization guilty of exterminating and persecuting
Jews and killing prisoners of war and slave laborers. They identified
as a war criminal anyone who was a principal, accessory to, or
consented in the commission of war crimes, or anyone who was a member
of an organization or group connected with the commission of such
crimes.
Why would the CIA withhold this important information 60 years after the fact? Full disclosure could shed light on the early post-war period and the activities of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, precursor to the CIA) at the dawn of the Cold War. The European press is equally curious:
Wie viele solcher vorbelasteten Mitarbeiter
rekrutierte die CIA? Wer ordnete das an? (Einem Edgar Hoover könnte man
das zutrauen.) In welchen Positionen wurden diese Mitarbeiter
eingesetzt? Und fanden deren totalitäre Ansichten im verständlichen
CIA-Kampf gegen den Kommunismus in der Agentur Verbreitung? Dass
Wissenschaftler, die im Dienste Nazi-Deutschlands gestanden waren, nach
’45 auf die Gehaltsliste der USA wechselten, war bekannt. Nun kommen
offenbar "aktivere" Nazis dazu. Die USA haben braune Flecken vor der
eigenen Haustür in Langley. Dagegen hilft nur Aufarbeitung durch
Historikerkommissionen, wie mehrere europäische Länder vorgeführt
haben. Die betreffenden Telefonnummern stehen im Internet. Das müsste
die CIA doch schaffen.
