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Documents show us relationship with nazis { May 14 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/14/politics/14nazi.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/14/politics/14nazi.html
May 14, 2004
Documents Show U.S. Relationship With Nazis During Cold War
By ELIZABETH OLSON
WASHINGTON, May 13 - The American government worked closely with Nazi war criminals and collaborators, allowing many of them to live in the United States after World War II, and paying others who worked for West Germany's secret service, according to declassified documents from the F.B.I., C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies released Thursday.
The disclosures came as part of a project to place more than eight million government documents in the public domain, under legislation passed by Congress in 1998 to create the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, or I.W.G.
"Although we have long known the outlines of the U.S. government's covert dealings with Nazi war criminals, the full scope of these relationships has never been fully documented or revealed," said Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the working group and a former congresswoman from New York. "Until the work of the I.W.G., these relationships remained one of the great post-World War II secrets."
The 240,000 pages released Thursday reveal a pattern of American cooperation with questionable people who were protected on the grounds that they had valuable intelligence to offer during the cold-war period.
It was not that such collaborators fell through the bureaucratic cracks and were overlooked by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said Norman J. W. Goda, an Ohio University history professor whose examination of the material is included in the book, "U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis," that the working group released Thursday.
"We had assumed that the I.N.S. dropped the ball, making only perfunctory background checks on these people," Mr. Goda said. "But the records show that immigration officials did investigate and tried to have these people deported."
"The problem," he said, "was that there were preferences in the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.," particularly of J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director, "to keep these people in the country so they could report on any Communist trends inside their own community."
Ultimately, Mr. Goda concluded, "such men added nothing except grist for the mill for their own propaganda."
Mr. Goda and other historians who studied the documents said that at least five associates of the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, each of whom had a significant role in Hitler's campaign to kill Jews, had worked for the C.I.A. The records also indicate that the C.I.A. tried to recruit another two dozen war criminals or Nazi collaborators. Some of them received employment and, in two cases, United States citizenship, according to the documents. The documents did not deal with those people who concealed their Nazi pasts in order to gain entry into the United States.
Also, several dozen people with criminal or dubious backgrounds were paid by the United States while they were employed by West Germany's secret service.
Timothy J. Naftali, an intelligence historian at the University of Virginia who examined the documents and also wrote chapters in the I.W.G. book, said: "We had no policies for helping Gestapo members, no disqualifiers unless the public knew about the crimes. It was kind of a 'don't ask, don't tell' culture."
The Interagency Working Group's mandate to examine declassified intelligence documents has been extended by one year, and its staff members said there would be a report in 2005 about activities in Asia and a final report later to summarize the group's findings.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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