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Documents trace us employment of nazis in cold war { May 14 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0405140327may14,1,5066920.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hedhttp://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0405140327may14,1,5066920.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
Documents trace U.S. employment of Nazis in Cold War
By Siobhan McDonough
Associated Press
May 14, 2004
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government ignored any possible moral qualms in employing ex-Nazis after World War II, say historians who examined a mountain of declassified papers released Thursday.
The government "dishonored the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and American soldiers who died," said Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of a government-appointed group studying millions of pages of files from that era.
Reinhard Gehlen, for example, was recruited by the CIA after World War II because he was chief of army intelligence for the Nazis on the Eastern front, where most of the mass killings of Jews occurred. Gehlen was undoubtedly involved in the brutal interrogation of Russian prisoners of war, Holtzman said.
Gehlen was brought to the United States and then sent back to Germany to set up a major spy network for the U.S. He first worked for the CIA and later his operation became the West German intelligence service. He was thought to have employed Nazi war criminals.
Gehlen is just one example of how the FBI and other U.S. agencies ignored the murky pasts of alleged Nazi collaborators, many living in the United States, because the government saw them as useful during the Cold War, according to the records released at the National Archives.
Four historians who collaborated on a book, "U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis," based on the records, said a good deal of information about the Holocaust was available early to officials of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor.
The book, also released Thursday, cites papers describing the systematic killing of European Jews months before the Allies acknowledged knowing about it. They did so in a December 1942 statement saying Nazi Germany was carrying out a policy of mass extermination.
In the summer of 1942, Joseph Goldschmied, a Czech banker who fled to America, gave U.S. officials a 26-page account of the German occupation, describing a shift in strategy from forced emigration of Czech Jews to their annihilation.
The historians also found detailed accounts from an unknown source, writing from Lisbon in a series of letters starting in June 1942, asserting Germany was no longer merely persecuting European Jews--"It is systematically exterminating them."
The letters appear to have been sent to Allen Dulles, then a U.S. intelligence officer stationed in New York, before his transfer to Switzerland in November 1942. Dulles later became CIA director.
Such material adds to evidence that some U.S. officials had heard reports about elements of the Holocaust. But the historians say their findings do not contradict long-existing accounts by U.S. officials that they did not know the scope of the killings at the time.
Historians discussed how alleged Nazi war criminals used their knowledge of the Soviets and Eastern Europe to play up their value to Allied officials after the war.
Eichmann aide hired
Historian Norman J.W. Goda said the FBI "did not dig deep for the truth" on such people because it wanted them on America's side in the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
The government saw Nazi sympathizers as useful in countering pro-communist leanings in immigrant communities in the United States, and the CIA and other agencies sometimes thwarted immigration authorities from beginning deportation proceedings, the records show.
The records also describe the case of Otto von Bolshwing, a former SS officer hired by the CIA in 1949. Bolshwing had worked with Adolf Eichmann before the war in planning the expropriation of Jewish property in Austria and later served as SS consultant to the forces that staged the bloody purge in Bucharest, Romania, in 1941.
The documents also show Theodor Saevecke served as a CIA agent in Berlin in the late 1940s, despite evidence he had executed members of the Italian resistance during the war.
"In U.S. intelligence, there was no prohibition of hiring anyone in the Gestapo and SS," said historian Timothy Naftali. "This was a `don't ask, don't tell' culture."
The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group released the book by its independent historians. The group has overseen the declassification and release of roughly 8 million pages of U.S. government records related to war criminals and crimes committed by Germany and Japan during World War II.
INS probe dropped
In the thousands of newly released files, the CIA is also shown seeking the Immigration and Naturalization Service's help in easing travel in and out of America for Mykola Lebed, a Ukrainian accused of aiding German storm troopers in brutal suppression of local resistance during World War II.
The INS found "some basis for at least some of these allegations," according to a 1953 letter from the agency seeking direction from the Justice Department. If they were true, the agency said, Lebed should be deported.
But INS called off its investigation of Lebed at the CIA's request, even while declining at that time to give him freedom to leave and return to the United States at will.
"I do not feel that we are in any position to give such assurance, since there is a strong likelihood that subject is inadmissible under the immigration laws," the INS commissioner wrote.
Goda said Lebed was hired by the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps and then, in 1948, by the CIA. He entered the United States under the cover of the Displaced Persons Act.
Goda said the documents show the INS was not, as long thought, "asleep at the switch" during the years when many Nazi sympathizers entered the country. "They tried to institute proceedings against these people," he said, only to be thwarted by the FBI, CIA or others in government.
With Lebed, he said, "the CIA was strong-arming INS to allow him to stay, and leave on CIA business and come back."
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune
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