http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11896-2001Apr27.html
Documents Show Nazis' Role in U.S. Intelligence
By George Lardner Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 27, 2001; 3:28 PM
U.S. intelligence agencies used a rogue's gallery of Nazi war criminals after World
War II, some of whom cleverly ingratiated themselves with the West, to help cope with
the new threats posed by the Soviet Union and its communist allies.
The collaboration, rarely questioned on moral grounds, was detailed today in the
unprecedented release of 20 long-secret CIA "name files," the first of several
hundred that are to be made public under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act enacted
by Congress in 1998.
The 10,000 pages, outlined in a news conference at the Holocaust Museum and released
later at the National Archives in College Park, include files on Adolf Hitler and
other notorious Nazis, from Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller to former UN Secretary
General Kurt Waldheim.
In some cases, they serve primarily to refute lingering rumors, such as unfounded
talk that Mueller and Waldheim may have been U.S. intelligence assets. In other
instances, as Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), one of the authors of the law suggested,
they tell us more "about ourselves: what we knew and when we knew it."
The most striking disclosures were about the "second tier" of Nazis who used their
intelligence expertise, often directed against the Soviet Union, to align themselves
with western powers. As a panel of historians enlisted by government officials to
study the records concluded:
"Many lesser-known Nazis committed serious crimes, but in the postwar period received
light punishment, no punishment at all, or received compensation because western
intelligence agencies considered them useful assets in the Cold War."
Expressing her dismay, former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman (D-N. Y.), one of the
presidentially appointed members of the interagency working group in charge of the
law, pointed out that three Nazis charged with war crimes, Emil Augsburg, Wilhelm
Hoettl and Klaus Barbie, were all employed by the U. S. Army's Counterintelligence
Corps [CIC] or the Office of Strategic Services.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
