May 14


USA:

Nazis often used by U.S. following war, historians say
WWII: Crimes in early stages of Cold War.



The U.S. government threw moral qualms to the wind in employing ex-Nazis
after World War II, contend 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, 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 America and then sent back to Germany to set up a
major spy network for the United States. First, he worked for the CIA;
later his operation became the West German intelligence service and he was
thought to have employed Nazi war criminals.

He 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 new 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 in a December 1942
statement saying Nazi Germany was carrying out a policy of mass
extermination acknowledged knowing about it.

In the summer of 1942, Joseph Goldschmied, a Czech banker who fled to the
United States, 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.

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 communist Soviet Union.

The government saw Nazi sympathizers as useful in countering any
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
pogrom 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 the Nazi and Japanese Imperial Government during World
War II.

On the Net: Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records
Interagency Working Group: www.archives.gov/iwg

(source: Associated Press)