http://www.jta.org/story.asp?story=7532
Who won Cold War? Nazis, say CIA files
By Sharon Samber, Jewish Telegraphic Agency 04/29/2001
WASHINGTON, April 29 (JTA) - Newly declassified CIA files provide an
inside glimpse of the extent to which U.S. intelligence officials
relied on suspected Nazi war criminals for information about the
Soviets after World War II.
According to the files, some of the Nazis on the CIA's payroll lived
the high life after the war, apparently profiting from stolen Jewish
property.
Perhaps the most famous Nazi on the U.S. intelligence payroll was
Klaus Barbie, a Gestapo officer known as the "Butcher of Lyon" for
ordering the murder of French Jewish children during the war.
Among the files' other findings was that Gestapo head Heinrich Mueller
likely died at the end of World War II, and therefore never worked for
the CIA, contradicting previous assumptions.
Nearly 10,000 pages were made available to the public last Friday
under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998, but historians were
quick to point out that many questions linger because the files must
still be analyzed.
The files focus on 20 Nazi figures, including Adolf Hitler and Adolf
Eichmann.
Included in the Hitler file was a document involving an informant who
said in January 1937 that he had talked with a surgeon who had
observed Hitler. According to the informant, the surgeon believed
Hitler was "a border case between genius and insanity," and
potentially could become "the craziest criminal the world ever saw."
In April 1937, the doctor told the informant that Hitler had begun to
swing toward insanity and that Germany therefore was doomed, according
to the document.
Austrian officials claimed that the documents prove that Kurt
Waldheim, the former U.N. secretary-general and Austrian president,
was not guilty of Nazi-era war crimes.
But an official from the U.S. Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit,
Eli Rosenbaum, said the files only showed that Waldheim had not worked
for the U.S. intelligence community after the war. Waldheim may have
worked for Soviet intelligence organizations, Rosenbaum added.
The Waldheim file shows the United States suspected that Waldheim had
been compromised by the Soviet Union, but nevertheless did not ask for
a CIA background check when Waldheim ran for U.N. secretary-general in
1971.
After Waldheim's Nazi past was discovered - he served during World War
II in a Nazi army unit linked to atrocities against civilians in the
Balkans - the United States put Waldheim on its "watch list" of
undesirable aliens in 1987.
The newly released documents indicate that the Office of Strategic
Services, the CIA's wartime predecessor, was determined to identify
and track down Nazis. After the war ended, however, many of those
same Nazis were employed by U.S. intelligence to help spy on the
Soviets.
At the same time, other Nazis were hired by the Soviet Union to spy on
the United States.
Of the 20 Nazis who were the focus of the just-released files,
Rosenbaum said, at least six were used by U.S. intelligence, six by
Soviet intelligence and five by the CIA-dominated Gehlen Organization,
the West German intelligence bureau established by a former Hitler
general, Reinhard Gehlen.
"These documents show the real winners of the Cold War were Nazi war
criminals," Rosenbaum said.
The Nazis were able to escape justice because the United States and
Soviet Union were too focused on challenging each other in the postwar
period, Rosenbaum said. U.S. officials "lost their will to pursue Nazi
perpetrators, and even deemed some of the criminals to be useful in
conducting Cold War intelligence operations," he said.
In recent years, U.S. intelligence officials have been forced to admit
that they used Nazi war criminals as informants at the dawn of the
Cold War, an approach that was "a horrendous mistake," according to
historian Richard Breitman, who directed research of the CIA files.
Declassifying the files could help prevent future atrocities because
democracy is strengthened when its "dirty linen" is exposed, said
former U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the Nazi War Crimes
and Japanese Imperial Government Interagency Working Group, which
worked to open and examine the files.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) started a crusade in 1994 to declassify
U.S. intelligence agency documents on the Holocaust and America's
postwar dealings with former Nazis.
Maloney was spurred to action after the U.S. government refused to
open documents relating to Waldheim, who had hid his Nazi past for
decades.
(c Jewish Telegraphic Agency Inc. The above information is available
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JTA.)
