Updated with another article published on June 8th, 2006. Please scroll down.
(Sydney Morning Herald)
The New York Times Revealed: great pains US took to let in Nazis
May 15th, 2004
By Elizabeth Olson, in Washington
The US Government worked closely with Nazi war criminals and collaborators, allowing many to live in the US after World War II, and paying others who worked for West Germany's secret service, declassified documents from the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies reveal. The disclosures came as part of a project to place more than 8 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.
"Although we have long known the outlines of the US 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.
The 240,000 pages reveal a pattern of US co-operation with questionable people who were protected on the grounds that they had valuable intelligence to offer during the Cold War.
Norman Goda, an Ohio University history professor who examined the material, said at least five associates of the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, each of whom had a significant role in Hitler's effort to exterminate Jews, had worked for the CIA.
The records also indicate that the CIA tried to recruit a further two dozen war criminals or Nazi collaborators. Some were given jobs and, in two cases, US citizenship. The documents did not deal with those who hid their pasts in order to gain entry to the US.
"We had assumed the [immigration department] dropped the ball, making only perfunctory background checks on these people," Dr Goda said. "But the records show immigration officials did investigate and tried to have [them] deported.
"The problem was that there were preferences in the CIA and FBI, especially preferences of [FBI director] J. Edgar Hoover, to keep these people in the country so they could report on any communist trends inside their own community."
The New York Times
(Sydney Morning Herald)
The New York Times CIA hid Nazi's identity
June 8th, 2006
Scott Shane in Washington
THE CIA took no action after learning the pseudonym and whereabouts of the fugitive war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1958, according to CIA documents that shed new light on the spy agency's use of former Nazis as informants after World War II.
The CIA was told by West German intelligence that Eichmann was living in Argentina under the name Clemens, a slight variation on his actual alias, Ricardo Klement. But the agency did not share the information with Israel, according to Timothy Naftali, a historian who examined the documents.
Two years later, Israeli agents ended a long hunt by abducting Eichmann in Argentina and flying him to Israel, where he was tried and executed in 1962.
The Eichmann papers are among 27,000 newly declassified pages released by the CIA to the US National Archives in the wake of growing congressional pressure to open files about former Nazi officials later employed as American agents. The material reinforces the view that most former Nazis gave US intelligence authorities little of value and in some cases turned out to be damaging double agents for the Soviet KGB.
Elizabeth Holtzman, a former congresswoman and a member of the US government panel examining the files, said the documents showed the CIA "failed to lift a finger" to hunt Eichmann and "force us to confront not only the moral harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis.
The US government, preoccupied with the Cold War, had no policy at the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The records show US intelligence officials protected many former Nazis for their perceived value in combating the Soviet threat.
But Ms Holtzman, speaking at a press briefing at the National Archives on Tuesday, said information from the former Nazis was often tainted both by their "personal agendas" and their vulnerability to blackmail.
"Using bad people can have very bad consequences," she said. She and other group members suggested the findings should be a cautionary tale for intelligence agencies today.
As head of the Gestapo's Jewish affairs office during the war, Eichmann implemented Hitler's policy of exterminating Europe's Jews and promoted the use of gas chambers. He was in charge of all German trains carrying Jews to death camps in occupied Poland and once bragged he had personally sent more than 5 million Jews to their deaths on his trains.
Captured by the US Army at the end of the war, he gave a false name and went unrecognised, hiding in Germany and Italy before fleeing to Argentina in 1950.
The New York Times
It's even worse here in Australia
And have a good look at some of what Hitler still had up his sleeve.
And today's NAZIs still have them.
And THAT'S what these above stories are REALLY about!