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May 4, 2001/Iyar 11, 5761, Vol. 53, No.31
CIA files show Nazis were 'winners of Cold War'
SHARON SAMBER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
WASHINGTON - 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 April 27 under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998.
The files focus on 20 Nazi figures, including Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann.
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 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.
"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.
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