A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.
The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.
It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.
The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis. Read More Here.
The Office of Special Investigations (OSI), in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, had been investigating and prosecuting cases against Nazi offenders since 1979. OSI established a record as the most active and successful such law enforcement unit in the world. The first director of OSI, Walter Rockler, had been a prosecutor during the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings.
OSI conducted civil proceedings, as criminal prosecutions in the Nazi cases are, in effect, barred by the ex post facto clause of the United States Constitution. Sanctions imposed as a result of successful civil prosecution by OSI are denaturalization (revocation of U.S. citizenship) and deportation. The key element in OSI prosecutions is past participation of the defendant in Axis-sponsored persecution of individuals on the basis of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion. Naturalization fraud or visa fraud allegations were often included as well. There is no statute of limitations on civil immigration and naturalization fraud claims.
Despite initial predictions that its work would soon be finished, OSI has been active for over 25 years. It has opened hundreds of investigations and has initiated proceedings leading to the denaturalization and/or removal of more than 100 Nazi offenders from the United States. In addition, with the assistance of the INS — and, since 2002, its successor, the Department of Homeland Security — OSI has succeeded in blocking attempts made by more than 200 individuals suspected of participating in Nazi crimes to gain entry to the United States, among them the former United Nations Secretary General and later Austrian President Kurt Waldheim. The majority of persons against whom OSI has initiated proceedings were either members of auxiliary police forces serving in German-occupied territories, or guards at concentration camps and forced-labor camps. More.
Despite these efforts, doubts persist in some circles as to whether the United States Government has been fully honest about this emotion-charged issue. For example, Christopher Simpson, in his 1988 book, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, asserts that “US intelligence agencies did know–or had good reason to suspect–that many contract agents they hired during the Cold War had committed crimes against humanity on behalf of the Nazis. The CIA, the State Department, and US Army intelligence,” Simpson states, “each created special programs for the specific purpose of bringing former selected Nazis and collaborators to the United States. Other projects protected such people by placing them on US payrolls overseas.”(3) The fact that most US intelligence records from this time period are still classified only lends greater mystery to the issue.
The CIA comes under particular scrutiny because of its secrecy and reputation. Over the years, observers have charged that:
* CIA, and its predecessor organizations such as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, 1942-45), the Strategic Services Unit (SSU, 1945-46), and the Central Intelligence Group (CIG, 1946-47), employed German intelligence personnel as sources of information. Afterward, the CIA sponsored the new West German intelligence service, an organization under the control of officers of the defunct German general staff. The ranks of the organization sheltered many officers of the German SS and SD whose loyalty to the new West German Government remained in doubt.
* CIA and its predecessor organizations employed former collaborators of the Third Reich, primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe, initially as sources of information and later as operational assets for activities behind the Iron Curtain.
* CIA, including the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC, 1948-52), brought Germans and East Europeans to the United States to provide detailed information on the Soviet Union.
* CIA, including OPC, formed “secret armies” from various émigré groups in Europe and trained them in the United States. The ranks of these groups included numerous former collaborators of Nazi Germany, and some of these people remained active in other CIA projects.
* CIA evacuated Nazi war criminals and collaborators through “rat lines” in southern Europe, allowing them to escape justice by relocating them incognito in South America.
* CIA abused its legal authority to bring Soviet and Soviet Bloc defectors and other persons of interest to the United States.
* CIA covered up its these activities from Congressional and other Federal investigators.
The extent to which the Agency is guilty or innocent of these charges is a matter of continuing debate among historians. Certainly, the Agency’s own secretiveness and its previous public scandals color the debate. For decades, the CIA faced little public scrutiny of its operations or the identity of its agents. But the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961, highlighting the CIA-sponsored, ill-fated invasion of Cuba and the Agency’s reliance on Cuban émigrés, cracked CIA’s picture-perfect mirror. Controversies in Vietnam later in the decade only increased concern among Americans about CIA’s accountability. During the 1970s, a series of Congressional investigations pointed to extensive problems within CIA and presented an image of the Agency as a “rogue elephant.” More.