National Archives

Hitler's Shadow - Nazi War Criminals, U.s. Intelligence, and the Cold War National Archives

At the end of World War II, Allied armies recovered a large portion of the written or filmed evidence of the Holocaust and other forms of Nazi persecution. Allied prosecutors used newly found records in numerous war crimes trials. Governments released many related documents regarding war criminals during the second half of the 20th century. A small segment of American-held documents from Nazi Germany or about Nazi officials and Nazi collaborators, however, remained classified into the 21st century because of government restrictions on the release of intelligence-related records. Approximately 8 million pages of documents declassified in the United States under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act added significantly to our knowledge of wartime Nazi crimes and the postwar fate of suspected war criminals. A 2004 U. S. Government report by a team of independent historians working with the government?s Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), entitled U. S. Intelligence and the Nazis, highlighted some of the new information; it appeared with revisions as a 2005 book.1 Our 2010 report serves as an addendum to U. S. Intelligence and the Nazis; it draws upon additional documents declassified since then. The latest CIA and Army files have: evidence of war crimes and about the wartime activities of war criminals; postwar documents on the search for or prosecution of war criminals; documents about the escape of war criminals; documents about the Allied protection or use of Nazi war criminals; and documents about the postwar political activities of war criminals. None of the declassified documents conveys a complete story in itself; to make sense of this evidence, we have also drawn on older documents and published works.