CIA Opens Nazi Files, Including Hitler's

April 27 -- The CIA released files today showing how some World War II Nazis found refuge from prosecution in the heated competitiveness of the Cold War.

In what some called the biggest revelation since Nuremburg, the CIA offered 20 files on Adolf Hitler and some of his top deputies.

"These files demonstrate as a body that the real winners of the Cold War were Nazi criminals, many of whom were able to escape justice because East and West became so rapidly focused after the war on challenging each other that they lost their will to pursue Nazi perpetrators," said Eli Rosenbaum, a Justice Department official, at a news conference at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Analysts said the documents showed many of the Nazis profiled tried to ingratiate themselves with the world's two emerging superpowers, offering their intelligence expertise in actions against the other.

Rosenbaum said at least six may have been used by U.S. intelligence agencies, and six others may have been used by Soviet intelligence organizations.

Thomas Baer, a member of an interagency group that worked with the CIA to release the papers, told Reuters, “these materials show that the United States of America retained Nazi war criminals and there will be no question about it."

Among the other Nazis who had CIA files were: Josef Mengele, who carried out medical experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp; Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller; Adolf Eichman, the architect of the plan to exterminate Jews; and Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in occupied Lyon, France.

There were few revelations about more infamous Nazis, but analysts pointed out the documents showed no evidence that Kurt Waldheim, who later became U.N. secretary-general, was used as an U.S. intelligence source.

There had been rumors that the CIA knew of Walheim's Nazi past.

Dark Portent

The files also included an ominous secondhand personality analysis of Hitler, performed by his own physician.