CIA Opens Nazi Files, Including Hitler's

April 27, 2001 -- 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.

On Dec. 7, 1944, Ron Carroll of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote a memo about a German informant's meeting with a surgeon who had analyzed Hitler.

The informant, Hans Bie, met Ferdinand Sauerbruch, a well-known professor of surgery at Berlin University, at a party in January 1937.

Carroll wrote: "Sauerbruch … stated that from close observation of Hitler for many years, he had formed the opinion that the Nazi leader was a border case between genius and insanity and that … the decision would take place in the near future whether Hitler's mind wouldswing toward the latter."

The memo continued: "Sauerbruch then said that should the latter occur, Hitler would become "the craziest criminal the world every saw."

When Bie and Sauerbruch met again in April 1937, the doctor "stated that in his opinion, the swing towards insanity had taken place and that the first symptom was the dismissal of moderate members of Hitler's government," according to the memo.

The Search for War Criminals

The files also detailed the worldwide hunt for Nazi war criminals after World War II.

Gestapo chief Mueller, who was involved in carrying out Hitler's Final Solution, the extermination of all European and Russian Jews, has never been found.

When Berlin fell in 1945, the Allies were able to find a number of Gestapo officials, but no Mueller. The hunt continued over the years, with the finger pointed at many men in Germany and Austria, but the CIA eventually assumed Mueller was killed in the war's closing days.

The files showed the CIA did not effectively pursue Eichmann, Mueller's No. 2 and one of the architects of the Final Solution, until 1959.

When the war ended, the OSS believed Eichmann fled to Austria and then Argentina. He was finally captured in 1959 by Israeli agents, and tried in Israel in 1961.

He was executed the following year.

Decloaking the Past

Some 10,000 pages were declassified today, the latest of millions of pages of U.S. intelligence material released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 2000.

"Today history is being made, or maybe a better way of saying this is history today is being reported," Sen. Mike Dewine said. The Ohio Republican helped pass the law that ordered the CIA to make its records public.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat who served on the committee that oversaw releasing the records, said: "The act has been called the biggest series of revelations since the Nuremberg trials. Now over 3 million pages of U.S. intelligence documents are organized and available to the public through the national archives."

The Nuremberg trials took place shortly after the end of World War II when indictments were issued against 24 men and six organizations. The indictments accused the defendants of murdering millions of people as well as carrying out the war in Europe.