U.S. need not have spent $30 million on declassifying WWII criminal records

A National Archives and Records Administration report shows that much of the United States' $30 million expenditure on declassifying records of its involvement with Nazi and Japanese war criminals could have been averted had the government complied with its own declassification rule.

The newly released final report of the working group created by the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act posits that too often documents are classified to avoid embarrassment or, more often still, simply because it is easy to do so without accountability.

The government is legally obligated to release all records that shed light on the extent of American involvement with German war criminals after the end of World War II. Similar disclosure was later added for Japanese war criminals.

The U.S. government used many former Nazi officers and scientists to develop intelligence against the Soviet Union, according to declassified documents.

In 2004, the working group published a book, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, a volume of analyses produced by independent historians working with the project. A separate book on the smaller amount of records involving Japanese war criminals was published in 2006.

We now know as a result of the declassification that the use of Nazi war criminals was harmful, in other than moral ways, to the United States, Elizabeth Holtzman, a former Democratic congresswoman from New York and one of the public members of the working group, wrote in the final report. The Soviets, it turns out, were targeting and hoping to 'turn' Nazi war criminals being hired in droves by our spy network in West Germany.

A former Nazi SS officer, Hans Felfe, who became head of counterintelligence in the West German intelligence organization sponsored by the CIA, turned out to have been a Soviet agent. His unmasking finally alerted the CIA to the Soviet targeting of the war criminals recruited by Western intelligence, Holtzman wrote.

According to the report, the CIA largely refused to cooperate with the declassification effort between 2001 and 2005, citing a need to protect its sources and methods, even those 60 years past. The declassification effort had to be extended by two years in 2005 because of the CIA's resistance.

CIA spokesman George Little said Monday the agency fully complied with the process.

The CIA has always provided vital support to this effort and took an even more aggressive stance two years ago, Little said.

The CIA ultimately spent more than $3 million on the project according to the report, although the agency refuses to release the exact amount because its budget is secret.

That money, like the remaining $27 million spent by other agencies to declassify the wartime records over the eight years, came out of regular declassification and Freedom of Information Act budgets, degrading both activities.