The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of initiated a search for information in classified American government records about the Holocaust and other war crimes committed by Nazi Germany or its allies. A second target of this law was information about any individuals with Nazi pasts who may have been used as intelligence sources and protected against prosecution after World War II.
The Central Intelligence Agency has now located and declassified files on a substantial number of individuals suspected of involvement in criminal activity for the Nazi regime or its allies and satellites. In other cases a CIA file on an individual contains evidence about criminal activity by others. Nineteen CIA "name files" being opened today represent the first significant products of this search within CIA records. The CIA's release of these records is welcome and newsworthy.
Absent the Disclosure Act, it is highly unlikely that many of these records would have been declassified and opened for many years. Some still sensitive information has been redacted in accordance with the exemptions in the Act. These redactions are generally very narrow, and in the view of the IWG's historians the resulting documents are clear enough to be used for historical analysis. What is a CIA name file? Each name file is a collection of diverse information on an individual.
Documents in the file may include published materials, declassified documents available elsewhere, interrogations, confidential reports from agents or informants, internal communications about these individuals, and CIA analytical reports. Whose Files Are Now Declassified? Another fourteen CIA name files involve individuals who served Nazi Germany, survived the war, were suspected of involvement in criminal Nazi or Nazi intelligence activities or had evidence of such activity by others, and came to the attention of American intelligence agencies after May Nine of the fourteen persons in this second tier had some contact with the West German intelligence organization established by General Reinhard Gehlen, which was initially under the control of the U.
Army and was taken over in by the CIA. Some of the fourteen individuals in the second tier tried to use their intelligence expertise, acquired in Nazi Germany and often directed against the Soviet Union, to ingratiate themselves with the Western powers.
