Westen govts lose more credibility as moral leaders

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Westen govts lose more credibility as moral leaders
Kashif
04/28/01 at 17:29:50
CIA recruited Nazis to spy on Soviets
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
29 April 2001
The United States has admitted that it recruited several known Nazi war criminals as anti-Soviet intelligence agents immediately after the Second World War, helping them to escape justice in exchange for information that turned out to be of dubious value.

Files on 20 Nazi figures, declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency, show that three war criminals ­ Emil Augsburg, Wilhelm Höttl and Klaus Barbie ­ worked directly for US intelligence. Of these, only Barbie, a Gestapo officer called the "butcher of Lyon" for his persecution of French resistance leaders, was ever brought to justice.

The files show that nine other Nazi criminals received indirect help from the US through a spy network set up in West Berlin by Reinhard Gehlen, a hastily rehabilitated German general who had previously been head of Nazi intelligence on the eastern front. The nine included Guido Zimmer, an official notorious for rounding up Jews in northern Italy, and Eugen Dollman, who was suspected of collusion in the 1944 massacre of 335 Italian civilians in the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome. None received more than token punishment for their crimes, and many prospered.

Although the US was not the only power to help known Nazi criminals, the new files give the clearest indication yet how middle-ranking SS and Gestapo officers were able to save their skins if they were smart enough to claim knowledge that the Allies might find useful at the onset of the Cold War.

For example Augsburg, an SS officer who participated in "special duties" against the Jews (ie helping to exterminate them), was recruited by the US Counterintelligence Corps ­ the forerunner of the CIA ­ after claiming that he had eight trunks full of information on Soviet agents. The trunks were never found, but Augsburg continued to live off the payroll of various western intelligence agencies for 20 years.

At no stage, according to Norman Goda, an Ohio University historian who helped present the files at a news conference in Washington on Friday, did the US government ask "the moral question ­ should we use these people?". Eli Rosenbaum, a Nazi hunter working for the US Justice Department, added: "These files demonstrate that the real winners of the Cold War were Nazi criminals... They 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."

Höttl, an SS major who had helped deport Jews to Auschwitz, peddled intelligence of varying quality to "anyone who would pay him", according to his file. He set up a Swiss bank account with purloined Nazi funds and lived comfortably in Vienna until his death in 1999.

Barbie lived comfortably as a US agent in Germany from 1947 to 1949 before setting himself up in Bolivia under the name Klaus Altmann. He was eventually found by the French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld in the 1980s, was convicted of crimes against humanity and died in a French prison in 1991.

The new files cleared up some old mysteries, showing that Kurt Waldheim ­ the SS officer who went on to be the United Nations secretary-general and President of Austria ­ was never a CIA spy, and strongly suggesting that Heinrich Müller, the Gestapo chief whose death has long been shrouded in mystery, died in the final battle for Berlin.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=69349
NS
Re: Westen govts lose more credibility as moral leaders
Saleema
04/28/01 at 20:58:32
[slm]

Oh no! I'm so shocked! It's the end of the world now. How could they do something like that!?!

(yes, being sarcastic)
[wlm]
Saleema


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