Report: U.S. recruited Nazis to help during Cold War

Report: U.S. recruited Nazis to help during Cold War

NEW YORK -- The CIA and other U.S. agencies "used the services" of over 1,000 former Nazis during the Cold War, the New York Times is reporting.

This was happening "as recently as in the 1990s," while the agencies in question did all they could to hide the Nazis' past, an article quoting "newly disclosed records and interviews" has suggested.

Written by Eric Lichtblau, the author of "The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men," the New York Times piece says that American agencies saw former Nazis of all ranks as "significant anti-Soviet assets", and for that reason proceeded to aggressively recruit them in the 1950s.

"They believed the ex-Nazis' intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called 'moral lapses' in their service to the Third Reich," writes Lichtblau.

Some of those were suspected of direct involvement in World War II war crimes, said the article, and quoted Holocaust scholar at American University Richard Breitman as stating that "all in all, the American military, the CIA, the FBI and other agencies used at least 1,000 ex-Nazis and collaborators as spies and informants after the war."

Norman Goda, a University of Florida historian on the declassification team, said that "the full tally of Nazis-turned-spies is probably much higher, but many records remain classified even today, making a complete count impossible."

The CIA thus hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s "even after concluding he was probably guilty of 'minor war crimes'," while in 1994, "a lawyer with the CIA pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated...