CIA Suppressed Information About Nazi Fugitive

The United States learned the location and alias of fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann two years before Israel captured him but kept the information secret as part of its efforts to combat communism in post-war West Germany, according to a historian who reviewed 27,000 pages of newly declassified documents.

The Central Intelligence Agency knew that senior Gestapo officer Eichmann was hiding in Argentina in 1958 under an alias, but left it up to Germany to deal with him, said University of Virginia historian Timothy Naftali, who reviewed thousands of documents on CIA ties to Nazis from the US National Archives released Tuesday.

The papers also show that from 1952, West Germany knew that Eichmann was hiding in Argentina under an assumed identity, but kept quiet about it fearing the fugitive might talk about Hans Globke, a former Nazi was a top national security advisor to then-chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

"When one knows the hunt for Eichmann was prolonged because the Israelis knew that he was in Argentina but did not know the alias under which he was hiding, one understands completely the importance of these documents," Naftali told AFP. "The West Germans at the time had the responsibility of arresting or at least transmitting this information and it is they who are the most guilty."

An executor of the "final solution"

The Israelis kidnapped Eichmann, one of the main executors of Adolf Hitler's "final solution," the Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II, in Buenos Aires in 1960. He was brought secretly to Israel, where he was tried, convicted and hung in 1962.

The CIA documents reveal that the United States, at the request of West Germany, successfully pressured the US magazine "Life," which had acquired the rights to publish Eichmann's memoir, to delete a reference to Globke, Naftali said.

They also show that the United States used a large network of spies recruited among former Nazis and that the CIA had virtually no interest in arresting war criminals, focusing instead on Cold War issues.

"The American policy of the time was not to pursue Nazi war criminals," Naftali said. "They thought that was the responsibility of the Germans."

Shedding new light

Since 1999 a task force mandated by the US Congress has been researching the National Archives and documents as they are declassified to shed light on the relations between US authorities and Nazi war criminals after World War II.

The group's work also focuses on US aid given to certain leaders of the Japanese regime in power during the 1930s and 1940s.

Some eight million pages from the CIA, FBI and Defense Department have been studied thus far, according to the National Archives. The final report is due to be published in spring 2007.