US suppressed Eichmann whereabouts to help WGermany

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N06446998.htm

WASHINGTON, June 6 (Reuters) - The CIA suppressed the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann to help protect high ranking West German officials from possible revelations about their own Nazi pasts, according to CIA documents released on Tuesday.

A March 1958 memo from West German intelligence informed the CIA that Eichmann, the senior Gestapo officer who oversaw Hitler's "Final Solution" to annihilate European Jewry, was living under the alias "Clemens" in Argentina where he had arrived seven years earlier, the documents show.

"It now appears that West Germany could have captured him in 1958, if it wished to," said University of Virginia historian Timothy Naftali, director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

"Newly released CIA materials suggest that in the highest levels of the Konrad Adenauer government, there was concern about what Eichmann could say if caught about those close to the chancellor."

He was speaking at a news conference where a government working group headed by the National Archives announced the release of 27,000 pages of CIA documents relating to the spy agency's ties to former Nazis, including war criminals.

over time. What was true in 1958 is not always true today.

Globke is the important name here: he wrote the frigging race laws, but was allowed to sit in the Adenauer Cabinet nonetheless. His fall would have doomed the young and - predominately - "ex"-Nazi German conservative party. The SPD was still aiming for a neutral, unified Germany; not compatible with the cold war.

A name which should be remembered and honored in this circumstances is Fritz Bauer. He was the Hessian chief public prosecutor and the only German official who ever had the balls to go after the perpetrator. He had the material to get Eichmann in 1958, but wasn't allowed to act on it. It is assumed that he forwarded his findings to Arendt, who in turn informed the appropriate persons.
Bauer died a few years later under unclear circumstances; the police report said suicide.

CIA Ties With Ex-Nazis Shown
Anti-Communist Effort Is Detailed In Agency Records

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 7, 2006; Page A21

The CIA organized Cold War spy networks that included former Nazis and failed to act on a 1958 report that fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was living in Argentina, newly released CIA records show.

The records were among 27,000 pages of documents made public yesterday at the National Archives. They shed new light on the secret protection and support given to former Nazi officials and Nazi collaborators by U.S. intelligence agencies as fighting communism became the central aim of American foreign policy in the years after World War II.


(snip)

"It's a rare release of operational files," said Allen Weinstein, head of the National Archives and chairman of the interagency working group overseeing the declassification of records about World War II crimes and criminals. "The files are also more inclusive than any other CIA files made public before. . . . This time, the documents are nearly all without redactions, providing researchers and historians the clearest view yet of the postwar intelligence world."

more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/06/AR2006060601555.html?nav=rss_politics