U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (review)

Thanks to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 and the Interagency Working Group (IWG) created for its implementation, some eight million pages of World War II era documents have been declassified. Despite the Freedom of Information Act, these records of the CIA, the former OSS, the U.S. Army, and the FBI had been almost as inaccessible as the German records held by the former Soviet Union and its satellites. The opening of all these collections during the last decade has fueled a burst of more accurate analysis of many aspects of the Holocaust.

The IWG decided that it could benefit from the input of expert historians, and this volume is one product of that decision. In fifteen essays, they have revealed some of the insights provided into several long-standing questions. Who among the Allied leaders and agencies knew what about the Holocaust and when? Could they have rescued significantly more Jews? What U.S. businesses collaborated with the Nazis, how significantly, and with what effects? How were perpetrators used directly or indirectly by U.S. intelligence agencies after the war? Although the authors could only scratch the surface of this new hoard of evidence, they felt it useful to publish some of these new insights.

Although there are no major revisions, new details deepen our understanding. For instance, regarding efforts to save the Hungarian Jews in 1944, it is clearer that Walter Schellenberg approved the Brand Mission, with the intention of dividing the Allies, and that Adolf Eichmann was not working at cross-purposes with him. Although the negotiations saved 1,684 Hungarian Jews, the proposed trucks-for-Jews exchange went no further. American counterintelligence's suspicions of the double agent known as Bandi Grosz guaranteed that Brand and Grosz's proposals were not heard. Grosz (Andre Gyorgi) was indeed an SD (SS Security Service) agent who, together with another agent, Fritz Laufer, had played a key role in the manipulation and demise of an OSS intelligence network in the Balkans, codenamed "Dogwood."

Richard Breitman and Robert Wolfe tell us about Reinhard Heydrich's plan to eliminate Czech children identified by intelligence and personality to be potential leaders of Czech nationalist resistance. Cumulatively Breitman's new information about the Abwehr and the SD and their leaders Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and Walter Schellenberg is significant. Then he drops the bomb that much more on the SD is still held in classified British records. There is also new information about Gestapo intelligence operations and efforts by many postwar agencies to use Gestapo personnel against the Soviet Union. The protection that the latter won thereby demonstrates that prosecuting them remained a low priority even as the full scope of their horrendous crimes was being revealed.

The authors provide some direct answers to the questions they set out to explore. "In all, newly released OSS records concerning German camps reflect the strategic priorities of the war and thus confirm earlier historical findings regarding Allied intelligence and the Holocaust. . . . The OSS does not seem to have taken much detailed interest in German camps as they concerned the extermination of Jews" (p. 37).

One chapter covers Chase National Bank's involvement in exchanges that generated significant dollar funds for the Nazis as late as June 1941. Several rumors about Allied, West German, Latin American, and Syrian use of Gestapo personnel after the war are clarified. Six case studies reveal the gamut of FBI complicity in opening America as a refuge for Nazi collaborators. Any background would be tolerated if someone were useful against the communists. Otherwise Hoover's preoccupation with communism guaranteed FBI indifference to émigré involvement in Nazi war crimes. In an entire chapter devoted to Wilhelm Höttl, Norman Goda portrays the complex triple-crossing maneuvers of a war criminal and embezzler who never shrank from an opportunity to play his games with anyone...