U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (review)

"History Matters" is the motto chosen by the authors of this book; having read it, one is inclined to believe the opposite. If U.S. intelligence did perceive the true scope and unprecedented character of German crimes during the Second World War, few lessons were drawn from it at the time or later. Nothing attests better to the prevalence of oblivion than, first, the integration of some of the most deadly executioners of the "final solution of the Jewish question" into the ranks of Western intelligence during the Cold War, and, second, the burying of information important for our understanding of Nazi policy as well as for the tracing of war criminals in classified intelligence files only recently made accessible to scholars.

Students of history know that even depressing topics can make excellent reading. U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis is such a case. The authors present a complex, heterogeneous and technical topic in a clear and concise narrative. Although this book is an anthology (Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda provide most of the contributions, many well suited for classroom use), it has the contextual qualities of a monograph study. Subdivided into three sections ("Espionage and Genocide," "Collaboration and Collaborators," "Postwar Intelligence Use of War Criminals"), the authors present their analysis of documents surveyed by the Nazi War Criminal and Imperial Japanese Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) for which they worked since its inception following the passing of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act by Congress in 1998. While the essays highlight the wealth of newly-available documentation, important intelligence files remain closed, most notably in Germany where the obscure roots of its services still await to be researched.

The book is neither a history of the IWG nor of "what made the greatest difference at the time"—U.S. military intelligence (5).¹ Instead, it covers a broad range of topics from financial assistance provided to the Third Reich by U.S. companies via knowledge about the Final Solution during the war to the "ratlines" used by German and other war criminals to escape justice after 1945. That some of the facsimile documents printed as illustrations look a little cryptic, that not all case examples fit into the broader argument, and that the text bristles with acronyms might be due to the nature of the subject. What matters more is the authors' awareness that what we are interested in now seemed then much less important; the pitfalls of presentism that accompany Holocaust studies are thus avoided. It remains difficult, Richard Breitman points out, "to discern whether even the better dispatches had any impact at the time" (14). Intercepted reports like the ones sent by the Chilean consul in Prague and outspoken antisemite Gonzalo Montt Rivas who, in early November 1941, noted Germany's determination "to get rid of the Jews at all costs," might look from our perspective like clear proof of impending genocide; at the time, however, they were merely filed by British and American intelligence officials preoccupied with winning the war (16).

U.S. intelligence agencies did not lack information, but the ability and willingness to properly use it. The book details numerous examples: the withholding of over nine thousand pages of Gestapo files from the Nuremberg judges; the FBI's shielding of collaborators with Nazi Germany who after 1945 emigrated to the U.S.; the tendency by U.S. agencies to overlook "Nazi pasts if the individuals seemed especially valuable," as highlighted by the use of former SD officer Wilhelm Höttl who in 1944 was involved in the deportation of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz (285). Höttl's case was no exception during the Cold War: Walter Huppenkothen, an SD commander responsible for the murder of Jews and other civilians in Poland, passed as an expert on Communist cells without providing any useful information; while the CIA claimed to have no interest in tracking down Adolf Eichmann, it...