Adolf Eichmann
(1906-1962) |
n June 6, the US national archives released some
27,000 pages of secret records documenting the CIA’s Cold War
relations with former German Nazi Party members and officials.
The files reveal numerous cases of German
Nazis, some clearly guilty of war crimes, receiving funds,
weapons and employment from the CIA. They also demonstrate that
US intelligence agencies deliberately refrained from disclosing
information about the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann in order to
protect Washington’s allies in the post-war West German
government headed by Christian Democratic leader
Konrad Adenauer.
Eichmann, who had sent millions to their deaths
while coordinating the Nazis’ “final solution” campaign to
exterminate European Jewry, went into hiding in Buenos Aires after
the fall of the Third Reich. Utilizing friendly contacts in the
Catholic Church and the Peron government in Argentina, Eichmann
was able to reside in the South American country for 10 years
under the alias of Ricardo Klement. He was abducted in 1960 by
Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, put on trial in Israel
and executed in 1962.
The documents show that the CIA was in possession
of Eichmann’s pseudonym two years before the Mossad raid. The CIA
received this information in 1958 from the West German government,
which learned of Eichmann’s alias in 1952. Both the CIA and the Bonn
government chose not to disclose this information to Israel because
they were concerned that Eichmann might reveal the identities of
Nazi war criminals holding high office in the West German
government, particularly Adenauer’s national security adviser
Hans Globke.
Hans Globke (1898-1973)
Click on the image for enlargement
When Eichmann was finally brought to trial, the
US government used all available means to protect its West German
allies from what he might reveal. According to the declassified
documents, the CIA pressured Life magazine into deleting
references to Globke in portions of Eichmann’s memoirs that it chose
to publish.
In addition to the revelations regarding
Eichmann, the documents chronicle the CIA’s creation of
“stay-behind” intelligence networks in southwestern Germany and
Berlin, labeled “Kibitz” and “Pastime,” respectively. The Kibitz
ring involved several former SS members. In the early 1950s, the CIA
provided these groups with money, communications equipment and
ammunition so that they could serve as intelligence assets in the
event of a Soviet invasion of West Germany.
Joachim von Ribbentrop
(1893-1946) |
The CIA documents were reviewed by Timothy
Naftali, a historian with the National Archives Interagency Working
Group, the government body that oversaw their declassification and
release. According to an article published by
Naftali, the stay-behind program was dissolved “in
the wake of public concerns in West Germany about the resurgence of
Neo-Nazi Groups.” Specifically, the Kibitz-15 group, led by an
“unreconstructed Nazi,” became a potential source of public
embarrassment for the US, as its members were broadly involved in
Neo-Nazi activity. [1]
The CIA terminated the program by 1955 and
arranged for many of its contacts to be resettled in Canada and
Australia. According to the documents, Australia provided funds for
relocation while the CIA provided its ex-assets with a “resettlement
bonus.”
The CIA employed Gustav Hilger, a former adviser
to Nazi Foreign Minister
Joachim von Ribbentrop. As an employee of the German foreign
office, Hilger was present at the negotiation of the Stalin-Hitler
pact in 1939. The CIA deemed his experience with the USSR
sufficiently valuable to free him from incarceration at Fort Meade
in Maryland and employ him as an intelligence evaluator in West
Germany.