CIA admits employing Nazis
Klaus Barbie: Used by the CIA as an intelligence source
By Nick Bryant in Washington
The United States Government has released a swathe of classified documents which show that Nazi officials were employed by Western and Soviet intelligence organisations after the war.
The files contain more than three million pages of background intelligence on some of the most notorious figures in the Third Reich, including Adolf Hitler, Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie and Josef Mengele.
A Justice Department spokesman, Eli Rosenbaum, said the files demonstrated that as a body, the real winners of the Cold War were Nazi criminals.
Many of them were able to escape justice because the East and West became so rapidly focused on challenging each other that they lost their will to pursue them.
The documents show that German intelligence officers, many of whom were known to have committed terrible crimes, were often welcomed into the CIA, largely because of the information they held on the Soviet Union.
Others used their knowledge and expertise to evade punishment.
But the files made available by the US National Archive have also scotched a widespread rumour concerning Gestapo chief Heinrich Muller, an architect of the "final solution" - Hitler's plan for the extermination of all European and Russian Jews.
It has long been thought that he worked as an intelligence officer for America long after the war, but the files confirm that he died in 1945.
One of the more intriguing documents comes
from Hitler's personal doctor, who predicted in
1937 that his patient would "end up as the
craziest criminal the world had ever seen".
-- Anonymous, April 27, 2001