The CIA and the Nazis
Six months after the Allies liberated the German concentration camps, a court-martial was established in Nuremberg to prosecute Nazi war criminals. Some of the most dangerous have been brought to justice – but not all. Documentary conspiracy? Reveals how more than 4,000 former Nazis secretly worked for the US government to help fight the Soviet Union. Reinhard Gehlen was an intelligence officer in Hitler’s General Staff who was transferred to run an American intelligence program in West Germany to spy on the Russians. At the same time, the United States welcomed former Nazi scientists and engineers to the United States. But the scope of those actions is only now becoming clear: A law was passed in 1998 requiring the release of documents used to recruit former Nazis. The documents are being reviewed by the CIA and the Nazis to understand the extent to which the United States recruited their former enemies to fight their new ones.
The truth is that thousands of ex-Nazis, some of whom committed atrocities, worked for the U.S. government without the public knowing. During the war, their crimes ranged from overseeing slave labor camps to sending orphans to their deaths. After the war they were either scientists in the US or agents in Europe, both on the US payroll.
