Ex-Nazis employed by West a 'horrendous mistake,' historians say

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From David Ensor
CNN National Security Correspondent

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Historians from a government committee investigating CIA files on prominent Nazis say they show U.S. intelligence made a "horrendous mistake" by employing ex-Nazi agents after the war.

"It was a horrendous mistake, morally and politically," said Richard Breitman, an American University professor working with the Nazi War Crimes working group.

Known Nazi intelligence officers like Klaus Barbie, Wilhelm Hoetl, and Emil Augsburg became paid agents of Western intelligence agencies including U.S. Army intelligence after World War II, as the West sought Germans who could help against the Soviet KGB.

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Breitman said the move to employ the ex-Nazis was a mistake because they were known to be unreliable and were vulnerable to blackmail by the Soviets.

About 18,000 pages of CIA files on prominent former Nazis also suggest that Heinrich Mueller, a senior Nazi involved in the Holocaust who disappeared in Berlin in 1945, apparently died around that time.

The files show the CIA did an extensive investigation into whether he might have fallen into Soviet hands, but found no such evidence. The files "establish pretty definitively" said Timothy Naftali, a historian from University of Virginia, that Mueller was never a U.S. agent.

The files reveal additional information about a number of German intelligence officers who managed to avoid trial for war crimes because they negotiated the early surrender of German forces in northern Italy with Allen Dulles, the then chief of U.S. intelligence in Berne, Switzerland.

They also contain the 1937 story of a prominent German surgeon about the mental health of Adolf Hitler. Professor Ferdinand Sauerbruch is quoted in a 1944 memo as having said in 1937 that:

"The Nazi leader was a border case between genius and insanity and that in his opinion the decision would take place in the near future whether Hitler's mind would swing towards the latter. Professor Sauerbruch then said that should the latter occur, Hitler would become 'the craziest criminal the world ever saw.'"

Simon Wiesenthal Center
Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group

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