'After World War II, Nazis were given safe haven in US'

A secret history of the United States government's Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a "safe haven" in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad. 

The 600-page report, which the justice department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades. 

It describes the government's posthumous pursuit of Dr Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a justice department official's drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government's mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible. 


Perhaps the report's most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency's involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the CIA's use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations. 

The justice department report, describing what it calls "the government's collaboration with persecutors," says that OSI investigators learned that some of the Nazis "were indeed knowingly granted entry" to the US, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. "America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became - in some small measure - a safe haven for persecutors as well," it said.