Last Update: 02/02/2005 20:14

ADL calls on CIA to hand over files on suspected Nazis

By Ariel Zilber, Haaretz Correspondent



Responding to reports that the Central Intelligence Agency has balked at Congressional requests to hand over secret files on Nazi war criminals, the Anti-Defamation League has called on the CIA to publicize all records relating to the agency's post-war recruitment of suspected Nazis.




"Sixty years after the end of the war, the time has come to make this information available," ADL National Director Abraham Foxman said in a statement released on Tuesday.

"With the number of survivors and witnesses diminishing by the day, and the reality that the Holocaust is fading into the pages of history and memory, we should not have to wait any longer," Foxman said.

The ADL issued the statement in reaction to a report in The New York Times this week detailing the difficulty Congressional investigators are experiencing in forcing the CIA to declassify documents relating to their recruitment of former Nazis, as they are required to do by the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which was passed by Congress in 1998.

The agency has already released more than 1.2 million pages of documents, however intelligence officials are quoted by the Times as saying that the law does not require them to disclose all information relating to the agency's relationships with former Nazis.

"What's so puzzling about this is the agency has already released a significant number of documents," Foxman said. "Why the change of heart now not to finish the process? What is there still left that some feel needs to be hidden? The expediency and the errors of the past are not a reflection of the intelligence community today."

"One finds it difficult to understand why the leadership today is protecting the truth," Foxman said.