Newly Declassified OSS Records Shed New Light on WWII

[Q]

Newly Declassified OSS Records Shed New Light on WWII
U.S. Newswire
26 Jun 10:28

Newly Declassified OSS Records Shed New Light on World War II
To: National Desk
Contact: National Archives Office of Public Affairs,
301-713-6000; Web site: http://www.nara.gov

COLLEGE PARK, Md., June 26 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Today the Nazi War
Criminals Interagency Working Group (IWG) is making available to
researchers approximately 400,000 pages of previously classified
documents from the records of the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS, 1942-45) and of the Strategic Services Unit (SSU, 1945-46),
forerunners of the CIA.

The release is a major opening by the IWG, the group established
by President Clinton in 1999 to expedite the declassification of
records related to war crimes of the Nazi government and its
allies. The OSS documents contain historically valuable material
that would not have been declassified without the passage of the
Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and the efforts of the National
Archives and the Central Intelligence Agency under that act.
The documents come from a larger OSS collection, much of which
was declassified by the CIA in the 1980s. The IWG release consists
of documents previously withheld by the CIA because of the
sensitive information they contained on sources and methods. They
cover diverse topics and activities relating to intelligence
operations during the War and, because they were withdrawn from
other files, are not organized by topic or activity.
The National Archives has an inventory of this eclectic
collection. The documents contain general information about OSS
activities worldwide, about Nazi Germany and its allies.
Researchers who review the many thousands of pages will find
information that is valuable to investigations in a broad range of
subjects.

Among the materials researchers will find:
-- New information on the Nazi roundup of Roman Jews
-- 1,200 reports based on information supplied to Allen Dulles,
the head of the OSS in Switzerland by the anti-Nazi German
Foreign Office official Fritz Kolbe
-- Reports on the U.S. Safehaven program to identify and block
from flight German financial assets and other war spoils
-- Reports on OSS clandestine missions into France and Norway
-- Records of the OSS insurance intelligence unit (IIU)
-- Prisoner of war interrogation reports
-- Refugee and emigre debriefings, including interviews with
civilian internees returning from the Far East
-- Information related to looted art
-- Reports on Japanese balloon warfare over the U.S. Pacific
Northwest

A portion of the records includes messages of the SS Security
Service (SD) sent from Rome to Berlin during August, September, and
October, 1943, that were intercepted and decoded by British
intelligence and shared with U.S. intelligence. The messages
provide historical insight into what the Allied governments knew
about the Holocaust, when they learned it, and what might have been
done with the information they possessed. The decodes are also
valuable in adding to what is known about Nazi intervention in
Italy, providing detail about the early German decision to deport
Italian Jews to Auschwitz. The existing scholarly literature lacks
a clear consensus on exactly who ordered the deportation and murder
of Italian Jews and when it occurred.

The documents also contain lengthy verbatim excerpts from
"private" conversations among German POWs secretly recorded by the
British and later given to American intelligence officials. In
these conversations, German army, navy, and SS officers unwittingly
gave British intelligence analysts commentaries on past and current
actions by top Nazi officials. In some cases, these POWs also
described their own attitudes toward Nazi mass killings and
atrocities. Some captives continued to support the fatherland to
the end, but others tried to distance themselves, focusing blame on
Heinrich Himmler and the SS. These documents will provide
researchers a better picture of the relationship between the German
army and the SS, additional details about Nazi concentration and
extermination camp operations, an assessment of German morale
toward the end of the war, among many other topics.

Within the OSS collection there are previously unreleased
documents concerning the OSS penetration of the German Foreign
Office using the anti-Nazi German informant Fritz Kolbe. Codenamed
George Wood, Kolbe maintained contact with Allen Dulles -- then
head of the OSS in Switzerland -- and is widely considered by
intelligence historians one of the best informants for the OSS.
This opening contains the first complete set of Kolbe documents and
shows who within the U.S. government had access to his information.
The IWG was established by Executive Order in January 1999 to
coordinate the large-scale effort of federal agencies to expedite
the release of U.S. records relating to the Nazis and their allies.
The President named the group's members from the major agencies
holding classified records and appointed three members to represent
the public. The group's purpose is to locate, inventory, recommend
for declassification, and make available all classified Nazi war
criminal records. The Act defines Nazi War criminal records as
records pertaining to individuals in the Nazi government, or in
governments allied with the Nazis, who participated in racial,
religious, or political persecution or to theft of the assets of
persecuted people.

------
For press information, contact Giuliana Bullard, 703-532-1477,
or Susan Cooper at the National Archives and Records Administration
at 301-713-6000.
Additional information is available at http://www.nara.gov/iwg.
-0-

/U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/
06/26 10:28
Copyright 2000, U.S. Newswire
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