Secret report: CIA created 'safe haven' for Nazis

WASHINGTON - The Central Intelligence Agency created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II for intelligence gathering purposes, the New York Times revealed Sunday, citing a 600-page report "which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years."

According to the American daily, the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the C.I.A.'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 NYT article states.

The Justice Department report says 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,” said the remain.

According to NYT, the report cites help that C.I.A. officials provided in 1954 to Otto Von Bolschwing, an associate of Adolph Eichmann who had helped develop the initial plans “to purge Germany of the Jews” and who later worked for the C.I.A. in the US. After learning of Von Bolschwing’s Nazi ties, the Justice Department sought to deport him in 1981, but he died that year at age 72.

The report also examines the case of Arthur L. Rudolph, a Nazi scientist who ran the Mittelwerk munitions factory and was brought to the US in 1945 for his rocket-making expertise under Operation Paperclip, an American program that recruited scientists who had worked in Nazi Germany. Rudolph has been honored by NASA and is credited as the father of the Saturn V rocket.

The report cites a 1949 memo from the Justice Department’s No. 2 official urging immigration officers to let Rudolph back in the country after a stay in Mexico, saying that a failure to do so “would be to the detriment of the national interest,” according to NYT.

Justice Department investigators later found evidence that Rudolph was much more actively involved in exploiting slave laborers at Mittelwerk than he or American intelligence officials had acknowledged, the report says.

In 1983, after finding evidence that Rudolph was much more actively involved in exploiting slave laborers at Mittelwerk than he or American intelligence officials had acknowledged, the Justice Department tried to deport him, and he fled to Canada.

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