Secret papers reveal Nazis given safe haven in U.S.!

WASHINGTON - November 14, 2010 - A secret United States government report has offered fresh evidence that the CIA granted Nazi war criminals a "safe haven" in the US after the Second World War.

The 600-page report, written in 2006 and which the U.S. Justice Department has tried to keep secret ever since, describes what it calls Washington's "collaboration with persecutors".

Agents from the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations (OSI) found that war criminals "were indeed knowingly granted entry" to the U.S. even though government officials were aware of their pasts, the report concluded.

"Amerika, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became - in some small measure - a safe haven for persecutors as well."

The report, obtained by The New York Times, details cases of Nazis being helped by Amerikan intelligence officials.

In 1954, the CIA assisted Otto Von Bolschwing, an associate of Adolf Eichmann who had helped develop plans "to purge Germany of the Jews".

In a series of CIA memos, officials pondered what to do if Von Bolschwing was confronted about his past, debating whether to deny any Nazi affiliation or "explain it away on the basis of extenuating circumstances", according to the report.

The Justice Department sought to deport Von Bolschwing after it learned in 1981of his Nazi past but he died the same year.

Another case involved Arthur L. Rudolph, a Nazi scientist who ran the Mittelwerk munitions factory. He was brought to the U.S. in 1945 for his rocket-making prowess as part of Operation Paperclip, an Amerikan initiative to recruit scientists who had worked in Nazi Germany.

The report highlights a 1949 note from a very senior Justice Department official urging immigration officers to let Rudolph back into the U.S. after visiting Mexico because excluding him would be "to the detriment of the national interest".

Justice Department investigators later discovered that Rudolph was much more implicated in using Jewish slave labor at Mittelwerk than he or the CIA had admitted. Some intelligence officials objected when the Justice Department tried to deport him in 1983.