A German court has rejected a journalist's request to force the country's foreign intelligence service to release all its files on the top Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and on how long its spies knew he was hiding out in Argentina. Previously released files showed that the forerunner to the secret service Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) knew Eichmann's whereabouts for eight years before he was captured in 1960 by Mossad agents, then tried and executed in Israel.
However, some files had been blackened, and a journalist of the newspaper ‘Bild’ had requested that the BND be forced to release these redacted files too - something the service says would harm Germany's foreign relations and the national interest. The German government also takes that view.
On Thursday, the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig said in a statement that it had "rejected a claim by a journalist for all Federal Intelligence Service documents on Adolf Eichmann to be made available to him unblackened".
During World War II Eichmann was in charge of organizing the logistics of the Holocaust and the mass deportation of Jews to extermination camps. Israel hanged him in 1962 for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Journalists had in 2010 won a legal victory forcing the BND to make available some of its files. These showed that the Gehlen Organization, precursor to the BND, had known since 1952 that Eichmann was living under a false name near Buenos Aires.
The suspicion is that the post-war government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer wanted to prevent Eichmann being captured in case he revealed highly embarrassing details about the pasts of high-ranking figures in the West German elite.
The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, Dieter Graumann, told 'Bild' that "while I have to accept the court's ruling I have no comprehension whatsoever that the Chancellery is blocking the access to the file."
