07 June , 2006
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) kept quiet about the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s for fear he might expose undercover anti-Communist efforts in West Germany, US documents released on Tuesday show. In a memo to the CIA in March 1958, German intelligence officials wrote that they knew where Eichmann was hiding. But neither Germany nor the United States acted on the information. But the CIA did nothing, and Eichmann – the infamous organizer of the so-called Final Solution that led to the murder of six million Jews in the Nazi extermination camps – was eventually seized by Mossad agents in 1960 and flown to Israel where he was tried and executed in 1962. Eichmann was not the only prominent war criminal to benefit from the CIA's inaction. In 1983, Washington admitted that US Army intelligence officers helped the Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyons", flee to Bolivia and escape prosecution by France after the war. A government report at the time admitted that the officers "interfered with the lawful and proper administration of justice" by protecting him after he had been recruited as an anti-Communist spy.
Germany's attitude at the time was also criticized. University of Virginia historian Timothy Naftali, the director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, said at a news conference in Washington: "Newly released CIA materials suggest that in the highest levels of the [West German] government, there was concern about what Eichmann could say if caught about those close to the Chancellor [Konrad Adenauer]."
