Declassifying the Secrets of War Crimes

John W. Carlin

Although a huge body of information has become available, including wartime and postwar military and diplomatic records and captured Third Reich records, much information held by U.S. intelligence agencies that could shed new light on events of the World War II and the Cold War has remained classified.

For several years, it has been one of the special concerns of the National Archives and Records Administration to work with other agencies in the Federal government to meet the demand for more information about Nazi war crimes and those who committed them. This has been done through our chairmanship of the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG).

The IWG has a simple mandate: Declassify as much as possible the remaining classified U.S. Government records about war criminals and crimes committed by the Nazis and their allies, specifically including the Japanese, during World War II.

Its authority is derived from two acts of Congress: the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act of 2000, which extended the life of the IWG another two years and confirmed that declassification of documents pertaining to Japanese war crimes is among IWG responsibilities.

The IWG, which NARA chairs, is made up of a group of private citizens and representatives of various government agencies. Thomas Baer of Los Angeles, Richard Ben-Veniste of Washington, DC, and Elizabeth Holtzman of New York are the public members. Representing other Federal agencies are John E. Collingwood, Federal Bureau of Investigation; Stewart Aly, Office of the Secretary of Defense; William H. Leary, National Security Council; David Holmes, Central Intelligence Agency; Paul Shapiro, Holocaust Memorial Museum; Eli M. Rosenbaum, Department of Justice; and Marc J. Susser, Department of State. NARA's representative, who is chair, is Steven Garfinkel, Director of our Information Security Oversight Office. The 2000 legislation extending the jurisdiction to Japanese war crimes also added a public member, who has yet to be named.

To date, the IWG has overseen the declassification of about 2.7 million pages, mostly from the Army's Counter Intelligence Corps, the Central Intelligence Agency (and its predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services), the State Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. An estimated 3 to 5 million more pages remain to be examined for declassification.

The actual declassification is done principally by the agencies that hold the records, except in the case of Army records that have already been accessioned by NARA—for which we have declassification authority. The guidelines for declassification were spelled out in the 1998 legislation and in directives from the National Security Advisor. The IWG staff monitors the declassification work of the agencies and reports to the IWG. At the conclusion of its work, the IWG will produce a major report to Congress that will sum up the effectiveness of the declassification project and highlight lessons learned, both in terms of historical information and the usefulness of such topical declassification projects.

Not all classified material will be made public, because the legislation establishing the IWG in spelling out its mission also provided some exceptions. Generally, those exceptions allow material to remain classified if its release would impair U.S. national security and would compromise U.S. intelligence efforts by revealing human sources or intelligence methods. Other exceptions include material whose release would harm U.S. relations with other countries or would be a "clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy." Most of the records, however, are being released.

The IWG's biggest release to date was last June, when it opened about 400,000 pages of classified documents from the OSS that had been previously withheld by the CIA. This release made headlines around the world because, among much new information, it provided documentation that British intelligence had intercepted and decoded German messages relating to plans to round up Italian Jews and ship them to Germany for liquidation. The information was shared with U.S. intelligence at the time, and its discovery sheds some light on the abiding question of historians concerning what allied governments knew about the Holocaust as it was being perpetrated.

By the time you read this column, the IWG expects to have added to the trove of new information with the release of some CIA "personality files" on a variety of Nazi officials, ranging from Adolph Hitler and his top aides to obscure officials of the Third Reich. The CIA rarely releases its "personality files," and few exceptions, such as that of Lee Harvey Oswald, are made. These files, too, will fill in more details.

The work of the IWG is far from over, and the legislation last fall extended its life until December, 2003. It also explicitly added to the list of records to be examined and declassified those related to war crimes of the Japanese Imperial Government. These records are not expected to be as voluminous as the Nazi records; however, as always with archives, there are bound to be some surprises among records that have not been looked at closely since they were created.

As the IWG heads into its third year of operation, it will do so under new leadership. Dr. Michael Kurtz, who has been our NARA chair since the beginning, has stepped down to focus on his work as Assistant Archivist for Records Services-Washington, DC. He helped the IWG compile a remarkable record of success and raise the bar of public expectation for public disclosure and governmental accountability. He has been succeeded by Mr. Garfinkel, who will build on this foundation and bring his in-depth knowledge of classification and declassification to the job.

The IWG has millions of pages of classified material yet to examine. But before its work is done, we can expect to have deepened our knowledge and understanding of some of the darkest moments of the twentieth century.