The CIA suppressed the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann to help protect high ranking West German officials from possible revelations about their own Nazi pasts, according to CIA documents released today.
A March 1958 memo from West German intelligence informed the CIA that Eichmann, the senior Gestapo officer who oversaw the Holocaust, was living under the alias "Clemens" in Argentina where he had arrived seven years earlier, the documents show.
"It now appears that West Germany could have captured him in 1958, if it wished to," said University of Virginia historian Timothy Naftali, director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.
"Newly released CIA materials suggest that in the highest levels of the Konrad Adenauer government, there was concern about what Eichmann could say if caught about those close to the chancellor."
He was speaking at a news conference where a government working group headed by the National Archives announced the release of 27,000 pages of CIA documents relating to the spy agency's ties to former Nazis, including war criminals.
The CIA also could have passed along the information to Israeli intelligence, which was ending its own search for Eichmann in Argentina when the US spy agency received word of his whereabouts from West Germany.
It was not US policy at the time to pursue former Nazis, who were still being recruited as Cold War spies against the Soviet Union.
The Israelis finally captured Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. He was tried in Jerusalem for crimes against the Jewish people, found guilty and hanged in 1962.
But Mr Naftali said the CIA also helped West Germany to suppress part of Eichmann's diary that could have embarrassed Mr Adenauer's national security adviser, Hans Globke, himself a former Nazi.
Eichmann's family had sold the Nazi fugitive's memoirs to Life magazine to raise money for his defence. West Germany officials asked the CIA to help suppress the document.
About 8 million pages of documents from agencies that also include the FBI and the Defence Department have been declassified under the disclosure act. The working group established by the disclosure act is also examining federal government affiliations with war criminals from Imperial Japan.
The CIA had previously released more than 1.2 million pages of documents relating to former Nazis in compliance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998.