Nazi war criminals got away with atrocities because of evidence hidden in UK and US archives
Nazi war criminals got away with atrocities because of evidence hidden in UK and US archives
Thousands of pages of documentation describe atrocities carried out in both Eastern and Western Europe
David Keys
Saturday 01 June 2013
Nazi war criminals escaped prosecution because crucial evidence in Britain’s National Archives and in government archives in the United States was ignored for decades.
The thousands of pages of documentation describe atrocities carried out in both Eastern and Western Europe – but have only been examined by German government war crimes investigators over the past four years, after most of the suspects and witnesses had died. At no stage had British or US intelligence told the Germans of the existence of the material.
Much of the original material was gathered when British and US intelligence services bugged a small number of prisoner of war camps near London and Washington DC during World War Two. For years the documents were kept under wraps by the intelligence services because the prisoner-of-war camp bugging program would have been regarded as illegal under international law – and, more importantly, because, during most of the Cold War, the US and Britain did not want to alert the Soviets to the fact that they had developed this intelligence gathering technique.
“All the relevant material was of course known to the British and American intelligence services during and after the war – and was in the public domain after its declassification in the US in the 1970s and the UK in 1996. However, prior to 2009, no use was ever made of the material to track down war criminals. If the direct evidence and the indirect leads contained in the material, had been used earlier by official war crime investigators, there is no doubt that a number of war criminals would have been arrested and brought to trial,” said London School of Economics historian, Professor Sönke Neitzel, co-author of Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying – a recently published book on the World War Two allied prisoner-of-war camp bugging operation.
More:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/nazi-war-criminals-got-away-with-atrocities-because-of-evidence-hidden-in-uk-and-us-archives-8640776.html
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