CIA to Detail Cold War Ties to Former Nazis

Subject:
Update on CIA-Nazi file release and comments on PBS series Auschwitz
From: "Robert Lederman" robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 09:30:36 -0500

LA Times 2 7 05
CIA to Detail Cold War Ties to Former Nazis

WASHINGTON - The CIA (news - web sites), under pressure from Congress, has
agreed in principle to release new documents detailing its ties to former
Nazis who aided U.S. Cold War espionage against the Soviet Union, officials
said Sunday.

Facing demands for public testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee
(news - web sites), CIA officials have conceded that records on former Nazis
who have not been accused of war crimes, including members of the German SS,
should be subject to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998, the
officials said.

"This means the information we thought would come out when we wrote the law
will now come out," said Sen. Mike DeWine (news, bio, voting record)
(R-Ohio), who co-wrote the disclosure legislation.

The CIA, which had no immediate comment, has released about 1.25 million
pages of documents about Nazi war criminals in compliance with the
disclosure act, which requires government agencies to divulge records of war
criminals to the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records
Interagency Working Group.

The CIA had refused to disclose documents on former Nazis who had not been
targeted as war criminals. Members of the working group and U.S. lawmakers
contend the law applies to any individual who belonged to an organization
guilty of war crimes.

The records at issue include hundreds of thousands of pages of documents,
including material on CIA dealings with former members of the Nazi party and
the German SS, who joined the allied Cold War effort against the Soviet
Union in Europe, congressional officials said.

The CIA's position changed last week after DeWine, who sits on the Senate
Judiciary Committee, demanded that CIA Director Porter J. Goss appear before
the panel to provide a public explanation of his agency's refusal to
disclose the records.

DeWine is expected to seek a two-year extension for the working group, which
had been scheduled to dissolve at the end of March.
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RL comments
http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/

Having just watched PBS' Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State I feel compelled
to comment. It was a beautifully and sensitively made documentary, but did
it cover
up more than it uncovered?

The premise of the series is that by educating the public about what
Auschwitz was really about that future acts of genocide could be avoided.
But how can the public understand what Auschwitz was really about with no
reference to:
1. Eugenics as a whole or the fact that eugenics (forcible population
control by government)
began in the US and was far more advanced in the US than in Germany until
the mid 1930's. Why omit the fact that eugenics-based ideas are behind many
of the
policies of the Bush administration and were the essense of the Giuliani
administration or that IG
Farben was broken up into pharmaceutical and chemical companies
(many with direct Bush family connections) that are still poisoning
millions of people worldwide with their products? The series extensively
describes Dr. Mengeles' experiments as if they were the work of an isolated
madman rather than what he was...a eugenics scientist funded by the
Rockefellers.

2. The corporate ownership of Auschwitz. IG Farben is mentioned two or three
times during the series as is the issue of the Auschwitz camp complex being
a factory/industrial/slave labor complex. Yet, there is not a single mention
of the fact that Rockefeller's Standard Oil was a half-owner; that the
Dulles brothers were the IG Farben lawyers; that Presidents
Roosevelt and Truman considered trying the Rockefellers as traitors,
that Prescott Bush and other
Wall St bankers were the financiers of it or that the Bush family fortune
derived from funding Hitler and the Nazis.

The film also emphasizes how Auschwitz guards and average Germans
profitted from looting the wealth of European Jews, yet makes no mention
of the banks, insurance companies and corporations -
many of them Fortune 500 companies today -
which were the far bigger looters.

If one were to sue a car
manufacturer for a defect would one place the ultimate liability on the
factory workers who assembled the car or on the corporate owners who decided
on a cost-risk based analysis to not correct safety defects? If one hires a
hitman to commit a murder, is not the one doing the hiring as guilty as the
one actually committing the murder?

3. The series makes quite a point about thousands of SS members who
participated in the Holocaust escaping punishment yet never once alludes to
the fact that the US government imported thousands of these
same SS officials to the US or that
we are living in a police state modeled on their ideas.

Perhaps the reason PBS had to omit these things was that its top corporate
patrons are the very corporate identities who brought us the Nazi Holocaust
like Chase Bank, Standard Oil/Exxon, the Rockefeller Foundation etc.

Somebody spent millions to make a sanitized series on Auschwitz
which will become the standard educational means of
informing (misinforming) future Americans about this event yet completely
omits mention of some of the most cupable parties.
Can that have been an accident? (see LA Times article below)

The single best thing in the documentary is in the last few minutes when a
former Auschwitz SS guard who feels he did nothing wrong
nevertheless tells the world that Holocaust denial
is a lie; that Auschwitz was really a death camp where millions were murdered. The
series is worthwhile for that one moment alone.

The real lesson of Auschwitz is that it was a model of corporate ideology
that is
increasingly being applied on a worldwide scale. Lower wages, cut health benefits,
poison the food supply, make water something people have to buy,
decrease democracy while pretending to increase it, imprison minorities,
use ID as a means to control
population...in a sense we are living in a giant corporate Auschwitz.
The Bush administration is IG Farben 2005.