Wiesenthal Center: CIA/Eichmann Cover-Up “A Black Mark on American History”

June 6, 2006

WIESENTHAL CENTER: CIA/ EICHMANN COVER-UP “A BLACK MARK ON AMERICAN HISTORY”

Recently declassified Cold War-era documents from the National Archives which confirm that the CIA and the West German government knew and suppressed information on the whereabouts Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, constitutes “a black mark on American history,” said the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

“The March 1958 memo from the West German Intelligence to the CIA that confirmed Eichmann’s alias and his whereabouts in Argentina confirms what Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal had already discovered from his own sources and forwarded to Israel and West Germany in the early 50s,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center. “This shocking memo also confirms what Mr. Wiesenthal often said: ‘When the Cold War finally ends and history will ask who won, the answer will be neither the West nor the East but the Nazis.’”

“In the decades following the Second World War, Wiesenthal was virtually alone in trying to bring Nazi war criminals to the Bar of Justice.,” continued Cooper. “Today’s revelations confirm what he was really up against in the pursuit of justice for the victims of history’s worst genocide.”

The information on Eichmann that Wiesenthal forwarded helped lead to the war criminal’s arrest by Israeli agents. Eichmann was tried for “Crimes against Humanity” and executed in 1962.
Simon Wiesenthal was credited with bringing some 1,100 Nazi war criminals to justice. He died last September at the age of 96.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS and the Council of Europe.

For more information, please contact the Center's Public Relations Department, 310-553-9036.