News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: History

Date: April 29, 2001

Today in history - In 1865, the steamer Sultana exploded on the Mississippi River near Memphis, Tenn., killing more than 1,400 Union prisoners of war.

The man who ordered that escaping POWs be shot -

"CIA Sheds New Light on Hitler And Hunt for Nazis
By Mark Wilkinson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Adolf Hitler's personal physician predicted in 1937 his patient could become ``the craziest criminal the world ever saw,'' according to CIA (news - web sites) files released on Friday.

The CIA made public 20 ``Name Files'' it kept on Nazi leaders such as Hitler, Heinrich Mueller and Adolf Eichmann who were known or suspected to have committed crimes against humanity during World War Two.

The files, which contain 3 million pages of background and intelligence about some of the most notorious war criminals of the Third Reich, were released in accordance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998.

``These disclosures add significant new information about this most critical juncture of world and American history,'' said Steven Garfinkel, chair of the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group.

CIA name files are rarely disclosed. They include declassified documents, interrogations, confidential reports from agents and informants and CIA analytical reports.

Among the files was a 1944 report by an informant working for the Office of Strategic Services -- the CIA's forerunner -- that related an assessment of Hitler's personality by the Fuehrer's personal physician.

In January 1937, at a party, the OSS informant struck up a conversation with Ferdinand Sauerbruch, a well-known professor of surgery at Berlin University.

Growing Megalomania

Sauerbruch, according to the intelligence report, candidly spoke of Hitler's growing megalomania and argued that he was a border case between genius and insanity, with the potential to become ``the craziest criminal the world has known.''

The files also shed more light on the worldwide hunt for Nazi war criminals.

The OSS, for instance, were unable to locate Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller who was involved in carrying out Hitler's Final Solution, the extermination of all European and Russian Jews.

Mueller was notorious for signing the ``Bullet Order'' in March of 1944, which violated the Geneva Convention by authorizing German guards to shoot escaped prisoners of war. He also authorized the torture of the German officers involved in the July, 1944 putsch against Hitler.

In May of 1945, only weeks after Berlin fell to the Allies, the search for Gestapo officials had turned up a number of high-ranking officers, but no sign of Mueller.

The hunt continued and many men named Heinrich Mueller were found in Germany and Austria, but the Gestapo head seemed to have vanished. The CIA assumed Mueller was killed in the closing days of the war.

The files also revealed that until 1959 the CIA did not effectively pursue Adolf Eichmann, Mueller's number two and one of the architects of the Final Solution.

Eichmann, the head of the Gestapo Department for Jewish Affairs, had proposed that all European Jews be deported to Madagascar in 1940. Two years later, along with the Reich's head of Security Reinhard Heydrich, Eichmann planned the liquidation of the Jews.

As the war drew to a close, Eichmann was believed by the OSS to have escaped to Austria and later to Argentina. In 1959 the CIA set out to find him but Israeli agents captured Eichmann first and smuggled him into Israel for trial in 1961.

He was executed the following year.

The CIA also revealed that a number of suspected Nazi war criminals had joined the ranks of the U.S., British, French, German and Russian intelligence services during the Cold War, thereby escaping unscathed from their criminal pasts. "