At least 1,000 former Nazis were recruited by the CIA and FBI to spy on behalf of the United States during the Cold War, The New York Times reported Monday.
The article comes ahead of the release of a book written by Times reporter Eric Lichtblau titled “The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men.”
As the book and the article explain, ex-Nazis were hired by American spy agencies at the height of the Cold War for their intelligence value against the Russians, providing leads to agency officials on communist “sympathizers.”
High-ranking SS officers like Otto von Bolschwing, mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, a main architect of the “Final Solution,” were protected by leading intelligence officials like J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI and Allen Dulles at the CIA.
Records also show that some Nazis were not only recruited as spies, but were actively relocated to the US by the CIA. Von Bolschwing’s son, Gus von Bolschwing, who moved to New York City in 1954 along with his father, told The Times that he didn’t think his father’s relationship with the CIA was “consistent with our values as a country.”
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