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U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis. By Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda, Timothy Naftali, Robert Wolfe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1005. x + 495 pp.
"History Matters" is the motto chosen by the authors of this book; having read it, one is inclined to believe the opposite. If U.S. intelligence did perceive the true scope and unprecedented character of German crimes during the Second World War, few lessons were drawn from it at the time or later. Nothing attests better to the prevalence of oblivion than, first, the integration of some of the most deadly executioners of the "final solution of the Jewish question" into the ranks of Western intelligence during the Cold War, and, second, the burying of information important for our understanding of Nazi policy as well as for the tracing of war criminals in classified intelligence files only recently made accessible to scholars.
Students of history know that even depressing topics can make excellent reading. U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis is such a case. The authors present a complex, heterogeneous and technical topic in a clear and concise narrative. Although this book is an anthology (Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda provide most of the contributions, many well suited for classroom use), it has the contextual qualities of a monograph study. Subdivided into three sections ("Espionage and Genocide," "Collaboration and Collaborators," "Postwar Intelligence Use of War Criminals"), the authors present their analysis of documents surveyed by the Nazi War Criminal and Imperial Japanese Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) for which they worked since its inception following the passing of the Nazi War Crimes...