The ‘Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Acts’ of 1998, opened a comprehensive collection of thousands classified records from the Second World War -all which were declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Interagency Working Group (IWG). Even though it took several years for most of these documents to become available to scholars, and many were not declassified until 2005 and 2007. Documents related to the NWCDA project have been released as late as 2017.
The 1.3 million Army and Intelligence files include thousands of journals regarding war criminals and their use by Allied and Soviet intelligence agencies. These include files on German war criminals, but also collaborators from the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, and elsewhere. The files also include information on Allied and non-aligned states that had an interest in Axis personalities, including Great Britain, France, Italy, Argentina, and Israel.
The 1,110 re-released CIA files are in most cases far more detailed than the files of the initial CIA release in 2001 and after. They contain a trove of information on Nazis who eventually worked for the Gehlen Organization or as Soviet spies after the war. They hold information about important Nazi officials who escaped and became figures of security interest in other countries spanning the globe from the Middle East to South America. Together, the Army and CIA records will keep scholars of World War II and the Cold War busy for many years to come.