Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records ‘Interagency Working Group’
The Interagency Working Group (IWG) or the ‘The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group’ is a United States government interagency group. The group main objective -is to locate and identify, which documents are suitable for recommending a declassification of classified U.S. records, -relating to Nazi German and Imperial Japanese War Crimes.
Background
The group was created on the backdrop of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (NWCDA), passed in 1998, and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act of 2000 (JIGDA).
The Interagency Working Group, managed from 1999 to 2016 -to declassify an estimated eight million pages of documents, which is now accessible to the public. In early 2010 -the first declassified documents under the ‘Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act’ were released on the internet.
Declassification of Classified U.S. Records
- Strategic Services records: ‘1.2 million pages’
- Central Intelligence Agency: ‘Over 100,000 pages of files’
- Federal Bureau of Investigation: Over 350,000 pages of subject files
- Army intelligence files: ‘Approx. 300,000 pages’
News and Rapports
The Interagency Working Group has issued three reports to Congress and issues news releases and occasional newsletters. On March 25, 2005, President George W. Bush signed into law legislation pushing back the group’s sunset date to March 2007. Documents related to the project have been released as late as 2017.
Congress reports
Disclosures research
The wealth of new materials allowed for studies unprecedented in depth, breadth, detail, and nuance. This work is indebted to their first investigations of the declassified materials, as well as studies of covert operations behind the Iron Curtain. These include studies of Soviet counterintelligence.
Richard Breitman, Norman J. W. Goda, Timothy Naftali and Robert Wolfe -first explored the disclosures in the rapport ‘U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis.’ Later on, Breitman and Goda revisited the subject in ‘Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War’.