Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group
The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group is a United States government interagency group, which is tasked with locating, identifying, inventorying, and recommending for declassification classified U.S. records relating to Nazi German and Imperial Japanese war crimes.
The group was created by the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, passed in 1998, and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act of 2000. The Interagency Working Group has declassified an estimated 8 million pages of documents from the Office of Strategic Services, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Army intelligence. The group issued three reports to Congress between 1999 and 2007.
Some of the declassified documents center on reports of the Japanese exploitation of 'comfort women' before and during World War II, as well as the FBI and CIA's investigations of Adolf Hitler's possible survival after the war ended.
History
The group was created by the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, passed in 1998, and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act of 2000. Between 1999 and 2016, the working group declassified and opened to the public an estimated 8 million pages of documents, including 1.2 million pages of Office of Strategic Services records, over 100,000 pages of Central Intelligence Agency files, more than 350,000 pages of Federal Bureau of Investigation subject files, and nearly 300,000 pages of Army intelligence files. The IWG has issued three reports to Congress and it 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.
Summary
Nazi War Crimes
Documents declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which began to be released online by the early 2010s, included hundreds of pages of documents compiled by the FBI and CIA in relation to the health, psychological profile, and possible survival of Adolf Hitler following the end of World War II in Europe. One report to the CIA included a purported photograph of Hitler in Colombia, South America, the authenticity of which the agency did not endorse. Additional documents related to Hitler's possible survival were released in late 2017 along with files related to the investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.Japanese Imperial Government
Agencies were advised that particular attention should be given to locating any records related to "so-called 'comfort women' program, the Japanese systematic enslavement of women of subject populations for sexual purposes." However, the IWG expressed its disappointments because the IWG uncovered and released few Asian theatre records. Thus, the IWG apologized to the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of WWII in Asia which was involved in the commencement of this project.The IWG published a report titled Researching Japanese War Crimes, Introductory Essays. In the report, the IWG analyzed the reason why comfort women documents were scarce:
The report further stated that this practice was not charged with criminal acts:
There was one exception, for an offense occurring in the Dutch East Indies.