Germany's major intelligence agency has claimed to destroy personal files of its former Nazi employees.
Some of former NSDAP, Gestapo, SS and SD officials were recruited after the World War II by West-German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND). According to data from the agency it is estimated that they were about ten per cent of the people employed there during the post-war period.
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| BND seal |
The scandal was revealed after former BND director, Ernst Uhrlau had invited an independent group of historians to study how much West-German intelligence agencies were depending on former Nazis.
The speaker of the group Dr Klaus-Dietmar Henke has revealed recently in media, that in 2007 the agency had destroyed about 250 personal files of the BND employees who used to be connected with the Nazi movement.
Der Spiegel which has published an interview with Henke described whole incident "the true historical scandal". It also notes that, for several decades after the end of WWII in BND existed a policy of recruiting new staff from among the family members. As a result many people working in BND are direct descendants of those former Nazi officials and were interested in hiding these facts.
The agency has claimed that the documents were destroyed, but as they added, these files were only 2% of the total size of the agency’s archive available to historians. In their opinion the documents "were not deemed to be worth keeping".
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| Reinhard Gehlen |
West-German intelligence had employed hundreds of former Nazi officials in the period between 1956-1971. First BND director Reinhard Gehlen was general in Wehrmacht and since 1945 he worked as a CIA agent. According to the leaks published by Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung in 2009, he as well as his American employers were aware of the Nazi past of many West-German intelligence agents.
This information reveals an interesting plot in the newest German History, it is worth to think about how much we Poles actually know about our Western neighbour.
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