The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group is a

United States government The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 states, a city within a fede ...

interagency group, which is tasked with locating, identifying, inventorying, and recommending for declassification classified U.S. records relating to

Nazi German Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...

and Imperial Japanese war crimes. The group was created by the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (NWCDA), passed in 1998, and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act of 2000 (JIGDA). The Interagency

Working Group A working group, or working party, is a group of experts working together to achieve specified goals. The groups are domain-specific and focus on discussion or activity around a specific subject area. The term can sometimes refer to an interdis ...

(IWG) has declassified an estimated 8 million pages of documents from the

Office of Strategic Services The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the intelligence agency of the United States during World War II. The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branc ...

, the

Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

, the

Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, ...

, and Army intelligence. The group issued three reports to

Congress A congress is a formal meeting of the representatives of different countries, constituent states, organizations, trade unions, political parties, or other groups. The term originated in Late Middle English to denote an encounter (meeting of a ...

between 1999 and 2007. Some of the declassified documents center on reports of the Japanese exploitation of '

comfort women Comfort women or comfort girls were women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied countries and territories before and during World War II. The term "comfort women" is a translation of the Japanese '' ia ...

' before and during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, and the FBI and CIA's investigations of

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...

's possible survival of the war.

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

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 (in October 1999, March 2002, IWG 2002 and April 2007), and it issues news releases and occasional newsletters. On March 25, 2005, President

George W. Bush George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party, Bush family, and son of the 41st president George H. W. Bush, he ...

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 whereabouts of

in the unlikely event of his survival following the end of World War II. Additional documents related to Hitler's possible survival were released in late 2017 in tandem with the release of files related to the investigation of the

assassination of John F. Kennedy John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. CST in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza. Kennedy was in the vehicle with ...

. Earlier in 2017, excerpts from Kennedy's diary were published online revealing that he believed in mid-1945 that Hitler might have survived the end of the war in Europe.

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.

Research cost and scale

As of 2007, the IWG estimated that the implementation of the two Disclosure Acts costed $30 million. From a total of 620 million pages, U.S. Government agencies screened over 100 million pages for relevance under the NWCDA and screened over 17 million pages under the JIGDA. Only a small percentage of these screened pages were found to be responsive to the Disclosure Acts: nearly 8.5 million pages of documents were relevant to the NWCDA, and over 142,000 pages were relevant to the JIGDA. IWG 2007, p. 43

Membership

The members of the group are appointed by the president. Members include:

References

Primary sources

* * * *

External links

*{{Official website, https://www.archives.gov/iwg/ United States federal boards, commissions, and committees Nazi war crimes Japanese war crimes War crimes organizations