Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 6. April 2007 / Time Line April 6, 2007
Version 3.004/06/2007
NAZI AND JAPANESE WAR CRIMES DECLASSIFICATION PROJECT
CONCLUDES
NCH WASHINGTON UPDATE (Vol. 13, #11; April 6, 2007)
The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records
Interagency Working Group (IWG), the group tasked with locating,
declassifying, and making publicly available U.S. records of Nazi
and Japanese war crimes, concluded its work on March 31, 2007.
The IWG was formed under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998
and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act of 2000. Its
membership consists of representatives of seven Executive Branch
agencies and three Presidentially appointed public members. The IWG
was extended twice, most recently in March 2005, to complete the
largest ever congressionally mandated single-subject
declassification effort.
The group's Final Report to Congress will be issued in mid-April.
It will describe the history of the legislation that brought about
the declassification effort; agencies' implementation of the act;
the declassification results; and recommendations for future
declassification policies.
The seven-year, roughly $30 million declassification effort,
resulted in the opening of more than 8 million pages of U.S.
records-not all of them directly linked to war crimes. Notably, the
records include the entirety of the operational files of the Office
of Strategic Services (the predecessor agency of the CIA), and more
than 163,000 pages of CIA materials of a type never before opened
to the public.
The declassified records also included more than 435,000 pages of
FBI files, 20,000 pages from Army Counterintelligence Corps files,
100,000 pages related to Japanese War crimes, and 6 million
additional pages of records.
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