U.S. intelligence involvement with German and Japanese war criminals after World War II

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While the United States was involved in the prosecution of people involved in the war crimes of World War II, US military and intelligence agencies protected some war criminals in the interest of obtaining technical or intelligence information from them, or to recruit them for intelligence work. The relationships with German war criminals started immediately after the end of the Second World War, but some of the relationships with Japanese war criminals were slower to develop.

The concealment was not always deliberate, as some records were scattered among a huge volume of government records. In some cases, prosecutors actively developed cases against individuals, yet were unaware the US had recruited them. The US Congress instituted the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, under the auspices of the National Archives and Records Administration, to investigate the issue.^[1] Many of these relationships were formed by the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) before the creation of the CIA in 1947. The CIA took over the relationships and, in some cases, concealed them for nearly 60 years.