ＣＩＡ、元ナチ将校との情報交換の事実認める（ロイター）

TEL AVIV — A top commander in Hitler’s secret police, responsible for deporting tens of thousands of Jews, was shielded by the U.S. and German authorities after World War II and later joined West Germany’s foreign intelligence service, which knew about his wartime role, newly disclosed records reveal.

By the war’s end the official, Franz Josef Huber — who also held a general-level rank in the SS, the Nazi paramilitary organization — led one of the Gestapo’s largest sections, stretching across Austria and with roles out to the east. In Vienna after the Nazi takeover, his forces worked closely with Adolf Eichmann on deportations to concentration and extermination camps.

Eichmann would eventually be executed for his role in coordinating the murder of millions of Jews. Next Sunday is the 60th anniversary of the opening of his trial in Jerusalem. But Huber never had to hide or to escape abroad, as many other top Third Reich commanders did.

He spent the final decades of his life based in his hometown, Munich, with his family, under his own name. And the explanation for this strange immunity appears to lie in his usefulness in the spying conflicts of the Cold War.

U.S. intelligence documents show that there was strong interest in drawing on Huber’s wartime network to recruit agents in the Soviet bloc, even as Austria was seeking to have him tried for war crimes.

“Although we are by no means unmindful of the dangers involved in playing around with a Gestapo general,” a C.I.A. memo from 1953 stated, “we also believe, on the basis of the information now in our possession, that Huber might be profitably used by this organization.”

Newly disclosed U.S. and German intelligence records reveal that both countries made efforts to conceal Huber’s role in the crimes of the Third Reich and to prevent him from facing trial. The German public broadcaster ARD obtained the records and shared them with The New York Times. They will be presented in a “Munich Report” investigative documentary scheduled to be broadcast in Germany on Tuesday.

The German intelligence service, known by the initials BND, employed Huber full-time for nearly a decade, giving him a cover story that made him appear to work for a private business. It was nearly 20 years after the war before agency bosses decided they could no longer tolerate the connection. A December 1964 memo warned that disclosure of the secret would “frustrate the efforts of the service’s leadership to build confidence with the federal government and the public.”