Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group

The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group is a United States government interagency group, which tasked with locating, identifying, inventorying, and recommending for declassification classified U.S. records relating to Nazi and Japanese war crimes.

The group was created after the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act 1998 (PL 105-246). Since 1999, the Interagency Working Group (IWG) has declassified and opened to the public an estimated 8 million pages of documents, including 1.2 million pages of Office of Strategic Services records; 50,000 pages of Central Intelligence Agency name and subject 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 two reports to the Congress of the United States (in October 1999 and March 2002), and it issues news releases and occasional newsletters.

On March 25, 2005, President George W. Bush signed into law legislation pushing back the group's sunset date to March 2007.

The members of the group are appointed by the President. Current membership is:

  • Steven Garfinkel, Chair
  • Thomas Baer, head of Steinhardt Baer Pictures Company
  • Richard Ben-Veniste, a partner at Mayer Brown
  • Christina Bromwell, Office of the Secretary of Defense
  • Elizabeth Holtzman, former Congresswoman from New York
  • William Hooton, Federal Bureau of Investigation
  • William H. Leary, National Security Council
  • Eli Rosenbaum, Director of the Office of Special Investigations, Department of Justice
  • Paul Shapiro, Director, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
  • Marc J. Susser, The Historian, Department of State
  • Mary Walsh, Central Intelligence Agency

Famous quotes containing the words government, working, records, nazi, imperial, japanese, crimes, war and/or group:

    This Government has found occasion to express, in a friendly spirit, but with much earnestness, to the Government of the Czar, its serious concern because of the harsh measures now being enforced against the Hebrews in Russia.
    Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)

    Working women today are trying to achieve in the work world what men have achieved all along—but men have always had the help of a woman at home who took care of all the other details of living! Today the working woman is also that woman at home, and without support services in the workplace and a respect for the work women do within and outside the home, the attempt to do both is taking its toll—on women, on men, and on our children.
    Jeanne Elium (20th century)

    The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
    John Berger (b. 1926)

    What is most original in a man’s nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn’t have been content to enjoy the atmosphere.
    Leonard Cohen (b. 1934)

    If you are ambitious of climbing up to the difficult, and in a manner inaccessible, summit of the Temple of Fame, your surest way is to leave on one hand the narrow path of Poetry, and follow the narrower track of Knight-Errantry, which in a trice may raise you to an imperial throne.
    Miguel De Cervantes (1547–1616)

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    Mae West, U.S. screenwriter, W.C. Fields, and Edward Cline. Cuthbert Twillie (W.C. Fields)

    Heaven absolves all crimes committed to gain a throne once Heaven gives it to us.
    Pierre Corneille (1606–1684)

    War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.... A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice—is often the means of their regeneration.
    John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)

    No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.
    Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)