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:
“The only government that I recognize—and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army—is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind—intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“Time grows dim. Time that was so long
grows short, time, all goggle-eyed,
wiggling her skirts, singing her torch song,
giving the boys a buzz and a ride,
that Nazi Mama with her beer and sauerkraut.
Time, old gal of mine, will soon dim out.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“The imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.... The Japanese people are ... simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Crimes increase as education, opportunity, and property decrease. Whatever spreads ignorance, poverty and, discontent causes crime.... Criminals have their own responsibility, their own share of guilt, but they are merely the hand.... Whoever interferes with equal rights and equal opportunities is in some ... real degree, responsible for the crimes committed in the community.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“In time of war you know much more what children feel than in time of peace, not that children feel more but you have to know more about what they feel. In time of peace what children feel concerns the lives of children as children but in time of war there is a mingling there is not children’s lives and grown up lives there is just lives and so quite naturally you have to know what children feel.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women.... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)