A UF professor helped declassify documents revealing that the U.S. employed more than 1,000 Nazi spies during the Cold War.
Norman J.W. Goda, professor of Holocaust studies, was part of an interagency group that looked at over 8 million documents under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.
With the release of a new book about the documents, the professor is in the national spotlight once again. In October, the New York Times published an article adapted from “The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men,” by Eric Lichtblau. The article quoted Goda on his knowledge of Nazis and U.S. intelligence.
The disclosure act required all government agencies to declassify documents relating to Nazi war crimes and the fate of war criminals after the war. It also put together the interagency group to look through the documents.
Goda worked on the declassification team from 1998 to 2010. He spent one year at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., looking over the documents. Before coming to UF in 2009, he worked at Ohio University.
“As a historian, it’s a thrill to see new records that no one ever thought would be declassified,” Goda said. “There are all kinds of secrets in there.”
The records provided new information on the Holocaust, what U.S. intelligence agencies knew and what German soldiers said confidentially, he said.
The agencies processed records and sent them to the National Archives, where Goda and his team looked through them to find gaps such as redacted information.
“The process as a whole was a big success,” he said.
Goda and the rest of the team who helped declassify the records wrote a book with the information they found called “U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis,” published in 2004. Goda later published another book, “Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence and the Cold War,” in 2010.
American University professor Richard Breitman worked on the declassification team with Goda. Breitman co-authored both books and said “a good number” of people and historians now use the books as sources.
“That served as a way for other scholars to get into the records because there was so much in material,” he said.
Goda said the post-war trends they found in the documents were in line with what they expected, but they also found new, surprising information. For example, he said, after the war, the U.S. Army hired a man for counterintelligence who was second in command in the operation that gassed most of Poland’s Jewish population.
Jack Kugelmass, UF professor and director of the Center for Jewish Studies, said Goda’s work is influential.
“Some of his work now has national and international consequences,” he said.
[A version of this story ran on page 3 on 11/7/2014]
