The US National Archives has issued a report based on newly declassified material, which confirms that the US protected Nazi war criminals as early as 1946. I noticed it mentioned on German news, ironically.

The report, titled “Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, US Intelligence and the Cold War,” draws on information classified until 2005 and made available under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, an effort by Washington to shed more a critical light on its own secrets.

The report looks into a number of former SS and Gestapo members who escaped justice with the US either knowingly tolerating their escape or even helping them to flee.

The report is available at www.archives.gov (PDF). Here are some excerpts:

The CIA moved to protect Ukranian nationalist leader Mykola Lebed from criminal investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1952.

[…]

…on October 15, 1959, only 10 days after the CIA Munich base made the request [for a US Visa], a KGB assassin named Bogdan Stashinskiy murdered Bandera with a special gun that sprayed cyanide dust into the victim’s face. The Soviets, who had penetrated Bandera’s organization and the BND years before, evidently decided that they could not live with another alliance between German intelligence officers and Ukrainian fanatics.

[…]

Once in the United States, Lebed was the CIA’s chief contact for AERODYNAMIC. CIA handlers pointed to his “cunning character,” his “relations with the Gestapo and … Gestapo training,” that the fact that he was “a very ruthless operator.”