Army Awards INSCOM Personnel for Support of Nazi Records Initiative

Courtesy Photo | Dr. Kurtz presents an award to Lt. Col. Jasey B. Briley, the 310th Military Intelligence Battalion commander.  

FORT HUACHUCA, AZ, UNITED STATES

10.24.2022

Courtesy Story

U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence

by Michael E. Bigelow, INSCOM Command Historian

On 25 October 2000, Maj. Gen. Robert A. Harding, the Army’s assistant G2, hosted an award ceremony for fifty members of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). In the ceremony at Fort Meade, Maryland, General Harding rewarded fifty soldiers, civilians, and contractors for their efforts in digitizing, declassifying, and transferring records on the Nazi war crimes to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

Three years earlier, President Bill Clinton had signed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and established an interagency working group, under Dr. Michael Kurtz, to oversee its execution. The act’s provisions called for identification and declassification of records relating to Nazi war crimes. These records would, in turn, be transferred to NARA. The undertaking would give the public access to these World War II-era records that could help further understanding of the Holocaust, war crimes, and the war and postwar activities of U.S. and allied intelligence agencies.

For the Army, records of the Nazi war crimes mainly consisted of the holdings of the 902d Military Intelligence Group’s Investigative Records Repository (IRR). The IRR stored the Army’s counterintelligence investigative files, including postwar records of the Counter Intelligence Corps investigations of former Nazi officials. All told, the repository estimated it had almost 15,800 pertinent files requiring more than 134 man-years to complete the screening, declassification, and transfer. In September 1999, the Army staff budgeted $1.3 million to bankroll the project. Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. Robert Noonan, the Army G2, directed INSCOM to complete the Nazi records project by 1 October 2000.

With such a tight timeline, the IRR’s personnel needed additional manpower. INSCOM sent reinforcements from the other units of the 902d MI Group and the battalions of the 704th MI Brigade. At times, the group worked 24-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week digitizing the decades-old microfilm and paper records and bringing them into the Information Age. Much of the work entailed feeding 13,000 reels of microfilm through scanners to capture the documents electronically. If all went well, scanning a reel took about a half-hour.

Not everything, however, went well. An electrical transformer blew, and generators had to be used for power, until a replacement could be brought in from South Dakota. When a server later crashed and no backup system existed, the project lost three weeks of data. Nevertheless, through hard work and dedication, the project’s staff turned over 15,742 electronic files to NARA by 29 September 2000.

Since 1999, the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act has declassified and opened to the public an estimated eight million pages of documents, which includes almost 300,000 pages from INSCOM’s IRR. Collectively, these records will help shed new light on the events of World War II and the beginnings of the Cold War. The year-long project demonstrated the command’s extraordinary ability to reallocate resources and apply expertise to meet Army requirements.

To see more entries visit the interactive timeline on the MI history website: https://ikn.army.mil/apps/MIHistory/ (CAC required)
Errors or questions? Contact [e-mail]

• Date Taken: 10.24.2022
• Date Posted: 10.24.2022 13:28
• Story ID: 431908
• Location: FORT HUACHUCA, AZ, US