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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

I searched for a random keyword and found this file: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-101...

1 July 1947

Enclosed herewith are translations from the official gestapo files of a list of persons connected with the work of the Third International in China. These files are in possession of Turin, NY and he is combing through them extracting this type of information which will be forwarded to you as it is obtained.

I guess it's not super surprising that US intelligence was interested in the results of Gestapo intelligence on communists in other countries, but it does make me incredibly, incredibly uncomfortable.

Some of the Gestapo notes identify various people as "US citizen, Jew," "German citizen, Jewess," etc.

(On the technical side - is the OCR'd text available, or only searchable?)

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The Nazis before and during WWII were fastidious about documentating the backgrounds, political affiliations, and connections of pretty much everyone they could, but especially their perceived foes. They were assisted in this by tabulating equipment provided by IBM. So they probably had more complete records of this sort of thing than anyone else at the time.

Sure, but don't we think they'll be ... colored by Nazi ideology? Was the US really happy to think that anyone who the Nazis think is a communist and a threat to the Reich is someone that they should also consider a communist and a threat to the republic? Barely two years after sending half a million soldiers to die because this country was too evil that we needed to pay any cost to defeat them? After discovering the Holocaust, which we didn't know about when we made that decision and only learned about as we found the piles of dead bodies? We're not only interested in their intelligence, we trust the Gestapo's judgment?

I mean, I guess at some level I always knew the answer was yes, but this is pretty blatant.

I don't see any evidence of unconditional trust of the Gestapo's judgement. As an intelligent analyst, you would be pretty stupid to ignore information just because its contents might be unreliable. Reliability and utility are two distinct axes (even if not entirely orthogonal).

The image quality is too poor for me to spend the time to figure out what all the text and annotation is saying. It looks like it's something like a summary of major leaders of the Chinese branch of the Comintern with supporting documentation, but I'm not entirely certain.

The US recruited actual members of the Nazi party[1], so a few files is not much in comparison.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

Replace a few words and you have the present day situation.

I've had a lot of fun doing just that over the course of this project. Little random stuff like a report on a "professional strip-teaser" named Candy Barr and her film "Smart-Alec" is the stuff that stuck with me.

A few people have asked about the text, so once the 11/03 release is complete in the next couple of days, I should be able to upload it to github. I'm sure that someone who is really familiar with image manipulation/cleanup could produce a better text index.

The US has a long history of employing former Nazi and fascist officials post WW2.

There were projects to capture/recruit scientists, intelligence agents and propaganda experts.

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