Crowcass

Publié le 21 juillet 2005 par Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF)

Central Registry Of War Criminals And Security Suspects. Wanted Lists. Soft Back Edition. CROWCASS is an acronym for Central Registry Of War Criminals And Security Suspects. Sixty years ago CROWCASS was established by the United Nations to trace ex-enemy nationals suspected of committing war crimes in Europe. From 1945 to 1947 the Allied authorities established a pool of information on persons in custody or wanted for questioning in connection with war crimes they may have witnessed or perpetrated. The results were published in a number of registers which all bore the generic term CROWCASS. These registers, which acted as a contemporary `Nazi Hunter's Bible', were issued to the units responsible for tracing war criminals. The final CROWCASS Wanted Lists were issued in 1947 and are presented here in their entirety for the first time.

Listed in these registers are more than 50,000 individuals who were being sought as witnesses and perpetrators of countless war crimes. Included are Adolf Hitler (listed as CROWCASS File Number 1), Hitler's `eminence grises' Martin Bormann, Police Chief `Gestapo' Mueller, genocide architects Adolf Eichmann and Alois Brunner (sometimes reported as still at large in Syria), Mussolini rescuer - commando leader Otto Skorzeny, `The Beast of Buchenwald' - Ilse Koch, her camp commandant husband Karl (actually shot by the SS in 1945) and even Friedrich von Lindeiner, the Luftwaffe commander of Stalag Luft 3 at the time of The Great Escape. French Nazi Hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld are very familiar with CROWCASS having tracked down Klaus Barbie - The Butcher of Lyon who also appears within its pages. U.S.

Nazi Hunter and director of the Los Angeles based Simon Wiesenthal Foundation Ephraim Zuroff acclaimed the publication of CROWCASS as "a huge help". Zuroff commented recently "Since Operation Last Chance was initiated we've had 365 suspects reported to us and only yesterday the government of Hungary agreed to the extradition of one of them. But this is only the smallest tip of an Iceberg. Publication of the CROWCASS report will be a huge help in tracking down the war criminals that still think that they will go to their deaths without being published for their crimes.

British writer Ian Sayer, who tracked down S.S. General Wilhelm Mohnke - in charge of the defence of Hitler's bunker to the end and responsible for the massacre of Allied prisoners of war at Wormhoudt, Normandy and Malmedy - said "CROWCASS was of great assistance to me in the Mohnke case. Its publication will illustrate the vast scale of Nazi war crimes and brutality carried out during World War II. It is an important document which will be of great value to both historians and researchers now and in the future. However, it should be remembered that many of these individuals who appear in CROWCASS were wanted simply as witnesses and not as perpetrators. It should also be noted that with a project of this nature there were inevitably many factual errors which were never corrected.