The Central Intelligence Agency is refusing to hand over documents about its clandestine ties with Nazi war criminals, according to a report in Sunday´s New York Times.

A government working group requesting those documents under a 1998 disclosure law says the CIA is withholding information about its relationship with Nazis after the end of World War II, the report said. The spy agency says it is not withholding any documents relating to the commission of war crimes by "officials, agents or collaborators of Nazi Germany," but is keeping secret only documents that do not relate to "war crimes per se."

"I think the CIA has defied the law, and in so doing has also trivialized the Holocaust, thumbed its nose at the survivors of the Holocaust and also at Americans who gave their lives in the effort to defeat the Nazis in World War II," former NY congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman was quoted as saying in the Times report.

Holtzman and others seeking the documents under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act said they decided to make public their campaign to pressure the CIA into handing over the material.

Historians who have studied the 1.2 million pages already released under the disclosure law say the material shows that the CIA had ties with high-ranking Nazi officials, including five associates of Adolf Eichmann who were on the CIA payroll, according to the report. US officials have defended the practice of recruiting Nazis as spies as essential to the Allied effort in World War II that helped bring about the defeat of Nazi Germany. (© 1995-2005, The Jerusalem Post 01/31/05)