It turns out that in 2007 the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND – the German intelligence agency) shredded the files of 250 BND employees who had been members of either the National Socialist German Workers Party, better known as the Nazis, or the Gestapo.
What is especially fun about this is that some of the 250 whose records were shredded were considered to be war criminals. The researchers who dug this information out of the BND archives say that there is no evidence that this was a deliberate cover-up of the Nazi past of BND employees, but was rather a result of carelessness and that the files were not worth keeping.
I’m not sure that “carelessness” is better than “deliberate Nazi involvement cover up”, since it suggests that the BND isn’t checking over the files it shreds before it does so. One wonders what else has been inadvertently shredded. All in all, definitely some egg on the faces of BND big-wigs, and some troubling questions to be asked and answered.
