Historian Norman Goda has encountered more than one surprise when examining recently declassified documents dating back to before the outbreak of World War II.

He found the paracodeine capsules of Adolf Hitler’s trusted lieutenant, Hermann Goering. The counterfeit British pounds produced by German forgers to disrupt England’s wartime economy. And there is evidence that as early as March of 1942, Allied intelligence organizations may have been aware of the Third Reich’s plans to murder all European Jews.

Goda is among a number of scholars at Ohio University navigating their way through never-before-seen files and records that challenge the way historians treat topics ranging from American recruitment of Nazi war criminals for espionage missions against the Soviet Union at the close of World War II to Communist domination of Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the conflict.

Powerful political and legal forces, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the need for government agencies of the United States to comply with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, have created new frontiers for historical exploration. Researchers such as Goda find themselves in the enviable position of being among the first to delve into aspects of the historical record that only now are coming to light.

The work not only could satisfy curiosity and add to the body of historical knowledge. The material also promises to ignite spirited debate on what we know of the past — or, at least, what we think we know of how events unfolded.

Germany Declassified

Goda began his exploration of newly declassified documents in his role as consultant to The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group. The task force, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1998, reviews and declassifies millions of documents relating to German and Japanese war crimes found in such agencies as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Army, and the Department of State.

Packing a presidential appointment, top-secret clearance, and expert status on Nazi Germany, Goda routinely travels to Washington, D.C., and the National Archives. There he assesses the relevance of records, files, and documents to the declassification effort required to bring U.S. agencies into compliance with the Disclosure Act. It’s a daunting task.

“The universe of documents created by World War II is tremendous. It includes millions and millions of documents,” he says. “The first thing you have to figure out when you find a document that is interesting is whether it’s really new. Maybe there was a copy of the same document that was made available 20 or 30 years ago that I just may not have seen.”

Goda, who has been working on the project since 2000, acknowledges that surveying sources previously untouched is a “thrill,” but he is measured in his enthusiasm. “You can’t know everything,” he says. “You can’t have seen everything and you need to know where to look for another possible copy.”

The historian has found FBI files containing interrogation reports by British intelligence of leading Gestapo and SS figures, some of which shed light on war crimes investigations. He checked the documents against tribunal files and U.S. Army records and learned that some of the material had never been released.

CIA records also tend to be originals. The intelligence agency is handing over hundreds of so-called “name” files that chronicle the movements, descriptions, and careers of former German military and secret police officers.

“It’s material that generates originally with the CIA, and since the CIA is not in the habit of turning over records in general, you know that the stuff is new,” he explains.

The process has produced significant findings for Goda and his colleagues. In the spring of 2001, the Interagency Work Group captured headlines when it assisted in the reclassification of 20 CIA files on Adolf Hitler, Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Mueller, and other officials of the Third Reich.

More recently, Goda and his colleagues uncovered references to a dispatch from a Chilean diplomat in Prague, which was removed from a diplomatic pouch and examined by British and American intelligence relatively early in the war. The contents of the document reveal that the Allies were in possession of evidence as early as the spring of 1942 of Germany’s ultimate intent to murder all European Jews.

This is especially poignant material for Goda and other American Jews whose families emigrated to the United States from eastern Europe in the early 20th century to escape the Nazi onslaught. Those remaining died at the hands of the kind of war criminals Goda now encounters in the files and records he examines in the nation’s capital.

One such figure is SS Major Wilhelm Hoettl. Linked to the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, Hoettl was recruited by the Allies at the close of hostilities to gather intelligence for the coming Cold War with the Soviet Union. Contemporary works, published in the 1980s, assert that highly placed officials sought war criminals and were willing to overlook past transgressions in the rush to gain an advantage over the Russians. Goda sees a very different picture emerging.

“What I’m finding is that you’re talking about lower-level officers who work for American Army Counterintelligence officers who just got to Europe and found themselves having to produce intelligence reports,” he says. “They wound up using people that they didn’t know and whose pasts they did not know.”

The 600-page CIA file on Hoettl suggests that in some cases, there is no conspiracy — merely incompetence. For instance, while one organization was in the process of hiring the Austrian Nazi, others cut him loose when they discovered his true identity.

“I don’t know if that is an argument that would go over particularly well, but nevertheless, it’s what I’m finding,” Goda says.

The revelation could cause debate among former intelligence officials, government bureaucrats, and competing authors who have advanced different theories on recruitment policies.

Hoettl’s case is just one example of how archival work generates new perspectives on history. Other research suggests that former President Ronald Reagan may not have been insensitive to the German persecution of the Jews, as some have argued. Reagan received biting critique in 1985 for dishonoring the memory of death camp survivors and American servicemen when he visited a German cemetery in Bitburg that contained the graves of German soldiers who had served in the Shutzstaffel or SS. Units of the SS served as guards for concentration camps and participated in the massacre of U.S. soldiers at Malmedy in 1944.

New documents suggest that Reagan authorized a secret manhunt in South America in pursuit of Nazi war criminals such as death camp doctor Josef Mengele. The government aborted the operations at the last moment for a variety of reasons, including the discovery of Mengele’s body by West German and Brazilian police officials.

Sometimes the records and documents can be more stubborn in giving up their secrets. Goda puts it another way: “Sometimes a new document will fill in a gap, but it can often depend upon the question you ask of the record. What new context does it create for the existing knowledge on a particular subject?”

Michael Barnhart, distinguished professor of history at Stony Brook State University of New York, supports the notion that the file can speak to the historian even through what is missing or cannot be found. Barnhart’s work with Japanese Naval archives revealed that in the 1950s, the families of former admirals and ranking naval officers gained access to the records and removed incriminating references to their relatives. Such pilfering ultimately produced so-called “authorized” biographies designed to absolve their families from post-war scrutiny. Barnhart has found those works valuable in examining such elements as the relationship between the Imperial Army and Navy during World War II.

When faced with new conclusions, Barnhart joins Goda in a fundamental response.

“The first reaction is not to doubt the validity of the research,” Barnhart says, “but rather to ask who made the documents available and did they have an agenda? Is it the whole story?”

Church And State: The Legacy Of Stalin

There is definite face value to the bust of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in Steven Miner’s office. It speaks to why someone who knew he wanted to be a historian as early as high school adopted the study of Mother Russia and its ruthless leader as a life’s work.

“When people come in, they say ‘Oh, you are a Russian historian,’” says Miner. “If I had a picture of Hitler, even if I were a German historian, they’d think I was a nut.”

It’s that reaction — that indifference or temptation to overlook the magnitude of Stalin’s crimes — that captures Miner’s interest.

“Why is Stalin somehow more respectable than Hitler?” he asks. “He shouldn’t be.”

Miner has been pursuing tales about the late Russian leader since leaving his native California and spending his university days in Great Britain. Early in his professional career, the quest to know more about the man who some say brought Russia from the Bolsheviks to the atom bomb prompted Miner to author Between Churchill and Stalin, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1988. Research for the book, which documented the formation of the alliance between Britain and Russia in World War II, produced a discovery that Miner filed away for future study. Stalin had ruthlessly persecuted the Russian Orthodox Church prior to the war, but later supported a religious revival in territories that had been occupied by the Germans during the invasion of the Soviet Union.

The historian believed that Stalin supported re-establishment of the church to advance certain political goals and not just for propaganda value or to rouse Soviet nationalism to meet the challenge of the German invasion. He had his hypothesis. What he lacked was proof.

Miner had Russian connections. He’d participated in historical exchanges prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but when the Communist government fell, a colleague inside Russia invited him to Moscow to evaluate archives becoming available to all historians. He could hardly pass up the opportunity, despite the somewhat unsettled political circumstances still unfolding at his destination in summer 1992.

“Honest to goodness, when I got on that airplane headed to Russia, I had no idea if there was anyone there to meet me on the other end,” he remembers. “I was petrified. I thought, ‘What if nobody is there?’”

Miner found on his initial visit and in subsequent trips that the collapse of the Soviet Union “opened everything and everything was open.” Walking past stunned archivists who had no orders to prohibit visiting historians from viewing requested materials, he began to pursue his hypothesis. He picked at a rich vein of information originating from documents contained in the files maintained by the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church.

“It requires a good bit of digging, a bit like panning for gold,” Miner says. “One can search for days or weeks with rather slim pickings, only suddenly to come upon a treasure trove of even a single document that makes one stand up and take notice.”

Piecing together fragments of information from additional KGB and state archives, he unearthed compelling evidence that Stalin orchestrated the reopening of Orthodox churches and strategically confined the activity to areas that German forces had occupied and subsequently abandoned during the long retreat from Russia in 1943 and 1944. Miner also observed that Stalin worked in collaboration with the church’s leadership, which sought to consolidate its hold on new territories by eliminating competing religious interests such as the Greek Revival Church. State and church combined to outwardly buoy the war effort, but secretly connived to consolidate control over newly acquired populations.

“A lot of this stuff was just really gold,” he recalls. “I would not let the stuff out of my sight. My first trip there, I wrote by hand and I would spend the whole day copying out specific documents. I literally didn’t go to lunch. I didn’t even go to the bathroom. I got there when the archives opened and I would leave when they told me to leave.”

The material had to be compelling because the work was challenging. In the cold winter months, Miner wore longunderwear, turtlenecks, and sweaters while confronting antique microfilm machines with bulbs that flickered and dimmed without warning. Due to wartime paper shortages and the habits of Russian bureaucrats, many files and records contained scrawled notations or minutes of meetings in the margins — all the way around the page. While Miner is fluent in the Russian language, deciphering the handwriting of hurried secretaries and officials dating back decades was a daunting but rewarding task.

“Boy, did I get the proof!” he says, his eyes lighting up.

Stalin didn’t always rule with such a tight fist, the documents suggest. The dictator actually considered factors such as public opinion, resistance of populations to Soviet reoccupation, and desertion in the Russian army to develop polices and advance his agenda.

Still, notes bulging with evidence don’t necessarily prove or disprove a hypothesis. The historian must confront what author and professor David Lowenthal once termed “the sheer pastness of the past.” Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country addresses the notion that “As the past no longer exists, no account can ever be checked against it, but only against other accounts of that past; we judge its veracity by its correspondence with other reports, not with events themselves.”

That’s precisely how Miner came to re-examine the role of a seemingly innocuous bureaucrat he first read about in the British archives. Peter Smollett was a Soviet operative who infiltrated the British Ministry of Information’s Russian division in 1941. Smollett appeared to be a minor player who provided information by reviewing BBC scripts, choosing books for course readings, and approving public speakers, exhibits, and cultural events. Once Miner began connecting the Russian use of the church, policy of control, and subjugation of the Balkans with Smollett’s involvement with the BBC, the spy’s activities revealed a more sinister motive. While Smollett’s radio scripts advanced the idea that Stalin was relaxing his repression of the church as a gesture of Russian goodwill, delivery for the region was far from imminent. In fact, Smollett’s contamination of the BBC message enabled Stalin’s conquering armies to take advantage of an initial welcome in order to consolidate control and set the stage for years of brutal occupation. Miner realized that the network of espionage and subversion reached farther than anyone had imagined.

“So all this stuff that I had looked at in Britain, this propaganda and the alliance, suddenly took on a whole new coloration,” he says. “The guy I’d just thought of as a bureaucrat was a Soviet spy and I had to go back and look at all the information that I’d read and re-piece together his activities.”

While colleagues support Miner’s findings, the historian anticipates that leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church may not respond as favorably. Miner’s research is the focus of Stalin’s Holy War, published by the University of North Carolina Press this spring.

Donald J. Raleigh, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has offered support for the value such new perspectives bring to the study of history. “The opening of the archives and of the country have provided unprecedented opportunities to re-evaluate the Soviet experience and to address topics that heretofore were dealt with in a cursory or otherwise unsatisfactory fashion,” he writes in the Russian Review.

The Rush Of Discovery

It’s an alluring combination of diligence and discovery that prompts historians to return time and again to the archives. In fact, even as Goda helps to complete a report for Congress in 2004 that summarizes the declassification effort, he is deep into a new project. With a colleague, Richard Breitman of American University, Goda has completed 10 chapters of a work that presents new stories of Nazi war crimes and re-examines existing knowledge on the topic.

“You never know what you’re going to find,” Goda says. “Right now, I have a draft of a chapter on how the Chase National Bank helped expropriate German Jews between 1937 and 1940. The reason I have the information is that the FBI had sources inside the bank.”

The archives still beckon to Miner. He’s already under contract with Yale University Press to deliver a work in which he explores the circumstances surrounding Stalin’s murder of party dissident Sergei Kirov in 1934. Miner also hopes to produce a history of the Soviet Union along the lines of James McPherson’s epic of the American Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom. Telling the story that nobody knows more than fuels Miner’s curiosity. He describes it as an adrenaline rush that hit him square in the face one night as he emerged from his labors in a Russian library.

“I remember coming out of the Pushkin Archives and walking down the street and breathing this cold air and thought, I can’t believe people are paying me to do this. I’m reading letters that are interesting to me and that nobody ever thought I should see.’”

For more information about the Department of History, visit the Web at http://www-as.phy.ohiou.edu/Departments/History/.