But there seems to be more to the current debate than new documents alone can explain. The cold war, an era of moral absolutism, has given way to an age in which even ''good'' states can be bad, or at least reveal their imperfections. An age where neutrality itself is necessarily relative.

''Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, we tended to imbue ourselves with a facile purity in the West,'' said Andre Glucksmann, a French philosopher. ''We blamed the other and did not look too closely at ourselves. We glossed over the corner of neutrality in most people, the neutrality that is also the instinct to save one's skin.''

Truth and Cynicism

The extent to which the ''truth'' about World War II was shaped by the often cynical political imperatives of the postwar years is now becoming clear. As the British historian Norman Davies has pointed out, the only war crimes deemed worth investigating in 1945 ''were those committed by the defeated enemy.''

There was, for example, no appetite to discover who killed 26,000 Allied Polish officers in the Katyn forests in 1941 because the Soviet Union, at war's end, was an ally. Later, the issue was simply buried in the Soviet sphere.

Similarly, Western attempts to probe who killed whom in Yugoslavia between 1941 and 1945 -- and particularly the role of the Catholic church in quisling Croatia's genocidal drive against Serbs and Jews -- were scarcely serious because they met political objections. To look too closely was to destabilize Yugoslavia; and to criticize the Catholic church was to play into the hands of the Communists.

The truth, beside such calculations, was of little moment. Politics was paramount. The same is certainly true of Switzerland, Sweden and Portugal, states that all became part of the Western family after 1945. Portugal, still under its dictator Antonio Salazar, entered NATO. Switzerland and Sweden were lands of freedom and democracy. Pressing them on their war records was not a priority in the West.

Immediately after the war, the United States did attempt to press Portugal to surrender 44 tons of German gold by freezing its assets in the United States. But seven years later, with America anxious to get Portugal into NATO and secure an important strategic base in the Azores, the matter was dropped.