The two most frequent exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act cited in the report are:

1. American Aid for Nazi Collaborators The full report details how the United States became a “safe haven” for some Nazis, with some American officials actively working to help persecutors gain entry to the United States and conceal their identities and crimes. But the redacted version prepared by the Justice Department omits many of the central elements of these cases. The redacted report omits the debate within the CIA in 1953 over what Otto von Bolschwing, a Nazi associate of Adolph Eichmann who became a CIA asset, should tell immigration officials or others in the United States if confronted about his Nazi past. It also deletes references to what American officials knew about his atrocities, including the assertion from a Justice Department officials that he might “be guilty of acts more heinous than anyone else currently under investigation.” Redacted Original Read Page 261–263 » A section on Arthur Rudolph, a German scientist who ran slave labor camp at Mettelwerk and went on to become an honored NASA scientist, omits numerous references to what Rudolph was alleged to have done in Germany, such as “forcing slave laborers to watch hangings.” Read Page 334 » A section on Tscherim Soobzokov, a Waffen SS member who worked with the C.I.A. in the 1960s after moving to New Jersey, deletes numerous references to the C.I.A.’s knowledge of his wartime activities and the Justice Department’s legal problems in bringing a case against him as a result. Read Page 345–348 »

2. ‘A Dead End’ In discussing the 1977 prosecution of Feodor Fedorenko, a Ukranian-born accused of being a guard at Treblinka before moving to the United States, the redacted report deletes extensive discussions about the legal problems the case faced in going to the Supreme Court, including a prosecutor’s acknowledgement that “we are at a dead end in this case.” Read Page 53 »

3. Regrets to an Accused Nazi In the 1980 case against Frank Walus, a Chicago man from Poland accused of committing wartime atrocities as a member of the Gestapo, the report discusses the evidentiary problems and faulty eyewitness accounts that led the Justice Department to drop the case and express its “regret” to Walus. Deleted from the report is the intense disagreement among current and former Justice Department officials, including Walter Rockler, the former head of the Nazi-hunting unit, over whether the Justice Department should have expressed any regret at all to the defendant. Read Page 87 »

4. Allegations of Misconduct In a section on the Justice Department’s most highly publicized failure, the case against Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk, the department deleted extensive passages regarding misconduct allegations that an appellate judge raised against prosecutors in 1994 in failing to turn over material to the defense. A department ethics investigation later rejected the allegations. Read Page 168 »

5. No ‘Mere Functionary?’ A section on a 1986 investigation into Kurt Waldheim, who became president of Austria that year, omits sharp internal disagreement over the probe’s diplomatic implications. It also deletes extensive evidence produced by O.S.I.’s director at the time, Neal Sher, as well as the World Jewish Congress (W.J.C.) about Waldheim’s wartime activities, including violence by his unit. Read Page 310 »

6. Reagan and the ‘Belarus Conspiracy’ The Justice Department deleted a passage on a memo that an O.S.I. lawyer sent in October 1980, on the eve of the presidential election, informing the attorney general that Ronald Reagan had been indirectly tied to an investigation into a supposed conspiracy to bring Nazis from Belarus to the United States. The author of the memo, Allan Ryan, said he informed the attorney general of the theory being pursued by one of his lawyers, John Loftus, because he did not want to be accused of trying to “save Reagan a month before the election.” The conspiracy theory, and Reagan’s purported connection to it, were later debunked following several investigations. Read Page 357 »

7. Swiss Purchase of Nazi Gold In 1997, as an international body known as the TGC (the Tripartite Gold Commission) was preparing to redistribute gold looted by the Nazis, an intense internal dispute erupted between the State Department’s Stuart Eizenstat and the Justice Department’s Eli Rosenbaum over how culpable the Swiss should be held for buying Nazi gold during the war. The Justice Department report deletes extensive references to this internal debate, including the Justice Department’s belief that there was “definitive proof” that the Swiss had accepted Nazi gold and that the Truman Administration, in “dissembling to Congress,” had vastly underestimated the size of the gold purchases years earlier. Read Page 410 »

8. A Dispute with Germany Beginning in the mid-1980s, Germany began complaining to American officials that the United States was improperly sending German-Americans suspected of war crimes back to Germany to avoid prosecution. The Justice Department deletes several sections about the internal dispute over the issue, including the fact that the U.S. State Department sided with Germany. Read Page 435 »

9. ‘An Unmitigated Disaster’ In early 2000, Justice Department officials met with Latvian officials in the country’s capital of Riga in the hopes of persuading the Latvians to cooperate more aggressively in pursuing suspected Nazis from the region. The Justice Department report deletes references to the meetings as “a hideous failure” and “an unmitigated disaster.” Read Page 471 »