The group was created by the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, passed in 1998, and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act of 2000. Between 1999 and 2016, the working group declassified and opened to the public an estimated 8 million pages of documents, including 1.2 million pages of Office of Strategic Services records, over 100,000 pages of Central Intelligence Agency files, more than 350,000 pages of Federal Bureau of Investigation subject files, and nearly 300,000 pages of Army intelligence files. The IWG has issued three reports to Congress, and it issues news releases and occasional newsletters. On March 25, 2005, PresidentGeorge W. Bush signed into law legislation pushing back the group's sunset date to March 2007. Documents related to the project have been released as late as 2017.
Summary
Nazi War Crimes
Documents declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which began to be released online by the early 2010s, included hundreds of pages of documents compiled by the FBI and CIA in relation to the health, psychological profile, and possible whereabouts of Adolf Hitler in the unlikely event of his survival following the end of World War II. Additional documents related to Hitler's possible survival were released in late 2017 in tandem with the release of files related to the investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Japanese Imperial Government
Agencies were advised that particular attention should be given to locating any records related to "so-called 'comfort women' program, the Japanese systematic enslavement of women of subject populations for sexual purposes." However, the IWG expressed its disappointments because the IWG uncovered and released few Asian theatre records. Thus, the IWG apologized to the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of WWII in Asia which was involved in the commencement of this project. The IWG published a report titled Researching Japanese War Crimes, Introductory Essays. In the report, the IWG analyzed the reason why comfort women documents were scarce: The report further stated that this practice was not charged with criminal acts: There was one exception, for an offense occurring in the Dutch East Indies.
Research cost and scale
As of 2007, the IWG estimated that the implementation of the two Disclosure Acts costed $30 million. From a total of 620 million pages, U.S. Government agencies screened over 100 million pages for relevance under the NWCDA and screened over 17 million pages under the JIGDA. Only a small percentage of these screened pages were found to be responsive to the Disclosure Acts: nearly 8.5 million pages of documents were relevant to the NWCDA, and over 142,000 pages were relevant to the JIGDA.
Membership
The members of the group are appointed by the president. Members include: