It is a commonplace in the documents declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 that U.S. intelligence services employed and protected selected Axis war criminals in order to employ them as purveyors of (often untrustworthy) human intelligence. That protection also derived in some cases from a principled sense of obligation for services already rendered, however self-serving for the enemy turncoat and only putatively beneficial to the United States. This sense of U.S. obligation survived even when there was little expectation that such hirelings would be of use in the future.

The case of SS-Standartenführer Eugen Dollmann is a classic example of a U.S. intelligence agency perforce coddling a war crimes suspect who was no longer a useful source. Dollmann had played a prominent role in Operation Sunrise, the timely and opportunistic surrender of German forces in Italy on May 2, 1945, one week before the VE-Day capitulation of the remainder of the German armed forces. For U.S. intelligence, failure to shield Dollmann would risk embarrassing public disclosure of continued covert anti-leftist operations by the United States in postwar Italy. Furthermore, it could deter more skilled Nazi intelligence sources from trusting U.S. spymasters' promises of unending protection.

Dollmann's case also illustrates the setbacks to scholarship that resulted from the half-century delay in the declassification of Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), Office of Strategic Services (OSS), CIA, FBI, and Army documentation of war crimes and intelligence dossiers of war criminals. Documents released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act allow us to fill in some historical gaps and amend otherwise reliable accounts.