US Intelligence and the Nazis

US INTELLIGENCE AND THE NAZIS

By RICHARD BREITMAN et al

Cambridge University Press, 2005, 495 pp, $49.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Theodore Saevecke lived out his last years on a comfortable West German pension as a retired senior police officer. He was also a veteran of Gestapo operations against civilians and political prisoners in Italy in World War 11, and he had organised the deportation of seven hundred Italian Jews to extermination camps in Poland. Saevecke was a war criminal by any standards, except, apparently, those of the West German police and the CIA who employed him despite their knowledge of his Nazi past.

But why would the US government, which had just fought a war against Nazism, now protect its former enemies? History professor, Richard Breitman, and his fellow scholars have pored through the eight million pages of US government records declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998, and these new archival secrets suggest some answers, none of them pretty, about the use of Nazi war criminals by US governments after the war.

Breitman documents how US intelligence agencies “found it desirable to make post-war intelligence use of a substantial number – at least some dozens – of their former intelligence or police enemies – against the new threat ‘Communism’”. Former Nazi intelligence personnel, some of them members of criminal organisations such as the SS (the Nazi Party’s paramilitary ideological enforcers) and the Gestapo (the Nazis’ political police), were protected by their new American employers from prosecution for war crimes and put to work against the common enemy of the Nazis and the CIA – the communist and non-communist left.

SS General, Karl Wolff, for example, had organised transports of Italian Jews to execution camps and was involved in criminal reprisals against the Italian Resistance yet was rewarded during a military tribunal two years after the war with an unprecedented private meeting with the US judges who declined to prosecute him. His accomplice, SS officer Eugen Dollman, was given false identity papers by his new American protectors and shipped to safety in Franco’s fascist Spain in 1952 to avoid trial in Italy.

Wolff and Dollman were the beneficiaries of a “misplaced sense of obligation for services rendered” (they had self-servingly arranged an early surrender of German troops in northern Italy) but none of the other war criminals saved by the US had even this level of flimsy justification.

Former chief Nazi prosecutor, SS officer Manfred Roeder (‘Hitler’s bloodhound’), for example, won the favour of the CIC (the Counterintelligence Corps of the US Army) and was spared prosecution at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after the war, thanks to his claim of access to a treasure of intelligence records on the ‘Red Orchestra’, the Soviet Union’s anti-Nazi intelligence network in western Europe composed of leftist anti-Nazis.

General Reinhard Gehlen, head of the German Army’s intelligence work on the Eastern front, was also sponsored by the CIC, and then the CIA, for a decade in the expectation (fulfilled in 1956) that he would become head of a future West German security service. Gehlen’s US-subsidised organisation was staffed with hundreds of former SS and Gestapo men. When Washington learned about Gehlen’s use of these war criminals, it chose to do nothing about it and the spies, torturers and murderers remained on the US payroll. Gehlen’s Nazis manufactured ‘intelligence’ about a fictitious threat of Soviet westward expansion to feed an anti-communist CIA.

Hatred of communism, and claims of special knowledge of Soviet espionage, became assets for many former Gestapo officers. When captured, the clever ones sensed what their US interrogators wanted and offered up an anti-Red past whitewashed of the more uncomfortable bits – such as their supervision of the Einsatzgruppen, the genocidal SS mobile killing units in occupied areas of eastern Europe, and their involvement in the deportations of millions of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps. Gestapo and SS officer, Walter Rauff, for example, escaped Europe with US help and his extradition from the military dictatorship of Pinochet’s Chile was not pursued by Washington for decades.

On the basis of his knowledge of Soviet infantry tactics, the CIC hired SS officer, Heinz Reinefarth, who was responsible for the mass murder of Polish civilians in the destruction of Warsaw during the Polish rising of August 1944. Emil Augsburg, an SS ‘expert’ on Slavic peoples in the USSR, was hired by the CIC which was salivating at the prospect of Augsburg’s (never recovered) trunks of files on the Comintern (the Moscow-led international organisation of communist parties).

Otto ‘Scarface’ Skorzeny (Hitler’s favourite commando) was hired by the CIA for service in Egypt where he imported over a hundred SS cronies including the deputy leader of the Hitler Youth. The CIA also extended a hand of friendship to the Ukrainian, Mikola Lebed, whose collaboration with the Gestapo in 1941 had led to wholesale murders of Jews in the Ukraine but who was smuggled into the US under legal cover by the CIA.

The FBI also tapped into the rich anti-communist vein of Europe’s fascists. The FBI protected many East European Nazi collaborators who had relocated to the US as ‘displaced persons’. The FBI withheld evidence in the 1950s of the criminality of Lazslo Agh, a Hungarian camp officer who lied his way into the US in 1949, despite the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service collecting testimony from dozens of witnesses who reported Agh’s sadistic punishments on Jews including burial up to the neck and the forced eating of their own faeces.

The same courtesy was extended to Viorel Trifa, a leader of the fascist Romanian Iron Guard and instigator of a bloody Bucharest pogrom in 1941, who had become the Romanian Orthodox Archbishop in the US. John Avdzej from Byelorus lived quietly in the US under FBI protection as an ‘asset’ in the FBI’s war against the left in the Russian émigré community. As did Andrija Artukovic from Croatia (the Interior Minister in the Ustasa regime of the Nazi puppet state who was responsible for ‘ethnic cleansing’ atrocities in the hundreds of thousands against Jews, Serbs and Romany).

Krunoslav Draganovich, a senior Ustasa functionary and Catholic priest, ran the US Army’s Vatican-based system (the ‘ratline’) for smuggling Nazi fugitives out of Europe after the war. The ‘ratline’ saved the hide of Klaus Barbie (the Gestapo chief in Lyon, France, responsible for the torture and murder of French Resistance fighters and deportation of Jews to death camps) by smuggling him to Bolivia under a new identity to avoid arrest by French authorities for war crimes. Draganovich was also hired by the CIA in 1951 to spy on Tito’s left-wing government in Yugoslavia.

While there was, says Breitman, no overarching policy by America spy outfits to employ Nazis, his extensive list of examples shows that “the contention that US intelligence agencies employed only a few bad apples will not stand up to the new documentation”. Breitman argues that confusion or inexperience in the immediate postwar period was not the root of the problem because the practice of the CIC and CIA hiring of Nazis, in full knowledge of their monstrous crimes, continued for many years.

Breitman suggests that Washington’s lack of attention to the Holocaust was part of the problem. Information on the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews flowed from many sources including intercepted diplomatic pouches, the Polish underground, refugees and escaped prisoners, yet this intelligence was dismissed by Allied governments as a distraction from winning the war and, more cynically, as unwanted evidence for loosening tight immigration controls on Jewish refugees. Thus, personal participation in genocide was downgraded from a serious war crime and did not automatically rule out a Nazi’s chance of employment with US intelligence.

Another answer, with more explanatory power, is skirted around by Breitman. He documents the anti-communist mindset which made Nazi war criminals acceptable to the US government in the Cold War but, not being a Marxist, Breitman doesn’t draw the conclusion that, just as capitalist Germany used the Nazis against the trade unions and socialists when it suited them, so did capitalist USA.

This conclusion would have been more likely if Breitman’s book had better integrated the new revelations and case studies into the broader context of US collaboration with the Nazis. Breitman’s example of participation by a major US bank (Chase National) in a Nazi scheme to earn foreign exchange in the US, for example, isn’t placed in the context of the extensive profiteering of many major US corporations (including Standard Oil, ITT, DuPont, General Motors and Ford) from investing in and trading with Nazi Germany (with its cheap slave labour force), in some cases well into the war.

Nevertheless, Breitman’s book is an important addition to our knowledge of how, and why, US capitalist governments provided “a back door to tranquility and fat pensions for men who had committed – or at least abetted – the worst atrocities of the twentieth century”. The ‘good Nazi’ had arrived in the war against the left.