Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  When I speak of your achievements that does not mean we did not make mistakes. We were not afraid to make mistakes because we were not afraid to try things that had not been tried before. All of us would like to think that we could have done a better job, but all of you must know that, whatever the errors or failures, you have done an honest and self-respecting job. But more than that, because there existed in this organization a sense of solidarity, you must also have the conviction that this agency, in which each of you played a part, was an effective force.

  Within a few days each one of us will be going to new tasks whether in civilian life or in government work. You can go with the assurance that you have made a beginning in showing the people of America that only by decisions of national policy based upon accurate information can we have the chance of a peace that will endure.

  It fell to OSS Deputy Director Ned Buxton to speak of Donovan at the farewell gathering.

  Let me say as simply as I can that we are very proud to have stood with him at Armageddon. At the outbreak of global war, he was given a fantastic assignment—to create and operate a secret intelligence agency after the enemy had erected its barbed wire and contrived every conceivable scheme to make himself impregnable. The General created the organization; he formulated the program, he devised the tactics; he penetrated the barriers. He personally attended the invasions. . . .

  You were a legend of gallant combat leadership in the First World War.

  It would seem that a very full and honorable lifetime of unique experience and training had unconsciously prepared you for your role in World War II.

  When Buxton finished speaking, the entire audience of 2,000 filed past Donovan so that each could shake his hand. He called them by name, joked with them, and thanked them for their service. Then they all returned to their offices to finish up the last day of the OSS.

  It remained for an OSS wag to send out a bulletin to all stations. Its classification was Arcanissimum, its number ultimum. It was addressed to Urbi et orbi; the subject was Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. Its origin was E septime circulo in the theater of war infernus. On the face of the message was the sketch of a tombstone inscribed Hic Jacet Inconsecrata in Terra Infans Illicitus Gulielmi Donovan Intempeste Leortus, Perum Quiden Tarde Occisus, Quern Nomines O.S.S. Nuncupare Solebant Resurgan (??) Natus Est MCMXLI obit MCMXLV Siste Viator, Pro Infelicem, Lacriman Relinquite.

  On the base of the grave marker was imprinted BUY WAR BONDS!

  A little pot containing one flower stood before the tombstone.

  PART FOUR

  The Cold War Years

  1945-1959

  36

  Bringing the Nazis to Trial

  ONE OF DONOVAN’S last acts as director of the OSS was to send a memorandum to all OSS men who were working on war crimes investigations to continue their activities under the direction of the general counsel. At the end of September he flew to Germany to take up his duties as assistant prosecutor.

  “We are awaiting the General, who no doubt is busy winding up OSS,” General Counsel James Donovan (no relation to William Donovan) wrote to his wife from Berlin. “You probably know that it goes out of business on Oct. 1. So far as I know, however, it’s almost a paper change for administrative purposes, and I’ll go right on liquidating its affairs for the War Department.”

  Donovan arrived on October 2 at OSS quarters, which were in a country house in the Wansee Lake region near Berlin which, as James Donovan said, “was strafed by Russian planes but otherwise undamaged.” Donovan consulted with his still loyal OSS men. That evening, along with Ambassador Murphy, Donovan looked at a harrowing motion picture that Field Photo had made of the Nazi concentration camps.

  In a few days Donovan and his staff left for Nuremberg, which had been badly shattered by British bombing and the siege by the American Seventh Army. “You simply cannot imagine the result,” wrote James Donovan to his wife.

  It is the most complete picture of devastation that could be conceived. You stand in the “Grand Hotel” (about 50 percent of which is intact, but frightfully damaged) and so far as you can see it looks like the ruins of Carthage. You can drive for ten minutes in any direction and cannot see a building standing. The damage to London is negligible compared with this. The walled city is simply a huge mass of rubble, twisted steel and great concrete slabs. Parts of the wall can still be seen in places; but very little of it. I cannot believe that this city could be rebuilt in anything less than a century. I think they would be better off to allow it just to stand—and begin to build on another site.

  Where the people who survived now live is beyond me. They are fed in bread lines, and you see some walking along the streets in the day, looking dazed and haggard. If we are going to establish in our trial—the main point—that to plan and launch a war of aggression is a crime, punishable under international law, we certainly came to the right place in which to hold the trial.

  Hundreds of SS prisoners were working on the Criminal Courthouse to put it in condition for the trial. Bill Donovan’s office in the courthouse was directly across from that of Justice Robert Jackson, who was chief prosecutor.

  “The prisoners, Göring, Ribbentrop et al, are housed in a big jail just behind the courthouse,” wrote James Donovan. “From a window across from my office you can look down into the exercise yard and see them walking around. They are not allowed to speak to each other and are under heavy guard.”

  In Nuremberg Bill Donovan lived in a suburban house that had been unscathed by the war, under heavy army guard. That die-hard Nazis might try to assassinate either Jackson or Donovan seemed very possible. Ruth Donovan and David’s wife, Mary, had come to Nuremberg to join Donovan.

  One day Adolph Schmidt in Berlin received a message from Donovan to bring some investigation reports to Nuremberg. He drove down from Berlin. “When I walked into the general’s residence, Donovan was in the library declaiming in German,” Schmidt remembered.

  “I never knew you could speak German,” Schmidt said.

  “Yes, I spent time studying it. I’ve spent considerable time in Germany over the years. I like the language and the people. I am to be the prosecuting attorney.”

  “You’re going to do it in German?”

  “I’m going to do it all in German so the men in the box know just why they’re being tried. We’ll be the laughingstock of the legal profession if we don’t show that this war has been criminally conducted.”

  Schmidt expressed agreement.

  “Jackson is saying that Hitler and his men lost the war, shoot them,” continued Donovan. “This won’t do. Otherwise, if we lost a future war, our politicians could be shot too.”

  OSS reports, particularly those from the German underground, provided Donovan valuable information with which to interrogate the captive Nazis. There were extensive reports on the atrocities of the Holocaust and the oppression of slave labor; other documents detailed how various Nazi leaders had stolen art treasures from all over Europe; Field Photo had assembled a collection of photographic evidence of Nazi horrors.

  Hermann Göring was second only to Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy, and Donovan spent ten days alone interrogating him. One day he confronted Göring with details of his looting. Göring, who had charged his entire staff with collecting, had assembled a vast store of art objects. He had intended to open a new museum to house the art, according to the report, “either in Berlin or at Counhall, in which case a railroad was to be built from Berlin to bring tourists.”

  Time and again Donovan accused Göring of kindling the Reichstag fire that had given Hitler the excuse to crack down on the political left and strengthen his hold on the levers of power.

  “You must at least be convinced that with death staring me in the face, I have no need to resort to lies,” Göring said to Donovan. “I give you my word that I had nothing whatever to do with the Reichstag fire.” Donovan was not convinced, but he passed on to other subjects.

  “You are walking on t
he edge of the grave,” Donovan told Göring, “and the question is only how you will go in, whether your people will learn that you were a man to be respected for what you did for Hitler or to be despised.”

  Donovan called on Fabian von Schlabrendorff, an OSS German resistance leader, to help him with Göring. Donovan considered it critical to shorten the trial as much as possible. He was of the opinion that if Göring would assume responsibility as the representative of Hitler for most of the war crimes, his conviction, sentencing, and execution would be quick. Other top Nazis would then be tried, but the rank and file could be turned over to German courts. Donovan believed that if the Germans themselves tried the Nazis, they would share the responsibility for their condemnation and would help to atone for their nation’s crimes against humanity. Moreover, it seemed to Donovan that the trials should not be conducted under Anglo-Saxon law but under German law, which the Nazis had violated. Only then would the German people as a whole share in the world’s revulsion for the Nazis and prevent the rise of another Hitler in the future. Could Schlabrendorff suggest how he might talk Göring into a deal? After all, the Nazi knew full well that his execution was already a certainty.

  Schlabrendorff suggested that Donovan put on full uniform with all his medals in place to visit the medal-conscious Göring and appeal to his sense of honor as an officer and a gentleman. Donovan arrived at Göring’s cell in full uniform, displaying his formidable assortment of decorations, and Göring was impressed; here was a man who owned more medals than he did. Göring agreed to the arrangement, and Donovan turned his attention to Rudolf Hess.

  “Tomorrow we are going to make a very interesting experiment,” James Donovan wrote to his wife on November 7, “and I will write you all about it. Hess has been claiming that his memory is bad and that he suffers from total amnesia. He met Göring in one of the rooms and simply passed him by. Well, we are going to take him in tomorrow and run for him some sound movies of himself when he was at the height of his power, next to Hitler in all Germany. I wonder what will go through his mind when he sees them. We’re quite sure—by medical testimony, etc.—that he is a faker. But I’m going to sit there and just watch his reactions.”

  On the next day Hess, his hands handcuffed to two guards, sat in a projection room and watched newsreels taken during the days of his ascendancy. While he gazed at the screen, Bill Donovan, Jackson, James Donovan, and Russian and American psychiatrists studied him. A shot of a “Party Day” in Nuremberg flashed on the screen while Wagnerian music thundered through the room. On the screen Hitler did a small jig of joy when Hess led the multitudes in a chant of “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” Hess sat impassively. When the movie had finished, Col. John Amen, the chief interrogator, asked Hess in a gentle voice, “Do you remember?”

  Hess tried to brush his hands across his eyes, but the handcuffs prevented him. “I recognized Hitler and Göring,” he finally said. “I recognized the others, but only because I heard their names mentioned and have seen their names on cell blocks in this jail.”

  “Don’t you remember being there?”

  “I don’t remember. I must have been there because obviously I was there, but I don’t remember.”

  The guards led Hess back to his cell, and the experiment was over.

  When Donovan talked to Jackson about the arrangement Göring had agreed to, the chief prosecutor would have none of it. The two men also had sharp differences about legal procedures. Justice Jackson was in favor of employing mainly documentary evidence, whereas Donovan held that the major emphasis should be placed upon the testimony of defendants and German witnesses. Only then, he thought, would the Germans accept the guilt of the Nazis.

  Robert G. Storey, the distinguished Texas jurist, was on Jackson’s staff at Nuremberg. He said later:

  One of my most embarrassing experiences was to be caught in the middle of the rather tense dispute between Justice Jackson and his associate, General Donovan.

  General Donovan was very strong in his belief that a great many enemy witnesses should be used in lieu of documents. He argued that documents would be dry and uninteresting. On the other hand, Justice Jackson and some of us contended that we could not afford to take a chance with enemy witnesses, especially when we had absolute and convincing proof of the guilt of the various defendants through their various documents and admissions.

  Jackson and Donovan discussed their viewpoints with Storey in private conversations, and he attempted to reconcile their differences.

  “Finally, General Donovan would not yield and neither did Justice Jackson,” said Storey. “I was present when the break came.”

  Donovan argued that “it is not convincing to read in the court long indictments and the exhibits in substantiation.” Donovan reminded Jackson that most of the important documents had been provided by the OSS. They had their value, but they could not make up the entire case. “The important thing,” he contended, “is to prove German national guilt through the lips of the German leaders who were responsible.”

  “Bill, you may be right,” said Jackson, “and I think I am right, but it so happens that I have the responsibility and I am going to run this case according to my best judgment. I highly respect you, personally and officially, but it is an honest difference of opinion.”

  “Bob, you may be right, but I believe you are wrong. If that is your final decision, I shall return to the States and withdraw from the prosecution.”

  Donovan was convinced that Jackson’s position was legally and politically unsound. He explained to Adolph Schmidt that he “wanted to make it clear to the German people that the trials were not a retribution but were because of the Nazis’ unprecedented outrage against humanity.”

  “Jackson,” claimed Donovan, “was not interested in principles, but he only wanted to execute the Nazis.”

  Shortly after the trial began, Donovan left for the United States. At his Georgetown home he talked off the record with newspaperman James Wright. Donovan told Wright that he “never was for mass trials, and attempting to hold the German General Staff as a staff responsible for military deeds or misdeeds. He wanted to try individuals and hold them for their individual wrongs.”

  Donovan said that he was for “sucking Schacht, Göring et al into the cases as witnesses, so that the German people would be impressed by the testimony of their own leaders with German national guilt.”

  Aside from talking to Wright, Donovan kept his peace. Ostensibly he had returned to America because, now that the war was over, his private law practice required his attention. He did not think it appropriate to air his disagreement with Justice Jackson.

  Donovan had kept in touch with the men responsible for turning his OSS into the truncated Strategic Services of the War Department, and he had reason to be satisfied with President Truman’s choice of his former aide Brig. Gen. John Magruder as the director. Magruder was assisted by Lt. Gen. William W. Quinn, who as the colonel in charge of G-2 of the Seventh Army had worked closely with him during the landings in southern France. Unlike other G-2 officers, Quinn had also listened carefully to OSS reports on the German buildup that led to the Battle of the Bulge, and had, in fact, been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his accurate assessment of German intentions as the battle progressed.

  “I had been on my way to reassignment to Japan,” recalled Quinn. “I was getting my DSM at the Pentagon on September 30, 1945, when I was handed a note to go and see Gen. Clayton Bissell of G-2.”

  “You’re going over to OSS,” said Bissell. “Your orders for the Pacific have been changed. You are to report to General Magruder as his executive officer.”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” said Quinn.

  “You don’t have to. This is by order of President Truman.”

  During the last days of the OSS, Donovan had received a phone call from President Truman, requesting his views on who might be the director of the Strategic Services Unit (SSU).

  “It can’t be somebody from the ONI, the
FBI, or others who fought the OSS,” Donovan told the President. “Put in Bill Quinn.”

  It was decided between the President and the retiring OSS director that Magruder would be given the job in order to provide initial continuity, but since he was suffering from painful arthritis and wished to resign, Magruder would turn it over to Quinn as soon as possible.

  “Donovan had gone to Germany the day before Magruder took over his office,” said Quinn. “I’d seen him just before then at a cocktail party in Georgetown. ‘If there is anything I can do to help you, just give me a call,’ he said.”

  Quinn and Magruder were astounded at the speed with which Donovan had left the OSS. “You know, it’s an amazing thing, that Donovan can walk out and not have the umbilical cord stringing behind him,” said Magruder.

  Upon his return from Nuremberg, Donovan discovered that the squabble concerning the future of a peacetime central intelligence service to take the place of his wartime OSS was continuing in the Truman administration. At least President Truman had come to a new appreciation of Bill Donovan’s contribution to the Allied victory. As OSS sources dried up, the flow of significant intelligence to Washington dwindled. By the end of 1945 Truman found himself increasingly in the dark about what was going on abroad. He determined to award Donovan the Oak Leaf Cluster to the Distinguished Service Medal that he had won in World War I. Donovan was to come to the White House on January 11, 1946, to receive the honor. Most people given such a high award wanted the press and various dignitaries and friends in attendance, but not Donovan.

  “When asked what guests he wished to invite, [Donovan] expressed the wish to come alone,” Truman noted in his desk calendar.