Hunting Hitler
Page 10
Dulles and the SS
At the end of World War II, Dulles, yet still operating in Berne, Switzerland, rescued Nazi intelligence director Reinhard Gehlen out of a prison camp. Under Hitler, Gehlen had been responsible for Nazi military intelligence on the Eastern Front, including the Soviet Union. Gehlen fit perfectly into the plan Dulles had masterminded to use the Nazi SS intelligence operation built by Himmler as a key element in the plan to evolve the wartime OSS into the peacetime CIA. Key to Dulles’s plan was a decision by the United States to create what eventually became the post-war Allied military tribunals judging Nazi war criminals in what was known as the Nuremberg Trials. Nazi intelligence assets like Gehlen were much too valuable to future US intelligence to be found guilty of the war crimes they had committed. Dulles’s plan was to re-employ Gehlen and his network of SS intelligence agents in Eastern Europe as the backbone around which an anti-Soviet, anticommunist intelligence network could be formed, headquartered in what emerged as Western Germany and tasked with performing undercover work against communists throughout Eastern Europe.
“By the summer of 1945, Dulles had finished his negotiations with Gehlen,” wrote JFK assassination researcher James DiEugenio in his 2012 book, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case. DiEugenio reported that by September 1945, Gehlen and six of his aides were flown to Washington by Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith.118 As a result of high-level discussions in Washington, Gehlen’s Nazi intelligence organization was transferred under his control to work in Eastern Europe until Germany was reorganized.
In 1949 Gehlen signed a contract to work for the CIA for five million dollars a year. In 1950 High Commissioner of Germany John McCloy appointed Gehlen as advisor to the German chancellor on intelligence. Ultimately Gehlen became intelligence chief of the Federal Republic of Germany, better known simply as West Germany. This was quite a reward for a Nazi responsible for torturing, starving, and murdering some four million Soviet prisoners of war. By rescuing Gehlen from the fate of being tried and possibly executed as a war criminal, Dulles accomplished the goal of basing US post-war intelligence efforts on the remnants of Himmler’s Nazi SS intelligence operation. DiEugenio summarized Dulles’s accomplishment as follows:
By consummating the Gehlen deal, Allen Dulles accomplished two things. First, he signaled that the hallmark of the coming national security state would be anticommunism. Morality, honesty, common sense, these would all be sacrificed at the altar of this new god. Second, he guaranteed that the future successor to the OSS, the Central Intelligence Agency, would be compromised in a strange way: it would be viewing the new red threat not through American, but through German—indeed, Nazi—eyes, an incredible distortion, since in essence Gehlen was selling Hitler’s view of the Soviet Union and communism. Not coincidentally, this was a view that dovetailed with Dulles’s.119
Note that Allen Dulles followed General Walter Bedell Smith as CIA Director. Note also that Allen Dulles and John McCloy both ended up being appointed to the Warren Commission tasked with investigating the assassination of JFK. The Warren Commission ended up with a whitewash conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. In what has to be one of the greatest government investigation failures of the twentieth century, the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had no connection to the FBI or the CIA, despite evidence that at the time of the assassination Oswald was being paid $200 a month to act as an informant, and the existence of a CIA file on Oswald that dated back to his defection to the Soviet Union in 1957. Prior to being appointed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson to serve on the Warren Commission, JFK, angered over Dulles’s complicity in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, fired Allen Dulles as CIA director, a position he had held since being appointed by Eisenhower in 1952.
John McCloy is also infamous for a letter he wrote on November 18, 1944, when he was Assistant Secretary of War, explaining to John Pehle, then the director of the War Refugee Board, that the War Department would not authorize Pehle’s request to have the Army Air Force bomb the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, a move that may have saved thousands of Jews from being killed in the gas chambers.120 The letter has been on display in the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
Bormann escapes to Argentina
Bormann was on the long list of prominent Nazis whose bodies were never found at the end of World War II. Presuming Bormann had escaped from the Führerbunker, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg tried Bormann in absentia in November 1945 and, in October 1946, found him guilty and sentenced him to death, provided Bormann could ever be found. Then, in December 1972, construction workers found the remains of two corpses near the Lehrter Banhof, the site of the central train station in West Berlin, and the controversy over whether or not Bormann escaped was rekindled. At a press conference in Frankfurt on April 11, 1973, Procurator General Horst Gauf proclaimed officially that Bormann had died on May 2, 1945, by biting down on a glass capsule containing what was described as Blausäure, or prussic acid. The capsule was supposedly one of 850 vials the Abwehr, the German military secret service, had ordered manufactured by the Schering pharmaceutical company for espionage operatives on perilous missions.121
As with Hitler, dental records were used to establish the corpse was Bormann’s. The corpse was initially presumed to be Bormann’s because the place of its discovery matched the account of Bormann’s attempted escape from the Führerbunker published by Hugh Trevor-Roper in his 1947 book, based largely on the testimony of Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann who claimed to have seen the corpses of Bormann and SS doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger near the railroad switching yard in Berlin, with the moon shining bright enough that their faces were clearly illuminated. According to Trevor-Roper’s account, Axmann stopped for a moment when he recognized the bodies, but Russian fire kept him from examining them closely. He saw no obvious signs of wounds on either Bormann or Stumpfegger, so Axmann presumed they had been shot in the back.122 The body of Bormann that Axmann claimed to have seen was never found subsequently, so no positive medical identification of a Bormann corpse was ever made in 1945. Axmann’s unsubstantiated testimony was the only evidence that Bormann had died trying to escape the Führerbunker.
In his 1981 book, Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile, journalist Paul Manning describes three different times when he was told by three different individuals that Bormann’s escape was arranged by the scheme of substituting a stand-in for his body in the freight yards of Berlin. One source was a career agent in the Secret Intelligence Service of the British Foreign Office, another served in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the third was a member of Mossad, the exterior arm of Israeli intelligence. Manning has insisted that Bormann escaped with Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller. The first tip came over dinner in 1947, in the US press club in Frankfurt. Here is how Manning described the discussion:
It was the day I had returned from Berlin and a personal meeting with General Lucius D. Clay, military governor of the US Zone of Occupation. General Clay had offered me the position of his civilian deputy, but I had turned it down with some reluctance, preferring to remain a European reporter for American newspapers. During the press club dinner, the British agent and I discussed the fascinating and bizarre disappearance of Reichleiter Bormann; this source said flatly that Mueller had engineered Bormann’s escape, using the device of a concentration camp look-alike to throw future investigations off the scent.123
Then, in 1973, on a visit to Bonn, a conversation with one of General Gehlen’s aides in the Federal Republic intelligence service confirmed the 1947 British tip by stating, “The skull represented as Bormann’s is a fraud. Naturally the West German government wishes to bury the past and establish Bormann’s death once and for all. They have been constantly unsettled by continued revelations and scandals.” Then, in 1978, an Israeli Mossad agent with a German specialization described to Manning the file in Tel Aviv that Israeli intelligence had never closed on Bormann. “We know he is in South Amer
ica. We are not very compelled to find him because he was never personally involved in the ‘final solution,’” the Israeli explained. “Bormann’s business was business, and from what I know personally, he did a thorough job of shifting German assets away from the Third Reich.”124
Manning further reported that Müller initiated his Bormann scheme in the last months of the war during a visit to the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. There Müller examined several inmates in the special elite group known as Sonderkommando, experts in engraving and counterfeiting who were responsible for producing counterfeit British pounds and other currencies for SS officers to use in their flight from Germany at the end of the war. Finding two inmates who resembled Bormann, Müller had them placed in special confinement where a dental room had been made for the “treatment” of the two men. A Nazi dentist worked on the mouth of each man until his teeth, real and artificial, matched Bormann’s precisely.
Then, in April 1945, the unfortunate stand-ins from Sachsenhausen were killed in the Gestapo basement secret chambers with cyanide spray blown from a cigarette lighter. At Gestapo headquarters, the night of April 30, 1945, the bodies were taken by a special SS team to the freight yards near the Weidendamm Bridge and buried not too deep beneath the rubble in two different locations. Axmann discovered the first body in 1945, but the second remained buried until 1973, when a former SS man, on orders from Müller, who was then with Bormann in Argentina, leaked the information to a Stern magazine editor in 1975 as part of a ploy to prove that Bormann had died on April 30, 1945, in the Berlin freight yard. “The funeral and burial caper was to be a Müller trademark throughout the years of searching for Martin Bormann,” Manning wrote. “The Mossad was to point out that they have been witnesses over the years to the exhumation of six skeletons, two in Berlin and four in South America, purported to be that of Martin Bormann.”125
Respected military historian and journalist Ladislas Farago, whose acclaimed 1964 biography, Patton: Ordeal and Triumph,126 formed the basis for the 1970 film, Patton, staring George C. Scott, wrote a controversial book in 1974—Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich, claiming that Bormann was alive and living in Argentina.127 Farago claimed to have been given an intelligence file in Buenos Aires from the offices of the Secretaría de Informaciones de Estato, or S.I.D.E., the Argentinian government’s official intelligence agency. The file contained documentation that Bormann had entered Argentina in 1948, having sailed from Genoa, Italy, disguised as a Jesuit priest traveling on a second-class ticket with false documents issued by the Vatican.128
Farago further claimed that Bormann gained approval to enter and live in Argentina after German agent Ludwig Freude made it clear to Perón and Evita in 1947 that Freude had arranged for the Nazi deposits made in Argentina banks to be inaccessible in Bormann’s absence and without his personal participation in deciding how the funds were to be dispersed.129 Documents made public in Argentina in 1955, after the fall of Perón, and later in 1970, showed that Perón and Evita handed over to Bormann the agreed 25 percent of the Nazi currency, gold, and platinum deposited in Argentina banks by Bormann from Germany.130
In 1998, the Bormann controversy surfaced once again in Germany, after German and Swiss scientists reportedly established from DNA tests that the skeleton dug up in Berlin was Bormann’s. According to newspaper reports, the DNA obtained from a piece of the skull was compared to a tissue sample donated by an 83-year-old relative of Bormann’s who was then living near Frankfurt.131 But published details remain sketchy, failing to identify the scientists or the relative involved in the testing. There is no documentation that the DNA testing conducted was ever submitted to a peer-reviewed scientific or medical journal for publication.
The Vatican and the Nazi ratline
The role of the Vatican in World War II has been highly controversial. Former Romanian KGB intelligence officer Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa was the highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the West. In his 2013 book, Disinformation, he has argued convincingly that the construction of Pope Pius XII as “Hitler’s Pope” was a KGB invention that derived from the war between communism and the Catholic Church that Pacepa described as being “almost as old as communism itself.”132 Pacepa documents the calumny traces to a Radio Moscow broadcast on June 3, 1945, that proclaimed the leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Pius XII, had been “Hitler’s Pope,” implying that he had been an ally of the Nazis during World War II and that he had done nothing to stop the Holocaust. Pacepa demonstrates that contrary to the Soviet propaganda, Pope Pius XII aided European Jews in World War II by diplomatic initiatives, various public pronouncements, and by promoting a network of Catholic Church sanctuary for Jews throughout Europe.
Still, there is considerable evidence that rogue elements within the Catholic Church established a monastery-based ratline to provide escaping Nazis with a way to flee Europe, many with the intended destination of Argentina. As documented by Argentina-based journalist Uki Goñi, a key player was Argentinian cardinal Antonio Caggiano, who as the bishop of the industrial city Rosario was also the leader of the Argentinian chapter of Catholic Action, a lay organization with Vatican support that had become “the rallying point for a vibrant anticommunist crusade in Argentina during the 1930s and 1940s.”133 As Goñi pointed out, Caggiano played a major role organizing mass rallies in the 1930s in support of decent housing and a minimum wage that “brought together workers, nationalist activists, military officers and Catholic Action supporters in a mix that predated Perón’s brand of ‘Catholic populism’ by only a few years.”134 Called to Rome in 1946 by Pope Pius XII to be anointed cardinal as only the second Argentinian prelate to be elevated to this high position in the Catholic Church hierarchy, Caggiano was accompanied by Augustín Barrére, the staunchly anticommunist bishop of Tucumán, Argentina. Cardinal Tisserant, the Vatican’s expert on Russian affairs who dreaded the possibility of a Soviet takeover of Europe in the aftermath of World War II, assisted Caggiano and Barrére. “Through their efforts at the Vatican and their influential whispering in Perón’s ear, Caggiano and Barrére paved the way for some of the worst Nazi criminals and collaborators to escape to Argentina,” Goñi wrote.135
The way Perón’s Odessa worked, a Nazi seeking to escape Europe could be issued a permit to enter Argentina from Argentina’s immigration office under a false name, permitting the Nazi to obtain a Red Cross “travel document” under the same alias. Created for refugees who had lost their identification papers, Red Cross “travel documents” were the equivalent of a valid passport. With a landing permit and traveling documents in hand, the Nazi could apply at an Argentinian consulate in Europe to obtain an entry visa. Nazis on the run could leave the consulate with an Argentinian visa stamp on their Red Cross papers, with the consul issuing the immigrant an “identification certificate” that was used to obtain a Cédula de Identidad upon arrival in Buenos Aries. “The way was thus cleared for a successful escape to South America with nothing less than a change of identity thrown in,” Goñi noted.136
Several prominent Catholic clerics played a major role in the post-war effort to help Nazis flee Europe for Argentina. Bishop Alois Hudel was a devoted National Socialist who wrote a book in 1936, The Foundations of National Socialism, in which he argued that Hitler was preparing the ground for the creation of a Christian Europe.137 Hudel created a “sanctuary in Rome,” through which passed thousands of former Nazi officials, some of them major war criminals or accomplices to war crimes. Another was Monsignor Krunoslav Draganovic, a Croat who was a devoted supporter of the pro-Nazi Ustasche regime led by Ante Pavelic in the ethnic mix thrown together when Yugoslavia existed as a kingdom before WWII but it was made into a Soviet republic in 1943. A figure notorious in coordinating from Argentina with the so-called “Vatican ratline” was Carlos Fuldner, born in Argentina to a German family. In 1932, Fuldner was an early recruit to the SS. A petty criminal who had to flee Germany to return to Argentina in the mid-1930, Fuldner retur
ned to favor in Germany before the end of World War II. He was reinstated in the SS and carried both an Argentinian and a German passport as he shuttled between Berlin and Madrid on “special missions” assigned by Himmler himself. In 1948, Fuldner returned to Europe as a special agent for Perón, where he set up Nazi rescue offices in Genoa and Berne to coordinate with Draganovic and Swiss officials to smuggle Nazi war criminals to Argentina.138
There was a natural alliance between Perón and Argentina, various elements within the Catholic Church, and the former Nazi leaders. As noted by Nazi researcher Peter Levenda in his 2012 book, Ratline: Soviet Spies and Nazi Priests, and the Disappearance of Adolf Hitler, all three “saw their enemy as Communism, and their natural allies in the fight against the Communists were the Nazis.”139 Among the more prominent Nazi war criminals who escaped Europe to Argentina via the Vatican ratline were the following: Josef Mengele, the infamous “Angel of Death” physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp; Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo genocidal criminal known as the “Butcher of Lyon” for his torturing of prisoners, including women and children, in France; and Adolf Eichmann, the notorious SS officer who was a major organizer of the Holocaust.
Another natural ally in this mix of the Catholic Church, former Nazis, and anticommunism was Allen Dulles, as well as the OSS operating out of Berne. James Jesus Angleton, who ultimately became the CIA chief of counter intelligence, continued working with Dulles in Switzerland even after World War II was over, coordinating US intelligence activities with the Vatican. “Angleton and Dulles laundered millions through the Vatican to defeat the Italian Communists in the elections,” wrote former Justice Department Nazi hunter John Loftus and his investigative journalist co-author Mark Aarons in their 1991 book, Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and Soviet Intelligence. “In return, the Vatican facilitated the escape of tens of thousands of Nazis to the West, where they were supposed to be trained as ‘Freedom Fighters.’”140 By the way, Angleton, in his role as chief of CIA Counter Intelligence, serving under CIA director Allen Dulles, and as part of his responsibility for overseeing the CIA’s program running military “false defectors” to the Soviet Union, was the keeper of Lee Harvey Oswald’s CIA “201” personality file, which was compiled prior to the JFK assassination.141