The American operation at Fort Hunt quickly involved other German general officers as well. Indeed, it appears that most of the POW generals who arrived in the United States after the German surrender in May 1945 endured at least a few weeks of American interrogation and eavesdropping at the secret facility in Virginia. All of the generals who arrived at either Camp Dermott or Camp Ruston in the fall of 1945, including Generals Gallenkamp, Gaul, Hermann, and Pollert, appear to have come through Fort Hunt.13
The Fort Hunt operation also illustrated a significant change in the Anglo-American relationship regarding prisoners of war. Beginning in the months following D-Day, American military intelligence had gradually exerted more autonomy in its relationship with senior German POWs. After the war in Europe concluded, the conduit of intelligence information began to flow in the opposite direction. Whereas the British had typically taken the lead in interrogating high-ranking Wehrmacht officers throughout the war, they now relinquished this responsibility to the Americans. For instance, the Royal Air Force sent a memorandum to the U.S. Military Intelligence Service dated May 21, 1945, requesting details about the German-Japanese liaison, especially the Japanese development of airplanes and communications, from General Kessler.14 Britain largely abandoned its interrogation and eavesdropping activities and now relied on the Americans to share any valuable information gleaned from the prisoners captured at the end of the war.
Despite significant Allied interest in Ulrich Kessler, the most prominent and potentially valuable German general officer to arrive at Fort Hunt in the summer of 1945 was Reinhard Gehlen. Brigadier General Gehlen served as chief of Fremde Heer Ost (German Eastern Front Intelligence Service) from April 1942 until near the end of the war. In this capacity, Gehlen’s organization was responsible for collecting “all possible intelligence material dealing with the military, political and economic situation existing in the U.S.S.R. and the southeastern European countries.” After Hitler relieved him of command in April 1945, Gehlen and his staff hid their most important intelligence documents before surrendering to the Americans on May 22, 1945. Unfortunately for Gehlen, the Americans did not at first realize whom they had captured. The general transited through five different locations, from Fischhausen, south of Munich, to Wiesbaden, west of Frankfurt, before the American Captain John Boker finally took an interest in him.15
Boker, whose suspicions about the Soviet Union had already been aroused, immediately saw Gehlen as a potentially valuable contributor to American intelligence. “The interrogations which I made of several high-ranking German officers who had commanded units on the Eastern Front and interrogations which were made at CSDIC (UK) had undoubtedly awakened what was already a more than latent antipathy toward the Soviets,” Boker later stated. “It was clear to me by April 1945,” Boker reported, “that the military and political situation would not only give the Russians control over all of Eastern Europe and the Balkans but that as a result of that situation, we would have an indefinite period of military occupation and a frontier contiguous with them.” Convinced that Gehlen was able to provide essential information about the Soviet Union, Boker reassembled Gehlen’s staff, retrieved a significant number of the hidden German intelligence documents, and alerted his superiors to Gehlen’s potential value to U.S. intelligence.16
Boker initially fought an uphill battle. He believed that significant resistance existed in Washington toward gathering intelligence against the United States’s Soviet allies and that Gehlen’s work with American intelligence initially had to be kept secret, even from most American personnel. Eventually Boker convinced enough of his superiors in Europe of Gehlen’s potential value that General Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, provided a plane to transport Gehlen, several of his subordinates, and their cache of German intelligence documents to Fort Hunt in August 1945. Yet, upon arriving in Virginia, Boker still had to persuade the officers in the Eastern European Order of Battle Branch at the Pentagon, to whom the “Gehlen Organization” had been assigned, that these prisoners of war were valuable to the United States. Boker later claimed that “everywhere in the Pentagon . . . there was considerable hostility to working with Germans in any way and the feeling that the Germans could be of no use to us in any current endeavor.” But “the extent and value of the information that Gehlen’s group possessed became at once apparent to the Eastern European O.B. Group” once they began working with the prisoners, according to Boker, and the American captors “became quite enthusiastic.”17
U.S. military intelligence officials not only directly interrogated these men and bugged their rooms, as they had done with Kessler, Aschenbrenner, and the other generals at the facility, but they actually developed a collaborative working relationship with the Gehlen Organization. In ten months at Fort Hunt, Gehlen and his staff, who came to be known as the Bolero Group, under the supervision of the American Captain Eric Waldman from the Pentagon, produced numerous reports regarding various aspects of Soviet military capabilities. These included “Methods of the German Intelligence Service in Russia,” “Development of the Russian High Command and Its Conception of Strategy during the Eastern Campaign,” “Fighting Methods of the Russian Armies Based on Experience Gained from the Large-Scale Russian Offensives in the Summer of 1944 and the Winter of 1945,” and “Development and Establishment of the Russian Political Commissars within the Red Army,” as well as studies of the Russian army order of battle and surveys of Russian army units and equipment and of the organization of Russian commands and troop leadership. Having directed Hitler’s intelligence network against the Russians for three years during the war, Gehlen now provided the same service for the U.S. War Department at war’s end.18
Notably, by the time the U.S. Army transferred him back to Europe in early July 1946, Gehlen had “not only prepared reports based on German records but also had access to and commented on American intelligence reports.” Moreover, Waldman, who accompanied the Bolero Group to Germany, observed that the reason U.S. Army intelligence repatriated the Gehlen Organization was “to allow this group of German officers to engage in collection of intelligence against the Soviet forces in Germany.” This decision, according to Waldman, “was crucial since it marked a radical departure from the concept of writing [historical] studies based on old Wehrmacht files.”19 The Pentagon had progressed significantly from its initial skepticism of Gehlen to a full-fledged relationship with the man who eventually would lead the new West German state’s intelligence apparatus in the mid-1950s, and all because of a mutual distrust of the Soviet Union.
The War Department’s collaboration with the Gehlen Organization led to an even more collaborative relationship with a group of German General Staff officers. On September 25, 1945, a little over a month after Gehlen’s arrival at Fort Hunt, twenty-seven German officers and eleven German enlisted men boarded the SS West Point, bound for the United States.20 These prisoners of war had agreed to work for a coordinated U.S., British, and Canadian military intelligence project. Kept secret from the American public as well as from the other Allies, the “Hill Project” eventually expanded to almost two hundred prisoners of war who produced over thirty-six hundred pages of documents for the Western Allied governments. The story of these “hillbillies,” as their Allied captors frequently referred to them, is a little-known aspect of the interesting postwar relationship between American military intelligence and various high-ranking Wehrmacht officers.
An informal agreement between Major General Clayton Bissell, the assistant chief of staff, G-2 (Military Intelligence), of the U.S. War Department, and Major General John Alexander Sinclair, the director of military intelligence in the British War Office, created the Hill Project as “a skeleton German General Staff organization formed for the purpose of conducting such research for the War Department General Staff and the British General Staff as may be directed.” This agreement placed the operation at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, and received the approval of the U.S. Army chief of staff on April 22, 194
5. Exactly one month later, on May 22, 1945, the two Allies concluded the Sinclair-Bissell Agreement. This Anglo-American military intelligence accord obligated General Bissell and the U.S. War Department to “provide necessary facilities near Washington (near the German Military Document Section) for the handling of key enemy specialist personnel” and delineated a fifteen-point research agenda titled “Subjects for Research of German Documents.”21
Before the work of the Hill Project could begin, however, the documents library had to be assembled. This job fell to the U.S. Army’s Document Control Section in Frankfurt, Germany, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel S. Frederick Gronich. Gronich and his staff collected and catalogued the majority of the German documents captured in the closing months of the war in Europe. Gronich’s operation maintained a “detailed card index for all captured documents in Germany,” allocated “priorities for research by various agencies,” shipped large volumes of documents to either London or Washington—later Camp Ritchie—and oversaw the operations of the U.S. Third Army, U.S. Seventh Army, and Austrian Document Centers as well.22
Because of his involvement with the exploitation of captured German documents, Gronich quickly became involved in the U.S. relationship with the German prisoners working for the Hill Project as well.
As early as 1943, British and American military intelligence agreed to collect and maintain captured enemy documents. The armies in the theater of operations immediately used important captured documents for “timely and accurate information regarding the German order of battle and related intelligence data.” The Allied militaries then transferred the documents to the Military Intelligence Research Section (MIRS) in either London or Washington for safekeeping and further detailed research. In the spring of 1945 the London MIRS was renamed the London Military Documents Center and became a “records control and transmission organization.” The Washington MIRS, soon to be renamed the German Military Documents Section, became the primary “records depository.”23
On July 14, 1945, two months after the formal German surrender and the conclusion of the war in Europe, the U.S. War Department and the British War Office jointly established the German Military Document Section (GMDS) at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. The camp’s fairly secluded location along the Maryland–Pennsylvania border about sixty-five miles northwest of Baltimore allowed the GMDS to remain out of the public eye. Its mission was to “establish and operate a library of captured German documents and publications” and to “conduct such military document research as is mutually agreed upon” by the Directorate of Military Intelligence of the British War Office and the assistant chief of staff, G-2 (Military Intelligence), of the U.S. War Department.24
A view of the GMDS area at Camp Ritchie (Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)
The initial library holdings consisted entirely of previously captured German documents transferred from the Washington Branch of the MIRS, actually located at Fort Hunt, Virginia. The initial American staff of nineteen officers and fifty-three enlisted men at Camp Ritchie occupied themselves in the summer of 1945 with setting up the library and learning to file documents according to the German filing system, or Einheitsaktenplan, albeit with several “extensive” American adaptations. GMDS personnel even received the “full approval” of Dr. Luther H. Evans, the librarian of Congress, and his chief of processing, Herman Henkle, for their efficient filing system.25
The following month the GMDS staff continued their efforts in the “sorting and filing of captured German documents, publications, and periodicals, in preparation for future intelligence research on the German armed forces.” The prisoners needed for the research project and the German General Staff documents that constituted the main focus of the operation, however, were yet to arrive. At this early stage, the GMDS began circulating some of the German documents and publications already on hand to other U.S. government agencies, including the Air Technical Service Command, the State Department, Army Ground Forces, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and even the surgeon general, and the FBI attached a permanent liaison officer to the operation.26
Despite the presence of the GMDS Library at Camp Ritchie, the U.S. War Department did not officially notify the camp’s administrative staff of the establishment of the Hill Project until September 8, 1945. By this time the German POW personnel for the project were slated to arrive in less than a month. This may explain some of the animosity that developed between the chief of the GMDS, the American Colonel George F. Blunda, who directed the intelligence operations, and Camp Ritchie’s post commandant, Colonel Mercer Walter, who oversaw the actual prisoner-of-war camp.
Further complicating the two men’s relationship was the divided control of the prisoners, which eventually undermined the productivity of the project and had to be addressed in early 1946. When the project began in the fall of 1945, keeping the prisoner-of-war camp and the secret military intelligence project under separate command made sense. The research required special intelligence leadership and U.S. military intelligence rightfully took control of the extraordinary arrangement. Establishing, administering, and providing security for a POW camp, on the other hand, seemed best left to the Army Service Forces, who were responsible for all POW camps in the United States.
Dr. Bloomfield, special consultant to the secretary of war, examines a document in the General Library of the German Military Document Section Library at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. (Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)
“Col. G. F. Blunda, our new Chief.” Colonel George F. Blunda commanded MIRS, later renamed GMDS. (Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)
Unfortunately, the problems of divided command reached the boiling point within only a few months. Colonel Blunda sent a long letter to the War Department in Washington detailing numerous problems with the relationship between the Hill Project and Colonel Walter’s administration of the prisoner-of-war enclosure and the guard unit assigned to it. Blunda requested that Walter be relieved of responsibility for the hillbillies, complaining that Walter would “not take any responsibility nor any steps to liberalize the handling of the Hill Project in order to insure complete cooperation and the highest efficiency of the personnel therein.”27
Blunda provided the War Department with a list of grievances. Foremost among them was Colonel Walter’s insistence that the Allied officers who served as research project chiefs escort prisoners from their compound to the research building when sufficient guards were not available. Blunda’s prior request that the hillbillies be allowed to come and go without escort had “met with a flat refusal.” The GMDS chief contended that “such a method [resulted] in a loss of work on the Project both in the chain of thought being disturbed and because of the psychological reaction whereby the Chief of the Project [tried] to get along without the member from the Hill rather than go fetch him.”28
The underlying problem was a fundamental difference in how each of these two men viewed the prisoners at Camp Ritchie. Blunda, who worked directly with the Germans as chief of GMDS, saw these men as colleagues whose “complete cooperation [was] not only desirable but essential.” Walter, by contrast, perceived the members of the Hill Project as “purely and simply prisoners of war.” On one occasion a prisoner was “manhandled by the guard,” causing “an adverse effect on all members of the Hill,” according to Blunda. Moreover, Walter gave the U.S. personnel on base openly preferential treatment. For example, more than once Walter denied the Germans any butter or marmalade in the mess hall, despite the fact that the prisoners shared the mess with American personnel for whom these items were always available. The camp commandant refused to divide the items equally if sufficient quantities were not available for everyone in the dining hall. Blunda criticized this decision as “not conductive to good morale, particularly when it is known that the amount of butter drawn is based on the total strength of U.S. [personnel and prisoners of war] combined.”29
The War Dep
artment’s response to Colonel Blunda’s allegations can be inferred from a memorandum addressed to the GMDS chief from Colonel Walter, dated February 7, 1946. Walter informed Blunda that “effective 11 February 1946 such prisoners of war as may be selected mutually by the Chief, GMDS [Blunda] and the Commanding Officer, PW Guard Detachment [Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Duin] will be granted parole privilege and will be authorized to move about the parole area while on official business during the period 0700 to 1830 hours on normal work days.” The camp commandant also stipulated that with proper notification parole privileges could be obtained for work on weekends and holidays as well. Furthermore, he authorized special quarters outside the prisoner-of-war compound for the general officer prisoners, provided that a GMDS officer was “designated daily to be responsible for the General Officers during off duty hours.”30
Despite these later administrative issues, for most of the month of September 1945 the American, British, and Canadian personnel occupied themselves conducting practice searches for “materials on specific subjects which [were] likely to be important fields of study” in order to “train new personnel in tracing a subject through the documents library and to test the current filing and indexing systems.” The GMDS staff still awaited the arrival of both German documents and POW researchers, which were scheduled to be shipped to Camp Ritchie sometime during September. Not until the last day of the month, however, did five railcars arrive full of captured German documents from the Heeresarchiv (German Army Archive), the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH; German Army High Command), and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW; German Armed Forces High Command). The GMDS staff did not have adequate time to catalog these valuable German General Staff papers before the prisoners arrived as well.31
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