by Peter Day
The questioning of Schellenberg about German intelligence assessments of the Soviet Union seems to have stirred something in Klop’s memory. At the end of July 1945, sitting in Guy Liddell’s office discussing future candidates for questioning, he asked Liddell if he knew the whereabouts of Gustav Hilger, his saviour in Russia in 1920.
Hilger had stayed in Russia and become Germany’s most influential diplomat and leading Soviet strategist. When Hitler invaded in 1941 he returned to Berlin and became part of a small group of experts, known as the Russland-Gremium, on Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop’s immediate advisory staff. He explained later:
I spent the war years in Berlin watching with dismay the horror and muddle of German occupation policies in the conquered territories in the East … I had never believed that Russia could be defeated. My apprehensions turned into more concrete visions of utter defeat and destruction owing to our mistakes.233
In March 1945, Ribbentrop had suggested that Hilger should go to Stockholm to try to get in touch with the Soviet Mission to sound them out about a separate peace.
Klop’s fellow interrogator Stuart Hampshire established that Hilger was being held in the American Zone but it had not occurred to anyone to question him. It was only when Hampshire began trying to arrange for him to be sent to Britain that the Americans recognised the importance of their captive and refused to let him out of their clutches. It was decided that Klop should do a tour of Germany, under Dick White’s direction, to capture the prevailing mood in the defeated country. White was based at Eisenhower’s headquarters and involved in arranging interrogations of the major figures of the Nazi regime and investigating Hitler’s last days in his Berlin bunker.
Klop was already in the process of interrogating Ernst Kaltenbrunner when White phoned on 24 August to say that the Americans were on the point of shipping Hilger back to Washington. Klop flew straight to Germany and managed to get three days’ uninterrupted discussion with his old friend at Bad Oyenhausen, headquarters of the British Zone of Occupation.234
He reported back:
Gustav Hilger has probably more right than any other German today to speak with authority on German-Russian affairs during the last twenty-five years … a living encyclopaedia on Russia and Russians … the indispensable adviser of and interpreter to German Ministers and Ambassadors. Hilger’s account and interpretation of events … deserve close attention. The fact that Hilger has been neither a soldier nor a member of the National Socialist Party adds to the soundness of his views.
He looks at the developments that led to Germany’s downfall with the sad resignation of a man whose constant advice to his superiors: ‘Do not underestimate Russian strength’ was not heeded, who has lost his only son during Hitler’s invasion of Russia and who, after passionate protests to his Foreign Office against the treatment reserved for Russian prisoners of war and civilians alike, knows [that] his wife, daughter and grandchildren [are] in Russian hands.235
Over fifteen close-typed pages Klop gave Hilger’s account of the economic and military interdependence of Russia and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, even after the advent of a Nazi regime that was ideologically totally opposed to Communism. There were eyewitness accounts of Ribbentrop’s meeting with Stalin in August 1939 that led to the non-aggression treaty and Foreign Minister Molotov’s return visit to Hitler, in November 1940, where it was clear the agreement was already beginning to unravel amid Russians territorial demands and Germany’s increasing military prowess. Hitler had tried to divert Russia’s military aspirations towards Iran and the Persian Gulf while he seized control of Western Europe.
Hilger predicted that Stalin would see the destruction and subjection of Germany as vital to the Soviet Union’s future security. Hilger spent the rest of 1945 and part of 1946 at the US interrogation centre at Fort Meade, near Washington, but was returned to Germany in 1946 to help supervise the setting up of the Gehlen organisation, which eventually became the West German intelligence service, under the command of Major General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s head of military intelligence on the Eastern Front. The Soviet Union were so keen to get Hilger over to their side that they held his wife, daughter and two granddaughters hostage until a successful CIA undercover operation succeeded in releasing them and bringing them to the West. Although Hilger was suspected of complicity in war crimes, through his knowledge of the death squads that operated in conquered territories in Eastern Europe, his expertise was considered invaluable and he continued to work for the CIA up until 1953 when he accepted a job in the German Foreign Office.236
The America-backed Gehlen, who recruited SS and Germany Army officers for his anti-Soviet operations, found himself in direct competition with the British-backed Office for the Protection of the Constitution led by Otto John, who had been a part of the anti-Hitler German resistance.
Despite all this frantic activity, there is still the nagging question of what Klop was doing in early June 1945 that was so important that MI6 could not spare him to interrogate Walther Schellenberg. It is possible that Klop was deeply implicated in one of the most shameful incidents of the post war era – the escape, via the Vatican, of one of the worst Nazi war criminals to evade justice.
Ante Pavelić was the founder of the Croatian Liberation movement or Ustashe – meaning rebels – who were behind the assassination of the Serbian King Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1934. Pre-war they were backed by Fascist Italy and Hungary. When Germany seized control of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Pavelić was declared chief of an extended vassal state that included Bosnia-Herzegovina. He introduced a wave of ethnic cleansing, against Jews, gypsies and ethnic Serbs who were terrorised, driven from their homes, raped and massacred. Some Orthodox Serbs were given the choice of conversion to Catholicism or death. Catholic clergy were implicated in the massacres and the Vatican has been accused of turning a blind eye. Estimates of the number of dead vary from four hundred thousand to one million. News of these atrocities had reached the Allies long before the end of the war and was certainly known to Marshal Tito’s Communist Partisans who, with British support, had helped drive the Germans out of Yugoslavia. With the Russian Red Army advancing from the east, and the certainty that the Partisans would wreak terrible revenge, Pavelić and his Ustashe leaders decided early in May 1945 to flee westwards, taking with them the contents of the Croat Treasury and the proceeds of looted gold and valuables from their victims. US Intelligence estimates put the total of the Croat Treasure at eighty million US dollars, some of which had already been transferred to Swiss bank accounts and more found its way to Spain and Argentina to facilitate the escape of Nazi war criminals. But a substantial part of it was with the Pavelić convoy which set out on 8 May from their temporary headquarters in the castle of Novi Dvor, near the Slovenian border, heading for the Austrian city of Klagenfurt with the intention of surrendering to the British and Americans. They were still nursing the hope that they could continue the fight against Communism from there.237
No exact record of their surrender is available but an investigation into Nazi looted gold by President Bill Clinton’s deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart Eizenstat in 1998 concluded:
US Intelligence reports indicate that the fleeing Ustashe leaders carried at least part of the Croatian Treasury with them into the British zone of occupation in Austria where it was seized by the British authorities. The British occupation authorities in Austria acknowledged no recovery of any monetary gold or non-monetary gold originating with the puppet Croatian Ustashi regime, and no gold attributed to the Croatian regime was transferred to the Tripartite Gold Commission.238
Part of the basis of Eizenstat’s conclusion was a five-page report by Special Agents William Gowen and Louis Caniglia of the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps, written in August 1947 but only released as a result of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in America. Quoting ‘very reliable sources’ they averred that when Pavelić fled into Austria he was ‘protected by the British in British-guarded and requisitioned qua
rters for a two-week period’. Thereafter, to avoid the outcry that would be caused if their hospitality became public knowledge, Pavelić was allowed to find his own safe hideaway within the British zone of occupation in Austria. They went on to reconsider the many rumours surrounding the treasure that Pavelić and his entourage had brought out of Croatia and came down firmly on what they believed to be the version closest to the truth:
British Lt Colonel Jonson was placed in charge of two trucks laden with the supposed property of the Catholic Church in the British zone of Austria. These two trucks, accompanied by a number of priests and the British officer, then entered Italy and went to an unknown destination. This treasure is reputedly financing the Croat resistance movement in Yugoslavia. The resistance forces using the Croat Cross (similar to the Cross of Lorraine) as their symbol, go by the name of Krizari (Crusaders) and are under the command of former Ustashe General Boban.239
Jonson is not a common English name and there is no officer of that name, nor a Lt Col. Johnson, in the official British Army List for 1945‑6. But we do know that Johnson was Klop’s pseudonym and, according to his wife’s account, he was permitted to use the rank of colonel and wear the uniform.240 It wasn’t unusual for members of the intelligence services to be permitted a courtesy military rank: Dick White began as a major and rose to the title of brigadier during his service as a liaison officer with General Eisenhower’s intelligence staff. Moreover, the time scale of mid-May to early June fits very closely with the period when MI6 was arguing that Klop was too busy to interrogate Schellenberg.
It was Helenus Milmo at MI5 headquarters who spoke to his counterparts at MI6 on 9 June, on instructions from Dick White, about arrangements for Klop to conduct the interrogation of Schellenberg. He recorded:
I undertook to put the matter up to Section V [of MI6] with the view to U35’s recall from overseas for the purpose of proceeding to Frankfurt. I spoke to Major [Felix Cowgill] who felt that he could give no final decision … but asked me to telephone Colonel White suggesting that U35 could be made available within a week to ten days, if this were acceptable to SHAEF [Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force]. He stated, however, that if a compromise of this kind could not be reached the Section V interest in allowing U35 to complete his present work before returning to the UK would have to give place to the major interest of ensuring that no stone is left unturned to make the exploitation of Schellenberg’s case a success.241
Since there has never been any official British acknowledgement of involvement in Pavelić’s escape and disappearance it is impossible to confirm Klop’s involvement, if any. The extent to which the Krizari, and their pro-Nazi predecessors in Croatia led by Pavelić, had tacit support or even active encouragement from the Catholic Church, in particular Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac of Zagreb and the priest Krunoslav Draganović, remains a hugely controversial subject. It became known that the college and church of San Girolamo dei Croati in the Via Tomacelli in Rome was being used by Draganovic as a holding station for wanted Nazis escaping through the ‘Ratlines’ to South America.
The two American agents remained very firmly of the view that Britain was not only shielding Pavelić but deliberately assisting the Krizari. This was considered to be part of a policy of distancing Britain from the Communist President of Yugoslavia, General Tito, despite having supported him wholeheartedly in his guerrilla campaign against Nazi occupation of his country.
Gowen and Caniglia pointed out that Pavelić was certainly getting help from someone and it was not the Russians or the Americans. He was hardly likely to receive sympathy from the French because he was held responsible for the political assassination of the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou along with King Alexander of Yugoslavia before the war. And while the Vatican might shield him they would not be able to support his wife and family, whose whereabouts the British must surely know. They pointed out that in August 1946 pamphlets, bearing Pavelić’s signature and pledging ceaseless warfare against the Communists, were dropped over Croatia by aircraft apparently flying from the British zone of Austria. They also accused Britain of an anti-American propaganda campaign implying that the US authorities were extraditing more people to face war crimes trials in Tito’s courts than was Britain.
Their suspicions would have been confirmed by a meeting in Rome on 11 August 1947 between Lt Col. George F. Blunda of US Army Intelligence and two British officials. An account of this meeting only emerged under US Freedom of Information rules in 2001. The British representatives were David Vere Bendall, Third Secretary at the Rome embassy, ex-Grenadier Guards, previously attached to Allied Forces HQ; Caserta and Wing Commander Derek Hugo Verschoyle, pre-war literary editor of The Spectator magazine and appointed in 1946, without previous diplomatic experience, as embassy First Secretary. Blunda was in no doubt that Verschoyle was there to represent British Intelligence and both men were well aware, as was Blunda, that Pavelić was now being harboured by the Vatican.
Blunda was clearly irritated that the British had already missed an opportunity to arrest Pavelić during a search for war criminals in Genoa and acutely conscious that to arrest a man under the nominal protection of the Pope was a politically explosive operation. So he flatly refused the proposal by the two Britons that the Americans should go ahead and do the deed unaided. If there was going to be controversy then Britain could share in it, especially since he discovered that Verschoyle knew the exact location of the room within the Vatican grounds where Pavelić was holed up. He even had a report, from a month earlier, of their quarry being seen beyond the Vatican’s protective cordon, walking in the Via Corso Umberto with a solitary bodyguard. His hair was cut short, he had a beauty mark on his left cheek and he was clothed in a monk’s habit.
In the face of Blunda’s obstinate refusal to go it alone, Mr Verschoyle proposed a splendid compromise: Italian police should carry out the arrest, without knowing exactly who their suspect was, with American and British agents on hand to ensure all went smoothly. Even better, Verschoyle agreed to devise a scheme to lure Pavelić from his lair and to make the phone call that would trigger the arrest.
As Blunda observed phlegmatically in a report to his superiors in November 1947, which he warned must not be seen by any British authorities:
To this day the British have not called on us to put this plan into effect. They have indicated that they are unable to get Pavelić out of the Vatican grounds.242
Pavelić remained in Italy, staying at a monastery near Castle Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer palace, until November 1948 when he was smuggled away, by now disguised with a heavy beard and moustache, in an Italian merchant ship to Argentina. He continued his campaign on behalf of the Ustashe movement until his death in 1959.243
He remains one of the most notorious war criminals to escape retribution. He was the beneficiary of the dramatic realignment that was taking place in attitudes among British and American politicians towards the Communist menace that had preoccupied them before Hitler’s rise to power. Behind the scenes Allied intelligence services were forging new alliances and re-establishing old ones in anticipation of that realignment. Pavelić had been smart enough to recognise that trend and as early as October 1944 had sent an emissary to Allied Command in Caserta in southern Italy pleading that Croatia could only exist with the support of Great Britain.244
Klop would have a part to play later in MI6’s construction of a Cold War apparatus in Eastern Europe, particularly through his connections with the Czech secret service.
CHAPTER 13: MAX KLATT
The mystery of Max Klatt tested some of Britain’s finest minds and found no convincing answer. Among those puzzling over its complexity were Gilbert Ryle, Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford University, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper who officially investigated and recorded The Last Days of Hitler, and Klop Ustinov.
Professor Ryle, who had been recalled from Oxford in February 1946 to continue his wartime MI6 duties, teamed up with Klop to co
nduct the interrogations. They made an unlikely combination: the tall, slim, scholar and the short, pugnacious spy. Ryle had taught himself German well-enough to read the major philosophers in their own language but preferred to conduct the interviews in English with Klop adopting the more neutral role of interpreter, usually purporting to be a born and bred Englishman using his usual pseudonym of ‘Mr Johnson’ rather than giving away his original German nationality.
The existence of Max Klatt had been known to British intelligence since 1941, thanks once again to the cryptographers at Bletchley Park. In June that year, they began to decipher radio traffic picked up between the Klatt organisation in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia and the Vienna office of German military intelligence, the Abwehr.
It was immediately clear that this was a major intelligence asset for the German army. Daily reports flowed in from all over the Soviet Union and British operations in the Middle East and North Africa. By the end of the war Bletchley had dealt with more than 5,000 Klatt communications. Not only did they appear to come from many locations, they were extraordinarily up-to-date, sometimes reporting events on the day they happened. That implied that reports must be transmitted by radio yet the listeners could find no evidence of incoming radio messages from agents in the field to the collator at the centre of the web in Sofia. There was the additional mystery of why the network was based in Sofia, transmitting information huge distances, only to relay it back as a package to Vienna and then back to Berlin.245