“Under Turrou, CROWCASS … operated on two distinct levels,” writes intelligence veteran and historian William Corson: “[first], to catalog war crimes and the locations of war criminals; and [secondly] to recruit former Nazis to serve as U.S. intelligence agents and sources.” Turrou became the contact man inside CROWCASS for American intelligence agencies that wished to frustrate unauthorized attempts to locate Nazis who had gone to work for the West. Concealment of a recruited agent was generally achieved by simple deletion of the suspect’s name from the list of those in U.S. custody, thus ensuring that the new employee would be officially considered missing. Vienna OSS chief Charles Thayer acknowledges that he did just that for German political warfare expert Hans Heinrich Herwarth in 1945. And Reinhard Gehlen himself chuckled over the irony that he was still officially a “fugitive” as late as 1949 owing to the fact that notice of his surrender had been intentionally deleted from POW lists with Turrou’s assistance. As will be seen, CROWCASS intelligence “assets”—meaning agents or sympathizers who could be tapped for clandestine missions—eventually became an important element in many U.S. intelligence operations in Europe during the late 1940s.3
In the first months after Germany’s surrender the relationship between army counterintelligence agents in Europe and their targets had been clear enough. U.S. investigators hunted down fugitive Nazis in order to penetrate and destroy any underground Fascist movements that had survived the collapse of the Hitler government. The army took the threat of such movements quite seriously. Germany had, after all, risen from the ashes of World War I and evaded the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty through use of a variety of underground organizations, and Hitler and his top lieutenants had repeatedly pledged that they would do it again if Germany fell to the Allies. Detection of underground Nazi groups, therefore, became a high-priority task.
Most of these investigations were conducted by the Army Counterintelligence Corps. This agency worked closely with CROWCASS and served as a political police, in effect, in the U.S.-occupied zone of Germany during the first few years after the war.
CIC investigations into underground Nazi activity became some of the first Nazi recruitment operations. This paradox is similar in many respects to the situation often faced in more conventional police work; destruction of a ring of criminals sometimes requires enlistment of one of them as an informer against the others. This enrollment of criminals, which is the daily bread of most civilian detectives and district attorneys, is typically carried out through harsh threats of punishment, followed by soothing offers of protection if a suspect cooperates. The object, at least ideally, is to bring an entire group of suspects to justice, even if that entails special leniency for a few of them. Not surprisingly, U.S. investigators frequently cut deals with some Nazis in order to land more important fugitives.
As the cold war congealed, however, the targets of the investigations shifted from underground Nazis to underground Communists and to persons viewed as sympathetic to the USSR. Many CIC investigators filed away their dossiers on war crimes suspects or let such cases slip to the bottom of the list of high-priority projects that never seemed to get any shorter. On an administrative level, the leadership and drive needed to trace and prosecute war crimes suspects were eroded.
Meanwhile, the CIC’s networks of recruited informants and contract agents consisting of former Nazis and so-called minor war criminals largely remained in place. In several documented cases the CIC undertook efforts to enlist the help of the Nazis’ own experts like Gestapo veteran Klaus Barbie in tracking down Communist intrigue.
But it is at that point that the similarity between conventional police work and the security efforts of the CIC ended. No longer were the CIC’s Nazis used primarily to trace war criminals, nor were those informers enjoying CIC protection forced to pay some sort of penalty for their role in war crimes and crimes against humanity. As the cold war became an institution, the Nazis were simply turned loose.
The great majority of early (i.e., 1944 to 1947) recruitment and protection of Nazis by the U.S. government was the product of what many people would term “police informer” types of relationships. Gene Bramel, a young CIC agent who worked with SS man Klaus Barbie after the war, summarizes the CIC’s point of view neatly: “They say, ‘[W]hy did you use Nazis?’ That is a stupid question. It would have been impossible for us to operate in southern Germany without using Nazis. We were Americans. I spoke pretty good German, but by the time I got through ordering dinner they would have suspected I was American. And who knew Germany better than anyone else? Who were the most organized? Who were the most anti-Communist? Former Nazis. Not to use them would mean complete emasculation. And we used them, the British used them, the French used them, and the Russians used them.”4
“You deal all the cards and play them as they come,” reflects Herb Brucher, a former special agent with the 970th CIC detachment, which handled thousands of former Nazis as informers and contract agents between 1945 and 1949. “We dealt with Communists; we dealt with Nazis.… I never held that against the guy—though if you had something you could hold over a guy’s head, then you could use that like a form of blackmail to get information.” Brucher, like most CIC veterans, has few regrets about his work, which included efforts to locate German scientists for transfer to U.S. laboratories as well as a major campaign utilizing ex-Nazis to penetrate the German Communist party. Use of ex-SS men in such circumstances “never bothered me at all,” he comments. “I guess it was all that training, but I personally took to it like a duck to water.”5
It is clear that a Catch-22, rather than some vast conspiracy, is what accounts for the army’s policy toward most Nazi fugitives, at least in the early years. Protecting war crimes suspects from arrest was, of course, banned; one important function of the CIC was, after all, the pursuit and arrest of underground Nazis. There was one hitch, however. A few selected Nazis could be protected or even paid off if doing so led to the arrest of more important fugitives.
At the same time the main type of payment available for the Nazis the 970th had recruited was “an allowance of soap, razors, chewing gum, and a little tobacco,” as Brucher puts it, “and who the hell wants to work for that?” Many American agents turned to trading these items on the black market to obtain German currency for paying their informers. But when that failed to yield enough money, the Americans offered their wards the only thing the CIC had that was cheap and plentiful: protection. The more protection the American agents offered, the bigger the network of subagents they could run. The bigger the net, the more information that came in. And the more information that came in, the more successful the American agent was considered. No matter if the information the Nazis were providing was little more than clippings from Czech or Polish newspapers; there was no way to check it anyway, at least not at first. What mattered was volume, and protection equaled volume.6
The dusty, sprawling U.S. interrogation center at Camp King, near Oberusel, was apparently the most active recruiting center for ex-Nazis interested in throwing in their lot with the Americans. Commanded by Colonel William R. Philp and later by Colonel Roy M. Thoroughman, Camp King was a striking example of the blurring of the lines between the hunter and the prey.
Camp King had been the Luftwaffe’s primary interrogation center for captured American and British fliers during the war, and it was there that the Germans developed highly effective interrogation techniques utilizing the latest breakthroughs in human psychology. Contrary to the stereotyped Nazi use of rubber hoses, the Luftwaffe’s approach combined meticulous cross-referencing of every known fact about any given Allied air force unit, on the one hand, with subtle attempts to gain the respect of their prisoners, on the other. The results had been spectacular: Virtually every Allied airman let slip some fragment of information that, when combined with what the Germans already knew, proved to be of intelligence value. “Poker-faced Scharff,” by all accounts the best German interrogator, testified later that “all but abou
t 20 out of more than 500 I interviewed did talk, and told me exactly the things I was trying to find out.”*7
In mid-1945 the United States seized the Luftwaffe center and transformed it into a holding tank for a number of the highest-ranking Nazis in captivity, including General Gehlen, Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, and Julius Streicher, as well as military leaders such as Field Marshal Albert Kesselring; Hitler’s successor, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz; and scores of others. Some trusted Luftwaffe interrogators who had once translated English into German for the Nazis were even put back to work translating German into English for the Allies.
Camp King, however, was not simply a high-level POW camp. Its unique mission was, as an internal history of the camp puts it, to “utilize the knowledge and abilities of the former German intelligence personnel to collect information of interest to the United States.” About 200 SS, SD, and Abwehr men were assigned to write “histories” of their wartime experiences. Some of these studies concerned Nazi command structures and were subsequently used in connection with postwar trials. But the majority of the studies, even in 1945, were designed to produce information about the USSR, not Nazi Germany, and the authors of such studies were in many cases quietly let out of prison and placed on U.S. or British intelligence payrolls.
The activities at Camp King, although approved by the army’s chief of intelligence in Europe, General Sibert, often ran directly counter to the publicly announced policy of the United States. Once, for example, the American zone provost marshal rejected a proposal from Colonel Philp that a systematic screening and interrogation of German POWs released from Russian custody be undertaken to gather intelligence on potential military targets in the Soviet-occupied zone. The provost marshal objected to the fact that Abwehr and SS officers were to be employed as interrogators and analysts in the effort. (Philp’s proposal, in fact, had originated with Reinhard Gehlen, who had, as noted earlier, begun his secret spy organization under Philp’s patronage at Camp King.) Despite the prohibition, Colonel Philp remained convinced that unless this information was collected at the time the POWs returned to Germany it would be lost forever. Philp, therefore, secretly obtained permission from General Sibert and proceeded. “Screening teams were established within the German refugee processing camps at Hersfeld, Hof, Ulm and Giessen,” according to the unpublished history of Camp King.8 “[A]pproximately 300,000 POWs were screened and carded. In many cases, exploitation [i.e., use as an informer or contract agent] was made at the processing camps.”
This two-tier American policy in Germany occurred again and again throughout the cold war and was not so different, in fact, from the practice of the French, British, and Soviet governments. It combined a public condemnation and pursuit of fugitive Nazi criminals, on the one hand, with secret protection and utilization of some of the same men, on the other. Leaks were everywhere, however, and such protection did not remain truly secret for long. As the contradictory two-tier system gradually matured during the late 1940s, it became routine for U.S. intelligence agencies to defy the announced policies of the American government concerning Nazi fugitives. Public leaders in Germany (including newspaper reporters, for example, as well as political officials) tacitly cooperated with the intelligence agencies. “Well-informed people knew that this had to be done,” says a former State Department political affairs officer who prefers anonymity, “and it was better to avoid any fuss.”
By the end of 1947 the U.S. Army had begun at least a half dozen large-scale programs designed to tap the talents of SS and German military intelligence veterans. Operation Pajamas, for example, organized “exploitation of German personnel used in forecasting European political trends.” Birchwood did the same with “economic experts,” in this context clearly suggesting men who had worked for the SS and for Goering. Project Dwindle collected Nazi cryptographic experts and equipment. Apple Pie, a joint U.S.-British operation, recruited “certain key personnel of [SS] RSHA Amt VI” who were expert in Soviet industrial and economic matters, according to the U.S. orders that established the code word designators for the program. Project Panhandle undertook “operational exploitation”—in other words, recruitment for pay—”of German ex-Military Intelligence personnel for collecting military intelligence on the USSR and its satellites.” Project Credulity traced German scientists wanted for the JIOA Paperclip project. These efforts, though highly secret from the general public, were nevertheless approved and managed through regular intelligence channels. They received conventional code names and were financed in the normal army intelligence budget.9 These were not a conspiracy within the intelligence community to defy the rest of the government; these exploitation programs were the official, though secret, U.S. policy.
Virtually all U.S.-Soviet cooperation in the pursuit of war criminals had collapsed by mid-1946, with the important exception of the International Tribunal at Nuremberg. It is possible to debate endlessly over who exactly was to blame for the deterioration of the earlier efforts to bring Nazi criminals to justice. The competition over scientists and industrial laboratories was clearly a factor. So was the larger and more fundamental struggle over spheres of influence in France, Central Europe, and the Middle East. Any way one looks at it, however, it is clear that the failure of East and West to work together to prosecute war crimes suspects provided tickets to freedom, in effect, for thousands of the men and women who were responsible for the Holocaust and other outrages.
Belligerent confrontations began between East and West over just what did, and did not, constitute prosecutable war crimes as early as the summer of 1945. This conflict was particularly sharp in the cases of prominent members of Catholic political parties from Eastern Europe. The Soviets argued that many of these conservative Christian Democratic politicians had carried their countries into an open alliance with the Nazis, that they then had served as responsible officials in Axis regimes and had helped establish or administer laws for registration of Jews, creation of concentration camps, and the rest. Therefore, the Soviet reasoning went, these officials had contributed to the persecution of innocent people—or were at least suspects—and should be delivered to postwar Eastern European governments for trial.
Many American and other Western officials, on the other hand, preferred to concentrate on the role that the same religious parties had played on the eve of Germany’s defeat, when much of the Christian Democratic establishment in Eastern Europe had turned against the Nazis. Although the United States had formally agreed as early as 1943 to turn over war criminals to the country where they had committed crimes, by 1945 U.S. policymakers were viewing anti-Communist Catholic leaders as an essential part of postwar coalition governments in Eastern Europe. The United States interpreted many Soviet war crimes accusations as basically political charges tailored to undermine Western influence in the region.
The question of how to handle suspected war criminals was further complicated by serious East-West disputes over repatriation of refugees. At least 8 million displaced people from Eastern Europe were living in hovels in occupied Germany and Austria in 1945. The United States, Britain, and the USSR had agreed at the Yalta Conference that these people were to be returned to their various homelands, where it was hoped they would be reintegrated into postwar society. Contrary to the lurid accounts that appeared in the West during the cold war, the overwhelming majority of these refugees voluntarily returned to their countries of origin without incident.
But the fact remained that between 1 and 2 million of the refugees did not wish to go back. Many of those who refused to return viewed themselves as heroes, of a sort, who had rebelled against Stalin even though that had entailed working with the Nazis. The Soviets, however, regarded most of the remaining refugees as people who had committed serious acts of treason, and Stalin insisted that they be returned. This harsh judgment was not entirely without justification, because a substantial number of the émigrés were, in fact, the former soldiers, SS volunteers, or quisling officials of the Nazis. “Treason” to the S
oviets, however, also included acts such as public criticism of the Communist party, which was hardly considered a crime in the West.
The American and British authorities cooperated in the repatriation programs for a time, but with increasing reluctance. The prospect of driving an innocent person into Stalin’s USSR against his or her will was distasteful to most Westerners, for obvious reasons. The majority of the remaining displaced persons appeared to be political or economic émigrés, by Western standards, not war criminals.
Western reluctance to turn over refugees—and criminal suspects—to the Soviets was reinforced as word trickled back from the East concerning the fates of some of those who had been delivered during the first months after the war. Trials of suspect quislings and native-born SS men in the East were generally a mere formality in those days and often dispensed with altogether. Thousands of summary executions were carried out in the USSR, Poland, and other areas under Red Army control. Modern historians in Yugoslavia concede that “tens of thousands” of Nazi collaborators were killed, often without trial, in that small country alone during 1945.10 And millions of men and women from throughout Eastern Europe were deported to forced labor camps deep inside the USSR, many never to return.
Soviet suspicions that the West was intentionally harboring persons they considered traitors and war criminals expanded side by side with the West’s growing reluctance to repatriate refugees. The already tense relations between the superpowers further deteriorated. The USSR refused to participate in the CROWCASS identification project or in most other war crimes inquiries sponsored by the Western Allies. Western investigators were generally barred from gathering evidence concerning incidents that had taken place inside Eastern Europe, and the bulk of evidence concerning Fascist crimes collected by the USSR was kept sealed off from the outside world in carefully restricted archives.
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