Post by Watchman on Mar 8, 2006 12:30:35 GMT -5
By absorbing the Nazi war criminal infrastructure
by Jared Israel
[Posted 23 December 2003]
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On Oct 8, 1998, the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act became US law. This legislation:
“...calls for the establishment of the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group [IWG] to locate, identify, and make available to the public Nazi war criminal records.” [1]
The IWG’s task was to organize previously classified documents from the OSS, predecessor of the CIA, as well as from the CIA and other intelligence sources, and to make these documents available to the public. These were to include documents relating to possible collusion between US government organizations and Nazi war criminals.
Millions of pages have been released but very little information has trickled down to the broad public. And this trickle has been presented in a way calculated to minimize public awareness of the extent to which the Nazi apparatus was recruited in order - literally - to *become* the US covert operations and intelligence apparatus (the CIA etc.)
This story centers around the figure of Reinhard Gehlen.
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Who was Reinhard Gehlen, and how did US intelligence use him?
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From April 1942 on, Gehlen was head of German Armies East, the Nazi Army’s intelligence corps in conquered Soviet territory. Commenting on the release of some previously classified documents concerning Gehlen, the IWG wrote:
“Working immediately after the war with Army Intelligence, the Gehlen Organization became the responsibility of the CIA, which continued the relationship until 1956. One document released by the IWG on June 26, 2000, shows an early connection between the Strategic Services Unit (predecessor of the CIA) and Gehlen’s group. The SSU searched for members of Gehlen’s organization in POW camps and extensively interrogated them. As the Cold War developed during 1946, American intelligence officials found themselves lacking recent experience with Soviet intelligence activities and decided to use German experts on the Soviet Union - even though some may have been war criminals.”[2]
The above paragraph includes not one false statement; yet it is completely misleading. This suggests that the IWG’s talent may lie in disinformation rather than research.
1) The statement that the Gehlen organization was “working...with Army Intelligence” is misleading because “working with” implies equality of power: one does not “work with” men hiding from the law. The Nazis recruited by US intelligence were wanted for the worst war crimes; they were “employees” whose alternative was the hangman's noose. Surely they did what they were told.
2) The use of “working with” is also misleading because it suggests that Gehlen’s Organization (the 'Org’) was separate from the Strategic Services Unit and later from the CIA. This is not true. Gehlen’s Org became a decisive, perhaps *the* decisive component of the CIA’s worldwide apparatus. Its thousands of highly experienced operatives, much older than incoming CIA recruits, had to have a big effect on the culture of the CIA. Thus, US intelligence was Nazified.
3) The statement that, “As the Cold War developed during 1946, American intelligence officials found themselves lacking recent experience with Soviet intelligence activities and decided to use German experts on the Soviet Union - even though some may have been war criminals,” is false for three reasons.
a) First, it states that the advent of the so-called Cold War preceded the decision to use Gehlen. But in fact, the relationship between US intelligence and Gehlen began before World War II ended. That is, it began considerably before the ‘outbreak’ of the Cold War.
b) Second, under the terms of the agreements at the Potsdam Conference, [2A]
"5. War criminals and those who have participated in planning or carrying out Nazi enterprises involving or resulting in atrocities or war crimes shall be arrested and brought to judgment. Nazi leaders, influential Nazi supporters and high officials of Nazi organizations and institutions and any other persons dangerous to the occupation or its objectives shall be arrested and interned."
As we shall see, Gehlen and his Foreign Armies East organization did participate in "planning or carrying out Nazi enterprises involving or resulting in atrocities or war crimes."
Moreover, Gehlen brought numerous SS and Gestapo figures into the Gehlen Org, as his part of the US intelligence apparatus was known. US intelligence officials were required under the terms of the Nuremberg Tribunal to arrest these men. Given that US intelligence officials would inevitably discover whom he was recruiting, Gehlen would not have dared to involve SS and Gestapo officers without US approval. [2B]
Did USSR intelligence know about the Gehlen Org? Of course they knew. They knew that the US was basing its foreign operations on the extensive apparatus of war criminals responsible for the deaths of millions in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Balkans. For the Soviets, this was proof positive that the US meant to overthrow the Soviet regime and replace it with people who had sided with the Nazis during World War II. Thus the creation of the Gehlen Org constituted the most extreme provocation, helping guarantee the climate of intense hostility which came to be called the ‘Cold War.’ This is the exact opposite of the IWG claim that the recruitment of Nazis was a practical (if regrettable) *response* to the Cold War.
c) Third, the comment that “some [of Gehlen’s men] may have been war criminals” is simply shocking. The Law under which the IWG was formed is “The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.” Note the use of the term “war crimes.” As we shall see, one does not need to read the declassified documents to know that Gehlen’s Org was composed of the worst war criminals. And I shall show that the US intelligence officials who recruited Gehlen and company had to know with whom they were dealing. The statement that Gehlen's men "may have been war criminals" clearly indicates that the IWG is trying to cover up what happened: that the US knowingly reconstructed the Nazi war criminal machine.
4) The IWG's statement that the CIA “continued the relationship until 1956” is a bad joke.
Reading it, one might get the impression that the CIA broke with Gehlen and company in 1956, but that is not true.
In 1956 the US intelligence group known as Gehlen’s Org became the BND, the Western German equivalent of the CIA. [2C] And it was run by Reinhard Gehlen.
"Thus, the US reinstated in Germany the apparatus that had planned and carried out Nazi foreign operations during the World War." These men had vast experience of war and racist mass murder and they had the knowledge that the US was sponsoring them. When the BND, for example, conspired with Croatian fascists in the late 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, the people doing the conspiring were the same Nazis who had butchered Yugoslavia during World War II.
Let me note, for the record, that this re-creation of the Nazi foreign operations apparatus was an outrageous betrayal of the hundreds of thousands of US and Allied troops who fought and died believing they were ridding the world of the horror of Nazism.
US and then German covert operations - obviously the most critical expression of the foreign policy of any country - were built out of the criminal Nazi apparatus. This information is staggering. But what is just a staggering is that *ordinary people have no idea that these damning records have been released.*
I have been reading media coverage of the release of the Gehlen documents and two things are striking: there is very little coverage, and what does exist is a whitewash. Consider for example an article that appeared in the 'alternative' newspaper, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, entitled “The CIA’s Worst Kept Secret." [3]
In this article the author, Martin Lee, portrays the creation of the CIA via the recruitment of thousands of Nazis as a ‘mistake’. But how could such a mistake be made?
According to Lee, the US spymasters were fooled by Gehlen and/or didn’t ask too many question because they preferred not to know the answers.
From April 1, 1942 on, Gehlen was head of the so-called ‘Foreign Armies East,’ the infamous intelligence service of the Nazi Army within the Soviet Union. Martin does state that before the war ended, Gehlen arranged with the U.S. that the Americans would adopt his entire staff.
One of the US officers with whom Gehlen met was General Edwin L. Sibert, chief of military intelligence in the American zone in Germany. Another was Allen Dulles, a top official at the OSS, predecessor of the CIA. During the latter half of the war, Dulles ran the OSS station in Berne, Switzerland, conducting espionage operations in Nazi Germany. In the 1950s he was director of the CIA.
According to Lee, Gehlen fooled Dulles: [3]
“Although the Yalta Treaty stipulated that the United States must give the Soviets all captured German officers who had been involved in ‘eastern area activities,’ Gehlen was quickly spirited off to Fort Hunt, Va. The image he projected during 10 months of negotiations at Fort Hunt was, to use a bit of espionage parlance, a ‘legend’ - one that hinged on Gehlen’s false claim that he was never really a Nazi, but was dedicated, above all, to fighting Communism. Those who bit the bait included future CIA director Allen Dulles, who became Gehlen’s biggest supporter among American policy wonks.”
In support of this thesis, Lee quotes Richard Breitman, an historical consultant and the main public voice of the IWG:
“‘It was a horrendous mistake, morally, politically, and also in very pragmatic intelligence terms,’ says American University professor Richard Breitman, chairman of the IWG review panel.”
But did General Sibert make a “horrendous mistake”? Was spymaster Allen Dulles fooled? Is it possible that American spies who spent the war fighting German intelligence did not know what Gehlen and his Foreign Armies East had done in conquered Russia? Doesn’t this look like an attempt to minimize the impact of the CIA-Nazi documents?
This way of writing guarantees that the small amount of information that reaches the public concerning the Nazi origins of the CIA is framed so as to suggest that it was all a blunder.
But how could US officials use Nazi war criminals 'by mistake'? These people were responsible for the worst crimes in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, slaughtering millions of Jews, Serbs, Roma ('Gypsies') and others. How could such well-known monsters be recruited as the building blocks of US foreign operations 'by mistake'?
By reconstructing the Nazi apparatus, the US Establishment put a Nazi stamp on US foreign policy, spat in the face of the victims of the Holocaust, guaranteed maximum hostility in the USSR, and had a major impact on domestic US politics as well. Such a huge effort, with such far-reaching implications, carried out with painstaking attention to detail, cannot have been a blunder.
Mr. Lee writes that:
'A long-hidden trove of once-classified CIA documents confirms one of the worst-kept secrets of the Cold War - the CIA's use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a clandestine campaign against the Soviet Union.' [3]
[My emphasis]
But Gehlen's boys were not just spies. As we shall see, they were the worst war criminals of the century.
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An Ideology of Racism
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According to Lee, Gehlen fooled US spymaster Allen Dulles into believing he had never been a ‘sincere’ Nazi.
But what is a Nazi?
It is common in the US these days to use ‘Nazi’ to describe someone who is mean or repressive. Sometimes the word is even used to describe a harsh comic figure, as in Seinfeld’s ‘Soup Nazi.’
But the Nazis were not just brutal. The central feature of Nazism, which attracted supporters from Cairo to New York, was fanatical racism, especially towards Jews. That racism derived false intellectual justification from the pseudo-science of Eugenics, which originated in Britain and gained prominence in the US in the first half of the century, and was adopted by Hitler’s Nazis.
Eugenics posits the existence of supposedly inferior, imagined “races”. Coincidentally, these groups coincide with existing objects of bigotry - Black people, Jews, Slavs, American Indians, Mexican Americans, ‘Gypsies’ and so on. According to Eugenics, these groups, and also people with physical or mental disabilities or whose behavior is considered anti-social, must (according to Eugenics) be eliminated from the gene pool, one way or another. In this way, a Master Race is to be created.
Eugenics was financed by pillars of the US Establishment, such as the Rockefeller and Carnegie Institutes and the Ford Foundation. Eugenics was endorsed by the US State Department and the Supreme Court.[4]
The Nazis took to eugenics like ducks to water.
During World War II, the Nazis incorporated Eugenics in all their military plans. The Nazi troops had been indoctrinated with the idea that it was necessary to kill off these "inferior specimens" in order to save first Germany and then humanity.
Starting in April 1942, Reinhard Gehlen was in charge of the Nazi military intelligence organization in the Soviet Union, Foreign Armies East. What did the Nazis do in the vast areas they conquered?
This part of the USSR was populated mainly by Slavs, with a large Jewish minority, and many Roma (‘Gypsies’). The Nazi goal was to destroy what they bizarrely called “Jewish Bolshevism.” They aimed to eliminate all Jews and Roma and to reduce the Slavic population by 30 million, enslaving those who survived. This plan created hell on earth. According to Prof. Christopher Simpson, a member of the Historical Advisory Panel of the IWG and the author of Blowback, a study of the Nazi-CIA marriage:
[Excerpt from "Blowback" starts here]
The slaughter that followed the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 is without equal in world history. Next to the Nazis’ operation of the anti-Jewish extermination centers at Treblinka, Sobibor, Birkenau, and elsewhere, the most terrible crimes of the entire war took place in the name of anticommunism in the German-occupied territories on the eastern front. Civilian casualties in these areas were so enormous, so continuous, and so extreme that even counting the dead has proved impossible. Scholars have attempted to deduce the numbers of fatalities from captured German records, reports of Einsatzgruppen (mobile execution squads), prisoner of war (POW) camp mortality reports, and Soviet census statistics. The evidence indicates that between 3 and 4 million captured Soviet soldiers were intentionally starved to death in German POW camps between 1941 and 1944. About 1.3 million Jews were exterminated inside Nazi-occupied Soviet territory, mainly through mass shootings but also through gassing, deportation to extermination camps, looting and destruction of villages, hangings, and torture. The generally accepted figure for all Soviet war dead is 20 million human beings - about 15 percent of the population of the country at the time - but the destruction was so vast that even this number can be only an educated guess.
The Nazis deliberately used famine as a political weapon in the East, and it soon became the largest single killer. As the German invasion of the USSR began, General (later Field Marshal) Erich von Manstein ordered that “the Jewish-Bolshevist [sic!] system must be exterminated.... In hostile cities, a large part of the population will have to starve.” Nothing, Manstein continued, “may, out of a sense of mistaken humaneness, be distributed to prisoners or to the population - unless they are in the service of the German Wehrmacht.” [5]
[Excerpt from "Blowback" ends here]
Take note of General Manstein’s words: “a large part of the population will *have to* starve.” He speaks of these people as if they were disease-carrying animals whom public health officials must put to sleep. Those who object to withholding food from “the population” suffer from “mistaken humaneness”... Thus the entire Wehrmacht, not just the SS or Gestapo, was enlisted in a slaughter which was “without equal in world history.”
What about Reinhard Gehlen? His intelligence group, Foreign Armies East, was responsible for evaluating information obtained from the interrogation of POWs. These POWs were mostly Slavs or Jews. As part of the general plan for so-called ‘racial purification,’ Gehlen and his people helped to formulate a sub-plan for POWs which used mass torture and mass murder to extract maximum information, with the result - beneficial to those with a eugenics ideology - that millions of Slavs and Jews were killed in the process:
[Excerpt from "Blowback" starts here]
Gehlen derived much of his information from his role in one of the most terrible atrocities of the war: the torture, interrogation, and murder by starvation of some 4 million Soviet prisoners of war. Even Gehlen’s defenders - and there are many of them, both in Germany and in the United States - acknowledge he was instrumental in organizing the interrogations of these POWs. The success of this interrogation program from the German military’s point of view became, in fact, the cornerstone of Gehlen’s career. It won him his reputation as an intelligence officer and his major general’s rank. [That is, it was because of these monstrous interrogations that in 1942 Gehlen was put in charge of Foreign Armies East, Nazi military intelligence in the USSR - J.I.]
But these same interrogations were actually a step in the liquidation of tens of thousands of POWs. Prisoners who refused to cooperate were often tortured or summarily shot. Many were executed even after they had given information, while others were simply left to starve to death. True, Gehlen’s men did not personally administer the starvation camps, nor are they known to have served in the execution squads. Such tasks were left to the SS, whose efficiency in such matters is well known.
Instead, Gehlen’s men were in a sense like scientists who skimmed off the information and documents that rose to the surface of these pestilent camps. Now and again they selected an interesting specimen: a captured Russian general ready to collaborate, perhaps, or a Ukrainian railroad expert who might supply the locations of vulnerable bridges when given some encouragement to talk. Gehlen’s officers were scientists in somewhat the same way that concentration camp doctors were: Both groups extracted their data from the destruction of human beings.[6]
[Excerpt from "Blowback" ends here]
So Gehlen and his organization were involved in the monstrous crimes on the Eastern front in the same way that Eichmann and his men were involved in the death camps: as planners, and also in the same way as people like Dr. Mengele, as gatherers of information. Moreover, this information was then processed and provided to the Nazi Army in order to help them “pacify” the conquered areas. Thus Gehlen and Co. also aided in carrying out the mass murder of civilians. To this end, they employed a vast network of spies, corrupt government officials, Nazi sympathizers, Soviet officers and troops who had gone over to the Nazi side, willing thugs, and so on.
Gehlen’s Foreign Armies East intelligence apparatus was organizationally distinct from the SS and the Gestapo, who actually carried out the organized killing. During official US interrogations, with stenographers present, Gehlen stated that he would never use SS or Gestapo men. The SS and Gestapo had been declared criminal organizations at the Nuremberg Tribunal and the US officials who employed Gehlen were required to arrest anyone whom they knew had been a member of either organization. So in order to protect his hosts, Gehlen had to say, on record, that he would never employ men who had been in the SS. [2B]
But despite Gehlen’s supposedly ‘plausible denial,’ in fact the Org was full of SS killers.
[Excerpt from "Blowback" starts here]
At least a half dozen of his first staff of 50 officers were former SS or SD men including SS Obersturmfuehrer Hans Sommer, who had set seven Paris synagogues to the torch in October 1941, SS Standartenfuehrer Willi Krichdaum, Senior Gestapo leader in Southeastern Europe and SS Sturmbannfuhrer Fritz Schmidt, Gestapo Chief in Kiel Germany, each of whom was given responsible positions in the new Gehlen organization. [7]
[Excerpt from "Blowback" ends here]
Gehlen’s Foreign Armies East had only dealt with the occupied USSR. By recruiting members of the SS and Gestapo, Gehlen and his US backers extended the Org’s reach directly to Eastern and Southeastern Europe. For example, Willi Krichdaum, mentioned above, was the senior Gestapo official in Southeastern Europe. That includes Yugoslavia, where the Nazis committed some of their worst crimes.
Men like Krichdaum would know the names of members of Waffen SS divisions from their areas. The Waffen SS was recruited from Volksdeutsche (people of German descent living outside Germany) and non-German Nazi volunteers from all over Europe. The more extensive Gehlen’s Org became, the more ties it had to these Nazis - these Waffen SS volunteers who had quietly returned to their countries of origin (the UK, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Yugoslavia, Italy and so on). Thus Gehlen’s Org gave US intelligence a readymade political apparatus all over Europe.
Once Gehlen and the US representatives worked out the details for Americanizing his Nazis, the next step was to reconstitute the whole structure, including middle leaders and the rank and file. For that purpose, Gehlen’s Org screened displaced persons arriving in Germany. Gehlen chose Franz Six to oversee the screening:
[Excerpt from "Blowback" starts here]
Gehlen’s man in émigré enterprises, SS Brigadefuhrer Franz Six, is a major war criminal and is still alive at last report. He was once described by Adolf Eichmann as a Streber (a ‘real eager beaver’) on the so-called Jewish Question and as a favored protégé of SS chief Himmler’s. Eichmann should have known: His own first efforts in the Holocaust were carried out under Six’s personal command in the “Ideological Combat” section of the security service. In 1941 Six led the Vorkommando Moskau, an advance squad of the Nazi invasion, whose job it was to seize Communist party and NKVD archives in order to compile lists of hunted Soviet officials and to liquidate those who were caught. Six’s Vorkommando never made it to Moscow, but his own reports indicate that his unit murdered approximately 200 people in cold blood in Smolensk, where they had stopped on the march to the Russian capital. The Smolensk victims, Six wrote headquarters, included “46 persons, among them 38 intellectual Jews who had tried to create unrest and discontent in the newly established Ghetto of Smolensk.[8]
[Excerpt from "Blowback" ends here]
Franz Six and his underlings knew what they were looking for:
[Excerpt from "Blowback" starts here]
Although it is true that the majority of the postwar refugees in Germany were not Nazi collaborators and had not committed war crimes, it is also true that the minority who had done such things were exactly the ones who were sought out by the Org as Gehlen’s [CIA] group came to be known. [9]
[Excerpt from "Blowback" ends here]
These people were the all-important link between Gehlen’s people and the local Nazi apparatus on the ground in Russia and Eastern and Southeastern Europe. With their recruitment, a huge part of Hitler’s foreign operations apparatus had been recreated.