Demjanjuk trial.
The U.S.-Soviet agreement offered new hope to the Demjanjuk defense. Perhaps Moscow would grant Demjanjuk investigators permission to search for archival evidence proving that the testimony of Treblinka survivors had pushed the wrong man to the foot of the gallows.
Fourth, OSI released a lengthy report on Robert Jan Verbelen, a convicted Belgian Nazi collaborator who had worked for and was protected by the United States after the war. Reinforced by newly declassified government documents, the publication offered a glimpse into the inner sanctum of U.S. espionage in the “Dodge City” days just after World War II. During that time, America, England, and France were scrambling to gather information about the new threat to their national security—their former ally Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. As illustrated by the following three accounts, the story the Verbelen report told was not a pretty one.
THE SPY NETS
While the Justice Department was stalking John Demjanjuk as Nazi collaborator Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, the CIA and the Justice Department were trying to protect the identity of a major convicted Nazi war criminal. His name was Robert Jan Verbelen. To the embarrassment of the intelligence establishment, however, Nazi hunters uncovered evidence that Verbelen had worked for the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Austria immediately after the war.
The Department of Justice handled the Verbelen leak the way it had dealt with the Klaus Barbie scandal. It commissioned OSI to unravel the story, and for the same reasons. The Justice Department didn’t want to be accused of a cover-up that could cripple or destroy the credibility of an already beleaguered OSI. And Justice wanted to manage the spin on the story to control the damage.
OSI issued its internal Verbelen report in 1988 while John Demjanjuk was waiting for the Israeli Supreme Court to decide whether he should ascend the gallows, spend the rest of his days in prison, face another trial as Iwan of Sobibor, or go free. For national security reasons, the report “could not make public” every detail of the U.S.-Verbelen connection. In spite of that limitation, the document sketched a clear picture of America’s postwar espionage operations in Austria. And more important, it illustrated the total dependence of U.S. intelligence agencies on the services of former Nazi SS and SD officers, Gestapo chiefs, Einsatzkommando leaders, German army intelligence officers (Abwehr), and a string of vicious Nazi collaborators stretching from Croatia to Latvia.
Robert Jan Verbelen was a decorated officer in the Flemish SS and a leader of DeVlag, a pro-Nazi organization of young Flemish fascists who considered Hitler their fuhrer. As a lieutenant in the Flemish SS, Verbelen recruited fellow SS men and members of DeVlag into terror teams and death squads that worked closely with the Nazi SD security detail in Belgium to help keep the country safe for its German occupiers.
Like Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie in Lyon, Verbelen’s mission as security corps leader was to crush the Belgian resistance. And like Barbie, he failed. The best he could do during his two-year reign of terror was to arrest, imprison, torture, and murder hundreds of resistance fighters, some of whom ended up in Camp Dora excavating tunnels in the Harz Mountains. To punish the resistance and to deter others from joining it, Verbelen’s terror squads attacked and assassinated Belgian politicians and judges who refused to support the Nazis. They gunned down policemen sympathetic to the Belgian resistance. And they tossed grenades into taverns, pubs, and cafes frequented by Belgian anti-occupation nationalists.
As a reward for his dedication, the SS promoted Verbelen to captain and awarded him the German War Meritorious Cross. When the Allies liberated Belgium in September 1944, three months after the Normandy invasion, Verbelen fled to Germany with the retreating German army, leaving his wife and two children behind. Unable to punish Captain Verbelen personally for his crimes, Belgian resistance fighters murdered his family instead.
Not long after the war ended, a Belgian military war crimes court tried sixty-two members of DeVlag and convicted fifty-nine, among them SS Captain Verbelen, who was sentenced in absentia to death. Unlike France, which asked the United States to help locate and extradite Klaus Barbie, Belgium did not seek U.S. assistance in finding and extraditing Verbelen. If it had, the United States would not have had far to look. Like Barbie in Munich, which was the heart of U.S. espionage in Germany, Verbelen was working for the CIC in Vienna, the center of U.S. espionage in Austria.
When Verbelen arrived in Vienna in 1947 with false papers identifying him as Peter Mayer, a Czech displaced
As one would expect from a military detachment, CIC’s covert espionage program was highly organized. It divided the American zone in Austria into subdetachments centered in Salzburg, Linz, Gmunden, and Vienna. Each subdetachment set up a string of fifteen to twenty field offices. Each field office, in turn, ran nets (networks) of sources, sub-sources, informants, and stringers. Because CIC didn’t have any spies of its own under deep cover in the Soviet Union or its satellites, it was forced to rely completely on the services of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators eager to walk through the open door and work for the United States in order to avoid arrest, trial, and punishment.
Without digging very deeply, OSI investigators identified thirteen Nazi war criminals who had held key positions in CIC’s Austrian spy web. Although OSI declined to reveal their names in its 1988 report for national security reasons, they included: a Yugoslavian general who was on a British-American list of Nazi collaborators to be “handed over to Yugoslavian authorities immediately” after they were arrested… the chief of Security Services in a Nazi puppet state and a Balkan Gestapo agent, both wanted by their native countries for ordering the burning of villages and the massacre of their inhabitants… a Nazi collaborator wanted in his native country for torturing and murdering two Catholic priests and an unspecified number of Jews as chief of a Jewish ghetto that was eventually liquidated… a Romanian Iron Guardist who played a role in Viorel Trifa’s January 1941 uprising and massacre of Jews in Bucharest… and an SS lieutenant colonel responsible for the torture of resistance fighters and POWs, and the extermination of Jews in several countries.
CIC had both eyes open when it hired those war criminals and others like them to form the spine of American espionage operations in Austria. Corps guidelines cautioned its agents against hiring known or convicted Nazi war criminals, but did not preclude them from hiring
In other words, war criminals were useful to the United States because they could be blackmailed.
Verbelen took the usual path to employment by the United States. A friend and former SS officer working for the 430th CIC in Vienna introduced “Peter Mayer” to Captain Frank Hastings, head of the Vienna espionage office. Hastings rightly assumed that Mayer was also a former SS officer, and didn’t bother to investigate his background. Why should he? Mayer came highly recommended by one of CIC’s top SS sources and, as far as Hastings knew, he wasn’t a known or convicted war criminal and, therefore, was eligible to work for the United States.
At the time he hired Verbelen, Hastings was running three nets of spies in Vienna, headed by agents code- named Bobi, Nick, and Hermann. Bobi and Nick were ethnic German Nazi collaborators from a Baltic country. Hermann was a former Austrian Nazi SS officer. The nets were filled with suspected war criminals. Hermann, for example, had “succeeded in developing a large net of informants who were, for the most part, former members of the Nazi party, SS, or SD.”
Hastings assigned Verbelen, aka Peter Mayer, code name Herbert, to Project Newton, which was tasked with collecting intelligence on the Austrian Communist Party. As the head of one of three nets embedded in
