Artukovic? Otto von Bolschwing? Hermine Braunsteiner? Wernher von Braun? Nicolae Malaxa? Boleslavs Maikovskis? Arthur Rudolph? Tscherim Soobzokov? Hubertus Strughold? Viorel Trifa?
RUSTY AND ZIPPER
Brigadier General Reinhard Gehlen was one of the biggest, best known, and most politically dangerous and controversial Cold War spies of the postwar era. Books have been written about him and his espionage work for the United States from 1946 to 1956. His spy network, which the United States called the Gehlen Org, worked first for the CIC under code name Rusty, then for the CIA under code name Zipper.
Gehlen moved in and out of the shadow world of smoke and mirrors, asset theft and double-agent perfidy, blackmail and assassinations, and top-secret communiques. As a result, much of what has been written about him and his organization is riddled with gaps, weak links, and blurred connections. Newly declassified documents have filled in some holes and clarified some issues.
General Gehlen was the Reich’s chief of the Foreign Army-East (FHO), an intelligence-gathering organization with two missions. The first was to collect military information about the Soviet Union. The second was to pinpoint the location of Jews, communists, Gypsies, and other enemies of the Reich so that Einsatzkommandos, with the aid of local police and militia volunteers, could arrest, rob, and murder them. Given the critical postwar intelligence role that Gehlen played, first for the United States, then for West Germany, it is important to ask whether he was a war criminal. The answer is as murky as Gehlen’s own spy world.
Reinhard Gehlen was a soldier in the German regular army. He was not a member of the Nazi Party nor did he belong to any Nazi criminal organization such as the SS, SD, or Gestapo. Like Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, General Gehlen was a desk man. As such, it is unlikely that he got his gloves bloody rounding up and shooting the more than 1.5 million Jews, Gypsies, and communists who were executed in the forests of the Soviet Union, Gehlen’s territory of expertise. What is clear, however, is that his agents did his dirty work.
To supply Gehlen with the intelligence information he demanded, his men interrogated, then approved or supervised the torture and the starvation and/or execution of three to four million captured Soviet soldiers in POW camps like Rovno and Chelm. The number is equivalent to the entire population of Los Angeles. Like the Dora Nazis who knew about and approved the use of slave laborers to excavate tunnels, Gehlen knew how his agents extracted the intelligence information they fed him. There is no evidence to suggest that he objected to their methods.
The CIC never placed Gehlen’s name on—and in fact they more likely scratched it from—the Central Registry of War Criminal and Security Suspects (CROWCASS). If General Gehlen had been tried for war crimes, however, he undoubtedly would have been as slippery as a double agent, arguing like Eichmann in Israel and Romanian Iron Guardist Bishop Valerian Trifa in America that he never killed or tortured anyone. Whether he ever pulled the trigger, personally ordered the execution of POWs, or was present when they were tortured and murdered will probably never be known. Be that as it may, the Displaced Persons Commission defined high-level intelligence officers (
Anticipating the defeat of Germany, Gehlen, like von Braun and Lebed, feathered a warm nest for himself. He microfilmed FHO’s extensive files on the Soviet Union and buried them in the Alps in airtight, rustproof canisters. Among the documents were Soviet five-year plans; analyses of Soviet defense production capabilities; the sites of Soviet research centers and critical oil and mineral deposits; and the names of Communist Party officials.
When Gehlen surrendered to the U.S. Army just before the end of the war, he offered CIC the microfilm and his entire anti-Soviet espionage network, most of which was still in place. Frank Wisner interviewed him in Germany and the CIC debriefed him for months at Fort Hunt, Virginia, a suburban Washington POW interrogation center, code name “Box 1142.” Once again following the principle of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the interrogators never seriously investigated Gehlen for suspected war crimes. They asked “Is he useful,” not “What war crimes did he commit?”
The CIC was impressed with Gehlen’s cache of microfilm, his Soviet intelligence experience, and his pool of intelligence officers, agents, and informants. It was also desperate. The United States didn’t even know where to find the major bridges in the Soviet Union, much less have any reliable information about its new enemy’s troop strength, weapons deployment, long-range-missile capabilities, and nuclear research.
For the CIC, and soon for the CIA, Gehlen was a gift from Ares, the god of war.
In late 1946, a year and a half after the war ended, the CIC hired Gehlen, code name Utility, and his entire network and set him up at a secret location in Pullach, a small town south of Munich and the site of a former Waffen SS training camp. At the insistence of the United States, Gehlen promised not to employ SS, SD, or Gestapo men. But sensing that Washington was just trying to cover its backside, Gehlen stuffed the upper echelons of the Org with war criminals, using phony papers and false names to avoid detection and prosecution at Nuremberg. How many? Historian Timothy Naftali, a specialist on Gehlen, cautiously concluded: “At least one hundred of Gehlen’s officers and agents had served with the SD or Gestapo, and the number may in effect be significantly higher.”
Naftali and journalist Christopher Simpson have compiled a partial list of the major Nazi war criminals who ran the Gehlen Org. Besides Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, there are four especially vicious Nazis on their list —Alois Brunner, Franz Six, Emil Augsburg, and Erich Deppner. The crimes against humanity of these former Nazis are important because they illustrate the kind of murderers the United States either approved for employment in Operations Rusty and Zipper or indirectly hired by looking the other way.
SS Major Alois Brunner was one of the first former Nazi colleagues Gehlen hired. Brunner’s credentials were impeccable. According to recently declassified CIA files, he was the architect of the Nazi extermination system, which began with penning Jews in ghettos so they could be easily located when the time came to load them into wagons, vans, and trains for transport to death camps. Eichmann considered Brunner “his best man.”
Unlike Eichmann, however, Brunner was more than just a genocide planner. He trained cadres of Gestapo, German police, SS officers, and Nazi collaborators, like Trawniki men, in the art of exterminating Jews with speed and efficiency. And he practiced what he preached.
Brunner had rounded up and sent an estimated forty-seven thousand Austrian Jews for deportation, personally leading one transport to an SS camp outside Riga, Latvia, before the death camps were up and running. From Vienna, Brunner went to Berlin, where he helped deport German Jews. He was then posted to Greece, where he sent an estimated forty-three thousand Salonika Jews to Auschwitz and Treblinka. After Greece, he was posted to France, where he took over the bustling Drancy transit camp outside Paris. As Drancy commandant, he sent another estimated twenty-five thousand men, women, and children directly to the gas chambers. From France, Brunner went to Slovakia to mop up the last remaining Jews.
France never forgave Brunner. In 1954, it convicted him in absentia and sentenced him to death. At the time, he was working for the United States in the Gehlen Org under the name Alois Schmaldienst. Fearing for his life, he fled to Syria, probably on the Vatican ratline, under the name Dr. Georg Fischer.
Syria welcomed Brunner, granted him asylum, and hired him to create a state security organization. Not long after he settled in Damascus, the CIA hired him through the Gehlen Org to help Egypt develop its brutal security police force. Brunner’s presence in the Middle East did not go unnoticed. The Israeli Mossad sent him a special greeting, but he survived. The letter bomb merely blinded him in one eye and tore off several fingers of his left hand.
When France and Germany learned that Brunner was living comfortably in a Damascus hotel, they requested his extradition. Syria refused to give him up. In 1987, Brunner granted the
Dr. Franz Six was a prewar college professor with degrees in law and political science and dean of the faculty of the prestigious University of Berlin. During the war, SS Brigadier General Six was an intelligence officer like Gehlen, a protege of Heinrich Himmler, and an Einsatzgruppe leader responsible for the murder of thousands of Jews and other civilians in the Soviet Union, according to recently declassified CIA files. Eichmann called him
