After the war, one United States, so to speak, used the CIC to find and punish Dr. Six for war crimes. He avoided detection and arrest by joining the other United States, which used the CIC to help staff the Gehlen Org. Unaware that Dr. Six was working for the United States, however, an ambitious CIC investigator discovered him and turned him over to the U.S. military tribunal at Nuremberg before the United States could rescue him.
Nuremberg convicted Dr. Six of murder and sentenced him to twenty years in prison. An attorney on the team that prosecuted Einsatzgruppen criminals at Nuremberg called Dr. Six “one of the biggest swine” of them all. After Dr. Six served four years in prison, America granted him clemency as part of its generous program to free Nazi war criminals convicted by the United States. A week later, Dr. Six was back at work for the United States in the Gehlen Org. He died a free man in Germany.
Dr. Emil Augsburg was a Polish-born colleague of Dr. Six with a doctorate in Soviet studies. In 1941, he joined the SD. His assignment was to carry out “special duties” in Poland, a euphemism for killing Polish Jews, according to recently declassified CIA files. Like Dr. Six, Augsburg also led an Einsatzkommando unit in the Crimea region of Russia, where the German army had captured Iwan Demjanjuk in May 1942. Augsburg’s personnel records show that he had achieved “extraordinary results… in special tasks,” another euphemism for the murder of Jews. The extraordinary results earned him a promotion to major.
Around the same time the German army took Demjanjuk prisoner during the battle of Kerch, Augsburg was seriously wounded in an air attack and evacuated to Berlin. After his recuperation, the SS assigned him to create an index of Soviet leaders to be targeted for behind-the-lines assassination. After the war, Augsburg hid in a Benedictine monastery in East Germany and eventually made his way to the Vatican, where he found a safe haven.
His creation of the Soviet name index made Augsburg, aka Althaus and Alberti, extremely valuable to the Org. Gehlen hired his former colleague and gave him two critical espionage assignments—to supervise the agent net that interrogated emigres and defectors from the East, and to create airtight cover stories for Org agents scheduled to cross into the Soviet Union on espionage assignments. Gehlen considered him “a shining star… a godsend.”
Poland convicted Augsburg in absentia, but Germany declined to hand him over for punishment. Instead it hired him to work for Gehlen, who was now employed by the new West German intelligence service. Germany eventually fired Augsburg on suspicion of working for communist East Germany. Like Dr. Six, Emil Augsburg died a free man.
SS Major Erich Deppner was to Holland what Klaus Barbie was to France and Robert Jan Verbelen was to Belgium. His assignment from Berlin was to crush the virulent Dutch resistance. As the head of a security team, Deppner is credited with torturing and murdering approximately 450 Dutch resistance fighters, according to Dutch sources. He also is credited with killing the last remaining Soviet POWs held in Holland’s Kamp Amersfoort.
Deppner commands a highly emotional place in the memory of Holland’s Jewish community. He was the first commandant of the Dutch transit camp of Westerbork, from which more than one hundred thousand Jews, including Anne Frank, were transported to death camps—at first to Auschwitz, and later to Sobibor during the time John Demjanjuk was allegedly serving as an SS guard there.
The United States hired Deppner, aka Egon Dietrich and Ernst Borchert, through the Gehlen Org. Precisely what he did for Rusty and Zipper is not fully known. The Dutch repeatedly asked Germany to extradite him, but Germany always refused. Finally, in 1964, almost twenty years after the war and perhaps under pressure from Holland, West Germany tried Deppner for murdering more than sixty Soviet POWs. Germany acquitted him for the same reason Austria had acquitted Robert Jan Verbelen—he had just been following orders.
Like Franz Six and Emil Augsburg, Erich Deppner died a free man, in 2005.
Based on newly declassified documents, it is possible to draw several conclusions about the Gehlen Organization. First, when the CIA took over “control” of the Gehlen Org from the CIC in 1949, shortly after Congress had approved the CIA’s new espionage charter, the agency’s employment policy was simple and clear. As historian Naftali put it: “There was no internal CIA policy against hiring Nazi war criminals.”
Second, Operation Zipper grew like a tumor as long as the CIA nourished it with cash. The Gehlen Org was so bloated that, at its peak, it was running up to four thousand agents and informants for the United States.
Third, the CIA never lost control of the Org because it never had control. And it certainly didn’t know how many Nazi war criminals it was employing through Gehlen. Nor did it care.
Fourth, the Gehlen Org was corrupt from top to bottom. Besides the usual internal power struggles and competition for talent and money, the Org was infested with double agents, double and triple dipping, Soviet moles, and fraudulent reporting. Much, if not most, of the information the Gehlen Org provided the United States was based on rumor, faulty sources, and outright lies.
Finally, under the guise of national security protection and perhaps as a final World War II irony, the Gehlen Org turned out to be a danger to U.S. national security. As a rogue espionage program, it opened a back door into U.S. intelligence operations in Europe for communist moles. And it deliberately planted or cultivated a false notion in the minds of Washington decision makers and eager spooks like Frank Wisner. That false notion cost the United States billions of dollars, created unrealistic expectations in emigre communities, and cost the lives of thousands of covert operatives and underground insurgent soldiers who believed in America.
Reinhard Gehlen had convinced the United States that Stalin was about to attack West Germany and start World War III. He spoon-fed the United States the lie because he thought—and rightly so—that the lie was what the budget-hungry Pentagon and CIA wanted to hear. The Allen Dulleses, the Frank Wisners, the J. Edgar Hoovers, and the Joe McCarthys of America were all ears.
Victor Marchetti, a former Soviet military analyst for the CIA and a vocal critic of the agency’s failed policies, summarized the value of the Org in sobering terms.
“The Gehlen organization provided nothing worthwhile in understanding or estimating Soviet military or political capability in Eastern Europe or elsewhere,” Marchetti wrote. “The agency loved Gehlen because he fed us what we wanted to hear. We used his stuff constantly, and we fed it to everybody else: the Pentagon, the White House, the newspapers. They loved it, too. But it was hyped up Russian Boogeyman junk, and it did a lot of damage to this country.”
Whether or not one agrees with Marchetti’s harsh assessment, the conclusion to America’s ten-year espionage waltz with Reinhard Gehlen is as inescapable as it is damning. Under the guise of national security, and based on false assumptions and misguided Cold War pragmatism, the United States allowed itself to be duped into becoming an international employment agency for Nazi war criminals and terrorists.
Finally, as symbols of corruption and cover-up, Robert Jan Verbelen, Mykola Lebed, and Reinhard Gehlen add perspective and context to the John Demjanjuk story. By all Holocaust standards, Demjanjuk was a minor war criminal, a colorless death camp guard whom no one seems to remember. As a Trawniki man, he had no intelligence value to the United States. After the war, he didn’t work for the CIC, the CIA, the Gehlen Org, or the FBI. He tested diesel motors for the Ford Motor Company in Ohio and was not privy to embarrassing U.S. secrets.
That made John Demjanjuk a perfect diversion for the American intelligence establishment with secrets to hide, and perfect fodder for the American justice system and its courts.
PART FIVE
Justice on Trial
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
