The Nazis Next Door (13 page)

Just a few years later, however, von Bolschwing realized that Hitler was bound to fall. So, like General Wolff in Italy and other senior Nazis, he decided to cast his lot with the Americans. He began secretly providing intelligence to the U.S. Army about his Nazi colleagues and about German military operations even as the war was still being waged. He pledged his “loyalty to the United States.”
Yes, he had been an SS officer, he admitted to the Americans, but he had turned against Hitler by the end, he insisted; he was an
opponent
of the führer and had tried to bring him down, he claimed. There was no mention of his work with Eichmann to rid Germany of the Jews; only of his newfound commitment to helping America defeat the Nazi scourge. Army officials were impressed. Von Bolschwing, his American handlers believed, was one of the “good” Nazis; one of the reformed ones who had denounced the evils of Nazism and could now be used to help the United States. His cooperation at the end of the war was “virtually indispensable,” an Army colonel wrote in August 1945. There was no thought of investigating the SS officer for possible war crimes, only of finding more ways for the United States to utilize him. “It is with pleasure that I commend him for his fine work,” the Army colonel wrote in one letter of reference, “and recommend him without hesitation to any Military organization with which he may come in contact in the future.”

The glowing endorsements opened doors for von Bolschwing. In the early years after the war, with American intelligence officials scrambling to find any ex-Nazis they could to provide dirt on the Soviets, von Bolschwing showed up all around Europe. The former Eichmann aide worked for a time with the spy ring of Wilhelm Höttl, the Nazi SS leader who had convinced American intelligence officials that his knowledge of the Russians should not “be left unused in an internment camp.” Von Bolschwing also caught on with Reinhard Gehlen’s American-funded spy network—until Gehlen, the former Nazi general, dropped him for ineptitude and insubordination. The setback to his spy career was short-lived: the CIA picked up von Bolschwing in the early 1950s to run his own spy network informing on the Soviets in Austria. The Americans paid him some $20,000 a year
to run a small group of ex-Nazi spies, with a “long overdue” raise promised to boost their “general morale.” Von Bolschwing was now a valued American employee. When he developed stomach problems—the apparent result of stress from his spy work—the Americans ordered him to take a month’s vacation to rest up. When he needed a car, they found him one. With a long record of anti-Russian work on his Nazi resumé, he promised the Americans a treasure-trove of secrets on the Soviets and their plans for Europe. But like the cache of gold he had chased in Palestine years earlier, his bold claims produced little but dust. Sometimes he even proved to be a liability. Once, on a train ride in Austria in 1953, von Bolschwing managed to lose a suitcase filled with classified American spy photos, film, and an incriminating letter exposing the identity of a fellow undercover agent. In a moment of what the CIA called “sheer foolhardiness,” von Bolschwing had mistakenly swapped his suitcase for another bag on the train, this one filled with toiletries, a pajama top, and a dress shirt. Twelve days later, after a frantic search and a bit of blind luck, von Bolschwing managed to retrieve his bag with all the top-secret material still safely inside. The CIA breathed easier. “We are convinced, after this affair,” his American boss wrote gratefully, “that there is a Goddess of Good, who must look over our left shoulder and does favor us with an occasional smile.”

Some officials within the CIA, however, had doubts from the start about the agency’s bungling, well-paid ex-Nazi spy.

What was known about von Bolschwing’s war record with the Nazis “rests almost entirely
on his own unsupported statements,” an early CIA assessment of its new spy noted. Von Bolschwing was “self seeking, egotistical, and a man of shifting loyalties,” and his claims to have been a Nazi opponent who tried to thwart Hitler didn’t hold up to scrutiny. He was “a shady character,” another CIA memo concluded bluntly. “Hold him with a tight rein,” one assessment warned.

Yes, von Bolschwing admitted to being a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party before and during the war, but only as a way of getting government approval for a cement factory he wanted to build in East Prussia, he insisted. It was simply a business decision. The CIA knew better. Inside its own files was a mound of evidence linking him directly to Eichmann and top echelons of the SS. After the war, the agency noted in his file, “Bolschwing was denounced by a source believed to be reliable, as a member of the notorious SD Sonderkommando ‘Eichmann’ [team].” Another source in Poland identified him as the SS’s top man in Romania in aiding the Iron Guard.

But the CIA stuck with von Bolschwing nonetheless. His membership in the Nazi Party under Hitler was “relatively inconsequential, particularly in view of subject’s excellent service on our behalf,” one assessment concluded.

Indeed, the CIA would rally to the ex-Nazi officer’s aid many times over the years. When the Austrians inquired about von Bolschwing in 1950 because of war crimes suspicions surrounding him, CIA officials covered for him. The Austrians were told that there was “no file available.” It was a lie of necessity, the CIA believed. One senior CIA official cabled: “Consider it essential
[von Bolschwing] maintain present position and freedom of movement.” When von Bolschwing ran into visa problems a few years later, the CIA tried to help get him citizenship in Austria, even after lying to the Austrians about his Nazi past. When that didn’t work, they took another course that von Bolschwing had favored all along—to “realize his dream of becoming an American citizen.” To get him into the United States, the CIA sped up his visa application and cleaned up his record—with instructions for von Bolschwing and officials at the CIA not to say anything to U.S. immigration officials about his Nazi affiliation. The extraordinary treatment was “a reward for his loyal post-war service and in view of the innocuousness of his [Nazi] party activities,” the CIA wrote. The spy agency attended to every detail of the relocation. When Mrs. von Bolschwing, who feared flying, expressed anxiety about taking a plane to America, the CIA booked passage for the couple on the luxurious
Andrea Doria
cruise ship instead. With the family’s “smooth landing” happily confirmed by the CIA on February 2, 1954, a military intelligence officer who had worked with von Bolschwing in Europe after the war was there to greet them and even to host them in his Boston home for their first few months in America. Less than a decade after the Nazis’ defeat, Ossie had a new home and a new life.

It was a comfortable life, and a profitable one, as von Bolschwing used his expertise in international trade to become an executive for a series of big drug and chemical companies in America, including Warner-Lambert and the Cabot Corporation.
He would travel back to Germany, back to the place where he had worked for Eichmann decades earlier, to consult on big projects like a carbon plant that Cabot was building in Frankfurt. If his colleagues knew anything about his true past, they did not say. He was so well-connected that he was even in line for a prestigious State Department posting in India as an American representative in international development. That is, until his old boss in the Jewish Affairs office was captured that spring day in 1960. Eichmann’s capture threatened all that. Von Bolschwing feared that he was next. So he went back to the one place he thought could best help him: the CIA.

When the agency had brought him to America six years earlier as a reward for his good work, his handlers had ordered him—for his sake and for theirs—to break off all contact. He had been told to come back to his old CIA bosses only in a “dire emergency,” a “life or death” situation. In von Bolschwing’s mind, the capture of his old Nazi boss in Argentina qualified as just such an event. When he learned of Eichmann’s brazen abduction, he went immediately to one of his old CIA handlers to ask for protection. His own name was bound to come out at Eichmann’s trial, he predicted. (He was right; it did.) He wasn’t worried about just the prospect that the Israelis would try to abduct him as they had Eichmann, he told the CIA; he was “afraid for his life.”

So, after a six-year estrangement from its ex-Nazi spy, the CIA went back to work to help von Bolschwing. The agency had as much reason as he did to fear the possible fallout from Eichmann’s capture. American intelligence officials had done little for years to find Eichmann, despite his global notoriety. By 1952, when the Austrians asked about Eichmann’s status as a fugitive, America’s waning interest was clear. “Prosecution of war criminals is no longer considered of primary importance to U.S. Authorities,” an Army intelligence official wrote in an internal memo. Two years before the Israelis captured Eichmann, in fact, the CIA received a tantalizing lead that Eichmann might be living in Argentina under the last name “Clemens.” The CIA did nothing. Not until the Israelis
captured “Ricardo Klement” in Buenos Aires did officials at the spy agency realize—or care—just how close they had come to nabbing the world’s most notorious Nazi.

Worse still for the CIA, von Bolschwing was just one of at least five ex-Nazis associated with Eichmann and the Final Solution who had worked with the CIA after the war in providing Soviet intelligence. The other four, unlike von Bolschwing, had remained in Europe, but their ties to the CIA ran almost as deep. CIA officials, alarmed by the implications of Eichmann’s capture, combed their own files to determine how much damage von Bolschwing and the others might inflict. They were desperate to keep von Bolschwing’s name—and his involvement with the CIA and with Eichmann—out of the newspapers.

West German agents, meanwhile, spent a month in Washington going through secret U.S. intelligence files on their own. Only then, CIA officials said in a string of secret, internal memos, did the agency unearth “voluminous information” about Eichmann that linked von Bolschwing directly to him and the Jewish Affairs office. Of course, much of the evidence linking von Bolschwing to Eichmann had been sitting in the CIA’s own files for years, but officials at Langley played dumb, blaming von Bolschwing ‘s dishonesty for their current predicament as they tried to assess the damage. The agent “failed to advise us
that he had been involved with several war criminals,” one internal memo said flatly. They knew von Bolschwing was a Nazi, CIA officials admitted; they just didn’t realize how bad a Nazi he really was. For the CIA, it was better to appear duped by an Eichmann collaborator than complicit with one.

Von Bolschwing’s pleas for help set off months of memos, in-house reviews, and handwringing at the CIA. Ultimately, the agency was willing to give the desperate von Bolschwing what he wanted: silence and protection. The CIA would not give him up to the Israelis, the agency assured him. Nor would it tell the U.S. Justice Department what it knew about his true Nazi past and risk a messy deportation case if prosecutors were to try to throw him out of the country. No one else even had to know that Ossie von Bolschwing was living the good life of an American businessman in New York City.

But the CIA’s silence came with one condition, and it was not negotiable. Von Bolschwing was still being considered for the plum job in India with a State Department development agency, thanks to the support of a former governor in New Jersey who ran the export firm where he worked. He would have to drop out of the running for the post, CIA officials decided. Immediately. The agency could not risk the publicity the job was bound to bring him just as the case against Eichmann was ramping up in Israel. “It is our assumption,” an internal CIA memo warned, that von Bolschwing “may be named as EICHMANN’S collaborator and fellow conspirator and that the resulting publicity may prove embarrassing to the U.S. if the subject becomes involved with [the State Department agency] or its activities.” Without saying exactly why, the CIA pressured the State Department to drop von Bolschwing from consideration. That failed; he had too much support. CIA officials realized that they needed to get von Bolschwing himself to drop out. He needed to be told point-blank, the CIA decided, that unless he withdrew his bid for the job, the CIA would have no choice but to let his political supporters know all about his Nazi past and his ties to Eichmann—“with resultant unpleasantness to himself.”

So, on a spring evening in New York City, two CIA officials who worked with von Bolschwing during his spy days in Eastern Europe sat him down to deliver the ultimatum: either relinquish the State Department job or risk the messy consequences. Despite the ominous message, von Bolschwing’s visitors struck a conciliatory tone. The CIA, his old handler began, valued his “continued friendship.” Agency officials did feel a bit duped by everything they were now learning of his close ties to Eichmann, his handler admitted, but no one was angry with him, he stressed, and the meeting wasn’t meant as a punishment. “The purpose of the meeting,
it was explained, was to draw his attention to the scandal that might result if he pressed his desire for employment” with the State Department, his handler wrote afterward. Eichmann’s arrest had simply made it impossible for von Bolschwing to serve in a government post, they said.

Von Bolschwing protested. It was ridiculous for anyone to suggest that he had been Eichmann’s collaborator, he said. He brought out a denazification certificate he had received in Austria after the war. Surely that was evidence of his innocence, was it not? He tried to walk his old CIA colleagues through his career with the Nazis—to explain how he’d been forced to join the party and played only a nominal role before turning against Hitler. They cut him off. They had expected his strident denials. They had read through all the new material linking him to Eichmann in the Jewish Affairs office. It was obvious, his handler told von Bolschwing, that he had told the CIA “far less than the truth about his Nazi activities.” As much as he liked von Bolschwing, he said, it was impossible to believe from the SS records in their possession that he was anything but an active participant and full partner in Eichmann’s operations in Nazi Germany. That was all likely to spill out into public view if he pushed ahead with the State Department posting, his handler warned him. The record of his SS activities with Eichmann, if it became known, would surely make him “a pariah” in America and Europe. There was the risk not just of a public shaming, but of a war crimes prosecution. Did he really want to go through “the anguish and expense of a legal trial before a West German or Israeli court?” his handler asked.