The Nazis Next Door (7 page)

“We knew what we were doing,”
said Harry Rositzke, a CIA officer who ran the agency’s Soviet spy section in Munich in the early 1950s. “It was a visceral business of using any bastard as long as he was anti-Communist . . . The eagerness or desire to enlist collaborators means that sure, you didn’t look at their credentials too closely.” Wrote another CIA officer in 1953: “The West is fighting
a desperate battle with the East, with the Soviets, and we will pick up any man who will help us defeat the Soviets—any man no matter what his Nazi record was.”

As part of one secret spy program called Operation Happiness, the Americans provided a roster of newly freed ex-Gestapo officers with money, jobs for their children, promises of immunity, and a bevy of other enticements in exchange for their service. Even then, some of Hitler’s men turned them down rather than work for Germany’s conquerors. “A burned child avoids fire,” remarked one ex-Gestapo leader, working as a watchmaker in West Germany a few years after the war, as he refused the Army’s repeated overtures. He wouldn’t work for them,
the watchmaker told U.S. officials, “regardless of how much they would pay him.” As badly as the Americans wanted the Nazis, the Nazis didn’t always want them.

The zeal that the United States had shown at Nuremberg for punishing Nazi war criminals was already on the wane. For the first four years after the war, the United States on its own had tried and executed 277 German war criminals, imprisoning more than 700 others.
Retribution was swift. But within the newly formed West Germany, pressure was mounting on the Americans by the late 1940s to show leniency toward dozens of convicted Nazis already sentenced to the gallows or long prison sentences for war crimes. The Russian threat, as always, was at the center of America’s calculations over what to do about the Nazis. With war breaking out in Korea in 1950 in a proxy fight between Moscow and Washington, the West Germans made their leverage plain: if Truman wanted their help in confronting the Soviets, the Americans would have to show Germans convicted of war crimes some forgiveness.

The decision on whether to grant leniency to the Nazis fell to John McCloy, a pragmatic Washington lawyer who led the American operations in Germany after the war. McCloy’s seeming indifference to the horrors of the Nazis’ genocide was already on display. As a top official in the Roosevelt administration during the war, McCloy in 1944 had rejected repeated pleas from Jewish leaders and from FDR’s own War Refugee Board to bomb the train line from Hungary to Auschwitz, or the concentration camps themselves, in an attempt to disrupt the mass killings. Now, seven years later, with the West Germans pressuring him to extend clemency to convicted war criminals, McCloy complied. In January 1951 he announced that he was sparing twenty-one Nazi war criminals from execution and slashing the jail terms of dozens more, allowing them to walk out of prison to freedom. Among the beneficiaries were Nazi officers who had taken part in notorious war massacres; scientists involved in the medical experiments at concentration camps; and industrialists who had helped to build and finance Germany’s gas chambers and missiles, profiting handsomely. The British and the French were outraged by the Americans’ sudden generosity. The West Germans, of course, were thrilled; they knew they had the Cold War and the flare-up in Asia to thank. “Now that the Americans have Korea
on their hands,” smirked one German industrialist given his early freedom on slave-labor charges, “they are a lot more friendly.”

The Americans’ shift in attitude meant not just freedom for many of the accused war criminals in those early years after the war; it meant jobs and protection as well, as the American spy chiefs moved to exploit their newfound partners in the Cold War. So it was that America’s network of “reformed,” Communist-hating Nazis took root less than a decade after Nazi Germany’s surrender.

In New York, a Nazi collaborator named Mikola Lebed worked with the CIA to stir Soviet resistance among Ukrainian immigrants in America. He gave anti-Soviet speeches, ran CIA front groups, and traveled back to Europe on occasion for covert assignments. During the war, Lebed had been “a well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans” in the Ukraine, according to a witness account in the Army’s own files, and was linked to the “wholesale murders” of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. Intelligence officials smuggled him into the United States with his wife and daughter anyway, and when the INS tried to deport him in 1952 over reports of his war crimes, Allen Dulles blocked the move; Lebed’s spy work was of “inestimable value”
to the CIA, Dulles wrote.

Outside Los Angeles, Andrija Artukovic, the top-level Nazi collaborator implicated in the murders of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Serbs, and Roma, became a friendly resource for the FBI in tracking Communist threats in America. With rival Croatian refugees accusing him of war crimes, Artukovic was happy to have the government on his side, and he made clear to agents “his deep appreciation of the FBI’s interest in his safety.”

In Washington, one of Hitler’s top Russia aides, Gustav Hilger,
was still shadowing the Soviets—but now as a secret analyst for the CIA. Although he was wanted in Europe for Nazi war crimes, senior State Department and CIA leaders intervened on Hilger’s behalf and brought him to the United States under an alias, giving him high-level security clearance and the veneer of respectability through postings at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. Hilger made no apologies for his Nazi loyalties. “I feel no need
to defend my actions or opinions; nothing urges me to make emphatic avowals or denials of my past life,” he wrote in 1953 from his new home in America.

In Jordan’s capital city of Amman, meanwhile, Tscherim Soobzokov trolled through immigrant hangouts on orders from the CIA to identify fellow refugees from the North Caucasus—White Russians, as they called themselves—who hated the Soviets as much as he did. As part of a classified covert program, his job was to recruit other immigrants from the old country who might be willing to spy on Russia for the Americans.

In Bavaria, Klaus Barbie—better known in Nazi-occupied France during the war as the Butcher of Lyon—was living with his family in a comfortable apartment provided by the Americans. He was earning a decent wage as a spy. Lounging poolside, he and other ex-Nazi operatives would use a municipal swimming hole in Bavaria as a convenient spot to meet their American contacts; they figured their comings and goings would attract less attention that way. When French authorities demanded his extradition—“Arrest Barbie Our Torturer!” implored one headline—the Americans refused to turn him over. As tensions with the French rose, U.S. agents spirited him out of Europe altogether, bringing him to Bolivia in 1951. Barbie seemed like
an “honest man,” one Army assessment concluded, and his value to the United States as an anti-Soviet agent was simply “too great” to give him up.

Nowhere was the postwar collaboration between ex-Nazis and American intelligence officials seen more vividly than in Germany itself. There, under a secret program code-named Rusty, some four thousand agents under the control of a well-connected ex-Nazi brigadier general named Reinhard Gehlen began spying for the Americans almost immediately after the war. With the United States and Russia maneuvering to control postwar Europe in a divided Germany and beyond, Gehlen’s men would secretly lay surveillance cables along the Russian zones, monitor the Soviets’ radio traffic, and toil along European rail lines to get intelligence on their movements. America’s own spies did not know the German locales or the language well enough for such rudimentary spy-craft, so the Army and the CIA farmed out the work to Gehlen’s men. “Now was the ideal time
to gain intelligence [on] the Soviet Union if we were ever going to get it,” said one American agent working with the ex-Nazi general.

Many of Gehlen’s agents—at least a hundred, by one count,
and probably more—had clear ties to Nazi atrocities; they were better described as “outlaws” than intelligence assets, one American military agent wrote in warning against hiring them. Gehlen’s group, financed by the Americans, became a safe haven for war criminals of all stripes and levels. One of his couriers had served on a mobile Nazi killing unit linked to the murders of eleven thousand Jews. Another Gehlen man killed Russian political prisoners during the war. A third was responsible for recycling the clothing seized from Jews en route to the death camps in Poland.

Just how many war criminals Gehlen employed in his European spy ring was a mystery, however, because the onetime Nazi general at the center of the vast postwar fiefdom refused to give his military and CIA handlers the real names of his agents. Indeed, he ran his burgeoning network with impunity. The United States paid his group a half-million dollars a year in the early years after the war. Gehlen was even feted on a red carpet tour of America in 1951 that included a World Series game at Yankee Stadium. The general showed little appreciation. If he answered his handlers’ queries at all, he would often feed them half-truths and disinformation, or play them off the French and the British, who were also vying for his services. Starved for information on the Russians, American intelligence officials continued working with Gehlen and paying him despite their frequent misgivings. Sometimes the Army officers chasing Nazi war criminals would press for information about the wartime activities of one of Gehlen’s notorious agents. Back off, American intelligence officials told them; these were Gehlen’s men. They were untouchable.

While their American handlers tried to airbrush their records for appearance’s sake, some of the ex-Nazi spies did not bother to disguise their ideology, or their crimes. Theodor Saevecke, an SS officer who worked with Adolf Eichmann, had rounded up Jews during the war to send to slave-labor camps, and had admitted ordering the public executions of political prisoners in a town square in Italy as a demonstration of unflinching Nazi force. Even when he went to work for the CIA in postwar Europe, he was unrepentant—and brutally candid in a way that unnerved his American bosses. Most of the former Nazis in the CIA’s employ at least tried to hide their criminal pasts, but their man Saevecke “still hankers back after the days when the [Nazi] Party was in the saddle,” his CIA handler wrote in 1951. “He is convinced that the principles of National Socialism
were sound.”

When Saevecke faced war crimes accusations from survivors in Italy, he turned for protection, not surprisingly, to the CIA. Saevecke had two cards to play: besides his spy work for the agency after the war, he also claimed to have helped Allen Dulles and Nazi general Karl Wolff in the final weeks of the war to negotiate the early surrender in Italy. Dulles, who by now had risen to CIA director, didn’t remember him, but he was willing to help anyway, if possible, just as he had with Wolff and a number of others. “Our attitude on [Saevecke] will depend on how bad he really was,” Dulles wrote. “If his past [is] in any way defensible,” the CIA would try to make the war crimes charges go away and allow him to continue his espionage work. If not, the CIA suggested, the agency could always find him a job at a private detective agency as “insurance” against something going wrong.

Lucky for Saevecke, it didn’t come to that. With the help of whitewashed documents furnished by the CIA, the former SS officer was “exonerated” of war crimes accusations and remained a free man for another three decades, living off a pension from West Germany and dying of old age in 1988.

The Nazis’ past crimes were of little importance, moral or otherwise, to their American intelligence handlers. The only real deterrent to using them as spies, though minimal, was the risk of political embarrassment or diplomatic run-ins should those crimes, and the Americans’ knowledge of them, become known.

Wilhelm Höttl, a fervent Nazi and a notorious con artist, was virtually unknown outside the spy world in the years after the war. Inside the halls of the CIA, he would prove one of the most damaging of all the Nazi spies. An early supporter of Hitler and the Nazi Party, the Austrian-born Höttl was a senior officer in the Nazis’ SD branch, the security division, working to deepen Hitler’s hold over occupied Italy and Hungary. Self-assured and convincing, he emerged from the war largely unscathed—regarded as a “witness” to the Nazis’ war crimes rather than a major player. Indeed, his testimony at the Nuremberg trials would produce one of the most wrenching and indelible moments, and a statement that would echo for decades. As a witness at Nuremberg, Höttl recounted a conversation in which the fugitive Eichmann had confided to him that the Nazis had killed six million Jews—four million in concentration camps and another two million elsewhere. But Höttl, despite his claims of innocence, was no mere bystander: his own involvement ran deep, as a top officer under Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a leading Nazi SS man who was ultimately executed after Nuremberg. Höttl himself was implicated in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews.

It was Allen Dulles, predictably, who first pursued Höttl as an American spy. At the same time that Dulles was working with General Wolff in Italy at the close of the war, he was also authorizing separate talks with Höttl in Austria. “H. is, of course, dangerous. He is a Nazi,”
an American intelligence officer wrote to Dulles in 1945, in reference to Höttl. As a result, any contact with him should be “as indirect as possible,” the officer said. Still, Höttl made a “favorable impression” and appeared sincere and trustworthy, the officer wrote; using him as an American spy, even at a distance, seemed worth the risk.

Dulles agreed,
echoing the assessment: “This type of source requires utmost caution.” Höttl’s wartime record with the SS “is, of course, bad,” Dulles added. “But I believe he desires to save his skin and therefore may be useful.”

As the delicate dance between Höttl and his handlers continued in the months after Germany’s surrender, it was difficult to tell who had the upper hand—the Americans who had just won the war, or the vanquished Nazi officers who wanted to sell them their spy services. The Americans were desperate for intelligence on the Communists, and Höttl knew precisely which weak spots to hit in his dealings with Dulles. The British, he told one American interrogator, had a “well-established” intelligence operation in Europe, while the Americans clearly did not. Their intelligence operations in Europe were weak, he said, and they would inevitably have to turn to ex-Nazis like himself for information. “I believe that I can be of considerable benefit to the interests of the USA,” Höttl said, sounding like an eager job applicant; his knowledge of the Soviets, he added, should not “be left unused in an internment camp.”