GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

GENERAL REINHARD GEHLEN:

THE BANALITY OF COLLABORATION

HIST 606: COLLABORATION IN WWII

DR. AVIEL ROSHWALD

BY

SEAN P. MCBRIDE

WASHINGTON, DC

6 MAY 2010

AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM

McBride, 1

Introduction

On April 1, 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Reinhard Gehlen assumed command of the German

General Staff intelligence division, Fremde Heere Ost [FHO].1 On February 27, 1945, Brigadier

General Reinhard Gehlen personally met with Adolf Hitler in the Reich Chancellery to discuss

the strategic situation on the Eastern Front.2 On July 1, 1946, Reinhard Gehlen departed

Washington, D.C. with Pentagon authorization and support to reactivate his spy network against

the Soviet Union.3 On September 20, 1950, Gehlen met with Konrad Adenauer at the Koenig

Museum in Bonn to discuss the reformation of his spy service under full West German

sovereignty.4 On April 1, 1956, the Gehlen Organization became the West German

Bundesnachrichtensdienst [BND],5 and Gehlen was commissioned a Lieutenant General in the

newly formed Bundeswehr.6 As this string of events suggests, Gehlen continually worked to

develop and operate an intelligence network against the Soviet Union from 1942 until his 1968

retirement, serving in turn Adolf Hitler, the United States Army, the Central Intelligence

Agency, and Adenauer’s Christian Democrats.

The first comprehensive attempt to explain Reinhard Gehlen’s provocative career was

made by Julius Mader, an East German intellectual who earned a doctorate in the “development,

system, and methods” of the “imperialist” West German intelligence service.7 Mader argued that

Gehlen was the Cold War equivalent of Mephistopheles from Goethe’s Faust, a “Fascist General

1 Heinz Höhne and Hermann Zolling, The General was a Spy: The Truth About General Gehlen and His

Spy Ring (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc., 1972), 10. 2 Reinhard Gehlen, The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen (New York: World Publishing,

1972), 2. 3 Jens Wegener, Die Organisation Gehlen und die USA: Deutsch-amerikanische Geheimdienstbeziehungen

1945-1949 (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2008), 66. 4 Mary Ellen Reese, General Reinhard Gehlen: The CIA Connection (Fairfax: George Mason University

Press, 1990), 120. 5 Reese, 141.

6 Gehlen, 380.

7 Helmut Müller-Enbergs, Wer war wer in der DDR?, 4th ed. (Berlin: Links Verlag, 2006), s.v. “Julius

Mader.”

McBride, 2

Staff Officer”8 that successfully carried out his “diabolical plan”

9 to plant “the seed of Satan”

10

in the anti-Fascist alliance of the Great Patriotic War by offering the United States knowledge of

the Soviet Union in exchange for permission to become “America's number one Spy in Europe…

without the knowledge of either the US Congress or the American People.”11

The American

Faust character thus gained intelligence on the Soviet Union, but at the cost of starting an

ideological Cold War in support of “the dream of Himmler and Schellenburg,” namely the

resurrection of Hitler's General Staff to serve as a foundation for the eventual rearmament of

Germany.12

Despite his impressive synthesis of literary flourish and sound Marxist-Leninism, this

paper disagrees with the theoretical conclusions reached by Julius Mader. Reinhard Gehlen was

never impressive enough to cause such a dramatic shift in the international political arena (often

characterized as “slight, soft-spoken[,] small and slim”),13

and his intelligence analysis (exposed

as a complete failure by intercepts from the ULTRA program)14

could never match

Mephistopheles’ offer of unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Nevertheless, Mader

correctly identifies the central puzzle of the U.S.-Gehlen relationship: how can a fellow-traveler

of the Nazi party’s war of aggression against the Soviet Union end up in the employ of the U.S.

Army mere months after Hitler’s suicide? How was he able to shield war criminals from

denazification efforts, aid German rearmament, and monopolize control over the clandestine arm

of the West German regime? What did this association mean in light of the subsequent Cold

8 Julius Mader, Die Graue Hand: Eine Abrechnung mit dem Bonner Geheimdienst (East Berlin: Kongress

Verlag, 1960), 52. 9 Mader, 43.

10 Mader, 101.

11 Julius Mader and Albrecht Charisius, Nicht Länger Geheim: Entwicklung, System und Arbeitsweise des

imperialistischen deutschen Geheimdienstes (East Berlin: Deutscher Militärverlag, 1969), 136. 12

Mader and Charisius, 136. 13

Reese, 4. 14

Wegener, 9.

McBride, 3

War? Furthermore, against which yardstick should we then judge Reinhard Gehlen? When was

Gehlen actually collaborating? Ultimately, this paper seeks to address these questions through

the framework of collaboration.

Historiography and Declassification

The study of Reinhard Gehlen is admittedly problematic due to the complexities of

historically studying espionage and clandestine intelligence organizations. Because spies

professionally work with secrets and operate covertly, scholarly efforts to unearth and analyze

those secrets in order to form coherent narratives are closely related to the paradox of clandestine

government agencies in open democratic societies. It is thus especially telling that the polemical

East German Julius Mader has been the only scholar to defend a doctoral dissertation on the

Gehlen Organization and the BND. At the mercy of the delicate balancing act between freedom

of information and national security, the primary sources available on Reinhard Gehlen have

been entirely dependent on the halts and spurts of government declassification.

Early works on Gehlen relied largely on the 36,852 typescript pages of FHO reports that

Gehlen handed over to the U.S. Army in exchange for clemency following World War II.15

While somewhat enlightening regarding Gehlen’s personal views of the Soviet Union and his

competency as an intelligence analyst, early efforts to use these documents to argue about

Gehlen’s post-1945 activities were highly speculative, written by either polemical East German

authors such as Julius Mader or Western journalists that used unsubstantiated off-the-record

sources to mythologize Gehlen as the “Spy of the Century.” This began to change when the U.S.

Army decided to declassify “well over a thousand” new intelligence documents on the 1950s

15

E.H. Cookridge, Gehlen: Spy of the Century (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972), 384.

McBride, 4

Gehlen Organization in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act.16

This decision,

accompanied by the subsequent agreement of several former U.S. intelligence officers to come

forward and tell their stories,17

provided the documentary basis for a series of less speculative

investigative works on the Gehlen Organization.

Based off these new sources, several works, exemplified by Christopher Simpson’s

Blowback, leveled the charge that the United States recruited former Nazis and SS officers to act

as clandestine agents for the CIA and its puppet Gehlen Organization.18

While Marxist authors

had long equated the CIA and the Gehlen Organization with the Waffen SS, the appearance of

these charges in the Western media increased political pressure for the declassification of

government documents relating to Western employment of Nazis and war criminals within the

CIA, the CIA-backed Gehlen Organization, and the West German BND.19

The initial outcome of

this pressure was the passage of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which resulted in the

formation of the Nazi War Criminal and Imperial Japanese Records Interagency Working Group,

tasked with finding and declassifying all U.S. government records relating to Nazi and Japanese

war crimes. With over 8 million pages of U.S. government records now declassified, including

thousands of new CIA documents on Gehlen, works such as U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis have

documented the controversial and troubling link between U.S. agencies and Nazi war criminals

in the early Cold War.20

Despite greater U.S. openness regarding this controversial element of

Cold War politics, the West German government has until very recently remained silent

16

Reese, xiii. 17

The most important of these new accounts are the memoirs of the CIA handler of the Gehlen

Organization throughout the period of CIA oversight. James H. Critchfield, Partners at the Creation: The

Men behind Postwar Germany’s Defense and Intelligence Establishments (Annapolis: Naval Institute

Press, 2003). 18

Christopher Simpson, Blowback (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), 5. 19

Wegener, 5. 20

Breitman et al, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

McBride, 5

regarding the BND’s employment of Nazis and war criminals. This has changed due to a March

18, 2010 article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung entitled “Eine ‘zweite Entnazifizierung,’”

which scandalously alleged that the covert collaboration between anti-Semitic war criminals and

anti-communist Western democracies continued under West German control into the 1960s,

deeply problematizing the postwar myth of Stunde Null.21

Under the pressure of this

controversy, the German government has finally begun in earnest to declassify compromising

BND documents. While it will be some time before these documents make their way into the

historiographical debate on German nationalism, intelligence history, and the Cold War, this

most-recent round of declassification finally allows scholars a complete view of this

controversial chapter of Cold War collaboration.

Pétain, Gehlen, and the Morality of Collaboration

Because the concept of collaboration originates out of the postwar French debate on the

Vichy regime, use of this theoretical lens has predominantly been limited to European

collaboration with German occupiers during World War II. Applying this analytical concept to

German collaboration with American occupiers during the Cold War therefore represents a

paradigm shift, necessitating that this paper reexamine and reevaluate the basic assumptions of

collaboration. Recent works by Timothy Brook on Chinese collaboration with the Japanese in

Manchukuo and mainland China22

and by Roger Peterson on collaboration and resistance within

the Soviet Bloc23

stand as previous attempts to shift the thematic debate outside of its narrow

21

Peter Carstens, “Eine ‘zweite Entnazifizierung’: NS-Verbrecher in BND,” Frankfurter Allgemeine

Zeitung, March 18, 2010, Inland Politik. Available at

[http://www.faz.net/s/Rub594835B672714A1DB1A121534F010EE1/Doc~EA65AAB2D1C2048249EAD3

E3BC2FA6BAA~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html]. 22

Timothy Brook, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 2005). 23

Roger Petersen, Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2001).

McBride, 6

temporal and geographical boundaries, but in many ways these newer examinations retain the

pejorative nationalist framework of collaboration as inherently immoral. Morality is equated

with the nation, making collaboration with the “other” an immoral exercise. In light of the

development of collaboration as an analytical concept during the postwar purge trials of Pétain

and other Vichy officials, it is understandable that this concept has become emotionally laden

with the charge of treason. However, by analyzing the German Reinhard Gehlen as a

collaborator rather than an occupier, this paper reverses the typical dynamic of WWII

collaboration.

This paper disputes the idea that the lessons of Vichy are universally applicable to all

forms of collaboration. Pétain collaborated with the Germans against the interests of the French

people (as defined ex post facto by de Gaulle and others with “proof of national sentiments”)24

,

ergo his actions were immoral and must be punished. This paper argues that this simplistic

analysis is both inaccurate and inappropriate, leading scholars such as Ben Cion Pinchuk to

conclude that “the use of [this] term… in research is problematic at best and misleading at

worst.”25

Viewing collaboration as a complex concept that transcends the specific characteristics

of Vichy or de Gaulle’s sense of nationalism, this paper takes Timothy Brook’s approach and

adopts Henrik Dethlefson’s minimalist definition of collaboration as “the continuing exercise of

power under the pressure produced by the presence of an occupying power.”26

In the spirit of treating collaboration as a “problem to be investigated” rather than a

“moral failure to be tagged and condemned,”27

this paper seeks to challenge the logic of using

24

Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago: The University

of Chicago Press, 2000), 123. 25

Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: the controversy over the Jedwabne

Massacre in Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 216. 26

Brook, 2. 27

Brook, 7.

McBride, 7

the nation-state as the basis for judging morality. Both Reinhard and Marshall Pétain were

military officers of a vaguely conservative bend from Roman Catholic backgrounds, who

decided to serve the interest of their former enemies and occupiers in the name of a common

conservative and anti-Communist ideology. Although both men were clearly collaborators,28

they suffered substantially different fates after the end of their collaborative relationships. Pétain

spent the rest of his life in captivity after having his death sentence commuted to life in prison,

while Gehlen went on to become the head of the German intelligence service. By shifting the

nation-state in question from France to Germany, this paper problematizes the idea that the

nation-state is fundamentally good or moral or that collaboration with an occupying power is

inherently immoral.

This paper also seeks to problematize the tendency to view collaboration with a foreign

occupier as unrelated to preexisting domestic political conflicts. This relates to the reevaluation

of the Vichy regime as “the very archetype of the guerre france-françoise,” effectively

redefining the conflicts of the Vichy years as the volcanic explosion of geothermal forces that

had long been active under the surface of the French nation.29

This paper views the capitulation

of Germany in 1945 (and to a lesser degree the German defeat at Stalingrad) as analogous to the

capitulation of France in 1940, in that both triggered profound identity crises based around

preexisting political fault lines. In the case of Pétain, the defeat of fascism discredited the

28

Both men quickly offered to collaborate with their erstwhile enemies soon after the defeat of their nations

in the battlefield. Following the July 10, 1940 vote providing him full powers, Philippe Pétain immediately

worked to redefine Franco-German relations along the lines of peaceful collaboration. Julian Jackson,

France: The Dark Years 1940-1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 139. Similarly, Reinhard

Gehlen planned to offer his expertise on the Soviet Union and the resources of FHO to the United States as

early as the end of 1944. Wegener, 57. Gehlen later wrote in his memoirs that he told his American captors

that “the collapse of the East-West alliance could only be a matter of time; a conflict of interest was bound

to break out between East and West and this would jeopardize the safety of Europe and of the United

States. So how could we reach an agreement as rapidly as possible on suitable terms for collaboration?”

Gehlen, 9. 29

Henry Rousso, The Vichy Synbrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1991), 6.

McBride, 8

National Revolution, ensuring that de Gaulle’s conception of the French nation became the

yardstick against which Vichy would be charged for treason.30

However, in the case of Gehlen,

the Allied invasion discredited National Socialism and divided the Reich, yet Gehlen himself

continued his intelligence career until 1968, albeit for different masters. Ultimately, these deep

continuities of Gehlen’s career merit a reevaluation of collaboration in the light of a potential

guerre france- françoise over the identity of the German nation.

By examining these problematic aspects of collaboration, this paper seeks to demonstrate

the historiographical futility of charging collaborators with treason. In the post-Nürmberg world

of international law, cosmopolitan thought, and human rights, the argument that one was “just

following orders” cannot excuse one from crimes against higher moral principles. When

German nationalism was used to pursue a policy of genocide and eugenics against

Untermenschen, treason became the moral course of action. The Holocaust has thus seriously

problematized the honor and morality previously attributed to the ancient Teutonic value of

Treue (fidelity). In this light, the nation appears as a deeply morally ambiguous construct,

especially in regards to its treatment of “others.”

Comparative Collaborations

Analyzing Gehlen’s career from 1942 until 1968 provides the ideal means to investigate

the analytical interrelationships and continuities between collaboration and preexisting domestic

political conflicts over the identity of the nation. Because Reinhard Gehlen did not consider

himself a National Socialist, an Atlanticist, or a democrat, each of the superiors that he served

from 1942 until 1968 can be considered an “other” of one kind or another. Reinhard Gehlen’s

career as a spymaster thus always remained a mixture of collaboration and resistance with

30

Jackson, 139.

McBride, 9

domestic and foreign “others” according to the “benefits and losses that [he] thought [he] could

decipher at the time.”31

His collaborations with the Nazis, the Americans, and the Christian

Democrats must therefore be viewed as an unapologetic attempt to steer his superiors towards his

unique and pragmatic sense of German nationalism based around a conservative vision of

German militarism, the values of the Prussian General Staff, and counterrevolutionary anti-

Communism.

Drawing from the concept of the guerre france-francoise, this paper argues against the

presumption of a universal conception of nationalism during periods of national trauma. Rather

than embracing a “post-national” agenda of discrediting the nation-state or denying the social

construction of national identity, the purpose of this argument is to reevaluate the theoretical

framework of collaboration in light of competing visions of the nation. Benedict Anderson is

correct in asserting that every nation is “imagined because the members of even the smallest

nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them,”32

but

this vision of individual imaginings of the nation must be countered with Aviel Roshwald’s

observation that most individuals cannot “construct their multifaceted identities out of whatever

cultural materials they happen to find in their attics.”33

The definition of the nation thus remains

a community effort, albeit one where different sub-national communities may imagine opposing

conceptions of the nation.

During a period of national trauma such as the guerre france-francoise, the tensions

between communities with opposing “imagined nations” can create a situation that approximates

the relationship between a domestic nationalist and a foreign occupier. Though the other

community is composed of fellow nationals, they become an “other” that poses a direct threat to

31

Brook, 245. 32

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), 6. 33

Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 301.

McBride, 10

the health and prosperity of the nation. The resulting us-them dichotomy thus retains numerous

commonalities with the traditional understanding of Collaboration. Adding to these

commonalties, the conflict between sub-national communities under an occupation, when

stripped of the labels of collaborators and resistors, often resemble political fault lines that

existed prior to the national trauma of capitulation. Just as the traditional archetype for the

modern pejorative definition of collaboration emerged from Vichy, the French National

Revolution emerged from the prewar guerre france-françoise. These links demonstrate that

scholars must pay more attention to the political contestation over defining the nation when

studying collaboration. As Reinhard Gehlen and others students of Clausewitz know, “war is a

continuation of political negotiation by other means,” suggesting that it is impossible to separate

either capitulation or occupation from the ongoing political negotiation over national identity.34

Judging from Reinhard Gehlen’s 1972 memoirs,35

Gehlen’s sense of nationalism was

closely related to his self-association with the German General Staff,36

considered by many to be

a “small, tight and proud aristocracy, alone in the German army entitled to wear the coveted “red

trousers,”37

but romantically described by Gehlen as “unsoldierly… atypical…seek[ing] and

cultivat[ing] the unorthodox, the unconventional, the unusual officer, in the hopes of thus

acquiring original thinkers and bold, untrammeled spirits.” 38

By emphasizing the General Staff,

34

Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe, Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2007), 258. 35

These memoirs must be met with skepticism, as they conflict with recently declassified documents.

Furthermore, it is quite possible that Gehlen’s postwar career led him to reinterpret his experiences in

World War II through the lens of the Cold War. Nevertheless, his general comments about his strong sense

of German nationalism are believable precisely because they are so unapologetic and countercultural.

Considering the domestic West German angst regarding nationalism in 1972, the unapologetic approach in

Gehlen’s memoirs suggest that he felt little need to placate to his audience. What other West Germans

would have felt so comfortable in 1972 asserting that "Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union was

correct”? Gehlen, 26. 36

He even had a portrait of the elder Field Marshal von Moltke in his living room. Gehlen, xi. 37

David Kahn, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II (New York: Da Capo Press,

1978), 405. 38

Gehlen, XI.

McBride, 11

Gehlen’s conception of Germany thus synthesized the tradition of Prussian militarism and

discipline with the Wolfgang Menzel’s romanticized ideal of Germany as the Volk der Dichter

und Denker. Adding to this strange synthesis, Gehlen quoted at length from comments made by

the historian Carl J. Burckhardt in 1925 that the German “inclination toward extreme solutions”

was responsible for both the Reformation and the philosophical [Marxist] revolution of the 19th

Century.39

This idea seems to relate the Western conflict against Bolshevism to the 17th

religious

conflict of the Thirty Years’ War, suggesting a pseudo-religious crusade against Marxist-

Leninism in which Germany plays the central role. Furthermore, Gehlen’s rhetoric conveys that

he views Communism and Christianity as diametrically opposed religions, contrasting “Marx

and Lenin” to Jesus and “Marxism” to “the teachings of our Lord.”40

The message is apparent:

as a German counterrevolutionary that combines Prussian discipline with the “untrammeled

spirit” of the General Staff, Gehlen perceives himself as central to “the great conflict existing

between the free world in the communist world.”41

Gehlen and the Nazis

It is admittedly problematic to treat Gehlen’s service in the General Staff as a form of

Collaboration, as both Adolf Hitler and Reinhard Gehlen considered themselves German.

However, the General Staff’s vision of Germany differed from that of the Nazi Party,

emphasizing professionalism, pragmatism, and conservatism over ideology and racial dogma.

The tensions over these differences became much more pronounced once the General Staff began

to perceive the Nazis as responsible for the military failures against the Soviet Union in

39

Gehlen, XXC. 40

Gehlen, 293. 41

Gehlen, 283.

McBride, 12

Operation Barbarossa and Operation Blau.42

Gehlen’s assertion in 1972 that "I still believe that

we could have achieved the 1941 campaign objectives had it not been for the pernicious

interventions of above all Hitler”43

thus expresses a view that was likely shared by most of the

General Staff in the last years of the war. In light of plot to assassinate Hitler as a means to free

the war effort from Nazi interference, the defeat at Stalingrad should be perceived as a paradigm

shift in the relationship between certain conservative elements of the German state and the Nazi

Party. Similar to the conquest in France in 1940, Stalingrad served as a national trauma that

created a situation akin to the guerre france-francoise. Due to these factors, this paper considers

it appropriate to analyze Reinhard Gehlen’s service to the Third Reich through the lens of

collaboration.

General Halder assigned Reinhard Gehlen as head of the FHO on the recommendation of

Colonel Heusinger, the chief strategist of Operation Barbarossa and the future first Inspector

General of the Bundeswehr.44

Due to Gehlen’s reputation as an organized, capable, and

apolitical General Staff officer,45

Heusinger considered him an excellent candidate to identify

and correct the FHO’s institutional deficiencies. Gehlen’s approach to improving the

organization reflected his apolitical nature, firing numerous poor performers and replacing them

with “soldiers or civilians, anti-Nazi or Nazis… provided that they seemed likely to raise the

intellectual level of the organization.”46

Along similar lines, Gehlen reached out to strengthen

ties with the Sicherheitsdienst [SD] (the Waffen SS intelligence service) and the Abwehr (the

42

Critchfield, 84. 43

Gehlen, 73. 44

Wegener, 19. Alaric Searle, Wehrmacht generals, West German society, and the debate on rearmament,

1949-1959 (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 284. 45

Reese, 14. 46

Höhne and Zolling, 15

McBride, 13

relatively anti-Nazi intelligence organization based around Admiral Canaris).47

Gehlen’s

effectiveness as an intelligence officer thus directly related to his political detachment from

National Socialism and his ability to promote cooperation between pro-Nazi and anti-Nazi

intelligence agents in the name of a common anti-Communist front.48

The failure of Adolf Hitler to heed the FHO’s detailed warnings about the imminent

threat of encirclement at Stalingrad led Reinhard Gehlen to assume a more critical perspective of

the Nazi leadership.49

Despite suggestions in his memoirs and by his hagiographers to the

contrary,50

Gehlen never took part in the organized anti-Nazi resistance or the plot against

Hitler.51

However, following Stalingrad, he did become more influenced by and accommodating

towards the anti-Nazi faction of his staff. Influenced by Lieutenant Colonel Alexis Freiherr von

Roenne, a Baltic Baron favorably disposed towards Russian nationalism and highly critical of

Nazi racial ideology, Gehlen circulated a memorandum criticizing the Nazi racial dogma as

responsible for destroying the goodwill the Russians felt towards the German Army.52

Determined to shift Nazi policy to adopt his “moderate and realistic political solution,” in which

Germany would liberate Russia from communism "with the help of the Russian peoples

themselves,"53

Gehlen cooperated with von Roenne to secretly build up a Russian Liberation

47

Höhne and Zolling, 17. 48

Höhne and Zolling, 25. While Gehlen had a largely positive reputation among his peers as apolitical and

professional, British and American agents working with ULTRA intercepts considered the intelligence

output of the FHO highly inaccurate, biased towards underestimating Russian capabilities, and filled with

Russian misinformation. Because Gehlen was one of the most professional and least dogmatic intelligence

experts on the Eastern Front, this must be read as a particularly damning criticism of the larger WWII

German intelligence community. Goda, “Manhunts: The Official Search for Notorious Nazis,” in U.S.

Intelligence and the Nazis, ed. Richard Breitman et al (Madden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004), 378. 49

Höhne and Zolling, 25. “Statement of Gerhard Wessel on Development of the German Organization

[undated],” Nation Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. 50

Cookridge, 68. 51

Critchfield, 27. 52

Höhne and Zolling, 25. 53

Gehlen, 73.

McBride, 14

Army of anti-Bolsheviks around the figure of General Andrei Vlassov.54

Despite Gehlen’s

hopes, the Nazi party remained steadfast in their racialized conception of the Eastern Front as a

war for Lebensraum, leading them to refuse to prop up a potential Russian “de Gaulle” that could

block the dreams of a Greater Germany stretching to the Urals.55

The failed July 20 plot against Hitler led the Gestapo to carry out a thorough purge of

intelligence agents suspected of anti-Nazi tendencies. Many of Gehlen’s closest advisors,

including von Roenne, von Rittberg, and other vocal anti-Nazis in the FHO, were arrested and

shot for anti-regime sentiment and connections to the assassination attempt.56

Admiral Canaris

was arrested, held and shot, and Abwehr was placed under the control of the Nazi SD.57

As a

result of this dramatic ideological reorientation in the German intelligence community, the

Waffen SS successfully gained control of nearly all aspects of military intelligence and

espionage,58

leaving Gehlen in charge of the last intelligence organization on the Eastern Front

unaffiliated with the Nazi Party. Despite this technical nicety, likely due to Gehlen’s excellent

reputation in the German intelligence community and personal rapport with General Heinz

Guderian,59

the FHO lost much of its freedom of action due to its growing dependence on the

Waffen SS due to the SD’s monopoly on intelligence collection assets.60

Although Gehlen

fatalistically became convinced of the eventual defeat of the Third Reich, he continued to

provide intelligence on the Soviet military until Hitler dismissed him and General Guderian for

“defeatism” on April 9, 1945.61

54

This also served as Gehlen’s future touchstone against accusations of racism. Wegener, 29. 55

Höhne and Zolling, 15. 56

Höhne and Zolling, 41. 57

Reese, 14. 58

Kahn, 268. 59

Höhne and Zolling, 41. 60

Critchfield, 25. 61

Reese, 15. Kahn, 539.

McBride, 15

Reinhard Gehlen was never truly a National Socialist supporter or resistor, leading his

actions throughout the Second World War to approximate a relationship of collaboration. As a

Reichswehr officer and German nationalist, he surely cheered the electoral success of the Nazis

in 1933 as a repudiation of Versailles, but no evidence suggests that Gehlen supported the

ideology of National Socialism.62

This is reflected in the means he used to reform the FHO. By

establishing himself as a moderate distinct from the Nazi sympathizers and critics, Gehlen was

able to bridge between the two factions in the interest of a common front against the Soviet

Union. Gehlen’s ideological leanings thus appear as the least-common-denominator between the

two factions: virulent anti-Bolshevism. While it is unclear whether this ideological stance was a

deeply-held personal belief, as suggested by his memoirs and his Marxist critics, or merely a

tactical stance taken to unify politically heterogeneous intelligence officers around a common

enemy, it is logical that Gehlen’s post-Stalingrad contact with the anti-Nazi Baltic Germans in his

organization, such as the Baron von Roenne, and the Russian anti-Communists around General

Andrei Vlassov made him gradually redefine the Eastern Front as a Western crusade to destroy

Bolshevism. While elements of Gehlen’s activities after Stalingrad defied the wishes of Adolf

Hitler, most clearly regarding his unsanctioned decision to help the Russian Liberation Army,

none of these activities can be considered resistance precisely because Gehlen’s relatively-benign

(and perhaps naïve) intent was to convince the Nazis to adjust their ideological stances. Thus,

while Reinhard Gehlen specifically distanced himself from the Nazis and the assassination

attempt on Hitler,63

he collaborated with the Nazi leadership against the Soviet Union until the

62

Wegener, 28. 63

Gehlen feared that the assassination of Hitler could lead to political chaos and the collapse of the German

Army, similar to the Russian Army during the First World War. Gehlen was not involved in the plot, but

Gerhard Wessel (Gehlen’s deputy) suggests he was aware of it “but had considered the matter too

dangerous to discuss.” “Statement of Gerhard Wessel on Development of the German Organization

[undated].” Nation Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

McBride, 16

final capitulation of the Reich.64

Gehlen and the Americans

After the defeat of the Third Reich seemed assured, Reinhard Gehlen began to

contemplate collaboration with the Americans. Recent sources indicate that he first aired this

possibility to one of his Baltic German employees, Baron von Rittberg, late in 1943 after

Operation Kutuzov demonstrated that the Soviet Union had definitively seized the strategic

initiative on the Eastern Front.65

Nevertheless, Gehlen likely thought little of the prospect until

von Rittberg and his other close advisors were assassinated for their involvement in planning the

plot to assassinate Hitler. Due to the risks involved in planning this operation, it is unsurprising

that no written records can verify when exactly Gehlen began his preparations for turning the

FHO over to the Americans, but by April 4, 1945 (five days before his dismissal by Hitler),

Gehlen met with his most important spy handler, Hermann Baun, to brief him on their plan to

change allegiance to the Americans.66

Drawing off an intelligence intercept of the occupation

zones planned at Yalta, they planned to move their personnel and documents into hiding in

southwest Germany to ensure collective surrender to the Americans. The first portion of their

plan went well, as the personnel successfully rendezvoused and waited out the chaotic first days

of the occupation. However, following his surrender to an American lieutenant on May 22,

Gehlen found it difficult to convince his American captors of his value. After a period of

64

Gehlen even proposed Operation Werewolf, which sought to apply the lessons of the Polish resistnace

movement to the construction of a similar German movement. In his debriefing with Critchfield, Gehlen

claimed this was just a pretext to maintain contact with the FHO personnel after he was relieved from

command. See “Statement of General Gehlen on Walter Schellenberg Story,” National Security Archive,

George Washington University, Washington, D.C. 65

This also fits with the Wessel’s statement that he and Gehlen agreed in May 1943 that “there was no

hope” of German victory in World War II. See “Statement of Gerhard Wessel on Development of the

German Organization [undated],” National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington,

D.C. 66

Wegener, 21.

McBride, 17

detention, during which Gehlen dubiously claimed in his memoirs to have obtained legal

permission from Admiral Dönitz as head-of-state to collaborate with Americans,67

Gehlen

eventually encountered Captain John Boker, a U.S. military intelligence officer interested in

collecting Germans with knowledge of the Soviet military.68

With his assistance, Gehlen was

able to meet General Sibert sometime in July, the G-2 (intelligence chief) for the European

theater, which allegedly resulted in a “Gentleman’s Agreement” over future collaboration

between the U.S. Army and Gehlen’s intelligence organization.69

Reinhard Gehlen defined the terms of the unwritten “Gentleman’s Agreement” in his

memoirs as follows:

1.) FHO would continue its information gathering operations as during the war.

2.) The German organization would run “jointly with the Americans.”

3.) The organization would be German-led but receive directives from the Americans.

4.) Americans would finance the organization in exchange for all intelligence reports.

5.) The organization will remain in American hands until a sovereign German government decided its future.

6.) The organization will respect the interests of Germany first if German and American interests diverge.70

In summary, Gehlen characterized this agreement as an extremely benign form of collaboration

based around anti-Communism that would jointly serve the American and German interests in

preventing the expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence. This account is doubtful, as it seems

highly unlikely that any U.S. occupation authority would provide Gehlen binding assurances that

67

This argument seems far too convenient to be true, as this anecdote serves as a legal cover and

exoneration from nationalist criticism. Considering that Gehlen sought to become the head spymaster of

West Germany, he probably invented this story to bolster his nationalist credentials. Interestingly, more

recent accounts have confirmed that such a meeting was possible, as Gehlen and Döntiz were quartered in

the Twelfth Army Group’s interrogation center at the same time. Reese, 45. Gehlen’s claim to have

secured the blessings of General August Winter, deputy chief of the Army High Command, for his plans, as

“he was the OKW authority I was able to reach” (Gehlen, 120) is however confirmed by General Winter’s

postwar statement. See “Statement of General WINTER on the HISTORY of the Organization,” National

Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. 68

This encounter was purely chance. Boker was investigating the Vlassov Movement, and he was advised

to talk to Gehlen. Gehlen had no part in arranging this meeting, and he was even half-dressed and asleep

when Boker arrived to ask him initial questions. See “Report of Initial Contacts with General Gehlen’s

Organization by John R. Boker, Jr. 1 May 1952,” National Security Archive, George Washington

University, Washington, D.C. 69

Gehlen, 123. 70

Gehlen, 122.

McBride, 18

it would respect the interest of Germany over those of the United States anytime before the

creation of the West German state, let alone as early as 1945. Recently discovered documents

seem to confirm these suspicions, instead suggesting that this “Gentleman’s Agreement” with

General Sibert envisioned collaboration completely occurring on American terms, including the

granting of U.S. citizenship to all of Gehlen’s personnel and their families and the wholesale

Americanization of the FHO as an intelligence division in the Pentagon.71

Considering the anti-

German sentiment throughout parts of American intelligence at this time, even this offer appears

relatively magnanimous. Due to his poor bargaining position this early on, Gehlen likely

conditionally accepted this unwritten offer, which, due to General Sibert subsequent

reassignment from Europe, allowed Gehlen to take advantage of the change in leadership and

creatively reinterpret the details of this unwritten agreement.72

Despite this apparent slight of hand, Reinhard Gehlen’s collaboration with the U.S. Army

and the Central Intelligence Agency appears to have been quite mutually beneficial once the

Americans came around to Gehlen’s anti-Bolshevik way of thinking.73

Over tine, the so-called

Gehlen Organization demonstrated its usefulness by providing the U.S. Army with most of its

actionable intelligence on Soviet threats and intentions. This became especially pronounced

during the Berlin Airlift, when Gehlen personnel provided real-time intelligence of Soviet air

movement unavailable form any other source.74

By improving the output of intelligence reports,

71

“Report of Interview with General Edwin L. Sibert on the Gehlen Organization, 26 May 1970,” National

Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. 72

By 1949, the CIA acknowledged Gehlen’s general demands by noting that “it is clearly recognized that

members of the German staff of this project are acting first and foremost as German nationals working in

the interest of the German people in combating communism by contributing their efforts and accumulated

experience in the field of intelligence against Communist Russia.” From [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM,

“Basic Agreement with [Gehlen Organization],” 13 June 1949,” National Security Archive, George

Washington University, Washington, D.C. 73

Searle, 106. 74

Critchfield, 86.

McBride, 19

Gehlen gradually built up his ties with key American intelligence leaders, such as Allen Dulles.75

These ties were crucial for placating Gehlen’s critics, many of whom formed an extremely

negative view of German intelligence while working with ULTRA, leading them to conclude that

the potential gains of collaboration were not worth the potential risks of becoming associated

with former Wehrmacht officers and war criminals.76

Gehlen thus gradually gained influence

over his American keepers,77

eventually allowing him the power to unilaterally dictate the terms

of his relationship with Washington. This is evident by Gehlen’s successful use of the threat of

dissolving the Gehlen Organization to force the Army and the CIA to make key concessions,78

including less oversight, higher funding, and an American acknowledgement that the Gehlen

Organization would be allowed to become part of a future sovereign West German state.

In addition to this extensive collaboration with the Americans, Reinhard Gehlen

simultaneously used the Gehlen Organization to carry out actions unsanctioned by his American

superiors.79

These actions revolved around the goals of preserving the general staff for the

remilitarization of Germany80

and establishing of the Gehlen Organization as the sole

intelligence and counter-intelligence organization of West Germany. In planning for the

remilitarization of Germany, Gehlen hired numerous former Army leaders as intelligence

75

Gehlen, 196. Reese, 178. 76

Goda, 385. 77

It appears that the U.S. Army did not oversee Gehlen very closely. A CIA report cites the U.S. Army

overseer of Gehlen “went around the bend” and fell “under the temptations of the fleshpots.” The article

goes on to detail high cases of VD among U.S. Army personnel attached to the Gehlen Organization,

leading it to conclude that “the Army did not control or even attempt closely to steer the Gehlen

Organization.” From “Debriefing of Eric Waldman on the U.S. Army’s Trusteeship of the Gehlen

Organization during the years 1945-1949,” National Security Archive, George Washington University,

Washington, D.C. 78

Critchfield, 122. 79

These actions did not occur without the knowledge of the Americans. James Critchfield, the head CIA

overseer of the Gehlen Organization, was fully aware of the role the Gehlen Organization was playing in

the remilitarization of Germany, although he did not know about Gehlen’s employment of war criminals.

This logically fits with the fact that most of these questionable personnel worked outside of the Gehlen

Organization headquarters at Pullach. Higher levels of the CIA did know about these personnel due to

efforts by a counterintelligence unit to infiltrate the Gehlen Organization. Critchfield, 167. 80

Searle, 105.

McBride, 20

personnel in order to protect them from American occupation authorities and provide them

resources to conduct their military planning.81

The most important of these hires was Adolf

Heusinger, Gehlen’s former boss and the key figure in the formation of the Bundeswehr. In

planning for the Gehlen Organization’s monopolization of all intelligence and

counterintelligence assets in the West German state, Gehlen attempted to prevent the intelligence

fiascos of World War II by eliminating competing intelligence agencies, much as the Nazi SD

accomplished in the Third Reich when it absorbed the Abwehr. For example, Gehlen actively

resisted the West German government’s efforts to form a counterintelligence organization called

the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution by conducting a heavy-handed smear

campaign against the appointed head of the organization, Otto John.82

Although Gehlen did not

destroy this new federal office, the FHO campaign against John succeeded in estranging Otto

John from the Christian Democrats, which led him to defect to East Germany in 1954.83

By

pursuing these goals, Reinhard Gehlen sought to promote his vision of the German nation.

Reflecting Gehlen’s previous stance of recruiting “soldiers or civilians, anti-Nazi or

Nazis… provided that they seemed likely to raise the intellectual level of the organization,”84

Gehlen’s efforts to preserve the General Staff and the German intelligence community defied

American instructions not to employ war criminals.85

Although Gehlen’s experience in World

War II demonstrates that he was not a Nazi himself, he hired and protected personnel with Nazi

backgrounds because he considered them useful. For example, many of the figures with Nazi

81

Searle, 105. 82

Otto John fled Germany with the help of British Intelligence after his brother was executed for

involvement in the failed assassination attempt on Hitler. Throughout the rest of the war, he collaborated

with the BBC German language broadcast service. Otto John defected to East Germany in 1954 citing

fears about the Gehlen Organization and the Christian Democrats’ decision to pursue remilitarization.

Critchfield, 179. 83

This clearly strengthened Gehlen’s hand considerably in his political battles in Bonn. Searle, 108. 84

Höhne and Zolling, 15. 85

Critchfield, 86.

McBride, 21

pasts were employed in counterintelligence and domestic espionage due to their expertise in this

field, leading to a troubling continuity between domestic espionage in the Third Reich and in the

early postwar years.86

Having learned from the purge of his anti-Nazi personnel following the

assassination plot against Hitler, Gehlen hid and protected these employees from the prying eyes

of his American keepers.

Many aspects of Gehlen’s collaboration with the American drew from his previous

experience during the Third Reich. The Gehlen Organization produced actionable intelligence

on Soviet actions and intentions for the Americans much as the FHO had for the Nazis, using

many of the same analysts, handlers, and even informants. His covert work in building up a

West German Army around Heusinger ironically mirrored his covert work in building up Russian

Liberation Army around Vlassov. His willingness to work with Nazis and anti-Nazis during the

postwar period mirrored his willingness to work the Nazis and anti-Nazis during World War II.

In both instances, he justified his actions as building a unified front against the Soviets. Both

Gehlen’s obsession with monopolizing all intelligence and counterintelligence functions in the

new West German government and his methods of exploiting divisions in the U.S. intelligence

community related to his experience with intelligence divisions in Nazi Germany. His attempts

to expand the Gehlen Organization into the new functions of counterintelligence and domestic

espionage was enabled by recruiting former Nazis and war criminals with expertise in the

Sicherheitsdienst and the Gestapo. These commonalities demonstrate the impossibility of

separating Gehlen’s collaboration with the Americans from his collaboration with the Nazis.

Gehlen and the Christian Democrats

The April 1, 1956 transformation of the CIA-backed Gehlen Organization into the West

86

Höhne and Zolling, 172.

McBride, 22

German BND was a major personal success for Reinhard Gehlen.87

In addition to providing

Gehlen with immense authority over intelligence and counterintelligence matters and influence

in German policymaking, the formation of the BND vindicated much of Gehlen’s vision of the

German nation. In contrast to Adolf Hitler, Konrad Adenauer shared many of Reinhard Gehlen’s

conservative sense of German nationalism, possibly due to their common background as middle-

class Roman Catholics in the Kingdom of Prussia.88

Furthermore, they both shared the vision of

the German nation as a part of Western Europe and the Western crusade against Communism.

Due to these similarities, Gehlen and Adenauer had a close relationship.89

Reinhard Gehlen’s downfall within the West German state resulted from two negative

characteristics he learned from his experiences in the FHO. The first characteristic was his

willingness to work with ideologically questionable people if their intelligence or skills could

add to the intelligence organizations, which backfired in the Heinz Felfe scandal.90

This 1963

scandal characterized the BND as ineffective and compromised as an intelligence service, largely

due to its morally questionable policy of hiring SS officers. Because this scandal coincided with

Konrad Adenauer’s resignation, Gehlen found himself ostracized by Ludwig Erhardt, who

ordered the BND’s liaison staff in the chancellery to evacuated the building, saying: “I will not

live under the same roof as these people.”91

The second negative characteristic that led to

Gehlen’s downfall was his deep suspicion of the Social Democrats, whom he characterized as a

87

Reese, 141. 88

Critchfield, 109. 89

Höhne and Zolling, 183. 90

In 1951, the former Sicherheitsdienst lieutenant Heinz Felfe joined the Gehlen Organization as a Russian

double agent. Over time, Felfe impressed his superiors with information supplied by his KGB handlers,

leading him to become head of the Soviet Union desk in the Gehlen Organization’s counterintelligence

division. After producing detailed plans of the Soviet Command Center in Karlshorst, Gehlen said “that

fellow Felfe is outstanding. He can produce what others cannot.” Höhne and Zolling, 149. With the

authority provided by his high position and close relationship with Gehlen, Felfe provided the KGB with

over 15,000 photographed documents, effectively blowing the cover of Gehlen’s network of informants in

Eastern Europe prior to his 1961 arrest. Reese, 150. 91

Höhne and Zolling, 15.

McBride, 23

sort of communist fifth column within the German state.92

Recent documents suggest that the

Gehlen Organization targeted select Social Democrats in their domestic espionage program, and

perhaps even fed some of this information to the Christian Democrats.93

Gehlen supported the

Federal Republic of Germany largely because he supported Adenauer’s Christian Democratic

government, not because of support of democratic or liberal values.94

Because Willy Brandt’s

vision of German Ostpolitik was completely contrary to Gehlen’s vehement anti-Communism,95

Gehlen found himself elbowed into retirement in 1968.

Conclusion

Reinhard Gehlen’s collaborations from 1942 until 1968 are difficult to fathom because

they demonstrate a troubling strand of antidemocratic and militaristic continuity in the postwar

redefinition of the German nation. His success in collaborating with the Americans, shielding

Nazis and war criminals from prosecution, and monopolizing the control over the clandestine

arm of the West German regime troublingly demonstrates how effective his vehement anti-

Communism was at winning over American support. Because Gehlen lacked the anti-Semitic

and racial ideology of the Nazis, even Captain Waldman, an Austrian that was so opposed to

National Socialism that he fled Austria after the Nazi takeover and joined the U.S. Army as an

intelligence officer, supported his request for American financial backing.96

Why did the

Americans decide to do so? Ultimately, this was for the very same reasons as the Nazis and the

92

Gehlen’s memoirs are particularly scathing towards Willy Brandt’s government, accusing them of being

duped into Ostpolitik by the Italian Communists and betraying the German nation by surrendering

“Germany's ancient territories to the east of the Oder and Neisse rivers and thus formally acquiescing to the

communist policies of aggrandizement in Central and Eastern Europe.” Gehlen, 355-7. 93

Critchfield, 110. 94

“If there was any one former general who threaten the establishment of parliamentary control…, then

that officer was Reinhard Gehlen.” Searle, 110. 95

This is quite ironic, considering that Brandt would leave office due to a scandal over one of his personal

aid’s turning out to be a Stasi agent. 96

Reese, 56.

McBride, 24

Christian Democrats: they considered him an effective tool against the Soviet Union. In the

context of anti-Soviet fears, the Nazis, the Americans, and the Christian Democrats were willing

to tolerate Gehlen’s independent views and eccentricities in light of his genuine anti-Bolshevism,

his expertise deciphering Soviet actions and intentions, and his unwillingness to challenge

authority that was also militantly anti-Communist.

Due to the inability of nationalist frameworks of “crimes against the nation” to accurately

judge the moral nuances of specific instances of collaboration, the moral judgment of Reinhard

Gehlen’s career must be based off the more universal concept of “crimes against humanity”

established by the Nürmberg Trials. By making the international law of the Nürmberg Trials the

centerpiece of ethical judgments of collaboration or resistance, morality becomes disaggregated

from any sense of the nation. This approach attempts to heed Timothy Brook’s call to “look

through the moral landscape to the political one underneath and figure out what is going on”97

by

detecting “ambiguity in what a superficial reading might otherwise dismiss as confirmation of

the norms by which a culture, then or now, has constructed its moral subjects.”98

The key moral

questions is no longer “did you collaborate or did you resist?,” but “how did this collaboration or

resistance violate conceptions of human rights and international law?”

When measured against this standard, Reinhard Gehlen falls short. He may not have

been a Nazi, but he collaborated with the Hitler regime in knowledge of the Holocaust99

He may

have shared a common anti-Communism with the Americans, but he defied the American efforts

at denazification. He may have had a personal rapport with Konrad Adenauer, but he had little

faith in democracy or a plural society. His anti-Communism thus blinded him to other moral

97

Brook, 5. 98

Brook, 246. 99

As an intelligence analyst on the Eastern Front, it is completely unfeasible that Gehlen was not aware of

the systematic murder of the Jews.

McBride, 25

considerations. In this regard, he was not alone. Gehlen’s collaborations with the Americans

and the Christian Democrats relied on a degree of naïve and sophomoric accommodation of his

antidemocratic and illiberal views. Gehlen’s actions also have American equivalents, such as the

United States’ willing collaboration with Klaus Barbie,100

proving that it problematic to assume

an inherent morality in any actor, even the United States. Gehlen was therefore much more than

a “bad” nationalist who employs war criminals and uses postwar doubts about the Soviet Union

to manipulate the “good” Americans and Christian Democrats into collaboration. Such

nationalist oversimplifications confuse Gehlen’s moral failings with his relatively banal

collaborations. Reinhard Gehlen’s career is not immoral because of his relatively banal

collaboration, but because of his personal moral failings and willingness to sacrifice the liberal

ideals of human rights, international law, and democracy for his rigid nationalist and anti-

Communist agenda.

100

Goda, 427.

McBride, 26

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