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A sampling of Gehlen's earliest reports is illustrative of much of the German espionage chiefs work during his first years of work for U.S. intelligence. According to a newly discovered secret summary of Gehlen's interrogation at “Box 1142”—the coded address for Fort Hunt, outside Washington, D.C.—Gehlen's first reports consisted of a detailed history of the German intelligence service on the eastern front, followed by a thirty-five-page summary on “Development of the Russian High Command and Its Conception of Strategy.” By August 1945 new reports on Soviet land war tactics and the political commissar system within the Red Army had been completed.

Gehlen's case officer at 1142 waxed enthusiastic about the “potentialities [of] future reports” and offered a closely typed list of twenty-eight new intelligence studies based on Gehlen and his hoard of records that were to be available within a few weeks. Every one of them concerned the USSR. They included surveys of Russian tanks, manpower, war production, propaganda, the Soviet
secret police (the NKVD), “employment of German methods … [for] evaluation of various new information received by the US,” and “suggestions as to the employment of sources for gathering information in the Central European Sector.”
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One would imagine that some U.S. intelligence officer must have asked Gehlen exactly how he had obtained his information, but the record of this inquiry, if it took place, has yet to appear. Instead, the source of Gehlen's data is simply referred to in the secret U.S. records that have surfaced as “Gehlen” himself or as “Gehlen's organization.”

In reality, Gehlen derived much of his information from his role in one of the most terrible atrocities of the war: the torture, interrogation, and murder by starvation of some 4 million Soviet prisoners of war. Even Gehlen's defenders—and there are many of them, both in Germany and in the United States—acknowledge he was instrumental in organizing the interrogations of these POWs. The success of this interrogation program from the German military's point of view became, in fact, the cornerstone of Gehlen's career. It won him his reputation as an intelligence officer and his major general's rank.

But these same interrogations were actually a step in the liquidation of tens of thousands of POWs. Prisoners who refused to cooperate were often tortured or summarily shot. Many were executed even after they had given information, while others were simply left to starve to death. True, Gehlen's men did not personally administer the starvation camps, nor are they known to have served in the execution squads. Such tasks were left to the SS, whose efficiency in such matters is well known.

Instead, Gehlen's men were in a sense like scientists who skimmed off the information and documents that rose to the surface of these pestilent camps. Now and again they selected an interesting specimen: a captured Russian general ready to collaborate, perhaps, or a Ukrainian railroad expert who might supply the locations of vulnerable bridges when given some encouragement to talk. Gehlen's officers were scientists in somewhat the same way that concentration camp doctors were: Both groups extracted their data from the destruction of human beings.
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Gehlen officially promised the Americans after the war that he would refuse “on principle” to employ former SS, SD, and Gestapo men in his new intelligence operation. His reassurances are not surprising; those groups had been declared criminal organizations
by the Supreme Allied Command in Europe during the war, and every former member was subject to immediate arrest. By 1946 these groups had been convicted as organizational perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the Nuremberg tribunal, and the earlier assertion of criminality had taken on the force of international law.

But Gehlen's reassurances on the SS issue proved to be false. At least a half dozen—and probably more—of his first staff of fifty officers were former SS or SD men, including SS Obersturmführer Hans Sommer (who had set seven Paris synagogues to the torch in October 1941), SS Standartenführer Willi Krichbaum (senior Gestapo leader in southeastern Europe), and SS Sturmbannführer Fritz Schmidt (Gestapo chief in Kiel, Germany), each of whom was given responsible positions in the new Organisation Gehlen.
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The earliest SS recruits were enlisted with phony papers and false names; Gehlen could, if necessary, deny that he had known that they had Nazi pasts.

It is reasonable to suspect that some Americans were aware of this ruse. It is, after all, the job of any professional intelligence officer to learn everything there is to know about the groups on his payroll and to collect information concerning his contract agents that might reveal their loyalty. General Sibert, who by then had become the leading American sponsor of the Gehlen Organization, had not gotten to be chief of U.S. Army intelligence in Germany by being naïve. It is hard to believe that Gehlen would have attempted to trick Sibert if the American had bluntly asked the German general if he was employing SS men; such deceit would have seriously undermined Gehlen's credibility had he been caught in the lie. The most likely scenario, according to intelligence veterans of the period, is one that repeated itself over and over again at virtually every level of contact between U.S. intelligence and former Nazis. Quite simply, Sibert knew what was going on—but didn't ask.

“Nobody had legalized, really, the functions of intelligence in those days,” says Lieutenant Colonel John Bokor, the son of the man who first recruited Gehlen and a career intelligence officer in his own right. “Today maybe things have changed, but back then the intelligence agent was on his own.… There just wasn't any sheet music for us all to sing from in those days. That's how a lot of those guys [former Nazis] got hired.”
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Nazis and collaborators became integral to the operation of Gehlen's postwar organization, and nowhere was this clearer than in control of émigré operations. As early as 1946 Gehlen had resumed limited funding of the Vlasov Army, the Ukrainian underground army OUN/UPA, and collaborationist leaders of other exile groups originally sponsored by Berlin. The cooperation of these groups was seen as crucial to successful interrogations of newly arrived refugees in the displaced persons (DP) camps. Although it is certainly true that the majority of the postwar refugees in Germany were not Nazi collaborators and had not committed war crimes, it is also true that the minority who had done such things were exactly the ones who were carefully sought out by the “Org,” as Gehlen's group has since come to be known. “The main source of informers,” noted a secret Gehlen study on recruitment of that time, “will … be the refugees from German minorities and ex-members of the Nazi organization.”
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By the end of 1947 Gehlen had restored, for the most part, the lines of command that Berlin had once used to control its assets inside the collaborationist organizations during the war. Two SS veterans, Franz Six and Emil Augsburg, took charge of essential aspects of émigré work for Gehlen. The careers of these Gehlen men illustrate the depth of the Nazi influence both within the Org and in the émigré organizations it had penetrated.

Each of them was a veteran of Amt VI (“Department 6”) of the SS RSHA, Nazi Germany's main security headquarters. This SS section had been a combined foreign intelligence, sabotage, and propaganda agency and was, in effect, the CIA of Nazi Germany. By war's end SS RSHA Amt VI had consolidated not only the foreign sections of the Nazis' police intelligence apparatus but military intelligence (Abwehr), Gehlen's own FHO, and much of the Nazi party's internal foreign espionage network as well. Amt VI was an extraordinarily rich collection of trained agents, intelligence files, saboteurs, and propagandists. Both Gehlen and the United States drew many of their most valuable recruits from this department after the war. Its hoard of files on the USSR and Eastern Europe, in particular, was without equal anywhere.

There was another side to the agency. Most of Amt VI's top officers had been instrumental in the mass extermination of Jews. Both Six and Augsburg had led mobile killing squads on the eastern
front. Others had participated in the Holocaust as administrators, paper shufflers, and idea men.

Gehlen's man in émigré enterprises, SS Brigadeführer Franz Six, is a major war criminal and is still alive at last report. He was once described by Adolf Eichmann as a
Streber
(a “real eager beaver”) on the so-called Jewish Question and as a favored protégé of SS chief Himmler's. Eichmann should have known: His own first efforts in the Holocaust were carried out under Six's personal command in the “Ideological Combat” section of the security service. In 1941 Six led the Vorkommando Moskau, an advance squad of the Nazi invasion, whose job it was to seize Communist party and NKVD archives in order to compile lists of hunted Soviet officials and to liquidate those who were caught. Six's
Vorkommando
never made it to Moscow, but his own reports indicate that his unit murdered approximately 200 people in cold blood in Smolensk, where they had stopped on the march to the Russian capital. The Smolensk victims, Six wrote headquarters, included “46 persons, among them 38 intellectual Jews who had tried to create unrest and discontent in the newly established Ghetto of Smolensk.”

As late as 1944 Six spoke at a conference of “consultants” on the “Jewish Question” at Krummhübel. The stenographic notes of the meeting indicate that “Six spoke … about the political structure of world Jewry.
The physical elimination of Eastern Jewry would deprive Jewry of its biological reserves,”
he announced.
“The Jewish Question must be solved not only in Germany but also internationally”
(emphasis added).
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Himmler was so pleased with Six's work that he lifted him out of projects in Amt VI and gave him a newly created department, Amt VII, of his own.

But Six was not simply a killer. He was a college professor with a doctorate in law and political science and a dean of the faculty of the University of Berlin and was regarded by some of his peers as one of the most distinguished professors of his generation. Six—Dr. Six, as he preferred—had joined the Nazi party in 1930, then the SS and SD a few years later. He was, along with Walter Schellenberg and Otto Ohlendorf, one of the nazified professors and lawyers who supplied a thin cover of intellectual respectability to the Hitler dictatorship. A number of such men enlisted in the security service and became the brains of the party, the intelligence specialists who presented dispassionate analyses to the Nazi high command concerning ideological warfare, racial questions in the East, and tactics for the Final Solution.

One of Six's most important projects in Amt VI was the Wannsee Institute, an SS think tank located near beautiful Lake Wannsee in the suburbs of Berlin. This was the SS's most sophisticated effort to gather strategic (i.e., long-term or long-range) intelligence on the USSR. It included collection and analysis of details on Soviet defense production capabilities, for example, activities at scientific research institutes, details of five-year plans, locations of oil and mineral deposits, identities of party officials, as well as the hoarding of Russian maps and technical books of every description.

Wannsee's work also involved, in characteristically Nazi fashion, studies of the location and size of the various ethnic groups in the USSR. Wannsee's highly secret reports were distributed to fewer than fifteen persons at the very top of the Nazi government, including General Gehlen (in his capacity as military intelligence chief on the eastern front), propaganda boss Paul Joseph Goebbels, and Hitler himself. The studies, which were among the most reliable information on the USSR produced by the Reich, were essential to the process of setting military strategy and selection of targets on the eastern front. The ethnic reports, which were the most accurate information available to the SS concerning locations of concentrations of Jewish population inside the USSR, provided a convenient road map for the senior SS leaders assigned the task of exterminating Jews.
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Most of the twenty-man staff at Wannsee were defectors from the USSR or scholars in Soviet studies from top German universities. It was this group that Gehlen sought out after the war to form the heart of his staff for émigré operations aimed at Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. At least one Wannsee veteran, Nikolai N. Poppe, lives in the United States today.
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Dr. Six was sought for war crimes after the fall of Berlin. He went to work for Gehlen in 1946, however, and was given the task of combing the Stuttgart-Schorndorf area for unemployed German intelligence veterans who might be interested in new assignments.
Unfortunately for Six, however, one of his subagents was a certain SS Hauptsturmführer Hirschfeld, who was also working for a joint U.S.-British operation tracing fugitive war criminals. Hirschfeld betrayed Six to the American CIC, which disregarded his protests and charged him with several war crimes, including murder. Once the capture of Six had been announced in the newspapers, there was little that Gehlen—or Gehlen's U.S. patron, General Sibert—could do for Six, at least not publicly. Six was tried before an American military tribunal in 1948, convicted of war crimes (including the murders in Smolensk), and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

The man who led the team of U.S. prosecutors at his trial, Benjamin Ferencz, remembers Six as a “clever man, one of the biggest swine in the whole [mobile killing squads] case.… Personally, I had more respect even for Ohlendorf, because he said, ‘Yes, I did it [commit mass murder].' Six, on the other hand, would say, ‘Who me? They were killing Jews? I had no idea!'”
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In the end, Six served about four years in prison before being given clemency by U.S. High Commissioner in Germany John McCloy. Even if the Americans had not known who Six was when he went to work for the Gehlen Organization in 1946, they could hardly plead ignorance after having convicted him in a U.S. military tribunal. Nevertheless, McCloy's clemency board specifically approved the former SS man for work in the Org, and Six was back at work in Gehlen's Pullach headquarters only weeks after his release from prison.
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