Blowback (22 page)

Hilger met frequently in Washington, D.C., with Kennan and Bohlen, who were then considered the United States' preeminent experts on U.S.-Soviet relations. Kennan personally intervened on Hilger's behalf to obtain him a high-level security clearance, and he listened closely to Hilger's advice before making recommendations on East-West policy to President Truman. In 1950, for example, Bohlen remembers that he, Hilger, and Kennan formed an analysis team specializing in interpretation of Soviet geopolitical strategy following the outbreak of the Korean War. The group was given access to highly classified information and reported directly to the Office of National Estimates, the country's most senior intelligence evaluation group, which in turn reported directly to the director of Central Intelligence and to President Truman. Hilger, the former Nazi Foreign Office executive who had once made his reports to Hitler, emerged in Washington as a highly influential expert on the USSR.
¹⁵

George Kennan has declined several requests for an interview, thus making it impossible to obtain his comments on the memos bearing his name and initials that discuss bringing Hilger into the United States. He did, however, write in 1982: “I do not recall seeing him [Gustav Hilger], or having any contact with him, in the period between the end of the war and his arrival in this country. I do not recall having had anything to do with, or any responsibility for, bringing him to this country; nor do I recall knowing, at the time, by what arrangements he was brought here.” He noted at that time, however, that he was “pleased that this had been done, considering that his [Hilger's] knowledge of Russia … would be useful to our government and public” and that without his being brought to this country there was a danger that he might have fallen into Soviet hands. Kennan also asserted that he had never seen any signs of Nazi sympathies on Hilger's part.
¹⁶

Kennan must have been aware that Gustav Hilger had been a senior member of the Nazi Foreign Office and an executive in Ribbentrop's personal secretariat during the war. The knowledge gained through that work was, after all, one of the main reasons why Hilger was brought to Washington. Whether or not Kennan
knew of Hilger's role in the Holocaust in the USSR, Hungary, and Italy is unknown. It can be said with certainty, however, that the Nazi Foreign Office records documenting Hilger's role in the murder of innocent people were in American hands in 1948 and that the tedious work of analyzing and cataloging that material was well under way. Had George Kennan, or any other member of the U.S. government of his stature, requested a dossier on Hilger's wartime career, those records could have been readily located. There is no indication among the available evidence that Kennan or anyone else ever inquired into Hilger's role in the Holocaust. It is clear, however, that Kennan, then one of the most powerful men in Washington, served as Hilger's personal reference during army and State Department security clearance inquiries.

The aura of respectability that surrounded Hilger seems to have deterred people who would have otherwise had a logical interest in his background. Alfred Meyer, an American expert on communism who coauthored a book with Hilger during the early 1950s, for example, has recalled that he never asked the German whether or not he had ever been a Nazi party member. “It would have been an indiscreet question,” Meyer said during an interview with the author. “To have been a Nazi, well, after the war that would have been a stigma.”

In fact, Hilger never was a member of the Nazi party. “He was somewhat of a coward politically,” as Meyer put it. “He didn't want to stick his neck out.” U.S. Army intelligence reports of the period reflect a belief that Hilger was basically a conservative who had found it convenient to join, rather than resist, the Nazi juggernaut. “He was a weak man,” Meyer said.

While in the United States, Hilger enjoyed “a generous grant,” according to Meyer, from the Carnegie Corporation. Most of his work during this period revolved around the Center for Russian Research at Harvard University and a similar post at Johns Hopkins University, which served as cover, in effect, for his CIA Office of National Estimates consulting assignment.
¹⁷

The only known protest to Hilger's presence in the United States during the 1950s came from Dr. Raul Hilberg, who was at the time a young historian working on a top secret analysis of captured German wartime records code-named Project Alexander. Hilberg, who is today better known as the author of the internationally acclaimed history of the Holocaust
The Destruction of the European Jews
, objected when Hilger was invited to speak at the Federal
Records Center in Virginia, where Project Alexander was then under way. Hilberg told the project's director that he would walk out in protest if the former Nazi diplomat was honored at the center, and shortly thereafter Hilger's invitation to speak was quietly canceled.

This incident did not become public, however, and Hilger remained in the United States until 1953, when he returned to Germany to become a senior adviser on foreign affairs to the Adenauer government. He retired in 1956 but continued to travel frequently between the United States and Europe.

In 1962 journalist and Nazi hunter Charles Allen located Hilger at a residence the German diplomat continued to maintain in Washington, D.C. According to Allen, the seventy-six-year-old Hilger still enjoyed enough clout at the State Department to have it maintain a telephone contact service (“extension 11”) on his behalf. Allen has also convincingly documented the State Department's consistent use of falsehoods to conceal its relationship with Hilger over the years.
¹⁸
The former member of the Nazi Foreign Office died in Munich on July 27, 1965.

Hilger's colleague Nikolai N. Poppe, a world-renowned scholar on Mongolia and the minority groups of the USSR, was also a Bloodstone recruit. Poppe's life illustrates the complexity and moral ambiguity of the Bloodstone program and of the broader U.S. enlistment of émigrés who had collaborated with the Nazis. Poppe is now ninety years old and living in comfortable retirement in Washington State.

Poppe defected to the Germans in August 1942, the day the Nazis arrived in Mikoyan-Shakhar, where he was teaching in the Pedagogical Institute. He actively collaborated in the creation of the quisling government in the Karachai minority region of the country. Among the first acts of that administration was expropriation of Jewish property, followed shortly by roundups and gassing of all the Jews who could be located in the area. Poppe also, according to his own account, assisted German military intelligence in identifying the rugged mountain passes through which German army and police troops could drive deeper into the country.
¹⁹

After the war Poppe condemned the actions of the SS in the Karachai region, particularly the massacres of Jews. He has written that he personally helped save the lives of a small group of mountain tribesmen known as the Tats from extermination. The Tats were Jewish by religion, but Iranian by ethnic heritage, and the
Wehrmacht and the SS were divided over the question of whether or not they should be massacred. Poppe asserts that he helped convince the Nazis that the Tats should be classed as non-Jewish and thus be allowed to live. There is no known proof other than Poppe's own statement that he took this action. It is a fact, however, that Poppe was an expert on the races of the region, that he was collaborating with the Germans at the time, and that the Tats were indeed spared.
²⁰

Whatever his reservations about the SS may have been, Poppe nonetheless volunteered to work for it for the remainder of the war. The SS installed him at the Wannsee Institute in 1943 as one of its most important intelligence experts on the USSR. The team of collaborators at Wannsee prepared reliable studies for the SS and the German high command describing the location of promising targets inside the Soviet Union, including concentrations of Jews and other minority groups.
²¹
This intelligence was of value to the SS for guiding the deployment of killing squads and to the Wehrmacht for planning military operations. While the SS would certainly have destroyed many innocent people without the help of the team of defectors at Wannsee, it is nevertheless true that their research permitted them to do the job more quickly and efficiently than would have otherwise been the case. The Wannsee collaborators did not sign orders for executions; they just told the killers where to find their prey.

Poppe says today that the personnel of the Wannsee Institute did not commit war crimes. In reality, however, Poppe's immediate superior at the institute ordered the murder of Jewish bookdealers throughout Eastern Europe and organized SS looting teams that seized the libraries of universities and scholarly institutes throughout German-occupied territory in order to improve Wannsee's collection of restricted books on the USSR.
²²

Poppe also asserts that his work for the SS consisted exclusively of monographs on Mongolian religious customs and on Siberia. This claim is difficult to take at face value, however, in light of his strong expertise on the Caucasus region of the USSR, one of the most important focal points of the war at the time he was employed by the SS.
²³

After the war Poppe worked briefly for British intelligence, then for the United States in the “historical study group” at Camp King. Before long he approached U.S. intelligence officials seeking permission to emigrate to the United States. U.S. officials knew exactly
whom they were getting when they imported Dr. Poppe. Among the now-declassified records of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps is the following memo, which is reproduced here in full:

TOP SECRET

22 May 1947

SUBJECT: Personnel of Possible Intelligence Interest

TO: Deputy Director of Intelligence, Headquarters, European Command, Frankfurt

APO 757 US Army

1. At the present time there is residing in the British Zone a Soviet citizen by the name of Nicolai Nicolovitch [
sic
] Poppe. He is living under an assumed name. Mr. Poppe is an authority on and a professor of Far Eastern languages.

2. His presence in the British Zone is a source of embarrassment to British Military Government, as the Soviet authorities are continually asking for his return as a war criminal. The British feel that Mr. Poppe is valuable as an intelligence source and have asked me if it is possible for U.S. intelligence authorities
to take him off their hands and see that he is sent to the U.S. where he can be “lost.”
[Emphasis added.]

3. For my information will you advise me as to what you may be able to do in this matter or in similar cases which may arise in the future.

[signed]

PETER P. RODES
Colonel GSC
Director of Intelligence
²⁴

Poppe was indeed “lost” by the Americans. Despite U.S. knowledge of Poppe's work for Nazi intelligence and Soviet efforts to capture him—indeed, probably precisely because of that knowledge—he was given a false name (Joseph Alexandris) while in Germany and was brought to the United States in 1949. Sanitized State Department telegraphic correspondence between Berlin and Washington, D.C., released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that Poppe's immigration to the United States was directly overseen by George Kennan and John Paton Davies, at the time senior executives in the political warfare unit at the State Department.
²⁵

According to Poppe's own account, he was flown to Westover
Field in Massachusetts aboard a U.S. Military Air Transport plane in May 1949. The following day he was flown to Washington, D.C., “where a man sent by the State Department was standing on the airfield to meet me.”
²⁶
While Poppe was in Washington, his work was coordinated by Carmel Offie, the OPC officer working under State Department cover who was responsible for the care and feeding of a number of Bloodstone émigrés.

Nikolai N. Poppe has since emerged as one of America's most prominent authorities on Soviet Mongolia, and he has helped train a generation of U.S. intelligence officers on the politics and culture of minority nationalities inside the USSR. Following a brief sojourn with Gustav Hilger at the State Department, Poppe was employed as a professor of Far Eastern languages at the University of Washington at Seattle. He remained there until his retirement and is a professor emeritus at that institution today. He is also a well-known scholar on Tibetan Buddhism and the author of more than 200 scholarly books, articles, and reviews concerning the history and languages of Central Asian peoples.
²⁷

An incident during Poppe's career in the 1950s illustrates the delicate influence that certain former Nazi collaborators have had on domestic politics in the United States. Early in the McCarthy era Professor Owen Lattimore, the director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University and a longtime adviser on Asian affairs to the State Department, was brought before a congressional investigating committee to face accusations of espionage and running a “Communist cell” in the Institute for Pacific Relations. McCarthy, whose allegations were already drawing criticism from Democrats and even a few Republicans, had pledged that his entire anti-Communist crusade would “stand or fall” on the supposed proof he had in the Lattimore case. As it turned out, McCarthy did not have evidence, and the committee ended up clearing Professor Lattimore. McCarthy had, in the language of a Senate committee's report on the case, perpetrated a “fraud and a hoax … on the Senate” and had “stooped to a new low in his cavalier disregard of the facts.”

Poppe's testimony, however, proved to be an important element in the resurrection of McCarthy's case against Lattimore. Poppe had (and has) a personal grievance against Lattimore, who he claims used his influence to block Poppe's immigration to the United States prior to 1949. In 1952 McCarthy and his ally Senator William Jenner organized a series of highly publicized, uncorroborated allegations
from former Communist Party, USA, official Louis Budenz claiming that Lattimore had been a party member. Those assertions covered Lattimore's domestic activities in the United States. It was left to Poppe, who was also a rival of Lattimore's in the field of Central Asia studies, to suggest that Lattimore's supposed loyalty to Stalin might be even more direct. Much of Lattimore's work on Mongolia was “very superficial,” Poppe testified as an expert witness, “and give[s] a distorted picture of the realities.… [Lattimore] had read all of this in various Soviet papers, and had taken these statements from them.”
²⁸
Poppe also says that he told Senate Internal Security Subcommittee investigators that he knew that Lattimore had conspired with “important Communist party bosses” during a trip to Moscow in the 1930s, although this latter claim was not published in the committee's testimony. The fact that Poppe had worked for the SS during the war was not brought out at the hearings, nor was the issue of Poppe's personal reason for disliking Lattimore.
²⁹