The Nazi Hunters (46 page)

Under the subheading ‘CAREER’ it lists Isselhorst’s wartime exploits – eschewing any mention of his war crimes – and then his immediate fortunes after the war.

‘Alleged to have been sentenced to death by Allied authorities, but released by the movement called the VECHTA group. Belongs to an organisation which is headed by Martin BORMANN, the aim of the movement was alleged to be anti-Russian, but possible . . . Soviet Connections have been observed.’

(For now, forget the ‘Martin BORMANN’ reference. Bormann was a senior figure in the Nazi regime, one rumoured to have escaped all efforts to find him after the war. Investigating any alleged Isselhorst–Bormann links lies outside of the scope of this book, certainly.)

Unpacking that paragraph a little, according to the US Army’s Intelligence Centre, Isselhorst was not executed by the French. Whatever the VECHTA group may be – and I can find no trace of it – they seem to have had the power to ‘release’ Isselhorst from Allied custody and to save him from both ‘death by shooting’ and ‘death by hanging’ – respectively the French and British sentences handed down on him.

So certain of this is the US Army’s Intelligence Centre that they repeat that 1957 assertion: ‘Alleged to have been sentenced to death by Allied authorities, but released by the movement.’ From studying the CIA 201 File on Isselhorst, there is no suggestion that what the US Army’s Intelligence Centre states isn’t true.

So, what is one to make of all of this?

If the CIA and the US Army’s Intelligence Centre are to be believed, Isselhorst was never executed – not by the French, not by anyone. Instead, he was rescued by some shadowy group (VECHTA), after which the CIA raised a 201 Name File on him. Which would suggest in turn that Isselhorst – resident in 1957 in France, according to the CIA – was an ongoing intelligence asset of some value to the Agency, and long after he was supposedly executed for war crimes.

If this is true, then maybe Isselhorst
was
CARETINA, the agent referred to in the 1962 memo about former
Sturmbannführer
Ernst. But put that to one side. Is there any corroborating evidence to suggest that any of this may be true; that Isselhorst, and even Ernst, were somehow recruited into the CIA?

Well, as it happens, there is.

On 10 May 1945 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a directive to General Dwight Eisenhower, commander of US forces in Europe, to arrest and hold all Nazi war criminals. However that directive was tempered with the following guidance: ‘in your discretion you may make such exceptions as you deem advisable for intelligence and other military reasons.’

In June 1945, Brigadier General Reinhard von Gehlen – the former head of Hitler’s Fremde Heere Ost (FHO, or Foreign Armies East), the
Wehrmacht
’s intelligence organization for the Eastern Front – made the American military a juicy offer. He would hand over intact all files gathered by his organization, including those on current undercover agents operating across Stalin’s Russia, if the Americans let him work for them.

Gehlen’s name was rapidly removed from any captured POW lists, and he became the US spy chief in Germany for the following two decades. Under what was code-named Operation Rusty, but became known as the Gehlen Organization, Gehlen reassembled his staff and files and got to work. Unsurprisingly, they made great use of former Gestapo and SS officers with experience serving on the Eastern Front. Gehlen reactivated his former agent network across Russia, only now it was to serve a new master.

Naturally, the newly formed Gehlen Organization worked closely with the obvious partner within American intelligence circles – the US Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). In 1947, under the National Security Act, the Central Intelligence Agency came into being. Reinhard Gehlen and Allen Dulles, the director of the new organization, hit if off immediately.

In July 1949 the CIA took full control of the Gehlen Organization, and CIA officer Colonel James H. Critchfield officially ran it for the next six years, although Gehlen himself remained the real man in control. After the war, CROWCASS – the Central Registry of War Crimes and Security Suspects – was the repository of records on wanted Nazi war criminals. At the same time as the CIA took control of the Gehlen Organization, the CROWCASS records were turned over to Reinhard Gehlen and his clandestine intelligence outfit.

The lunatics had truly been placed in charge of the asylum.

In March 1950 the US decided to formally appoint Reinhard von Gehlen as the head of the West German Intelligence Service. The Soviet Union objected vociferously; unsurprisingly, as Gehlen was wanted by the Soviets on charges of war crimes. In 1955, when West Germany was given back her sovereignty, the Gehlen Organization became the German foreign intelligence service, the BND.

Under the US War Crimes Disclosure Act, the CIA was forced to release an assessment of its links to former Nazis, marked ‘secret’ and entitled: ‘America’s Seeing-Eye Dog on a Long Leash’. The opening paragraph stated: ‘In 1949 . . . The CIA assumed responsibility for the nascent West German Intelligence Service. More than any single project, this action linked the Central Intelligence Agency with veterans of Nazi Germany’s intelligence services, some with notorious wartime reputations.’

The CIA report continues: ‘The Gehlen Organization has long been accused of acting as a shelter for Nazis and those who committed crimes during the Third Reich. Because of their sponsorship of the German intelligence service, the US Army and the CIA are implicated in this criticism. From the earliest days . . . CIA recognized this as a problem and, in fact, warned the Army about supporting Gehlen. After 1949, CIA inherited these same concerns and, while it curbed Gehlen’s viewpoint on the American war crimes program, the Agency could never get the Germans to “clean house’’.’

In 1972 Reinhard von Gehlen published his memoirs, denoting the level of ‘respectability’ and status he had achieved in civilized society. Entitled
The Service
, the book proclaims: ‘
The Service
is the memoir of General Reinhard Gehlen, legendary spymaster-in-chief, Hitler’s head of military espionage in Russia who, as the war ended, transferred his mammoth files and network of spies to the United States, ultimately to become chief of the unofficial West German intelligence agency.’

In 2006, a limited number of Gehlen Organization files were released under the US War Crimes Disclosure Act. From the study of those, the highly respected Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Project on Government Secrecy listed the names of the top Nazi war criminals employed by the Gehlen Organization, and thus also by the CIA.

These included: former SS
Oberführer
Willi Krichbaum, responsible for the deportation of Hungarian Jews, of whom some 300,000 lost their lives; SS
Standartenführer
Walter Rauff, who personally designed and supervised the mobile extermination vans used to gas Jews; SS
Oberführer
Dr Franz Six, who in 1941 commanded an
Einsatzgruppe
that exterminated the Jews of the Russian city of Smolensk; SS
Sturmbannführer
Alois Brunner, a Gestapo official who worked directly under Adolf Eichmann, and who ‘purged’ Paris of its Jews.

And lest one concludes that this was purely an American phenomenon, the British proved equally adept at recruiting suspected Nazi war criminals either to spy on the Russians, or because they were privy to Nazi Germany’s much-sought-after technological and military secrets. If there were an equivalent British act to the US Nazi War Crimes Act – which sadly there isn’t currently – files would doubtless emerge that would prove equally disconcerting.

The FAS list of the top Nazi war criminals employed by the Gehlen Organization and the CIA goes on and on. It includes SS commanders who served at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Dachau and other Nazi concentration camps.

It also includes the following entry:

SS Obersturmbannführer Dr. Erich Isselhorst, SS No. 267313. Born February 5, 1906. Subject was Commander of the Police and SD at Strasbourg and also Inspector of the SD, Stuttgart. He was also Commanding Officer of Einsatzkommando 8 of Einsatzgruppe A.

Isselhorst had attained the rank of
Standartenführer
by the end of the war.

The question has to be asked, therefore: was Isselhorst ever executed, as the French claimed? Or, as the CIA and related papers appear to suggest, was his ‘execution’ some kind of a cover, under which former
Standartenführer
Erich Isselhorst survived, to work for the Gehlen Organization and the CIA?

A copy of the French record of Isselhorst’s execution is held in the National Archives, together with the various items of correspondence from the British authorities, asking for proof that the death sentence passed down by both French and British courts had indeed been carried out. Yet the various CIA documents lodged in the US National Archives suggest that Isselhorst went on to have a long and useful career with the Gehlen Organization and the Agency.

Ultimately, whom does one believe?

Certainly, the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy has few doubts: Isselhorst is listed as one of a few dozen top Nazi war criminals who worked for both the Gehlen Organisation and the CIA.

Either way, it is perhaps fortunate that the possibility that Isselhorst escaped justice and went on to work for Western intelligence did not come to the notice of the Secret Hunters. It would have been the cruellest of blows to learn that Isselhorst may have escaped the justice that they believed had been rightly served.

Finally, we must return to
Sturmbannführer
Hans Dietrich Ernst. On 9 March 1977 a German newspaper carried the following short article:

A former SS officer accused of participating in the deportation and murder of numerous French Jews has been deprived by a court in Oldenburg, north Germany, of his right to practise as a lawyer. The action against Hans Dietrich Ernst, wartime regional commander of the German Security Service and Security Police in France followed representations by the French anti-Nazi lawyer, Serge Klarsfeld.

Ernst was sentenced to death four times by French courts, in absentia. The sentences were not recognized by West Germany, although the Cologne State Prosecutor is currently investigating Ernst’s wartime activity.

Incredibly, for three decades after the Secret Hunters were forced to abandon their search for him, Hans Dietrich Ernst led a quiet life in his native Germany, working as a lawyer and, very probably, as a Gehlen/CIA/BND agent. In the early 1980s the German authorities apparently got their act together to finally indict Ernst on war crimes charges.

He died of old age before he could face trial.

In the forties, fifties and sixties, as the West geared up for the Cold War, there appears to have been a triumph of amoral pragmatism over what was just and what was right. Was this – is this – ever justified or, indeed, sensible? Laying aside the moral issue, the simple fact of the matter is that the hiring of former Nazi war criminals to run our intelligence apparatus was a flawed policy, purely in terms of the results secured.

Those ‘former’ Nazis had a bankrupt moral code, were permanently damaged by the war crimes and unspeakable horrors they had perpetrated, and were loyal to no one – certainly not to the Western powers, who had vanquished the Nazi dream and, once again, left Germany in abject defeat. They owed their allegiances only to themselves and to their own kind. They proved at best questionable allies, and their intelligence of highly questionable value.

But even had they proved world-beating spies, was hiring those ‘former’ Nazis justifiable morally? The simple answer is no. If there had been a poll at the end of the war asking the people of the Allied nations if they backed such a policy, the answer would have been overwhelmingly negative. There are certain lines that should never be crossed. Hiring former mass murderers, rapists, child-killers and racist war criminals to people our intelligence apparatus was wrong, and it denied the victims of so much suffering that most crucial of things: justice.

When we speak of the Nazi war crimes, we – rightly – stress that such atrocities should never be allowed to occur again (although in the Balkans, Rwanda and Darfur we have, largely, failed). But we should also guard against those who have committed terrible crimes against humanity being allowed to escape unpunished, simply because it is hoped they might furnish some advantage to our cause. That is equally unacceptable. Shielding Gehlen, Barbie, Rauff – and possibly Isselhorst and Ernst – from justice was reprehensible in the extreme.

Our democratic institutions – including our military and intelligence apparatus – should never put themselves above the law.

Epilogue

During the war Lieutenant Colonel Brian Morton Foster Franks had been awarded the Military Cross (MC) in 1943, and the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) in 1944, following Operation Loyton. After the war he was awarded the French Légion d’honneur and the Croix de guerre. He achieved the rank of honorary colonel in command of 21 SAS, the Territorial regiment which he commanded until 1950, and which would form the basis for refounding the SAS Regiment proper, in the early 1950s.