The Nazis Next Door (5 page)

The next day, Dulles sent a secret telegram to Washington recapping what he excitedly viewed as a breakthrough meeting with Wolff. Much of the memo was devoted to how impressed he was with the Nazi general, a rose-colored view that ignored the many atrocities he had directed. “Wolff is [a] distinctive personality,” Dulles wrote, and “dynamic,” too. “Our reports and impressions indicate he represents more moderate element in Waffen SS,
with mixture of romanticism.” The general’s aim, Dulles cabled, was to help lead Germany out of war and “end useless material and human destruction.” Wolff was handsome and trustworthy, too, Dulles added later, and the Allies would be able to work with him. Those who had met him could plainly see that Wolff was “no ogre.”

Dulles was also duly impressed by Wolff’s Nazi deputies, the senior Black Order officers who had arranged the meeting. He learned that Nazi captain Guido Zimmer, “despite his membership of the SS, was a devout Catholic . . . Zimmer, somewhat of an aesthete and an intellectual, was moved by a desire to save the art and religious treasures of Italy” from ruin if the war continued, Dulles wrote. “Zimmer seemed to be a misfit in the SS . . . He was good-looking,
clean-cut, not the way one pictures the typical SS officer.”

Wolff sought no special protection from war crimes charges, Dulles insisted in his cable. But he did make one small request. It seemed that the general, while commanding his Nazi troops in Italy, had managed to acquire some three million shares of equity in Italian companies. Whether these shares were looted from the Jews, Dulles did not say. In any event, Wolff had asked Dulles what he should do with them. European finance was an area Dulles knew well. He had worked before the war as a lawyer representing major European banks and companies, and he seemed unfazed by the brazen request. “I suggested that if possible he make available to us [a] list giving numbers and names where registered securities involved and meanwhile do what he can to protect certificates from being sent to Germany,”
Dulles cabled Washington. Dulles would make sure that the Nazi general’s financial interests were safe with him.

General Wolff—the right-hand man to Himmler—now had the Americans on his side. A few weeks later, when a group of anti-Nazi partisans seized him at a villa near the Italian-Swiss border, Dulles’s men dispatched a team to rescue him. They got him out safely. A grateful Wolff thanked
his American rescuers with a bottle of Scotch whiskey and packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes. Dulles had become the Nazi’s protector. In a last testament written as a precaution as the fighting in Italy continued, Wolff expressed the gratitude of a condemned man looking to his patron saint for redemption. “If after my death, my honor be assaulted,” the general wrote, “I request Mr. Dulles to rehabilitate my name, publicizing my true, humane intentions.”

Dulles got what he wanted in the negotiations: Wolff and his men in Italy agreed to lay down their arms to the Allied troops. It was, at least on its face, a military and intelligence coup that proved a capstone in Dulles’s ascendant career, helping land him the job of CIA director eight years later, under President Eisenhower, side by side with his brother, John Foster Dulles, who was secretary of state. Viewed with any perspective, however, the early surrender did not hold up as the momentous occasion that Dulles had envisioned it. Coming just six days before the full surrender of Germany, its military impact was blunted. Lives were saved in Italy, to be sure, but most of them were likely Germans and Italians, not Americans.
Moreover, the success of Dulles’s maneuverings was overshadowed inside Roosevelt’s White House by the furious diplomatic fallout that his secret negotiations with the Nazis created in the waning days of the war, as Stalin and FDR exchanged a series of angry missives over what the Russians saw as an American double cross.

Stalin charged that the secret surrender talks in Italy were a ploy to get the Germans to turn their full aggression to the Russians in the east. FDR, denying disingenuously that any negotiations had taken place, bemoaned that “such distrust, such lack of faith”
threatened to sink their wartime alliance. Just days after writing his third and final letter to Stalin on the contretemps, FDR died. (Wolff sent Dulles a personal note of condolence.) The president’s warnings about the damage to U.S.-Soviet relations proved prescient. Indeed, some historians would come to view the confrontation over the early surrender engineered by Dulles and Wolff as the first major flare-up of the Cold War, fueling distrust between Washington and Moscow for years just as peace was at hand.

After the war, Wolff needed his patron saint. Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg, unimpressed by Dulles’s star Nazi, named him among a select group of some two dozen “major war criminals” facing possible death sentences. Wolff was held in an Allied POW camp along with other senior Nazis. Even in custody, however, it was clear that Wolffie had achieved a special place of favor afforded to few others. Technically a prisoner of war, he was allowed to continue wearing his German uniform and carrying a gun, and he even went yachting
with his family one weekend at a lake in Austria. Nonetheless, he was miffed. Official denials aside, he claimed that Dulles and his men had in fact promised him full immunity from prosecution—along with a cabinet minister’s spot in the new German government—in exchange for the Italian peace.

Dulles was already working the Nuremberg prosecutors to see that his ally would not face charges. He prepared affidavits in his defense, kept evidence of his crimes away from prosecutors, and rallied support for his man. So many of Wolff’s underlings from the Black Order were now also claiming protection from the Americans in Europe for their work with Dulles that policymakers in Washington had to decide what to do about all of them. Word soon came back that the United States and its allies “owe some moral obligation” to Wolff and his Nazi men for their help.
Famed spy chief James Angleton was even more blunt. “Military honor dictated that we honor the promises made to these men,” he wrote to the Army in 1946 about the need for protecting two Wolff SS officers from war crimes prosecutions. One of the SS men, Eugen Dollmann, not only escaped prosecution, but hooked on with the CIA, peddling Soviet intelligence of dubious value. And with little explanation, Wolff himself soon disappeared from the list of major war criminals at Nuremberg. Improbably, the top SS man became a mere “witness” to Nazi atrocities. There was little doubt who was responsible. “It is thanks to Mr. Dulles
that you were not included in the first Nuremberg trial list,” a Swiss diplomat told Wolff.

The bombastic Nazi general showed little gratitude. He was a leading general in the Third Reich, and he demanded to be treated like one. He was the true victim, he thundered to one Allied interrogator in 1947. His continued confinement as a POW—after handing Italy to Dulles and the Americans on a “silver platter”—was worse than anything the Jews ever faced under Hitler, he blustered. “A Jew is killed in the gas chamber in a few seconds, without having an idea or even knowing it. My comrades and I have been allowed to die once every night for 21 months. This is much more inhumane
than the extermination of the Jews.”

Ultimately, Wolff, one of the highest-ranking SS officials to survive the war, was convicted by a British court in 1949 as a “minor offender,” the equivalent of a traffic ticket usually reserved for Nazi privates, not SS generals. He was promptly released. His four years already spent in custody as a POW, yacht trips and all, were punishment enough, the court decided. He resumed a lucrative career in the German advertising industry and collected a German military pension for his service in the SS. Even so, Wolff remained upset, complaining for years that Dulles and the Americans had broken their promises to keep him out of trouble altogether. He even sent the Americans an itemized bill for some $50,000 in lost time, clothing, and property, as well as legal expenses. Dulles was not amused by his wartime partner’s hubris. Wolff, he said, “doesn’t realize what a lucky man he is not to be spending the rest of his days in jail, and his wisest policy would be to keep fairly quiet about the loss of a bit of underwear, etc. He might easily have lost more than his shirt.”

Wolff and his Black Order deputies in the SS were only the beginning. American military officials had their sights set on an even bigger target for recruitment: the Nazi scientists and engineers responsible for building Hitler’s war machine.

General Patton, Old Blood and Guts, was among the scientists’ biggest admirers. As commander of the American-run zone in Bavaria in the immediate aftermath of the Allied victory, Patton showed an odd, almost perverse fondness for the German POWs in U.S. custody. Even as he was castigating the Jewish survivors as subhuman “locusts,” Patton was hiring Nazis as camp administrators and allowing them to keep their posts in the civilian government. His actions ran afoul of General Eisenhower’s orders calling for the “denazification” of Germany, but Patton didn’t seem to care. He admired the Nazis’ technical competence, military rules be damned, and he wanted them kept in positions of authority in the camps. “Listen,” Patton told one of his officers, “if you need these men, keep them and don’t worry about anything else.”

Weeks after Germany’s surrender, General Patton visited a German POW barracks and sought out a senior Nazi prisoner who was being held there, a German general and scientist named Walter Dornberger. A leading German rocketeer, Dornberger had run the Nazis’ V-2 missile program and had overseen the work of Wernher von Braun and the other technical experts who built the missiles that Hitler had used in Europe to devastating effect. “Are you that guy who was in charge of the development of the V-2 rockets?” Patton asked Dornberger. “Jawohl, Herr General,” Dornberger answered with a nod. Patton, impressed, pulled three cigars from his pocket and handed them to his Nazi rival. “My congratulations,” Patton said. “I could not have done it.”

Germany’s production of the V-2, the world’s first long-range ballistic missile, represented both the soaring heights of the Nazi regime’s technological achievements and the barbaric depths of its inhumanity. At the Peenemünde rocket site and its successor, a sprawling underground facility called Dora-Mittelwerk, Hitler aspired to create a weapon unlike anything ever created—at any cost in lives and treasure. To build such a scientific marvel of destruction, the Nazis brought in tens of thousands of slave laborers from nearby concentration camps—Russians, French, Italians, Poles, Roma, Jews, and more. At Dora, the laborers slept head to feet in giant, dank tunnels connected to the rocket factory, then made the trek each day at gunpoint to begin their toils. Tasked with erecting Hitler’s missiles, the laborers were worked to exhaustion. They were routinely starved, beaten, stabbed, whipped, tortured, and brutalized. The boldest of the lot—prisoners suspected of plotting rebellion or sabotaging missiles—were hanged in the roll-call square, or sometimes in the factory from a giant crane; not in one fell swoop, but inch by inch, in slow, agonizing fashion. Nazi secretaries from the cavernous factory would come watch the spectacle for amusement. Prisoners were made to watch, too, as the limp corpses were left hanging for hours to warn the workers what would befall them if they interfered with Hitler’s missiles.

Every day, twenty or so prisoners died from the diseases that were rampant amid the corpses, feces, and vermin in the tunnels. At the start of the day, a Nazi doctor would inspect the prisoners to determine which ones were strong enough to work on the rockets and which ones would be sent to a makeshift hospital set up to keep the laborers sufficiently alive to work. A French prisoner at the Dora-Mittelwerk camp, Michel Fliecx, recounted what happened when he came down ill one day in 1944. “I was transported
on a stretcher from the tunnel . . . I was hoping they’d send me to the hospital. But no, they judged me still to be in too good shape; you had to be in the throes of death to get in now. I was again sent off . . . to the room reserved for those with dysentery . . . The first thing that hit me was a foul stench . . . On all sides, lying on disgusting straw mattresses, were skeletons, their dirty gray skin hanging from them.”

The factory at Dora-Mittelwerk was an assembly line of death. The more V-2 missiles Hitler wanted to launch across Europe, and the more quickly he wanted them built, the more hellish the work conditions for the slave laborers became. The factories were a demonic testament to Hitler’s determination to contort science and technology to fit his own twisted aims. “Leading men of science above all are to make research fruitful for warfare,” Hitler had declared in 1942, “by working together in their special fields.”

The victorious Americans saw the ballistic firepower that Hitler’s team of experts had created. The impressive German war machine, from planes and rockets to tanks and submarines, had nearly subsumed Europe. Military officials were amazed that a country of Germany’s size and relatively meager supply of raw materials had been able to achieve such battlefield dominance. They credited Hitler’s scientists, and they were determined to claim the Nazi brain trust for themselves. American commanders saw it as a matter of survival in the postwar world. Russia, the new enemy, was already enticing German scientists to its side with all sorts of promises; there were even reports that Moscow was kidnapping unwilling scientists and bringing them across to the Russian occupation zone. The Americans wanted their share. For both Washington and Moscow, Hitler’s scientists had become the spoils of war.

Even before Germany’s ultimate defeat, as the Allies were driving the Nazis back from one stronghold after another, American scientific and military teams were dispatched to search through newly seized areas, confiscate the reams of research records left behind, examine the equipment and technology that had driven Hitler’s brutal army, and interrogate Nazi scientists. A batch of SS chief Himmler’s records on Nazi medical experiments, hidden in a cave, was among the troves recovered. But Washington had bigger plans. Military officials were intent on exploiting the Nazis’ advances not just by seizing records and interrogating Hitler’s scientists, but by bringing those scientists to America—as researchers for the United States military.