Stasi-style secret police system forming in Canada, Britain, US
- Thread starter gangstalking
- Start date
Fact is there are too many humans on the planet. If one wants to cut the use of non renuable resources and the destruction of habitat human population has to be cut back.
Well seeing that I am “full of shit”, “clueless “and “ hunted down” , I get the message loud and clear. I thought that the topics put forth where important and worth discussion. I simply gave my point of view or opinion . My goal was not to offend anyone . I’ll keep my P.OV. to myself.
Don't give up.
There's always room for another whack job somewhere on the Internet.
Time for you to do your part and find a cheap, environmentally way to commit suicide. Notice the elite never admit there are too many of them.
It is, the crowd here cheers on the abuse and death of all minorities and 'upstarts' like Cuba, Iran and Venezuela. The psychopaths here cheer on the murder of millions of innocents if it increases their dividend check. (Right Walnut?)
The pricks here would like nothing better than to have you stop posting about the abuses the elite inflict on the most vulnerable. Of they stop you posts they are quite happy, if you leave the board they are ecstatic. They only have the support of the other local psychopaths and all they have are lies and baseless opinions. I hope, for your sake, that it takes more than that to stop you from posting actual cases as they cannot argue against facts,It will get you lots of bad press, you sure you are up to the task?
Jane Philpott delivered a sermon in 2016 about 'strange illnesses' around Hudson Bay area. Before that she spend a decade in Niger with 'Doctors without Borders' ($2B donations per year but no money to buy meds for the black people in Africa) failed to come up with any solutions on her own or with the help of the WHO and the DWB were not even called to look at an unknown type of infection. To leave a trail that easy to follows means the ones doing the abuse believe they are fully above any recrimination when the crimes they are committing include 'hunting people to the point of extinction'. Snipers and diseased blankets are not 'natural causes of death' except when these ****ers are holding the reins. Bankers who put the world into debt (to them only) of about $75T deserve something sharp rather than another pay raise for themselves.
At least they should know who the real enemy is, the Canadians who claim they are there to help.
BTW B Gates does not vaccinate his children even with single dose shots, WTF does that tell you??
At least they should know who the real enemy is, the Canadians who claim they are there to help.
BTW B Gates does not vaccinate his children even with single dose shots, WTF does that tell you??
If you took your bullshit post to any other forum you would be hounded like you never imagined. Want me to post it and make it clear where it came from and why there is no condemnation here when he would have it erased and get banned at the same time. This place is the only insane place left, no wonder psychopaths are the only permanent members.
German Govt Hires Ex-Stasi Agent To Patrol Facebook For ‘Xenophobic’ Comments
Those caught posting material that the government disagrees with are likely to face criminal prosecution.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/20...si-agent-patrol-facebook-xenophobic-comments/
Likely they will go for the gibbrish speakers as well...they can tell when someone uses poor piss doc translations like "Arglebarglearglebargle", which is everyone knows is a poor translation for the quaint American term "It's a sausage party. Wanna come?".
Oh...and "NO".
Those caught posting material that the government disagrees with are likely to face criminal prosecution.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/20...si-agent-patrol-facebook-xenophobic-comments/
Likely they will go for the gibbrish speakers as well...they can tell when someone uses poor piss doc translations like "Arglebarglearglebargle", which is everyone knows is a poor translation for the quaint American term "It's a sausage party. Wanna come?".
Oh...and "NO".
That pretty much matches what our friends in Germany say. If you say anything negative about refugees you are set upon by the appoligists and called nazi.Seems the German government is controlled by fascists right now.
What do you mean 'now'. The whole last century say people on power that were meant to be in power. Without Hitler the state of Israel would have no justification to be created in the first place. The Balfour Declaration is a promise from the Brits to create that State and you are all saying Hitler was behind it all.
You people really are the stupidest the planet has produced since day1 of creation. Time for that to change, hahaha.
You people really are the stupidest the planet has produced since day1 of creation. Time for that to change, hahaha.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen
Reinhard Gehlen (3 April 1902 – 8 June 1979) was a German general and intelligence officer who was chief of the Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East (FHO) military-intelligence unit during World War II (1942–45); spymaster of the CIA-affiliated anti–Communist Gehlen Organisation for the United States (1946–56); and the first president of the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) of West Germany (1956–68) during the Cold War. Gehlen was regarded as "one of the most legendary Cold War spymasters."[1]
Gehlen became a professional soldier in 1920 during the Weimar Republic. In 1942, he became chief of FHO, the German Army's military intelligence unit on the Eastern Front (1941–45). He achieved the rank of major general before being sacked by Adolf Hitler because of the FHO’s pessimistically accurate intelligence reports about Red Army superiority. In late 1945, at the start of the Cold War, the U.S. military (G-2 Intelligence) recruited him to establish the Gehlen Organisation, an espionage network against the Soviet Union, which employed former military officers of the Wehrmacht and former members of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD).
Gehlen was the first president of the Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany from 1956 to 1968. While this was a civilian office, he was also a lieutenant-general in the Reserve forces of the Bundeswehr, the highest-ranking reserve-officer in the military of West Germany.[2]
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/us/in-cold-war-us-spy-agencies-used-1000-nazis.html
WASHINGTON — In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.
The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of “minor war crimes.”
And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official.
Evidence of the government’s links to Nazi spies began emerging publicly in the 1970s. But thousands of records from declassified files, Freedom of Information Act requests and other sources, together with interviews with scores of current and former government officials, show that the government’s recruitment of Nazis ran far deeper than previously known and that officials sought to conceal those ties for at least a half-century after the war.
In 1980, F.B.I. officials refused to tell even the Justice Department’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the United States.
https://ips-dc.org/the_cias_worst-k...nfirm_united_states_collaboration_with_nazis/
The CIA’s Worst-Kept Secret: Newly Declassified Files Confirm United States Collaboration with Nazis
Pried loose by Congress, which passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act three years ago, a long-hidden trove of once-classified CIA documents confirms one of the worst-kept secrets of the cold war--the CIA's use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a
May 1, 2001 | Martin A. Lee “Honest and idealist … enjoys good food and wine … unprejudiced mind …”
That’s how a 1952 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assessment described Nazi ideologue Emil Augsburg, an officer at the infamous Wannsee Institute, the SS think tank involved in planning the Final Solution. Augsburg’s SS unit performed “special duties,” a euphemism for exterminating Jews and other “undesirables” during the Second World War.
Although he was wanted in Poland for war crimes, Augsburg managed to ingratiate himself with the U.S. CIA, which employed him in the late 1940s as an expert on Soviet affairs. Recently released CIA records indicate that Augsburg was among a rogue’s gallery of Nazi war criminals recruited by U.S. intelligence agencies shortly after Germany surrendered to the Allies.
Pried loose by Congress, which passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act three years ago, a long-hidden trove of once-classified CIA documents confirms one of the worst-kept secrets of the cold war–the CIA’s use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a clandestine campaign against the Soviet Union.
The CIA reports show that U.S. officials knew they were subsidizing numerous Third Reich veterans who had committed horrible crimes against humanity, but these atrocities were overlooked as the anti-Communist crusade acquired its own momentum. For Nazis who would otherwise have been charged with war crimes, signing on with American intelligence enabled them to avoid a prison term.
“The real winners of the cold war were Nazi war criminals, many of whom were able to escape justice because the East and West became so rapidly focused after the war on challenging each other,” says Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations and America’s chief Nazi hunter. Rosenbaum serves on a Clinton-appointed Interagency Working Group (IWG) committee of U.S. scholars, public officials, and former intelligence officers who helped prepare the CIA records for declassification.
Many Nazi criminals “received light punishment, no punishment at all, or received compensation because Western spy agencies considered them useful assets in the cold war,” the IWG team stated after releasing 18,000 pages of redacted CIA material. (More installments are pending.)
These are “not just dry historical documents,” insists former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the panel examining the CIA files. As far as Holtzman is concerned, the CIA papers raise critical questions about American foreign policy and the origins of the cold war.
The decision to recruit Nazi operatives had a negative impact on U.S.-Soviet relations and set the stage for Washington’s tolerance of human rights abuses and other criminal acts in the name of anti-Communism. With that fateful sub-rosa embrace, the die was cast for a litany of antidemocratic CIA interventions around the world.
The Gehlen Org
The key figure on the German side of the CIA-Nazi tryst was General Reinhard Gehlen, who had served as Adolf Hitler’s top anti-Soviet spy. During World War II, Gehlen oversaw all German military-intelligence operations in Eastern Europe and the USSR.
As the war drew to a close, Gehlen surmised that the U.S.-Soviet alliance would soon break down. Realizing that the United States did not have a viable cloak-and-dagger apparatus in Eastern Europe, Gehlen surrendered to the Americans and pitched himself as someone who could make a vital contribution to the forthcoming struggle against the Communists. In addition to sharing his vast espionage archive on the USSR, Gehlen promised that he could resurrect an underground network of battle-hardened, anti-Communist assets who were well placed to wreak havoc throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Although the Yalta Treaty stipulated that the United States must give the Soviets all captured German officers who had been involved in “eastern area activities,” Gehlen was quickly spirited off to Fort Hunt in Virginia. The image he projected during 10 months of negotiations at Fort Hunt was, to use a bit of espionage parlance, a “legend”–one that hinged on Gehlen’s false claim that he was never really a Nazi, but was dedicated, above all, to fighting Communism. Those who bit the bait included future CIA director Allen Dulles, who became Gehlen’s biggest supporter among American policy wonks.
Gehlen returned to West Germany in the summer of 1946 with a mandate to rebuild his espionage organization and resume spying on the East at the behest of American intelligence. The date is significant as it preceded the onset of the cold war, which, according to standard U.S. historical accounts, did not begin until a year later. The early courtship of Gehlen by American intelligence suggests that Washington was in a cold war mode sooner than most people realize. The Gehlen gambit also belies the prevalent Western notion that aggressive Soviet policies were primarily to blame for triggering the cold war.
Based near Munich, Gehlen proceeded to enlist thousands of Gestapo, Wehrmacht, and SS veterans. Even the vilest of the vile–the senior bureaucrats who ran the central administrative apparatus of the Holocaust–were welcome in the “Gehlen Org,” as it was called–including Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s chief deputy. SS major Emil Augsburg and gestapo captain Klaus Barbie, otherwise known as the “Butcher of Lyon,” were among those who did double duty for Gehlen and U.S. intelligence. “It seems that in the Gehlen headquarters, one SS man paved the way for the next and Himmler’s elite were having happy reunion ceremonies,” the Frankfurter Rundschau reported in the early 1950s.
Bolted lock, stock, and barrel into the CIA, Gehlen’s Nazi-infested spy apparatus functioned as America’s secret eyes and ears in central Europe. The Org would go on to play a major role within NATO, supplying two-thirds of raw intelligence on the Warsaw Pact countries. Under CIA auspices, and later as head of the West German secret service until he retired in 1968, Gehlen exerted considerable influence on U.S. policy toward the Soviet bloc. When U.S. spy chiefs desired an off-the-shelf style of nation tampering, they turned to the readily available Org, which served as a subcontracting syndicate for a series of ill-fated guerrilla air drops behind the Iron Curtain and other harebrained CIA rollback schemes.
Sitting Ducks for Disinformation
It’s long been known that top German scientists were eagerly scooped up by several countries, including the United States, which rushed to claim these high-profile experts as spoils of World War II. Yet all the while the CIA was mum about recruiting Nazi spies. The U.S. government never officially acknowledged its role in launching the Gehlen organization until more than half a century after the fact.
Handling Nazi spies, however, was not the same as employing rocket technicians. One could always tell whether Werner von Braun and his bunch were accomplishing their assignments for NASA and other U.S. agencies. If the rockets didn’t fire properly, then the scientists would be judged accordingly. But how does one determine if a Nazi spy with a dubious past is doing a reliable job?
Third Reich veterans often proved adept at peddling data–much of it false–in return for cash and safety, the IWG panel concluded. Many Nazis played a double game, feeding scuttlebutt to both sides of the East-West conflict and preying upon the mutual suspicions that emerged from the rubble of Hitler’s Germany.
General Gehlen frequently exaggerated the Soviet threat in order to exacerbate tensions between the superpowers. At one point he succeeded in convincing General Lucius Clay, military governor of the U.S. zone of occupation in Germany, that a major Soviet war mobilization had begun in Eastern Europe. This prompted Clay to dash off a frantic, top-secret telegram to Washington in March 1948, warning that war “may come with dramatic suddenness.”
Gehlen’s disinformation strategy was based on a simple premise: the colder the cold war got, the more political space for Hitler’s heirs to maneuver. The Org could only flourish under cold war conditions; as an institution it was therefore committed to perpetuating the Soviet-American conflict.
“The agency loved Gehlen because he fed us what we wanted to hear. We used his stuff constantly, and we fed it to everyone else–the Pentagon, the White House, the newspapers. They loved it, too. But it was hyped-up Russian bogeyman junk, and it did a lot of damage to this country,” a retired CIA official told author Christopher Simpson, who also serves on the IGW review panel and was author of Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War.
Unexpected Consequences
Members of the Gehlen Org were instrumental in helping thousands of fascist fugitives escape via “ratlines” to safe havens abroad–often with a wink and a nod from U.S. intelligence officers. Third Reich expatriates and fascist collaborators subsequently emerged as “security advisors” in several Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, where ultra-right-wing death squads persist as their enduring legacy. Klaus Barbie, for example, assisted a succession of military regimes in Bolivia, where he taught soldiers torture techniques and helped protect the flourishing cocaine trade in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
CIA officials eventually learned that the Nazi old boy network nesting inside the Gehlen Org had an unexpected twist to it. By bankrolling Gehlen, the CIA unknowingly laid itself open to manipulation by a foreign intelligence service that was riddled with Soviet spies. Gehlen’s habit of employing compromised ex-Nazis–and the CIA’s willingness to sanction this practice–enabled the USSR to penetrate West Germany’s secret service by blackmailing numerous agents.
Ironically, some of the men employed by Gehlen would go on to play leading roles in European neofascist organizations that despise the United States. One of the consequences of the CIA’s ghoulish alliance with the Org is evident today in a resurgent fascist movement in Europe that can trace its ideological lineage back to Hitler’s Reich, through Gehlen operatives, who collaborated with U.S. intelligence.
Slow to recognize that their Nazi hired guns would feign an allegiance to the Western alliance as long as they deemed it tactically advantageous, CIA officials invested far too much in Gehlen’s spooky Nazi outfit. “It was a horrendous mistake, morally, politically, and also in very pragmatic intelligence terms,” says American University professor Richard Breitman, chairman of the IWG review panel.
More than just a bungled spy caper, the Gehlen debacle should serve as a cautionary tale at a time when post-cold war triumphalism and arrogant unilateralism are rampant among U.S. officials. If nothing else, it underscores the need for the United States to confront some of its own demons now that unreconstructed cold warriors are again riding top saddle in Washington.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-...-studies/studies/vol-61-no-2/the-gestapo.html
The Gestapo: The Myth and Reality of Hitler’s Secret Police
Frank McDonough (Skyhorse Publishing, 2017), 293 pp., notes, glossary, sources, illustrations, and index.
Reviewed by David A. Foy
The very mention of the word “Gestapo” brings immediately to the minds of most people nightmarish images of sadistic butchers working for a criminal organization that prided itself on its ability to expertly and enthusiastically engage in genocide within Germany and occupied Europe before and during World War II. British historian and author Frank McDonough has written The Gestapo to refute that false impression, to provide what he calls a “fresh interpretation”—some would call it a “revisionist” view—of how the Geheime Staatspolizei operated, primarily within Germany from 1933 to 1945. As he states categorically, “The assumption that Gestapo officers arrested individuals, interrogated them brutally, then sent them to a concentration camp, is a myth.” (54) He also refers to his book as an example of “history from below,” written from the standpoint of individuals affected, rather than the traditional approach of “history from above,” focused on the organization. McDonough’s book is derived from research into a group of Gestapo records that amazingly survived the war: 73,000 records from the Dusseldorf region of Germany that document the interactions between the Gestapo and the German populace.
It is important to remember, McDonough posits, that the Gestapo began as nothing more than a police department, whose detectives followed strict protocols and were even issued an instruction manual for the conduct of investigations, arrests, and interrogations. He assesses that the Gestapo left most German citizens alone, because they were determined to be no threat to the state; furthermore, the vast majority of even those Germans who were investigated was usually released. It was not only a question of proclivities and authorities, it was a matter of numbers—McDonough claims that at no time in its history did the Gestapo ever have more than 16,000 active, full-time officers to monitor 66 million people, making it impossible to live up to their reputation of being omnipotent and omnipresent. His research also enables him to “bin” the victims of Gestapo abuse and torture into specific categories—religious dissidents, Communists, “social outcasts,” and Jews. The mature Gestapo recruited ordinary officers from either working-class or lower-class backgrounds, many of whom had left school at age 16 with no formal qualifications. By the late 1930s, those who were “up-and-comers” tended to be young, well-educated, middle class individuals, many of whom had law degrees or doctorates. Those German males who procured coveted posts in the political police/Gestapo were selected for their police training and experience, not their Nazi Party membership or status, and only a minority of Gestapo officers were ever Party members. Most who did join the NSDAP (Nationalsocialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi Party)) did so simply to keep their jobs, the only way to enjoy a lucrative pension in retirement.
In his opening chapter, McDonough discusses the origins and rapid development of the Gestapo, from a Prussian political police force in 1932, led by World War I fighter pilot ace Hermann Göring, to what was by 1936 a secret state police force for all Germany. McDonough credits Göring, along with Rudolf Diels, Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhard Heydrich, with the creation of the Gestapo.
The year 1933 proved to be a watershed for the development of the Gestapo—the Reichstag fire of February, likely set by mentally handicapped Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe, prompted the declaration of the Gestapo as the secret state police in Prussia by April. As Göring and Diels consolidated their gains and expanded their authorities in Prussia, Himmler and Heydrich competed with Sturmabteilung (SA) leader Ernst Rohm for control of the police in the other states of Germany. Rohm naively believed that Himmler’s Schutzstaffeln (SS) was subordinate to the SA, a conclusion McDonough accurately characterizes as “a grave tactical error.” (27)
Wrongly believing that Rohm intended to wage a coup, Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich murdered him during the 1 July 1934 “Night of the Long Knives,” a bloody purge of the SA by the SS. Heydrich used this non-existent threat to redefine the term “enemy of the state” and justify the continued existence of the Gestapo after 1934. Within two years, the Gestapo was recognized as the secret state police for all of Germany, and by the advent of World War II in 1939, the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) was the centralized security authority for the entire country, solidifying Himmler’s victory.
Predictably, the tenets of the major religious faiths in Germany before and during World War II ultimately meant conflict with the Gestapo. The welcome news of the Concordat between the Papacy and the Third Reich deceived many Catholic bishops, who were reluctant to criticize Hitler’s regime, at least until priests began being charged with currency smuggling and sexual abuse and once Hitler adopted the T4 program, the innocuous covername for a program of euthanasia. Among religious groups in Germany, the Gestapo particularly singled out Jehovah’s Witnesses for persecution, as they were a small group with no defenders and were officially banned by 1935.
The most systematically persecuted political group in Nazi Germany proved to be the Communists. The Reichstag fire provided the pretext for a crackdown, and 10,000 Communists were arrested that night. Some tragically fled to the Soviet Union, where they became victims of Stalin rather than Hitler; ironically, even after the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, German Communists remained supporters of the Soviet Union. The bottom line was that by the late 1930s, most German Communists resigned themselves to the Nazis as a fact of life, just another form of oppression the bourgeoisie waged against the proletariat.
Also falling victim to the Gestapo’s depredations were all those categorized as “social outsiders”—specifically, habitual criminals, homosexuals, sex offenders, prostitutes, juvenile delinquents, members of street gangs, Gypsies, and even the long-term unemployed. The most-hardened habitual criminals—the “three strikes and you’re out” equivalents—could find themselves in a concentration camp; 20,000 did, and most died, according to McDonough. In the most extreme cases of sexual misconduct, the state resorted to sterilization in a last-ditch effort to salvage these individuals as members of the “National Community.” Between 1933 and 1945, McDonough estimates that the state involuntarily sterilized more than 350,000 Germans.
Although not the primary target of the Gestapo, at least not initially, German Jews also fell victim to the secret police service. The author partially attributes the stage-by-stage persecution of the Jews in Germany to the economic success of German Jews, which prompted resentment from the rest of the populace. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws motivated many Jews to leave Germany, while those remaining faced increased persecution by the Gestapo, especially for “race defilement,” the legal definition of Aryan-Jewish sexual relations. But worse was to follow, especially in the wake of the November 1938 murder of a minor German consular official, Ernst vom Rath, by a German-Jewish teenager and refugee incensed at learning that his parents had been deported from Germany to Poland. The response to the murder was a nationwide Jewish pogram known as Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”), in which the windows of Jewish-owned shops were smashed, prompting more Jews to leave the Fatherland. In September 1941, when German Jews were forced to begin wearing the yellow Star of David with the word Jude (Jew) in black in the middle, most non-Jewish Germans applauded. Beginning the next month and continuing until the summer of 1942, the Gestapo organized wholesale deportations of German Jews. As McDonough puts it, “It is hard to understand the consequences of a tidal wave in the hours of darkness.” (211)
Reinhard Gehlen (3 April 1902 – 8 June 1979) was a German general and intelligence officer who was chief of the Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East (FHO) military-intelligence unit during World War II (1942–45); spymaster of the CIA-affiliated anti–Communist Gehlen Organisation for the United States (1946–56); and the first president of the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) of West Germany (1956–68) during the Cold War. Gehlen was regarded as "one of the most legendary Cold War spymasters."[1]
Gehlen became a professional soldier in 1920 during the Weimar Republic. In 1942, he became chief of FHO, the German Army's military intelligence unit on the Eastern Front (1941–45). He achieved the rank of major general before being sacked by Adolf Hitler because of the FHO’s pessimistically accurate intelligence reports about Red Army superiority. In late 1945, at the start of the Cold War, the U.S. military (G-2 Intelligence) recruited him to establish the Gehlen Organisation, an espionage network against the Soviet Union, which employed former military officers of the Wehrmacht and former members of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD).
Gehlen was the first president of the Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany from 1956 to 1968. While this was a civilian office, he was also a lieutenant-general in the Reserve forces of the Bundeswehr, the highest-ranking reserve-officer in the military of West Germany.[2]
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/us/in-cold-war-us-spy-agencies-used-1000-nazis.html
WASHINGTON — In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.
The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of “minor war crimes.”
And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official.
Evidence of the government’s links to Nazi spies began emerging publicly in the 1970s. But thousands of records from declassified files, Freedom of Information Act requests and other sources, together with interviews with scores of current and former government officials, show that the government’s recruitment of Nazis ran far deeper than previously known and that officials sought to conceal those ties for at least a half-century after the war.
In 1980, F.B.I. officials refused to tell even the Justice Department’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the United States.
https://ips-dc.org/the_cias_worst-k...nfirm_united_states_collaboration_with_nazis/
The CIA’s Worst-Kept Secret: Newly Declassified Files Confirm United States Collaboration with Nazis
Pried loose by Congress, which passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act three years ago, a long-hidden trove of once-classified CIA documents confirms one of the worst-kept secrets of the cold war--the CIA's use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a
May 1, 2001 | Martin A. Lee “Honest and idealist … enjoys good food and wine … unprejudiced mind …”
That’s how a 1952 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assessment described Nazi ideologue Emil Augsburg, an officer at the infamous Wannsee Institute, the SS think tank involved in planning the Final Solution. Augsburg’s SS unit performed “special duties,” a euphemism for exterminating Jews and other “undesirables” during the Second World War.
Although he was wanted in Poland for war crimes, Augsburg managed to ingratiate himself with the U.S. CIA, which employed him in the late 1940s as an expert on Soviet affairs. Recently released CIA records indicate that Augsburg was among a rogue’s gallery of Nazi war criminals recruited by U.S. intelligence agencies shortly after Germany surrendered to the Allies.
Pried loose by Congress, which passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act three years ago, a long-hidden trove of once-classified CIA documents confirms one of the worst-kept secrets of the cold war–the CIA’s use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a clandestine campaign against the Soviet Union.
The CIA reports show that U.S. officials knew they were subsidizing numerous Third Reich veterans who had committed horrible crimes against humanity, but these atrocities were overlooked as the anti-Communist crusade acquired its own momentum. For Nazis who would otherwise have been charged with war crimes, signing on with American intelligence enabled them to avoid a prison term.
“The real winners of the cold war were Nazi war criminals, many of whom were able to escape justice because the East and West became so rapidly focused after the war on challenging each other,” says Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations and America’s chief Nazi hunter. Rosenbaum serves on a Clinton-appointed Interagency Working Group (IWG) committee of U.S. scholars, public officials, and former intelligence officers who helped prepare the CIA records for declassification.
Many Nazi criminals “received light punishment, no punishment at all, or received compensation because Western spy agencies considered them useful assets in the cold war,” the IWG team stated after releasing 18,000 pages of redacted CIA material. (More installments are pending.)
These are “not just dry historical documents,” insists former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the panel examining the CIA files. As far as Holtzman is concerned, the CIA papers raise critical questions about American foreign policy and the origins of the cold war.
The decision to recruit Nazi operatives had a negative impact on U.S.-Soviet relations and set the stage for Washington’s tolerance of human rights abuses and other criminal acts in the name of anti-Communism. With that fateful sub-rosa embrace, the die was cast for a litany of antidemocratic CIA interventions around the world.
The Gehlen Org
The key figure on the German side of the CIA-Nazi tryst was General Reinhard Gehlen, who had served as Adolf Hitler’s top anti-Soviet spy. During World War II, Gehlen oversaw all German military-intelligence operations in Eastern Europe and the USSR.
As the war drew to a close, Gehlen surmised that the U.S.-Soviet alliance would soon break down. Realizing that the United States did not have a viable cloak-and-dagger apparatus in Eastern Europe, Gehlen surrendered to the Americans and pitched himself as someone who could make a vital contribution to the forthcoming struggle against the Communists. In addition to sharing his vast espionage archive on the USSR, Gehlen promised that he could resurrect an underground network of battle-hardened, anti-Communist assets who were well placed to wreak havoc throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Although the Yalta Treaty stipulated that the United States must give the Soviets all captured German officers who had been involved in “eastern area activities,” Gehlen was quickly spirited off to Fort Hunt in Virginia. The image he projected during 10 months of negotiations at Fort Hunt was, to use a bit of espionage parlance, a “legend”–one that hinged on Gehlen’s false claim that he was never really a Nazi, but was dedicated, above all, to fighting Communism. Those who bit the bait included future CIA director Allen Dulles, who became Gehlen’s biggest supporter among American policy wonks.
Gehlen returned to West Germany in the summer of 1946 with a mandate to rebuild his espionage organization and resume spying on the East at the behest of American intelligence. The date is significant as it preceded the onset of the cold war, which, according to standard U.S. historical accounts, did not begin until a year later. The early courtship of Gehlen by American intelligence suggests that Washington was in a cold war mode sooner than most people realize. The Gehlen gambit also belies the prevalent Western notion that aggressive Soviet policies were primarily to blame for triggering the cold war.
Based near Munich, Gehlen proceeded to enlist thousands of Gestapo, Wehrmacht, and SS veterans. Even the vilest of the vile–the senior bureaucrats who ran the central administrative apparatus of the Holocaust–were welcome in the “Gehlen Org,” as it was called–including Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s chief deputy. SS major Emil Augsburg and gestapo captain Klaus Barbie, otherwise known as the “Butcher of Lyon,” were among those who did double duty for Gehlen and U.S. intelligence. “It seems that in the Gehlen headquarters, one SS man paved the way for the next and Himmler’s elite were having happy reunion ceremonies,” the Frankfurter Rundschau reported in the early 1950s.
Bolted lock, stock, and barrel into the CIA, Gehlen’s Nazi-infested spy apparatus functioned as America’s secret eyes and ears in central Europe. The Org would go on to play a major role within NATO, supplying two-thirds of raw intelligence on the Warsaw Pact countries. Under CIA auspices, and later as head of the West German secret service until he retired in 1968, Gehlen exerted considerable influence on U.S. policy toward the Soviet bloc. When U.S. spy chiefs desired an off-the-shelf style of nation tampering, they turned to the readily available Org, which served as a subcontracting syndicate for a series of ill-fated guerrilla air drops behind the Iron Curtain and other harebrained CIA rollback schemes.
Sitting Ducks for Disinformation
It’s long been known that top German scientists were eagerly scooped up by several countries, including the United States, which rushed to claim these high-profile experts as spoils of World War II. Yet all the while the CIA was mum about recruiting Nazi spies. The U.S. government never officially acknowledged its role in launching the Gehlen organization until more than half a century after the fact.
Handling Nazi spies, however, was not the same as employing rocket technicians. One could always tell whether Werner von Braun and his bunch were accomplishing their assignments for NASA and other U.S. agencies. If the rockets didn’t fire properly, then the scientists would be judged accordingly. But how does one determine if a Nazi spy with a dubious past is doing a reliable job?
Third Reich veterans often proved adept at peddling data–much of it false–in return for cash and safety, the IWG panel concluded. Many Nazis played a double game, feeding scuttlebutt to both sides of the East-West conflict and preying upon the mutual suspicions that emerged from the rubble of Hitler’s Germany.
General Gehlen frequently exaggerated the Soviet threat in order to exacerbate tensions between the superpowers. At one point he succeeded in convincing General Lucius Clay, military governor of the U.S. zone of occupation in Germany, that a major Soviet war mobilization had begun in Eastern Europe. This prompted Clay to dash off a frantic, top-secret telegram to Washington in March 1948, warning that war “may come with dramatic suddenness.”
Gehlen’s disinformation strategy was based on a simple premise: the colder the cold war got, the more political space for Hitler’s heirs to maneuver. The Org could only flourish under cold war conditions; as an institution it was therefore committed to perpetuating the Soviet-American conflict.
“The agency loved Gehlen because he fed us what we wanted to hear. We used his stuff constantly, and we fed it to everyone else–the Pentagon, the White House, the newspapers. They loved it, too. But it was hyped-up Russian bogeyman junk, and it did a lot of damage to this country,” a retired CIA official told author Christopher Simpson, who also serves on the IGW review panel and was author of Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War.
Unexpected Consequences
Members of the Gehlen Org were instrumental in helping thousands of fascist fugitives escape via “ratlines” to safe havens abroad–often with a wink and a nod from U.S. intelligence officers. Third Reich expatriates and fascist collaborators subsequently emerged as “security advisors” in several Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, where ultra-right-wing death squads persist as their enduring legacy. Klaus Barbie, for example, assisted a succession of military regimes in Bolivia, where he taught soldiers torture techniques and helped protect the flourishing cocaine trade in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
CIA officials eventually learned that the Nazi old boy network nesting inside the Gehlen Org had an unexpected twist to it. By bankrolling Gehlen, the CIA unknowingly laid itself open to manipulation by a foreign intelligence service that was riddled with Soviet spies. Gehlen’s habit of employing compromised ex-Nazis–and the CIA’s willingness to sanction this practice–enabled the USSR to penetrate West Germany’s secret service by blackmailing numerous agents.
Ironically, some of the men employed by Gehlen would go on to play leading roles in European neofascist organizations that despise the United States. One of the consequences of the CIA’s ghoulish alliance with the Org is evident today in a resurgent fascist movement in Europe that can trace its ideological lineage back to Hitler’s Reich, through Gehlen operatives, who collaborated with U.S. intelligence.
Slow to recognize that their Nazi hired guns would feign an allegiance to the Western alliance as long as they deemed it tactically advantageous, CIA officials invested far too much in Gehlen’s spooky Nazi outfit. “It was a horrendous mistake, morally, politically, and also in very pragmatic intelligence terms,” says American University professor Richard Breitman, chairman of the IWG review panel.
More than just a bungled spy caper, the Gehlen debacle should serve as a cautionary tale at a time when post-cold war triumphalism and arrogant unilateralism are rampant among U.S. officials. If nothing else, it underscores the need for the United States to confront some of its own demons now that unreconstructed cold warriors are again riding top saddle in Washington.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-...-studies/studies/vol-61-no-2/the-gestapo.html
The Gestapo: The Myth and Reality of Hitler’s Secret Police
Frank McDonough (Skyhorse Publishing, 2017), 293 pp., notes, glossary, sources, illustrations, and index.
Reviewed by David A. Foy
The very mention of the word “Gestapo” brings immediately to the minds of most people nightmarish images of sadistic butchers working for a criminal organization that prided itself on its ability to expertly and enthusiastically engage in genocide within Germany and occupied Europe before and during World War II. British historian and author Frank McDonough has written The Gestapo to refute that false impression, to provide what he calls a “fresh interpretation”—some would call it a “revisionist” view—of how the Geheime Staatspolizei operated, primarily within Germany from 1933 to 1945. As he states categorically, “The assumption that Gestapo officers arrested individuals, interrogated them brutally, then sent them to a concentration camp, is a myth.” (54) He also refers to his book as an example of “history from below,” written from the standpoint of individuals affected, rather than the traditional approach of “history from above,” focused on the organization. McDonough’s book is derived from research into a group of Gestapo records that amazingly survived the war: 73,000 records from the Dusseldorf region of Germany that document the interactions between the Gestapo and the German populace.
It is important to remember, McDonough posits, that the Gestapo began as nothing more than a police department, whose detectives followed strict protocols and were even issued an instruction manual for the conduct of investigations, arrests, and interrogations. He assesses that the Gestapo left most German citizens alone, because they were determined to be no threat to the state; furthermore, the vast majority of even those Germans who were investigated was usually released. It was not only a question of proclivities and authorities, it was a matter of numbers—McDonough claims that at no time in its history did the Gestapo ever have more than 16,000 active, full-time officers to monitor 66 million people, making it impossible to live up to their reputation of being omnipotent and omnipresent. His research also enables him to “bin” the victims of Gestapo abuse and torture into specific categories—religious dissidents, Communists, “social outcasts,” and Jews. The mature Gestapo recruited ordinary officers from either working-class or lower-class backgrounds, many of whom had left school at age 16 with no formal qualifications. By the late 1930s, those who were “up-and-comers” tended to be young, well-educated, middle class individuals, many of whom had law degrees or doctorates. Those German males who procured coveted posts in the political police/Gestapo were selected for their police training and experience, not their Nazi Party membership or status, and only a minority of Gestapo officers were ever Party members. Most who did join the NSDAP (Nationalsocialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi Party)) did so simply to keep their jobs, the only way to enjoy a lucrative pension in retirement.
In his opening chapter, McDonough discusses the origins and rapid development of the Gestapo, from a Prussian political police force in 1932, led by World War I fighter pilot ace Hermann Göring, to what was by 1936 a secret state police force for all Germany. McDonough credits Göring, along with Rudolf Diels, Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhard Heydrich, with the creation of the Gestapo.
The year 1933 proved to be a watershed for the development of the Gestapo—the Reichstag fire of February, likely set by mentally handicapped Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe, prompted the declaration of the Gestapo as the secret state police in Prussia by April. As Göring and Diels consolidated their gains and expanded their authorities in Prussia, Himmler and Heydrich competed with Sturmabteilung (SA) leader Ernst Rohm for control of the police in the other states of Germany. Rohm naively believed that Himmler’s Schutzstaffeln (SS) was subordinate to the SA, a conclusion McDonough accurately characterizes as “a grave tactical error.” (27)
Wrongly believing that Rohm intended to wage a coup, Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich murdered him during the 1 July 1934 “Night of the Long Knives,” a bloody purge of the SA by the SS. Heydrich used this non-existent threat to redefine the term “enemy of the state” and justify the continued existence of the Gestapo after 1934. Within two years, the Gestapo was recognized as the secret state police for all of Germany, and by the advent of World War II in 1939, the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) was the centralized security authority for the entire country, solidifying Himmler’s victory.
Predictably, the tenets of the major religious faiths in Germany before and during World War II ultimately meant conflict with the Gestapo. The welcome news of the Concordat between the Papacy and the Third Reich deceived many Catholic bishops, who were reluctant to criticize Hitler’s regime, at least until priests began being charged with currency smuggling and sexual abuse and once Hitler adopted the T4 program, the innocuous covername for a program of euthanasia. Among religious groups in Germany, the Gestapo particularly singled out Jehovah’s Witnesses for persecution, as they were a small group with no defenders and were officially banned by 1935.
The most systematically persecuted political group in Nazi Germany proved to be the Communists. The Reichstag fire provided the pretext for a crackdown, and 10,000 Communists were arrested that night. Some tragically fled to the Soviet Union, where they became victims of Stalin rather than Hitler; ironically, even after the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, German Communists remained supporters of the Soviet Union. The bottom line was that by the late 1930s, most German Communists resigned themselves to the Nazis as a fact of life, just another form of oppression the bourgeoisie waged against the proletariat.
Also falling victim to the Gestapo’s depredations were all those categorized as “social outsiders”—specifically, habitual criminals, homosexuals, sex offenders, prostitutes, juvenile delinquents, members of street gangs, Gypsies, and even the long-term unemployed. The most-hardened habitual criminals—the “three strikes and you’re out” equivalents—could find themselves in a concentration camp; 20,000 did, and most died, according to McDonough. In the most extreme cases of sexual misconduct, the state resorted to sterilization in a last-ditch effort to salvage these individuals as members of the “National Community.” Between 1933 and 1945, McDonough estimates that the state involuntarily sterilized more than 350,000 Germans.
Although not the primary target of the Gestapo, at least not initially, German Jews also fell victim to the secret police service. The author partially attributes the stage-by-stage persecution of the Jews in Germany to the economic success of German Jews, which prompted resentment from the rest of the populace. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws motivated many Jews to leave Germany, while those remaining faced increased persecution by the Gestapo, especially for “race defilement,” the legal definition of Aryan-Jewish sexual relations. But worse was to follow, especially in the wake of the November 1938 murder of a minor German consular official, Ernst vom Rath, by a German-Jewish teenager and refugee incensed at learning that his parents had been deported from Germany to Poland. The response to the murder was a nationwide Jewish pogram known as Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”), in which the windows of Jewish-owned shops were smashed, prompting more Jews to leave the Fatherland. In September 1941, when German Jews were forced to begin wearing the yellow Star of David with the word Jude (Jew) in black in the middle, most non-Jewish Germans applauded. Beginning the next month and continuing until the summer of 1942, the Gestapo organized wholesale deportations of German Jews. As McDonough puts it, “It is hard to understand the consequences of a tidal wave in the hours of darkness.” (211)