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Operation Safehaven

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Operation Safehaven Synopsis Operation Safehaven Gerard Aalders During the spring of 1944, the US intelligence service Office of Strategic Services (OSS) received a continuously swelling stream of information indicating that the political and economic leaders of Nazi Germany were making preparations to flee abroad as defeat loomed. The Americans were convinced that a new war was being prepared, even as the current one was still being fought. More than half a century later, we in the new millennium may see such fears as absurd, but the Americans of that day were guided by their thorough studies of the history of German militarism in the aftermath of World War I. Investigations by Senate committees had revealed that Germany had begun to build a new army immediately after the end of the World War in 1918, and that at the same time, a well-planned rearmament program had been launched. All that had been top secret. The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 had only permitted Germany a small professional army of 100,000 men (the Reichswehr ), and had banned the arms industry altogether. But the Germans had circumvented “Versailles” in a multitude of ingenious ways, and had made a sport of leading allied control commissions on wild- goose chases. Operation Safehaven, launched in 1944, was to prevent any similar rearmament program from being repeated after the Second World War. Nonetheless, nothing of significance has ever been published about this intriguing operation, which has left its traces in all corners of the globe, and has been recorded in millions of documents. The history of Operation Safehaven – a misleading name, since it merely implies that its purpose was to prevent the Nazis from finding a “safe haven” – cannot be understood without background knowledge of the secret rebuilding of the German military potential after the First World War. Therefore, the scope of this study will include the largely unknown, yet fascinating, history of secret rearmament and preparation for war. The Period from 1919 to 1933 The Treaty of Versailles was a dictated peace, imposed by the victors, and very – arguably unjustifiably – unfavorable for the vanquished. Versailles required that Germany disarm. The Reichswehr , reduced to a small professional army, was deeply humiliated by its mandated miniscule size, while German industry was naturally enraged at the ban on producing goods of a military or 2 even semi-military nature. The Reichswehr commander, Major General Hans von Seeckt, took the initiative in “neutralizing” the “poison of Versailles,” as he called it – with considerable success. Germany concluded military cooperation agreements with the Soviet Union, Europe’s other pariah. The USSR, technologically underdeveloped as it was, wished to profit from advanced German technology, and in return made production facilities available. The German armaments industry during this period was not so much interested in profits as in the maintenance and advancement of its technological knowledge. The treaties between Moscow and Berlin provided for the establishment of training centers for pilots and tank crews on Soviet territory; later, Moscow was to make development and testing facilities for poison gas, explosives, tanks, aircraft and artillery available. Motivated by a desire not to lose technological knowledge and know-how, the German armaments industry seized the opportunity to perfect old technologies and develop new ones in Lenin’s Soviet Union. The financing of these projects was provided by both the German and the Soviet governments. Companies which plunged with greater or lesser success into the Soviet adventure included JUNKERS (aircraft), KRUPP and RHEINMETALL (ammunitions and armaments), IG FARBEN (chemicals, ammunitions and poison gas) ZEISS (military optical devices), the coal and steel producers STINNES and GUTEHOFFNUNGSHÜTTE , BLOHM & VOSS (ships) and the aircraft manufacturer ALBATROSWERKE . The production of poison gas was placed in the hands of a Soviet-German joint venture, BERSOL AG . German companies also developed major activities elsewhere in Europe, where they produced goods they were unable to manufacture in Germany. In the Netherlands, where KRUPP had purchased shares in an engineering firm, the company developed submarines which were built at the FEIJENOORD shipyards in Rotterdam, as well as in Spain and Finland. German navy crews were also trained in the latter two countries, and in Turkey. Krupp forged a close relationship with the Swedish armaments manufacturer Bofors, and successfully produced new types of artillery and ammunition in Sweden. The aircraft manufacturer Junkers established itself in that country as well as in the USSR, and developed the K-47, the antecedent to the feared JU-87 dive-bomber, or Stuka , while fellow aircraft manufacturer Dornier produced just across the Swiss border from the German city of Constance. Switzerland, like the Netherlands, was a favorite site for German armaments plants. A number of German banks opened branches in the Netherlands in order to be able to finance all these foreign activities. After Versailles, these banks, usually closely tied to major industrial groups, could no longer operate freely in London, then the center of the world’s financial markets. In addition to Krupp, such companies as ZEISS , SIEMENS (military electronics and fire-control systems), LEICA (military optics) and DORNIER established themselves in the Netherlands. Usually, German influence could not be discerned from the company name. Siemens, for example, made an agreement with the HAZEMIJER Company of Hengelo, the Netherlands, which thereupon changed its name from HAZEMIJER -APPARATEN [“Devices”] to HAZEMIJER -SIGNAAL . As far as Europe is concerned, let these examples suffice for now, and let us take a look at the United States. There, such German companies as BOSCH (electronics), SCHERING (pharmaceutics), KRUPP , RÖHM & HAAS (plastics) and of course IG F ARBEN had penetrated deep into the American economy. All the companies named still exist today, albeit in the case of IG F ARBEN in the form of the successor companies into which it was split up after World War II, of which BASF, HOECHST and BAYER are the best-known. 3 In virtually all cases, front men were used to conceal the identity of the actual German owners. During World War I, many German subsidiaries in the US had been confiscated and sold as enemy property. After a certain period, the parent companies perceived the situation as favorable to repurchase their subsidiaries via intermediaries. In doing so, intricate techniques were used to ensure that the identity of the owner would always remain secret. In the present book, this phenomenon, known as “cloaking,” or, in German, Tarnung , is to be examined in detail. Cloaking was of great importance for the penetration of foreign economies by German corporations. Initially, during the twenties, commercial, financial and monetary considerations were the main motivating factor behind the camouflage of German corporations abroad. War was not a major factor during this period. This, however, changed as 1939, and the rapidly growing possibility of war, approached. The means for camouflaging companies and other property, such as share-holdings, patents, trade marks, etc., in such a manner that they will no longer be recognizable as – in this case – German property, are legion. Often, this involved making use of “ Vertrauensmänner ” (liaisons or trustees), who might be citizens of the host country with which agreements were to be made, naturalized Germans with the citizenship of such a country, or citizens of neutral countries, to ensure that the property not be confiscated in wartime. The Period between 1933 and 1940 When Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany possessed technology and know-how that it would not have had, had its industrial establishment abided by the stipulations of Versailles. This explains why Germany could, in a relatively short time, build up an impressive armaments industry, army, air force and navy. During the period 1933 – 1940, production methods which had been developed during the foregoing period and which, thanks to such German trusts as IG F ARBEN and KRUPP , had been able to assume powerful positions in foreign economies, were elaborated upon. This study will primarily address the situation in the United States. In no other country did German trusts penetrate as deeply as in America. One result was that at the outbreak of the war, America was faced with a major shortfall of strategic goods which was so disconcerting that the Senate in 1941 established a special investigative committee to investigate the consequences. It was chaired by Sen. Harry S. Truman, who would succeed Roosevelt as president in 1945. The German heavy and chemicals industries were among the most advanced of that day. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a technological revolution had begun which had brought forth a whole range of new products and production technologies. The fact that at that time, unlike in the past, products and inventions could be protected by patent rights was of great significance. Especially the companies which were to merge to form the IG-FARBEN TRUST – although certainly not these exclusively – acquired a large number of patents. In order to get an edge on competitors, patent rights and the patent scopes were formulated so broadly that competitors saw little sense in undertaking research of their own. After all, the chance that, after a major investment in research which had enabled it, some invention might not be patentable due to its having violated this or that IG-FARBEN patent was so great that a company would prefer to reach an agreement with IG-FARBEN , combined with a right to manufacture products under license. The aggressive patent policy of this German monopolist became almost proverbial. 4 Three major areas of research constituted the pillars upon which IG-FARBEN ’S dominant position in the chemical industry was based. One was the technology upon which the production of coloring dies is based, which is the same as that used for a number of other products; including medicines, ammunition, explosives, plastics and synthetic rubber.
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