The CIA Covenant Nazis in Washington By Gregory Douglas Acknowledgement: The author would like to take this opportunity of thanking Mr. Robert Wolfe, once a custodian of Captured German Records for the National Archives and subsequently a member of the Interagency Working Group (IWG) dealing with the U.S. employment of top Nazis, for his creative confidences and advices. Without these, it would be entirely safe to say, this work would never have been undertaken or brought to a successful conclusion. To Robert Wolfe in his retirement home in Alexandria, Virginia, I extend a warm accolade. The Author Foreword After the German surrender on May 9, 1945, there was a wild witch-hunt in that conquered country to discover and prosecute as many of Hitler’s leading followers who had survived the finial days of the war. Allied propaganda had portrayed the German SS and, most especially, the dread Gestapo or Secret State Police, as engines of evil and their members were to be rigorously sought out, tried by military courts and imprisoned or executed. Times change, they say, and we must change with them, so very soon, the United States began to find useful employment for many of their former enemies. This led to the employment of many German SS, Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst personnel by both the United States Army intelligence organs and, after its founding in 1948, the new Central Intelligence Agency. The employment of these once-detested and persecuted Nazis was a matter of great and ongoing secrecy. Official files were searched for incriminating postwar documents and these papers were either removed and destroyed or redacted with strong prohibitions against their ever seeing the light of day. In the early 1980s, a file on former SS General and concentration camp head, Odlio Globocnik surfaced in the hands of John Costello, an English researcher and historical writer. Costello had obtained this file, and other explosive papers, from Robert T. Crowley, once Deputy Director of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division. Because the contents were considered by the finder as too controversial for him to deal with in print, it was passed on to one Gregory Douglas, another researcher who was digging into the post-war history of Heinrich Müller.In 1988, a copy of this file was sent to Gitta Sereny, an American of Hungarian origin who had written a book on Stangl, one of Globocnik’s camp commanders. It first appeared in 1974 and was entitled Into That Darkness. This work purports to be based on an interview with Franz Stangl, an SS officer who ran a camp in occupied Poland during the war where many prisoners were later stated to have been gassed. The book contains a lengthy section quoting Stangl, who according to Sereny’s version, fully admits his part in the purported killings and asks for forgiveness from God and his victims. The balance of the work consists of various supplementary testimonies from former associates and family members, all attesting to the evil nature of Stangl’s activities and all clearly acknowledging his willing cooperation in a state-sponsored program of genocide. Sereny, it should be noted, has made a comfortable living writing books and articles dealing with holocaust killings. But this particular book shows with great clarity the pitfalls that occur when a journalist, as opposed to a legitimate academic historian, produces a work which is not only entirely anecdotal in content, but ideological in thrust. There is no documentation, whatsoever, in this work which relies almost entirely on the author’s purported interviews with various people. Stangl died on the day following Sereny’s visit to him in prison where he was appealing his life sentence. Herein lies the key to the questionability of the entire book. Stangl had been sentenced to a life term in prison as the result of his easily-foreseen conviction as a camp commander. He, through his attorneys, was appealing this sentence. It is highly doubtful if either Stangl or his attorneys would permit such a damaging interview to take place and to permit Sereny, whose extremist views were well known, free and unfettered access to the prisoner. There would appear to be no question that Sereny and her photographer husband, Don Honeyman, did indeed visit the prison and did see Stangl. Sereny’s husband took several photographs of him, photographs which are extensively reproduced in the book. The published pictures, however, do not support statements alleged to have been made by the former Austrian SS officer, but merely prove that he permitted himself to be photographed by his visitors. By making such incriminating statements as Sereny placed, post mortem, in his mouth, Stangl would have irrevocably destroyed any chance he might have had in his pending appeal before the German courts. It is beyond reasonable belief that such statements were made under the circumstances indicated. A dead Stangl, however, could comfortably be alleged to have made any statement that the author chose to put into his mouth, and without the possible embarrassment to her or her publisher of an instant denial or possible legal proceedings. A careful reading of the book not only disclosed the author’s prejudice towards Stangl and the system he served, but also is entirely devoid of any facts to support her thesis. She notes that a number of witnesses died before the book was published, of course including her main source, Stangl. Much of the anecdotal material Sereny has put together to support her case is of such a nature as to preclude its ever being introduced in a court of law. Several examples are set forth as illustration. In one, Sereny claims that Stangl’s wife wrote her a letter following an interview Sereny had with the wife in Brazil. In this letter, which is not reproduced, Frau Stangl allegedly states that in 1945 she was interviewed by two members of the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence agency, and that they knew of her husband’s whereabouts in an American jail. “I examined their papers,” she is quoted as writing, “I have no doubt whatever that they were genuine.” The flaw in this scenario is obvious. It is simply not believable that the wife of an obscure SS officer would have the slightest idea what “genuine” U.S. CIC identification papers looked like. But Sereny states that the woman would have no reason to invent the incident. Perhaps the invention did not originate with Stangl’s wife, but with the author herself. At another point, Sereny introduced “Franciszek Zabecki” who she alleges was a Polish railroad worker, stationed in the vicinity of the Concentration Camp at Treblinka in German-occupied Poland. Sereny has this man counting all the trains carrying prisoners to the camp, standing outside in all kinds of weather and at all hours for a period of two full years. From his unrecorded and highly questionable comments, “Zabecki” states categorically that 1.2 million persons were killed in Treblinka during that time. It is anecdotal and imaginative material, at charitable best, that suffuses and supports the entire untenable structure of this work. Unfortunately, a large proportion of what purports to be important historical studies are based either on entirely faked documents or on the wishful thinking of mendacious and ideological journalists. Generations must pass before the fictive is eventually weeded out from the factual, and in the meantime an appellation which has been applied to the Sereny book, Dialogs with the Dead, could well be applied to other mendacious creative writing essays herein studied. Sereny found the contents of sufficient concern to bring them to the attention of a major British newspaper who duly commissioned her to write an article on the papers. Before progressing further with this subject, seven important pages are transcribed so that their impact can be better understood. These papers are US Army Counter Intelligence (CIC) reports. They are dated November 30,1948 and were prepared in the CIC Region VIII headquarters located in Berlin. The author of the initial report was one Severin F. Wallach, a CIC Special Agent and a Viennese-born Jew who specialized in interrogations of German sources. Note: A facsimile of these papers will be found in the Appendix.) The cover sheet of the report is marked WD 341/1 Jun 47 and is a standard War Department report form. It is headed “Agent Report” and was originally classified as “Secret”, a classification subsequently removed. Portions of this report are heavily censored and a full copy can be found in the Appendix. The subject is: “Former SS Generals MUELLER and GLOBOCNIK/ RE: Soviet Investigations/ RE: Project UEBERSEE/3. The file number is ‘VIII-12203’. 1. Recent investigations by special teams of Soviet agents in the Western Zones seeking definitive information about the possible whereabouts of former SS Generals Heinrich MUELLER and Odilo GLOBOCNIK have apparently uncovered sufficient information to justify increased activity. 2.Allegedly the Soviets have uncovered leads which cause them to suspect that the two above named subjects were not killed at the end of the war. This is part of their ongoing probings in re(ference) the possible possession of the West of high level Nazi leaders wanted by the Soviets either for trial or possible intelligence use by their agencies. 3. Up to this point in time, Soviet efforts have been directed towards discovering the whereabouts of HITLER, BORMANN and former SS General FEGELEIN. The Soviet view that these leaders fled from Berlin in April/May of 1945 and are being harbored in the West has been officially and strongly denied by careful coordination of all Western agencies concerned.