March 1945 ZURICH, SWITZERLAND
Allen Welsh Dulles was America’s top spy in Switzerland in charge of gathering wartime intelligence on Hitler. Nazi general Karl Wolff was the onetime right-hand man to SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Together, they sat by a crackling fire in the elegant library of a Zurich apartment for a pleasant conversation in early 1945. They spoke in German. America was still at war with Hitler, and the last shots of the Battle of Berlin would not be fired for another two months, but the two men — one the future director of the CIA, the other a leading Nazi general in the notorious Waffen SS — already had mutual interests to discuss.
General Wolff realized the war was lost, and he wanted protection from the war crimes charges that were sure to follow him. Dulles wanted Wolff’s help in getting the Nazi SS men in Italy whom Wolff controlled to lay down their arms early — before what appeared to be the inevitable German surrender. Perhaps just as important in the long term, he saw the ‘moderate’ Wolff as an ally in confronting the next big threat: the Russians. Wolff and his motley crew of Nazi underlings in Italy offered Dulles the promise of developing a long-term source of intelligence that could be turned against Stalin and the Russians once a postwar Germany was formed.
The moment was a harbinger. In the coming years, Dulles and America’s spy services would put to work hundreds of former Nazis as spies and operatives in both Europe and the United States as part of the new Cold War ethos. ‘Wolffie,’ thanks to Dulles, was the first big-name Nazi to help open the floodgates.
This rapprochement was a turn few could have predicted. For three and a half years, Hitler and the Nazis had been America’s wartime obsession in the European theater. The Nazis were the tyrannical warmongers denounced by FDR for ‘acts of savagery’ and ‘inhuman and barbarous activity.’ More than 185,000 American soldiers had lost their lives fighting in Europe. America’s obsession with Hitler’s aggression knew few limits. Fears reached such a fevered pitch during the war that, in one little-known operation, American officials even persuaded their Latin American neighbors to deport some four thousand ethnic Germans living in Colombia, Guatemala, and elsewhere — elsewhere—sending them to the United States to be imprisoned as ‘enemy aliens.’ Every German in the Americas, no matter how assimilated, could be suspected of plotting a ‘fifth column’ attack on the United States. Few if any of the German natives had actual ties to Hitler, but FDR was taking no chances.
Yet now here was Allen Dulles sharing a fireside Scotch with Himmler’s former chief of staff. To begin talks so abruptly with high-level Nazis was an astounding pivot. Even before Germany’s ultimate surrender, the fear of all things Nazi was cooling quickly in the minds of American military and intelligence officials. As Hitler’s war machine began to stall, the Nazis faded as the dominant threat they once were, and American officials were already beginning to plot how they would contain their new rival — the Soviets — in a Europe divided among the victors. A new mindset began to take shape: yes, there were ardent Nazi war criminals in Hitler’s murderous regime, but serving side by side with them were moderate and ‘repentant’ ones whose ‘heart had not really been in the Nazi cause,’ as one intelligence official said of none other than the notorious Nazi leader Hermann Göring. Perhaps America could tell the good Nazis from the bad, the thinking went, and turn the reformed ones to its advantage against the Soviets in what was to become a new cold war.
Dulles was a champion of the new mindset. With an ever-present smoking pipe in his hand and a bow tie crowning his tweed jacket, the Princeton-educated Dulles was the personification of a type: the Ivy League intelligence agent who came of age during World War II and went on to dominate the American spy business for generations. Beyond their blue-blood background, Dulles and his compatriots shared a single-minded contempt for the Soviet Union. Hitler was yesterday’s enemy; Stalin was the existential threat that would outlive the war.
Dulles ran America’s wartime intelligence operation in Europe from his perch in Bern, Switzerland. During the war, the secret spy cables he sent to his bosses in Washington were filled with intelligence not only on Hitler’s military activities, but also on the ominous threat posed by America’s wartime ally: the Russians. Again and again, Dulles would opine to Washington on Stalin’s agenda and how it might affect the world balance after the war. Dulles appeared much less concerned about the everyday terror enveloping Europe. In Switzerland, he was getting regular reports about the Nazis’ widespread massacre of Jews and European civilians, but his secret cables back to Washington included remarkably little on the topic. If reports of Jewish towns being evacuated and ‘liquidated’ were mentioned at all in his cables, Dulles would pass them along to Washington either without comment or with an air of resignation. In 1943, his boss in Washington asked Dulles about a report that the Nazis had hauled four thousand children, some as young as two years old, in boxcars from Paris to ‘unknown destinations.’ Dulles responded that such reports ‘exist in all countries under German domination,’ but unless the United States was going to undertake a massive refugee program, ‘I do not see much that can be done in regard to this type of situation.’ Regardless, he said, the problem was outside his area of authority. General Wolff was one of the senior SS leaders responsible for those massacres during the war. The general was a personal favorite of Hitler’s; they were so close that the Führer personally blessed Wolff’s divorce and remarriage to his mistress after lower-level Nazis objected on principle. With a perpetual smile on his face, the blond, Nordic-looking Wolff would often appear at Himmler’s side as the two men toured the concentration camp at Dachau, inspected French POWs, picked over antique Chippendale furniture and ornate rugs seized from Jews in occupied countries, or simply enjoyed a stroll in the countryside. The savagery of the camps was far from his mind. He ‘did not find the concentration camps pleasant,’ he conceded to one interviewer. Still, Wolff always made it a point to ask the prisoners how they were treated, he insisted; ‘none of them had ever complained.’ And what of those yellow Stars of David the Jews had to wear? ‘I had the impression,’ Wolff said, ‘that for the racially conscious Jews, it was an honor.’
Prosecutors at Nuremberg weren’t fooled by his shameless sophistry. Wolff, they concluded after the war, was Himmler’s ‘bureaucrat of death.’ He had worked with steel-cold precision to help set up the network of boxcars used to ‘resettle’ the Jews of Poland and herd them like cattle to their deaths. He watched the grisly medical experiments that Himmler wanted performed on prisoners at Dachau. He commanded the SS troops in Italy responsible for killing thousands of Italian women and children. Dulles’s own spy agency, the Office of Strategic Services, in a report just months after the war ended, blamed Wolff personally for the ‘wholesale slaughter of populations.’
High-level Nazi or not, General Wolff proved to be more an opportunist than a loyalist. He realized in early 1945 that despite Hitler’s promise of a secret weapon to win the war, the defeat of the Third Reich was inevitable. So, for weeks, a small group of Nazi SS officers in Italy who were loyal to him — Members of the Black Order, they called themselves — held clandestine meetings at his direction with Dulles’s men to discuss a possible surrender. Wolff’s motives were plain: he and his men saw in Dulles the chance, as one of them said, to ‘save their skins.’
This was a dangerous game for both sides. Wolff and his men faced execution if Hitler were to find out about their treasonous talks. Dulles, meanwhile, risked contravening the unambiguous declaration from FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at Casablanca two years earlier that the Allied powers would accept nothing less than an unconditional surrender from the Nazis… Officially, Dulles could offer Wolff nothing in return for his cooperation; no leniency, no immunity, nothing. Just the chance to surrender, with no official promises. But unofficially, it was clear that the conniving General Wolff saw Dulles as his best hope to escape the gallows for his war crimes.
Precies hetzelfde gold ook voor de FBI, samenwerking met top-nazi’s was geen probleem. Kortom, er bestaat al sinds de Tweede Wereldoorlog een nauwe samenwerking tussen SS-ers en andere massamoordenaars en oorlogsmisdadigers. Er is sprake van een continuïteit, vandaar dat de CIA moeiteloos de joodse Oekraïner Zelensky naar voren kon schuiven als toekomstige president van het land, gefinancierd door Washington en een joods Oekraïense miljardair, en intellectueel gesteund door joods Oekraïense vrienden, om samen te werken met neo-nazi's. Meer over de decennialang samenwerking tussen de CIA en neo-nazi’s en Joodse opportunisten uit Israel en joden in de zogeheten diaspora, de volgende keer.
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