Thus, there was a deadly chasm between the Allies’ public condemnation of Nazi crimes—words that they saw as strengthening the Alliance—and their frequent failure to rescue Jews from Hitler, the deeds that seemingly would be a logical consequence of their declarations. It was the fate of the perpetrators of genocide, not of the victims, that held the attention of policymakers in both the East and the West. Often the true force behind the Allies’ responses to Nazi crimes was their geopolitical strategy and desire to retain legitimacy in the eyes of domestic constituencies. Concern for the prisoners of the Reich was considerably farther down the list.
During the months of the 1939–41 Hitler-Stalin pact, the USSR had said nothing about the Nazi persecution of Jews and, indeed, very little about the Nazis’ brutal anti-Communist actions. But Soviet radio broadcasts accusing the Nazis of atrocities against Jews and Soviet citizens began almost immediately after the Germans invaded the USSR in the summer of 1941 and remained a major Soviet theme for the remainder of the war.
The Germans replied with a radio and propaganda campaign of their own. The SS and local Ukrainian collaborators discovered a series of mass graves of Ukrainian rebels that the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, had murdered in Lvov, Vinitsia, and Dubno, near what is today the Ukrainian-Polish border. The Germans aggressively publicized the NKVD killings to divert attention from the new executions undertaken by their own Einsatzkommando squads.2 The Soviets vehemently denied the German claims, but the Germans turned out to be telling the truth about the NKVD murders, even as they lied about their own.
Isolationists in the U.S. seized upon the news of Soviet atrocities as a means of discrediting information about Nazi pogroms against Jews and as further proof of their long-standing contention that the U.S. should stay out of Europe’s war. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that it would fly in the face of morals if the U.S. offered any aid to the Soviets in fighting the Germans. Harry S Truman, then a senator from Missouri, went a step further: The U.S. should extend aid to Europe, he contended shortly after the Nazi invasion of the USSR, but give it to “whatever side seemed to be losing. If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”3 Truman’s rhetoric changed after the U.S. entered the war, but the inter-Allied mistrust continued to run deep.
The offer of a separate peace to the British from Hitler’s heir-apparent Rudolf Hess became the focus of one of the first inter-Allied controversies over response to Nazi crimes. Hess, long one of Hitler’s most senior lieutenants, had flown to Scotland in 1941 in an ill-fated attempt to initiate clandestine peace negotiations. The British government claimed that Hess was clinically insane, and Hitler disavowed Hess and his mission. To the Soviets, though, Britain’s refusal to hang Hess forthwith suggested that he might someday be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Hitler. In the fall of 1942, Pravda ran a series of bitterly worded editorials calling on the British to try Hess as a war criminal. How could British promises concerning tough punishment of Nazi criminals be taken seriously, Pravda asked, when Britain had already become “a place of refuge for gangsters”?4
The British ambassador to Moscow, Archibald Clark Kerr, soon confronted Stalin on the Hess issue. “Stalin felt extremely bitter toward Hess and during the conversation gave the impression that he was still suspicious that the British might use Hess to make some kind of deal with Germany at Russia’s expense,” Kerr told the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Moscow, Loy Henderson. But Kerr insisted that public accusations in Pravda were no way to deal with an ally, and he eventually succeeded in extracting an unusual admission from Stalin that perhaps the party newspaper had made a mistake in publicizing the Hess situation.5
Soviet Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov brought up the war crimes issue again in a mid-November meeting with Kerr. Molotov bridled at Kerr’s suggestions that the fate of Axis leaders be settled through political negotiations and that any discussion of war crimes trials should wait until after the war was over. Molotov instead favored what Henderson described as “full dress political trials apparently similar to the Soviet purge trials of 1936–37 [except] on an international scale.”6
Molotov particularly pressed Kerr for a statement clarifying British and U.S. relations with the French navy commander, Admiral Jean Darlan, whom the Soviets regarded as a harbinger of another Western deal with the Axis. Darlan was a key figure in Vichy France, even leading the collaborationist government’s negotiations with Hitler. During the late-1942 Allied landing in French North Africa, however, he ordered French forces not to oppose the invasion. In exchange, he was named military governor of North Africa and received U.S. assurances that he would be recognized as a senior leader in any postwar French government. As far as Molotov was concerned, the “political situation in North Africa … had been confused” by the Allies’ deal with Darlan. The admiral may have double-crossed the Nazis, but he remained a hard-line anti-Communist, and Molotov objected to his role in North Africa. An American diplomatic report on the Kerr-Molotov encounter underlined the value the Soviets placed on U.S. relations with Darlan. Molotov “said the matter was of great significance.… The Soviet Government … took a deep interest in this subject.” It would be “embarrassing,” Henderson stressed, “if the situation with regard to Darlan should develop into another Hess issue.”7
In the Western view, the handling of Hess and of Darlan were two entirely different matters. To the Soviets, though, both incidents looked distinctly like backstage intrigues with the enemy, most likely at Soviet expense. Either way, a few weeks later a French rightist conveniently assassinated Darlan, while the admiral was in U.S. custody, thus ending the conflict with the Soviets for the time being. (The controversy over who was truly behind this assassination remains unresolved to this day.)8
Darlan’s mantle in the West was then taken up by General Henri Giraud, who had much the same politics as his predecessor but who was less compromised by cooperation with the Nazis. One of Giraud’s principal political and financial sponsors in Western circles was Allen Dulles,9 who had recently returned to his old haunts in Switzerland, this time as an intelligence specialist with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and as a personal representative of President Roosevelt.
Dulles plowed his energy into a series of political operations, many of them abortive, designed to exploit the cracks and fissures in Hitler’s empire. Dulles believed that he understood the political pressures within Germany’s ruling coalition particularly well. He rejected what he regarded as poorly informed anti-German stereotypes that indiscriminately lumped together Nazi ideologues with German bankers and industrialists, with the military leadership, and with the old German aristocracy. Dulles contended that each of these groups had its own interests that were not necessarily the same as those of Hitler’s government, particularly if the war turned against Germany. He believed that the Allies should make maximum use of these splits in fighting the war against Germany and—more controversially—in advancing U.S. interests in postwar Europe.
In time, Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles became two of the more influential advocates of separate peace tactics in elite U.S. circles. The wartime hatred of Hitler and the political dynamics of the U.S. system ensured that when a separate peace was publicly discussed at all, it would be stated in terms of support for Polish nationalists fighting both Hitler and Stalin, rather than as a settlement with Germany as such. The message was much the same in geopolitical terms, though, assuming that Nazi Germany could be convinced to join a cordon sanitaire against the Soviets, to step back from its announced intention of obliterating Poland, and limit the Reich to the German-speaking territories it had already captured. Thus John Foster Dulles—already a senior foreign policy expert for the Republican party—publicly declared in the spring of 1943 that Poland was the place to draw the line against the Soviet Union, and that the Soviet response to such measures was, as Gabriel Kolko ha
s written, “the test of future relations with Russia throughout the world.”10 Allen Dulles meanwhile opposed FDR’s agreement to seek an unconditional surrender of Germany, calling it a propaganda disaster that made most clandestine negotiations to split the Axis impossible.11
Allen Dulles put himself forward as the U.S. contact point in neutral Switzerland for disillusioned Axis officials interested in speaking confidentially with the West. Prior to Dulles’s arrival in Switzerland, U.S. and British intelligence had seen Germany almost exclusively as a target for espionage, not for political operations of the sort Dulles favored. (This quite un-British hesitancy to undertake clandestine political maneuvers was in part due to London’s concern over Stalin’s suspicion of such activities, and in part the result of a notorious 1939 double-cross at Venlo in which the Germans had used a promise of secret contacts with an ostensibly anti-Nazi underground to capture two British agents.)
“Dulles was the first [Allied] intelligence officer who had the courage to extend his activities to the political aspects of the war,” wrote Hans Gisevius, a former Gestapo officer who became a secret liaison between Dulles and a small group of anti-Hitler conservatives. “Everyone breathed easier; at last a man had been found with whom it was possible to discuss the contradictory complex of problems emerging from Hitler’s war.”12
During the winter of 1942, the SS sent German socialite and businessman Max Egon von Hohenlohe to meet Dulles in Bern and feel out the possibilities for a U.S.-German rapprochement. Dulles and von Hohenlohe had known one another for almost twenty years, and their reunion in Switzerland was congenial. Dulles went to considerable lengths to convince the SS that he favored a rapid settlement with Germany. He told von Hohenlohe that he was “fed up with listening all the time to outdated politicians, emigrés and prejudiced Jews,” according to captured German reports on the meeting now in U.S. archives. Germany would inevitably become a “factor of order and progress” in Europe following a settlement of the present conflict, Dulles indicated, and should be permitted to keep Austria and several other territories that Hitler had already claimed. Dulles “did not seem to attach much importance to the Czech question,” the meeting notes continued. “He favored enlargement of Poland eastwards [into the USSR] and the maintenance both of Romania and a strong Hungary as a cordon sanitaire against Bolshevism and Pan Slavism.… He regarded a greater Germany, federated on American lines and allied to a Danube confederation, as the best guarantee for the orderly reconstruction of Central and Eastern Europe.”13
Dulles told the SS envoy that “due to the inflamed state of public opinion in the Anglo-Saxon countries,” the U.S. government would not accept Hitler as a postwar chief of state. But it might be willing to negotiate with a National Socialist Germany led by another powerful Nazi, such as SS chief Himmler. In a second meeting, Dulles advised Hohenlohe that the SS should “act more skillfully on the Jewish Question” to avoid “causing a big stir.” There would be no war crimes trials for Nazis, obviously, with Himmler as head of state.14
The interesting question is whether Dulles’s comments were in fact an initiative toward a separate peace or a psychological ploy designed to sow discord in the German camp by setting Himmler against Hitler. One bit of evidence that supports the latter theory is that Dulles was accompanied in his talks by Edmond Taylor, one of the OSS’s most prominent anti-Nazi psychological warfare specialists.15 Taylor made aggressively pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic comments during the talks in an apparent bid to secure SS cooperation, according to the meeting notes, and these were quite out of tune with Taylor’s other work of the period.
The most likely explanation for the contradictions surrounding the Hohenlohe affair is that each side was attempting to deceive the other while at the same time leaving the door open to substantive negotiations should an opportunity arise. That is, both envoys sought approval from their superiors for what would otherwise be treasonous contacts with the enemy by describing them as covert operations designed to foster discord in the enemy camp.16 Meanwhile, however, each representative and perhaps both intelligence agencies had an overriding agenda as well: They wanted the negotiations for a separate peace to be carried through to completion, leading to German concessions in exchange for peace in the West and a free hand to continue war against the Soviets.
Recently opened OSS archives make clear that Dulles favorably reported to Washington on an offer from Hohenlohe at the same time Hohenlohe was reporting to the SS that the initiative came from Dulles. On the U.S. side, the OSS cables show that Dulles lobbied on Hohenlohe’s behalf,17 ensuring that the proposal would be considered directly by President Roosevelt,18 and continued to pursue contacts with Hohenlohe and other SS representatives for the remainder of 1943.19 While Dulles was not blind to the possibilities of using the negotiations simply as a means of sowing dissension in the SS,20 all of the available telegrams indicate that he saw Hohenlohe’s proposal as a realistic and desirable basis for U.S. strategy in Europe. On the German side, captured SS records and the memoirs of Walter Schellenberg (a Himmler protégé and the chief of the SS foreign intelligence service) each indicate that the proposal was seriously considered by Himmler himself.21 Himmler was tempted, by all accounts, but in the end failed to muster the courage necessary to overthrow his Führer.
Exactly what Stalin knew of Dulles’s talks with Hohenlohe will remain unknown until further Soviet archives concerning World War II are opened. It is now certain, however, that the USSR had its own high-level espionage networks inside the German, British, and French intelligence agencies, and had gained limited access to U.S. and Canadian political and intelligence circles.22 There are hints that the Soviets may have cracked the relevant U.S. codes that would have permitted them to read Dulles’s messages for themselves.23 (Stalin’s correspondence with Roosevelt during Dulles’s later negotiations with the SS suggest that he could have been reading Dulles’s dispatches to Washington before FDR himself did, for example.)24 And the USSR had opened its own clandestine contacts with the Nazis at Stockholm.25 Taken as a whole, it seems likely that the Soviets had an opportunity to pick up rumors and, perhaps, solid intelligence on Dulles’s meetings with the German representatives.
The fact that Dulles and the OSS went to considerable lengths to keep the negotiations secret from Stalin also suggests that the agency wanted to keep the door open to serious negotiations with Nazi Germany for a separate peace, if only as a contingency for the future. If all that Dulles and the OSS had desired was a psychological ploy to disrupt Nazi unity, then why not inform the USSR of what was up, and in so doing avoid any risk of damaging the strategic U.S.-Soviet alliance? The OSS and the NKVD shared secrets concerning other highly sensitive intelligence operations, but there is no evidence in the available records that the OSS attempted to do so in this case. That it did not seems most consistent with the conclusion that OSS leaders believed that separate peace negotiations could not be completely ruled out.
Meanwhile, the publicly announced East-West agreements to punish Nazi criminals provided an important countercurrent to the separate peace intrigues in Bern and other European capitals. The Allies pointed to the new UNWCC as proof of their commitment to purge Nazis, while the Soviets had mounted a large, relatively sophisticated effort to investigate Nazi crimes at least as early as the spring of 1942. (The USSR lays claim to having been the first of the Allies to formally call for international trials—not just investigations—of Nazis.)26 One week after the British announced the creation of the UNWCC in early October 1942, the Soviet Union convened its own war crimes panel, the ponderously titled Extraordinary State Commission for Establishing and Investigating the Crimes of the German Fascist Occupiers and Their Collaborators and the Damage Caused by Them to the Citizens, Kholkhozes, Social Organizations, State Enterprises and Institutions of the USSR—more simply, the Extraordinary State Commission (ESC).27 There was no formal affiliation between the ESC and the UNWCC, but the timing of the announcement and subsequent events made it clear tha
t the Soviets’ intent was to establish their own national commission to participate in the United Nations’ work.
Stalin suggested that the ESC contribute to the UNWCC intelligence information on Nazi crimes—a significant concession that went well beyond what either the U.S. or Britain was then prepared to do. But there was a catch: The Soviets wanted an agreement from the Western Allies that the fate of Nazi criminals would not be left to a “political decision” after the war, as Eden favored. Instead, Stalin insisted that senior Nazis (such as Hess) should be tried by an international tribunal as soon as they were captured. The British would not agree, but negotiations continued toward formal Soviet membership in the UNWCC.
For a few months during the winter of 1942–43, it seemed as though these negotiations might bear fruit. By the middle of March, internal correspondence between the State Department’s legal advisor’s office and Secretary of State Hull noted that “the Soviet Government … has now agreed to the immediate establishment of the [War Crimes] Commission and the appointment of a representative.”28 The U.S. should set about picking its own representative for the organization, legal advisor Green Hackworth indicated, because a formal meeting of the commission would take place soon.
The Splendid Blond Beast Page 15
