The Splendid Blond Beast

by Simpson, Christopher; Miller, Mark Crispin;

  Jack Neal at State was a cautious man, and he could smell the potential for trouble in this increasingly messy affair. After talking to Galloway at CIG, Neal wrote a memo for the files pinning responsibility for his actions on Dulles and the CIG, then wired back to Murphy at the U.S. embassy in Berlin that the State Department had concluded the Allies owed an obligation to Wolff, Dollmann, and other SS men involved in Sunrise. “Therefore,” he concluded in a top-secret cable on September 17, “definite consideration should be given to those favorable aspects when weighing any war crimes with which they are charged.”31

  Wolff’s role in organizing the extermination camps and in administering forced labor had been so direct and extensive that almost any public trial would likely lead to a long prison sentence or a death penalty, regardless of the SS general’s role in Sunrise. Dollmann and Wenner were more junior SS officers, but they faced many of the same problems as did Wolff, especially if the Italian authorities arrested them.

  The U.S. government transferred Wolff from an internment camp to considerably more comfortable lodgings in a mental hospital, then later often claimed that a mental breakdown had rendered him incompetent to stand trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.32 Wolff nonetheless became a favored informant for the U.S. prosecution team at Nuremberg, contributing evidence to a number of cases against other SS men, including some of his own subordinates.33

  British government prosecutors delivered the coup de grace to the efforts to bring Karl Wolff to justice. They formally requested that the U.S. turn over the SS general and several senior Wehrmacht generals for a full British war crimes trial. By then, Telford Taylor’s prosecution group was running out of funds and was under considerable pressure from the State Department and White House to wrap up its activities as quickly as possible. Taylor readily agreed to transfer Wolff to British custody for trial, and promised full cooperation in any future proceedings.34

  But the British did not try Wolff. Instead, they severed his prosecution from that of the Wehrmacht generals, despite the fact that Wolff’s case was considerably more clear-cut and easier to prosecute. They then kept Wolff in protective custody without bringing him to trial until Taylor’s war crimes unit had closed up shop and returned to the U.S.

  In late 1949, the British brought Karl Wolff before a denazification board (not an Allied court) in Hamburg—a move that might be fairly compared to charging the SS leader with traffic violations. Wolff’s Sunrise colleagues turned out in force for the “denazification.” Allen Dulles, Lyman Lemnitzer, and General Terrence Airey each submitted an affidavit on Wolff’s behalf to the German panel; Dulles’s senior aide, Gero von Gaevernitz, testified in person as a defense witness. The board deliberated briefly, determined that the Karl Wolff in the dock was in fact the well-known Nazi and SS leader, then went on to conclude that the time Wolff had served in Allied internment since the war had been punishment enough. Karl Wolff was free to go.35

  (Thirteen years later, the worldwide public attention to the Eichmann trial spurred German prosecutors to reopen the case against Karl Wolff for crimes against humanity. By that time, Allen Dulles had retired from the CIA in the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. The rest of the old Sunrise team seemed to prefer avoiding the highly public trial. German courts convicted Wolff of complicity in the murder of 300,000 Jews at Treblinka and sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. He served seven years before he was once again released.)36

  The path that Wolff’s aide Eugen Dollmann followed to freedom remains murky, but new light was shed on his case recently when some of the personal archives of military intelligence agent John Valentine Grombach found their way into the public domain. In the early 1950s, the CIA hired Grombach’s private intelligence network at $1 million per year to perform a variety of espionage services in Western and Eastern Europe. But Grombach’s relationship with the CIA went sour, and he began compiling hostile intelligence reports on CIA agents that he leaked to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and other bureaucratic rivals of the agency.37

  Dollmann “kept in touch with [the] American intelligence service” after the war, Grombach wrote in a confidential memo to the FBI in 1954. Dollmann “had his entry into Switzerland cleared by its influence, and began to work for CIA. His work became especially important during the period when General Walter Bedell Smith was Director and Allen W. Dulles was Deputy Director. Then, in November 1952, at a time when Mr. Dulles was in Germany, the whole thing blew up,” Grombach noted. German press reports brought to light a series of scandals concerning former Nazi officials who favored a Soviet-backed proposal for a neutral Germany. Dollmann’s role in the affair is not entirely clear to this day, but it was certain that he had some connection with the neutralists, who were enjoying clandestine support from both East German intelligence and nationalist German business interests in Argentina. That scandal in turn produced reports of Dollmann’s association with both the CIA and British intelligence. Dulles was “somewhat abashed” by this latest imbroglio, Grombach wrote, and “left Germany in haste.”38

  In time, the Swiss deported Dollmann for abuse of his visitor’s status. So far as can be determined, no court ever tried Eugen Dollmann for his role in the destruction of Italian Jews and the massacre of Italian hostages. Dollmann’s autobiography eventually appeared in German and English editions,39 and on the basis of his memoirs he today enjoys the reputation as something of a bon vivant. Dollmann’s colleague and prisonmate, Eugen Wenner, who shared with Dollmann the benefits of the U.S. intelligence intervention, also appears to have avoided all war crimes charges.

  There was a common pattern in the U.S. treatment of SS men involved in the Operation Sunrise negotiations. It began with early capture by U.S. forces, followed by transfer of the suspect to some form of privileged custody, such as a hospital or sanitorium, or into British custody. At least some of these transfers, such as Dollmann and Wenner’s move to Germany, were arranged by U.S. military and State Department officials specifically to help the former SS men escape trial in an Allied country. The chain of documentary evidence concerning Dulles’s role in the Wolff case is circumstantial but strong, and it indicates that Dulles joined with senior U.S. and British officials in securing an amnesty for the highest-ranking Nazi criminal to escape the war. As for Walter Rauff, he escaped from U.S. custody under mysterious circumstances, then made his way to safety, apparently with the assistance of a ranking Catholic prelate whose political operations in Italy were at that time bankrolled primarily by U.S. intelligence.40

  Officially, the United States, Britain, and the USSR formally agreed at the Potsdam Conference during the summer of 1945 to a tough program of demilitarization, decentralization, and denazification of Germany in general and of the German economy in particular. They also specified that Germany would pay substantial war reparations to the countries it had damaged.41 The Wolff and Horthy cases suggest that despite such public covenants, clandestine factions inside Western governments already enjoyed sufficient clout in the late 1940s to effectively derail prosecution of Nazi criminals, including those of very high rank, at least in certain circumstances. But this pattern of comfort extended to those who had once organized genocide was not simply some plot by insiders. It was, as will be seen, a structural problem, one that extended de facto amnesties to thousands of men and women who had promoted or profited from mass murder.

  * In an interesting example of bureaucratic psychology, the State Department legal advisor’s confidential memoranda on the Horthy case later began to contend that Jackson had said the Yugoslavs had accepted his proposal of a confidential deal in the Horthy affair, though this contradicts the rest of the written record in the case. As the legal advisor’s office began to see things, Horthy’s problems were mainly the Yugoslavs’ fault, and their continued pursuit of him was further evidence of the perfidy of Communists.

  17

  Double-Think on Denazification

  The United States and other Allies
agreed at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945 that Germany’s industrial power had been integral to Nazi crimes and to Hitler’s regime. Thus, the Allied occupation government in Germany would substantially reform the whole structure of the German economy, carry out denazification, break up the entrenched system of business cartels, and eliminate the Hitler era’s version of a military-industrial complex. The threads with which Germany’s economic elite and state had entwined one another during the Hitler years were to be broken forever.

  The Allies publicly resolved jointly to ban all German production of weapons, ships, airplanes, and other “implements of war.” German manufacturing of chemicals, steel, machine tools, “and other items directly necessary to a war economy” was to be rigidly controlled and limited to the nation’s peacetime needs.1 Germany was also to pay substantial war reparations to each of the countries it had damaged. The largest share of the reparations was to go to the USSR, which had paid the heaviest price at the hands of the Germans, but each of the Allies—Britain, France, Belgium, and even colonial India—were to get a piece.

  Detailed provisions specified the means for international cooperation in bringing accused war criminals to trial and purging Nazis from “public and semi-public office and from positions of responsibility in important private undertakings.”2 Written criteria distinguished major criminals from small fry. There were five basic categories of Nazi offenders, and the Potsdam agreements laid out a framework of procedures for handling each of them. The Allies publicly renewed their commitment to implement the Moscow Declaration of 1943 and to return accused Nazi criminals to the countries seeking them for trial.3 Further, the Allies concurred that “major war criminals whose crimes … have no particular geographical localization”—the high command of the German state, Nazi party, and SS, for example—were to face joint international trials.4 National courts of the Allied countries and Allied military courts in occupied Germany were to try the second echelon of accused war criminals.

  Importantly, Nazis accused of “analogous offenses” to war crimes, such as extermination of Jews and atrocities against civilian populations, would be tried before Allied courts in occupied Germany. Each Ally promised to arrest and intern German “key men,” including corporate leaders instrumental in Hitler’s rule. Finally, all of the Nazi party’s rank-and-file members were to be removed from offices of responsibility or influence, except in cases where party membership had been purely nominal.5

  Despite the scope and specificity of this agreement, the conflict within the U.S. government over denazification of German industry intensified, rather than attenuated, in the wake of the Potsdam meeting. Before August 1945 was out, U.S. occupation officers sympathetic to rapid restoration of German industry organized an administrative attack on the stronghold of anti-Nazi hard-liners in the U.S. military government. That conflict soon spilled over into conflicts among the U.S., France, and the USSR.

  The political issue was already explicit: “Major Scully denounced the denazification program as ‘witch hunting,’ and Lt. Col. Auffinger [chief of U.S. efforts to denazify German banks in Land Württemburg-Baden] declared that it would drive the German people into the hands of the Communists,” reported a memo concerning one August confrontation. “Col. Auffinger explained further his opposition to the program: we did not fight this war to destroy one dictatorship and build up another; we must preserve a counter-balance or bulwark against Russia.”6

  Colonel Robert Storey, the U.S. executive trial counsel at the International Military Tribunal and a senior aide to Robert Jackson, had “passed the word down that the denazification directive was to be relaxed,” Auffinger continued. Sympathetic U.S. officers promulgated this “relaxation” largely by word of mouth during the summer of 1945, but this rumor network had considerable effect. The hard-line U.S. officers targeted in Auffinger’s attack resigned before the year was out, despite the fact that it was their position in the denazification debate, not Auffinger’s, that the President of the United States had publicly endorsed at Potsdam.

  The denazification that did take place in Germany was usually spearheaded by Germany’s Socialists, Communists, and some religious leaders, who had resumed limited legal political activities inside their country for the first time in more than a decade. “Almost without exception as Allied troops captured the larger German cities they were met by delegations of left-wing anti-fascists, ready with programs, nominees for office in the local administration, and offers of aid in the process of denazification,” remembered Gabriel Almond, a conservative sociologist who specialized in studying the European left. The anti-Nazi underground tended to be militantly left wing and based in the labor movement, Almond said, because few others had been willing to take the risks. Nevertheless, their “success … in preserving a corps of political leaders capable of giving German politics a new direction after the occupation cannot be doubted after study of the local leadership of the new [postwar] political parties,” he continued, citing examples from Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, Frankfurt, and other cities. The groups made “rapid strides in recruiting members and supporters.”7

  The “Antifa” (antifascist) groups throughout Germany hastily organized local unions known as Betriebsrats (works councils) that took over management of hundreds of companies, particularly the larger factories. These committees then usually drove out the old boards of directors, Nazi-era personnel managers, Nazi Labor Front activists, and Gestapo informers.

  This form of denazification proved to be considerably more effective than much of what was undertaken by the Allied military government, at least during the first year after the defeat of Hitler’s regime. A later U.S. Military Government survey of sixty major German companies employing a total of more than 100,000 workers found that virtually all of the denazification activities at those plants had taken place before the beginning of Allied denazification efforts in the German economy.8 Though the study did not say so directly, this could mean only one thing: The denazification work had been in the main carried out by the Antifa and Betriebsrats and by shop-floor purges of alleged Nazis.

  But the radical politics of the Antifas disturbed Western military governments, which moved quickly to suppress the anti-Nazi groups under military regulations originally written to stamp out Nazi political activity. “Thus while the Antifa movement had some revolutionary potentialities, these were effectively restricted,” Almond notes with approval. “Allied policy … was to break the elan of the Antifas and place them under considerable restraint” from the very first days of the occupation.9 The U.S. and British occupation governments shut down the denazification work of the Betriebsrats by the summer of 1945, for the most part, and dispersed most of the more militant Antifa leaders by the end of the year.

  Dillon, Read & Co. partner William Draper became pivotal to the semiclandestine shift in U.S. policy toward Germany that summer. By 1945, Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Forrestal (Dillon, Read’s former president) engineered Draper’s appointment as chief of the economic division of the joint Allied Control Council for Germany (the central occupation government at the time) and as director of economic policy for the German territories administered by the U.S. As such, Draper emerged as by far the most powerful U.S. industrial and finance official in occupied Germany, with overall authority for implementing JCS 1067 and other U.S. denazification programs aimed at German bankers and businessmen.

  Draper was an imposing, broad-chested man with a bald pate and dark, bristling eyebrows that emphasized his high forehead. Prior to the war, he had been corporate treasurer at Dillon, Read and an officer of the German Credit and Investment Corporation of New Jersey, a Dillon, Read-sponsored holding company that specialized in international investments in Hitler-era Germany.10 He prided himself on his willingness to make tough, even brutal decisions to protect his vision of the common good. The Draper family owned textile mills, patents on textile equipment, and a substantial share of the international trade in fibers. Their New England
mill towns featured “model” workers’ communities where the company enforced a Draper family formula of no unions, proper sanitation, and good behavior.11 Draper’s social philosophy, in short, shared many of the same roots as that of the new “non-Nazis” in Aachen described by Padover.

  Draper’s 1945 decision concerning rations for German coal miners illustrates the point. “The Ruhr mines had to be mined if we were going to get the factories started,” Draper remembered during a later interview, “and we found that the miners couldn’t mine coal on 1,560 calories [per day, the official ration in 1945], or even 1,800. So one of the first steps we took was to raise the calorie level for the miners to 4,000 calories, against great protest, obviously. Then the next step we had to take was to search the miners when they went home every night, because they were dividing their 4,000 calories with their families. Well, from the humanitarian point of view that’s fine, but it couldn’t work, and so we had to strip them of food and they had to eat it themselves.…”12

  According to his own account, William Draper never had any intention of implementing JCS 1067, the Potsdam agreements, or Washington’s other publicly announced policies on denazification and decartelization of German industry. Draper considered such programs to be naïve and counterproductive, and he obstructed them at every opportunity.13 He surrounded himself with like-minded aides to the degree that he could, and together they often succeeded in undermining reform and denazification of the German economy before it began. Draper’s factotum and electronic industries specialist was Frederick Devereux, a senior AT&T official specializing in that company’s political operations. His steel industry chief was Rufus Wysor, the president of the Republic Steel Corporation, which itself had a long history of cartel agreements of questionable legality with the German steel companies he was now overseeing. Wysor was particularly aggressive: “What’s wrong with cartels, anyhow?” he replied when confronted with his lack of progress in denazifying and breaking up German steel and coal combines. “Why shouldn’t these German businessmen run things the way they are used to?… German business is flat on its back. Why bother them with all this new stuff?”14 Other senior Draper aides shared roughly similar backgrounds and perspectives.