There were plenty who would have liked to have gone for Reinhardt’s scalp. He was not a very popular man with his colleagues. He was, for a start, a sneak. Most recalled him as a boastful, rather unbalanced character, who suffered from persecution mania and was prone to exaggeration. CID Agent Bill Wilson described him as ‘full of crap’. A former CIC operative in Munich, Werner Michel, remembered that Reinhardt suffered from persecution mania to such an extent that on one occasion when Michel was present he rushed out of his billet, drew his service revolver and opened fire, exclaiming that ‘they’ were after him. Tom Agoston, who worked for INS as Reinhardt had once done, and knew Reinhardt well, recalled:
He was unbalanced up to a point. In Frankfurt he used to call me at 2 o’clock in the morning and say, ‘I just want to say goodbye.’
And I’d say: ‘Well, what’s happening? Are you going home?’
And he’d say: ‘No, I’m going to commit suicide.’
And I’d say: ‘For God’s sake where are you? Don’t be a bloody fool!’
And I went round there to his flat and found he was wearing a white tropical uniform. He was in the Coast Guard, he told me. He had three pistols on his desk and he said: ‘Well, all right. Well, I’m going to blow my brains out.’
I had to stop him. But he was a fantastic chap. He looked just like Erich von Stroheim. [The distinguished pre-war German film director and actor, famous for his character parts as a bullet-headed First World War Prussian officer with monocle and jackboots.]
Agoston recalled a second incident concerning Reinhardt which illustrated another facet of his personality:
There was a crazy German girl who was a mascot, a camp follower, and she picked up GI English. Her American English was so fantastic she was able to pass as a CIC officer and she borrowed a stolen jeep and forged papers, and checked into various hotels and billets and ran up bills. Now the first person to interrogate her was Reinhardt; and he put out a release about this ‘most dangerous Mata Hari’ – and she was just a good-time girl!
By June 1947– halfway through Colonel Smith’s and Lieutenant Kulka’s IG investigation in Garmisch-Partenkirchen – Guenther Reinhardt’s personal behaviour began to be a matter of serious concern to his superior officers. He would react strangely to minor situations, or burst into tears, or throw violent fits of temper during which he would hurl himself to the ground and roll back and forth. At other times, to the embarrassment of his superior officers, he would go about posing as the Chief of the CIC, and on holiday in Czechoslovakia it was said he had described himself everywhere as the ‘Chief of the American Intelligence in Germany’. These signs of incipient breakdown coincided with a growing awareness on Reinhardt’s part of the true extent of the corruption endemic in the American Zone. Indeed it is possible that – for a man with such a taut and rigid sense of morality, and such an extreme and manic black-and-white perception of good and evil – the former was partly a consequence of the latter. It is probable that a significant part of Reinhardt’s information came from his disaffected colleague in the CIC Special Squad in Munich, Leo Kulka, who at the end of July returned from the Garmisch investigation fully aware that the place was a hotbed of crime and corruption.
By late summer of 1947 both Reinhardt and Kulka were beginning to perceive that their careers in the CIC were, for possibly different reasons, in jeopardy. Both men had fallen foul of the organisation that employed them and both were harassed mercilessly over trivial formalities, presumably as a means of hindering their work and breaking their morale. We have already seen how Kulka complained of being confined to his quarters and charged for not wearing his proper insignia during the IG investigation in Garmisch. Not very long afterwards it was Reinhardt’s turn to bear the brunt of this kind of calculated and petty officiousness from his superiors. In a letter to Tom Agoston sent by Reinhardt from New York some months after the event, he described at length the humiliations to which he was subjected:
Being on the operations level I saw for the first time – and was aghast – the incredible extent of brazenness of irregularities. You know that I can’t keep my mouth shut when I see something wrong or crooked. The result was that the Regional Commander [of the CIC] hounded me in the rottenest way you can imagine. As I had a superior work record there was nothing they could do about that. So there was a thousand-fold chicanery in different ways. They gave me difficult assignments and then took my vehicle away from me under some pretext and made me hitch-hike 100 miles a day; they took the furniture out of my room on the pretext of an adjustment of inventory; they gave me assignments calculated to keep me from headquarters (30 miles in the country) during meal hours and when I returned they would call my attention [to the fact] that military regulations forbid feeding men outside the announced mess hall hours; they made me spend hours night after night re-writing agents’ reports in addition to my other duties ‘because I was the only professional writer in the office’; they gave me ‘Charge of Quarters Duty Agent’ duty over weekends at headquarters ‘because I needed this special training’; despite a written request from the Army hospital in Munich they refused me permission for hospitalisation ‘because there was too much work to do’ and threatened that if I had to go to hospital for a rest I would be sent back to the States as useless to CIC; they refused me permission to go to headquarters in Frankfurt to complain; they tore up formal communications through channels asking for reassignment; etc. etc. But I stuck it out.
In the meantime I was powerless to do anything about the irregularities of the agents under me. Even formal charges were disregarded. Then I personally made two arrests of Germans on whom I had the goods 100% but who had terrific MG connections. One case was that of the chief German in the Garmisch black-market ring about which you have written several times (anything you published was completely accurate but only 10% of what is really there!). The other [case] was a former SS man who was trafficking in genuine forged papers (if you know what I mean) and smuggling former Luftwaffe personnel wholesale out of Germany. In both cases the guys were out of jail in less than twelve hours and the evidence which I had turned over to the appropriate authorities was handed back to these men! In both cases I was reprimanded for ‘unauthorised’ arrests – simply because I had not observed the formality (disregarded in 99 and 8/10ths of all cases!) of securing written permission from the Regional Commander for the arrest. Both cases were reported to Frankfurt as actions by me which gravely jeopardised the occupation prestige and embarrassed the Army. At the same time the Regional Commander told Frankfurt that I had brought three American correspondents to a Halloween Party at the CIC Cloak and Dagger Club in Munich without permission, that they had seen all the German girls there, the CIC boys drunk, the CIC boys talking about classified stuff, the German girls in their cups spouting Nazi propaganda, etc. etc.
Well, I got orders transferring me to Berlin and to stop over in Frankfurt for two days duty at CIC headquarters.
And then Reinhardt learnt that his superiors had arranged ‘secretly but very efficiently’ to send him home. ‘G-I and Civilian Personnel had been told that it was a Top Secret security case,’ he complained bitterly in his letter to Agoston, ‘and that’s how they even arranged for a berth on the next ship.’
There was no appeal against this peremptory expulsion. Reinhardt was forbidden to go to the Inspector General under threat of immediate arrest. He was warned that if he made any move to get another job in Germany, or spoke to the press about what had happened, he would be arrested and charged with violation of security regulations. If he stepped so much as an inch out of line his German girlfriend, whom he hoped one day to marry, would be publicly dragged through the mud ‘because I had whored around with her’. ‘You know, of course,’ Reinhardt confided to Agoston, ‘that that tied my hands.’
It is not difficult to imagine Reinhardt’s state of mind on hearing this news. Shock followed by outrage, followed by a blind desire for revenge, for one last tilt against the flailing windmills. Th
at he should be bounced out of the country by the very authorities whose corruption he had sought to expose was too much to bear. He would reveal all. So before he sailed from Germany he dictated a formal 48-page report at CIC headquarters in Frankfurt ‘about all the irregularities and the faking of intelligence reports in the Munich Region’. This was the first of two reports Guenther Reinhardt was to present to the American authorities in connection with this affair. The report amounted to a blistering attack on the people who had just fired him. It accused the CIC of widespread corruption, incompetence and idleness, all due to the rivalry and lack of co-ordination of five overlapping Army Intelligence Agencies, and prognosticated that the United States faced ‘another Pearl Harbor in Germany’ because of the conditions prevailing in the CIC. Though it was actually written in Frankfurt in November as an embittered and angry valedictory to the US Occupation, it had its genesis in Munich in the preceding September, when it was first conceived in marginally less emotive circumstances at the suggestion of CID agent Philip Benzell, then a member of the extensive CID investigation in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Benzell subsequently provided a formal Army enquiry with this account of the strange meeting at which the first Reinhardt memorandum was mooted:
I met Mr Reinhardt at the billets of the 13th CID in Grünwald, which is a suburb of Munich. Present were – myself, Mr David Gallant (the Chief Agent of the 13th CID) and Reinhardt. At the outset of our conversation he handed me a typewritten sheet which outlined his personal history and accomplishments in the field of reporting and writing. He also stated that he had been a special employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and added that as proof his income tax returns be examined. After I had read this typewritten page he stated as follows (or words to that effect): ‘Benzell, I have asked that you meet me to discuss the investigation that you are conducting in Garmisch. I have heard that you are an “honest cop” and feel that you will take action on the matters which I have given you.’ Thereupon he told me a long story concerning the alleged misdeeds, misdoings and misconduct of a Major McCarthy . . . and a number of other indigenous persons. He alleged that all of these persons formed a combine, or ring, dealing in narcotics, currency, gold, jewellery, stolen cars and other assorted types of felonies.
The entire story was disjointed and not in sequence and at the conclusion of the interview, which lasted perhaps one-half to three-quarters of an hour, I requested that he reduce his story to some form of writing – coaching him, however, not to identify himself with the written story. I suggested that he neither date it nor write it in his own handwriting and that preferably it should appear as merely a typewritten piece of paper, on the theory that Reinhardt should enjoy the status of an informer and his identity be protected. He agreed to that and stated that he would be in touch at a little later date. It was also agreed that when I called him, the codeword to be used was that I wanted to see him ‘at the movies’. (This reference was in connection with the Bavarian film colony, which is also located in Grünwald.) After a passage of several weeks I called him on at least three occasions but was never able to contact him.
It took the painful trauma of his summary dismissal (which happened on 12 November) to force from Reinhardt his long-promised denunciation of the American Occupation in Germany and of the organisation to which he himself had been attached, the CIC. Though it was not the only formal complaint to have been made against the CIC at this time, it was by far the most explosive. According to Reinhardt, ‘there were terrific personnel shake-ups – the operations chief for Bavaria was dismissed instantaneously, the executive officer was transferred, the commanding officer about to sail for home was held over for weeks to explain things, etc. etc., but there was also a terrific cover-up and mutual protection operation going on from Garmisch to Augsburg and from Munich to Nuremberg.’
Having fired his first shot, Guenther Reinhardt set sail from Bremerhaven on 15 November 1947 on board the US Transport General Black and arrived in New York on 26 November. His German girl, Nora, sailed a few days later and arrived in New York on 4 December. Her arrival only served to complicate the private side of a life that was already publicly complicated enough. For at his apartment in Christopher Street, New York, Reinhardt also kept a wife. For years she had been a hopeless invalid, totally paralysed and mentally incompetent, but under New York law Reinhardt was permitted no divorce, and Nora was destined to remain no more than the Fräulein ‘from over there’.
Reinhardt’s 48-page report had evidently not got things off his chest and the sea air and the ocean crossing had done nothing to blow away his gloom. On the contrary, the 12-day voyage had provided him with nothing but time to brood, and it did not help that the ship itself seemed like a floating appendage of the US Occupation Zone he had just left, peopled by disgraced black-marketeers from the American PX, peddling diamonds and Leicas at $230 a go. By the time Reinhardt sailed past the Statue of Liberty he was half out of his mind.
When I got back to the States [Reinhardt wrote in his letter to Agoston], I was so damn mad I wanted to blow my top. Unfortunately at the Press Club in Washington, just before I was going up to Capitol Hill to lay the rotten mess of graft, stealing, smuggling, incompetence – and the danger to our entire Intelligence system – before some of my contacts in Congress, a couple of ‘newspapermen’ (who I did not know until much later were fixers for [Secretary of the Army] Royall) got hold of me and told me that it was my patriotic duty not to let any of this scandal out. Did I want to give gratis ammunition to the Russians? Didn’t I want to have things righted? Well, the best way – the only way – was to go directly to the Secretary of the Army and lay all my evidence before him. Mr [Kenneth C.] Royall would surely act – he was interested in discovering what really went on in Germany. He would act drastically – I would get all the reforms that I wanted.
So on December 8th and 9th I saw all the top boys at the Pentagon. On December 16th I was appointed and sworn in as Special Consultant to the Secretary of the Army at $35 a day plus per diem plus expenses and given an office and a secretary next to the Assistant Secretary of the Army, Gordon Gray.1
They even moved out his Executive Officer, a full colonel, temporarily. I was told to dictate my report and the Secretary would take action as each section was handed to him.
Like a fool I dictated everything.
This, Reinhardt’s second and principal memorandum, was longer and more substantial than the first, consisting of 55 pages of foolscap typescript, each page stamped TOP SECRET and (in the copy which has survived to the present) annotated by an unknown hand. The document bore no title or date and no signature of authorship, though the name of the author was soon to become a household word throughout the Department of the Army and the American Zone of Germany. The Reinhardt memorandum was divided into nine main sections, each section dealing with a particular abuse or set of abuses commonly practised (in Reinhardt’s opinion) by American personnel in Germany, and each further divided into sub-sections, citing particular examples and concluding with Reinhardt’s recommendations for further action. According to subsequent Army analysis, the two Reinhardt memorandums together contained 134 specific charges against the US Occupation, 47 of them against the organisation which had just sacked him, the Counter Intelligence Corps.
The opening section of the 55-page memorandum was entitled LOOT AND SMUGGLING SITUATION. It described how American military and civilian personnel were continuing to smuggle into the United States vast quantities of loot – rugs, art objects, furniture, porcelain, cameras, diamonds and jewellery amounting to more than three-quarters of a ton in individual cases – acquired illegally on the German black market. The higher the rank, according to Reinhardt, the worse the offence, and he cited the case of a general whose baggage to the States amounted to 166 crates, boxes and cases full of silverware, drapes, paintings and very valuable china which had formerly belonged to the castles and landed estates around Hesse. A second section of the memorandum, entitled BLACK MARKETING BY AMERICAN
DEPENDANTS, alleged that ‘greedy American wives are exploiting German misery and are acquiring valuable heirlooms in return for a few scraps of food’. Another section, headed PUBLIC DISPLAY BY ARMY OFFICERS OF EXCESSIVE LAVISHNESS, singled out ‘the lavish private railroad trains of certain general officers which are kept fully staffed and under steam 24 hours a day and which are used perhaps once every six weeks’, and the accommodation of a young army captain and his wife (typical, in Reinhardt’s view, of hundreds of similar cases) who ‘occupy a 12-room mansion and estate which can be compared with an American millionaire’s country residence. Their four servants cost them a total of $10 a month.’ Another section, SCANDALS IN CONNECTION WITH GERMAN MISTRESS OF AMERICAN PERSONNEL, cited the amorous career of ‘an exceptionally beautiful and clever German woman’ who was ‘among the last batch of mistresses of Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels,’ and who worked her way up the officer ranks of the CIC in Bavaria until the last in the line shipped her off for a 30-day pleasure trip in New York, where she was accommodated in some style in the Waldorf and the Ritz. At CIC regional headquarters in Munich, Reinhardt continued, ‘there were available on 1 October 1947 more than two dozen cases of irregularities of CIC agents in connection with their German Fräuleins which should have required drastic disciplinary action but which were covered up. (One of the ‘two dozen cases’, it must be said, would have been Reinhardt’s own.) Other sections dealt with black-market fiddles by the American civilian staff of the PX in Germany, failures in Army screening of visa applicants, suppression of important information to Washington, and the deficiencies of the CIC. But the major accusation of the memorandum, and the one of greatest significance to this story, was the fourth, which bore the heading ORGANIZED CRIMINAL BLACKMARKET ACTIVITIES OF AMERICAN PERSONNEL. This section dealt with Garmisch and opened with a broadside:
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