In the immediate post-war period, if you wanted good intelligence on what was happening in Europe, and particularly what was happening with the Soviets and Soviet influence within European societies, it was hard to find better assets than Germans who had intelligence experience and who were veterans of the campaign on the Eastern Front.
I can understand that. Similarly, it was important that the West attract scientists who worked on advanced weaponry, particularly in the nuclear field, but also in less lethal weaponry. There was a competition to win the allegiance of these scientists, and our loss was the Soviets’ victory.
Still, given the magnitude of the Nazi regime’s moral failings, this created a very unsavory legacy. Do you think it was worth it? Do you think we went too far?
I think we did. I can understand the mentality of the people at the time, but I can’t excuse it.
http://justanothervet.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/government-sponsorship-of-illegal-human-experimentati
on-scientific-opportunity-or-product-of-political-culture/
To the extent that the Nazi framing of the danger of Stalin and the Soviet Union entered US national security thinking, it in retrospect has caused a certain blindness to real opportunities for peace. The Soviets also recruited scientists from Germany.
The extent to which the Nazi regime’s moral failings extended to rank-and-file members of the various bureaucracies of the German war machine is hard to gauge. The imagination of weapons designers that extended to nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons was not limited to former German scientists. Moral failings are not a matter of nationality, as our current situation shows.
When you get to using former Nazis and neo-Nazis as intelligence agents in Eastern Europe, you risk supporting a future enemy. Or a future threat to the stability that you claim you are seeking. The issue here is the absolute failure to provide oversight over intelligence agency activities and the unleashing of the special operations proteges of Bill Donovan and Allen Dulles to do anything they pleased. Sixty years on, until there is a complete airing of the facts now still held secret after 30-40-50-60-70 years, one has only the surface history and that points to one massive failure after another to ensure peace and prosperity and instance after instance of creating new enemies and threats.
We also amputated the left wing of traditional US politics, which has led to our current political cul-de-sac. When you are searching out internal subversives, all political competitors look subversive and healthy political conversation cannot take place.
And you have to ask to what extent did the views and biases of these Neo-Nazis feed back through the intelligence community bureaucracy to bias refugee foreign policy advisors like Kissinger, Brzezinsi, and Allbright and to send the US down a dangerous neo-conservative path.
This is one of the least problematic aspects of our participation in the Cold War. Collecting these guys kept them out of Stalin’s hands. All to the good.
You are speaking of the scientists and engineers, not the intelligence agents, right?
WTF? Time for the Senate to release the CIA Torture Report without redaction just because of this. The Agency has no moral compass at all.
Easy to overlook and dismiss the huge price the USSR paid not to lose WWII. The US rewarded Germany and Japan with the means to rebuild their economies and thanked the USSR, without whom we couldn’t have won, by making them the new enemy. The world might have been a better place if the WWII alliance had remained in place.
The Republican recovery of parity required that that alliance not remain in place, no matter how carefully Roosevelt architected the United Nations to advantage the United States. The corporations and Republicans had to use that leverage to undo the labor gain they were forced to agree to during WWII.
Of course, the world would have been a better place. Just like now. If the US acknowledged that George W. Bush destroyed its legitimacy and mythical status as the sole superpower and started negotiating a Great Powers entente among the competing powers, we would be acting in concert with Europe, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, and some other nations instead of being Israel’s pit bull. We would allow Europe to become a friendly and independent power instead of continuing the NATO yoke of control.
But domestic politics is perpetually the foreign policy skunk in the woodpile. For every country.
Everyone is capable of redemption, so criminal behavior can sometimes be forgiven. But if you recruit someone precisely because of the crimes that they committed then you’re not looking to forgive.
But it wasn’t simply getting German rocket scientists under our auspices. Many were political organizers and were chosen precisely for that reason. Russ Bellant’s interview from last spring in THE NATION shows how widespread the war criminals were in the CIA’s post-war growth. Oglesby estimated that a full fifth of the CIA payroll was at one time war criminals.
Christopher Simpson’s central thesis in BLOWBACK is that the Nazification of US intelligence was an unintended consequence of recruiting Nazis, but considering Hoover’s involvement with Nazis in pre-war Interpol and Dulles’ long-time relations with Nazis through Wall Street and then when he was posted to Switzerland for the OSS, our leaders of the time weren’t blind to what they were doing.
Also, Simpson’s other main point was that much of the intelligence that we got from Gehlen et al was slanted in order for post-war Germany to get the best deal. The Org consistently overreported Soviet power and threats (gee, not unlike today) for the betterment of Germany. In the mid-fifties the Org, which had been part of the CIA, became Germany’s BND. How fully our intelligence services have been penetrated by fascists is up for debate. Considering that Reagan was spokesman for the CIA’s Congress For Freedom, which was one of the major CIA Nazi importation agencies in the fifties, an outside observer might ask oneself if our continuous wars since WWII are not a symptom of the fascist drift our country has suffered.
You can debate about the scientists, but taking on the Gehlen intelligence network was an utter disaster. They had their own agenda, which was nothing but the Nazi agenda adapted to postwar conditions. Plus in all probability the Gehlen apparatus was riddled with Soviet moles anyway.
Snagging their scientists, yes.
Helping out their war criminals, no.
“‘Vunce the rockets go up, who cares VERE they come down! That’s not my department’ said Werner von Braun”
The incomparable Tom Lehrer.
Of COURSE it was unsavory. Was it unavoidable? Almost certainly. It’s not as if the other side had any qualms about the fight we were in, right or wrong.
I’m old enough to remember this ditty when Tom Lehrer originally performed it. And I never forgot that line “Vunce the rockets go up, who cares VERE they come down!” It perfectly skewers the complete amorality of the man.
Thanks for posting this!