On 22 May 1945, two weeks after the unconditional German surrender, a former Wehrmacht major-general named Reinhard Gehlen walked into the headquarters of the United States Army G-2 (Intelligence) Division at Wiesbaden, presented his identification papers, and offered to the senior American intelligence officer present a complete copy of the working files of Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East), the Wehrmacht intelligence section he had directed from April 1942 to April 1945. Fremde Heere Ost had been the principal German military intelligence operation against the Soviet Union throughout the war. Gehlen had buried the files in fifty steel drums in a remote alpine meadow in the Bavarian Tyrol in late April 1945, knowing that the Allied forces would advance into the area within days, and had walked the seventy kilometres from his last operational headquarters to American lines specifically to make the offer he made on 22 May. The American officer who received him was the senior G-2 intelligence officer at Wiesbaden, Colonel John R. Deane Jr. Deane interviewed Gehlen for approximately three hours. He concluded that the files Gehlen was offering, which contained the Wehrmacht’s working order-of-battle data on the Red Army, the Wehrmacht’s network of Eastern European agent assets, and the Wehrmacht’s communications intelligence on the Soviet political and military leadership, would be of substantial operational value to the postwar American intelligence services. He arranged for Gehlen and his senior staff to be flown to the United States. They arrived at Fort Hunt, Virginia, on 28 August 1945. Gehlen spent the next three years at Fort Hunt working with the American intelligence services on the postwar reconstruction of the Eastern European intelligence operation. He returned to West Germany in July 1949 to head a new intelligence organisation, the Gehlen Organisation, which would become the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service) in 1956. He held the directorship of the BND until 1968. He died at Berg am Starnberger See in June 1979 at the age of seventy-seven.
Gehlen was the most senior single figure in a wider postwar pattern: the recruitment, by the American, British, and French intelligence services, of substantial numbers of former Wehrmacht, SS, and Gestapo personnel as operational assets in the postwar struggle against the Soviet Union. The pattern operated in parallel with the Vatican-administered ratlines and the wider postwar evacuation network described on the parent page The Ratlines, but was institutionally distinct from that network. The intelligence-services pattern was conducted by Western state agencies for state purposes; the Vatican-administered network was conducted by religious figures with mixed motivations. The two patterns overlapped in some specific cases (the Klaus Barbie case being the most famous example) but were operationally separate. The aggregate effect of the intelligence-services recruitment was the protection of perhaps a thousand individuals who would otherwise have faced prosecution. The wider effect was the substantial moral compromise of the postwar Western intelligence services in the foundational years of the Cold War.
Operation Paperclip
The principal American programme was Operation Paperclip, the systematic recruitment of German scientists, engineers, and technical specialists by the United States Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency between 1945 and 1959. The programme was authorised by President Truman by executive order in September 1946, on the basis of a recommendation from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the relevant German technical expertise should be retained for postwar American use rather than allowed to disperse to other countries (particularly the Soviet Union). The programme operated under sustained internal American debate over the propriety of its recruitment of figures who had been members of the SS or who had been substantively involved in the killing operations.
The programme recruited approximately 1,600 German scientists and engineers between 1945 and 1959. The most prominent figures included:
Wernher von Braun. The director of the V-2 ballistic missile programme at Peenemünde during the war. The V-2 had been manufactured at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp by approximately 60,000 prisoners, of whom approximately 20,000 had died from the conditions of the work. Von Braun had visited Mittelbau-Dora multiple times during the war and had been substantially aware of the conditions. He had been recruited to the United States in September 1945 and had become the senior figure in the postwar American rocket and space programmes. He had directed the development of the Saturn V rocket that landed Apollo 11 on the moon in July 1969. He died in Alexandria, Virginia, in June 1977 at the age of sixty-five.
Hubertus Strughold. The director of the Luftwaffe Medical Research Institute during the war. He had not been a defendant at the Doctors’ Trial but had been an associate of the senior figures who had been convicted. The wartime conduct of his Institute had included substantive participation in the medical experiments at Dachau, including the high-altitude and freezing experiments. He had been recruited to the United States in 1947 and had become a senior figure in the postwar American aerospace medicine programmes. He had been honoured by the United States Air Force with the renaming of an annual lectureship in his name, which had stood until 2013 when the Air Force quietly removed the name after substantial historical research had established the Institute’s wartime conduct. Strughold died in San Antonio, Texas, in September 1986 at the age of eighty-eight.
Walter Dornberger. The senior army officer responsible for the V-2 programme during the war. He had been Wernher von Braun’s military superior at Peenemünde. He had been recruited to the United States in 1947 and had become a senior figure in the postwar American missile programmes, working at the Bell Aircraft Corporation and subsequently as a consultant. He died in Sasbach in West Germany in June 1980 at the age of eighty-four.
The aggregate effect of Operation Paperclip on postwar American technical capacity was substantial. The American space programme, the American ballistic missile programmes of the 1950s and 1960s, and substantial elements of the American military technical establishment, drew on the recruited German expertise. The aggregate moral cost was the substantial and sustained American protection of figures whose wartime conduct would have made them prosecutable under any reasonable application of the Nuremberg framework.
The Gehlen Organisation
The Gehlen Organisation operated from 1947 to 1956 as a working partnership between the United States Army Counter Intelligence Corps and Reinhard Gehlen’s reconstructed wartime intelligence network. The Organisation employed approximately 4,000 personnel at its peak. Of these, approximately 100 had been senior SS or Gestapo officers; approximately 600 had been former Wehrmacht intelligence officers; and the remainder had been a mixture of former lower-ranking personnel and new recruits.
The senior SS and Gestapo personnel in the Gehlen Organisation included several figures who had had substantial operational responsibility during the war for the killing of European Jewry. The most consequential single figure was Klaus Barbie (subsequently transferred from CIC to the Vatican-administered ratline in 1951; see the page Klaus Barbie Trial 1987 for the fuller treatment). Other figures included Konrad Fiebig, who had served at the Buchenwald concentration camp; Friedrich Buchardt, who had served as deputy commander of Einsatzgruppe B; Erich Deppner, who had served as commander of Einsatzkommando 12 of Einsatzgruppe D; and several dozen others.
The operational rationale for the recruitment of these figures was the working argument that they had substantive intelligence value in respect of the postwar Soviet target. Most of the recruited figures had served in occupied Soviet territory during the war and had developed working knowledge of Soviet political and military structures. The intelligence value was, in some specific cases, real. The intelligence value was, in many cases, substantially overstated by the recruited figures themselves and by the American officers who advocated for their recruitment. The aggregate effect was the substantial protection of figures whose wartime conduct would otherwise have produced their prosecution.
The Gehlen Organisation was transferred from American control to West German control in 1956 with the establishment of the Bundesnachrichtendienst. Gehlen continued as director of the BND until his retirement in 1968. The BND under Gehlen retained substantial numbers of the original Gehlen Organisation personnel. The internal cultural effects of this retention were substantial; the BND’s institutional culture in its first three decades was substantially shaped by the wartime intelligence community from which its founding personnel had been drawn.
The German government’s engagement with the BND’s institutional past has been a sustained postwar project. The principal recent product has been the report of the Independent Historical Commission on the History of the BND, published in eight volumes between 2014 and 2024 and produced by a commission of professional historians chaired by Wolfgang Krieger. The report has documented in detail the recruitment of former SS and Gestapo personnel into the Gehlen Organisation and the BND, the institutional consequences of this recruitment, and the operational and moral compromises produced by it. The report is the most substantial single body of evidence on the wider intelligence-services pattern that this page addresses.
Klaus Barbie
The Klaus Barbie case was the most famous single American protection of a senior war criminal in the postwar period. Barbie had been the head of Section IV of the Sicherheitsdienst in Lyon from 1942 to 1944 and had been responsible for the deportation of approximately 7,591 Jews from the Lyon region and the personal torture of an unknown number of Resistance prisoners including the Resistance leader Jean Moulin (see Klaus Barbie Trial 1987). He had been arrested by American forces in 1947 and had been recruited as an informant by the United States Army Counter Intelligence Corps in April 1947. The CIC’s recruitment of Barbie had been undertaken without consultation of the higher American military or political authorities. The recruitment was approved by the local CIC commander on the basis of Barbie’s working knowledge of the French Communist movement and of the wider Eastern European intelligence networks.
The French government had requested Barbie’s extradition from American custody in 1949 and again in 1950. The CIC, knowing that to surrender Barbie would expose his service as an American informant and produce a public scandal, declined to do so. In 1951 the CIC paid the Croatian priest Krunoslav Draganović approximately 1,400 dollars to evacuate Barbie via the Vatican-administered ratlines to Bolivia under the false Croatian name Klaus Altmann. Barbie’s wife and two children travelled with him.
The American protection of Barbie was the subject of a sustained Department of Justice investigation in 1982 to 1983, conducted by Allan A. Ryan Jr. The Ryan Report, produced for the Attorney General William French Smith and published in August 1983, established the documentary record of Barbie’s American recruitment and the subsequent CIC ratline arrangement. The Report concluded that the United States government had been responsible, through its CIC agents, for the protection of a senior war criminal who had been condemned to death in absentia by a French court. The Report produced a formal American apology to France, delivered by Smith on 17 August 1983 to the French government. The apology was the first formal American acknowledgment of the wider intelligence-services pattern.
The Barbie case is the operationally clearest single example of the wider pattern. It was not, however, an isolated case. The Ryan Report and subsequent declassified documents have established that approximately fifty senior figures of similar profile to Barbie were recruited by the CIC during the period 1945 to 1955. The aggregate American protection of senior figures of the killing apparatus during this period was therefore substantial.
The British and French parallels
The British intelligence services pursued a parallel programme that was operationally smaller than the American programme but substantively similar. The British MI6 recruited approximately 200 to 300 former Wehrmacht and SS personnel between 1945 and 1955. The British recruitment was concentrated in the British zone of occupation in Germany and in the British Mandate territories. The principal recruitment was for intelligence operations against the Soviet Union and against the Chinese Communist movement. The British programme has been substantially less documented than the American programme; the relevant British records remain partly classified as of 2026.
The French intelligence services pursued a more limited parallel programme, principally in connection with French colonial operations in North Africa and Indochina. The French SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage) recruited approximately 100 to 200 former German personnel during the period 1945 to 1960. The French programme has been substantially less documented than the American programme.
The Soviet parallel
The Soviet intelligence services pursued a parallel programme that was operationally larger than any of the Western programmes. The Soviet recruitment of former German military, intelligence, and scientific personnel during the period 1945 to 1955 included approximately 6,000 to 8,000 individuals, of whom approximately 1,000 were senior personnel. The Soviet programme was directed principally at the postwar Soviet missile and aerospace programmes and at the Soviet engagement with the Warsaw Pact intelligence operations.
The Soviet programme has been less documented than the American programme but has produced substantial evidence in the post-1991 declassified Russian and East German archives. The principal Soviet recruitment was the German rocket and aerospace specialists who had not been recruited by the American Operation Paperclip. The Soviet R-1 ballistic missile, the foundation of the postwar Soviet missile programme, was substantially derived from the German V-2 design through the work of recruited German specialists.
The wider moral consequences
The aggregate effect of the intelligence-services recruitment was the protection of approximately one to two thousand senior figures across all the participating Western and Soviet services. The protection was operationally durable: most of the recruited figures lived out their lives without facing prosecution, and most died of natural causes in the countries where they had been recruited or in the countries to which they had subsequently emigrated.
The wider moral consequences of the recruitment have been the subject of sustained postwar debate. The principal arguments in favour of the recruitment, advanced at the time and in subsequent retrospective justifications, were three. The first was the working argument that the postwar Soviet threat had required the use of any intelligence assets that could contribute to its containment, regardless of the wartime conduct of the assets. The second was the argument that the alternative to recruitment had been the loss of the relevant expertise to the Soviet Union, which would have been worse for the Western strategic position. The third was the argument that the Western prosecutorial systems had been substantially overwhelmed in the immediate postwar period and that the recruitment of marginal figures into intelligence service had been a working compromise rather than an alternative to a non-existent prosecutorial capacity.
The principal arguments against the recruitment, advanced at the time and in subsequent retrospective critiques, were also three. The first was the moral argument that the recruitment had compromised the foundational legitimacy of the Western intelligence services. The second was the operational argument that the recruited figures had been frequently substantially overstated in their intelligence value and had produced operational outputs that did not justify the moral cost of the recruitment. The third was the political argument that the recruitment had compromised the wider Western political case in the postwar struggle against the Soviet Union, by demonstrating that the Western powers had been prepared to compromise the principles they had defended at Nuremberg in service of their immediate Cold War objectives.
The historical assessment that has emerged in the substantial postwar historiographical literature has been that the moral and political arguments against the recruitment were substantially correct, and that the operational arguments in favour of the recruitment were substantially overstated. The intelligence value of most of the recruited figures was, in operational terms, modest. The moral and political costs of the recruitment were substantial and durable. The Western intelligence services have, in the long retrospective assessment, paid a substantial price for the foundational compromise of their first postwar decade.
The continuing record
The systematic declassification of the relevant American, British, German, and Russian records has been the principal mechanism through which the historical understanding of the intelligence-services pattern has developed. The principal declassification streams have been: the United States Office of Special Investigations declassifications of the 1980s and 1990s; the United States Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 and the resulting Interagency Working Group declassifications between 1998 and 2008; the Federal Republic of Germany’s parliamentary inquiries on the BND of the 2010s and the resulting Independent Historical Commission reports; and the post-1991 Russian declassifications of the formerly Soviet archives.
The cumulative declassified record now available is substantial. The historical literature has, on the basis of this record, produced a substantially complete account of the principal patterns and the principal cases. The continuing declassification work, particularly in respect of the British records and certain residual American records, will likely produce additional cases and additional details. The wider pattern is now substantially documented and substantially settled in the historical assessment.
What the pattern shows
The intelligence-services protection of senior figures of the killing apparatus was the most substantial single moral compromise of the postwar Western political order in its founding period. The pattern operated in parallel with, and in some respects in tension with, the Nuremberg framework that the same Western governments had constructed and operated. The Nuremberg framework had established the principle that international crimes attract criminal responsibility and that senior officials do not enjoy immunity. The intelligence-services pattern operated, in practice, on the working principle that the same individuals who had been the operational defendants of the Nuremberg framework could be employed as intelligence assets if their employment served the Cold War objectives of the recruiting state.
The two patterns operated, for the substantial period of the late 1940s and 1950s, in working parallel. The Nuremberg framework produced its trials, its convictions, and its eventual clemency. The intelligence-services pattern produced its recruitments, its protections, and its eventual quiet retirements. The two patterns were institutionally distinct but were both products of the same Western political order. The contradiction between them was the substantive contradiction of the postwar Western political position. The contradiction was acknowledged in private at the time by the senior figures responsible for both patterns. The contradiction was not acknowledged in public until much later.
The continuing relevance of the pattern is substantial. The current operational practice of the major Western intelligence services has been substantially shaped by the institutional inheritance of the immediate postwar period. The American CIA, the British MI6, the French DGSE, and the German BND all retain operational practices and institutional cultures that were substantially shaped by the foundational compromises of the late 1940s and 1950s. The continuing engagement with the historical record has been, for these services, a sustained institutional project. The engagement has not been completed. The substantive record is now available. The operational consequences of the record will continue to be assessed for the foreseeable future.
See also
- Klaus Barbie
- The Einsatzgruppen
- The Mittelwerk and Dora Camp
- Klaus Barbie Trial and Conviction 1987
- The Doctors Trial
Sources
- Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988
- Allan A. Ryan, Klaus Barbie and the United States Government, U.S. Department of Justice, 1983
- Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America, Little, Brown, 2014
- Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip 1945 to 1990, St. Martin’s Press, 1991
- Wolfgang Krieger et al, Die Geschichte des BND, Independent Historical Commission, 8 vols, Ch. Links Verlag, 2014 to 2024
- Mary Ellen Reese, General Reinhard Gehlen: The CIA Connection, George Mason University Press, 1990
- Tim Naftali, The CIA and Nazi War Criminals, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book, 2005
- Norman J. W. Goda, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, National Archives Trust Fund, 2005