CIA Wiretap Records Reveal Link - Nazi Criminal Rademacher Spied For West Germany

Πηγή: Free Internet Press
By Intellpuke
Oct 11 2011

A wiretap operation conducted by the CIA against the BND, West Germany's foreign intelligence service, in the early 1960s revealed that the BND employed a senior Nazi war criminal, Franz Rademacher, to spy for it in Syria, CIA records show. Rademacher, a foreign ministry official during the war, submitted a notorious travel expense claim in 1941 -- 'Liquidation of Jews in Belgrade.'

A man named Franz Rademacher submitted what is likely the most notorious travel expense claim in world history. Rademacher, a division head in the German foreign ministry during World War II, traveled to Belgrade in October 1941 at the request of the local foreign ministry representative who was asking for the city's Jews to be deported.

Rademacher wanted to see whether the so-called problem "could be resolved on site." With both the SS and the Wehrmacht pushing to kill Jews, all sides quickly reached an agreement to shoot 1,300 Jewish residents. Upon his return, Rademacher filed a travel expense claim citing the reason for his trip as: "Liquidation of Jews in Belgrade."

Although experts were long aware of the document, it drew a great deal of attention last year, when a commission of historians, addressing the history of the foreign ministry during the Nazi years and the decades after the war, featured that travel expense report prominently. Horrified, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle declared the document proof that the ministry had allowed its employees to "claim murder as a business expense."

Westwelle's horror presumably would have been greater still if he had known about CIA documents in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., now analyzed by SPIEGEL. The CIA wiretapped members of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence service, in the early 1960s and found that the fugitive Rademacher was working as a German agent, delivering reports from Syria. Presumably, he received a salary at the taxpayers' expense. The CIA's wiretap transcripts further indicate that the BND prevented Rademacher from turning himself in.

If true, this would be another example of the BND actively preventing the prosecution of a Nazi war criminal. It recently emerged that this also happened in the case of Walther Rauff,  inventor of the mobile gas chamber.

Rademacher was actually one of the few diplomats to be investigated immediately after the end of the war. The ambitious son of a train conductor from Neustrelitz in Mecklenburg, northern Germany, he took over the foreign ministry's so-called "Jew department," known as "Deutschland III," in 1940. He procured anti-Semitic literature by the crate and soon gained a reputation as an "expert on Jews".

In this new position, Rademacher played a significant role in designing the "Madagascar Plan," the proposed deportation of around four million Jews to the African island, where they would languish, guarded by the SS and police.


Role In Deportation Of Jews  


That plan was eventually abandoned, but Rademacher was later involved in the deportation of Jews from France, Belgium and the Netherlands to the extermination camps. Sometimes the foreign ministry played a role in demanding that the governments Germany allied itself with surrender their Jewish citizens; sometimes the SS contacted the foreign ministry to inquire whether it had any objections on foreign policy grounds to a specific deportation. Rademacher contributed significantly to this efficient cooperation between his ministry and the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

All this made the Allies consider putting the senior foreign ministry official in the dock at the Nuremberg trials. In 1952, a German court sentenced the stocky man with a high forehead to three years and five months in prison, but the judges released him from custody until the appeal hearing, supposedly seeing no danger that he would flee. Rademacher seized his chance and departed for Syria via France.

By 1957 at the latest, the CIA had Rademacher in its sights there, but German authorities too were aware of his location. American historian Christopher Browning discovered years ago that Rademacher had signaled, through an intermediary, that he was considering turning himself in. He seemed to vacillate between remorse and stubbornness, but had once admitted to an Allied interrogator that he had "committed a huge crime" and didn't know how he could "ever make up for it."

According to one CIA source, Rademacher was hoping Hans Globke, a close adviser of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and higher ranking than the BND thanks to his position as head of the Chancellery, would be able to exert influence. Prior to 1945, Globke had had a role in creating anti-Semitic laws in the interior ministry, and Rademacher claimed to be in contact with him. But in the end, Rademacher stayed in Damascus.



BND Hired Nazis To Expand Arab Networks   

It's possible he was already then working for the BND, which was in the process of expanding its network of agents in Arab countries and drew partially upon former Nazis to do so. According to one CIA report, the German intelligence service was definitely interested in Rademacher "for many years" before apparently hiring him on in the spring of 1962.

The Algerian War was in full swing, and many former Nazis shared the Algerian revolutionary leaders' hatred of the West and, of course, of Israel. Rademacher was part of a circle of comrades who delivered weapons to the insurgents. Some of them also worked for the BND, and at least some of those were under CIA observation.

On May 21, 1962, the CIA reported from Munich: "Recent telephone conversations have revealed that Franz Rademacher was recently put on the UPHILL payroll," with "Uphill" being the code name for the BND.

According to the CIA documents, BND employee Hans Rechenberg, also a former Nazi functionary with very good contacts in Algeria, recruited Rademacher. Apparently, he first asked Rademacher to make an exonerating statement about Adolf Eichmann, the chief logistician of the Holocaust who was at that point on trial in Israel. As department heads, Eichmann and Rademacher had worked together to annihilate the Jews.

Rademacher, though, was afraid of facing the same fate as Eichmann, who had been abducted from Argentina by Israel's intelligence agency Mossad. Once again, he started to consider turning himself in to German justice authorities. This, Rechenberg felt, was not in the BND's interest, because then Rademacher would be "worthless," as Rechenberg explained in a telephone conversation with his boss, recorded by the CIA.


The original transcript of the conversation reads, in German:


"Rechenberg: … I've been thinking, we always wanted to write a huge book at some point about the final solution to the Jewish question -- and we could have Rademacher do it, from there. Then he'd have something to do. 'Rademacher on Eichmann,' that even makes a pretty good book title.


Boss: Aha.

Rechenberg: And I'll send him all the material … Then we've given him something to do, and he can stay down there."

It's unknown whether Rademacher ever wrote a history of the Holocaust for the BND. The CIA reports, although admittedly incomplete, indicate he stuck to delivering reports on Syria.


Arrest In Syria   


He can't have provided very many reports, though, because in July 1963, Syria arrested Rademacher on suspicion of espionage. Israel's domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet later claimed credit for feeding Syria, its enemy, documents incriminating Rademacher. Presumably this was done as a way to punish the Nazi murderer, and the ploy was successful.

Rademacher remained in a Syrian prison for over two years, by his own account with at least seven of those months spent in a dark cell. He suffered two heart attacks and by the end of it wanted nothing more than to go back home.

In 1966, Rademacher flew to Nuremberg, escorted by German foreign ministry officials. Police arrested him on arrival and he was soon back in court, but died in 1973, before the end of his trial.

Several observers noticed that the public prosecutor had done only sloppy research and that the court was making a noticeable effort to acquit Rademacher of as many of the charges as possible.

Whether the BND was behind this, trying to keep its former agent from talking, is a question to which not even the BND seems to know the answer now. Extensive portions of the agency's archives are only now being reviewed, said the BND's headquarters in Pullach, near Munich. The intelligence service responded to recent inquiries with the explanation that the BND archives "currently have no pertinent files accessible for research" on Rademacher.

In other words, that could change.

Hundreds of Nazi probes reopened

Left: Ivan “John” Demjanjuk, circa 1943, in an alleged “SS” identity card photo

Right: SA Standartenführer (Squadron Leader) Hans Gmelin, circa 1943, in Slovakia

Πηγή: AP
By DAVID RISING

Oct 5 2011

BERLIN (AP) -- Prosecutors have reopened hundreds of dormant investigations of former Nazi death camp guards and others who might now be charged under a new precedent set by the conviction of retired U.S. autoworker John Demjanjuk, The Associated Press has learned.

Given the advanced age of all of the suspects - the youngest are in their 80s - the head of the German prosecutors' office dedicated to investigating Nazi war crimes told the AP that authorities are not even waiting until the Demjanjuk appeals process is over.

"We don't want to wait too long, so we've already begun our investigations," prosecutor Kurt Schrimm said.

Meantime, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's top Nazi-hunter, Efraim Zuroff, told the AP he would launch a new campaign in the next two months - a successor to his Operation Last Chance - to track down the remaining Nazi war criminals.

He said the Demjanjuk conviction has opened the door to prosecutions that he had never thought possible in the past.

"It could be a very interesting final chapter," he said by telephone from Jerusalem. "This has tremendous implications even at this late date."

Demjanjuk, now 91, was deported from the U.S. to Germany in 2009 to stand trial. He was convicted in May of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder for serving as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

It was the first time prosecutors were able to convict someone in a Nazi-era case without direct evidence that the suspect participated in a specific killing.

In bringing Demjanjuk to trial, Munich prosecutors argued that if they could prove that he was a guard at a camp like Sobibor - established for the sole purpose of extermination - it was enough to convict him of accessory to murder as part of the Nazi's machinery of destruction.

After 18 months of testimony, a Munich court agreed and found Demjanjuk guilty, sentencing him to five years in prison. Demjanjuk, who denies ever having served as a guard, is currently free and living in southern Germany as he waits for his appeal to be heard.

Schrimm said his office is now again going over all of its files to see if others may fit into the same category as Demjanjuk.

He could not give an exact figure, but said there were probably "under 1,000" possible suspects who could still be alive and prosecuted, living both in Germany and abroad. He would not give any names.

"We have to check everything - from the people who we were aware of in camps like Sobibor ... or also in the Einsatzgruppen," he said, referring to the death squads responsible for mass killings, particularly early in the war before the death camps were established.

It has not yet been tested in court whether the Demjanjuk precedent could be extended to guards of Nazi camps where thousands died but whose sole purpose was not necessarily murder.

Murder and related offenses are the only charges that aren't subject to a statute of limitations in Germany.

Even the narrowest scenario - looking at the guards of the four death camps used only for killings: Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and Treblinka - plus those involved in the Einsatzgruppen could lead to scores more prosecutions, Zuroff said.

"We're talking about an estimated 4,000 people, to round it off," he said. "Even if only 2 percent of those people are alive, we're talking 80 people - and let's assume half of them are not medically fit to be brought to justice - that leaves us with 40 people, so there is incredible potential."

Immediately after the war, top Nazis such as Hermann Goering were convicted at war-crimes trials run by the Allied powers, while investigations of the lower ranks eventually fell to German courts.

But there was little political will to aggressively pursue the prosecutions, and many of the trials ended with short sentences, or acquittal, of suspects in greater positions of responsibility than Demjanjuk allegedly had.

For example, Karl Streibel - the commandant of the SS camp Trawniki where Demjanjuk allegedly was trained - was tried in Hamburg but acquitted in 1976 after the judges ruled it hadn't been proven that he knew what the guards being trained would be used for.

But the current generation of prosecutors and judges in Germany has shown a new willingness to pursue even the lower ranks, something applauded by Zuroff.

"Our goal is to bring as many people to justice as possible," Zuroff said. "They shouldn't be let off if they're less than Mengele, less than Himmler ... in a tragedy of this scope their escaping justice should not in any way mean that people of a lesser level would be ignored."

Working in favor of the new investigators is the fact that most suspects would likely have lived openly under their own names for decades, thinking they had no prosecutions to fear.

Those who are harder to locate will be the focus of the Wiesenthal center's new appeal, which Zuroff said would include unspecified reward money for information that helps uncover a suspect.

On the other hand, Schrimm said it only makes sense to try to bring new cases to trial once the Demjanjuk case is through the appeals process, rather than expend all the resources needed to charge a suspect only to have the case thrown out if Demjanjuk wins. But the appeal could still take at least another six months to a year - or longer - and the suspects are not getting any younger.

"It's very clear that they're old, that's why we're preparing everything now so that as soon as there is a final decision, we can move immediately with charges," Schrimm said.

Zuroff said he hoped that the appeal could somehow be fast-tracked so that new charges could be filed before it is too late.

"This ... is a test for the German judicial system to see if they can expedite this in an appropriate manner to enable these cases to go forward," he said.

The CIA and Nazi War Criminals

Gen. Reinhard Gehlen persuaded the U.S. Army and then the CIA to sponsor his intelligence network even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals.

Πηγή: Eyespymag
Edited by Tamara Feinstein
February 4, 2005


The CIA and Nazi War Criminals

National Security Archive Posts Secret CIA History Released Under Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 146


Washington D.C., February 4, 2005 - Today the National Security Archive posted the CIA's secret documentary history of the U.S government's relationship with General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army's intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II. At the end of the war, Gehlen established a close relationship with the U.S. and successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals. The use of Gehlen's group, according to the CIA history, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, was a "double edged sword" that "boosted the Warsaw Pact's propaganda efforts" and "suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB." [See Volume 1: Introduction, p. xxix]

The declassified "SECRET RelGER" two-volume history was compiled by CIA historian Kevin Ruffner and presented in 1999 by CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jack Downing to the German intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) in remembrance of "the new and close ties" formed during post-war Germany to mark the fiftieth year of CIA-West German cooperation. This history was declassified in 2002 as a result of the work of The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) and contains 97 key documents from various agencies.

This posting comes in the wake of public grievances lodged by members of the IWG that the CIA has not fully complied with the mandate of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and is continuing to withhold hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation related to their work. (Note 1) In interviews with the New York Times, three public members of the IWG said:

"I think that the CIA has defied the law, and in so doing has also trivialized the Holocaust, thumbed its nose at the survivors of the Holocaust and also at the Americans who gave their lives in the effort to defeat the Nazis in World War II." - Former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman
"I can only say that the posture the CIA has taken differs from all the other agencies that have been involved, and that's not a position we can accept." - Washington lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste
"Too much has been secret for too long. The CIA has not complied with the statute." - Former federal prosecutor Thomas H. Baer

The IWG was established in January 11, 1999 and has overseen the declassification of about eight million pages of documents from multiple government agencies. Its mandate expires at the end of March 2005.

The documentation unearthed by the IWG reveals extensive relationships between former Nazi war criminals and American intelligence organizations, including the CIA. For example, current records show that at least five associates of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann worked for the CIA, 23 other Nazis were approached by the CIA for recruitment, and at least 100 officers within the Gehlen organization were former SD or Gestapo officers. (Note 2)

The IWG enlisted the help of key academic scholars to consult during the declassification process, and these historians released their own interpretation of the declassified material last May (2004) in a publication called US Intelligence and the Nazis. The introduction to this book emphasizes the dilemma of using former Nazis as assets:

Leftist Terrorist Turned Neo-Nazi Says Was Stasi Informant Too

Πηγή: Spiegel

By

Horst Mahler was a leader of the German radical left in the 1960s and '70s. Now he's a member of the radical right, sitting in jail for denying the Holocaust. But he's reportedly verified reports that he informed for Communist spies in the '60s.

Horst Mahler, a former far-left lawyer now doing time in prison for Holocaust denial, has admitted to another strange twist in his head-spinning political career: He worked as an informant for East Germany's secret police -- the Stasi -- from 1967 to 1970.

Mahler has made a point of outraging the German public since the '60s. A former lawyer for the radical-left Red Army Faction (the "Baader-Meinhof gang"), he now belongs to the NPD, Germany's largest far-right party. On Sunday evidence emerged that he was an "inoffizieller Mitarbeiter" (IM), or unofficial collaborator, for the Stasi during three crucial years of his left-wing agitation. He's reportedly admitted to state investigators that the reports are true.

The Bild am Sonntag newspaper reported Sunday that it had documents implicating Mahler. But the Bild am Sonntag is not a neutral player -- the German left in those days marched against Bild as well as its parent company, Axel Springer -- and the Berlin state attorney's office said Monday it had no new evidence. But the left-leaning Berliner Zeitung reported Tuesday morning that Mahler has admitted his collaboration to investigators.

The Benno Ohnesorg Question

Mahler was a prominent figure in West Germany's so-called '68 student movement which was angered by residual Nazism in West Germany and by the government's involvement in the Vietnam War. When a left-wing protester named Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead in 1967 by a West Berlin police officer, students catalyzed around the conviction that West Germany was a "fascist" state. Mahler helped lead the way.

The shot that killed Ohnesorg has long been considered a turning point in German politics. The 1970s saw the rise of the Baader-Meinhof gang and a rash of anti-government terrorism from the radical left. Two years ago a fresh investigationrevealed that the West Berlin officer who fired the gun, Karl-Heinz Kurras, worked for the Stasi. The revelation sparked a furious rewriting of Cold War political history, starting with still-unproven speculation that Kurras killed Ohnesorg on orders from East Berlin.

The revelations about Mahler arise from this investigation. One veteran of that era, Gerd Koenen, who's written a number of moderate-minded books about Germany's "red decade," believes Kurras did not receive a direct order to commit murder. But, he says, "the East German government organizations clearly wanted to trigger unrest. In this respect, an agent planted within the ranks of the West German police had to play the role of the agitator and tough cop, if only for reasons of self-preservation."

Mahler, in any case, appears to have handed information about the '68 movement and the RAF's terrorist plans to the foreign-espionage department led by Markus Wolf, the notorious East Berlin spymaster. Rumors about his collaboration have circulated since the 1960s, but concrete evidence has been lacking until now.

Mirko Röder, Mahler's lawyer, responded to the initial revelations by saying to Bild am Sonntag, "If the prosecutors' findings point to him being an IM, I'm surprised how deeply the Stasi were able to infiltrate the political incidents of West Germany back then."