On October 19, 1948, the State Department’s George Kennan sent a friendly note to Frank Wisner, the head of the CIA’s covert operations branch, or OPC. “Dear Frank,” it began, “I am glad to learn that your efforts to bring Gustav Hilger to this country for work with CIA has been successful I regard him as one of the few outstanding experts on Soviet economy and Soviet politics. He had [sic] not only a scholarly background on Soviet subjects but has had long practical experience in analyzing and estimating Soviet operations on a day-to-day basis. I hope the Department of State may be provided with copies of any studies which Mr. Hilger produces under your direction.”
The subject of the letter, sixty-two-year-old Gustav Hilger, had an unusual pedigree, a German citizen who had spent nearly his entire life in first czarist and then Soviet Russia. Despite being educated as an engineer, in 1923 he had won appointment to the German embassy in Moscow due to his fluency in Russian and extensive contacts in the Kremlin. It was in that position a decade later that he met and developed a friendship with a young rising star in the American legation to the Soviet Union, George Kennan. The friendship lasted until Kennan was transferred from Moscow in 1937.
In his absence, Gustav Hilger’s résumé became a bit more checkered. In his counselor role with the embassy, Hilger served as chief interpreter for Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in the secret negotiations leading to the Nazi–Soviet concord, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, of 1939. After that accord collapsed with the launching of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, Hilger’s diplomatic status led to his being deported to Germany, where he served as Ribbentrop’s chief advisor on Soviet affairs for the rest of the war.
Like other high-ranking German officials, Hilger took pains to surrender to American soldiers at war’s end. Considered a “prisoner of high value,” he was taken to the United States for extensive questioning by Army intelligence, then returned to Germany in 1946. There, he found work as a Soviet analyst with the Gehlen Organization, a band of former German military intelligence officers that had been reconstituted under American army sponsorship. This was a secure enough position for American authorities to feign ignorance as to his whereabouts when the Soviets petitioned for Hilger’s arrest on charges of war crimes. Two years later, after determining that Hilger remained in danger of kidnapping or assassination by the Soviets, getting him out of Germany and into the United States became a CIA concern. Kennan urged Wisner to employ him as an OPC advisor, and Wisner was glad to do so. But how to get Hilger into the country with an international arrest warrant hanging over his head? The CIA’s answer was to just play dumb, to avoid learning those unpleasant details of a person’s life that might undermine the concept of plausible deniability.
To Gustav Hilger’s later good fortune, he had never joined the Nazi party, so there was scant reference to him in the Nazi party records housed in the American-controlled Berlin Document Center. What’s more, already in his mid-fifties when World War II began, Hilger spent the war essentially sitting behind a desk in the Soviet department of the Foreign Ministry, a locale that enabled him to profess ignorance about any nastiness that may have occurred on the battlefield.
As much as this strained credulity—how could any senior German Foreign Ministry official tasked to Soviet affairs not know of the atrocities being committed in Operation Barbarossa?—the idea was demolished altogether by Hilger’s receipt signature on a series of activity reports from the Eastern Front in 1941 and 1942. In unambiguous language, these papers included status reports from SS murder squads operating in conquered Soviet territory, even listing how many Jews, communists and “bandits” had been executed during that reporting period. At the very least, it meant Hilger had full knowledge of the slaughter being perpetrated on the Eastern Front. It also cast George Kennan’s comment that Hilger had “long practical experience in analyzing and estimating Soviet operations on a day-to-day basis” in a rather different light.
But only if one chose to see that light. Instead, by dismissing the charges laid out in the Soviet arrest warrant as propaganda, and by not seeking out the activity reports that had crossed Hilger’s wartime desk, the American intelligence community could continue to hold the German out as a respectable scholar. Ultimately, the CIA cut ties to Hilger in 1953 when an Agency analyst observed that his reports contained very little new, and that he was trading on the “ancient history” he had gleaned during his service to the Third Reich. As for Kennan, that grand master of forgetfulness, he would later write of Hilger: “I do not recall having had anything to do with, or any responsibility for, bringing him to this country; nor do I recall knowing, at the time, by what arrangements he was brought here.”
But such associations had set the Agency on something of a moral slippery slope: if it was permissible to employ those Germans who knew of the Holocaust while it was occurring, what of those who played a more direct role? And if it was possible to overlook the shady background of a man like Gustav Hilger by simply not digging too deeply, what about dealing with someone whose notoriety was impossible to ignore? Soon after taking control of the Gehlen Org, the CIA found its own uncomfortable answer to these questions in the form of a man named Otto Albrecht Alfred von Bolschwing.
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From an aristocratic and staunchly conservative family in Prussia, Bolschwing had been an early recruit to the Nazi Party. Once Hitler came to power, he steadily rose through the ranks to become a deputy of Heinrich Himmler in the Reich Main Security Office, or RHSA; Bolschwing’s specific area of responsibility was in the RHSA branch that focused on “the Jewish problem.” In 1937, he came up with a detailed proposal to drive the Jews out of Germany through terror tactics, and to rob them as they left.
So radical were Bolschwing’s politics that he was destined to be one of the few Nazis whose zealotry actually got him in trouble with the leadership. As chief SS intelligence officer in Romania in 1940, he encouraged leaders of the Iron Guard, a rabidly anti-Semitic paramilitary group, to attempt a coup against the existing German-allied government. The Iron Guard revolt of January 1941 was put down, but not before Iron Guard Legionnaires had rampaged through the Jewish quarter of Bucharest, burning synagogues and murdering residents with a display of sadism that managed to shock even resident SS officers. For his behind-the-scenes role in the coup attempt, done in defiance of Berlin policy, Bolschwing was hauled back to Germany and spent several months in detention.
The Prussian aristocrat was to spin this brief imprisonment into a very helpful postwar fiction, “proof” that he had opposed the Nazi regime and been persecuted as a result. Much to the contrary, after his Romanian hiccup, Bolschwing continued his rise in the Third Reich hierarchy, ultimately becoming a deputy to the chief logistician of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann. At war’s end, he escaped into American-occupied Austria where he linked up with a number of his exiled Iron Guard friends, before joining the Gehlen Org in 1947. Through that affiliation, Bolschwing became a familiar figure to those American army officers managing the Org under the code name Operation Rusty, although not necessarily in a good way; finding the Prussian unreliable and devious, the Org control officers were eventually warned “not to use subject in any capacity.”
But that had been 1947. By 1949, with Rusty now being managed by the CIA—and given the new code name of Operation Odeum—Bolschwing’s areas of expertise dovetailed with several initiatives the CIA was pursuing in collaboration with the Gehlen Org. In particular, the Org had recruited a group of old Romanian Iron Guardists, led by a man named Constantin Papanace, that the CIA hoped to use for espionage operations in their communist-controlled homeland. To augment that effort, the CIA also wanted to tap into Bolschwing’s intelligence network in Austria. In a report outlining the Prussian aristocrat’s potential, James Critchfield, the CIA’s chief liaison to Odeum, was unequivocal. “We are convinced that Bolschwing’s Romanian operations, his connections with the Papanace group, his internal Austrian political and intelligence connections, and last but not least, his knowledge of and probable future on Odeum’s activities in and through Austria make him a valuable man whom we must control.”
This the Americans set out to do. In February 1950, Bolschwing was hired away from Gehlen and put under direct CIA supervision. Given the intriguing code name of Agent Unrest, Bolschwing’s handlers were soon describing him in glowing terms. “He is unquestionably an extremely intelligent person,” one of his control officers wrote, “an experienced intelligence operator, a man with an unusually wide and well-placed circle of friends, acquaintances, and sources, and a man whose grasp of the political-intelligence field throughout the Balkans, and to a lesser degree in Western Europe, is of a high order.”
As for Agent Unrest’s Nazi pedigree, this could be conveniently forgotten; one after another, Bolschwing’s American supervisors were content to accept the false history that Bolschwing had concocted for himself in the war’s aftermath, a stirring tale of an anti-Nazi activist cast into prison for reasons of conscience.
One after another, Bolschwing’s American supervisors were content to accept the false history that Bolschwing had concocted for himself in the war’s aftermath…
Except matters hit a snag. Shortly after his move from the Org to the CIA, the Austrian government launched an investigation of Bolschwing, and asked American officials to conduct a check of his wartime background by looking through the Nazi Party files at the Berlin Document Center, or BDC. Given Bolschwing’s ties to the CIA, this request wended its way through the American bureaucracy in Berlin until it landed on the desk of Peter Sichel.
As was to be expected of such a committed Nazi, a check of BDC records on Bolschwing set off alarm bells, news that Sichel forwarded on to the CIA team overseeing Agent Unrest at Org headquarters in Pullach. Sichel soon received a curious follow-up: Pullach now wanted CIA Berlin to either withhold Bolschwing’s file from the Austrian government or, in the deliciously Orwellian jargon of bureaucratese, to produce a “negative file.”
On April 24, 1950, Sichel responded to his colleagues in Pullach by pointing out the absurdity of such a move, explaining that the Document Center files on Nazi membership and former German intelligence officers were so complete that to go back to the Austrians with a “negative file” could only arouse suspicion. “On top of this,” he wrote, “the persons you are dealing with are so well known and their background so well publicized in the past that I deem it improbable that you can protect them from their past history.”
As for the idea of giving Bolschwing a new identity, Sichel went a good deal further. “At the end of the war we tried to be very smart and change the name of several members of the SD [Security Service branch of the SS] and Abwehr in order to protect them from the German authorities and the occupation authorities. In most cases these persons were so well known that the change in name compromised them more than if they were to face a denazification court and face the judgment that would have been meted out to them.”
In closing, and despite his admonition, Sichel offered to withhold Bolschwing’s file if this was still what CIA Pullach desired. It was, and the CIA never passed on Bolschwing’s file in the Berlin Document Center to the Austrian government.
This wasn’t to be the end of the story, however. Suspecting the CIA was stonewalling, the Austrians asked at least two other American investigative agencies in Germany, the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps and the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, or CID, to intercede on their behalf for the Bolschwing file. Not only were these agencies similarly frozen out, but the Austrians’ persistence finally led the CIA to request the CID’s help in blocking them.
But for all their effort in recruiting and shielding him, Otto von Bolschwing also soon proved a disappointment to the CIA, more interested in producing run-of-the-mill historical analysis pieces about the Balkans than in exploring the potential for clandestine operations in the region. By the beginning of 1952, having concluded there was little chance Bolschwing “will ever develop into a first class agent,” CIA Pullach transferred him back to his adoptive hometown of Salzburg, Austria, and foisted him on the CIA unit there.
The solution CIA lawyers came up with was to expunge mention of his Nazi Party membership from his official records…
The Prussian was to get the last laugh. As some of his case officers long suspected, Agent Unrest’s greatest passion had always been less about conducting espionage against the Soviets and more about trying to gain American citizenship—and with the CIA having once hired the war criminal, the Agency was now on the hook for disposing of him. In 1953, Bolschwing’s employers went about the delicate task of preparing his immigration papers while skirting the issue of his Nazi background. The solution CIA lawyers came up with was to expunge mention of his Nazi Party membership from his official records; if Bolschwing were directly asked by immigration authorities, they advised, he “should admit membership, but attempt to explain it away on the basis of extenuating circumstances.”
The ploy worked. For the next quarter-century, Bolschwing and his family lived quietly in a Sacramento suburb, before finally coming to the attention of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the Nazi-hunting unit of the U.S. Justice Department, in the late 1970s. Destined to be the highest-ranking German war criminal ever prosecuted by the OSI, Bolschwing was stripped of his American citizenship in late 1981 for having lied on his immigration application, just weeks before his death from brain cancer.
***
The links that the CIA forged with former Nazis in the late 1940s were to ultimately hurt the Agency in a variety of ways.
For one thing, those links played perfectly into the hands of Soviet propagandists eager to declaim their American opponent as in league with “fascists” and “Hitlerites.” For ordinary Soviet citizens, survivors of the savagery of German forces in World War II, every unmasking of an Otto von Bolschwing conveyed the message that their government’s accusations against the West held the ring of truth.
Those ties also cast a blot on the CIA’s image—and by natural extension, that of the United States—that has never been dispelled. In the more than six decades since their employment with the CIA, scores of books have detailed the “Nazi connection” to the Agency, some claiming the number of war criminals involved ranged into the hundreds, even the thousands. In fact, the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations—certainly no apologist for the CIA—tallies the list of German Nazi war criminals employed by the Agency over the years at probably less than a dozen, while also pointing out that nearly all of these were “inherited” from other branches of government, as was the case with both Gustav Hilger and Otto von Bolschwing. No matter; in the public imagination, even those infamous figures with whom the CIA had no apparent connection, the Klaus Barbies and Josef Mengeles of the Nazi netherworld, are now firmly fixed in many minds as having been agency assets. It’s highly doubtful the CIA will ever get out from under this cloud; rather like a thief who admits to having robbed dozens of people, but certainly not hundreds, so an institution arguing it employed “only a handful” of Nazis is already playing a losing hand. As CIA historian Kevin Ruffner has noted, “In its quest for information on the USSR, the United States became indelibly linked to the Third Reich.”
But perhaps the greatest damage the Nazi connection inflicted on the CIA rests more in the psychological realm, as the “gateway sin” that paved the way for other sins to follow.
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