Reinhard Gehlen

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Reinhard Gehlen
Bundesarchiv Bild 183-27237-0001, Reinhard Gehlen.jpg
Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, c. 1943
Birth date 3 March 1902(1902-03-03)
Place of birth Erfurt, Province of Saxony, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire
Death date 8 June 1979 (aged 77)
Place of death Starnberg, Bavaria, West Germany
Allegiance  Weimar Republic
(1920–1933)
 National Socialist Germany
(1933–1945)
 United States
(1946–1956)
 West Germany
(1956–1968)
Service/branch War Ensign of Germany (1921–1933).png Reichswehr
Balkenkreuz.jpg Heer
Rank Generalmajor
Battles/wars World War II
Cold War
Awards Iron Cross
German Cross in Silver
War Merit Cross
Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
Grand Cross of the Order pro Merito Melitensi of the Order of Malta (1948)
Other work President of the West German Federal Intelligence Service

Reinhard Gehlen (3 April 1902 – 8 June 1979) was a Major-General in the German Wehrmacht during World War II. Starting in 1942 he served as chief of Fremde Heere Ost (FHO), the German Army's military intelligence unit on the Eastern Front. During the emerging phases of the Cold War, he was recruited by the United States military to set up a spy ring directed against the Soviet Union (known as the Gehlen Organization) which employed numerous former SS, SD and Wehrmacht officers and eventually became head of the West German intelligence apparatus. He served as the first president of the Federal Intelligence Service until 1968. Gehlen is considered one of the most legendary Cold War spymasters.

After the war, Gehlen claimed that he had been aware of the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. More generally, regarding his possible role in the so-called German resistance and helping the Soviet Union defeat Germany during World War II, see National Socialist Germany and partisans/resistance movements: Internal German resistance movements.

Early life and military service

Generalmajor Reinhard Gehlen.jpg
Reinhard Gehlen (BND).JPG

Reinhard Gehlen was born into a Roman Catholic family in Erfurt, the son of a bookstore owner. He joined the Reichswehr in 1920. He attended the German Staff College, graduating in 1935, after which he was promoted to captain and attached to the Army General Staff.[1]

Gehlen was on the General Staff from 1935-1936. At the time of the Poland Campaign, he was a staff officer of an infantry division.[1] In 1940, Gehlen became liaison officer to Army Commander-in-Chief Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch. He was later transferred to the staff of Army Chief of Staff General Franz Halder.

In July 1941, Gehlen was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel, sent to the Eastern Front and assigned to the German General Staff, section Fremde Heere Ost, FHO or Foreign Armies East as a senior intelligence officer.[2]

Gehlen states in his memoirs,[3] he was approached by Colonel Henning von Tresckow, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and General Adolf Heusinger to participate in an assassination attempt on German head of state Adolf Hitler. When the plot culminated in the failed bomb plot of 20 July 1944, Gehlen said his minor role was never discovered and he escaped Hitler's retaliation. Throughout his years at FHO, it was said Gehlen allowed determined opponents of the National Socialist government to hold conspiratorial discussions inside his section and he was present at Berchtesgaden in the final days before 20 July when details of the assassination attempt were discussed.[4]

In the spring of 1942 Gehlen took over FHO from Colonel Eberhard Kinzel.[5] Even before the disaster of Stalingrad, Gehlen realized that FHO must be fundamentally reorganized and he methodically set about finding the right personnel. Gehlen scoured army personnel files, searching for linguists, geographers, anthropologists, lawyers and junior officers who had recently joined FHO. He accepted anyone who seemed suitable to him and who would be likely to raise the intellectual level of FHO. A stream of fresh and energetic officers and experts flowed in.[6] It was this cadre that amassed a comprehensive data file on the Red Army, producing assessments and "defeatist reports" that reached Hitler. Their discouraging accuracy eventually resulted in his dismissal in April 1945, but not before his last promotion, to the rank of major general.[7]

During the war, Gehlen's organization accumulated a great deal of information about the Soviet Union and the battlefield tactics of the Red Army. When the Iron Curtain descended in 1946, leaving the Western Allies with virtually no intelligence sources in Eastern Europe, Gehlen’s vast store of knowledge made him very valuable.[1]

Realizing a German defeate, Gehlen made preparations to ensure his own survival after the fall of the Third Reich. He ordered the microfilming of the holdings of Fremde Heere Ost and had them placed in watertight drums, which he buried in several places in the Austrian Alps.[8] He had fifty cases of archives buried at the Elendsalm in the mountains of Upper Bavaria,[9] planning to sell them after the end of hostilities.

Post World War II

On 22 May 1945, Gehlen surrendered to the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Bavaria. He was brought to Camp King and interrogated by Captain John R. Boker near Oberursel. Because of his knowledge and contacts inside the Soviet Union he was very valuable to the Americans. He offered them his intelligence archives and his network of contacts in exchange for his liberty and the liberty of his colleagues imprisoned in American POW camps in Germany. Boker quietly removed Gehlen and his command from the official lists of American POWs and managed to transfer seven of Gehlen's senior officers to the camp. Gehlen's archives were unearthed and brought to the camp secretly, without even the knowledge of the CIC.

By the end of the summer, Boker had elicited the support of Brigadier General Edwin Sibert, the G2 (senior intelligence officer) of the Twelfth Army Group.[10] General Sibert contacted his superior, General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's chief of staff, who then worked with William Joseph Donovan, the former head of OSS and Allen Dulles, then the OSS station chief in Bern, to make suitable arrangements. On 20 September 1945, Gehlen and three close associates were flown to the United States to begin work for them. While there, Gehlen exposed a number of Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officers who were secret members of the U.S. Communist Party.

In July 1946, Gehlen was officially released from American captivity and flown back to Germany,[11] where he began his intelligence work on 6 December 1946 by setting up an organization of former German intelligence officers, first at Oberursel near Frankfurt, then at Pullach near Munich,[1] called the "South German Industrial Development Organization" to mask its true nature as an undercover operation and spy ring. Gehlen handpicked 350 former German intelligence agents to join him, a number that eventually grew to 4,000 undercover agents. This group was soon to be given the nickname the "Gehlen Organization" or simply "the Org."

Gehlen Organization

The anti-communist espionage networks of the Gehlen Organization remained in place after the Red Army's conquest and the consolidation of Soviet hegemony in the east of Europe.

Gehlen had always been under the sponsorship of US Army G-2 (intelligence), but he eventually succeeded in realizing his ambition of establishing an association with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), established in 1947. The CIA kept close tabs on the Gehlen group. For many years during the Cold War, Org agents were the only eyes and ears of the CIA on the ground in the Soviet Bloc nations.

Every German POW returning from Soviet captivity to West Germany, between 1947 and 1955, was interviewed by Org agents. The Gehlen Org employed hundreds of ex-National Socialist Party members and also had close contacts with East European émigré organizations. Unheralded tasks, such as observation of the operation of Soviet rail systems, airfields and ports were important functions of the Org, as was the infiltration of agents into the Baltic and Ukraine. The Org "Operation Bohemia" was a major counter-espionage success.

The Gehlen Organization was eventually compromised by East Germany, communist moles within itself and by communists and their sympathizers within the CIA and the British SIS (MI6), particularly Kim Philby. As the Org slowly emerged, bit by bit, from the shadows, Gehlen and his group came under relentless attack from both sides, East and West. The British, in particular, were hostile toward Gehlen and segments of the British press made sure the Org became known.

BND

Ten years after the end of World War II, on 1 April 1956, the Gehlen Organization was officially handed over to the government of the Federal Republic of Germany under Bundeskanzler Konrad Adenauer.[1] It formed the nucleus of the newly created Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND or Federal Intelligence Service).[1] Gehlen held the top leadership post (President of the BND), presiding over spectacular successes as well as failures, until being forced out in 1968. His downfall was as dramatic as his rise, resulting from several factors, including the discovery of Heinz Felfe (Ulrich Friedrich Bauer had long suspected him), an ex-SS lieutenant and Soviet agent in the Pullach headquarters complex,[12] estrangement from Chancellor Adenauer earlier in 1963 and above all, by his increasing inattention to business and his delinquent leadership which, taken altogether, resulted in a decline in efficiency of the BND. He retired from government service in 1968, receiving the pension of a Ministerialdirektor (one of the most senior civil service grades),[13] plus, allegedly, a honour pension from the CIA.

Memoirs

His memoirs Der Dienst were serialised by the newspaper Die Welt for a payment of 450,000 Marks. The first extract was published on 11 September 1971, to "widespread incredulity and scepticism". His stories about Martin Bormann were shown to be a hoax. Die Welt was embarrassed and the public disappointed by the extracts. The German newspaper Stern also weighed in on the criticism; Gehlen's reputation was finished off by the magazine Der Speigel. The Vienna newspaper Presse asked "Is Bonn's intelligence service in ruins?"[14]

Promotions

Reichswehr

  • 20 April 1920 Fahnenjunker (Officer Cadet)
  • 1 September 1922 Fähnrich
  • 1 December 1923 Leutnant (2nd Lieutenant)
  • 1 February 1928 Oberleutnant (1st Lieutenant)
  • 1 May 1934 Hauptmann (Captain)

Wehrmacht

  • 1 June 1938 Major i. G.
  • 1 July 1941 Oberstleutnant i. G. (Lieutenant Colonel in the General Staff)
  • 1 July 1942 Oberst i. G.
  • 1 December 1944 Generalmajor

Awards and decorations (excerpt)

Further reading

External links

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Reinhard Gehlen - Biografie WHO'S WHO
  2. ↑ FHO was organized in 1938 (on the break-up of section "Foreign Armies") with the task to prepare situation maps of the Soviet Union, Poland, Scandinavia and the Balkans and to assemble information on potential adversaries
  3. ↑ Gehlen, Reinhard; trans. David Irving (1971). The Service — The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen. New York: World Publishing, 97–99. 
  4. ↑ Höhne, Heinz & Zolling, Hermann, The General was a Spy, p. 38
  5. ↑ Höhne & Zolling, p. 10
  6. ↑ Höhne & Zolling, p. 13
  7. ↑ Höhne & Zolling, p. 44
  8. ↑ Christopher Simpson: BLOWBACK: The First Full Account of America's Recruitment of National Socialists, and its disastrous Effect on our domestic foreign policy. Collier Books, New York 1988, ISBN 0-02-044995-X, pp. 41.
  9. ↑ Höhne & Zolling, p. 52
  10. ↑ Christopher Simpson: BLOWBACK: The First Full Account of America's Recruitment of National Socialists, and its disastrous Effect on our domestic foreign policy. Collier Books, New York 1988, ISBN 0-02-044995-X, pp. 41–42.
  11. ↑ Höhne & Zolling, p. 63
  12. ↑ BND cryptanalysts deciphered KGB messages leading to Felfe
  13. ↑ Höhne & Zolling, p. 1
  14. ↑ Network - The Truth About General Gehlen and His Spy Ring by Heinz Hohn and Herman Zolling, Hamburg 1971 and London, 1972, pps:xx - xxiii.
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