Secret Intelligence and the Holocaust
Ed. David Bankier
New York: Enigma Books, 2006. p/b, $23
US Intelligence and the Nazis
Richard Breitman et al
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p/b, £16.99
On 11 January 1943, the British intercepted ‘one of the most extraordinary messages’ of the war at Bletchley Park: it referred ‘to 1,274,166 Jews killed during 1942 at four death camps – Lublin, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka’. The intercept was forwarded to Major Hugh Trevor-Roper, but he does not appear to have appreciated the significance of the document. He was far from alone in this failure to comprehend the enormity of Nazi crimes against Europe’s Jewish population. This startling revelation is contained in David Bankier’s introduction to the collection of essays, Secret Intelligence and the Holocaust, one of two volumes on the subject, prompted by the declassification of intelligence material in the second half of the 1990s. Richard Breitman, one of the principal contributors to the second volume under review, US Intelligence and the Nazis, has already written an essential volume in this field, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (Allen Lane, 2001). These two volumes continue the exploration of this exceedingly dark territory.
Let us look at the Bankier volume first. The importance of the new intelligence materials for our understanding of the Holocaust is brought home in Gerhard Steinberg’s opening essay. Here he argues that the history of the early days of the Nazi mass murder of Russian Jews has been transformed by intelligence materials revealing the extent of Order Police involvement in the massacres that accompanied Operation Barbarossa. Whereas it had been previously believed that the mass shootings of Russian Jews had been largely the work of the 3,000-odd strong SS Einsatzgruppen, now we know that the 20,000 strong Order Police were also heavily involved. From being regarded as a peripheral affair, these early massacres have now assumed greater importance for the development of the Nazi policy of genocide, because considerably more men and resources were devoted to them than was originally thought. The early stages of the Holocaust have had to be rethought.
Inevitably, which contributions seem most important in a collection such as this reflects the interests and concerns of the reviewer. Bearing this in mind, of particular interest in this are Piotr Wrobel’s ‘An NKVD Residentura (Residency) in the Warsaw Ghetto’, Hilary Earl’s ‘Confessions of Wrongdoing, or How to Save Yourself from the Hangman? An Analysis of British and American Intelligence Reports of the Activities of Einsatzgruppenfuhrer Otto Ohlendorf, May-June 1945’, and Norman Goda’s ‘True Confessions: Allied Intelligence, German Prisoners, Nazi Murders’. Let us look at Goda’s essay in a bit more detail.
Goda makes use of the secret tape recordings the OSS made of conversations between Nazi prisoners and of the reports of OSS agents placed in the prisoner population. The results are quite chilling. There were only a handful of prisoners who regretted Nazi atrocities. More widespread were the sentiments expressed by Generalleutnant Maximilian Siry. He discussed the mass murder of Russian prisoners of war (over 3 million were killed):
‘One cannot openly admit this, but we were far too soft. All these horrors have landed us in the soup now. If we had carried these atrocities through one hundred percent – to the point where the remainder of the people had disappeared – then no one would be able to say anything…… we were not hard enough – not barbaric enough.’
Similarly, SS Brigadefuhrer Kurt ‘Panzer’ Meyer, still celebrated as a war hero in some circles in both Britain and the United States, was recorded cheerfully boasting of having massacred the entire population of a Russian village in reprisal for the death of one of his dogs. Meyer, who vehemently denied any involvement in war crimes in his memoirs, was taped endorsing Hitler’s prophecy that the war would mean ‘the annihilation of the Jewish race’. Other Nazis, however, felt that the attempted extermination of the Jews had been premature, that they should have been exploited for the war effort and then exterminated once the war had been won.
The volume also includes interesting chapters on Vatican intelligence and the Holocaust, on the Trawniki Training Camp, on Adolf Eichmann and on agent networks in Istanbul.
The other book, US Intelligence and the Nazis, is also of considerable interest. It consists of essays written, in the main, by Richard Breitman and Norman Goda, with individual chapters by Robert Wolfe (‘Coddling a Nazi Turncoat’) and Timothy Naftali (‘Richard Gehlen and the United States’). There is a huge amount of useful material here, but of particular interest for this reviewer were Breitman and Goda’s joint essay on the Gestapo and Goda’s essays on the Croatian Ustasa and on Nazi collaborators in the United States.
The Gestapo chapter covers a lot of ground, including an account of the career of one Gestapo official, Walter Rauff. He had initiated the use of gas in the murder of Russian POWs and Jews in 1941, converting vans into gas chambers by making use of their exhaust fumes. These and other crimes did not stop elements within the Catholic Church from protecting him after the War. He hid out in Italy ‘in the convents of the Holy See, apparently under the protection of Bishop Alois Hudal’, before being smuggled out of the country to Syria in November 1948. Soon after, he escaped to South America. With a grim inevitability, Rauff ended up working for the Pinochet regime (Margaret Thatcher’s favourite dictatorship), ‘allegedly involved in the torture and deaths of many Chileans’. He died of a heart attack in May 1984.
Goda’s contribution on Croatia, ‘The Ustas: Murder and Espionage’, is also extremely interesting. Apparently, the Americans believed that the escape to Argentina of the Ustasa leader, Ante Pavelic, one of the worst Axis war criminals, was ‘facilitated not only by the Vatican, but also by British intelligence’. Over a hundred senior Ustasa members escaped to Argentina courtesy of the Vatican in the person of Father Krunoslav Draganovic, himself an unrepentant war criminal. He was also instrumental in the escape of Klaus Barbie. By the end of 1959, Draganovic was working for the Americans, providing them with Vatican intelligence, among other things. On one occasion, he even offered to raise a legion of Croatian exiles to overthrow Castro! Draganovic disappeared in 1967, resurfacing in Yugoslavia where he was wanted as a war criminal. According to the CIA, the most likely explanation for this was that he was handed over by the Vatican as part of their rapprochement with the Tito regime. Part of the deal involved Draganovic being left to live in retirement. He died in 1979, never having stood trial for any of his crimes.
Even more astonishing is Goda’s account of Viorel Trifa in his chapter, ‘Nazi collaborators in the United States’. Trifa had been a student leader of the Romanian fascist Iron Guard. In January 1941, he was one of the instigators of an anti-Semitic pogrom in which hundreds of Jews were killed, many with horrific cruelty, even by the standards of the time. He successfully avoided any post-war difficulties, eventually arriving in New York as a bona fide anti-Communist in July 1951. Here, in less than a year, he achieved the remarkable feat of becoming not only a priest in the Romanian Orthodox Church, but a full-blown bishop, taking the name Bishop Valerian. On 11 May 1955, Bishop Valerian actually conducted prayers in the US Senate, probably the only man to have ever ordered that Jewish victims should have their tongues cut out to have done so. His anti-Communism earned him the protection of the FBI, something that according to Goda, shocked even the CIA.
Both these volumes are highly recommended. They throw considerable light in dark places.