The Gehlen Organization ~ a post war Nazi Nexus

hermes7 (39)in #germany • 7 years ago (edited)

Today ill try to bring to you the mindblowing story of Reinhard Gehlen and the Gehlen Organization.

Being german myself and going to the public school system I learned nothing about this..
Actually I always thought the Allies were genuine about the Denazification.

Reading and reseaching about these topics by yourself can be fascinating and leads you to different conclusions about our past and present. But especially learning about the Gehlen Organization left me with some jaw dropping moments.

Reinhard Gehlen was a Genralmajor of the german Wehrmacht and Chief of Intelligence of the eastern Front called Foreign Armies East or german "Fremde Heere Ost".
As that he knew better than anyone that Germany would lose the war, since he had to constatly report grimmer and grimmer news to Hitler.
Because of that Hitler actually dismissed him from his post on april 9th 1945.(Gerhard Wessel tookhis position.)

During that time however, Gehlen made preparations to ensure his own survival after the fall of the Third Reich. He gathered all the files from "Fremde Heere Ost" on the Soviet Union and buried them in a Bavarian mountainside, because he had foreseen the post war tensions between the East and the West. And wanted to use them to his advantage.

On May 22 1945 he turns himself in 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 by Americans.
The Americans were really interested in him and his files etc. which led to him being flown into the USA, dressed up as a four star General, where he worked for the OSS .

In July 1946 Gehlen was flown back to Germany, where he began his intelligence work . 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.". The Org. was filled with former SS, SD ,Abwehr, Gestapo people.
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. Meaning the Gehlen Organization now worked for the CIA's Department for Russian and Eastern European affairs.
For almost ten years, the Gehlen Org. was literally the CIA's only source of intelligence on Eastern Europe.

To stress this point again, that Nazis were the CIA's only Intelligence on the Soviet Union, I quote what Karl Oglesbee wrote about this in his book The Yankee and the Cowboy War:

Look what power the victors conceded the vanquished. Exclusive purveyor of intelligence on the Soviet Union and East Europe to the United states, West Germany, and NATO, Gehlen and the spirit kept alive in him and his staff had more power over official American perceptions in the postwar world than even a German victory could have given them.The Gehlen-Vlassov intelligence system had become a main source and fountain of official American consciousness.
Behold the span of this concatenation. First in the time of Trotsky there is General Vlassov and his anti-Bolshevist army spy ring.The Vlassov apparatus is then at a certain later point assimilated to the Gehlen apparatus. Then just as the White Russian spies jumped to the Nazis when their own army went down, so now the German Nazi and Russian Czarist spies together jumped to the American army as the Wehrmacht was falling.Vlassov first became a department of Gehlen, then Gehlen became a department of Allen Dulles.This is how it came to pass that a Czarist spy ring inside a Nazi spy ring took up the inner seats in the American foreign intelligence apparatus at the percise moment that this apparatus was starting to come forward as a major playing in the great policy wars of Washington and the world.This is how it came to pass that everything offical Washington would know about the Soviet Union and East Europe on moste believable report, everything about the enemy our policymakers would most confidently belive, would come by way of czarists and Nazis installed at the center of our national intelligence system That was a buzzard that would come home to roost again and again.

How that would look like you may ask?
Well not only did many Nazis work there way up in many US agengency etc. but also they feed them missinformation to strengthen their position inside their Agency Networks.

General Gehlen frequently exaggerated the Soviet threat in order to exacerbate tensions between the superpowers. At one point he succeeded in convincing General Lucius Clay, military governor of the U.S. zone of occupation in Germany, that a major Soviet war mobilization had begun in Eastern Europe. This prompted Clay to dash off a frantic, top-secret telegram to Washington in March 1948, warning that war "may come with dramatic suddenness."
Gehlen's disinformation strategy was based on a simple premise: the colder the Cold War got, the more political space for Hitler's heirs to maneuver. The Org could only flourish under Cold War conditions; as an institution it was therefore committed to perpetuating the oviet-American conflict.
"The agency loved Gehlen because he fed us what we wanted to hear. We used his stuff constantly, and we fed it to everyone else – the Pentagon, the White House, the newspapers. They loved it, too. But it was hyped-up Russian bogeyman junk, and it did a lot of damage to this country," a retired CIA official told author Christopher Simpson, who also serves on the IGW review panel and was author of Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War.

But The Gehlen Org. is an even more entangled web that this brief summary would lead you to belief.
For example as the Nazis retreated on the eastern front during WW II they left behind guerilla fighters (" Organisation Werwolf") to harass the Red Army.

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This was going on from 1944 till 1952 primarily in Poland, Ukraine, and the baltic states. This was a continuous operation started by the Nazi's and kept going by the CIA/Gehlen Org. By shipping in weapons and Liaison officers.
As I heard of that immediately thought of Operation Gladio and according to some researcher's (e.g. Joseph P. Farrell)There is a definte Gehlen/Gladio connection.

They also were broadcasting ,via Radio Free Europe , Anti Communist Propaganda to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

On April 1. 1956 The Gehlen Org. was renamed into Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service (Germany))
Which till today remains Germanys single foreign intelligence agency. And had untill 1990 no legal basis.
Reinhard Gehlen was it's first President till 1968. Where then funnily enough the same Gerhard Wessel who took his position after Hitler fired Gehlen, became the next President of the BND.

I hope i was able to outline for you a post war Nazi Nexus.
If you have spotted mistakes, want to add something or want to debate me please do so (:!

sources:

(sorry didnt know how to delete the link erase the space between h and ttps..^^)

*h ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYp_05D7e6E
*h ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nM3ijTqLVQ&t=645s
*h ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCgYUCrT7z4&t=3207s

#nazi #cia #history #story