The_Info_Web/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/GOVERNMENT/INTERNATIONAL/Gehlen Organization.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	start	end	location
Gehlen Organization Gehlen Org Organisation Gehlen Org	Intelligence & Government	Organization Germany CIA Wehrmacht Nazi ColdWar Intelligence Soviet 1940s 1950s	CIA-funded intelligence network in West Germany from 1946 to 1956, built by Reinhard Gehlen from his Wehrmacht Eastern Front directorate, reconstituted as the Bundesnachrichtendienst in April 1956.	1946-07-01	1956-04-01	Pullach, Bavaria, West Germany

The Gehlen Organization (Organisation Gehlen), commonly called "the Org," was a CIA-funded intelligence network that operated from a compound at Pullach, near Munich, in the American occupation zone of postwar Germany from approximately 1946 to 1956. It was built by Reinhard Gehlen, a Wehrmacht general who had directed Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East), the Wehrmacht's intelligence branch covering the Soviet Union and Eastern Front, from 1942 to 1945. The Org provided the Central Intelligence Agency and its predecessor organizations with their primary human intelligence coverage of the Soviet bloc during the critical early Cold War period, and was reconstituted as the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, West Germany Federal Intelligence Service) in April 1956.¹

Origins: The Gehlen Deal

In April-May 1945, anticipating German defeat, Gehlen had the files of Fremde Heere Ost microfilmed and the film containers buried in the Austrian Alps, as Gehlen's memoir states. The CIA history's statement by Gehlen's deputy Gerhard Wessel records that after Hitler relieved Gehlen on April 9, 1945 the microfilmed Fremde Heere Ost files were moved by army truck and dispersed in three places in southern Germany: near the Wilder Kaiser, near Marquartstein and near Schliersee.² He surrendered to U.S. Army forces on May 22, 1945, and immediately proposed a bargain to his American captors: his organization, its accumulated records on the Soviet military and political structure, and its agent networks in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in exchange for American protection, funding, and operational support.

The offer was accepted by the Strategic Services Unit, successor to the Office of Strategic Services, and Gehlen was transported to the United States in August 1945 for debriefing at Fort Hunt, Virginia. He returned to Germany in 1946 to begin operations under American supervision. The CIA, formally established in 1947, inherited the arrangement from its predecessor organizations and took over direct management of the Gehlen network.¹

The arrangement with the U.S. Army was codenamed Operation RUSTY. Between 1945 and 1949 the Army handled the Organization and funded its intelligence collection.³ In late 1947 RUSTY moved from Oberursel to its own compound at Pullach, a village near Munich, and Col. Willard K. Liebel replaced Col. Deane as operations officer.³ In 1946 the Army's Counter Intelligence Corps arrested several Germans who said they worked for American intelligence; the Strategic Services Unit representative who investigated found "some of the agents employed were SS personnel with known Nazi records and, in most cases, undesirable people."³ The CIA's acting chief at the Karlsruhe Operations Base wrote in an August 1948 memorandum that he viewed RUSTY's recruiting methods "with great disgust."³ Lieutenant General Lucius D. Clay opposed CIA involvement, and his retirement in the spring of 1949 cleared the way for the Agency to assume control in July of that year; James H. Critchfield's December 1948 report was decisive in persuading CIA officials to take responsibility.²

The "Gehlen deal" gave the United States what no other arrangement could provide at that moment: an existing intelligence network with deep files on the Soviet military and security apparatus, agents in place across Eastern Europe, and operational experience in the specific geographical and political environment where American intelligence was most blind. The cost - accepting an organization staffed substantially by former Wehrmacht and Nazi intelligence personnel and directed by a general who had served Hitler - was accepted as the price of operational capability during the emerging Cold War.¹

Operations at Pullach

The Org operated from a former SS compound at Pullach, south of Munich, which had been used as a residence and headquarters by SS chief Martin Bormann before the war's end. The compound was ringed with American security and formally outside normal German jurisdiction. Gehlen ran the organization with substantial autonomy within the framework of CIA oversight and funding.

The Org recruited from the pool of former Wehrmacht intelligence officers, SD and SS personnel, and other German nationals with relevant experience and Eastern European contacts. This personnel base gave it operational reach into Eastern Europe but also embedded large numbers of individuals whose backgrounds included participation in Nazi intelligence operations, some of which had involved war crimes adjacent to intelligence collection in occupied territories.¹

The organization ran agent networks in East Germany and across the Soviet bloc, produced analytical assessments of Soviet military capabilities for American intelligence consumers, conducted counterintelligence operations, and developed liaison relationships with intelligence services in NATO member countries.¹

Personnel and Nazi Inheritance

The extent of former SS and Nazi party personnel within the Org was a persistent controversy that official accounts understated during the Cold War. The CIA accepted the personnel inheritance as a practical necessity: Gehlen's network was composed of the people who had relevant experience, and rebuilding from scratch would have taken years during which the United States would have lacked the coverage that German intelligence veterans could provide.

Academic research, including the work of the Bundesnachrichtendienst's Unabhängige Historikerkommission (Independent Historians' Commission, established by contract in February 2011, with volumes appearing from 2016),⁴ documented the extent of former SS membership and Nazi party affiliation among Org personnel. Breitman and his co-authors report that approximately 10 percent of Org employees had been SS members (a substantially higher proportion than in the West German government generally), and that individuals with wartime records involving repression operations had served in sensitive positions.⁵

The first Historians' Commission volume, by Christoph Rass, rests on a random sample of 3,650 life histories from the roughly 12,000 staff to 1968 and counts "NS markers"; Nowack's study of security reviews counted 68 persons removed in the 1960s, and Sälter's volume was reported in 2022 as finding that up to 20 percent of the early personnel had taken part in crimes and more than 30 in Einsatzgruppen shootings.⁶⁷

Former SS and SD Staff in the CIA's Name Files

The CIA acknowledged an intelligence relationship with Gehlen for the first time in an October 2000 court filing in Oglesby v. Army; the Disclosure Act processing released the Army's 2,100-page Gehlen file and nearly 2,100 further pages from CIA files.⁸ The Interagency Working Group historians found that nine of fourteen second-tier CIA name files involved individuals who had contact with the Organization.⁹ Emil Augsburg, an SD major and Wannsee Institute department director, was taken on by 1953 and regarded as a "shining star" of counterintelligence; Gehlen required him in 1954 to work outside Pullach, and he was dismissed in 1966.⁹ Wilhelm Krichbaum, former head of the Wehrmacht Secret Field Police, was a district chief in the Organization; a 1963 document apparently from the BND concluded he had worked for the Soviets since 1950.⁹ Hans Sommer, a Gestapo official, was recruited for counterespionage in early 1950 and dropped in 1953; Wilfried Krallert was picked up in 1952; Franz Six was reported to have joined in the mid-1950s.⁹ In 1963 the East German media charged that Gehlen had transferred a number of former SS and SD officials, among them Six, Augsburg and Franz Goering, to camouflaged positions.⁹ Friedrich Panzinger, released from Soviet custody in 1956 with a mission to penetrate the BND, reported it and was used as a double agent until his suicide in 1959.⁹

The CIA's own records, as disclosed through Freedom of Information Act releases, documented awareness of the Nazi personnel inheritance. Agency officials weighed the operational value of Gehlen's network against the security and political risks of employing former Nazis, consistently prioritizing operational continuity. The arrangement created long-term political vulnerabilities when the personnel roster became more widely known.¹

Soviet Penetration

The Org was penetrated by Soviet intelligence from its early years. The most serious known penetration was Heinz Felfe, who joined the Org in 1951 and rose to become chief of counterintelligence (the CIA study describes him as deputy chief of the section, in practice its real chief). Felfe was a former SS officer who had been recruited by Soviet intelligence and operated as a KGB agent within the Org and its successor the BND for approximately a decade before being exposed in November 1961. His position in counterintelligence gave him access to the operations, agent identities, and procedures that he was tasked with protecting - a near-ideal placement for a Soviet penetration agent.¹

Additional penetrations were identified over the years, and the extent of Soviet knowledge of Org operations has never been fully assessed. The KGB had specific and well-founded interest in penetrating the Gehlen network given both its CIA connection and its operational focus on the Soviet bloc.¹

Transition to the BND

When West Germany recovered sovereignty in 1955 and joined NATO, negotiations transferred the Gehlen Organization from American to West German government control. The BND was formally established on April 1, 1956, with Gehlen as its first president. The BND retained the Pullach compound, its personnel roster, and its operational assets. The CIA-BND liaison relationship that replaced the CIA-Org relationship maintained close cooperation on Soviet bloc intelligence through the remainder of the Cold War.¹

The CIA held the Organization in what its own history calls "trusteeship" from 1949 to 1956, and Critchfield was the Agency's representative at Pullach from June 1949 until 1956.¹⁰ After the East German uprising of 1953 the Communists announced in late November the roll-up of West German agent networks in the East; three cases led to the exposure of hundreds of other assets, and by the end of that year more than 200 Organization agents had fled to West Germany.¹⁰ The CIA history states that after the Felfe and Clemens scandals "it is believed that over 200 BND officers resigned or were dismissed in the 1960s because they had concealed their wartime pasts."¹⁰

Footnotes

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1. Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Doubleday, 2007, pp. 33-56. Gehlen, Reinhard. Der Dienst: Erinnerungen 1942-1971. v. Hase & Koehler, 1971 (Gehlen's memoir). Trento, Joseph. The Secret History of the CIA. Forum, 2001. ↩︎

2. Central Intelligence Agency, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, Vol. 1, document appendix, "Statement of Gerhard Wessel on Development of the German Organization," and photograph captions. https://archive.org/details/CIAAndTheOriginsOfTheBND1945-1949 ↩︎

3. Central Intelligence Agency, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, Vol. 1, chapters on Operation RUSTY (CIC arrests of 1946, the August 1948 memorandum, the move to Pullach). https://archive.org/details/CIAAndTheOriginsOfTheBND1945-1949 ↩︎

4. Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 20/1963, Kleine Anfrage of Die Linke, May 24, 2022. https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/20/019/2001963.pdf ↩︎

5. Breitman, Richard, Norman J.W. Goda, Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe. U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis. Cambridge University Press, 2005. Goschler, Constantin, and Michael Wala. "Keine neue Gestapo": Das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und die NS-Vergangenheit. Rowohlt, 2015. ↩︎

6. Rigoll, Dominik, "Nazi-Verstrickungen beim Geheimdienst: Die braunen Wurzeln des BND," die tageszeitung, December 9, 2016. https://taz.de/Nazi-Verstrickungen-beim-Geheimdienst/!5363325/ ↩︎

7. dts Nachrichtenagentur, "Über 30 BND-Mitarbeiter bei Kriegsverbrechen im Zweiten Weltkrieg," October 7, 2022. https://regionalheute.de/ueber-30-bnd-mitarbeiter-bei-kriegsverbrechen-im-zweiten-weltkrieg-1665142867/ ↩︎

8. Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, Final Report to Congress, April 2007, Figure 12. https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.pdf ↩︎

9. Breitman, Richard, "Historical Analysis of 20 Name Files from CIA Records," Interagency Working Group, 2001. https://www.archives.gov/iwg/declassified-records/rg-263-cia-records/historical-analysis-by-breitman.pdf ↩︎

10. Central Intelligence Agency, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1949-56, Vol. 1, declassified 2007. https://archive.org/details/CIAAndTheOriginsOfTheBND1949-1956 ↩︎