Klaus Barbie Page 15
According to Barbie in 1979, the operation was successfully completed. But in December 1947 Barbie gave a very different, and probably prejudiced, version of his Hamburg visit to the Americans. He explained that he went just to keep Schaefer company while his friend tried to obtain new identification papers. Barbie claimed that Gloede had acted as a provocateur, working for British Intelligence, persistently speaking about his armoury of revolvers, his secret transmitters and sizable funds, all of which were available for the fight against the Allies. British Intelligence, Barbie claims, wanted to recruit him as an informer. But alternatively, the British approach might have been an attempt to penetrate his network. Ignoring Gloede’s questions about his own activities, Barbie denied any links with underground organisations and refused to write a list of his contacts. Their conversation was followed by a brief, uncomfortable meal with a friend of Gloede’s who behaved suspiciously, and whom Barbie also suspected of being a British agent. After Barbie again refused to co-operate, the three SS men went by tram to the main station to catch a train for Hanover.
Intuitively, Barbie sensed that they had been watched in the restaurant and were being shadowed by a green sedan during their tram journey. Just before the train left, he was suddenly grabbed from behind and within seconds was spreadeagled on the platform. A green-bereted British soldier sat on top of him, pulling Barbie’s scarf tightly around his throat. Barbie alleges that he was then taken into an office and, without a word being said, systematically beaten up. Humiliated and unaccustomed to being the victim of such treatment, he became thereafter passionately anti-British.
Stripped of their possessions, the three were locked in two cells (Barbie by himself) in the hastily converted coal cellars of an old house. Unquestioned, they remained in their cells until the third day, when a British officer bringing food revealed that they would not be allowed any exercise because he was alone on guard duty. Thirty minutes later they heard flute music from above. Using a piece of waste iron found in a cell, they broke the cell locks. Barbie was the first to creep up the stairs. To his surprise, the solitary British soldier was totally engrossed in his flute-playing. Grabbing hold of a shovel, Barbie prepared to hit him over the head but was dissuaded by the others. Quietly, they filed behind the musician’s back, climbed over a wall and fled. Unshaven, with poor clothes and without any identification papers, Barbie sought out an ex-SS comrade for help. Finding his way through the bombed streets of Hamburg to the Rotenbaumchaussee, he knocked on the door to receive a warm welcome and the help he needed from the mother of his friend.
His escape and refuge were only temporary. The British had seized his personal notebook in which he had recorded compromising details of his underground activities, and the names of his contacts – an immature bungle for any would-be member of the Resistance, and one which the former Gestapo chief himself had so mockingly exploited in Lyons. Twice betrayed, Barbie’s own careless arrogance had now betrayed others. Increasingly, he and the group came under intense surveillance by Allied Intelligence, with British Intelligence even discovering that Barbie had threatened to ‘eliminate’ at least three people whom he suspected of treachery.
From Hamburg, Barbie and his two SS colleagues set out on foot back to Marburg, only to be rearrested by an armed watchman. Their anxiety at having no papers vanished when the watchman revealed himself to be also a former member of the SS. The Kamaradenschaft had intervened once more. Within three weeks they had obtained new false papers through a contact of Barbie’s and, just before Christmas, he was reunited with his wife. By then, the CIC in Marburg had itself identified ‘Becker’ as an active conspirator and had asked CIC headquarters in Frankfurt for available information on Barbie. In reply, on 2 January 1947, CIC Marburg received a copy of the 1945 SHAEF ‘central personalities index card’ describing Barbie as the head of section IV, Sicherheitsdienst Kommando Lyon – the Gestapo chief of Lyons and a ‘dangerous conspirator’. Physically he was described as having a ‘relatively large head … grey cold eyes’ and a toe missing.
By early January, British and American Intelligence had exhausted the time-consuming possibilities of both surveillance and penetration. In their view (which was more a reflection of the inadequacies of Allied Intelligence than of reality), this was the ‘last large organised group of Nazis to be formed in the Western zones of Germany’ and only intensive interrogation of the SS men would satisfactorily expose the full structure of the group.
‘Operation Selection Board’, the arrest of fifty-seven targeted Nazis in many towns and villages throughout the American zone, was set for 2.00 a.m. on 23 February 1947. Listed as target number three was Barbie, ‘a dominant figure’, believed to be living at the Schmidt’s house in Marburg using the aliases Becker, Speer and Heinz Mertens. His centres of operation were described as Marburg, Hamburg and Munich. But in the run-up to D-day, the Marburg CIC was clearly confused about how to handle their most important target. To protect a CIC source (presumably Frau Schmidt), the CIC agents were ordered not to raid Schmidt’s house. Preliminary surveillance had already shown that he was not there. In fact, on the cold and rainy night of the raids, he was fifty miles away in Kassel, staying with Fridolin Becker, another target. When CIC agents raided that house, Barbie escaped by hiding in the bathroom. More than seventy Nazi sympathisers were nevertheless arrested in the American zone, which the CIC considered a satisfactory outcome.
By then Barbie was hesitantly entering that twilight world between conspiracy and collaboration. Inevitably, it was not an easy transition. Suspicious of his German contacts, he was unwittingly also entangled in an extraordinarily chaotic web of inconsistent and contradictory policies and orders issued by various regions and agents of the CIC itself.
In the weeks before ‘Operation Selection Board’, Barbie had been shuttling between Marburg, Kassel and Munich, exploring the authenticity of an alluring offer to join a new intelligence-gathering team set up by two very senior ex-SS officers, SS Brigadier-General Franz Alfred Six and SS Colonel Emil Augsburg. Both had been directly involved in murdering thousands of Jews in eastern Europe. Six had been head of section VII in Himmler’s head office, the RSHA, and had served with extermination squads in Russia; while Augsburg, working ostensibly as an academic studying eastern Europe at the Wannsee Institute, was in reality attached to Adolf Eichmann’s S-4 department handling the Jewish question. Both were in hiding but claimed to have been approached by American intelligence agents with an offer to collect material about the Soviet Union. Barbie was invited to join the team.
Impressed by the high rank of the officers attempting to recruit him (especially Augsburg), Barbie was keen to accept. But the combination of the CIC swoops on 23 February against his own network and Six’s sudden arrest by American war-crimes investigators on charges of mass murder alarmed him that the ex-SS officer, Hirschfeld, who was making the offer, might in fact be a traitor. His fears were justified. Hirschfeld was in fact ‘Walter’, a German CIC informer involved in ‘Operation Flowerbox’, another CIC operation aimed at penetrating underground Nazi groups. Unsuspecting, Barbie had already confided his real identity and wartime activities to ‘Walter’ and had also disclosed that he had only recently narrowly escaped arrest. Nevertheless, despite Barbie’s history, ‘Walter’s’ handler, a CIC agent called John Dermer, wanted to use Barbie to penetrate a suspected Soviet spy ring in the small town of Schwaebish-Gemund. On 20 March 1947, he asked his regional headquarters in Stuttgart (responsible for CIC Region III) for permission. ‘It is at present believed,’ he wrote, ‘that a tight enough control over him can be maintained so that his arrest could easily be effected should such action become desirable. Using him for the purpose outlined here would be an excuse to keep him under surveillance.’ On 16 April, Dermer’s proposal was rejected. Barbie was instead to be arrested ‘as quickly as feasible’.
To the north, in Marburg, CIC headquarters responsible for Region I were still, unsuccessfully, trying to locate and arrest Barbie at th
e tail end of ‘Operation Selection Board’. Neither Region I nor Region II was aware that Barbie had, after some effort, contacted an old wartime friend from France who was already working for Region IV of the CIC, based in Munich. Having exhausted any possibility of continuing the fight against the Allies, Barbie was on the verge of accepting the offer to join them.
THE MERCENARY
Barbie began working for the CIC in spring 1947. When he arrived on 18 April for his first interview in the small Bavarian town of Memmingen, sixty miles from Munich, he was a reluctant recruit. Robert Taylor, the CIC special agent who was the first American to employ him formally, was himself not overenthusiastic. He knew that Barbie was a former Gestapo officer and therefore on the automatic arrest list; he even admits that he realised immediately that Barbie was ‘one of the chief personalities’ wanted in ‘Operation Selection Board’. As a preliminary introduction Barbie had sent Taylor a copy of a long article about René Hardy from a German newspaper. To prove his importance Barbie had also typed a five-page summary describing his own part in Hardy’s arrest and the result of his successful interrogation. But Taylor needed little persuasion because despite any personal reservations he ought to have had, he trusted the German informer who had brought Barbie to his office and Dale Garvey, his superior in Munich, approved the appointment apparently without hesitation. Neither of them thought it necessary at the time to inform CIC headquarters in Frankfurt that Taylor was not only in contact with Barbie, but also considering employing him.
It was not a routine interview for Taylor. A year earlier, the new recruit would have been prosecuted for war crimes. Since then the divisions in Europe had hardened; the Cold War had started, and any lingering ambivalence in American attitudes towards the communists had simply vanished. Former allies had become enemies, hunted enemies had become friends. All the Allied intelligence agencies were under enormous pressure to discover Soviet intentions and prevent the communisation of western Germany. The personal and organisational chaos within the multiplicity of rival agencies nonetheless led to people making decisions which twenty-five years later they find hard to explain. Today, Taylor says that he cannot remember whether he employed any ex-Gestapo agents, nor can he even remember meeting Barbie. At the time it was just another German with a ‘dirty past’. But he accepts the documentary evidence which proves he did.
Taylor’s had been a typical CIC career. After fighting with the 84th Infantry Division at the Battle of the Bulge, he was drafted into the CIC because he spoke German and, as a former journalist, was thought to know how to ask questions. He never received special training at the CIC headquarters at Fort Holabird, but got first-hand experience with a CIC detachment travelling at the front of the American advance across the Rhine and up to the Elbe. Taylor, like most other CIC officers, felt that he was part of an elite force. It could count Henry Kissinger and J. D. Salinger amongst its ranks. With special privileges and facilities, the CIC played an unprecedented role for an American army.
Their mission, detailed in SHAEF handbooks and the numerous briefing papers which had been so thoughtfully drafted during the months before the D-day landings, was to spearhead the demilitarisation and denazification of Germany. Armed with unlimited powers, they were to exorcise the Nazi spirit from Germany. Their orders were to arrest any German who might pose a threat to the Allied occupation; to arrest nearly all Nazi Party officials and any member of a paramilitary force which was part of the Nazi regime; and to dismiss from public office anyone who had been a supporter or had profited from the Third Reich. It was an enormous task which was compromised from the outset.
Towards the end of 1945, many of the more talented CIC officers clamoured for demobilisation and the chance to return home. ‘The rush was so great,’ remembers one official, ‘that the American military machine just melted like butter in the sun’. It was the less able, who had nothing to return home to and could make better fortunes as members of an occupation army, who remained. While most of the original core preserved their professional approach, the new recruits were distinguished for their ignorance, laziness, inability to speak German, misunderstanding of the situation in Germany, unsuitable backgrounds and tendency to outright corruption; these men were less willing to remove incriminated Nazis from sensitive or profitable positions.
Earl Browning was one of those who took the chance to return home. As a CIC officer moving just behind the front line, he had seen a lot of action: Aachen, the Ardennes, Remagen, and then down to the south of Germany where he was among the first to enter Dachau concentration camp. By the time he left Europe in September 1945, he had ‘seen enough to convince me that many Germans were not very nice people. I had been appalled by what I saw. Dachau had been a great shock.’ In early 1946, Browning was asked to return to Germany as a senior CIC officer. The CIC had lost too many skilled officers and there was no one in Germany to replace them. Browning accepted and returned in April 1946 as the regional CIC commander in Bremen.
The mood had noticeably changed. ‘The Germans were no longer our enemies. Denazification was no longer so important. People were more suspicious of the Russians.’ All the same, to his astonishment Browning found the CIC sharing their Bremen offices with the local Communist Party. So far it had been an amicable arrangement and at first Browning did not alter it; after all, it gave him an unbeatable opportunity to see the communists at work. But as he watched the Russian reparation teams move around the city, he decided that the war-time allies were also spying. The CIC asked the communists to leave and in June 1946 Browning submitted a proposal to Colonel Inskeep, the head of CIC in Frankfurt, that he be allowed to penetrate the local Communist Party. General Burriss, the head of G2, the US Army’s intelligence section, rejected the idea. In Browning’s view, Burriss simply reflected Headquarters’ naivety about communist intentions. He began collecting more information to resubmit his proposal.
Little irritated Browning more at that time than the procedures to be followed when handling Russian deserters. Many arrived with valuable intelligence material in the hope that it would sweeten their reception and guarantee them asylum. On the contrary, Browning found himself compelled to obey the agreement signed between General Clay and his Russian counterpart, General Vassily Sokolovsky, according to which the Russians were to be returned as deserters. ‘I knew that we were sending them back to be executed, and that was terrible.’ Before they went, Browning analysed their intelligence reports and used it to convince Burriss finally that the communists did have ‘aggressive intentions towards the US’.
By then the Frankfurt headquarters needed little convincing. The four powers’ regular negotiations in Berlin had been totally obstructed by the Russians, who had also subverted the elections to the Berlin city council. The western governments were alarmed that the Communist Party had merged with, or in their view swallowed up, the Socialist Party in the Soviet zone. The new SED (East German Socialist Party) was under Soviet control: there could be a serious threat to Allied security if the Communist Party did the same in the western zones. At the time, the American command was receiving no reliable intelligence whatsoever about communist activities and intentions, whether in Soviet-occupied Europe, or indeed in their own zone. Any hard information, even from the very lowest echelons, was a valuable addition.
‘Operation Sunrise’, Browning’s own name for the penetration of the Bremen Communist Party, began in September 1946. Browning believes it to have been the first covert operation of its kind in the US zone. His best recruits were members of the Bremen Communist Party whose loyalty he knew to be weak. ‘I wanted to know what they were telling the KPD [West German Communist Party] in our zone. We didn’t learn very much, but considering our total ignorance it was better than nothing.’ Within weeks he extended his operation and persuaded his informers to join the SED in the Soviet Zone. Once again, they only returned with trifles, but it was, Browning felt, a good start.
In the autumn of 1946, Browning remembers that he received
a telex from Garvey, who at that time was the CIC chief operational officer at headquarters in Frankfurt. Garvey’s message had been sent to all regional commands. It alerted CIC detachments that a senior Gestapo officer wanted for many war crimes had been seen in the US zone. If seen, said the telex, he should be arrested. The Gestapo officer’s name was Klaus Barbie.
On 1 March 1947, Browning replaced Garvey in Frankfurt as operations officer for the whole 7970 CIC. Garvey had just completed ‘Operation Selection Board’ and was sent to Munich, officially to ‘reorganise’ the CIC in Region IV – Bavaria. In fact, his major priority was to root out the blatant corruption among undisciplined American officers which had severely compromised the American military government. Surveying what he had inherited from Garvey, Browning concluded that CIC operations had become hopelessly chaotic. The 700 CIC agents were insufficiently supervised; their information was too often valueless; and German informers were able to sell the same erroneous information to several CIC agents in succession because no one at headquarters was monitoring the sources and the information. As a serious consequence, the same erroneous information coming apparently from two different souces would be used to confirm itself. Browning immediately began reorganising the central index system in Frankfurt and ordered all regions to submit a complete list of the names of their informers. They were to be registered and given a code name for security and future reference. Joe Vidal, described by those who know him as a ‘super-cool spook’, was in charge of the informants registry, known within the CIC as the ‘Tech Spec’. Garvey’s list reached Vidal in September. It included the names given to him by the Augsburg detachment which, through an office in Memmingen, was responsible for the area down to the Austrian border. Vidal, who later joined the CIA, noted that not all the informants listed were suitable under existing regulations. He sent the suspect list to Browning: