PART 1:
THE CIA COVENANT:
NAZI'S IN WASHINGTON
BY GREGORY DOUGLAS
Foreword
After the German surrender on May 9, 1945, there was a wild witch-hunt in that conquered
country to discover and prosecute as many of Hitler’s leading followers who had survived the finial days of
the war.
Allied propaganda had portrayed the German SS and, most especially, the dread Gestapo or Secret
State Police, as engines of evil and their members were to be rigorously sought out, tried by military courts
and imprisoned or executed.
Times change, they say, and we must change with them, so very soon, the United States began to
find useful employment for many of their former enemies.
This led to the employment of many German SS, Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst personnel by both
the United States Army intelligence organs and, after its founding in 1948, the new Central Intelligence
Agency.
The employment of these once-detested and persecuted Nazis was a matter of great and ongoing
secrecy. Official files were searched for incriminating postwar documents and these papers were either
removed and destroyed or redacted with strong prohibitions against their ever seeing the light of day.
In the early 1980's, a file on former SS General and concentration camp head, Odlio Globocnik
surfaced in the hands of John Costello, an English researcher and historical writer. Costello had obtained
this file, and other explosive papers, from Robert T. Crowley, once Deputy Director of the CIA’s
Clandestine Operations Division.
Because the contents were considered by the finder as too controversial for him to deal with in
print, it was passed on to one Gregory Douglas, another researcher who was digging into the post-war
history of Heinrich Müller. In 1988, a copy of this file was sent to Gitta Sereny, an American of Hungarian
origin who had written a book on Stangl, one of Globocnik’s camp commanders. It first appeared in 1974
and was entitled Into That Darkness. This work purports to be based on an interview with Franz Stangl, an
SS officer who ran a camp in occupied Poland during the war where many prisoners were later stated to
have been gassed. The book contains a lengthy section quoting Stangl, who according to Sereny’s version,
fully admits his part in the purported killings and asks for forgiveness from God and his victims. The
balance of the work consists of various supplementary testimonies from former associates and family
members, all attesting to the evil nature of Stangl’s activities and all clearly acknowledging his willing
cooperation in a state-sponsored program of genocide.
Sereny, it should be noted, has made a comfortable living writing books and articles dealing with
holocaust killings. But this particular book shows with great clarity the pitfalls that occur when a journalist,
as opposed to a legitimate academic historian, produces a work which is not only entirely anecdotal in
content, but ideological in thrust. There is no documentation, whatsoever, in this work which relies almost
entirely on the author’s purported interviews with various people. Stangl died on the day following
Sereny’s visit to him in prison where he was appealing his life sentence.
Herein lies the key to the question-ability of the entire book. Stangl had been sentenced to a life
term in prison as the result of his easily-foreseen conviction as a camp commander. He, through his
attorneys, was appealing this sentence. It is highly doubtful if either Stangl or his attorneys would permit
such a damaging interview to take place and to permit Sereny, whose extremist views were well known,
free and unfettered access to the prisoner. There would appear to be no question that Sereny and her
photographer husband, Don Honeyman, did indeed visit the prison and did see Stangl. Sereny’s husband
took several photographs of him, photographs which are extensively reproduced in the book. The
published pictures, however, do not support statements alleged to have been made by the former Austrian
SS officer, but merely prove that he permitted himself to be photographed by his visitors. By making such
incriminating statements as Sereny placed, post mortem, in his mouth, Stangl would have irrevocably
destroyed any chance he might have had in his pending appeal before the German courts.
It is beyond reasonable belief that such statements were made under the circumstances indicated.
A dead Stangl, however, could comfortably be alleged to have made any statement that the author chose to
put into his mouth, and without the possible embarrassment to her or her publisher of an instant denial or
possible legal proceedings.
A careful reading of the book not only disclosed the author’s prejudice towards Stangl and the
system he served, but also is entirely devoid of any facts to support her thesis. She notes that a number of
witnesses died before the book was published, of course including her main source, Stangl. Much of the
anecdotal material Sereny has put together to support her case is of such a nature as to preclude its ever
being introduced in a court of law. Several examples are set forth as illustration.
In one, Sereny claims that Stangl’s wife wrote her a letter following an interview Sereny had with
the wife in Brazil. In this letter, which is not reproduced, Frau Stangl allegedly states that in 1945 she was
interviewed by two members of the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence agency, and that they knew of her
husband’s whereabouts in an American jail. “I examined their papers,” she is quoted as writing, “I have no
doubt whatever that they were genuine.” The flaw in this scenario is obvious. It is simply not believable
that the wife of an obscure SS officer would have the slightest idea what “genuine” U.S. CIC identification
papers looked like. But Sereny states that the woman would have no reason to invent the incident. Perhaps
the invention did not originate with Stangl’s wife, but with the author herself.
At another point, Sereny introduced “Franciszek Zabecki” who she alleges was a Polish railroad
worker, stationed in the vicinity of the Concentration Camp at Treblinka in German-occupied Poland.
Sereny has this man counting all the trains carrying prisoners to the camp, standing outside in all kinds of
weather and at all hours for a period of two full years. From his unrecorded and highly questionable
comments, “Zabecki” states categorically that 1.2 million persons were killed in Treblinka during that time.
It is anecdotal and imaginative material, at charitable best, that suffuses and supports the entire
untenable structure of this work. Unfortunately, a large proportion of what purports to be important
historical studies are based either on entirely faked documents or on the wishful thinking of mendacious
and ideological journalists. Generations must pass before the fictive is eventually weeded out from the
factual, and in the meantime an appellation which has been applied to the Sereny book, Dialogs with the
Dead, could well be applied to other mendacious creative writing essays herein studied.
Sereny found the contents of sufficient concern to bring them to the attention of a major British
newspaper who duly commissioned her to write an article on the papers. Before progressing further with
this subject, seven important pages are transcribed so that their impact can be better understood.
These papers are US Army Counter Intelligence (CIC) reports. They are dated November 30,1948
and were prepared in the CIC Region VIII headquarters located in Berlin. The author of the initial report
was one Severin F. Wallach, a CIC Special Agent and a Viennese-born Jew who specialized in
interrogations of German sources. Note: A facsimile of these papers will be found in the Appendix.)
The cover sheet of the report is marked WD 341/1 Jun 47 and is a standard War Department
report form. It is headed “Agent Report” and was originally classified as “Secret”, a classification
subsequently removed. Portions of this report are heavily censored and a full copy can be found in the
Appendix.
The subject is: “Former SS Generals MUELLER and GLOBOCNIK/ RE: Soviet Investigations/
RE: Project UEBERSEE/3. The file number is ‘VIII-12203’.
1. Recent investigations by special teams of Soviet agents in the Western Zones seeking definitive
information about the possible whereabouts of former SS Generals Heinrich MUELLER and Odilo
GLOBOCNIK have apparently uncovered sufficient information to justify increased activity.
2.Allegedly the Soviets have uncovered leads which cause them to suspect that the two above
named subjects were not killed at the end of the war. This is part of their ongoing probings in re(ference)
the possible possession of the West of high level Nazi leaders wanted by the Soviets either for trial or
possible intelligence use by their agencies.
3. Up to this point in time, Soviet efforts have been directed towards discovering the whereabouts
of HITLER, BORMANN and former SS General FEGELEIN. The Soviet view that these leaders fled from
Berlin in April/May of 1945 and are being harbored in the West has been officially and strongly denied by
careful coordination of all Western agencies concerned.
4. As former chief of the GESTAPO, MUELLER is an especially attractive target for the Soviets
but GLOBOCNIK, because of his connections with the concentration camp system in Poland is considered
to be a more valuable propaganda target.
5. MUELLER’s value to Western intelligence is beyond doubt but continued protection of
GLOBOCNIK might prove to be an extreme embarrassment. British intelligence, because of their
cooperation in the transfer of GLOBOCNIK, has become increasingly insistent that GLOBOCNIK either
be terminated at once or relocated in such a manner as to totally remove him from Soviet investigators
areas of search. (Here is a handwritten comment: ‘approved’ and the initials ‘JST’)
6. GLOBOCNIK’s value as an expert on partisan warfare has proven to be less than useful. The
current projects he is involved in do not appear to be supplying the desired information or is the Historical
Section (of the US Army) pleased with the quality of his information.
7. Copies of British requests are attached herewith as are joint in-depth evaluations of the
probability of Soviet discovery of UEBERSEE 2 and 3. It should be noted that Soviet probes in Spain are
of necessity, extremely clandestine in nature, due to the hostility of the Spanish Government but it has been observed that the Soviets have been concentrating their activities in the BARCELONA (underlined with
the notation “ck” for “check”) area in recent months.
8. Cash assets (underlined) belonging to GLOBOCNIK, now being held in trust, could easily be
transferred should the decision be made to relocate him in the Western Hemisphere. A full accounting of
these funds is also attached herewith. (There is a notation “OK” and the initials “JST”).1
9. A complete reevaluation of UEBERSEE might well be indicated.”
(Paragraph 10 has been totally censored.)
11. For a more detailed exposition of the UBERSEE I situation and its involvement with HITLER
and other top Nazi leaders, see the previously mentioned report of former Oberstabzahlmeister (a German
military administration rank equivalent to Captain) FRANZBACH (underlined) of KO Spanien, Gr. III.
(encircled).2
This should make the current apprehensions fully clear. The Spanish port…(from this point
the balance of paragraph 11 has been censored).
12. If UEBERSEE II and III are to be at least partially continued, funding is certainly indicated.
Special funds now…(censored )… and under the control of Untersturmfuehrer Gross of RSHA:, Amt
VI/D4 3
can…(censored )… and also from the former Max Heillger Konto of the Reichsbank…” This was a
secret SS bank account later taken over by the US for intelligence funding. The balance of Paragraph 12 is
censored.
13. The utilization of RM and British Pound notes from these sources is counter indicated for the
above reasons and the use of US dollars is strictly prohibited because the…(censored) …gold and platinum
should be refined first. (“approved” with an illegible initial).
14. Original appraisals of former SS personnel with unsavory backgrounds such as GLOBOCNIK
and WIRTH should certainly be reconsidered, whereas the obvious value of MUELLER and SKORZENY
are self-evident and are clearly in line with the policy recently set…
(the balance of paragraph 14 and all of
paragraphs 15 and 16 are censored).
17. Anticipated objections by the HALDER group over the use of
MUELLER…”Censored….”HPA Chef can be circumvented by establishing a separate sub-unit within
the…( censored)…so that it will be possible to officially refute…”
(the balance of paragraph 17 and all of
paragraph 18 are censored).4
19. A full report by…(censored)…on the results of his review of Soviet agents under his
command see…( censored)…will be the determining factor in…( censored).
AGENT’S NOTES: A careful review of Annex “A” will present a much clearer view of the ongoing
situation as regards Operation…( censored)…The concerns of the P…( censored. Although a phrase is partially lined out, it appears the censored part reads “President and the Chief of Staff”)…can be directly
addressed in the final paragraph of Annex “A”.”
Severin F. Wallach (signature)
Special Agent CIC
APPROVED:
Andrew L. Venters (signature)
ANDREW L.VENTERS
Special Agent CIC
Operations Officer
The attached Annex, or supplement, was originally classified ‘Secret’ and declassified at a later
point in time.
ANNEX “A”- The Development and Usage of Former Senior SS Officers
Subject: Former SS Generals GLOBOCNIK and MUELLER
1.With the evident intentions of the Soviet powers to force a military solution upon the Western
Powers in the immediate future, it has become evident that the Germans will be called upon to assist in the
defense of their country as well as the other countries of Europe.
2. The Western Powers are sadly lacking in meaningful intelligence concerning the strengths and
weaknesses of the Soviets and that only the body of military technicians with recent and valuable
experience are the Germans.
3. The decision to rebuild the German Armed Forces under the aegis of the Western Powers has
already been taken and is now in train. Study and Historical groups composed of former German military
personnel with direct strategic and tactical experience in dealing with the Soviet military are rapidly
achieving the goals set for them.
4. Parallel with the development of military structures is the construction of intelligence gathering
agencies, again composed of experienced German military personnel. These former Wehrmacht members
have indicated considerable willingness to cooperate with the Western Powers.
5. Following the 20th of July attempt on HITLER’s life, the SS took over the functions of the
Abwehr. Both the Gestapo under General MUELLER and the SD under General Kaltenbrunner finally
controlled nearly all the incoming flow of intelligence. German Army intelligence was under the control of
the Chief of the General Staff and directed by General GEHLEN of Foreign Armies East.
6. The great majority of former Wehrmacht personnel of field grade and higher are strongly anti-Nazi,
were often involved in anti-HITLER plots and lived in fear of HIMMLER and his SS. Therefore,
ongoing cooperation between the former Wehrmacht members and former SS members would be difficult
in the extreme.
7. Also considered is the loyalty of the SS to HITLER. The army was not loyal to HITLER but the
SS was his private army and swore an oath of loyalty to him alone. Most surviving SS members are not
aware of HITLER’s departure from Berlin and assume he died in the defense of the city. Their immediate
loyalty is certainly not to the Western Powers. As SS men are accustomed to a totalitarian state, many have
sought out cooperation with the Soviets, the closest to their former system. Individual SS men can certainly
be used but must be carefully watched. In the event of a Soviet invasion of Europe, their assistance might
well swing over to the Soviets.
8. As the reemergence of HITLER on the international scene, even in the event of a renewal of
hostilities with the Soviets, is completely unthinkable, the use of his elite troops in combat or intelligence
gathering is not forseen at present.
9. The transfer of vast sums of money abroad by BORMANN during the last years of the war has
proven to be of considerable use to the Western Powers. Former Nazis have agreed to relinquish a portion
of their funds to aid the United States in its attempts to defend Europe against Soviet military adventures.
Furthermore, a considerable body of extremely valuable information has been made available to US
intelligence agencies. Former SS General MUELLER has proven to be of genuine worth and his
intelligence files of tremendous value.
10. MUELLER himself is certainly not a Nazi, having joined the Party very late. As a former
member of the Bavarian State Police whose duty it was to neutralize the early Nazi movement, he feels that
his survival and promotion was “a miracle” and he fully expected to be arrested in 1933. MUELLER is a
professional police officer who specializes in internal political affairs and is well known as being strongly
anti-Communist. His cooperation has proved to be of the greatest value. As soon as MUELLER’s transfer
to the United States has been approved, he will be flown out of Berlin along with his entire collection of
files. These files have been stored under conditions of extraordinary security at Wolzogenstrasse 15,
Region VII Headquarters.
11. While former SS General Odlio GLOBOCNIK does not have the expertise that MUELLER
does and is extremely unpleasant to deal with, nevertheless, he has abilities which might well fit in with
joint British-US Middle East concerns. In the event of military action on the part of the Soviets, it is
anticipated that attacks will be made on the oil producing centers of the Middle East. The recent emergence
of a highly radical Zionist State in Palestine has caused considerable apprehension in the West. It is felt
that many of the Zionist leaders are former Russian citizens and have been and are engaging in acts of
terrorism. The assassination of such men as Lord Moyne in Cairo and others as well as a particularly
vicious campaign of deadly terrorism directed against the British in Palestine has led to the belief that the
Soviets might well establish dangerous links which would certainly be exploited in the event of their
moving into the Middle East. Also, vital oil-producing Arab states are expressing extreme concern over the
establishment of a Zionist state.
12. In the event it should prove necessary for the Western Powers to take military action against
the Zionists, the use of former SS men like GLOBOCNIK has been repeatedly put forward by the British.
As it would be impossible to maintain such persons in a protective setting in the United States, it has been
suggested that they be set up in Syria in the event they are needed as specialists in detaining and coping
with dissident elements.
13. GLOBOCNIK has repeatedly expressed considerable determination in the matter of the
recovery of monies concealed in certain areas of Austria. Some of these assets have been recovered by
British Intelligence units and a portion thereof was turned over to us at the time GLOBOCNIK passed into
American custody. 1
14. GLOBOCNIK has been advised that these funds, which he claims were part of some “special
German government project” but which appear in truth to be loot from his death camps, are being held in a
form of trust for him until some future time.
15. It would appear that these missing items consist of cash, precious metals and jewels and that
British units have not been successful in making anywhere near a full recovery.
16. GLOBOCNIK indicates that he will give us exact locations of these caches which he alleges
have a very large value, providing that he personally be given 50% of all recovered funds and that
specified members of his family receive an additional 25% of the total.
17. It has been pointed out to GLOBOCNIK that he has been most fortunate in his treatment in
view of his past record and that continued importuning on his part could well result in probably terminal
unpleasantness for himself. The British had similar problems and a report is appended.
18. It should be noted that these caches apparently contain no documents of importance other than
Reichsbank receipts for deposits of specie.
19. GLOBOCNIK also strongly objects to being earmarked for the Syrian project. He claims that
he “does not hate Jews” and only wants to enjoy a peaceful retirement.
20. It is suggested that GLOBOCNIK be supplied with legitimate papers from Yugoslav sources.
Since the TITO break with Moscow earlier this year, the Yugoslavs have made numerous approaches to
the Western Powers in the matter of possible military assistance in the event of a Soviet invasion. One of
the benefits of this attitude is the cooperation of Yugoslav intelligence units with Western units. As
GLOBOCNIK originated in Trieste, it is felt that he can be given a legal Yugoslav identity and sent to
Canada under the care of …( censored )…. Later, transfer to the Miami area can be done with a view to
sending him to Syria via our transfer point…( censored.)
Andrew L. Venters (signature)
Special Agent CIC
Operations Officer
When she read over these documents, Gitta Sereny was horrified at the implications contained in
them. As a journalist specializing in Nazi-hunting and a person with a long history of cooperation with
British intelligence organs, she viewed the use by both England and America of Müller and Globocnik as
an outrage. Because of the gravity of the material, it was imperative that she use extreme care in
establishing the authenticity of the papers. She quickly contacted Robert Wolfe, at that time of the US
National Archives, Captured German Records Section, and a recognized expert on German military papers.
These papers were American and post-war but Wolfe indicated he would do his best to assist Sereny. He
personally was shocked by the contents of the papers which he also found outrageous but because of the
recent Klaus Barbie scandal, the documents might well be genuine.
Wolfe took the papers to the US Army Intelligence and Security Command at Ft. George Meade,
Maryland which contains the archives of US Military Intelligence and where originals of these papers would be found. When he showed the papers to Colonel Walsh, the director, Walsh felt that aside from a
missing declassification stamp, not unusual to find missing, the documents looked authentic. With the
director’s assurances that he would have the archives searched for anything relating to the subject, Wolfe
conducted his own investigation in his National Archives files. There he discovered an original file with
the signature of Severin Wallach and this signature matched the one on the Sereny file. It also established
that Wallach was attached to the Berlin CIC at the time in question.
After a considerable silence from Ft. Meade, Wolfe finally wrote a formal request to Colonel
Walsh for all material in their files on Heinrich Müller and Odilo Globocnik. Several days later, Wolfe
received word that the Meade repository had no files on either Globocnik or Müller. Since Müller was a
major player in the intelligence game, the lack of any information was unbelievable to Wolfe.
Sereny found this so upsetting that she came to Washington in person where she decided to
contact the O.S.I for their assistance. This agency, the Office of Special Investigations, is a small branch of
the Justice Department established to track down possible ex-Nazis who had slipped into the United States
by making false statements to the Immigration service. They had considerable investigative authority and
Sereny hoped that they could search the files at Meade for confirmation. In a meeting held with top level
O.S.I officials, it was mutually agreed that the documents in question contained potentially serious problems
for both Britain and the United States and that any investigation had to be carried out thoroughly and
promptly.
It came as no surprise that the special team of O.S.I investigators were able to locate a file on Muller and also on Globocnik in the Meade records. They did not give copies of these documents to either
Wolfe or Sereny but advised them that the file on Globocnik was very small indeed, while the one on Muller was only 40-plus pages and indicated that he was suspected of working for the Russians.
In point of fact, the file on Heinrich Muller runs to over 130 pages as the author discovered when
he received a copy in September of 1993. Fifty eight pages of the file, which is numbered XE 235539 WJ.,
were withheld because the staff at Meade decided that they were currently and properly classified as Secret
and Confidential and the release of these pages could “reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to
the national security.” Some of the material withheld appears to be concerned with an extensive
correspondence between the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office concerning their apprehensions that the
Americans might know where Muller was. The German requests for information, which are withheld in
their entirety from the Meade file, and the American answers, which do exist but which are heavily
censored, tally exactly.
The only mention in the entire file of a possible Russian employment is a brief report of March,
1951 wherein a German informer named Dr. Wilhelm H. Schmitz claimed that he believed that Muller might be working for Czech intelligence. There is no mention made of Russia but perhaps the O.S.I was
confused.
The O.S.I turned copies of the Sereny file over to the FBI for detailed forensic investigation. The
FBI checked the typewritten material and stated that the typewriters and the typefaces were correct to the
period. They also ran the text of the papers through a computer system to check the style of writing with
known original reports of both Wallach and Venters. The reports indicated that the writing styles were
identical.
Various sections of the Justice Department checked with former C.I.C agents who knew both men
and who verified the styles of writing used by both men. Sereny later located a former C.I.C officer who
knew both men very well and was told “It is extraordinary….The format is right, the methodology is
correct, and given the personalities of the two people who allegedly wrote this, even the tone and the
breadth of the concept fits.”
Instead of resolving the issue, these disclosures only created more problems. No one wished to
comment further upon the C.I.C file in general or on General Heinrich Muller in particular. His Meade file is
filled with references to his escape, references that are reinforced by reviewing the post-war German
attempts to locate him. The final word from official Washington came from Robert Wolfe who had had the
opportunity of witnessing the frenzied activities of terrified bureaucrats to hide historical cat boxes.
When formally queried about his own opinions on the authenticity of the Sereny file he stated in a signed
letter of August 19, 1993 on U.S. National Archives stationary... “based on all the internal evidence, the
documents would appear to be authentic.”
As to what actually exists in the Meade records, no one outside of that institution knows. The fact
that they believe certain papers relating to Müller bear directly on current national security might tend to
indicate that the Sereny file represents the tip of a very dangerous iceberg. In attempting to research the
postwar career of Heinrich Müller, the author wrote to numerous official agencies both in the United States and Europe. The responses varied from prompt and helpful to delayed and nonsensical. One US agency
stated that it would be necessary for Heinrich Muller to sign a notarized statement giving permission for
material on him to be released. Other agencies declined to answer at all.
Because Muller's 1948 interview was, according to the cover pages, conducted by the CIA, a
request for information under the Freedom of Information Act (F.O.I.A) was made to the CIA in September
1993. A very prompt answer by the CIA was sent on September 27 stating that they had had another
request for information on Muller's records and were processing it.
On January 11, 1995, the CIA F.O.I.A office responded by stating that they had finally reviewed the
files; that these files were to be denied in their entirety on the basis of specific exemptions. The first
exemption was that the material was ‘properly classified pursuant to an Executive order in the interest of
national defense or foreign policy. The second exemption consisted of the ‘Director’s statutory obligations
to protect from disclosure intelligence sources and methods, as well as the organization, functions, names,
official titles, salaries or numbers of personnel employed by the Agency, in accord with the National
Security Act of 1947 and the CIA Act of 1949, respectively.’ (Emphasis added - facsimile of document in
the Appendix)
The forbidden files run to a total of slightly over fifty pages and exist, not only in the CIA
archives but also are part of the Ft. Meade files. One report is under date of December 18, 1959 and the
other file, consisting of various sections, is undated. Requests for information on Muller were made only
under his real name and not the two known cover names Muller used after the war. F.O.I.A requests in that
area might generate even more interesting paperwork.
One man who might have been able to address this issue would be Dr. David Marwell who, as an
investigator for the O.S.I, reviewed the Muller files at Ft. Meade. As the CIA reports are currently a part of
this file, Dr. Marwell might possibly be able to shed some light on their contents. As Director of the Berlin
Document Center, Dr. Marwell proved to be most helpful in disproving the existence of two of Trevor Roper’s
key witnesses and no doubt he might wish to address the Muller files. Dr. Marwell later was the
head of the Presidential Commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy.
The person who obtained the Venters papers was Gregory Douglas, a California-based amateur
historian who had far more interest in the German armored forces of the second world war than the upper
levels of German political and military intelligence.
When the American authorities discovered his existence, they obviously became highly agitated
lest, in his ignorance of the explosive nature of his findings, he accidentally committed indiscretions that
could have grave repercussions.
Because government agencies, most especially the American agencies, are incapable of either
reason or subtlety, Douglas was the target of veiled threats and disruptive behavior aimed at discouraging
him from following up his new interest.
Douglas proved to be far more stubborn than his antagonists had reckoned upon and he eventually
obtained enough material to proceed with a series of books on one Heinrich Müller, once the head of
Hitler’s Gestapo.
In 1995, Douglas published his first book on the subject and was contacted by Robert T. Crowley.
Crowley, once deputy head of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, had known Muller and his CIA
handler, James Critchfield. Angry with his former employers because of their rough treatment of his longtime
friend James Angleton, once head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence division, Crowley gave Douglas
reams of documents from his files concerning not only Muller but many other Nazis employed by the
United States and even more files on the CIA men who dealt with them.
Since the publication of the first Gregory Douglas book on Heinrich Müller in 1995, the posture
of the CIA has been to maintain a stony public silence. To private or official inquiries about the allegations
that their agency employed not only the head of the Gestapo but many other top Third Reich intelligence
officials, the CIA simply refused to discuss the matter stating, in private, that Gregory Douglas was
probably mad and should not be encouraged by any means whatsoever.
In September of 1996, Colonel James Critchfield, the retired head of the CIA-controlled Gehlen
organization (that later became the official German Bundesnachrichtendienst or B.N.D) wrote to Douglas,
under the misapprehension that he had been a member of the CIA, and discussed his, and the CIA’s
employment of Muller and others. When Critchfield discovered that Gregory Douglas was not a former
CIA agent, (the misrepresentation was deliberate but generated by others to embarrass Critchfield) he
became vitriolic, demanding the return of his correspondence immediately and forbidding, under threat of
vague Federal prosecution for violations of what he termed “national security,” any mention of Critchfield,
the Gehlen Organization and their connection with Heinrich Müller.
Critchfield and his former employers, however, were fighting a losing battle as more and more
bits of information concerning Gestapo Muller's postwar employment began to leak out.
In June of 1998, the CIA became alarmed at the thought that Douglas was in possession of
documents that could prove that not only the dreaded the Gestapo Chief but other top Nazis had been in
their employ. There also existed photographs of Muller in the White House at an official function and
photographed by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, American driver’s license information, military membership
papers, including photo identification, family post war records and other pieces of distinctly unwelcome
paperwork.
Since threats seemed to have no effect, the next round bordered on the slapstick and ended up
costing the U.S. government several hundred thousand dollars but without any results whatsoever..
The first approach was made to Douglas by a Ted Landreth of Los Angeles. He put himself
forward as a former news director at CBS who owned a small television production company and was
deeply interested in doing a story on Muller's U.S. government employment. In actuality, Landreth had
once been a CBS News director but now was reduced to running a Los Angeles soup kitchen for street
people, retired prostitutes and hungry winos. Projected very large sums of money as payment were lightly
thrown about and eventually, Landreth met with Gregory Douglas upon several occasions.
In spite of the fact that Heinrich Muller was a man whose files, in Douglas’s possession, showed
him to be a major player in the German intelligence community, all Landreth was interested in was
learning as much as he could about the Gestapo chief’s connections with the CIA.
Landreth advised Douglas that he and an unnamed “associate” had gone to Mainz, Germany, and
opened negotiations with Z.D.F (Zweiten Deutschen Fernsehen), the State-owned television network.
Landreth claimed he had met with top officials of Z.D.F and was prepared to work with them in producing
what he called a “blockbuster” television expose on the subject.
Jim Willworth, a Los Angeles-based reporter from TIME magazine and a friend of Landreth,
informed Douglas that he would appear on the cover of that magazine and be “really world-famous!”
As if that stunning accolade were not enough, the second approach was made by a representative
of Z.D.F, a certain Herr Holger Hillesheim, who was to be flown to the United States for a personal meeting
with Douglas both in Washington and later in a suburb of Chicago where Gregory Douglas resides.
Before the arrival of the German Z.D.F representative, Landreth hastily prepared a contract, signed
it and sent it by fax to Gregory Douglas for his immediate signature. It was a fairly brief document filled
with a number of misused legal terminology scattered about but in his haste to obtain a signature, Landreth
had made a number of typographical errors.
Douglas informed Landreth that certain alterations would have to be made, mostly, Landreth was
assured, of a purely cosmetic nature.
Misspellings and grammatical errors were duly corrected and a few words altered.
The corrected copy was quickly faxed back to Landreth who immediately made all the changes
requested and returned the document, signed by himself, to Gregory Douglas.
The contract stated that once the contract was signed, payment would be made and the contract
would then be operative.
The funds, in a certified check, arrived and were deposited in Gregory Douglas’s bank.
Immediately after this, a frantic Landreth made numerous calls to determine if the money had arrived and,
discovering that it had, then announced in a somewhat different tone of voice that he would be sending a
courier to pick up all of the CIA postwar material.
Up to this point in time, the Los Angeles television producer cum soup kitchen executive had
always been polite to the point of obsequiousness but now that he possessed a signed contract, which, he
assumed, gave him control over the controversial and dangerous post-war CIA documents, he became far
more businesslike and even demanding.
When the subject of a courier being sent to obtain the CIA papers was broached, it was suggested,
gently, to Mr. Landreth that perhaps he might be better served if he read over the contract signed by
Douglas. His attention was specifically drawn to the clause discussing the documents in question.
Landreth initially read from his first copy of the contract but when it was pointed out to him that
the operative document that Douglas had signed was the one to read, it took him some time to locate it.
Finally, he read the paragraph which stated that immediately upon the execution of the contract,
the party of the second part, Douglas, “shall give to the party of the first part (Landreth) all of the below listed
documents.” Thereupon followed a long list of CIA post-war documents pertaining specifically to
Muller's employment by that agency. He apparently was still reading from the initial copy and when his
attention was specifically drawn to the final version of the contract, he became highly enraged. The
improved version read…”may give to the party of the first part” and it had to be pointed out to the Harvard
graduate that the word “may” is permissive.
He did not get the documents in question.
What Gregory Douglas neglected to inform him was that several months before, a friendly former
C.I.C operative living in New York had passed along the information that the Landreth family were all CIA.
His father, Edward, lived on the very wealthy upper east side of New York City and before he retired, had
run the Sterling Chemical Company in Havana, Cuba. This company was a CIA front, and Landreth, Sr.
was the CIA station chief in Havana. Also, a Landreth niece was still employed by the agency and
Landreth himself had even more and stronger connections with Langley.
Forewarned is always forearmed and Douglas was guided accordingly.
In spite of these revelations, Landreth’s money was gratefully received, however, regardless from
where it might have originated, probably from the privy purse of the CIA because Landreth was not a
wealthy man and, in fact, soup kitchens in Los Angeles are not considered profitable ventures.
Mr. Landreth had absolutely no interest in any of the wartime Muller papers but shortly after
regretting his grammatical alterations, he had a long conversation and, it later emerged, a long personal
visit, with various government officials in Germany. As a direct result of this visit, Douglas was then
approached by the German State Television network, the Z.D.F who expressed an eager hope that they
could work with Gregory Douglas in preparing a script based on the papers of one Heinrich Muller. This
was supposedly to be part of a series called “Hitler’s Helpers” that was being produced by the network.
The individual in charge of the Muller project was one Holger Hillesheim and he flew, along with
his wife, to meet with Gregory Douglas at his home outside of Chicago in July of 1998.
Hillesheim was reasonably conversant in English but seemed to have absolutely no knowledge of
the persona or activities of Heinrich Müller. Acting, as he said, on behalf of the Direction of Z.D.F, owned
entirely by the German government, he was prepared to offer the sum of $30,000 in four equal payments of
$7,500 each in return for any important documents prepared by Muller during his tenure as Chief of the
Gestapo.
This offer was made in the presence of a number of other persons but when Hillesheim was able
to speak to Gregory Douglas in private, he added, confidentially, that actually what Z.D.F wanted were the
CIA papers which, he explained, would be the central point of their Müller documentary.
Would these be available? He understood that there had been an earlier problem with Mr.
Landreth but it was now agreed that Z.D.F would take over where Landreth had left off.
Douglas advised Hillesheim that any and all documents would be available when a proper
contract was prepared but until such an event occurred, he would be unable to permit Hillesheim to photo
copy the CIA papers.
Z.D.F required a listing of Muller documents available for use and Douglas willingly obliged with
a list of over 17,000 pages of wartime Gestapo documents available. There was no problem obtaining this
listing because an extensive catalog existed of such documents, located in the U.S. National Archives and
supplied willingly by Robert Wolfe of that institution and this catalog was sitting on Douglas’s writing
desk under a Lenbach portrait of Bismarck while Hillesheim was negotiating.
A list of twenty-five subjects was subsequently prepared from this index for the senior
management of Z.D.F and duly faxed to them. Although many of the subjects had no bearing on Muller's personal career, they were immediately accepted by the television entity, a contract was drawn up and
signed by a Herr Hans-Joachim Hübner. In an accompanying letter, Herr Hübner stated “By the way,
please discuss all matters of the material direct with Holger.”
It was interesting to note that the contract contained no mention of any postwar CIA
documentation.
The Germans must have been satisfied because on August 11, 1998, the sum of $11,180.18 was
forwarded to Gregory Douglas’s account in Paris. In return, Herr Hillesheim was sent 991 pages of the
complete records of one Walter Schellenberg, 287 pages of classified RSHA telegrams sent by Himmler, Muller, Schellenberg and Wolff from August 1941 through January 1943 and a 185 page report on the
1939 bomb attack on Hitler. All of these were on microfilm at the National Archives but since the Germans
demanded paper copies, these had to be made from the microfilms.
In this shipment of interesting documentation there were no CIA documents included, which
would explain the fax from Hillesheim of September 21, 1998. Among other things, Hillesheim said:
“Please don’t let us forget about the other things we talked when we met last time in Freeport. You
promised to show me the originals of the M-material. Just me in person; no accompanying people, no
photographs or anything else. We talked about the after-war photographs from you, from Mr. Bender, from
the other guy. (These were pictures of Muller in America after 1948: Muller in a U.S. Army Colonel’s
uniform; Muller at a White House function and an old driver’s license with a postwar picture of the former
Gestapo chief.) We talked about the American name…why don’t you tell it to Bob Wolfe?’ (This was the
new name the CIA had given Muller when he was sent to the United States. Wolfe later admitted to
working for the CIA in what proved to be a vain attempt to wrest incriminating papers away from
Douglas.)
No such material was sent to Hillesheim because it was not specified in the contract.
Douglas then called Z.D.F offices in Mainz, Germany about future shipments, and payments, but
was informed that only Hillesheim could address this and further, that he was not actually an employee of
Z.D.F but a contract worker.
Since the postwar Müller CIA papers were not forthcoming, the payments abruptly stopped.
On December 15, 1998, Gregory Douglas sent the following fax to Hillesheim:
To: Holger Hillesheim
ZDF Historical Division
From:
Gregory Douglas
Fax No.: 608 325-2316
Date: 15. XII 1998
Dear Holger:
I am forwarding to you via fax another selection of the documents you have contracted for.
With reference to my fax of 9. November last, the markings on these are not legible and
should, therefore, prove not to present ZDF any trouble.
I have spoken with Mr. Wolfe about these and he has advised me that he no longer has any
interest in this project, i.e., the ZDF documentary on Heinrich Müller.
I have had no answer to my last three faxes to you concerning these papers so I would
greatly appreciate hearing from you as soon as possible about the following specific points:
1. ZDF has indicated that it wishes only copies of the microfilms and does not
wish
printed copies. Please confirm this as soon as possible by fax.
2. I have received from you the Federal Express Shipping Account number for
ZDF. Am I still to use this number or does your company wish another form of
transmittal. Please confirm this as soon as possible by fax.
3. There is a balance of $22,500 coming to me upon your receipt of these
microfilms.
I have already given you some microfilmed material and the current fax sending is a
sample of some of the contracted documents.
Will the payments be made in increments as we agreed and if so, please list each
shipment of documents you require from the contract and in the order in which your firm wishes
to receive it.
Please note that although I have moved, my bank account has remained the same and I
assume that payment will be made by direct wire as was the last payment.
I would like to conclude this venture as soon as conveniently possible so I would
request that you respond to my specific questions as set forth above in the text of this message.
I will be traveling after the first of the year and would greatly like to have you expedite
this at your earliest possible convenience.
Sincerely,”
There was no answer to this fax and a subsequent telephone call to Hillesheim indicated that his
phone had been disconnected. Another call to Z.D.F in Mainz disclosed that Hillesheim was no longer in the
employ of Z.D.F and further, Z.D.F was no longer interested in either Gregory Douglas, any existing contract
or documents he might have.
Apparently, Hillesheim was only a temporary employee of Z.D.F and when the CIA papers were
not forthcoming, because they were not included in the contract, the entire operation was disconnected and
shut down.
This, however, did not take ZDF off the hook on the contract and on November 1, 1999, a civil
suit [1:99CVO2901] against ZDF and the Federal Republic of Germany was filed in U.S. District Court for
the District of Columbia by Gregory Douglas’ attorney.
ZDF and its controlling agency, the German government, were charged with fraud and breach of
contract.
Up to this point in time, someone had paid out over $15,000 to Douglas in order to obtain the CIA
papers and had received nothing concerning the CIA’s postwar employment of Müller, for their generosity
with the U.S. taxpayer’s money.
Upon being served with papers, ZDF and its law firms fought back in the courts. Their basic
contention was that as ZDF was an organ of the German government, it had sovereign immunity and could
not be sued. This matter was thrashed out in the courts with the result that a court ruling was obtained
stating that both ZDF and the German government were to be held liable for their actions and the case was
permitted to proceed in the Federal court system.
Once this determination had been made, ZDF at once opened settlement negotiations with the
plaintiff’s attorney. One stipulation was that the German government be dropped as a party defendant and
the wrangling went on for a number of tedious years. Finally, an agreement was hammered out between the
parties in which ZDF would pay the balance of the contract and all of the plaintiff’s legal fees in return for
the balance of the documents listed in the contract.
The settlement fees were placed in escrow and Douglas then made 17,000 paper copies of all the
documents requested, from the National Archive microfilms.
At one point in the negotiations, the question of authenticity arose and Douglas suggested that
since most of the captured German records existed in copies in the American National Archives, it was to
be agreed by both parties that if a document’s authenticity was questioned, its current existence in the
National Archives would constitute proof of authenticity.
Since all of the documents in question existed on microfilm in the Archive findings, this was an
entirely safe offer to make and apparently the defendants agreed with it because it was accepted and
became a part of the settlement agreement.
The Germans received over 30 reams of printed document copies, which satisfied the settlement
agreement.
These were certainly valuable historical documents and no one knows exactly what their final cost
was but it would appear to be well in excess of a hundred thousand dollars, if various legal fees,
transportation costs for several German experts, courier fees and other expenses were taken into account.
The microfilms involved in this project cost less than four hundred dollars to purchase as
microfilm, the printing of the documents cost another two hundred and fifty and the shipping costs to
Washington by UPS no more than a hundred.
At the end of these financial debacles the famous CIA post war employment papers still had not
been neutralized and if the Agency had been behind the simplistic manipulations, they apparently had
learned a very expensive lesson and no additional attempts were made to lure Gregory Douglas into further
business ventures.
Gregory Douglas turned out to be a far more dangerous adversary than the CIA had reckoned
upon, had made fools of a number of them and extracted a good deal of money out of them in return for
nothing. Considering the CIA’s terrible reputation, this behavior on Douglas’ part is probably the most
entertaining part of this entire drama.
It should be fairly evident that if the CIA’s current statements that, according to their long-held
intelligence files, Müller must have died in 1945, are true, someone had spent a very large amount of
taxpayer’s money for nothing.
It is to be hoped that ZDF enjoyed their 17,000 page treasure trove of secret Third Reich
documents as much as Gregory Douglas enjoyed his pleasant new home in Normandy.
There is a saying that sums all of this up very cogently:
Do not teach grandmother to suck eggs.
His name was Heinrich Muller.
Even as a young man, Heini Muller had kept daily journals of his activities, journals that covered his military service as a pilot in the Imperial German air arm and an apprentice policeman in Munich. He continued these journals throughout the war and while employed by the top CIA leadership in Washington, continued his daily notations.
This work is a complete translation of his journals from December of 1948 through September of 1951.
When Heinrich Muller was hired by the CIA's Allan Welch Dulles and James Critchfield, head of the Gehlen Organization in Pullach, Germany and then extensively interviewed by James Speyer Kronthal, the CIA station chief in Bern, Switzerland in 1948, he had misgivings about working for his former enemies but pragmatism and the lure of large amounts of money won him over to what he considered to be merely an extension of his life-work against the agents of the Comintern. What he discovered after living and working in official Washington for four years was that the nation's capital was, in truth, what he once humorously claimed sounded like a cross between a zoo and a lunatic asylum.
His journals, in addition to personal letters, various reports and other personal material, give a very clear, but not particularly flattering, view of the inmates of both the zoo and the asylum. Muller moved, albeit very carefully, in the rarefied atmosphere of senior policy personnel, military leaders, heads of various intelligence agencies and the White House itself. He was a very observant, quick-witted person who took copious notes of what he saw. This was not a departure from his earlier habits because Heinrich Müller had always kept a journal, even when he was a lowly Bavarian police officer, and his comments about personalities and events in the Third Reich are just as pungent and entertaining as the ones he made while in America.
The reason for publishing this phase of his eventful life is that so many agencies in the United States and their supporters do not want to believe that a man of Müller’s position could ever have been employed by their country in general or their agency in specific.
The exhumation had been requested by the West German Ludwigsburg Center that dealt with ex-Nazi's sought for prosecution. This Center had information that Muller was not dead and was, in fact, gainfully employed by a foreign government. One of the first steps in proving this was to ascertain whether the corpse in the grave was that of Heinrich Muller, who had been issued a death certificate from the Death Bureau of Berlin-Center numbered 11 706/45.
A subsequent pathological examination proved that there were the remains of three different men in the grave, none of whom were Heinrich Muller.
The man being sought was the son of a minor official, had completed a primary school education, had taken technical training in aircraft engines and in June of 1917 had joined the German Army. Because of his background, after his preliminary training, Muller was assigned to Flieger Ausbildung Abteilung 287 in April of 1918. In the seven months remaining before the war ended, Muller was promoted to NCO in August of 1918 and won the Iron Crosses First and Second Class. He was also awarded the Bavarian pilot’s badge and after injuring his leg in an aircraft accident, the retired Bavarian pilot’s badge. Muller served on the Western Front throughout the war.
When the war was over, Muller joined the Munich Police in 1919 as a junior assistant. He passed his entrance examination and became a police officer. He was promoted to Police Secretary in 1929 and was in Section VI of the Bavarian State Police, a unit that dealt with Communist activity. In 1934, Müller and a number of his associates were transferred to the Gestapo in Berlin and joined the SS as a Sturmführer on April 20, 1934. In 1935, Müller was head of Department II (Gestapo). In 1936, he was head of the Gestapo division of the headquarters of the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei). In 1937, he was promoted to senior police official (Kriminalrat) and in 1939, to the rank of Reichskriminaldirektor or Director of Police.
His SS promotions were:
SS-Obersturmführer on July 1, 1934,
SS-Sturmhauptführer on January 30, 1935,
SS-Sturmbannführer on April 20, 1936,
SS-Obersturmbannführer on November 9, 1936,
SS-Standartenführer on January 30, 1937,
SS-Oberführer on April 20, 1939,
SS-Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der deutschen Polizei on December 12, 1940 and
SS-Gruppenführer und Generalleutnant der deutschen Polizei on November 9,1941.
The organization that Muller controlled, the Secret State Police, had been instituted by Hermann Goring as Minister President of Prussia in 1933 but was acquired by Heinrich Himmler as part of his empire building. The numerous changes, additions, absorption's and expansions of the Gestapo during the course of its existence would fill a volume, because like Himmler, Muller was also an empire builder.
Although on Muller's orders, most of the Gestapo records were destroyed in 1945, it can be approximated that the entire personnel roster of the Gestapo numbered 25,000 with a much larger but undetermined number, of V agents or Vertrauensleute, voluntary and paid informers. In 1943, when the army Intelligence system, the Abwehr, was broken up due to its poor performance, Müller managed to acquire its counter-intelligence department. Although Hitler had ordered in June 1941 that the army was to be the sole radio interception agency, Müller moved into this field as well and by the end of the war, was running an extensive radio intelligence department that specialized in “playback” or the turning of enemy agents to feed their former employers false information and locate other agents arriving or in place.
The Gestapo was renowned for its excellent filing system which permitted very close observation of the population. The Germans have always required the use of internal passports and required its citizens to register their current addresses and their places of employment so the Gestapo had less difficulty maintaining its control. The Gestapo also maintained telephone interdiction facilities and watched the mails. These methods are not unique to Germany or the Gestapo but were more prevalent and pervasive than in other western countries. Muller's men did not have the modern American technology of using privately owned television sets connected to the universal cable systems as a means of listening to private conversations, mainly because the television set was not in use in Germany at that period. Almost any other conceivable form of observation was in use and after the war, the victors expressed considerable professional interest in the Gestapo’s methods and techniques.
Heinrich Muller married Sophie Dischner in 1924. Her father published a right wing Bavarian newspaper that was opposed to Hitler. A son, Reinhard, was born January 4, 1927, and a daughter, Elizabeth, on September 9, 1936. He eventually became estranged from his wife and had a lengthy relationship with his private secretary, Barbara Hellmuth. Muller and his wife were devout Catholics and even as a high-ranking SS officer, Muller refused to leave the church. He only joined the NSDAP very late when he was compelled to do so. In fact, Muller had been known to the Party as a strong opponent when they were struggling for power in the Munich of the 1920's and early 1930's. Party members were shocked when Muller and the men of his bureau were taken into the SS and put in charge of the Gestapo, and never ceased complaining about what they felt was ideological outrage. Muller owed his continued career and subsequent advancements to his intelligence, drive and ruthlessness. He was a self-effacing man, photographs of whom are rare. His putative superior, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, was extensively interrogated by US authorities after the war when they were seeking Muller. Excerpts from the comments of a man who disliked Muller and was not only disliked in return but also virtually ignored, are interesting. This quote is from the interrogation:
“MULLER'S influence in forming the Stapo staff was manifest not only in its foundation; later all posts in Amt IV were occupied by persons selected by him, including the Police Attachés…MULLER was unhappily married, had two children, one a boy of 17 called up for service just before the end of the war. The second child was much younger. The latter child had pronounced Mongolian features, and it is believed that on this account, MULLER avoided all social intercourse between friends and neighbors. MULLER spent practically all his time in his office on account of his unpleasant conditions at home. Most of his social life was confined to such officials as HUBER, PIFFRADER, GEISLER, MEISINGER and GOTTHALMSEDER. …When I met him for the first time, I did not notice any peculiarities. He had a remarkably small figure, a piercing look in his dark eyes and there was, in his appearance, nothing frank and kind but rather ‘luring’. He was, however, polite (“korrekt”) but perhaps too modest…MULLER had a remarkable memory and knew every person who had ever crossed his path and all events. He was a living encyclopedia for HIMMLER….He always wanted to do everything for himself, and gave his associates no chance for independent development; in fact this bad habit had been criticized even by HIMMLER.”
There exist very few descriptions of Muller engaged in the art of interrogation, something he was very skilled at. Muller was persistent and would take hours over these sessions. With his remarkable memory, he was almost always able to extract the truth. The only surviving account comes from the writings of captured British intelligence agent Captain Best. Kidnapped in Holland after the November, 1939 bomb attempt on Hitler’s life, Best was brought before Muller and questioned.
“Muller was a dapper, exceptionally good-looking little man, dressed in imitation of Adolf Hitler, in a gray uniform jacket, black riding breeches and top boots. He started his ‘snort’ immediately when he entered, and as he walked towards me, increased the pitch and the volume of his voice with great virtuosity. He managed to get right up close to me before his vocal chords tore into shreds. ‘You are in the hands of the Gestapo. Don’t imagine that we shall show you the slightest consideration. The Führer has already shown the world that he is invincible and soon he will come and liberate the people of England from the Jews and Plutocrats such as you. You are in the greatest danger and if you want to live another day must be very careful.’ Then he sat down on a chair in front of me and drew it up as close as possible, apparently with the intention of performing some mesmerizing trick. He had rather funny eyes which he could flicker from side to side with the greatest rapidity and I suppose that this was supposed to strike terror into the heart of the beholder.” Best then encountered Heydrich who shouted to him: “So far you have been treated as an officer and a gentleman, but don’t think that this will go on if you don’t behave better than you have done. You have two hours left in which to confess everything. If you don’t, I shall hand you over to the Gestapo, who are used to dealing with such gangsters and criminals— you won’t enjoy their methods a bit.”
“I turned to Muller, who was standing at my side and asked: ‘Who is this excitable young officer?’ At this Heydrich really went off the deep end and literally foamed at the mouth; at all events, he sprayed me liberally with saliva. Muller quickly pushed me out of the room and into my own. Later on he came in again and told me I must not take the matter too seriously: ‘Soup is never eaten as hot as it is cooked.’”
Best concluded his description of Müller by saying: “In my experience, I always found Müller a very decent little man.”5
Heinrich Muller was five feet seven inches, strongly built, with dark brown hair, cut high on the sides and good features. He had a small, tight mouth and rarely smiled but his face, and in fact his entire persona, was dominated by a pair of hooded brown eyes that fixed themselves on people with great intensity. He walked with a slight limp as a result of a wartime injury. Muller was descended from Germans living in Alsace and he went to some trouble to conceal the family French connections because of Hitler’s strong dislike of the French.
Given the position Muller occupied in the Third Reich and the role he played during its course, the question arises as to why no writer or historian has made any attempt to produce an in depth work on the head of the Gestapo. Aside from several pages in two of Heinz Höhne’s books and some material in Aronson, there is almost nothing in print about Heinrich Muller, and much of that is extremely superficial or inaccurate. Although considerable information does exist in official files in archives, Muller has fallen through the cracks for several reasons.
Primarily, Heinrich Muller was a man who neither sought nor encouraged publicity. Unlike many of Hitler’s satraps, Muller disliked public display and was rarely photographed. Also, Muller was devoted to hard work and results, and preferred to work in private.
Secondarily, writers are drawn to the dramatic and the flamboyant, not the cold and secretive. Most treatments of historical personages consist, in the main, of wholesale filching from previous writers, gotten up in new clothing but without substance. In the academic world, this is not called plagiarism, which it is, but instead labeled as research, which it is not.
Thirdly, U.S. intelligence agencies give every appearance of being singularly displeased by any mention of the name of Heinrich Muller.
In 1973, West German authorities issued a warrant for the arrest of Heinrich Muller, having good reason to believe that he did not die in Berlin in 1945. Correspondence, still classified in US files, between German legal agencies and their US counterparts indicates unhappiness, frustration and growing displeasure on the part of the Germans and classic stonewalling on the part of the Americans. Portions of Muller's US C.I.C files now in Ft. Meade, Maryland, have been censored. None of the documents refused to researchers deal with immediate postwar searches for Muller but cover a much later period. The reasons given for continued classification is that their release would adversely affect US national security.
A US Counter Intelligence report dated June 4, 1946 and concerning Heinrich Muller, states in paragraph three that: “Reports from the Russian Zone of Berlin, seem to indicate that MUELLER shot himself, his wife and three other children on 27 April, 1946.” This date has been circled with a question mark and is very obviously a typographical error. Another CIC report of May 8, 1961 states that:…“SUBJ was killed or committed suicide close WWII and buried at Standort-Freidhof, Lilllienthalstr, 35, Berlin Nuekoellin. Allegedly SUBJ body subsequently exhumed for positive identification by allied authorities.” On the same page of the C.I.C file on Muller found at Fort George Meade in Maryland, additional information is given on Muller that answers a number of puzzling questions about his purported death. Given as his date of birth are both April 28, 1900 and June 7, 1896. Also given is a home address of Prag Street 10 in Berlin.
The Chief of the Gestapo was born in Munich on April 28, 1900 and lived at Cornelius Street 22 in Berlin-Lankwitz. However, there was another Heinrich Muller in the RSHA, also an SS-Gruppenführer but this Heinrich Muller was Doctor Muller and had once been a high-ranking NSDAP official in the state of Hessen in 1933. He was a friend of Dr. Werner Best whom he invited to be Police Chief in that state. When Best went into the SS, he brought his friend Dr. Heinrich Muller with him. It was to avoid confusion that Heinrich Muller was called “Gestapo” Muller.
Dr. Muller did kill himself just before the war ended and his body was subsequently found by the Soviets. The papers discovered on the body indicated that the owner was an SS General named Heinrich Muller from the RSHA, with the date of birth and home address which are both indicated in the CIC file and in the SS personnel records of the Berlin Document Center.
Heinrich Muller's son indicated in an interview with the author that his family had been notified by German authorities that the body of SS General Heinrich Muller had been buried and that papers found on the corpse identified it. Muller stated that he had been told that this body had been dug up, examined and reburied in another area. No papers were ever shown to the family and have never surfaced in the intervening years. The purported grave of “Gestapo” Muller was opened in 1963 and parts of three other people were found in it, not a reburied corpse of a single person.
Aside from considerable activity on the part of German authorities to locate Muller for prosecution, nothing was heard about the former Gestapo Chief until a tabloid article appeared in the German magazine Focus in late 1995. It described how Muller had fled to the Argentine, was discovered by Czech intelligence agents, drugged, kidnapped, flown to Moscow and shot. Muller's son was supposed to have assisted in this, a statement greeted by the son with a mixture of humor, contempt and an emphatic denial of the claim.
Another important Third Reich personality has been subjected to a far greater flood of tabloid journalism over the years but in the case of Martin Bormann, the overall body of writing sounds as if it were part of a therapy program in an asylum.
It might be instructive to consider, briefly, the post-war career of Bormann, the former Reichsleiter and powerful Secretary to the Fuhrer, because it can serve as a comparison between historical writing and journalism. Creative writers assertions to the contrary, the two are not the same and the latter merely obscures the former. The basic facts concerning the fate of Martin Bormann are that on May 1, 1945, those persons remaining in the Chancellery bunker complex made an attempt to escape the underground confines of Hitler’s last headquarters. Among these were Bormann, Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler’s last doctor, Artur Axmann, leader of the Hitler Youth and others.
They emerged from the relative safety of the bunkers to witness Soviet troops fighting the defenders of Berlin. The two Soviet generals leading this attack, Marshals Konev and Chukov, had both been charged by Stalin with the task of conquering the capital, but instead, attacked each other to impress Stalin. The streets were littered with rubble, the corpses of German and Soviet military personnel, and civilians who had tried to venture out of their hiding places in search of better shelter and food.
The escape party broke into smaller groups; one consisted of Dr. Stumpfegger and Martin Bormann. Sometime around midnight, Axmann came across the corpses of both men lying by the railroad bridge at the Invaliden Street. Neither man showed any sign of violence, but Axmann had no time to conduct a thorough investigation. After the cessation of hostilities, the Soviets had German civilians remove the corpses in the streets and bury them as quickly as possible. A number of persons came forward later to state that the bodies of Stumpfegger and Bormann were buried on the grounds of an exhibition hall near the railroad bridge. Searches were conducted but no bodies were located.
Bormann was charged, tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to death in absentia and in the ensuing years, a great manhunt for Bormann was conducted, mainly in the media.
Cataloging the various sightings of Bormann would assume epic proportions; but suffice it to say that the missing Reichsleiter was seen in Munich, Rome, Moscow, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Chile, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, Japan and Panama. He was disguised as a farmer, a Franciscan monk, an export businessman and the owner of a bowling alley in Buenos Aires. He escaped from the ruins of Berlin on foot, in a helicopter, in a boat, a float plane and possibly even on a donkey. He fled to Denmark or the Bavarian Alps at the same time and from there began his world cruise that so occupied various persons over the years.
Dr. Fritz Bauer, a Jewish attorney and former concentration camp inmate, became the postwar Attorney General for the State of Hesse and launched a campaign to track down and punish his former jailers. Bauer was successful in locating a number of minor players but the famous Bormann was always just one step ahead of him. His favorite phrase, given at numerous press conferences was, “We are now closing in on Bormann and will have him in custody soon!”
As the police will testify, whenever a particularly notorious murder has been committed, there are always a number of individuals with weak minds who come forward and confess. This is why the police always keep some details from their press releases and these details simply are not known to the spurious killers. A number of such individuals came forward from time to time to enrich the Sunday supplements and encourage writers like Ladislas Farago who claimed to have original postwar photographs of Bormann. When these proved to be fakes, Farago went on to other projects, leaving the field to Dr. Bauer and Simon Wiesenthal, an Austrian engineer who had also been incarcerated in a camp because he had the misfortune to be Jewish. Like the Attorney General, Wiesenthal was always just one step behind Bormann, but, the elusive man was constantly moving around, hidden in underground bunkers built by Nazi escapees deep inside various South American countries which these gentlemen claimed held more Third Reich leaders than the Nuremberg Party rallies.
Bauer and Wiesenthal were both motivated by a desire for revenge, but Bauer wished to try Bormann, and Wiesenthal was apparently far more interested in publicity and fund-raising. In the end, both they and a legion of tabloid journalists were to be disappointed. They never found a living Bormann, and their publishers, who would cheerfully print a street map of the lost continent of Atlantis with a perfectly straight face, began to look for other subjects such as flying saucer landings, plots by Martians to kill President Kennedy and Global Warming.
Although a living Bormann was never found, a dead one certainly was. On December 7/8, 1972, excavations at the site of the former exhibition hall uncovered two skeletons. They were located in the approximate area where the German gravediggers claimed they had put them in 1945. The remains were subjected to thorough testing by government pathologists and the final report indicated that without a doubt, these were the remains of Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger and Martin Bormann. Quite naturally, journalists and other individuals with heavy investments in time or money were most unhappy about this closure of what had been a low-grade money machine.
The question arises that if Bormann had indeed been dead since May 1, 1945, who was running around the world in various guises, and positively identified by hundreds of absolutely trustworthy witnesses? Perhaps a simple explanation may be found in Douglas’ acid comments about witnesses that could be located through the medium of a cart full of cigarettes or perhaps the person seeking his few moments of fame and bribed with a bad dinner and cheap wine at a Buenos Aires restaurant.
Although Bormann has fallen off of the stage, rumors, backed up by more trustworthy witnesses have it that Bormann was rescued by a British intelligence team who were acting on the orders of Winston Churchill. Living safely in the English countryside, Bormann died several years ago and was buried in a secret, unknown grave in England. Martin Bormann now finds himself in good company, along with Lord Kitchener, Amelia Earhart, the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, John Wilkes Booth and Elvis Presley, all of whom have been seen at various places, long after their deaths, by absolutely trustworthy witnesses.
After the war, Krichbaum had been recruited by former Major General Reinhard Gehlen and in 1946 was Gehlen’s chief agent recruiter stationed in Bad Reichenhall. Krichbaum was responsible for locating former Gestapo and SD agents and securing positions for them inside the Gehlen Organization.
This organization, located at the former Nazi official complex at Pullach southeast of Munich,became affiliated with the CIA when that organization was officially founded in 1948. According to Muller's papers, Krichbaum had been in touch with his former chief through ex-Gestapo personnel living in Switzerland and opened discussions with the Americans about the possibility of employing Muller.
The head of this organization, Lt Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA, had heard rumors that the head of the Gestapo had fled to Switzerland and was working with Swiss intelligence. Through the services of former SS-Oberführer Krichbaum, Critchfield made contact with Müller in early 1948.
During the course of that year, a number of CIA luminaries, including Alan Welch Dulles, alter head of the CIA and Frank Gardner Wisner, later head of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations, were in Italy along with James Jesus Angleton to disrupt the Italian general elections. Dulles had known Müller during the war when the former was OSS station chief in Bern, Switzerland.
Because of Müller’s knowledge and expertise in matters concerning Soviet intelligence, backed with archival material that the former head of the Gestapo had hidden in Berlin and Switzerland, the CIA expressed an immediate and intense interest in recruiting Müller. Krichbaum acted as a go-between in the negotiations with his former superior who was chafing at his comfortable but boring retirement and the CIA controlled Gehlen Organization under Colonel James Critchfield.6
It was never a question of the Americans threatening Müller with exposure if he did not cooperate, but more a question if Müller was willing to work for a former enemy. In the event, because of his detestation of communism and the perceived opportunity to do further damage to this system, Müller had little difficulty in working for American intelligence.
Muller and His Journals
As a young man, Heinrich Muller began to keep a brief record of his daily activities, a practice that he maintained throughout his life. There were times during the Sturm und Drang of his life when he was unable to maintain his entries, but these gaps were generally filled in when he had the opportunity.
In the beginning, Muller only noted down how much he had paid for something or a brief record of a trip or a chance meeting with an attractive woman, generally including her address and other such important information. When he was a young mechanic at the BMW aircraft engine plant, he kept notes on various engines he worked on, with occasional comments about the progress of the First World War that erupted when he was fourteen years old. Once Müller joined the army in 1917 and was assigned to a flying unit, his notes became more personal and began to cover his flights, actions and a host of other incidents that were far more interesting than the day-to-day drudgery of factory work.
He met his future wife at a Munich bus stop and was careful to note down the time and place of the meeting as well as her address and the fact that her father published a newspaper for the Bavarian People¹s Party (BVP). After the war, Müller joined the Bavarian Political Police and was heavily involved in activities against both the communists and Nazis and his earlier journals were now eclipsed by locally momentous events. The Hitler Putsch of 1923 was one event which got considerable coverage as well as the aftermath of the earlier communist seizure of power in Munich and its eventual overthrow by units of the Freikorps, the army, and police.
As Muller advanced in the Bavarian police, his notebooks are filled with observations on the political scene of the late 1920's and the eventual rise to power of Hitler and the National Socialists. Thinking he would be removed from his post when Hitler became Chancellor and the NSDAP came to power in Bavaria in 1933, Muller, who was always an ambitious man, began to prepare a flood of well-researched papers on his struggles with the communists in Bavaria and his observations on how they could best be countered by the new state.
These reports came into the hands of Heinrich Himmler who turned them over to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS intelligence service. Heydrich then decided to overlook Muller's persecution of the Nazi movement as well as his adherence to the Catholic-oriented conservative Bavarian People’s Party and put him in charge of the Gestapo. This agency was a Prussian state entity, not very large in size and certainly not particularly influential. Muller, ever using his ambition as a goad and his intelligence as a weapon, began to develop this small group of professional police officials into a huge agency that at its height had over fifty thousand agents, sub agents and informers. Muller developed card files on nearly everyone in Germany and his organizational skills increased not only the size, but also the effectiveness of the Gestapo.
This agency dealt mainly with internal subversion and was in essence a police counter-intelligence group. Many of Muller's associates were professional police officers and many were not members of the Nazi Party. Muller himself did not join the Party until 1939, at which time he was awarded the Blood Order, one of the most prestigious Party decorations, ironically intended for members of the NSDAP who had been involved with the 1923 Putsch in Munich. Since Müller was involved in the crushing of this uprising, his award of the Blood Order, plus his membership in the SS, infuriated loyal Party officials in Munich who bombarded their superiors with loud complaints about Mueller's new plumage, as they termed it. During this time, Muller kept his journals up but as the war approached, their pages were no longer filled with women¹s addresses or telephone numbers or how much he had paid for a sausage and beer in the local restaurant. Instead of bratwurst, the pages were filled with high-level material on internal matters, often affairs that were never reported in the German press and certainly not outside the country.
It would be entirely safe to say that Heinrich Muller with his telephone taps, legions of informers, mail surveillance departments, radio interception teams and millions of index cards, knew more about the internal workings of Hitler’s Third Reich than anyone else. Muller wrote much of this fascinating but little known historical material down on a daily or weekly basis. When working on his journals at home, Muller taught himself to write backwards so his ever curious and always disapproving wife, Sophie, could not read his acid and often secret remarks.
After the war and his resettlement in Switzerland, Muller resumed keeping his journals and he brought these with him to the United States in 1948. Heinrich Muller's journals were certainly never intended for publication or justification. They are always brutally frank, cynical, highly informative and at least for some readers, entertaining. Muller did not suffer fools gladly and even though he had to work with his former enemies, there was no reason for him not to perform private literary surgery on their overweight, alcoholic bodies and flabby personalities.
In his journals, Muller emerges early on as a womanizer, a cynical and very often amoral man, consumed with ambition and tolerating no one who attempted to stand in his way.
His wartime Swiss acquaintance, Allan Dulles, offered Muller a job. He took it and used his position to ingratiate himself with the President of the United States and the Director of the FBI as well as to marry into a wealthy and influential Washington family. He had no hesitation in exchanging information and confidences with a high-level Soviet agent although his raison d¹etre was to assist his new employers in tracking down and exposing the same people. At one time, he had the same agent to dinner with two of the senior members of the CIA and, from his notes, thoroughly enjoyed the irony of the situation. In fact, it could be said that Muller always seemed to enjoy the ironical side of his work, took nothing seriously and filled his journals with comments and asides which the complaisant and conventional view with genuine horror and, more often than not, great disgust.
In Washington, Muller lost no time in climbing the social ladder and filling his Georgetown home with a fortune in art stolen by the Germans during the war. Some of this art, which included portions of the famed Amber Room, he sold off for the private purses of his co-workers in the CIA. He once gave a small, very private dinner for the President to which Muller wore all of his Third Reich and Imperial decorations and while sitting across from President Truman, discussed the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy, a man to whom Muller was supplying inside information to aid him in his reign of terror.
Muller had known the British-Soviet spy, Harold “Kim” Philby who worked for everyone from the Nazis to the communists, before the war and renewed his acquaintance when Philby was sent to Washington as British liaison to the FBI and CIA.
There are several instances where Muller, Philby and Viktor, his NKVD friend, and occasionally, Allan Dulles, would sit in the refined atmosphere of Washington's highly exclusive Metropolitan Club library and discuss all manner of highly classified information. In return for his hospitality, Muller was given an equal amount of highly classified Soviet and British information that his CIA employers found of great value. This high level information trading between putative enemies is typical of the intelligence communities of all nations and is certainly the rule, not the exception.
Initially, when Muller came to Washington in 1948, he was not fluent in English and was certainly a stranger, but he quickly adapted. From trivia about his water pipes and the weather, Muller's journals quickly expand into detailed, highly opinionated, coverage of the Red spy hunts, the internecine fighting in the nation's capital, open warfare between the FBI and the CIA, and Muller's negative and often highly entertaining views on the top levels of the CIA. It is in these passages that Muller wields the knife as well as the bludgeon.
Although happily married, Muller had no problem conducting brief but intense affairs with the bored and unsatisfied wives of his closest co-workers, affairs which he had no problem entering in his journals, along with any significant pillow talk he gleaned from his romps in a Gretna Green hotel bedroom.
Becoming a friend of Sothenes Behn, wealthy and powerful head of IT&T, Muller took a great
interest in the American stock market and with the advent of the Korean War, began to buy stock in
companies dealing with the Pentagon. He obtained highly secret, inside information on contracts to be let
by the American military and he and his Soviet spy friend began to invest heavily in the market.
In his relations with his personal staff, Muller clearly emerges as a kind and very considerate man but outside of his inner circle, he was entertaining, pleasant... and utterly ruthless. He kept at least one assassin on his staff and had no qualms when this man dispatched people who Muller felt might have identified him as the former head of the Gestapo. At the same time, Muller encouraged romances among his staff members, gave extensive financial support to the family of one assistant and certainly was very kind and affectionate to his dog.
Frederick the Great once said that the more he saw of humanity, the more he loved his dogs, and Muller, by his actions and personal views, certainly agreed with the Prussian King’s commentary.
Although it is doubtful if Muller could have added valuable medical knowledge to his other attributes, nevertheless, he instructed his CIA co-workers in various methods of giving unwanted people sudden heart attacks.
When he first came to Washington, Muller noted that a number of inconvenient people, to include James Forrestal, were being thrown out of upper floor windows to their deaths on the pavement below. He suggested that an induced heart attack was far less dangerous to people passing by on the sidewalk beneath the victim.
One of the criticisms of the series on, and by, Heinrich Muller is that the tenor of the conversations held between American government officials and the former chief of the Gestapo is outrageously cynical, manipulative and amoral on the part of all parties involved. There seems to be an image fixed in the minds of a few which has all leading members of a government in general and the CIA in particular, participants in an elegant and refined tableau reminiscent of a dinner at Thomas Jefferson’s Montecello where serious matters of state were debated by high-minded gentlemen over port and a pipe of fine Virginia tobacco. In reality, the days when gentlemen were to be found in government are long over and forgotten with only the memory lingering on to uplift the spirits of the hopeful and trusting. Pragmatism and ruthlessness have replaced manners and morals so that the private discussions of Presidents, Congressmen, Cabinet members and heads of intelligence agencies sound far more like a sit down in a Brooklyn clam house between Mafia dons than an eighteenth century literary salon. As Muller himself often said, morals and ethics are excellent norms but not very effective techniques.
Nearly all of the historical events depicted in these books run counter to the history which has been taught in the schools or depicted in an endless flood of works on the Second World War and the years subsequent. In the main, this is because the propaganda of those eras has been codified by the participants themselves and embroidered by a following legion of obedient court historians, poured into literary concrete and pointed to with great pride by their creators.
No government or leader has ever admitted being wrong, as witness the complete reluctance to absolve Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short of culpability in the lack of preparation at Pearl Harbor in 1941. It is now generally believed by the majority of interested Americans that President Franklin Roosevelt, and his immediate cohorts, had ample pre-knowledge of the pending Japanese attack but in spite of this widespread belief, no administration will ever admit to the errors of another administration, even sixty years after the fact.
The survival and employment by the United States of Heinrich Muller and a significant number of his former agents is contained in American archives but for reasons that are entirely obvious, these papers are still sealed with the highest security classifications. Even though all the participants in this event are long dead, governments, like corporations, are living entities and the sins of the fathers are not to be visited upon their children.
The journals of Heinrich Muller are by their very nature, revisionist in the extreme and because of this revision of favorite myths and legends, abhorrent to the orthodox as well as those who chance to be employed by the same agencies that Muller so brutally scores. In order to refute his ugly depictions of national icons, legions of historians, government officials and ubiquitous academics have been improving their shining hours by frantic and extensive searches in various archives and official records on two continents. The sole purpose of their labors is to attempt to disprove the myriad allegations of ignorance, idleness and vice expressed by the former head of Hitler’s secret police in his private journals. The sum and total of all this wasted labor can be found in such unhappy comments as are found in a British intelligence journal which states with shrill authority that because there were two typographical errors in three volumes, the contents of all of them have no historical value whatsoever.
Less substantive objections generally center on the fact that the reader¹s sensibilities and beliefs have been badly shaken; that the material simply cannot be true because the reader believes something else which, because he believes it, means it must be the personification of truth itself. At the end of the twentieth century one finds hope, trust and idealism residing in adjoining cots at a cut rate nursing home while waiting for the lights to go out.
Muller's journals did not begin in 1948 nor end in 1952 but they represent an important era in American history and present views of an insider who was privy to the most intimate secrets of the United States government and its senior members at the beginning of the Cold War, a campaign whose long-term effects are still being felt throughout the world.
Monday, 6 December 1948
The first week in Washington. I think I would have preferred to go to the tropics but it appears not to be. Impressive white buildings in one part of the city and terrible Negro slums in the rest. Contrasts are indicative of the attitude towards the social position of the former slaves. Ignore them. On the 8th the President will be talking to the President of Cuba about nothing but I am to see him as soon as my new chiefs of office will allow it. To begin to work on background material as soon as we have selected a proper house. Not considered a good idea for me to work in a regular office but at home.
Wednesday, 8 December 1948
Will move into a pleasant house in the Georgetown area. It is for sale but the government will rent it for me. It is an older house, more of a villa than a small house, but with a few servants and much better furniture, it will suffice. Thick piles of papers on the Chambers business to go over as well as preparing some material for the Justice Department based on my own papers. I will interview Colonel Hoover soon enough. It will be interesting to meet my opposite number, especially since I know a great deal about him but he knows almost nothing about me. Advantages are always better if you have them. Winter is not as bad here as it was in Munich but there are no mountains to hike in although they tell me that “out West” there are more than enough. I will have to wait on that.
Sunday, 12 December 1948
I went to Mass this morning. Should take up where I left off and establish my good relations with the Church. Three of my people will arrive here tomorrow. The State Department spy ring is far more extensive than I would have thought. Apparently, Roosevelt was fully aware of the penetration by communists and permitted it. The entire agency is filled from cellar to attic with Lenin-lovers. Typical pseudo-intellectual assholes; they are everywhere in Washington. Totally ignorant but well-born fools or intelligent radicals. I have no choice...I have to associate with the former and destroy the latter. The lease is signed, money paid and I am now awaiting the furniture. The crated paintings are safe enough here. Insisting on bringing them with me prevented some official thief from taking them home with him. The money situation is not at all bad but we must be careful not to let the idiots know how much I have or they will try to reduce my salary. Most of them don’t know the difference between an original Raphael and a Klee so I am more or less safe there although I cannot hang anything where it can be seen. The new place is bigger than the one in Geneva but I know there is a cemetery nearby. Well, we all end up in one sooner or later.
Oakhill Cemetery lies on the edge of Georgetown. Muller had a large and very expensive collection of rare art, much of which had been looted during the war by the Germans and after the war by the O.S.S and the C.I.A. He supplemented his income by dealing in such art, both for himself and his American friends.
Monday, 13 December 1948
The arrival of my staff people has been delayed for a week, making things rather difficult. Typical military stupidity. Someone obviously couldn’t read the papers correctly. I have set up a camp bed in the best bedroom and brought over all of my paintings. Even if I can’t hang them yet, it is pleasant enough to look at the crates. I have told T. (Truman, ed.) that there is no doubt at all that Hiss is the one the Soviets called ‘Alexi’ at least in the reports I have. He fits all the points very well. Such unhappiness.
I am told the President is not happy about the amount of espionage we have uncovered here. He thinks that by firing Wallace and closing down the O.S.S (which T. says stands for “Oh So Social” because it was full of socially prominent fools) he can clean up the Roosevelt sewer. I think not. I will have to talk to him about this...that is if they ever let me see him. I am told he is curious. Also that I must play the piano for him like a street musician’s pet monkey! Well, I can play a little Strauss and perhaps some simple Chopin.
We knew all their diplomatic codes were broken before the war by us, the British and the Soviets. That’s why I never liked to send coded messages and I refused to use our telephone system because it was like an old garden hose. Too many leaks. They tell me Hoover listens to everyone, or used to. Truman hates him and considers him to be a debased timeserver and informer. Who isn’t? Truman did not receive a majority in the election, only 49% but he did win which is important. I remember a conversation with Ribbentrop once about hunting. He said he had missed an elk by “just a centimeter” but he did miss and the distance isn’t important.
FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, is called “Colonel” by Muller. Hoover was offered this rank by Roosevelt during the war but declined the honor, expecting to be made a General at least. Hoover, at Roosevelt’s instruction, tapped the telephones of official Washington and rushed the results to Roosevelt. He attempted to do this with Truman but was ordered to cease this practice at once and Truman refused to have any dealings with Hoover. Adolf Berle, Jr. was one of the “Brain Trusters” of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Undersecretary of State under Hull. He has been identified as a Soviet source.
Friday, 17 December 1948
Two of my people have arrived at last and I was able to get some decent furniture into the house. In cleaning out a closet, I found some old newspapers talking about Wilson’s death. Old newspapers, dripping faucets and dead flies on the window ledges are being cleaned out. My family is doing well enough, I understand, but I can do very little now. The Amis are still looking for me and I have been told to be very careful because they are watching everyone in Pasing. Small, discreet assistance is being rendered.
I have turned nearly all of my State Department material over to the Justice people and also have had my first unofficial guest, Msgr. S. (Spellman, ed.). We make progress to save our souls. A bit of pleasant information for him. Pius hates the communists worse than I do so at least I have some friends left. Christmas is always a bad time when one is away from family but we will make do. The Americans cook turkey (Trauthahn) here and celebrate on Christmas Day instead of Christmas Eve. We shall keep to the old customs and have goose and ham. A tree with candles too but I am told that electric lights are considered safer.
After the war, Muller's wife and daughter returned to the old family home in Pasing, a suburb of Munich. They were later joined by his son who had been in a prisoner of war camp as a tank driver in the elite Adolf Hitler Leibstandarte Armored Division. The American CIC as well as Soviet intelligence closely watched the family and it was eventually discovered that Muller had contact with his wife but nothing could be done about this because CIC reports were not acted upon. Muller was a nominal Catholic who officially had to leave the Church at Himmler’s request. In 1948, Pope Pius XII who, as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli had been Nuncio to Germany, had a deep and abiding hatred of communism, having seen its terrorist actions at the end of the First World War.
Wednesday, 22 December 1948
Interesting news this morning. The dining room is much the way I want it with fresh paint, new draperies and much of the furniture from Geneva in place. At breakfast I had a visitor who was much excited. When the servants had left, he closed the door in a most conspiratorial manner and rushed over to tell me the news! Mr. Duggan had accidentally fallen out of his office window last night! Such a tragedy and so soon before the holidays too. Well, I suppose if he had lived, he would have been up before the courts and might have said something. Of course I have not been here long enough to have helped him and I have only been through New York, but my fellow workers seem to be more than capable in this field. We all share such common interests.
My informant, who kept trying to eat my fresh rolls, told me that the matter is to be kept quiet. I wonder when a man falls sixteen floors to the street how this can be kept quiet? Did he come down on somebody, I wonder? How do you explain the brains on a car parked on the street? He had a bad headache and his head exploded suddenly?
I am supposed to talk to a Mr. Nixon either today or tomorrow about some of this. Not to mention the fake suicide at all. He doesn’t know and ought not to but is considered a very good ally. Now it seems I will not see the President until after the holidays because he has gone home to his farm. It gives me more time to polish my English. One of the water pipes broke last night but fortunately there was nothing in the cellar and everything has been fixed. The neighborhood is pleasant and there are some excellent parks here. I shall make a visit to the art museum as soon as I can, that is if I get through the mountains of files that they keep dumping on me. The new secretary is not as pretty as the last one but is very accommodating. The question is whether or not she stays in the house or lives elsewhere. We will see how we get along. It is good to have the regular cook back. He knows exactly what I want and when I want it. It is a terrible trouble to break in new servants. I used to let my wife do that but now it is my job.
More trouble in Berlin but that is to be expected. Mundt is supposed to stop over this afternoon and perhaps we can settle a few things. There was great tension in Soviet-blockaded Berlin but this did not materialize into open warfare as the militant U.S. war party so often and loudly predicted. Karl Mundt, a conservative Congressman from South Dakota, had been elected in 1946 along with Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin. The American Congress was, by 1948, extremely conservative, mainly as the result of a grassroots movement against the rampant liberalism of the Roosevelt era.
Friday, 24 December 1948
Hiss claims that all are lies. We know better. Pot boiling over the Duggan “accident.” Nixon is sure the man killed himself rather than face “the music” but we know better here. The rest of the staff is here and about half of the house is ready for use. My bedroom is finally finished and last night I personally hung my treasures up. One does get used to the same mattress and while the windows do not give me the view I used to have, still, the effect is soothing and restful. Herta is not as pleasant as Barbara or Anna but, all in all, gives promise. I told her to stop eating so much! She is used to the very poor food in Europe after all. If she starts to get fat, I will have to replace her. Krieger will come over in January and if H. doesn’t work out, at least I know where I am with my loyal stenographer.
The Duggan referred to here is Laurence H. Duggan, who had been accused by Whittaker
Chambers of being a communist spy. Duggan had attended Harvard University where he knew Alger Hiss,
also an accused State Department spy (later convicted). Duggan joined the Department of State in 1930
and became a political affairs adviser, leaving the Department in 1944. At the time of his death, Duggan
was connected with the Rockefeller interests. After being accused by former communist agent Chambers,
Duggan either jumped, fell, or, as now seems most likely, was pushed from his office window in New York.
His friends in the government subsequently lauded him and the matter was shelved. Subsequent
deciphering of Soviet secret messages, called Venona by U.S. intelligence, revealed that Duggan was
indeed an agent. Muller was already aware of this fact because the Germans had intercepted Soviet
intelligence messages sent from Ottawa, Canada, in a code that like the codes used by the NKVD in
Australia, could be easily broken.
Saturday, 25 December 1948
Christmas this evening. An excellent goose which I bought myself and in the very large drawing room a very fine tree. I decided not to put electric lights on it and I put it into the stand that revolves and plays songs on the apparatus inside. The candles make my staff feel at home. The gifts are ready to hand out and the staff got me a very nice watch that I will have to wear to keep them happy.
The President’s people have said that Duggan was not a spy and was the victim of an accident, not a suicide. How do you define an accident? He was accidentally standing by an open window in the middle of winter when some thoughtless secretary shoved him out because he bit her breasts the night before? That awful Roosevelt woman says that press accounts of the high-flying Duggan were terrible. I can write better English than she can but we at least have similar interests...women.
I have discovered that Washington is, like the boiler in the cellar, not unlike Berlin. Gossip, chatter, innuendo, deep thrusts into the back by good friends, greed and, above all, total ignorance of almost everything but how to acquire money and most of all, importance.
I am learning to be very awe-inspired when I have to listen to people like General Smith who is a very small-minded man. He is near-sighted and stares intently at people, impressing them with the brilliance of his mind. If he wore glasses, he would be less impressive. When he was in England with Eisenhower, he chased hotel maids from morning to night. Of course Eisenhower had an affair with his driver, female I must say. Well, I can’t condemn them for such activities but I would never have chased old English women around with my pants open. Smith is now busy practicing his expertise on the Russians but it is rumored that he may return here permanently. They seem to like military personages running their various agencies.
The Admiral was at Pearl Harbor when it came under attack. For some reason, I have neglected to enlighten him about certain facts concerning that episode, facts which would no doubt meet with the disbelief the orthodox display when confronted with uncomfortable truths. I may have to go to New York after all when the Grand Jury comes back next month. It will be interesting to go to the Metropolitan Museum at least. Perhaps I will have the chance to see the President before then. I will have to go downstairs soon so I will wish my family and myself a very Happy Christmas and a Fortunate New Year!
Tuesday, 28 December 1948
I see that Truman will be receiving a nice increase in his pay soon. Too early for me to consider such a thing. Christmas was as expected, sad but very pleasant in the new country. No longer hear German in the streets, although in Geneva it was more often French. Some prominent USA trade union people are being investigated by the legislature now. I have always maintained that next to university professors, the trade unions conceal the worst communists.
I will see the President sometime just after the New Year.
Now that the house is in order, I am having the wine cellar filled and I am expected to have some of my fellow workers over for a New Year party.
General Truscott told me an extremely funny story about General Smith. He does not like him at all and I will put this down in case I need it later on.
The General, who was Chief of Staff to Eisenhower, was in Sicily during the campaign there and apparently was late for a conference with General Patton (probably the best the Americans had). They sent a staff car to see why he was late and found his car parked on the edge of a road. This was near an American artillery battery and when Smith heard the guns firing, he was sure they were Germans and fled, screaming like a girl, from his car and ran down into the bushes. It took three officers, including a General, to convince him that it was safe to return but everyone was terribly embarrassed to discover that Smith had shit his pants full! Someone had to put down a briefcase for him to sit on so he didn’t mess the car!
They say Patton enjoyed this very much.
The story about Walter Bedell Smith is quite true and can be found today in the papers of General George Patton. From 1946 through 1949, Smith was U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and after this, head of the CIA. According to his files, Müller’s initial contact with Smith and several others came about while he was being considered for employment.
Sumner Welles, who had once been the de facto Secretary of State and a close personal friend of Roosevelt, had left the government in 1943 as the result of a scandal involving a homosexual incident with a black Pullman porter on an official trip. He later began to drink heavily and was found unconscious on the grounds of his Maryland estate under circumstances that have never been explained.
Sunday, 2 January 1949
We have had very bad weather here, all across the eastern part of the continent. Very cold and much snow. Not unfamiliar to me. If Americans have a few centimeters of snow on the ground, they go quite mad with apprehension. The press is always filled with amusing stories. In Canada, some politician, out for a walk in the bad snowstorm, lost his way, fell into a river and drowned.
We had a decent little party last night and only one senior officer got drunk and threw up in the pantry. None of them know the difference between vinegar and prime vintage so I served them terrible domestic wine and champagne in expensive bottles. Soldiers who spend their wars in canteens or safely behind desks are so boastful with a few ounces of alcohol in them.
I recall a talk I had recently with Thayer and that obnoxious Russian, Pash. He is a hard-faced man with glasses who used to be a gymnastics teacher, hates all communists, Jews and Japanese. He was bragging to us how he pushed a General Dewitt into locking all the Japanese-Americans away in concentration camps at the beginning of their war. He took positive delight in this and then went on to discuss, in front of Thayer who had pretensions of gentility, the way he had Togliatti shot in Rome last July. I quote him exactly “We shot the ginny (?) in the head and he still lived. The next time we can stick a grenade up his wop ass.” After Thayer looked like he might enjoy throwing up privately, Pash went on to discuss how he and the Wisner gang of assassins were once going to shoot Wallace! He was very bitter that he was talked out of this little program! Marvelous what kind of lunatics we have to deal with. Suppose he didn’t like the President’s piano playing and fired a Panzerfaust into his ear?
Wallace needs to be attended to but not by Pash and I think a heart attack would be most beneficial. When I said this, Thayer looked at me as if I were mad and then excused himself. He probably did vomit into the bushes outside. At any rate, he did me the disservice by leaving me with the lunatic Pash who revealed a plot to me about poisoning some left wing newspaper reporter he hated.
I will have to go to New York at once and can see the President when I come back. After him, I will be honored to visit with Colonel Hoover and, of course, the Admiral once again. I use the excuse of my work to avoid most of these idiots and assholes but sometimes, I have a duty to perform. This is not much different from the old days, after all.
Boris T. Pash was born Boris Pashkovski in Russia. His father was the Metropolitan Theophilus Pashkovski. Boris shortened his name in 1932. He was a refugee who came to this country after the October Revolution. He was a gym teacher in Los Angeles and held a rank in the National Guard of California. He was instrumental in persuading General De Witt to endorse a program of deportation and imprisonment of all Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. Pash was later chief of security for the Manhattan atomic program and while there, incurred Roosevelt’s wrath by attempting to arrest a number of communist agents engaged in work on the project. He later became head of the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) in San Francisco.
After the war, he was in charge of the ‘Alsos Project’ in which Pash and a team of military police went around conquered Germany rounding up German atomic scientists and shipping them to the United States. Later, he became involved with the new CIA and worked with Frank Wisner, head of the CIA’s clandestine operations. Pash was a strong anti-communist and became involved in various assassination projects such as the attempted murder of Italian communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti on 14 July, 1948, in Rome. The assassination attempt was a failure.
The Thayer mentioned was Charles Thayer who had been OSS chief in Vienna after the war. He became head of the Voice of America in 1947. He died in 1969 during a heart operation. Thayer was a strong proponent of the use of former Third Reich officials to combat communism but was viewed as too liberal by the hard-line conservatives who were bent on purging any element from government that they did not view as strongly anti-Soviet. Thayer’s problem was that he adopted a more moderate course of action and eventually was forced out of government service.
The Gestapo Chief in Washington
At the beginning of December, 1948, a German national arrived in Washington, D.C. to take up
an important position with the newly-formed CIA. He was a specialist on almost every aspect of Soviet
intelligence and had actively fought them, both in his native Bavaria where he was head of the political
police in Munich and later in Berlin as head of Amt IV of the State Security Office. His name was Heinrich Muller.
Even as a young man, Heini Muller had kept daily journals of his activities, journals that covered his military service as a pilot in the Imperial German air arm and an apprentice policeman in Munich. He continued these journals throughout the war and while employed by the top CIA leadership in Washington, continued his daily notations.
This work is a complete translation of his journals from December of 1948 through September of 1951.
When Heinrich Muller was hired by the CIA's Allan Welch Dulles and James Critchfield, head of the Gehlen Organization in Pullach, Germany and then extensively interviewed by James Speyer Kronthal, the CIA station chief in Bern, Switzerland in 1948, he had misgivings about working for his former enemies but pragmatism and the lure of large amounts of money won him over to what he considered to be merely an extension of his life-work against the agents of the Comintern. What he discovered after living and working in official Washington for four years was that the nation's capital was, in truth, what he once humorously claimed sounded like a cross between a zoo and a lunatic asylum.
His journals, in addition to personal letters, various reports and other personal material, give a very clear, but not particularly flattering, view of the inmates of both the zoo and the asylum. Muller moved, albeit very carefully, in the rarefied atmosphere of senior policy personnel, military leaders, heads of various intelligence agencies and the White House itself. He was a very observant, quick-witted person who took copious notes of what he saw. This was not a departure from his earlier habits because Heinrich Müller had always kept a journal, even when he was a lowly Bavarian police officer, and his comments about personalities and events in the Third Reich are just as pungent and entertaining as the ones he made while in America.
The reason for publishing this phase of his eventful life is that so many agencies in the United States and their supporters do not want to believe that a man of Müller’s position could ever have been employed by their country in general or their agency in specific.
Introduction
In the early morning hours of September 25, 1963, a grave was opened in the West Berlin
Kreuzberg military cemetery and the contents removed for forensic examination. The marker indicated that
the occupant of the grave was Heinrich Muller, born April 28, 1900, and killed in the street fighting in
Berlin in 1945 when the Soviet Army seized the German capital. The memorial stone did not indicate that
Müller had been an SS-Gruppenführer and a Lieutenant General in the German Police and that since 1935,
was the head of the German Gestapo or the Secret State Police.The exhumation had been requested by the West German Ludwigsburg Center that dealt with ex-Nazi's sought for prosecution. This Center had information that Muller was not dead and was, in fact, gainfully employed by a foreign government. One of the first steps in proving this was to ascertain whether the corpse in the grave was that of Heinrich Muller, who had been issued a death certificate from the Death Bureau of Berlin-Center numbered 11 706/45.
A subsequent pathological examination proved that there were the remains of three different men in the grave, none of whom were Heinrich Muller.
The man being sought was the son of a minor official, had completed a primary school education, had taken technical training in aircraft engines and in June of 1917 had joined the German Army. Because of his background, after his preliminary training, Muller was assigned to Flieger Ausbildung Abteilung 287 in April of 1918. In the seven months remaining before the war ended, Muller was promoted to NCO in August of 1918 and won the Iron Crosses First and Second Class. He was also awarded the Bavarian pilot’s badge and after injuring his leg in an aircraft accident, the retired Bavarian pilot’s badge. Muller served on the Western Front throughout the war.
When the war was over, Muller joined the Munich Police in 1919 as a junior assistant. He passed his entrance examination and became a police officer. He was promoted to Police Secretary in 1929 and was in Section VI of the Bavarian State Police, a unit that dealt with Communist activity. In 1934, Müller and a number of his associates were transferred to the Gestapo in Berlin and joined the SS as a Sturmführer on April 20, 1934. In 1935, Müller was head of Department II (Gestapo). In 1936, he was head of the Gestapo division of the headquarters of the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei). In 1937, he was promoted to senior police official (Kriminalrat) and in 1939, to the rank of Reichskriminaldirektor or Director of Police.
His SS promotions were:
SS-Obersturmführer on July 1, 1934,
SS-Sturmhauptführer on January 30, 1935,
SS-Sturmbannführer on April 20, 1936,
SS-Obersturmbannführer on November 9, 1936,
SS-Standartenführer on January 30, 1937,
SS-Oberführer on April 20, 1939,
SS-Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der deutschen Polizei on December 12, 1940 and
SS-Gruppenführer und Generalleutnant der deutschen Polizei on November 9,1941.
The organization that Muller controlled, the Secret State Police, had been instituted by Hermann Goring as Minister President of Prussia in 1933 but was acquired by Heinrich Himmler as part of his empire building. The numerous changes, additions, absorption's and expansions of the Gestapo during the course of its existence would fill a volume, because like Himmler, Muller was also an empire builder.
Although on Muller's orders, most of the Gestapo records were destroyed in 1945, it can be approximated that the entire personnel roster of the Gestapo numbered 25,000 with a much larger but undetermined number, of V agents or Vertrauensleute, voluntary and paid informers. In 1943, when the army Intelligence system, the Abwehr, was broken up due to its poor performance, Müller managed to acquire its counter-intelligence department. Although Hitler had ordered in June 1941 that the army was to be the sole radio interception agency, Müller moved into this field as well and by the end of the war, was running an extensive radio intelligence department that specialized in “playback” or the turning of enemy agents to feed their former employers false information and locate other agents arriving or in place.
The Gestapo was renowned for its excellent filing system which permitted very close observation of the population. The Germans have always required the use of internal passports and required its citizens to register their current addresses and their places of employment so the Gestapo had less difficulty maintaining its control. The Gestapo also maintained telephone interdiction facilities and watched the mails. These methods are not unique to Germany or the Gestapo but were more prevalent and pervasive than in other western countries. Muller's men did not have the modern American technology of using privately owned television sets connected to the universal cable systems as a means of listening to private conversations, mainly because the television set was not in use in Germany at that period. Almost any other conceivable form of observation was in use and after the war, the victors expressed considerable professional interest in the Gestapo’s methods and techniques.
Heinrich Muller married Sophie Dischner in 1924. Her father published a right wing Bavarian newspaper that was opposed to Hitler. A son, Reinhard, was born January 4, 1927, and a daughter, Elizabeth, on September 9, 1936. He eventually became estranged from his wife and had a lengthy relationship with his private secretary, Barbara Hellmuth. Muller and his wife were devout Catholics and even as a high-ranking SS officer, Muller refused to leave the church. He only joined the NSDAP very late when he was compelled to do so. In fact, Muller had been known to the Party as a strong opponent when they were struggling for power in the Munich of the 1920's and early 1930's. Party members were shocked when Muller and the men of his bureau were taken into the SS and put in charge of the Gestapo, and never ceased complaining about what they felt was ideological outrage. Muller owed his continued career and subsequent advancements to his intelligence, drive and ruthlessness. He was a self-effacing man, photographs of whom are rare. His putative superior, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, was extensively interrogated by US authorities after the war when they were seeking Muller. Excerpts from the comments of a man who disliked Muller and was not only disliked in return but also virtually ignored, are interesting. This quote is from the interrogation:
“MULLER'S influence in forming the Stapo staff was manifest not only in its foundation; later all posts in Amt IV were occupied by persons selected by him, including the Police Attachés…MULLER was unhappily married, had two children, one a boy of 17 called up for service just before the end of the war. The second child was much younger. The latter child had pronounced Mongolian features, and it is believed that on this account, MULLER avoided all social intercourse between friends and neighbors. MULLER spent practically all his time in his office on account of his unpleasant conditions at home. Most of his social life was confined to such officials as HUBER, PIFFRADER, GEISLER, MEISINGER and GOTTHALMSEDER. …When I met him for the first time, I did not notice any peculiarities. He had a remarkably small figure, a piercing look in his dark eyes and there was, in his appearance, nothing frank and kind but rather ‘luring’. He was, however, polite (“korrekt”) but perhaps too modest…MULLER had a remarkable memory and knew every person who had ever crossed his path and all events. He was a living encyclopedia for HIMMLER….He always wanted to do everything for himself, and gave his associates no chance for independent development; in fact this bad habit had been criticized even by HIMMLER.”
There exist very few descriptions of Muller engaged in the art of interrogation, something he was very skilled at. Muller was persistent and would take hours over these sessions. With his remarkable memory, he was almost always able to extract the truth. The only surviving account comes from the writings of captured British intelligence agent Captain Best. Kidnapped in Holland after the November, 1939 bomb attempt on Hitler’s life, Best was brought before Muller and questioned.
“Muller was a dapper, exceptionally good-looking little man, dressed in imitation of Adolf Hitler, in a gray uniform jacket, black riding breeches and top boots. He started his ‘snort’ immediately when he entered, and as he walked towards me, increased the pitch and the volume of his voice with great virtuosity. He managed to get right up close to me before his vocal chords tore into shreds. ‘You are in the hands of the Gestapo. Don’t imagine that we shall show you the slightest consideration. The Führer has already shown the world that he is invincible and soon he will come and liberate the people of England from the Jews and Plutocrats such as you. You are in the greatest danger and if you want to live another day must be very careful.’ Then he sat down on a chair in front of me and drew it up as close as possible, apparently with the intention of performing some mesmerizing trick. He had rather funny eyes which he could flicker from side to side with the greatest rapidity and I suppose that this was supposed to strike terror into the heart of the beholder.” Best then encountered Heydrich who shouted to him: “So far you have been treated as an officer and a gentleman, but don’t think that this will go on if you don’t behave better than you have done. You have two hours left in which to confess everything. If you don’t, I shall hand you over to the Gestapo, who are used to dealing with such gangsters and criminals— you won’t enjoy their methods a bit.”
“I turned to Muller, who was standing at my side and asked: ‘Who is this excitable young officer?’ At this Heydrich really went off the deep end and literally foamed at the mouth; at all events, he sprayed me liberally with saliva. Muller quickly pushed me out of the room and into my own. Later on he came in again and told me I must not take the matter too seriously: ‘Soup is never eaten as hot as it is cooked.’”
Best concluded his description of Müller by saying: “In my experience, I always found Müller a very decent little man.”5
Heinrich Muller was five feet seven inches, strongly built, with dark brown hair, cut high on the sides and good features. He had a small, tight mouth and rarely smiled but his face, and in fact his entire persona, was dominated by a pair of hooded brown eyes that fixed themselves on people with great intensity. He walked with a slight limp as a result of a wartime injury. Muller was descended from Germans living in Alsace and he went to some trouble to conceal the family French connections because of Hitler’s strong dislike of the French.
Given the position Muller occupied in the Third Reich and the role he played during its course, the question arises as to why no writer or historian has made any attempt to produce an in depth work on the head of the Gestapo. Aside from several pages in two of Heinz Höhne’s books and some material in Aronson, there is almost nothing in print about Heinrich Muller, and much of that is extremely superficial or inaccurate. Although considerable information does exist in official files in archives, Muller has fallen through the cracks for several reasons.
Primarily, Heinrich Muller was a man who neither sought nor encouraged publicity. Unlike many of Hitler’s satraps, Muller disliked public display and was rarely photographed. Also, Muller was devoted to hard work and results, and preferred to work in private.
Secondarily, writers are drawn to the dramatic and the flamboyant, not the cold and secretive. Most treatments of historical personages consist, in the main, of wholesale filching from previous writers, gotten up in new clothing but without substance. In the academic world, this is not called plagiarism, which it is, but instead labeled as research, which it is not.
Thirdly, U.S. intelligence agencies give every appearance of being singularly displeased by any mention of the name of Heinrich Muller.
In 1973, West German authorities issued a warrant for the arrest of Heinrich Muller, having good reason to believe that he did not die in Berlin in 1945. Correspondence, still classified in US files, between German legal agencies and their US counterparts indicates unhappiness, frustration and growing displeasure on the part of the Germans and classic stonewalling on the part of the Americans. Portions of Muller's US C.I.C files now in Ft. Meade, Maryland, have been censored. None of the documents refused to researchers deal with immediate postwar searches for Muller but cover a much later period. The reasons given for continued classification is that their release would adversely affect US national security.
A US Counter Intelligence report dated June 4, 1946 and concerning Heinrich Muller, states in paragraph three that: “Reports from the Russian Zone of Berlin, seem to indicate that MUELLER shot himself, his wife and three other children on 27 April, 1946.” This date has been circled with a question mark and is very obviously a typographical error. Another CIC report of May 8, 1961 states that:…“SUBJ was killed or committed suicide close WWII and buried at Standort-Freidhof, Lilllienthalstr, 35, Berlin Nuekoellin. Allegedly SUBJ body subsequently exhumed for positive identification by allied authorities.” On the same page of the C.I.C file on Muller found at Fort George Meade in Maryland, additional information is given on Muller that answers a number of puzzling questions about his purported death. Given as his date of birth are both April 28, 1900 and June 7, 1896. Also given is a home address of Prag Street 10 in Berlin.
The Chief of the Gestapo was born in Munich on April 28, 1900 and lived at Cornelius Street 22 in Berlin-Lankwitz. However, there was another Heinrich Muller in the RSHA, also an SS-Gruppenführer but this Heinrich Muller was Doctor Muller and had once been a high-ranking NSDAP official in the state of Hessen in 1933. He was a friend of Dr. Werner Best whom he invited to be Police Chief in that state. When Best went into the SS, he brought his friend Dr. Heinrich Muller with him. It was to avoid confusion that Heinrich Muller was called “Gestapo” Muller.
Dr. Muller did kill himself just before the war ended and his body was subsequently found by the Soviets. The papers discovered on the body indicated that the owner was an SS General named Heinrich Muller from the RSHA, with the date of birth and home address which are both indicated in the CIC file and in the SS personnel records of the Berlin Document Center.
Heinrich Muller's son indicated in an interview with the author that his family had been notified by German authorities that the body of SS General Heinrich Muller had been buried and that papers found on the corpse identified it. Muller stated that he had been told that this body had been dug up, examined and reburied in another area. No papers were ever shown to the family and have never surfaced in the intervening years. The purported grave of “Gestapo” Muller was opened in 1963 and parts of three other people were found in it, not a reburied corpse of a single person.
Aside from considerable activity on the part of German authorities to locate Muller for prosecution, nothing was heard about the former Gestapo Chief until a tabloid article appeared in the German magazine Focus in late 1995. It described how Muller had fled to the Argentine, was discovered by Czech intelligence agents, drugged, kidnapped, flown to Moscow and shot. Muller's son was supposed to have assisted in this, a statement greeted by the son with a mixture of humor, contempt and an emphatic denial of the claim.
Another important Third Reich personality has been subjected to a far greater flood of tabloid journalism over the years but in the case of Martin Bormann, the overall body of writing sounds as if it were part of a therapy program in an asylum.
It might be instructive to consider, briefly, the post-war career of Bormann, the former Reichsleiter and powerful Secretary to the Fuhrer, because it can serve as a comparison between historical writing and journalism. Creative writers assertions to the contrary, the two are not the same and the latter merely obscures the former. The basic facts concerning the fate of Martin Bormann are that on May 1, 1945, those persons remaining in the Chancellery bunker complex made an attempt to escape the underground confines of Hitler’s last headquarters. Among these were Bormann, Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler’s last doctor, Artur Axmann, leader of the Hitler Youth and others.
They emerged from the relative safety of the bunkers to witness Soviet troops fighting the defenders of Berlin. The two Soviet generals leading this attack, Marshals Konev and Chukov, had both been charged by Stalin with the task of conquering the capital, but instead, attacked each other to impress Stalin. The streets were littered with rubble, the corpses of German and Soviet military personnel, and civilians who had tried to venture out of their hiding places in search of better shelter and food.
The escape party broke into smaller groups; one consisted of Dr. Stumpfegger and Martin Bormann. Sometime around midnight, Axmann came across the corpses of both men lying by the railroad bridge at the Invaliden Street. Neither man showed any sign of violence, but Axmann had no time to conduct a thorough investigation. After the cessation of hostilities, the Soviets had German civilians remove the corpses in the streets and bury them as quickly as possible. A number of persons came forward later to state that the bodies of Stumpfegger and Bormann were buried on the grounds of an exhibition hall near the railroad bridge. Searches were conducted but no bodies were located.
Bormann was charged, tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to death in absentia and in the ensuing years, a great manhunt for Bormann was conducted, mainly in the media.
Cataloging the various sightings of Bormann would assume epic proportions; but suffice it to say that the missing Reichsleiter was seen in Munich, Rome, Moscow, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Chile, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, Japan and Panama. He was disguised as a farmer, a Franciscan monk, an export businessman and the owner of a bowling alley in Buenos Aires. He escaped from the ruins of Berlin on foot, in a helicopter, in a boat, a float plane and possibly even on a donkey. He fled to Denmark or the Bavarian Alps at the same time and from there began his world cruise that so occupied various persons over the years.
Dr. Fritz Bauer, a Jewish attorney and former concentration camp inmate, became the postwar Attorney General for the State of Hesse and launched a campaign to track down and punish his former jailers. Bauer was successful in locating a number of minor players but the famous Bormann was always just one step ahead of him. His favorite phrase, given at numerous press conferences was, “We are now closing in on Bormann and will have him in custody soon!”
As the police will testify, whenever a particularly notorious murder has been committed, there are always a number of individuals with weak minds who come forward and confess. This is why the police always keep some details from their press releases and these details simply are not known to the spurious killers. A number of such individuals came forward from time to time to enrich the Sunday supplements and encourage writers like Ladislas Farago who claimed to have original postwar photographs of Bormann. When these proved to be fakes, Farago went on to other projects, leaving the field to Dr. Bauer and Simon Wiesenthal, an Austrian engineer who had also been incarcerated in a camp because he had the misfortune to be Jewish. Like the Attorney General, Wiesenthal was always just one step behind Bormann, but, the elusive man was constantly moving around, hidden in underground bunkers built by Nazi escapees deep inside various South American countries which these gentlemen claimed held more Third Reich leaders than the Nuremberg Party rallies.
Bauer and Wiesenthal were both motivated by a desire for revenge, but Bauer wished to try Bormann, and Wiesenthal was apparently far more interested in publicity and fund-raising. In the end, both they and a legion of tabloid journalists were to be disappointed. They never found a living Bormann, and their publishers, who would cheerfully print a street map of the lost continent of Atlantis with a perfectly straight face, began to look for other subjects such as flying saucer landings, plots by Martians to kill President Kennedy and Global Warming.
Although a living Bormann was never found, a dead one certainly was. On December 7/8, 1972, excavations at the site of the former exhibition hall uncovered two skeletons. They were located in the approximate area where the German gravediggers claimed they had put them in 1945. The remains were subjected to thorough testing by government pathologists and the final report indicated that without a doubt, these were the remains of Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger and Martin Bormann. Quite naturally, journalists and other individuals with heavy investments in time or money were most unhappy about this closure of what had been a low-grade money machine.
The question arises that if Bormann had indeed been dead since May 1, 1945, who was running around the world in various guises, and positively identified by hundreds of absolutely trustworthy witnesses? Perhaps a simple explanation may be found in Douglas’ acid comments about witnesses that could be located through the medium of a cart full of cigarettes or perhaps the person seeking his few moments of fame and bribed with a bad dinner and cheap wine at a Buenos Aires restaurant.
Although Bormann has fallen off of the stage, rumors, backed up by more trustworthy witnesses have it that Bormann was rescued by a British intelligence team who were acting on the orders of Winston Churchill. Living safely in the English countryside, Bormann died several years ago and was buried in a secret, unknown grave in England. Martin Bormann now finds himself in good company, along with Lord Kitchener, Amelia Earhart, the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, John Wilkes Booth and Elvis Presley, all of whom have been seen at various places, long after their deaths, by absolutely trustworthy witnesses.
Historical Background
Living comfortably in Switzerland under the name of Schwartzer after the end of the Second
World War, as an intelligence resource of the Swiss government, Heinrich Müller was contacted in 1948
by his onetime deputy in the Gestapo, SS-Oberführer Willi Krichbaum. Krichbaum, a long-time personal
acquaintance of Müller, had been a senior Gestapo official in the Southeastern Grenz-Polizei or Border
Police and had headed the Geheime Feld Polizei, the investigative body of the Abwehr since September of
1939. After the war, Krichbaum had been recruited by former Major General Reinhard Gehlen and in 1946 was Gehlen’s chief agent recruiter stationed in Bad Reichenhall. Krichbaum was responsible for locating former Gestapo and SD agents and securing positions for them inside the Gehlen Organization.
This organization, located at the former Nazi official complex at Pullach southeast of Munich,became affiliated with the CIA when that organization was officially founded in 1948. According to Muller's papers, Krichbaum had been in touch with his former chief through ex-Gestapo personnel living in Switzerland and opened discussions with the Americans about the possibility of employing Muller.
The head of this organization, Lt Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA, had heard rumors that the head of the Gestapo had fled to Switzerland and was working with Swiss intelligence. Through the services of former SS-Oberführer Krichbaum, Critchfield made contact with Müller in early 1948.
During the course of that year, a number of CIA luminaries, including Alan Welch Dulles, alter head of the CIA and Frank Gardner Wisner, later head of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations, were in Italy along with James Jesus Angleton to disrupt the Italian general elections. Dulles had known Müller during the war when the former was OSS station chief in Bern, Switzerland.
Because of Müller’s knowledge and expertise in matters concerning Soviet intelligence, backed with archival material that the former head of the Gestapo had hidden in Berlin and Switzerland, the CIA expressed an immediate and intense interest in recruiting Müller. Krichbaum acted as a go-between in the negotiations with his former superior who was chafing at his comfortable but boring retirement and the CIA controlled Gehlen Organization under Colonel James Critchfield.6
It was never a question of the Americans threatening Müller with exposure if he did not cooperate, but more a question if Müller was willing to work for a former enemy. In the event, because of his detestation of communism and the perceived opportunity to do further damage to this system, Müller had little difficulty in working for American intelligence.
Muller and His Journals
As a young man, Heinrich Muller began to keep a brief record of his daily activities, a practice that he maintained throughout his life. There were times during the Sturm und Drang of his life when he was unable to maintain his entries, but these gaps were generally filled in when he had the opportunity.
In the beginning, Muller only noted down how much he had paid for something or a brief record of a trip or a chance meeting with an attractive woman, generally including her address and other such important information. When he was a young mechanic at the BMW aircraft engine plant, he kept notes on various engines he worked on, with occasional comments about the progress of the First World War that erupted when he was fourteen years old. Once Müller joined the army in 1917 and was assigned to a flying unit, his notes became more personal and began to cover his flights, actions and a host of other incidents that were far more interesting than the day-to-day drudgery of factory work.
He met his future wife at a Munich bus stop and was careful to note down the time and place of the meeting as well as her address and the fact that her father published a newspaper for the Bavarian People¹s Party (BVP). After the war, Müller joined the Bavarian Political Police and was heavily involved in activities against both the communists and Nazis and his earlier journals were now eclipsed by locally momentous events. The Hitler Putsch of 1923 was one event which got considerable coverage as well as the aftermath of the earlier communist seizure of power in Munich and its eventual overthrow by units of the Freikorps, the army, and police.
As Muller advanced in the Bavarian police, his notebooks are filled with observations on the political scene of the late 1920's and the eventual rise to power of Hitler and the National Socialists. Thinking he would be removed from his post when Hitler became Chancellor and the NSDAP came to power in Bavaria in 1933, Muller, who was always an ambitious man, began to prepare a flood of well-researched papers on his struggles with the communists in Bavaria and his observations on how they could best be countered by the new state.
These reports came into the hands of Heinrich Himmler who turned them over to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS intelligence service. Heydrich then decided to overlook Muller's persecution of the Nazi movement as well as his adherence to the Catholic-oriented conservative Bavarian People’s Party and put him in charge of the Gestapo. This agency was a Prussian state entity, not very large in size and certainly not particularly influential. Muller, ever using his ambition as a goad and his intelligence as a weapon, began to develop this small group of professional police officials into a huge agency that at its height had over fifty thousand agents, sub agents and informers. Muller developed card files on nearly everyone in Germany and his organizational skills increased not only the size, but also the effectiveness of the Gestapo.
This agency dealt mainly with internal subversion and was in essence a police counter-intelligence group. Many of Muller's associates were professional police officers and many were not members of the Nazi Party. Muller himself did not join the Party until 1939, at which time he was awarded the Blood Order, one of the most prestigious Party decorations, ironically intended for members of the NSDAP who had been involved with the 1923 Putsch in Munich. Since Müller was involved in the crushing of this uprising, his award of the Blood Order, plus his membership in the SS, infuriated loyal Party officials in Munich who bombarded their superiors with loud complaints about Mueller's new plumage, as they termed it. During this time, Muller kept his journals up but as the war approached, their pages were no longer filled with women¹s addresses or telephone numbers or how much he had paid for a sausage and beer in the local restaurant. Instead of bratwurst, the pages were filled with high-level material on internal matters, often affairs that were never reported in the German press and certainly not outside the country.
It would be entirely safe to say that Heinrich Muller with his telephone taps, legions of informers, mail surveillance departments, radio interception teams and millions of index cards, knew more about the internal workings of Hitler’s Third Reich than anyone else. Muller wrote much of this fascinating but little known historical material down on a daily or weekly basis. When working on his journals at home, Muller taught himself to write backwards so his ever curious and always disapproving wife, Sophie, could not read his acid and often secret remarks.
After the war and his resettlement in Switzerland, Muller resumed keeping his journals and he brought these with him to the United States in 1948. Heinrich Muller's journals were certainly never intended for publication or justification. They are always brutally frank, cynical, highly informative and at least for some readers, entertaining. Muller did not suffer fools gladly and even though he had to work with his former enemies, there was no reason for him not to perform private literary surgery on their overweight, alcoholic bodies and flabby personalities.
In his journals, Muller emerges early on as a womanizer, a cynical and very often amoral man, consumed with ambition and tolerating no one who attempted to stand in his way.
His wartime Swiss acquaintance, Allan Dulles, offered Muller a job. He took it and used his position to ingratiate himself with the President of the United States and the Director of the FBI as well as to marry into a wealthy and influential Washington family. He had no hesitation in exchanging information and confidences with a high-level Soviet agent although his raison d¹etre was to assist his new employers in tracking down and exposing the same people. At one time, he had the same agent to dinner with two of the senior members of the CIA and, from his notes, thoroughly enjoyed the irony of the situation. In fact, it could be said that Muller always seemed to enjoy the ironical side of his work, took nothing seriously and filled his journals with comments and asides which the complaisant and conventional view with genuine horror and, more often than not, great disgust.
In Washington, Muller lost no time in climbing the social ladder and filling his Georgetown home with a fortune in art stolen by the Germans during the war. Some of this art, which included portions of the famed Amber Room, he sold off for the private purses of his co-workers in the CIA. He once gave a small, very private dinner for the President to which Muller wore all of his Third Reich and Imperial decorations and while sitting across from President Truman, discussed the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy, a man to whom Muller was supplying inside information to aid him in his reign of terror.
Muller had known the British-Soviet spy, Harold “Kim” Philby who worked for everyone from the Nazis to the communists, before the war and renewed his acquaintance when Philby was sent to Washington as British liaison to the FBI and CIA.
There are several instances where Muller, Philby and Viktor, his NKVD friend, and occasionally, Allan Dulles, would sit in the refined atmosphere of Washington's highly exclusive Metropolitan Club library and discuss all manner of highly classified information. In return for his hospitality, Muller was given an equal amount of highly classified Soviet and British information that his CIA employers found of great value. This high level information trading between putative enemies is typical of the intelligence communities of all nations and is certainly the rule, not the exception.
Initially, when Muller came to Washington in 1948, he was not fluent in English and was certainly a stranger, but he quickly adapted. From trivia about his water pipes and the weather, Muller's journals quickly expand into detailed, highly opinionated, coverage of the Red spy hunts, the internecine fighting in the nation's capital, open warfare between the FBI and the CIA, and Muller's negative and often highly entertaining views on the top levels of the CIA. It is in these passages that Muller wields the knife as well as the bludgeon.
Although happily married, Muller had no problem conducting brief but intense affairs with the bored and unsatisfied wives of his closest co-workers, affairs which he had no problem entering in his journals, along with any significant pillow talk he gleaned from his romps in a Gretna Green hotel bedroom.
In his relations with his personal staff, Muller clearly emerges as a kind and very considerate man but outside of his inner circle, he was entertaining, pleasant... and utterly ruthless. He kept at least one assassin on his staff and had no qualms when this man dispatched people who Muller felt might have identified him as the former head of the Gestapo. At the same time, Muller encouraged romances among his staff members, gave extensive financial support to the family of one assistant and certainly was very kind and affectionate to his dog.
Frederick the Great once said that the more he saw of humanity, the more he loved his dogs, and Muller, by his actions and personal views, certainly agreed with the Prussian King’s commentary.
Although it is doubtful if Muller could have added valuable medical knowledge to his other attributes, nevertheless, he instructed his CIA co-workers in various methods of giving unwanted people sudden heart attacks.
When he first came to Washington, Muller noted that a number of inconvenient people, to include James Forrestal, were being thrown out of upper floor windows to their deaths on the pavement below. He suggested that an induced heart attack was far less dangerous to people passing by on the sidewalk beneath the victim.
One of the criticisms of the series on, and by, Heinrich Muller is that the tenor of the conversations held between American government officials and the former chief of the Gestapo is outrageously cynical, manipulative and amoral on the part of all parties involved. There seems to be an image fixed in the minds of a few which has all leading members of a government in general and the CIA in particular, participants in an elegant and refined tableau reminiscent of a dinner at Thomas Jefferson’s Montecello where serious matters of state were debated by high-minded gentlemen over port and a pipe of fine Virginia tobacco. In reality, the days when gentlemen were to be found in government are long over and forgotten with only the memory lingering on to uplift the spirits of the hopeful and trusting. Pragmatism and ruthlessness have replaced manners and morals so that the private discussions of Presidents, Congressmen, Cabinet members and heads of intelligence agencies sound far more like a sit down in a Brooklyn clam house between Mafia dons than an eighteenth century literary salon. As Muller himself often said, morals and ethics are excellent norms but not very effective techniques.
Nearly all of the historical events depicted in these books run counter to the history which has been taught in the schools or depicted in an endless flood of works on the Second World War and the years subsequent. In the main, this is because the propaganda of those eras has been codified by the participants themselves and embroidered by a following legion of obedient court historians, poured into literary concrete and pointed to with great pride by their creators.
No government or leader has ever admitted being wrong, as witness the complete reluctance to absolve Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short of culpability in the lack of preparation at Pearl Harbor in 1941. It is now generally believed by the majority of interested Americans that President Franklin Roosevelt, and his immediate cohorts, had ample pre-knowledge of the pending Japanese attack but in spite of this widespread belief, no administration will ever admit to the errors of another administration, even sixty years after the fact.
The survival and employment by the United States of Heinrich Muller and a significant number of his former agents is contained in American archives but for reasons that are entirely obvious, these papers are still sealed with the highest security classifications. Even though all the participants in this event are long dead, governments, like corporations, are living entities and the sins of the fathers are not to be visited upon their children.
The journals of Heinrich Muller are by their very nature, revisionist in the extreme and because of this revision of favorite myths and legends, abhorrent to the orthodox as well as those who chance to be employed by the same agencies that Muller so brutally scores. In order to refute his ugly depictions of national icons, legions of historians, government officials and ubiquitous academics have been improving their shining hours by frantic and extensive searches in various archives and official records on two continents. The sole purpose of their labors is to attempt to disprove the myriad allegations of ignorance, idleness and vice expressed by the former head of Hitler’s secret police in his private journals. The sum and total of all this wasted labor can be found in such unhappy comments as are found in a British intelligence journal which states with shrill authority that because there were two typographical errors in three volumes, the contents of all of them have no historical value whatsoever.
Less substantive objections generally center on the fact that the reader¹s sensibilities and beliefs have been badly shaken; that the material simply cannot be true because the reader believes something else which, because he believes it, means it must be the personification of truth itself. At the end of the twentieth century one finds hope, trust and idealism residing in adjoining cots at a cut rate nursing home while waiting for the lights to go out.
Muller's journals did not begin in 1948 nor end in 1952 but they represent an important era in American history and present views of an insider who was privy to the most intimate secrets of the United States government and its senior members at the beginning of the Cold War, a campaign whose long-term effects are still being felt throughout the world.
The Müller Journals
translated by Gregory Douglas and Dr. Charles B. Burdick
Monday, 6 December 1948
The first week in Washington. I think I would have preferred to go to the tropics but it appears not to be. Impressive white buildings in one part of the city and terrible Negro slums in the rest. Contrasts are indicative of the attitude towards the social position of the former slaves. Ignore them. On the 8th the President will be talking to the President of Cuba about nothing but I am to see him as soon as my new chiefs of office will allow it. To begin to work on background material as soon as we have selected a proper house. Not considered a good idea for me to work in a regular office but at home.
Wednesday, 8 December 1948
Will move into a pleasant house in the Georgetown area. It is for sale but the government will rent it for me. It is an older house, more of a villa than a small house, but with a few servants and much better furniture, it will suffice. Thick piles of papers on the Chambers business to go over as well as preparing some material for the Justice Department based on my own papers. I will interview Colonel Hoover soon enough. It will be interesting to meet my opposite number, especially since I know a great deal about him but he knows almost nothing about me. Advantages are always better if you have them. Winter is not as bad here as it was in Munich but there are no mountains to hike in although they tell me that “out West” there are more than enough. I will have to wait on that.
Sunday, 12 December 1948
I went to Mass this morning. Should take up where I left off and establish my good relations with the Church. Three of my people will arrive here tomorrow. The State Department spy ring is far more extensive than I would have thought. Apparently, Roosevelt was fully aware of the penetration by communists and permitted it. The entire agency is filled from cellar to attic with Lenin-lovers. Typical pseudo-intellectual assholes; they are everywhere in Washington. Totally ignorant but well-born fools or intelligent radicals. I have no choice...I have to associate with the former and destroy the latter. The lease is signed, money paid and I am now awaiting the furniture. The crated paintings are safe enough here. Insisting on bringing them with me prevented some official thief from taking them home with him. The money situation is not at all bad but we must be careful not to let the idiots know how much I have or they will try to reduce my salary. Most of them don’t know the difference between an original Raphael and a Klee so I am more or less safe there although I cannot hang anything where it can be seen. The new place is bigger than the one in Geneva but I know there is a cemetery nearby. Well, we all end up in one sooner or later.
Oakhill Cemetery lies on the edge of Georgetown. Muller had a large and very expensive collection of rare art, much of which had been looted during the war by the Germans and after the war by the O.S.S and the C.I.A. He supplemented his income by dealing in such art, both for himself and his American friends.
Monday, 13 December 1948
The arrival of my staff people has been delayed for a week, making things rather difficult. Typical military stupidity. Someone obviously couldn’t read the papers correctly. I have set up a camp bed in the best bedroom and brought over all of my paintings. Even if I can’t hang them yet, it is pleasant enough to look at the crates. I have told T. (Truman, ed.) that there is no doubt at all that Hiss is the one the Soviets called ‘Alexi’ at least in the reports I have. He fits all the points very well. Such unhappiness.
I am told the President is not happy about the amount of espionage we have uncovered here. He thinks that by firing Wallace and closing down the O.S.S (which T. says stands for “Oh So Social” because it was full of socially prominent fools) he can clean up the Roosevelt sewer. I think not. I will have to talk to him about this...that is if they ever let me see him. I am told he is curious. Also that I must play the piano for him like a street musician’s pet monkey! Well, I can play a little Strauss and perhaps some simple Chopin.
Berle
This Chambers is a fat homosexual idiot but he put everyone right into the fire with his papers.
Now they tell me that even before the war, he told the State Department about high-level espionage in the
State Department but that Berle shut him up. When I told them that Berle worked with the Soviets, there
was much head scratching and long faces.We knew all their diplomatic codes were broken before the war by us, the British and the Soviets. That’s why I never liked to send coded messages and I refused to use our telephone system because it was like an old garden hose. Too many leaks. They tell me Hoover listens to everyone, or used to. Truman hates him and considers him to be a debased timeserver and informer. Who isn’t? Truman did not receive a majority in the election, only 49% but he did win which is important. I remember a conversation with Ribbentrop once about hunting. He said he had missed an elk by “just a centimeter” but he did miss and the distance isn’t important.
FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, is called “Colonel” by Muller. Hoover was offered this rank by Roosevelt during the war but declined the honor, expecting to be made a General at least. Hoover, at Roosevelt’s instruction, tapped the telephones of official Washington and rushed the results to Roosevelt. He attempted to do this with Truman but was ordered to cease this practice at once and Truman refused to have any dealings with Hoover. Adolf Berle, Jr. was one of the “Brain Trusters” of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Undersecretary of State under Hull. He has been identified as a Soviet source.
Friday, 17 December 1948
Two of my people have arrived at last and I was able to get some decent furniture into the house. In cleaning out a closet, I found some old newspapers talking about Wilson’s death. Old newspapers, dripping faucets and dead flies on the window ledges are being cleaned out. My family is doing well enough, I understand, but I can do very little now. The Amis are still looking for me and I have been told to be very careful because they are watching everyone in Pasing. Small, discreet assistance is being rendered.
I have turned nearly all of my State Department material over to the Justice people and also have had my first unofficial guest, Msgr. S. (Spellman, ed.). We make progress to save our souls. A bit of pleasant information for him. Pius hates the communists worse than I do so at least I have some friends left. Christmas is always a bad time when one is away from family but we will make do. The Americans cook turkey (Trauthahn) here and celebrate on Christmas Day instead of Christmas Eve. We shall keep to the old customs and have goose and ham. A tree with candles too but I am told that electric lights are considered safer.
After the war, Muller's wife and daughter returned to the old family home in Pasing, a suburb of Munich. They were later joined by his son who had been in a prisoner of war camp as a tank driver in the elite Adolf Hitler Leibstandarte Armored Division. The American CIC as well as Soviet intelligence closely watched the family and it was eventually discovered that Muller had contact with his wife but nothing could be done about this because CIC reports were not acted upon. Muller was a nominal Catholic who officially had to leave the Church at Himmler’s request. In 1948, Pope Pius XII who, as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli had been Nuncio to Germany, had a deep and abiding hatred of communism, having seen its terrorist actions at the end of the First World War.
Wednesday, 22 December 1948
Interesting news this morning. The dining room is much the way I want it with fresh paint, new draperies and much of the furniture from Geneva in place. At breakfast I had a visitor who was much excited. When the servants had left, he closed the door in a most conspiratorial manner and rushed over to tell me the news! Mr. Duggan had accidentally fallen out of his office window last night! Such a tragedy and so soon before the holidays too. Well, I suppose if he had lived, he would have been up before the courts and might have said something. Of course I have not been here long enough to have helped him and I have only been through New York, but my fellow workers seem to be more than capable in this field. We all share such common interests.
My informant, who kept trying to eat my fresh rolls, told me that the matter is to be kept quiet. I wonder when a man falls sixteen floors to the street how this can be kept quiet? Did he come down on somebody, I wonder? How do you explain the brains on a car parked on the street? He had a bad headache and his head exploded suddenly?
I am supposed to talk to a Mr. Nixon either today or tomorrow about some of this. Not to mention the fake suicide at all. He doesn’t know and ought not to but is considered a very good ally. Now it seems I will not see the President until after the holidays because he has gone home to his farm. It gives me more time to polish my English. One of the water pipes broke last night but fortunately there was nothing in the cellar and everything has been fixed. The neighborhood is pleasant and there are some excellent parks here. I shall make a visit to the art museum as soon as I can, that is if I get through the mountains of files that they keep dumping on me. The new secretary is not as pretty as the last one but is very accommodating. The question is whether or not she stays in the house or lives elsewhere. We will see how we get along. It is good to have the regular cook back. He knows exactly what I want and when I want it. It is a terrible trouble to break in new servants. I used to let my wife do that but now it is my job.
More trouble in Berlin but that is to be expected. Mundt is supposed to stop over this afternoon and perhaps we can settle a few things. There was great tension in Soviet-blockaded Berlin but this did not materialize into open warfare as the militant U.S. war party so often and loudly predicted. Karl Mundt, a conservative Congressman from South Dakota, had been elected in 1946 along with Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin. The American Congress was, by 1948, extremely conservative, mainly as the result of a grassroots movement against the rampant liberalism of the Roosevelt era.
Friday, 24 December 1948
Hiss claims that all are lies. We know better. Pot boiling over the Duggan “accident.” Nixon is sure the man killed himself rather than face “the music” but we know better here. The rest of the staff is here and about half of the house is ready for use. My bedroom is finally finished and last night I personally hung my treasures up. One does get used to the same mattress and while the windows do not give me the view I used to have, still, the effect is soothing and restful. Herta is not as pleasant as Barbara or Anna but, all in all, gives promise. I told her to stop eating so much! She is used to the very poor food in Europe after all. If she starts to get fat, I will have to replace her. Krieger will come over in January and if H. doesn’t work out, at least I know where I am with my loyal stenographer.
Saturday, 25 December 1948
Christmas this evening. An excellent goose which I bought myself and in the very large drawing room a very fine tree. I decided not to put electric lights on it and I put it into the stand that revolves and plays songs on the apparatus inside. The candles make my staff feel at home. The gifts are ready to hand out and the staff got me a very nice watch that I will have to wear to keep them happy.
The President’s people have said that Duggan was not a spy and was the victim of an accident, not a suicide. How do you define an accident? He was accidentally standing by an open window in the middle of winter when some thoughtless secretary shoved him out because he bit her breasts the night before? That awful Roosevelt woman says that press accounts of the high-flying Duggan were terrible. I can write better English than she can but we at least have similar interests...women.
I have discovered that Washington is, like the boiler in the cellar, not unlike Berlin. Gossip, chatter, innuendo, deep thrusts into the back by good friends, greed and, above all, total ignorance of almost everything but how to acquire money and most of all, importance.
I am learning to be very awe-inspired when I have to listen to people like General Smith who is a very small-minded man. He is near-sighted and stares intently at people, impressing them with the brilliance of his mind. If he wore glasses, he would be less impressive. When he was in England with Eisenhower, he chased hotel maids from morning to night. Of course Eisenhower had an affair with his driver, female I must say. Well, I can’t condemn them for such activities but I would never have chased old English women around with my pants open. Smith is now busy practicing his expertise on the Russians but it is rumored that he may return here permanently. They seem to like military personages running their various agencies.
The Admiral was at Pearl Harbor when it came under attack. For some reason, I have neglected to enlighten him about certain facts concerning that episode, facts which would no doubt meet with the disbelief the orthodox display when confronted with uncomfortable truths. I may have to go to New York after all when the Grand Jury comes back next month. It will be interesting to go to the Metropolitan Museum at least. Perhaps I will have the chance to see the President before then. I will have to go downstairs soon so I will wish my family and myself a very Happy Christmas and a Fortunate New Year!
Tuesday, 28 December 1948
I see that Truman will be receiving a nice increase in his pay soon. Too early for me to consider such a thing. Christmas was as expected, sad but very pleasant in the new country. No longer hear German in the streets, although in Geneva it was more often French. Some prominent USA trade union people are being investigated by the legislature now. I have always maintained that next to university professors, the trade unions conceal the worst communists.
I will see the President sometime just after the New Year.
Now that the house is in order, I am having the wine cellar filled and I am expected to have some of my fellow workers over for a New Year party.
Welles
More strange stories to relate. The former deputy Secretary of State, Welles, was found lying
unconscious in the snow at his estate near here on the day after Christmas. Robert told me that Welles, who
was once the real Secretary (I keep wanting to write Minister here) of State was an old fairy who liked
sailors, especially black ones. Could one of them have beaten him up? This does happen but no one wants
to talk about it. He is alive but has frostbite. The Stalingrad sickness. We used to call the East Medal the
Frozen Meat Order for just that reason.General Truscott told me an extremely funny story about General Smith. He does not like him at all and I will put this down in case I need it later on.
The General, who was Chief of Staff to Eisenhower, was in Sicily during the campaign there and apparently was late for a conference with General Patton (probably the best the Americans had). They sent a staff car to see why he was late and found his car parked on the edge of a road. This was near an American artillery battery and when Smith heard the guns firing, he was sure they were Germans and fled, screaming like a girl, from his car and ran down into the bushes. It took three officers, including a General, to convince him that it was safe to return but everyone was terribly embarrassed to discover that Smith had shit his pants full! Someone had to put down a briefcase for him to sit on so he didn’t mess the car!
They say Patton enjoyed this very much.
Walter Bedell Smith
The next time I have to deal with Smith, I will remember the story but I do not think I will bring it
up to him. I understand he will be in Washington officially on Tuesday. He will see the President. Wants to
be let out of the Ambassadorship and am told he has had someone write a book for him.The story about Walter Bedell Smith is quite true and can be found today in the papers of General George Patton. From 1946 through 1949, Smith was U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and after this, head of the CIA. According to his files, Müller’s initial contact with Smith and several others came about while he was being considered for employment.
Sumner Welles, who had once been the de facto Secretary of State and a close personal friend of Roosevelt, had left the government in 1943 as the result of a scandal involving a homosexual incident with a black Pullman porter on an official trip. He later began to drink heavily and was found unconscious on the grounds of his Maryland estate under circumstances that have never been explained.
Sunday, 2 January 1949
We have had very bad weather here, all across the eastern part of the continent. Very cold and much snow. Not unfamiliar to me. If Americans have a few centimeters of snow on the ground, they go quite mad with apprehension. The press is always filled with amusing stories. In Canada, some politician, out for a walk in the bad snowstorm, lost his way, fell into a river and drowned.
We had a decent little party last night and only one senior officer got drunk and threw up in the pantry. None of them know the difference between vinegar and prime vintage so I served them terrible domestic wine and champagne in expensive bottles. Soldiers who spend their wars in canteens or safely behind desks are so boastful with a few ounces of alcohol in them.
I recall a talk I had recently with Thayer and that obnoxious Russian, Pash. He is a hard-faced man with glasses who used to be a gymnastics teacher, hates all communists, Jews and Japanese. He was bragging to us how he pushed a General Dewitt into locking all the Japanese-Americans away in concentration camps at the beginning of their war. He took positive delight in this and then went on to discuss, in front of Thayer who had pretensions of gentility, the way he had Togliatti shot in Rome last July. I quote him exactly “We shot the ginny (?) in the head and he still lived. The next time we can stick a grenade up his wop ass.” After Thayer looked like he might enjoy throwing up privately, Pash went on to discuss how he and the Wisner gang of assassins were once going to shoot Wallace! He was very bitter that he was talked out of this little program! Marvelous what kind of lunatics we have to deal with. Suppose he didn’t like the President’s piano playing and fired a Panzerfaust into his ear?
Wallace needs to be attended to but not by Pash and I think a heart attack would be most beneficial. When I said this, Thayer looked at me as if I were mad and then excused himself. He probably did vomit into the bushes outside. At any rate, he did me the disservice by leaving me with the lunatic Pash who revealed a plot to me about poisoning some left wing newspaper reporter he hated.
I will have to go to New York at once and can see the President when I come back. After him, I will be honored to visit with Colonel Hoover and, of course, the Admiral once again. I use the excuse of my work to avoid most of these idiots and assholes but sometimes, I have a duty to perform. This is not much different from the old days, after all.
Boris T. Pash was born Boris Pashkovski in Russia. His father was the Metropolitan Theophilus Pashkovski. Boris shortened his name in 1932. He was a refugee who came to this country after the October Revolution. He was a gym teacher in Los Angeles and held a rank in the National Guard of California. He was instrumental in persuading General De Witt to endorse a program of deportation and imprisonment of all Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. Pash was later chief of security for the Manhattan atomic program and while there, incurred Roosevelt’s wrath by attempting to arrest a number of communist agents engaged in work on the project. He later became head of the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) in San Francisco.
After the war, he was in charge of the ‘Alsos Project’ in which Pash and a team of military police went around conquered Germany rounding up German atomic scientists and shipping them to the United States. Later, he became involved with the new CIA and worked with Frank Wisner, head of the CIA’s clandestine operations. Pash was a strong anti-communist and became involved in various assassination projects such as the attempted murder of Italian communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti on 14 July, 1948, in Rome. The assassination attempt was a failure.
The Thayer mentioned was Charles Thayer who had been OSS chief in Vienna after the war. He became head of the Voice of America in 1947. He died in 1969 during a heart operation. Thayer was a strong proponent of the use of former Third Reich officials to combat communism but was viewed as too liberal by the hard-line conservatives who were bent on purging any element from government that they did not view as strongly anti-Soviet. Thayer’s problem was that he adopted a more moderate course of action and eventually was forced out of government service.
Thursday, 6 January 1949
New York. Bad weather in Washington when I left. Cold and instead of snow, it rained! Excellent rooms at the Hotel Plaza and a fine view from my windows of the great park. Much like the English Garden.
A shipment arrived for me here on the Los Angeles out of Antwerp. Must supervise the disposition of my material.
While the Grand Jury is sitting here, I am involved in work on the witnesses and the individuals being heard. Max Bedacht, whom I know of from my Munich days, is a witness. A known communist for certain but one who has changed his allegiance. A brief conversation with him and we talked about Weiss Ferdl and a pub he knew in Schwabing. Get on their good side, always.
Levine, the writer, talks to me about the communists for over three hours. He once said he knew about the late Duggan being a communist agent but now recants somewhat. He is getting pressure from the Administration here that, on the one hand, wants to clean out the communists (mostly because the people want them to) but on the other do not want to disrupt the image of the Roosevelt Administration and their communistic New Deal. They wish to have it both ways and they cannot.
I had to talk to Chambers who is a fat, untidy and very emotional man, filled with guilt about his
communism and his homosexuality. Basically, he is trying to tell the truth and often does but he is so
emotionally involved that he often goes far afield.
New York is a very interesting city. The famous “skyscrapers” are impressive and I spent part of yesterday morning at the Metropolitan Museum, which is splendid and can be walked to from the hotel although my security people do not like the idea. I will have to come back again or at least spin out my stay here and see more of it. Also, visited a dozen very good antique galleries and made some purchases. In one, I found a complete set of silver service for twelve. German, mid-19th century and obviously stolen by a GI after the war. But cheap enough and the initial matches my own new name so I had to buy the set. Two heavy boxes that my man carried out to the taxicab. The drivers of these vehicles are quite interesting characters. Also bought two miniatures, Elizabethan English, which show a man and his wife. Good frames and good techniques.
More work with the Grand Jury people. Levine very strongly exposes extensive communist networks here, in Mexico and Canada. At least some of what he produced as evidence makes complete sense and I will have to check it out. He thinks I am Swiss and asked me where he could buy a good cuckoo clock! I told him that these were German and he made a great face and said bad things about the Germans. These encounters are entertaining because I wonder what Levine would do if he discovered that he had lunch in the hotel suite of the head of the Gestapo! He even mentioned my old agency and went into some entirely inaccurate history. It was all I could do to keep from laughing in his very serious, pedantic face!
Colonel Hoover now claims he has “investigated” over two million US officials and found that only about seven thousand were “suspicious.” First, I cannot believe he has investigated so many and my own percentages are far higher. I am looking forward to my interview with him. It would be better to interview him at my home in Washington. He can sit down while I stand up with the window behind me. That way, I will have the physical and psychological advantage over him. I am told to keep my secretary away from him because attractive women tend to annoy him. A very proper man but, according to my background information, a savage anti-communist who ruthlessly persecuted thousands both during and after the 1914 war. Terrible legal troubles later over this but one can see just how he thinks. When Wilson was hidden in the White House (syphilis or stroke?) and no one ran the country, Hoover and his people ran amok (a word I learned from Hewel).
Americans tend to be either one way or the other. One day they embrace you and the next, beat you to death with a piece of metal pipe. This mindless chatter will go on for weeks but I have no reason to go back to Washington as long as I can impress people here. This is where the activity is, after all.
Perhaps I can get to a concert at the Metropolitan Opera. Is it true that they have a gold curtain there? Perhaps someday the Americans might reconstitute the Berlin Philharmonic but I doubt if Furtwängler will ever be allowed to conduct it. After all, he dared to conduct the orchestra when Hitler was present and this makes him a dangerous and evil Nazi although all he thought of was skiing, women and music. I understand F. was to conduct in Chicago but the Jews in the orchestra there made such a fuss that he will probably not come.
The American Army board has recommended clemency for most of the Peiper men from the Ardennes battle. If they didn’t need us so badly to fight the Russians, they would have hanged a lot more of us.
Ambassador Walther Hewel was Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop’s permanent representative at Hitler’s military headquarters. As a young student at the Munich University, Hewel had been with Hitler in his abortive putsch in 1923 and later went to Java where he learned to speak the local language. He vanished at the end of the war and is reputed to have escaped from embattled Berlin.
It was 1951 before Wilhelm Furtwängler, former conductor of the famous Berlin Philharmonic was permitted to conduct in public again.
Thursday, 20 January 1949
Today, Truman is to be inaugurated here at a great ceremony. I was invited to attend but have made my excuses. From what I have seen of American parades, compared with German ceremonies, they always seem very amateurish. Besides, I have to go over literally thousands of pages of paper, some mine and some theirs, dealing with communists and I simply cannot spare the time.
There was also a large official function last evening, also to which I did not go although one of my General friends offered to get me a ticket. I have no interest in meeting with famous Americans at this point and besides, my English is not so good yet. Perhaps later when I learn to speak with less accent. I am hiring a speech teacher who thinks I am a Swiss national, which in fact I suppose I am although the German is certainly not the same.
Cold, very clear and windy. I took a pleasant walk through the streets of Georgetown and noticed all of the very old red brick buildings, built like Dutch houses, almost up to the street and very narrow. Attractive enough and how interesting to compare these old and historic buildings with the awful Negro slums in other parts of town. We would never have permitted such disgusting living areas in Germany but this is a democracy, as I am constantly being told, and people can largely do as they like.
A little later, I heard the roar of military aircraft over the city and went up on the roof just to be certain that the Russians weren’t attacking. American planes, part of the ceremony. It takes a very long time to get the sound of bombers directly overhead out of one’s mind.
Friday, 4 February 1949
Our dear friend Comrade Josef does not want to come to visit Truman in the United States because his doctor won’t allow him to! No one dares tell Stalin what to do. I understand that he wishes to meet Truman in Czechoslovakia instead. Two reasons for this: One, Stalin dares not leave Russia because he is terrified of a coup and second, he hates Truman who has consistently thwarted his expansionist plans and will make some kind of an attempt to kill him in the safety of one of his slave countries. Probably blame it on priests or the Benes faction. I have given my own opinion on this where it should do some good but have been told that Truman detests Stalin, sees him for what he is, a lunatic murderer, and will not go.
Weather has been cold and very clear. There is a garden here that has gone to seed and perhaps in the spring, something creative can be done. I should have Papa come over and work in it but that certainly will not be. Things seem to be going as well as can be expected at home. The family is still being bothered by the Amis but I think they can survive. They are looking in the wrong place for me after all. Do these idiots think I am hiding in the attic or creep into the house disguised in a wig and false beard?
After the war, Müller’s family all lived in a small house in the Munich suburb of Pasing. His father, wife, daughter and son, a recently released prisoner of war, were quite poor and ostracized because of Müller’s position in the Gestapo. Müller’s father, Alois, had never been a great success in life, having tried his hand at a number of occupations; policeman, church restorer and professional gardener. He failed at all of these projects and certainly instilled a greatly heightened sense of ambition in his only son.
Thursday, 10 February 1949
More paperwork, endless paperwork. I was given a fine shepherd dog today as a guard animal. A male, about a year old, black and tan and very intelligent. He has some enormously long name on his papers but I will call him Maxl. My wife hated dogs but I do not and I think we will get along very well indeed. Well-trained, just like Hitler’s favorite bitch was. Schopenhauer was right about people and dogs. On the other hand, Herta is still stuffing herself like a sausage and the cook is complaining that she invades his kitchen at all hours and disrupts his planned meals. I have spoken with H. about this eating problem several times and I will have to get rid of her if she does not stop. I do not like people to ignore my suggestions and her problem is not physical. Also, I do not like fat women and she is moving quickly in that direction.
Irmgard has arrived, is not happy with my domestic arrangement and I assured her it would change soon. My excuse was that H. had been assigned to me!
After finally meeting the President, some of my impressions. I never knew Roosevelt but this one must be a welcome change. A dynamic man, friendly but also firm. Not well versed in European politics and very suspicious of the military. He understands domestic politics very well, having been a legislator for some years. I think basically an honest man and I can see why Stalin loathes him. Truman comes directly to the point and cuts through the diplomatic nonsense. As I thought, he is of two minds about the communist business, also a little frightened about its extent and probably would like to push it aside. We talked about Duggan and he does not feel he was a communist and said “poor man” several times. He asked me what I thought about Hitler and so on. Intelligent questions. He will officially hear nothing bad about Roosevelt but in private does not speak well of him. This is a small town farmer in thought and the sophistication of the American intellectual establishment very much annoys him. They, of course, hate him because they all loved Roosevelt and his ways. Truman said that Roosevelt had to “put him on the ticket” because he was forced to...that R. wanted crazy Wallace but couldn’t get him. In revenge, R. never told Truman anything at all and completely ignored him! And this when R. knew he was dying! T. also said Roosevelt “couldn’t tell the truth to save his soul.” That I can believe. He also told me that the White House was “a pigsty” when he moved in and that Mrs. Roosevelt and the family lived like “poor white trash” in what he called the People’s House.
Mrs. R. used to bring her lady friends into the building, even when the President was there, but refused to allow him to bring any of his lady friends around. And Truman said the cook belonged in the kitchen of a penitentiary and that State dinners were avoided like the Black Death.
Another historical footnote: When R. died, his old friend (who I know hated him) Churchill, refused to attend the funeral. I told T. that C. was a drunken, fat little fairy and I actually got the President to laugh. He told me that he heard I liked to play the piano and that I must visit with him at home and we could play duets! My God, I will have to fortify myself with schnapps first! They tell me his unattractive daughter thinks she is a wonderful singer but sounds like a cat was being run over by a truck. That will be an evening I could do without, believe me. The term “monkey love” is often very applicable.
The wall hangings have come down from New York and I will have them put up over the weekend. They will join the Goeblens already in the hall. Every time I see these, I recall them hanging in the new Chancellery. The Vienna Museum is no doubt still looking for them. If Peiner had finished his projected pieces, they would have been returned to Vienna and I would have bare places on my walls.
I am to have some of my associates in for dinner next week. Someone told me that I am supposed to have a “wonderful wine cellar,” but this was from someone who was at the New Year’s party and drank the swill! (The same General who threw up in the pantry). I am supposed to have lunch with Wisner but I will put it off as long as I can. I cannot abide him; he drinks far too much, is terribly arrogant without any visible reason for it and appears to me to be more than half-mad. I mentioned my opinions of him to the President but he is not sufficiently in control to do much about such assholes as Pash and Wisner.[Interesting comment about control and the President there D.C]
The tapestries mentioned were on loan to Hitler from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna while Werner Peiner, a German artist, was working on an original series of hangings, which depicted scenes from German military history. This series was never finished and the old tapestries vanished at the end of the war.
Monday, 14 February 1949
I need to devote more time to these personal records but the amount of work I have laid out for myself makes it difficult. For obvious reasons, I cannot have my secretary transcribe them (I think I have found a job for her at the Treasury Department.) She hates Maxl, who now sleeps in my room, and he detests her in turn. Dogs always know about such things. Herta is available but too difficult. She said last week that either the dog goes or she does. She leaves next week and Irmgard will take her place. If I am careful about what I say, I might be able to get I. to write up these notes.
Interesting situation here with Agnes Smedly(L), a communist agent, and Anna Strong,(R) another one.
Meisinger exposed the Sorge ring in Japan during the war and Smedly was involved. Just recently,
MacArthur released some background material on the ring and Smedly threatens to sue! This seems to be
the standard communist tactic. First, deny everything and then sue anyone who even hints that they were an
agent. This works with weak people and makes them retract but has become very obvious as a legal tactic
and we ought to find ways to circumvent their legal remedies. Now to more interesting comments.
Have finally met with Colonel Hoover! He wouldn’t come here so we met on neutral ground. He insisted on bringing three men with him so I countered with six! The result was that we went off privately and had a surprisingly amiable conversation. He is angry because he doesn’t really know who I am and keeps hinting that he has “certain information” about me. I know I have real information about him but since I have to work with him, I kept my mouth shut. I was fully warned and was properly pro-American and very laudatory of his efforts, “even from the earliest days” to alert America to the “Red Menace” as he calls it. He is a strict disciplinarian and seems to be very competent but is the sort which is either highly dictatorial or very subservient. In my case, he poked around to see if I was a potential rival. I convinced him that I was not although he occupies the same position in this country that I did in Germany. I confess I would like his job but he has been in place for years and the game would not be worth the candle.
We fenced with each other for nearly two hours but it was not unprofitable for either one of us and I am sure we can work together. One always has to defer to him but not out of ignorance or weakness. He will exploit both. He knows Truman doesn’t like him so I made him happy when I told him that I had praised him to the President and hoped that he would achieve the recognition from the new leader which he once had from the last, great one. I must say that he didn’t like Roosevelt either and told me at least ten really terrible anecdotes about the man.
Better to be a live dog than a dead lion.
I will invite Mr. or better, Director Hoover over for dinner one of these days. I don’t know if he is a fairy or not; I suspect not. He lives with his mother, they tell me, and is very pure of thought and deed. Probably asexual which in the end gives him more energy to direct to his work. He made a sly reference to my secretary going to the Treasury and I told him, in all innocence, that I would send her to work for him if he wished. I stopped short of mentioning some of her attributes because he made a very sour face. At least she could get fat and he wouldn’t care. The problem is to get Hoover to cooperate by sharing his files. The President told me he could order this but I prefer to have it voluntary. I see several ways to accomplish this in a friendly way so we will follow that path and see where it goes.
There will be a very high-level strategy meeting next week and I would like Hoover to attend. The President will either come or send a top aide. The question: How far are we to go? Hoover says that the State Department people are heavily infiltrated with “Reds” and cites Harry Dexter White. I made him happy when I told him all I knew about White, who was a Russian-born communist. I told Hoover that it was unfortunate that White had a fatal heart attack last year, or we could use him to extract more of Hoover’s “Reds” from the department. I made a tentative comment about heart attacks and how easy they were to achieve and he did become very interested! More on this for him later.
Like many of the officials here, Hoover is quite anti-Semitic and comments often about how many of the known (and proven) traitors were Jews. He claims that all the communists are Jews but I did not find this so in Germany. In this matter, Hoover is almost as brutal as Wisner who would have fit in well in Germany. I would never have allowed W. inside the Gestapo but Schellenberg could have put him to use. I never permitted any of my people in sensitive positions to drink like Wisner does. One warning and out they went!
Harry Dexter White was born in the United States but his parents were Russian in origin. White was one of the top aides for Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau. White was the man who conceived the basis of the so-called “Morgenthau Plan,” heartily endorsed by General George Marshall and President Roosevelt, to reduce both the population and production of a conquered Germany to a series of small, pastoral states. Truman shelved this savage program after he became President and White was later exposed as an active Soviet agent. He died of a sudden heart attack after having been accused of espionage. As this happened before Müller came to the United States, he cannot be held to account. Neither was he involved in the rapid descent of Laurence Duggan from his office window to the pavement below.
Frank Wisner, Sr. (Junior was U.S. Ambassador to India during the Clinton Administration and had been rumored as designate Director of the CIA) head of the CIA’s clandestine operations, drank to excess, and was fond of using Eastern Europeans with histories of barbaric behavior. He filled the ranks of CIA operatives with such people who were also found in astonishing number in the CIA-controlled Gehlen organization.
Wednesday, 23 February 1949
Some public talk about German nerve gasses which the papers here call “death sprays.” This is either Tabun, Sarin or Soman, who knows? An American officer now claims that the U.S. found over a hundred tons of it in a cave somewhere and it was destroyed.
What should have been said was that the gasses were sealed in artillery rounds and were dumped into the Baltic. Such stupid people! The shell casings will eventually rust through and that will be the end of everyone in the Baltic States. Since Comrade Josef has either slaughtered most of the Balts, deported the others to Siberia and left only the pro-communists in place, it will be no great loss. As I told Director Hoover, a good communist is a dead communist. He responded that in America they say that a good nigger is a dead nigger. I have heard the same thing about Red Indians and Germans. The CIA has been running fast boats into the Baltic, landing agents there. Much anti-Russian partisan activity there as well as in the Ukraine. Should make Wisner happy. It certainly improves my day when I read the very secret reports about all this. Imagine that here I am, living in great comfort in the very center of power of my late enemies, reading, with permission, some of their most closely guarded secrets! Who would have thought it in April of 1945 with Berlin in ruins and the entire country virtually dead?
Anna Strong, a writer who worships Stalin and his system, is being kicked out of Russia. No one knows the reasons for this but she must have made the Red God mad. Surprising he didn’t have someone stick a pick ax in her thick head. Now she will come here and perhaps we can get an investigation going although she is supposed to be senile and no one wants to bother.
We had the same problem, albeit with different factors, in the business of Gerstein. There was a man that was totally mad, running around talking about gassing tens of thousands of Jews a day and Hitler watching in glee. Himmler wanted him killed but we decided to put him into a lunatic asylum where he belonged. Now we read books by feeble-minded pseudo-historians who have gotten their hands on a great mass of completely faked papers by G. and write about him as if he were a “great Christian hero” of some vast, mysterious and non-existent resistance. I wonder what happened to the stories about the factories making tons of hand soap out of dead Jews? Or the lampshade business? I suppose wars open up the sewers which underlie so much of humanity and the apes rule for a few months. I believe the Strong woman should have a heart attack. Of course here, they shove them out of windows that shows a lack of professional finesse, not to mention a greater lack of concern for those down below.
Saturday, 5 March 1949
Yesterday I was advised that a major arrest would be made involving a member of the Justice Department and a Soviet diplomat. Today it has happened. One Miss Coplon of the Justice Department and a V.A. Gubitchev were bagged by the FBI in New York. The woman, who was having an affair with the Russian, had compromising documents on her at the time of the arrest. Also, yesterday, (Judge) Medina ruled that the case against eleven major communists could proceed. I have met Medina twice now and aside from looking like a French waiter, he is a man of great patience who is determined not to let the attorneys from the other side wear him down. The communists’ lawyers claim that the juries are filled with pro-government witnesses and that Negroes and Jews are being excluded from these juries along with women, other communists, child molesters, the criminally insane, prostitutes and monkeys from the zoo. I believe the attorneys feel that juries made up of these assholes would certainly be in complete sympathy with their accused friends and would let them go free.
Sunday, 6 March 1949
Very lengthy conversation today with Arthur about some of my new superiors. Interesting material although I already knew a good deal of it from the earlier days.
A warning for me not under any circumstances to acknowledge possession of any material in my papers that could be anti-British, nor should I ever make any kind of anti-British remarks to the O.S.S Dulles, Wisner or Angleton. The other Dulles I am not to worry about at this point...yet. Why? I find that all of these men are in the pay of the British intelligence and that they will give the British anything that might be of use to them, no matter how damaging it might be to this country. Germany no longer counts as far as the British are concerned, and they now concentrate their fishing in troubled waters in Washington, not Berlin. Of course they want their empire back again and they want this country to get it for them. That will never happen. T. said that Roosevelt was anti-colonial and that he, too, had no intentions of helping Britannia rule anything but a pond for geese.
The Dulles brothers have been Anglophiles since they were children. Their uncle was Lansing, once a Secretary of State under Wilson. We knew him as the man whom Whitehall paid to push America into the war on their side. The nephews were influenced by their uncle and apparently have no problem with taking bribes. Here, being pro-British is a mark of refinement and one finds all kinds of British supporters in what passes for the American aristocracy. They used to take speech lessons so they could talk like an Englishman! I heard Dulles, speaking of Ambassador Kennedy whom he has been alleging was a German agent (because the British hated him), that “all Irish were nothing but a pack of damned bogtrotters.” I had to have this explained to me and Arthur, who is Irish in ancestry, thought it was funny! The Irish have quite a sense of humor. Especially in view of the reign of terror the British turned loose there after the 1916 business.
It is doubtful if England will ever instigate another major war and get the Americans to pull their coals from the fire one more time but the real danger here is the Soviet connection. We knew in Germany long ago, and knew very well, that Stalin had many very important agents in England, many in the intelligence area. I am sure that most of them are still in place now. Hoover also thinks so and like me, he simply does not trust any of them.
Anything that might reflect badly on the British, and there is so much, from assassinations to the instigation of wars of extermination, cannot be given to their American foils at all. If I expressed my own views on the British, it would ruin any chances I might have for both the safety of myself and the success of my work.
There is then a problem. Of course not to let these men find out anything but at the same time, should not the President be warned about the treachery of his people? I know from what he and others have said, that T. does not trust either the CIA or the British. Hoover does not and neither do a number of my colleagues. Of course many of them are not of the social level to be pro-British.
The British detest the Jews and the Irish and the Roosevelt administration was full of both and most are still in place. The British government is also filled with an army of ideological communists and, given their detestation and envy of the United States, are very serious menaces to our security in America.
If we are to root out and dispose of the Soviet agents and helpers here, as T. has stated very firmly he wants, the British must not get wind of this program or the information would go straight to Moscow and all of our work would be undone in a minute.
Comrade Josef would at once retrieve all of his pet rats and just put more in place and we would be right back at the beginning. A very sensitive area and one that calls for the greatest caution. I have done this before. When I began with the Gestapo, my worst enemies were our pro-Soviet people in the Foreign Office and the Army.
Just as well we cleaned that shit house out but it took a bomb under Hitler’s legs to really finish the job. A few may have survived but we got more than our share. Down in Bern, Dulles had a whole stable full of them working for him. Such a stupid, self-righteous asshole after all! I am quickly getting the same attitude towards my American pseudo-aristos as I did towards our von und zu Scheisshaufens. (Piles of shit, Ed.) At least the German nobility can trace its ancestry back to something more significant than bigoted religious fanatics who burned their neighbors alive and London’s deported criminals. Not to say much, but a difference.
To be continued...
March 7 1949 (35S)
New York. Bad weather in Washington when I left. Cold and instead of snow, it rained! Excellent rooms at the Hotel Plaza and a fine view from my windows of the great park. Much like the English Garden.
A shipment arrived for me here on the Los Angeles out of Antwerp. Must supervise the disposition of my material.
While the Grand Jury is sitting here, I am involved in work on the witnesses and the individuals being heard. Max Bedacht, whom I know of from my Munich days, is a witness. A known communist for certain but one who has changed his allegiance. A brief conversation with him and we talked about Weiss Ferdl and a pub he knew in Schwabing. Get on their good side, always.
Levine, the writer, talks to me about the communists for over three hours. He once said he knew about the late Duggan being a communist agent but now recants somewhat. He is getting pressure from the Administration here that, on the one hand, wants to clean out the communists (mostly because the people want them to) but on the other do not want to disrupt the image of the Roosevelt Administration and their communistic New Deal. They wish to have it both ways and they cannot.
New York is a very interesting city. The famous “skyscrapers” are impressive and I spent part of yesterday morning at the Metropolitan Museum, which is splendid and can be walked to from the hotel although my security people do not like the idea. I will have to come back again or at least spin out my stay here and see more of it. Also, visited a dozen very good antique galleries and made some purchases. In one, I found a complete set of silver service for twelve. German, mid-19th century and obviously stolen by a GI after the war. But cheap enough and the initial matches my own new name so I had to buy the set. Two heavy boxes that my man carried out to the taxicab. The drivers of these vehicles are quite interesting characters. Also bought two miniatures, Elizabethan English, which show a man and his wife. Good frames and good techniques.
More work with the Grand Jury people. Levine very strongly exposes extensive communist networks here, in Mexico and Canada. At least some of what he produced as evidence makes complete sense and I will have to check it out. He thinks I am Swiss and asked me where he could buy a good cuckoo clock! I told him that these were German and he made a great face and said bad things about the Germans. These encounters are entertaining because I wonder what Levine would do if he discovered that he had lunch in the hotel suite of the head of the Gestapo! He even mentioned my old agency and went into some entirely inaccurate history. It was all I could do to keep from laughing in his very serious, pedantic face!
Colonel Hoover now claims he has “investigated” over two million US officials and found that only about seven thousand were “suspicious.” First, I cannot believe he has investigated so many and my own percentages are far higher. I am looking forward to my interview with him. It would be better to interview him at my home in Washington. He can sit down while I stand up with the window behind me. That way, I will have the physical and psychological advantage over him. I am told to keep my secretary away from him because attractive women tend to annoy him. A very proper man but, according to my background information, a savage anti-communist who ruthlessly persecuted thousands both during and after the 1914 war. Terrible legal troubles later over this but one can see just how he thinks. When Wilson was hidden in the White House (syphilis or stroke?) and no one ran the country, Hoover and his people ran amok (a word I learned from Hewel).
Americans tend to be either one way or the other. One day they embrace you and the next, beat you to death with a piece of metal pipe. This mindless chatter will go on for weeks but I have no reason to go back to Washington as long as I can impress people here. This is where the activity is, after all.
Perhaps I can get to a concert at the Metropolitan Opera. Is it true that they have a gold curtain there? Perhaps someday the Americans might reconstitute the Berlin Philharmonic but I doubt if Furtwängler will ever be allowed to conduct it. After all, he dared to conduct the orchestra when Hitler was present and this makes him a dangerous and evil Nazi although all he thought of was skiing, women and music. I understand F. was to conduct in Chicago but the Jews in the orchestra there made such a fuss that he will probably not come.
The American Army board has recommended clemency for most of the Peiper men from the Ardennes battle. If they didn’t need us so badly to fight the Russians, they would have hanged a lot more of us.
Ambassador Walther Hewel was Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop’s permanent representative at Hitler’s military headquarters. As a young student at the Munich University, Hewel had been with Hitler in his abortive putsch in 1923 and later went to Java where he learned to speak the local language. He vanished at the end of the war and is reputed to have escaped from embattled Berlin.
It was 1951 before Wilhelm Furtwängler, former conductor of the famous Berlin Philharmonic was permitted to conduct in public again.
Thursday, 20 January 1949
Today, Truman is to be inaugurated here at a great ceremony. I was invited to attend but have made my excuses. From what I have seen of American parades, compared with German ceremonies, they always seem very amateurish. Besides, I have to go over literally thousands of pages of paper, some mine and some theirs, dealing with communists and I simply cannot spare the time.
There was also a large official function last evening, also to which I did not go although one of my General friends offered to get me a ticket. I have no interest in meeting with famous Americans at this point and besides, my English is not so good yet. Perhaps later when I learn to speak with less accent. I am hiring a speech teacher who thinks I am a Swiss national, which in fact I suppose I am although the German is certainly not the same.
Cold, very clear and windy. I took a pleasant walk through the streets of Georgetown and noticed all of the very old red brick buildings, built like Dutch houses, almost up to the street and very narrow. Attractive enough and how interesting to compare these old and historic buildings with the awful Negro slums in other parts of town. We would never have permitted such disgusting living areas in Germany but this is a democracy, as I am constantly being told, and people can largely do as they like.
A little later, I heard the roar of military aircraft over the city and went up on the roof just to be certain that the Russians weren’t attacking. American planes, part of the ceremony. It takes a very long time to get the sound of bombers directly overhead out of one’s mind.
Friday, 4 February 1949
Our dear friend Comrade Josef does not want to come to visit Truman in the United States because his doctor won’t allow him to! No one dares tell Stalin what to do. I understand that he wishes to meet Truman in Czechoslovakia instead. Two reasons for this: One, Stalin dares not leave Russia because he is terrified of a coup and second, he hates Truman who has consistently thwarted his expansionist plans and will make some kind of an attempt to kill him in the safety of one of his slave countries. Probably blame it on priests or the Benes faction. I have given my own opinion on this where it should do some good but have been told that Truman detests Stalin, sees him for what he is, a lunatic murderer, and will not go.
Weather has been cold and very clear. There is a garden here that has gone to seed and perhaps in the spring, something creative can be done. I should have Papa come over and work in it but that certainly will not be. Things seem to be going as well as can be expected at home. The family is still being bothered by the Amis but I think they can survive. They are looking in the wrong place for me after all. Do these idiots think I am hiding in the attic or creep into the house disguised in a wig and false beard?
After the war, Müller’s family all lived in a small house in the Munich suburb of Pasing. His father, wife, daughter and son, a recently released prisoner of war, were quite poor and ostracized because of Müller’s position in the Gestapo. Müller’s father, Alois, had never been a great success in life, having tried his hand at a number of occupations; policeman, church restorer and professional gardener. He failed at all of these projects and certainly instilled a greatly heightened sense of ambition in his only son.
Thursday, 10 February 1949
More paperwork, endless paperwork. I was given a fine shepherd dog today as a guard animal. A male, about a year old, black and tan and very intelligent. He has some enormously long name on his papers but I will call him Maxl. My wife hated dogs but I do not and I think we will get along very well indeed. Well-trained, just like Hitler’s favorite bitch was. Schopenhauer was right about people and dogs. On the other hand, Herta is still stuffing herself like a sausage and the cook is complaining that she invades his kitchen at all hours and disrupts his planned meals. I have spoken with H. about this eating problem several times and I will have to get rid of her if she does not stop. I do not like people to ignore my suggestions and her problem is not physical. Also, I do not like fat women and she is moving quickly in that direction.
Irmgard has arrived, is not happy with my domestic arrangement and I assured her it would change soon. My excuse was that H. had been assigned to me!
After finally meeting the President, some of my impressions. I never knew Roosevelt but this one must be a welcome change. A dynamic man, friendly but also firm. Not well versed in European politics and very suspicious of the military. He understands domestic politics very well, having been a legislator for some years. I think basically an honest man and I can see why Stalin loathes him. Truman comes directly to the point and cuts through the diplomatic nonsense. As I thought, he is of two minds about the communist business, also a little frightened about its extent and probably would like to push it aside. We talked about Duggan and he does not feel he was a communist and said “poor man” several times. He asked me what I thought about Hitler and so on. Intelligent questions. He will officially hear nothing bad about Roosevelt but in private does not speak well of him. This is a small town farmer in thought and the sophistication of the American intellectual establishment very much annoys him. They, of course, hate him because they all loved Roosevelt and his ways. Truman said that Roosevelt had to “put him on the ticket” because he was forced to...that R. wanted crazy Wallace but couldn’t get him. In revenge, R. never told Truman anything at all and completely ignored him! And this when R. knew he was dying! T. also said Roosevelt “couldn’t tell the truth to save his soul.” That I can believe. He also told me that the White House was “a pigsty” when he moved in and that Mrs. Roosevelt and the family lived like “poor white trash” in what he called the People’s House.
Mrs. R. used to bring her lady friends into the building, even when the President was there, but refused to allow him to bring any of his lady friends around. And Truman said the cook belonged in the kitchen of a penitentiary and that State dinners were avoided like the Black Death.
Another historical footnote: When R. died, his old friend (who I know hated him) Churchill, refused to attend the funeral. I told T. that C. was a drunken, fat little fairy and I actually got the President to laugh. He told me that he heard I liked to play the piano and that I must visit with him at home and we could play duets! My God, I will have to fortify myself with schnapps first! They tell me his unattractive daughter thinks she is a wonderful singer but sounds like a cat was being run over by a truck. That will be an evening I could do without, believe me. The term “monkey love” is often very applicable.
The wall hangings have come down from New York and I will have them put up over the weekend. They will join the Goeblens already in the hall. Every time I see these, I recall them hanging in the new Chancellery. The Vienna Museum is no doubt still looking for them. If Peiner had finished his projected pieces, they would have been returned to Vienna and I would have bare places on my walls.
I am to have some of my associates in for dinner next week. Someone told me that I am supposed to have a “wonderful wine cellar,” but this was from someone who was at the New Year’s party and drank the swill! (The same General who threw up in the pantry). I am supposed to have lunch with Wisner but I will put it off as long as I can. I cannot abide him; he drinks far too much, is terribly arrogant without any visible reason for it and appears to me to be more than half-mad. I mentioned my opinions of him to the President but he is not sufficiently in control to do much about such assholes as Pash and Wisner.[Interesting comment about control and the President there D.C]
The tapestries mentioned were on loan to Hitler from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna while Werner Peiner, a German artist, was working on an original series of hangings, which depicted scenes from German military history. This series was never finished and the old tapestries vanished at the end of the war.
Monday, 14 February 1949
I need to devote more time to these personal records but the amount of work I have laid out for myself makes it difficult. For obvious reasons, I cannot have my secretary transcribe them (I think I have found a job for her at the Treasury Department.) She hates Maxl, who now sleeps in my room, and he detests her in turn. Dogs always know about such things. Herta is available but too difficult. She said last week that either the dog goes or she does. She leaves next week and Irmgard will take her place. If I am careful about what I say, I might be able to get I. to write up these notes.
Have finally met with Colonel Hoover! He wouldn’t come here so we met on neutral ground. He insisted on bringing three men with him so I countered with six! The result was that we went off privately and had a surprisingly amiable conversation. He is angry because he doesn’t really know who I am and keeps hinting that he has “certain information” about me. I know I have real information about him but since I have to work with him, I kept my mouth shut. I was fully warned and was properly pro-American and very laudatory of his efforts, “even from the earliest days” to alert America to the “Red Menace” as he calls it. He is a strict disciplinarian and seems to be very competent but is the sort which is either highly dictatorial or very subservient. In my case, he poked around to see if I was a potential rival. I convinced him that I was not although he occupies the same position in this country that I did in Germany. I confess I would like his job but he has been in place for years and the game would not be worth the candle.
We fenced with each other for nearly two hours but it was not unprofitable for either one of us and I am sure we can work together. One always has to defer to him but not out of ignorance or weakness. He will exploit both. He knows Truman doesn’t like him so I made him happy when I told him that I had praised him to the President and hoped that he would achieve the recognition from the new leader which he once had from the last, great one. I must say that he didn’t like Roosevelt either and told me at least ten really terrible anecdotes about the man.
Better to be a live dog than a dead lion.
I will invite Mr. or better, Director Hoover over for dinner one of these days. I don’t know if he is a fairy or not; I suspect not. He lives with his mother, they tell me, and is very pure of thought and deed. Probably asexual which in the end gives him more energy to direct to his work. He made a sly reference to my secretary going to the Treasury and I told him, in all innocence, that I would send her to work for him if he wished. I stopped short of mentioning some of her attributes because he made a very sour face. At least she could get fat and he wouldn’t care. The problem is to get Hoover to cooperate by sharing his files. The President told me he could order this but I prefer to have it voluntary. I see several ways to accomplish this in a friendly way so we will follow that path and see where it goes.
There will be a very high-level strategy meeting next week and I would like Hoover to attend. The President will either come or send a top aide. The question: How far are we to go? Hoover says that the State Department people are heavily infiltrated with “Reds” and cites Harry Dexter White. I made him happy when I told him all I knew about White, who was a Russian-born communist. I told Hoover that it was unfortunate that White had a fatal heart attack last year, or we could use him to extract more of Hoover’s “Reds” from the department. I made a tentative comment about heart attacks and how easy they were to achieve and he did become very interested! More on this for him later.
Like many of the officials here, Hoover is quite anti-Semitic and comments often about how many of the known (and proven) traitors were Jews. He claims that all the communists are Jews but I did not find this so in Germany. In this matter, Hoover is almost as brutal as Wisner who would have fit in well in Germany. I would never have allowed W. inside the Gestapo but Schellenberg could have put him to use. I never permitted any of my people in sensitive positions to drink like Wisner does. One warning and out they went!
Harry Dexter White was born in the United States but his parents were Russian in origin. White was one of the top aides for Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau. White was the man who conceived the basis of the so-called “Morgenthau Plan,” heartily endorsed by General George Marshall and President Roosevelt, to reduce both the population and production of a conquered Germany to a series of small, pastoral states. Truman shelved this savage program after he became President and White was later exposed as an active Soviet agent. He died of a sudden heart attack after having been accused of espionage. As this happened before Müller came to the United States, he cannot be held to account. Neither was he involved in the rapid descent of Laurence Duggan from his office window to the pavement below.
Frank Wisner, Sr. (Junior was U.S. Ambassador to India during the Clinton Administration and had been rumored as designate Director of the CIA) head of the CIA’s clandestine operations, drank to excess, and was fond of using Eastern Europeans with histories of barbaric behavior. He filled the ranks of CIA operatives with such people who were also found in astonishing number in the CIA-controlled Gehlen organization.
Wednesday, 23 February 1949
Some public talk about German nerve gasses which the papers here call “death sprays.” This is either Tabun, Sarin or Soman, who knows? An American officer now claims that the U.S. found over a hundred tons of it in a cave somewhere and it was destroyed.
What should have been said was that the gasses were sealed in artillery rounds and were dumped into the Baltic. Such stupid people! The shell casings will eventually rust through and that will be the end of everyone in the Baltic States. Since Comrade Josef has either slaughtered most of the Balts, deported the others to Siberia and left only the pro-communists in place, it will be no great loss. As I told Director Hoover, a good communist is a dead communist. He responded that in America they say that a good nigger is a dead nigger. I have heard the same thing about Red Indians and Germans. The CIA has been running fast boats into the Baltic, landing agents there. Much anti-Russian partisan activity there as well as in the Ukraine. Should make Wisner happy. It certainly improves my day when I read the very secret reports about all this. Imagine that here I am, living in great comfort in the very center of power of my late enemies, reading, with permission, some of their most closely guarded secrets! Who would have thought it in April of 1945 with Berlin in ruins and the entire country virtually dead?
Anna Strong, a writer who worships Stalin and his system, is being kicked out of Russia. No one knows the reasons for this but she must have made the Red God mad. Surprising he didn’t have someone stick a pick ax in her thick head. Now she will come here and perhaps we can get an investigation going although she is supposed to be senile and no one wants to bother.
We had the same problem, albeit with different factors, in the business of Gerstein. There was a man that was totally mad, running around talking about gassing tens of thousands of Jews a day and Hitler watching in glee. Himmler wanted him killed but we decided to put him into a lunatic asylum where he belonged. Now we read books by feeble-minded pseudo-historians who have gotten their hands on a great mass of completely faked papers by G. and write about him as if he were a “great Christian hero” of some vast, mysterious and non-existent resistance. I wonder what happened to the stories about the factories making tons of hand soap out of dead Jews? Or the lampshade business? I suppose wars open up the sewers which underlie so much of humanity and the apes rule for a few months. I believe the Strong woman should have a heart attack. Of course here, they shove them out of windows that shows a lack of professional finesse, not to mention a greater lack of concern for those down below.
Saturday, 5 March 1949
Yesterday I was advised that a major arrest would be made involving a member of the Justice Department and a Soviet diplomat. Today it has happened. One Miss Coplon of the Justice Department and a V.A. Gubitchev were bagged by the FBI in New York. The woman, who was having an affair with the Russian, had compromising documents on her at the time of the arrest. Also, yesterday, (Judge) Medina ruled that the case against eleven major communists could proceed. I have met Medina twice now and aside from looking like a French waiter, he is a man of great patience who is determined not to let the attorneys from the other side wear him down. The communists’ lawyers claim that the juries are filled with pro-government witnesses and that Negroes and Jews are being excluded from these juries along with women, other communists, child molesters, the criminally insane, prostitutes and monkeys from the zoo. I believe the attorneys feel that juries made up of these assholes would certainly be in complete sympathy with their accused friends and would let them go free.
Sunday, 6 March 1949
Very lengthy conversation today with Arthur about some of my new superiors. Interesting material although I already knew a good deal of it from the earlier days.
A warning for me not under any circumstances to acknowledge possession of any material in my papers that could be anti-British, nor should I ever make any kind of anti-British remarks to the O.S.S Dulles, Wisner or Angleton. The other Dulles I am not to worry about at this point...yet. Why? I find that all of these men are in the pay of the British intelligence and that they will give the British anything that might be of use to them, no matter how damaging it might be to this country. Germany no longer counts as far as the British are concerned, and they now concentrate their fishing in troubled waters in Washington, not Berlin. Of course they want their empire back again and they want this country to get it for them. That will never happen. T. said that Roosevelt was anti-colonial and that he, too, had no intentions of helping Britannia rule anything but a pond for geese.
The Dulles brothers have been Anglophiles since they were children. Their uncle was Lansing, once a Secretary of State under Wilson. We knew him as the man whom Whitehall paid to push America into the war on their side. The nephews were influenced by their uncle and apparently have no problem with taking bribes. Here, being pro-British is a mark of refinement and one finds all kinds of British supporters in what passes for the American aristocracy. They used to take speech lessons so they could talk like an Englishman! I heard Dulles, speaking of Ambassador Kennedy whom he has been alleging was a German agent (because the British hated him), that “all Irish were nothing but a pack of damned bogtrotters.” I had to have this explained to me and Arthur, who is Irish in ancestry, thought it was funny! The Irish have quite a sense of humor. Especially in view of the reign of terror the British turned loose there after the 1916 business.
It is doubtful if England will ever instigate another major war and get the Americans to pull their coals from the fire one more time but the real danger here is the Soviet connection. We knew in Germany long ago, and knew very well, that Stalin had many very important agents in England, many in the intelligence area. I am sure that most of them are still in place now. Hoover also thinks so and like me, he simply does not trust any of them.
Anything that might reflect badly on the British, and there is so much, from assassinations to the instigation of wars of extermination, cannot be given to their American foils at all. If I expressed my own views on the British, it would ruin any chances I might have for both the safety of myself and the success of my work.
There is then a problem. Of course not to let these men find out anything but at the same time, should not the President be warned about the treachery of his people? I know from what he and others have said, that T. does not trust either the CIA or the British. Hoover does not and neither do a number of my colleagues. Of course many of them are not of the social level to be pro-British.
The British detest the Jews and the Irish and the Roosevelt administration was full of both and most are still in place. The British government is also filled with an army of ideological communists and, given their detestation and envy of the United States, are very serious menaces to our security in America.
If we are to root out and dispose of the Soviet agents and helpers here, as T. has stated very firmly he wants, the British must not get wind of this program or the information would go straight to Moscow and all of our work would be undone in a minute.
Comrade Josef would at once retrieve all of his pet rats and just put more in place and we would be right back at the beginning. A very sensitive area and one that calls for the greatest caution. I have done this before. When I began with the Gestapo, my worst enemies were our pro-Soviet people in the Foreign Office and the Army.
Just as well we cleaned that shit house out but it took a bomb under Hitler’s legs to really finish the job. A few may have survived but we got more than our share. Down in Bern, Dulles had a whole stable full of them working for him. Such a stupid, self-righteous asshole after all! I am quickly getting the same attitude towards my American pseudo-aristos as I did towards our von und zu Scheisshaufens. (Piles of shit, Ed.) At least the German nobility can trace its ancestry back to something more significant than bigoted religious fanatics who burned their neighbors alive and London’s deported criminals. Not to say much, but a difference.
To be continued...
March 7 1949 (35S)
Foreword:footnotes
1.The discovery and removal of millions of dollars worth of Globocnik’s buried concentration
camp gold by others, using data supplied by Douglas, is covered in the appendix.
2. KO Spanien” was the title of the Army Intelligence (Abwehr) organization in Spain. Franzbach
was head of Group III or counterintelligence. His specialty was the distribution of foreign currency and
passport matters. His headquarters was located in Barcelona. A.A.:Pol I M 30: Abwehr, KO Spanien:
September 1940-August 1944: Band 1:282343-49. This section was taken over by Müller on February 12,
1944.
3. Group D4 of the RSHA-SD was run by Gross according to the January 1945 table of
organization of the SD. This Group dealt with South America. OKH:H2/114: 9 Januar 1945.
4. The Halder referred to here is Franz Halder (1884-1972). As Colonel General, Halder was Chief
of the Army General Staff from September 1, 1939 until September 24, 1942 when he was dismissed from
his post by Hitler. After the war, Halder worked for the United States Army Historical Branch as head of a
group of former senior German officers engaged in writing military history. The HPA Chef referred to
could only be General Wilhelm Burgdorf. Burgdorf had been head of the HPA (Heeres Personal Amt), or
Army Personnel Office, from October 10, 1944. The only other such officer to head this office was
General Schmundt who died in October of 1944 as the result of injuries received in the July 20, 1944
attempt on Hitler’s life. The significance of Burgdorf’s appearance here in a post-war context is that he was
in the Führerbunker in Berlin in the month of April, 1945, and has repeatedly been stated to have died
there. No body was ever recovered and the reason for this is now evident.
Introduction:footnotes
5 Best, S.Payne, “The Venlo Incident,” London, 1950.
6
“The American Army even recruited and evacuated the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Mueller. To
prevent later accusations that the United States government was employing the notorious Mueller, the
Americans used Gehlen’s organization to finance his work.” Trento, Joseph, “The Secret History of the
CIA” New York, 2001, p29.
