HERBERT HAGEN WAS born in 1913. At age twenty-three, this brilliant student of Professor Franz Six joined the SD.
Six offered Hagen a position as head of Department II-112. The aim of that section was the war against the Jews. Hagen accepted. His talents as a journalist were also useful to Six in his capacity as head of the Institute for Foreign Studies, an organization that reported to the SD and whose newspaper published numerous articles bearing Six’s byline but written by Hagen. Books such as World Jewry: Its Organization, Its Power, Its Politics, published by the Nazi Party under the pseudonym Dieter Schwarz, were the fruit of a collaboration between Six and Hagen. Hagen’s predecessors had assembled a hard core of anti-Jewish fanatics; Hagen’s subordinates included Dieter Wisliceny, future exterminator of the Jews in Hungary and Czechoslovakia; Theodor Dannecker, future exterminator of the Jews in France, Bulgaria, and Italy; and Adolf Eichmann, future architect of the Final Solution.
Hagen successfully bureaucratized the ideological nature of the anti-Jewish work. The SD was later revealed to be a more effective enemy of the Jewish people than the Gestapo. During his interrogation in Jerusalem, Eichmann would state: “Hagen was a reasonable man, with a broad perspective and a good general culture. He was excellent at assimilating a problem and creating a summary of it. He was Six’s close personal friend, and he became his writer. Every six months, Hagen would write a long activity report for Department II-112, each one remarkable for its clarity and attention to detail.”
Due to a series of circumstances, we were practically the only people to consult those notes: at the CDJC in Paris, there was a cardboard box filled with Hagen’s personal files, which he had forgotten when Paris was liberated. Those files were not examined until after Eichmann’s trial. Hagen was the master spy working against the Jewish world, compiling endless files on them. He informed men and institutions of the Nazi viewpoint on the Jews so that they could accomplish their tasks in accordance with Hitler’s wishes.
During the first six months of 1938, Department II-112 organized twenty-three conferences: Eichmann spoke once, Dannecker four times; Hagen spoke on eighteen occasions about Jewish issues. Eighteen conferences in six months. Hagen used all his legal and police skills in the service of this task. Eichmann and Hagen were very close friends. Eichmann would address letters to “Lieber Herbert” and sign them “Ady.”
That intimacy dated back to an extraordinary journey the two men took together to Palestine in order to deepen their knowledge of the Jewish world and examine the possible benefits to the Third Reich of a Jewish state. Eichmann repeated at his trial in 1961: “Hagen was my boss … I was Hagen’s subordinate.” Their trip was the result of discreet contact between the Nazis’ intelligence agency and an agent for the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization, which was presumably eager for German emigrants to move to Palestine. Eichmann and Hagen met the agent, Feivel Polkes, in the Kranzler café, but the talks were never followed up, with the two SS men concluding that Palestine’s Jews were resolutely opposed to the Reich. The anti-Jewish persecutions of 1938 put an end to any such contact.
Through carefully developed methods, Department II-112—led by Hagen and Eichmann—examined Jewish movements all over the world, setting up permanent intelligence agents in Paris, New York, Cairo, Jerusalem, Prague, Bucharest, and other cities. Section II-112 amassed files and experiences that would be used in the Reich’s conquered European territories to attack various Jewish communities with an efficiency that still surprises Holocaust historians.
In October 1938, Hagen went to Vienna and Prague, where he delivered some advice: “Now would be a good time to engineer a widespread action against the Jews.” He went back to Prague in May 1939, after the Czech capital had been occupied, and on June 30 he outlined his plan: “Show the influence of Jews in Czech politics, culture, and economics. That way, we will be able to name and shame the leaders responsible for tolerance toward the Jewish influence [an effective way of getting rid of Czech politicians still in power]; show that a converted Jew remains a Jew in his character.”
When Himmler reorganized the police into the RSHA, Hagen was given the job of leading section VI-2: “Judaism and anti-Semitism.” In June 1940, SS-Standartenführer Helmut Knochen arrived in Paris at the head of a Sonderkommando, a special commando of twenty men, the hard core of the Sipo-SD in France. Questioned in Nuremberg, Knochen replied, “It was Heydrich himself who put me in charge of that mission. SS-Hauptsturmführers Hagen and Dietl were with me.”
Knochen soon entrusted his right-hand man, Hagen, with the crucial task of establishing the Sipo-SD on the Atlantic coast. On August 1, Hagen was named Kommandeur of the Sipo-SD in Bordeaux, where he quickly deployed his anti-Semitic zeal: the city’s chief rabbi testified in 1944 that “within days of the occupation, about two hundred German Jews were taken for who-knows-what reason to camps in Gurs and Saint-Cyprien.”
On December 8, 1941, Hagen decreed: “All Jews must be detained, irrespective of their age.” Moreover, Hagen’s former assistant, Dannecker—who had since become head of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Department in France—wrote to SS-Obersturmbannführer Lischka on January 13, 1942: “SS-Sturmbannführer Hagen informed me yesterday that the internment of Jews in the Basses-Pyrénées and the Landes in concentration camps is necessary for military reasons as well as for the extension of the anti-Jewish measures.” The next day, SS-Obersturmbannführer Lischka informed the military command of his decision to follow Hagen’s advice.
Hagen extended his zone of action as far north as Brittany, establishing the Sipo-SD in the Atlantic region’s main cities in order to prevent or suppress all French opposition and in order to organize the arrest of Jews.
On May 5, 1942, Heydrich sent General Karl Oberg to Paris to oversee the SS and the German police in France and appointed Herbert Hagen to be Oberg’s personal adviser. This was a huge promotion for Hagen. Not yet thirty, he was for a time also the head of department VI of the Sipo-SD in France. That department specialized in intelligence gathering on foreign governments, the French government, and French political parties.
Hagen is the perfect example of the “desk killer.” No, he did not get his hands dirty; no, he was not a sadistic torturer; but his fanatical intelligence, used in the service of evil, defined the guidelines and the structures within which men like Barbie committed their atrocities. Hagen’s notes, written in light-filled offices overlooking the Bois de Boulogne, trace the journey taken by the Jews toward their bitter end in Auschwitz.
Hagen was perfectly aware of what happened to the Jews. He was informed of their arrests and transfers: every document Oberg received passed through Hagen’s hands.
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ON JULY 2, 1942, there was a meeting among Oberg, Knochen, Hagen, Lischka, and Bousquet; Hagen kept the minutes. That meeting was about the Vél’ d’Hiv roundup. Hagen also presided over the meeting on July 17, in which the fate of the children arrested during that roundup was decided. They were all deported.
Herbert Hagen was one of the last German criminals to have been convicted in absentia in France. On March 18, 1955, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
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JENS HAGEN PULLED himself together after examining his father’s dossier. He began by explaining to us that his mother was sick, that his family was poor, that we should spare his father, that he had changed.
“We are happy to consider the possibility that your father has changed. Anyone can change. But for that we would need proof—and it is very easy to supply it. The best thing would be if your father were to turn himself in to the French authorities and ask to be tried. He would be a valuable historical witness, because he was present at the origin of the anti-Jewish persecutions. Eichmann and Dannecker were his protégés. He knows a lot of things. It would be extremely positive if he were to appear in court in France. And it would prove that he really has changed. He can help today’s society to understand how he became the SS Herbert Hagen of the 1940s. In that case, we would defend the Herbert Hagen of 1971, who would almost certainly not go to prison for his crimes. But if he doesn’t turn himself in to the French authorities, that means he hasn’t really changed.”
Jens told us he would pass on our proposal to his father. Beate and I smiled at each other after he left: we were not naïve; we knew we would never hear back from him. But, from a legal standpoint, we had to at least try this approach before entering the fray of battle.
It was, incidentally, very interesting to see how a supposedly left-wing journalist, the son of one of the biggest Nazi criminals, judged the generation that preceded his. Apparently, his feelings as a son outweighed all other considerations.
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AND SO, IN three days, we had filmed both Lischka and Hagen. On March 4, 1971, I went to Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, to speak with Adalbert Rückerl, prosecutor general at the Office for the Investigation of War Criminals in Germany.
Dr. Ruckerl looked through the dossiers on Lischka and Hagen. Soon afterward, he recorded a declaration:
These deportations of Jews took place for racial reasons. In accordance with our legislation, these are base reasons [niedrige Beweggründe], which means that, by virtue of current German criminal law, the cases in question can be pursued; there is no statute of limitations. Foremost among the persons liable to such prosecution are Lischka and Hagen. I am of the opinion that we must arrest those at the summit of the hierarchy, responsible in whole or in part for these events; it is these men that we must submit to the impartial justice of the German courts.
Now, to help us in our battle and to strengthen our resolve, we had this declaration from the most competent German to judge such matters, affirming that Lischka was at the very top of the list of Nazi criminals. This time, we were ready to move from words to action.