16

Prisoner Transfers

Miklós Horthy had led the establishment of a Catholic, monarchist state in Hungary after suppression of the Communist rebellion in Budapest in 1919. U.S. aid to shore up the wobbly Horthy government, it will be recalled, had been the centerpiece of Allen Dulles’s recommendations to President Woodrow Wilson during the young diplomat’s days as the chief of U.S. political intelligence for Central Europe. Horthy had emerged as something like the grand old man of Hungary during the interwar years, at least in the eyes of his supporters. He was well liked in Washington, where many in the State Department had convinced themselves that Horthy had been “forced” to join the Axis.

Horthy had always been a conservative militarist, in the mold of Spain’s Franco or Portugal’s Salazar, rather than a Hitler-style Nazi. He preferred political and economic persecution of Jews and Romanis to outright murder, at least usually. Hitler had grown worried about Horthy’s loyalty in the last year of the war, so the Germans deposed him, installed a more compliant regime, and swept away hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to death camps within a few weeks.1 Most experts agreed that the Horthy government’s disenfranchisement and ghettoization of Jews had set the stage for their eventual destruction.

The U.S. Army captured Horthy during the summer of 1945 and interned him in Ashcan, the U.S. POW camp for high-ranking Axis prisoners. Within weeks after his arrival, U.S. political advisor Murphy sought Washington’s approval for Horthy’s release.² Legal advisor Green Hackworth agreed, provided the USSR did not formally object.³ The Soviets said nothing.

Murphy wished to offer Horthy political asylum and protection from prosecution in exchange for his cooperation in establishing a postwar Hungarian regime sympathetic to the U.S.⁴ The U.S. ambassador in Budapest, Rudolf Schoenfeld, believed that Hungary’s postwar government of 1945 would secretly agree to this, providing it did not have to do so publicly.⁵ The postwar coalition government of Hungary did not want to try Horthy for treason if it was possible to avoid doing so, according to U.S. embassy reports of the day, because many felt a trial would undermine the state.⁶

The chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, Robert Jackson, promised Horthy that if he cooperated with the U.S. political agenda, the United States would block any war crimes charges against him and refuse to transfer him to Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia.⁷ Horthy agreed. Jackson then met with Czech and Yugoslav war crimes officials, telling them it “would sit rather badly with the world” if their countries tried the regent, owing to Horthy’s advanced age (he was then over seventy) and his “signs of senility.”⁸ (In fact, Jackson knew that U.S. doctors had examined Horthy and found him to be in excellent health; he lived for more than twenty years after the war.)⁹ Jackson offered the Yugoslavs a confidential deal under which Horthy would be formally charged with war crimes but not actually turned over to Yugoslavia for trial or punishment. The Yugoslavs rejected the overture, however, insisting that Horthy must be transferred to Belgrade and put on trial.*

At the UNWCC, the new U.S. representative, Colonel Joseph V. Hodgson, sought to derail the Horthy prosecution when consideration of the case came up a few weeks later. The UNWCC committee deadlocked over the case, split between the Yugoslavs and Czechs on one side and the U.S. and British delegations on the other. They eventually compromised by charging Horthy with crimes against humanity—the most morally compelling, but legally the weakest, offenses in his case—and adjourned the war crimes charges stemming from Hungary’s invasions of its neighbors.10 This action satisfied the Czechs, who refrained from further requests to place Horthy on trial. But the Yugoslavs would not give up.

U.S. military authorities in Germany meanwhile released Horthy from Ashcan, and he took up residence in Bavaria. Officially, the former regent was supposed to notify U.S. authorities if he planned to move, but other than that he was free—a remarkable status considering that he was facing formal charges of crimes against humanity in two Allied states. Despite Yugoslav protests, Robert Murphy and the U.S. ambassador to Hungary worked to clear Horthy’s petition for permission to emigrate to Switzerland or Portugal, both of which were willing to provide him with asylum.¹¹ In the end, the U.S. State Department succeeded in protecting Horthy from trial on any charges, including crimes against humanity, even though the U.S. had itself supported such charges during the compromise at the UNWCC.

Some senior U.S. officials even made sure that Horthy was invited to U.S. diplomatic receptions in Germany. Less than two years after the fall of Berlin, the Yugoslav government formally protested to Washington after noticing a news dispatch from Munich describing the wedding of U.S. consul Sam Woods. The published invitation list included a dozen senior officials of the U.S. Military Government in Germany—and Miklós Horthy.

“The Yugoslav Ambassador has the honor to draw the attention of the Honorable [U.S.] Secretary of State to the fact that Admiral Horthy is a war criminal,” the protest read. Horthy has been “registered as No. 2779 by the Yugoslav War Crimes Commission, and as No. 6 on page 26 of the International Commission for War Criminals in London. The Yugoslav Government requested the American Authorities at Wiesbaden for extradition of Admiral Horthy on March 6, 1946, and repeated this request on August 24, 1946, without result.…” The Yugoslavs wanted to know what disciplinary action was planned against Woods et al. for consorting with Horthy.12 The U.S. responded stiffly that the wedding was of “a private nature … [and] not a matter for representations on the part of the Yugoslav government.” Secretary of State Marshall summarily rejected the protest.¹³

The more sophisticated Axis defendants soon learned how to make the most of the divisions among the Allies. The postwar careers of the SS men who had negotiated with Allen Dulles during Operation Sunrise provide an example of how symbiotic relationships evolved among the victors and the vanquished during the first years after the war. The Dulles case is interesting not only because it was typical of thousands of less prominent instances, but also because of the symmetry in Dulles’s behavior in the wake of two different genocides—the Armenian Genocide and the Nazi Holocaust—more than two decades apart.

After the German surrender, SS General Karl Wolff proceeded on the assumption that Wolff’s cooperation with Dulles had won him a place in a postwar German government. Wolff sought to pick up “the political threads” of his old command, an OSS report states, by “playing on the old discrepancy between Russia and America.”¹⁴ But by June 1945, when most of the concentration camps had been opened and public outrage was at a high tide, Allied troops arrested and interned Wolff and his senior aides.

Though Dulles was later to deny it, he extended de facto protection to Karl Wolff and at least two of his assistants, Eugen Dollmann and Eugen Wenner, both of whom were later indicted by Italian authorities for their roles in massacres of Italian partisans and deportation of Italian Jews to Auschwitz.¹⁵ Circumstantial evidence links Dulles to the escape of another of Wolff’s assistants, Walter Rauff, whose rise through SS ranks had been helped by his use of gas trucks to murder thousands of Jewish women and children on the Eastern Front.¹⁶

Allied war crimes investigators identified Wolff almost immediately as one of the most powerful members of the Nazi inner circle to survive the war. The French and Soviet governments favored prosecuting Wolff before the first international tribunal at Nuremberg—an “honor” of sorts, as this trial was reserved for the highest-ranking Nazi criminals in custody.¹⁷ Had Wolff been tried there, he almost certainly would have been hung.

But the U.S. and British representatives on the Nuremberg planning committee demurred. There were too many high-ranking Nazis to try at the first tribunal, they contended. Only one SS officer should be prosecuted there; the others would surely get their turn later. The case against the Gestapo’s chief, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, would be easier to make than that against Wolff, the U.S. contended, even though Wolff probably had more power in the SS as a whole. After much debate, the tribunal’s planning committee decided to prosecute Kaltenbrunner first, in the autumn of 1945. They slated Wolff to be the chief SS defendant at a second international tribunal, scheduled to open sometime in 1946.18

But that was not to be. Within weeks of the opening of the first international trial at Nuremberg, Robert Jackson recommended to Washington that the U.S. should not cooperate in any further joint trials of Nazis, regardless of the commitments in the Moscow Declaration.¹⁹ State-to-state relations between the U.S. and USSR had deteriorated sharply since Truman had come to office, notwithstanding generally good relations between American and Russian military commanders in the field. Jackson believed that the Soviet vision of justice in Europe required revolutionary reorganization of German society and a rapid expansion of Soviet geopolitical power beyond its old borders. Any new international trial of Nazi leaders would almost certainly provide the USSR with a forum where it could continue to make political gains. Jackson wanted no part in it.

Instead, Jackson convinced Truman, the U.S. should hold its own trials of Nazi defendants then in U.S. hands. These trials became known as the “later” Nuremberg trials or, more formally, as the “Subsequent Proceedings.”²⁰ These later trials, prosecuted under the command of General Telford Taylor, proved to be one of the most comprehensive efforts ever attempted to prosecute the perpetrators of genocide. Taylor and his colleagues brought more than 180 individual German leaders to justice and simultaneously created a permanent record of tens of thousands of instances of Nazi criminality. The subsequent proceedings included three major prosecutions of SS defendants, one of German justice ministry officials, one of Nazi doctors active in the concentration camps, three of senior German military commanders, three of major German industrialists, and one trial of twenty-one leaders of the various ministries of the Hitler government.²¹

But Karl Wolff again succeeded in wriggling off the hook, despite the fact that he was personally implicated in one way or another in almost half of the cases brought to trial in the subsequent proceedings series. Meanwhile, Wolff’s top SS aides who had been active in Sunrise—Walter Rauff, Eugen Dollmann, Eugen Wenner, and others—also escaped prosecution even though they were charged with crimes against humanity by postwar Italian authorities.

Allen Dulles and his colleagues in U.S. clandestine operations could not order Telford Taylor or the Italian government not to prosecute Wolff and the other SS men who had been active in Sunrise. He lacked authority to do so and, considering the strong personal commitment of Telford Taylor and his aides to the war crimes trials, any obvious attempt to derail a prosecution would likely have only strengthened their determination to proceed. But Dulles and the emerging CIA could nonetheless make their influence felt both directly and indirectly, even after Dulles had left his OSS post in Berlin and returned to civilian life.

In the fall of 1946, the Italian government issued arrest warrants for the former top SS and Gestapo officers in Italy, including at least three of Wolff’s senior aides in the Sunrise affair. This in turn triggered inquiries from the State Department to the U.S. Central Intelligence Group (CIG) concerning what should be done with the SS men then in U.S. custody. (The CIG was the immediate predecessor of the CIA and had administrative responsibility for most aspects of U.S. intelligence affairs between the time the OSS officially ended operations in 1945 and the creation of the CIA in 1947.) The CIG’s liaison officer with State, Robert Joyce, prepared a reply that in time became the standard language used to explain the U.S. commitment to the SS men who had participated in Sunrise.

The records of the former OSS provide proof that Eugenio [sic] Dollmann, Aide to General Wolff and former SS Standartenfuehrer, as well as former SS Sturmbannfuehrer Eugen Wenner, also connected with Wolff and now being held captive in Italy, participated in the operation leading up to the German capitulation in Italy. Mr. Allen Dulles, formerly of OSS and later of SSU [Strategic Services Unit, a short-lived U.S. intelligence agency], who initiated the negotiations, has been contacted here and confirms the foregoing. Major General [Lyman] Lemnitzer, who also participated in the negotiations is convinced, after an examination of the records and contact with Dulles, of Dollmann’s participation. Present representations by the Italians would appear to be an endeavor to undermine, in Italy, the Allied position [two lines of text censored] … it would appear that Allied interests would be advanced if AFHQ [U.S. military headquarters] would confirm the fact of Dollmann’s and Wenner’s participation … and that these persons should receive such consideration as might be appropriate in the present circumstances.22

Italian authorities also tightened the screws on Walter Rauff, whom the Americans were then holding at a relatively high security prison at San Vittore. Rauff had been one of Wolff’s most important links to Cardinal Schuster and Monsignor Bicchierai throughout the negotiations with Dulles, according to accounts by both Rauff and Dulles.²³ When the Italians sought to prosecute Rauff for his work as a Gestapo leader and SD chief in Milan, the U.S. authorities transferred him to a prison hospital in Milan, and from there to a low-security POW camp near Rimini that had seen a series of mass prison escapes during the previous summer. On December 29, less than a month after the CIG secretly declared its interest in protecting the Sunrise SS prisoners, Walter Rauff walked away from the Rimini camp and disappeared.²⁴

“I went to Naples,” Rauff told a Chilean immigration court almost two decades later. “There a Catholic priest helped me to go to Rome where I stayed more or less a year and a half, and always in convents of the Holy See.… With the help of the Catholic Church my family was able to come from the Russian zone in Germany to Rome. Reunited with my family, I [then] went to Damascus,” and from there eventually on to refuge in South America.²⁵ The evidence points to Bichierrai and Schuster as the organizers of Rauff’s escape, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has concluded.²⁶

With Rauff hidden by the Vatican and Wolff in U.S. hands in Germany, Italian officials renewed their efforts to prosecute Dollmann, Wenner, and a handful of other senior SS officers whom they believed to be still in U.S. custody in Italy. An Italian military tribunal in Rome filed formal charges against Dollmann and three others on November 25, alleging that they had been instrumental in mass executions of civilian hostages. The U.S. then shuttled Dollmann from his internment center, where the Italian prosecutors knew he was being held, to a U.S. Army hospital. But that could only work temporarily, and by the following spring the U.S. military command in Italy was complaining to the State Department and to CIG of the necessity for a decision on what was to be done with Dollmann on a more permanent basis.27

After a flurry of discussions in Washington, the records of which are still classified today, the State Department determined that “both Dollmann and Wenner will be removed to Germany under security arrangements as soon as EUCOM [European Command, the U.S. military high command in Europe] confirms they will accept them.” The U.S. shipped Dollmann immediately.²⁸

Once Wolff, Dollmann, and Wenner were safely beyond the reach of Italian law, they renewed their appeals for a complete amnesty from war crimes prosecutions. “SS General Karl Wolff claims that in connection with Operation Sunrise leading to surrender of German forces in Italy certain oral promises were furnished him by von Gaevernitz of OSS, as well as Dulles, regarding personal immunity for Wolff and his assistants, in particular [Eugen] Dollmann and [Eugen] Wenner,” Robert Murphy reported to Washington in the summer of 1947. “Wolff alleges Major Weibel of Swiss General Staff was witness and guarantor to these promises. Sworn interrogatory between Wolff and Swiss national Max Husmann on fifth July 1947 indicates this may have been the case.

“Some U.S. intelligence authorities in Germany are of definite opinion that military honor requires pardon and immunity for Wolff and his adjutants who are at present in automatic arrest category,” Murphy continued. “Can you make discreet inquiries of Dulles and others concerning nature of possible promises and their opinion as to what extent moral obligation on part of U.S. may exist with respect to Wolff group. Early reply requested.…”²⁹

Dulles, Major General Lyman Lemnitzer, and CIG Assistant Director Colonel Donald H. Galloway again intervened to assist the SS men, according to U.S. records. Galloway told the State Department’s security chief Jack Neal that “the [Wolff] group rendered services to the Allies, therefore, the Allies were morally obligated to weigh the good along with the bad. Whatever they might be charged with should be weighed against the good which they did.” Dulles again insisted that he had made no “promises of immunity, safe refuge or payment of money” to the SS.30 But his claims on this point had begun to wear thin, considering that sworn testimony from four SS officers that he had made these promises had now been corroborated in affidavits by Max Husmann and Max Weibel, both of whom were widely reputed to be senior employees of the Swiss intelligence service who had worked extensively with Dulles throughout the war. Murphy’s telegram to Washington indicates that “some U.S. intelligence authorities in Germany” had reached the same conclusion concerning obligations incurred by Dulles.

Jack Neal at State was a cautious man, and he could smell the potential for trouble in this increasingly messy affair. After talking to Galloway at CIG, Neal wrote a memo for the files pinning responsibility for his actions on Dulles and the CIG, then wired back to Murphy at the U.S. embassy in Berlin that the State Department had concluded the Allies owed an obligation to Wolff, Dollmann, and other SS men involved in Sunrise. “Therefore,” he concluded in a top-secret cable on September 17, “definite consideration should be given to those favorable aspects when weighing any war crimes with which they are charged.”³¹

Wolff’s role in organizing the extermination camps and in administering forced labor had been so direct and extensive that almost any public trial would likely lead to a long prison sentence or a death penalty, regardless of the SS general’s role in Sunrise. Dollmann and Wenner were more junior SS officers, but they faced many of the same problems as did Wolff, especially if the Italian authorities arrested them.

The U.S. government transferred Wolff from an internment camp to considerably more comfortable lodgings in a mental hospital, then later often claimed that a mental breakdown had rendered him incompetent to stand trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.³² Wolff nonetheless became a favored informant for the U.S. prosecution team at Nuremberg, contributing evidence to a number of cases against other SS men, including some of his own subordinates.³³

British government prosecutors delivered the coup de grace to the efforts to bring Karl Wolff to justice. They formally requested that the U.S. turn over the SS general and several senior Wehrmacht generals for a full British war crimes trial. By then, Telford Taylor’s prosecution group was running out of funds and was under considerable pressure from the State Department and White House to wrap up its activities as quickly as possible. Taylor readily agreed to transfer Wolff to British custody for trial, and promised full cooperation in any future proceedings.34

But the British did not try Wolff. Instead, they severed his prosecution from that of the Wehrmacht generals, despite the fact that Wolff’s case was considerably more clear-cut and easier to prosecute. They then kept Wolff in protective custody without bringing him to trial until Taylor’s war crimes unit had closed up shop and returned to the U.S.

In late 1949, the British brought Karl Wolff before a denazification board (not an Allied court) in Hamburg—a move that might be fairly compared to charging the SS leader with traffic violations. Wolff’s Sunrise colleagues turned out in force for the “denazification.” Allen Dulles, Lyman Lemnitzer, and General Terrence Airey each submitted an affidavit on Wolff’s behalf to the German panel; Dulles’s senior aide, Gero von Gaevernitz, testified in person as a defense witness. The board deliberated briefly, determined that the Karl Wolff in the dock was in fact the well-known Nazi and SS leader, then went on to conclude that the time Wolff had served in Allied internment since the war had been punishment enough. Karl Wolff was free to go.³⁵

(Thirteen years later, the worldwide public attention to the Eichmann trial spurred German prosecutors to reopen the case against Karl Wolff for crimes against humanity. By that time, Allen Dulles had retired from the CIA in the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. The rest of the old Sunrise team seemed to prefer avoiding the highly public trial. German courts convicted Wolff of complicity in the murder of 300,000 Jews at Treblinka and sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. He served seven years before he was once again released.)³⁶

The path that Wolff’s aide Eugen Dollmann followed to freedom remains murky, but new light was shed on his case recently when some of the personal archives of military intelligence agent John Valentine Grombach found their way into the public domain. In the early 1950s, the CIA hired Grombach’s private intelligence network at $1 million per year to perform a variety of espionage services in Western and Eastern Europe. But Grombach’s relationship with the CIA went sour, and he began compiling hostile intelligence reports on CIA agents that he leaked to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and other bureaucratic rivals of the agency.37

Dollmann “kept in touch with [the] American intelligence service” after the war, Grombach wrote in a confidential memo to the FBI in 1954. Dollmann “had his entry into Switzerland cleared by its influence, and began to work for CIA. His work became especially important during the period when General Walter Bedell Smith was Director and Allen W. Dulles was Deputy Director. Then, in November 1952, at a time when Mr. Dulles was in Germany, the whole thing blew up,” Grombach noted. German press reports brought to light a series of scandals concerning former Nazi officials who favored a Soviet-backed proposal for a neutral Germany. Dollmann’s role in the affair is not entirely clear to this day, but it was certain that he had some connection with the neutralists, who were enjoying clandestine support from both East German intelligence and nationalist German business interests in Argentina. That scandal in turn produced reports of Dollmann’s association with both the CIA and British intelligence. Dulles was “somewhat abashed” by this latest imbroglio, Grombach wrote, and “left Germany in haste.”³⁸

In time, the Swiss deported Dollmann for abuse of his visitor’s status. So far as can be determined, no court ever tried Eugen Dollmann for his role in the destruction of Italian Jews and the massacre of Italian hostages. Dollmann’s autobiography eventually appeared in German and English editions,³⁹ and on the basis of his memoirs he today enjoys the reputation as something of a bon vivant. Dollmann’s colleague and prisonmate, Eugen Wenner, who shared with Dollmann the benefits of the U.S. intelligence intervention, also appears to have avoided all war crimes charges.

There was a common pattern in the U.S. treatment of SS men involved in the Operation Sunrise negotiations. It began with early capture by U.S. forces, followed by transfer of the suspect to some form of privileged custody, such as a hospital or sanitorium, or into British custody. At least some of these transfers, such as Dollmann and Wenner’s move to Germany, were arranged by U.S. military and State Department officials specifically to help the former SS men escape trial in an Allied country. The chain of documentary evidence concerning Dulles’s role in the Wolff case is circumstantial but strong, and it indicates that Dulles joined with senior U.S. and British officials in securing an amnesty for the highest-ranking Nazi criminal to escape the war. As for Walter Rauff, he escaped from U.S. custody under mysterious circumstances, then made his way to safety, apparently with the assistance of a ranking Catholic prelate whose political operations in Italy were at that time bankrolled primarily by U.S. intelligence.40

Officially, the United States, Britain, and the USSR formally agreed at the Potsdam Conference during the summer of 1945 to a tough program of demilitarization, decentralization, and denazification of Germany in general and of the German economy in particular. They also specified that Germany would pay substantial war reparations to the countries it had damaged.⁴¹ The Wolff and Horthy cases suggest that despite such public covenants, clandestine factions inside Western governments already enjoyed sufficient clout in the late 1940s to effectively derail prosecution of Nazi criminals, including those of very high rank, at least in certain circumstances. But this pattern of comfort extended to those who had once organized genocide was not simply some plot by insiders. It was, as will be seen, a structural problem, one that extended de facto amnesties to thousands of men and women who had promoted or profited from mass murder.

* In an interesting example of bureaucratic psychology, the State Department legal advisor’s confidential memoranda on the Horthy case later began to contend that Jackson had said the Yugoslavs had accepted his proposal of a confidential deal in the Horthy affair, though this contradicts the rest of the written record in the case. As the legal advisor’s office began to see things, Horthy’s problems were mainly the Yugoslavs’ fault, and their continued pursuit of him was further evidence of the perfidy of Communists.