The far right is on the rise in Germany and state institutions are increasingly under scrutiny for aiding and harboring fascist elements. elements. In the first part we looked at the period of supposed denazification after World War II and how former Nazis were reintegrated in virtually all structures of the state up to the highest level.
So make sure to check out out that video as well. Right-wing extremism has contaminated the German police, military and intelligence structures. And this has an important history.
To better understand the situation in Germany today, we are going to look at the history of these intelligence organizations and how and why they were led by the most vicious Nazis of the Third Reich, such as the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the CIA of Germany. and probably the most important partner of US intelligence in the Cold War and its forerunner, an organization aiming at nothing less than the continuation of Hitler's aims through its quote, monstrous underground power in Germany an effective, clandestine web of fascism led by one of the most scary and ruthless hunter of communists Hitler's most senior military intelligence officer on the Eastern Front, Reinhard Gehlen. General Gehlen began planning his surrender to the United States around late 1944, when Germany's defeat became inevitable. Alongside other high-ranking Nazi security officers, like SS leader, Heinrich Himmler.
Many Nazis devised secret surrender plans with common tactics. These tactics involved offering valuable assets to the Western Allies, such as espionage information or a relatively swift surrender of German forces, while downplaying their involvement in war crimes and genocide. Their goal was to secure immunity from prosecution.
Among them, General Gehlen would become the most significant figure. The 5'8 tall and scrawny Gehlen, possessed exceptional skills as a spymaster with a scrupulous attention to detail. In March 1945, Galen and his senior officers microfilmed the extensive documentation on the USSR, concealed the film, and buried it at the Austrian Alps. Finally, on May 22, 1945, Galen and his top aides surrendered to the Counterintelligence Corps of the U.S.
Army and were then taken to Fort Hunt, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. Along with him, the US, through Operation Paperclip, also brought people like Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who would later work for NASA. A year later, Galen and his staff were brought back to Germany, at Camp King in Oberursel, near Frankfurt, for interrogation and deal-making. American interrogators were delighted when Galen eventually provided them with the hidden records. The CIA remained vague about where Galen got that information from.
In fact, he got much of it through his role in one of the most vicious atrocities of the war. The interrogation, torture and murder by starvation of approximately 4 million Soviet prisoners of war. But there was an annoying problem with this plan.
The Yalta Agreements obligated the US to surrender Axis officers involved in Eastern Area activities to the Soviets. But the Americans didn't really bother. The US acknowledged Galen's potential as an exceptional spymaster and hunter of communists, equipped with a network of anti-communist intelligence contacts. Galen struck an attractive deal with the Americans.
In return for his freedom, he would assist them in the fight against communism. So basically, a deal with no downsides for either party. A year later, the US Army founded what would later become the Organisation Gehlen, or short, the Org, financed by the US, with Reinhard Gehlen under the code name Dr. Schneider becoming its leader in 1947. The verbal agreement included its purpose, The basis is the common interest in the defense against communism.
The Org would develop into one of the, if not the most important intelligence partner of the CIA and NATO. Gehlen had declared that it's not only in the East where the communist enemy lies. His organization would also aim to fight, quote, communism inside West Germany.
On December 6, 1947, the Org moved to Pullach near Munich, where its successor organization would stay until 2019. The new location, now called Camp Nikolaus due to the founding date, was special. Part of the site complex had served as a settlement for high-ranking Nazi Party members, such as Martin Bormann, the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Hitler's private secretary. Its name?
Rudolf Hess Reich Settlement. Named after one of the most powerful Nazis, the appointed deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler, Gehlen helped a large number of his former Nazi colleagues to dodge denazification through giving them new identities and start a new career in the young Federal Republic of Germany. Along with them came former SS, Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst members, who were actually subject to immediate arrest since these organizations had been declared criminal organizations by the Supreme Allied Command and and convicted as organizational perpetrators of war crimes by the Nuremberg Tribunal. But again, nobody gave a shit.
The new members included SS-Hauptsturmführer Otto von Bolschwing, instigator of a bloody pogrom in Bucharest and senior aide to Adolf Eichmann, major organizer of the Holocaust, also recruited. Gestapo commander responsible for sending Anne Frank to her death, Karl Josef Silberbauer, and Alfred Bensinger, nicknamed Der dicke, former sergeant of the notorious secret field police, who now headed the most important mission in the world. important department of the Org, Agency 114, establishing a massive network of informers to monitor communists and pacifists.
Konrad Fiebig, who would later be charged with the murder of 11,000 Jews in Belarus, was one of the guys working here. Another was SS Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner, who would go on to die peacefully of old age, despite being responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 Jews. Last but not least, SS Major Emil Augsburg, wanted in Poland for having planned the executions of Jews. A CIA assessment described him as, quote, honest and idealist, who enjoys good food and wine, and has an unprejudiced mind.
Operating until 1956, the Org was allowed to employ at least 100 former Gestapo or SS officers, and would soon recruit over 4,000 anti-communist secret agents. The German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau reported, It seems that in the headquarters, one SS man paved the way for the next, and Himmler's elite were having happy reunion ceremonies. The CIA's James Critchfield, who worked with the Galen organization, said in 2001, quote, CIA research in the early 50s found that 13 to 28 percent of the Galen organization's staff were former Nazi Party members.
The report points out that the proportion of former Nazi party members is comparable to the membership of the second German Bundestag or parliament, which was 26.5%. The organization also encompassed the so-called Professorengruppe, group of professors, which included the proud anti-Semite Werner Konze, to collect intelligence and spread anti-communist propaganda. Furthermore, through his close Nazi contacts with the Der Spiegel magazine, Gehlen could exert great influence on public opinion. From 1949, the newly created CIA took over and became the chief funder and authority of the Org. It's estimated that the CIA gave 1.5 million US dollars per year, which would be about 20 million today, to the Hitlerite organization.
The Org would receive further secret financial support from a reptile fund of the Chancellor and from corporations such as Standard Electric, later part of ITT Corporation, that had financed the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile or Messerschmitt, which was later absorbed in what would become Airbus Europe's second largest armament corporation Then finally on April 1st 1956 and no, this was sadly no April Fool's joke the Gehlen organization would turn into the official secret intelligence service of the German state which exists to this day The Bundesnachrichtendienst, in English Federal Intelligence Service, short BND. You can think of it as the CIA of Germany, and its first president, of course, Reinhard Gehlen himself. The presidents of the BND had their office in the former bedroom of Martin Bormann, in the presidential villa in Pulach.
Along with Gehlen came his Nazi colleagues, and the BND by no means stopped hiring additional. Nazis. It was later revealed that the daughter of the architect of the Holocaust Heinrich Himmler worked at the BND in the early 60s.
Gudrun Burwitz, also known as the Princess of Nazism, worked in Pullach using a different name and remained a Holocaust denier until the very end. She served in a leadership position in the Stille Hilfe, Silent Help organization, as an aging grandmother, assisting former SS members. trying to dodge the law. Gehlen managed to form a strong relationship with the right-hand man of the then chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Not least due to Hans Globke being a staunch Nazi himself, of course.
We've talked about Globke in the first part. This gave the BND relative freedom within the federal chancellery, disregarding so-called democratic mechanisms and giving it free reign. Until recently, chancellors like Angela Merkel, stopped all attempts to investigate the BND's past, later adopting a much laxer attitude, realizing it doesn't look good if other institutions look into their past, but the BND doesn't.
The BND is the biggest of the three federal intelligence services in Germany and is, at least officially, concerned with foreign intelligence. The Military Counterintelligence Service, short MAT, is responsible for military counterintelligence. as the name suggests. And last but not least, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, which translates to Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in English.
It's the other big player and is the domestic intelligence agency, tasked, among other things, with protecting the liberal democratic constitution from extremism. Although, as we will see, it's not that interested in fighting the right-wing side of things. This should come as no surprise, since the fascists could make themselves very comfortable here as well. If you've followed the news a little bit over the past years, you might have heard about a few scandals in which the Verfassungsschutz was involved in connection to a certain underground Nazi network. which committed brutal massacres some years ago.
But this deserves its own video. In the next part, we're gonna dive into the history of the institution whose budget has tripled over the last 20 years to strengthen the counter-revolutionary basis of the German capitalist state, which Reinhard Gehlen contributed to significantly. So his story doesn't end here.
Make sure you subscribe to the channel to not miss the next video about the Nazi contaminated anti-communist institution linked to the CIA assisted secret web of repression around all of Europe that continues to collaborate with far-right terror Making sure that Nazism can stay alive in Germany to this day