The fact that we've never heard about any good coming from it, tells me that it would have been better, not to baby and protect known murderers. Have any of those records been declassified yet, or will they ever be declassified? The more our intelligence agencies hide from us, the more you have to question what it is they are actually doing. Based on what has come out about them these past 5-6 years, you have to wonder if that corruption was part, and parcel of their beginnings.
You’re judging it with 77 years post-event eyes.
Do you experience the Cold War?
At the time we were desperate, and I mean desperate for on the ground intelligence on the USSR. Many were convinced WWIII was imminent.
Gehlen was never associated with any war crimes. “Hiring” Gehlen was no different than using former WWII Wehrmacht & Luftwaffe leaders and generals to stand up the modern Bundeswehr and Luftwaffe. The post-script on the Gehlen Organization which became the BND was their military and industrial reporting was good to excellent their political intelligence reporting poor.
The good social democrat Konrad Adenauer forced Gehlen when he was the first director of the BND to hire Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS) men to deal with ‘the avalanche of subversion hitting them from East Germany’.
Desperate times (or at least what was perceived at the time as desperate times) requires one to do desperate things. Looking back on it is easy to do and therefore easy to make superficial moral judgements. Hindsight is always 20-20!