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!
Yes I did. I was born in 1947. Describe desperate? Desperate enough to trust cold-blooded murderers that you'd just finished facing on the battlefield, to give you actual intelligence? That's pretty naive. And some of them were likely double agents.