CIA, KGB, Mossad – They All Hired Nazi War Criminals as Spies

The gas vans that used exhaust fumes to kill thousands of Jews during transportation were designed by SS colonel Walter Rauff. He was a friend of Holocaust architect Reinhard Heydrich, and oversaw the killing of 100,000 people. Yet, a few years after World War II, the Israeli secret service hired him as a spy and helped him flee justice to South America. Rauff also worked for West Germany’s intelligence agency, founded under C.I.A. supervision by another Nazi turncoat, lieutenant general Reinhard Gehlen.

The Allies swore to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, but only few were caught and tried. In the 1960s, Israel deployed elite operatives to capture or kill Nazi war criminals. Most famously, Mossad teams spirited Adolf Eichmann from Buenos Aires to trial in Jerusalem, and assassinated Herbert Cukurs (the ‘Butcher of Riga’) near Montevideo. But in Israel’s early years, its existence threatened by Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, it was forced to obtain intelligence from Rauff and other Nazis who had contacts in those countries. During the Six-Day war, too, Israel benefited from intelligence provided by ex-Nazis, and it was a ex-Nazi commando, Otto Skorzeny, whom the Mossad hired to infiltrate Egypt's’s missile project, which employed German scientists, technicians, and security staff.

Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries During the Cold War, a new book by Danny Orbach, is a trove of astounding stories of how exigency and realpolitik converged with the ruses and wangles of ex-Nazis keen on saving their skins.

The book pieces together a disquieting yet compelling picture of how the C.I.A., the K.G.B., and Mossad recruited Nazi mercenaries without any qualms, helping them evade war-crime trials if it served a purpose. It’s based on declassified documents, including details from Mossad’s archives, and interviews with retired intelligence officers.

Thanks for this info. I just ordered the book from Amazon. I previously read “Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped and the Quest to Bring Them to Justice” by Guy Walters. According to Walters, the British Military were initially the most intent on hunting down Nazi war criminals, but like with the U.S., France, etc., the hunts eventually petered out due to lack of staff, and money. I look forward to reading this book too. Currently reading the biography titled “Hitler” by Joachim C. Fest.

"It is a disgrace that Americans helped war criminals escape justice as a matter of policy. This was the democrat policy of FDR and Truman."

And still, to this day, we have no idea what actual intelligence was gathered by the use of these Nazi war criminals, or if it was of any use, or beneficial to this country during the Cold War. The fact that Nazis/Commies are running this country now, tells me it did diddly-squat.

“Why waste all the perfectly good intelligence, insider-political knowledge and operations ability?”

Ask the hundreds of thousands they murdered in cold blood. Ask the women they humiliated, stripped naked and shot into a muddy ditch. They had nothing that important that they shouldn’t have seen a rope.
In fact, many of them exaggerated things so they could save their necks from the rope. If you have nothing valuable, you aren’t worth saving.

You are so righteous, but I am sorry, that’s NOT how the real world works, nor how it has worked in history - including our beloved OSS/CIA after WWII.

Standard procedure is to hang the leaders, and sift through and co-opt what remains.

The USA/allies “purged” or investigated something like 4-5% of the German adult population after WWII

In Japan, that number was miniscule - something like 0.2%. We left their political-economic structure in tact, and basically took over the top positions

And you can argue the Japanese government were far more murderous than even the Nazi were and deserved hanging even more. But that’s not what we did.

We did not need the CIA and like everything else, the intel community should have faced a massive draw down in 1946...
We did not have anything beyond standard military intelligence formations before WWII.
Henry Stimson was mocked for his comment that “gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail”.
What people failed to note is the other side of his morality. When someone took advantage of that basic American decency and sucker punched us, he came back as Secretary of War and built a 16 million man army, the Manhattan project and dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. When Patton was under fire for the slapping incident, Stimson decided he would stay on duty and went and told the Senate as much.

Our turn towards British inspired OSS/CIA models turned America into untrustworthy sneaks rather than the John Wayne mentality we should have.

Our turn towards British inspired OSS/CIA models turned America into untrustworthy sneaks rather than the John Wayne mentality we should have.

I agree with you there. At some point after WWI, the progressive-globalists-empire-builders steadily took control of our country, and we turned into an empire, always at war somewhere. And for that, you need a security state.

Its in over-drive now.

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