How Reinhard Gehlen built the BND into a state in the state

[chlamor]

Some obvious problems with the not so subtle swipes taken by the folks at WSWS but for the info:

How Reinhard Gehlen built the BND into a state in the state
By Wolfgang Weber
December 9, 2017

The Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) has been leaked over 100,000 pages of documents of the former chief of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) Reinhard Gehlen (1902-1979). In the edition of December 1, 2017, the editors Uwe Ritzer and Willi Winkler report on four pages about the results of a first review of this find.

The archive contains spy records, political "situation reports", dossiers on politicians, artists and personalities from the academic world,
correspondence, personal records - all hitherto unknown material uncovered by any historian. Much of it seems to be historically worthless snippets such as receipts for daily expenses, condolence, greeting cards, but some contain explosive information. Gehlen had meticulously collected everything over the course of two decades, procured it as a private archive when he retired in 1968, and thus ensured secrecy even after his death.
The material enriches well-known facts with innumerable photos, film footage, documents recorded on microfilm, names and many detailed information. According to SZ, this explains how and where Gehlen, who was in charge of the collection of information on the social, economic and political life of the enemy of the Soviet Union as head of the Foreign Army East Division of the General Staff of the Army, was present weeks before the Capitulation to "the time after" prepared.

It shows how he and his closest associates buried the collected files in the mountains of Upper Bavaria as a bargaining chip for his personal negotiations with the victorious powers; shortly after the surrender, he welcomed his "expert knowledge" of the US Army, was welcomed and flown to the United States. How he signs a deal there, according to which he will build and lead a secret service on behalf of the CIA in Germany. "Without biographical break," write the SZ authors, Gehlen was in this way "one of the most powerful men in the Federal Republic" ascended.

Transfer company for old Nazis and right-wing Wehrmacht officers

That Gehlen worked with Nazi criminals, generals and officers of the Wehrmacht and old comrades of the SS and the Nazi secret service SD is not new. The Historical Commission, which was used a few years ago to process the history of the BND, has already brought much to light. What is new are the systematics and the sheer dimensions with which he did this - and was actively supported and covered by the Adenauer government.

The SZ authors themselves write that the "Organization Gehlen", as the BND was called before 1956, after the collapse of the Nazi dictatorship "the best conceivable job creation measure for ex-officers and old Nazis." Equally fitting would be the name "transfer company", whereby in contrast to today's "transfer companies" Gehlen's apparatus did not serve the promotion of workers to unemployment, but the smooth transfer of the repressive apparatus and its members from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic of Germany.

In keeping with the spatial and local continuity, the organization Gehlen moved to the "Reichsiedlung Rudolf Heß" quarter in December 1947, ie exactly 70 years ago, in a completely secluded residential quarter in the community of Pullach in the forest south of Munich.

The all and all inspiring driving force of this apparatus is the profound hatred of "communism". Gehlen does not mean by that the Stalinist rulers in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. As the documents also show, he later helps his close confidant Berthold Beitz, the Plenipotentiary of the Krupp Group, to establish economic contacts with the East against reservations by the Federal Government. In return, Beitz serves the BND as an informant by reporting extensively after each visit.

Under Communism, Gehlen's apparatus understands everything that has to do with the working class, its organizations, political leaders and parties, the October Revolution, and the Soviet Union, which still exists despite the Stalinist degeneration-in short, everything that Hitler once called " Mein Kampf
" was "Marxism "Or" Bolshevism "designated and declared the main enemy of the National Socialists.

It goes without saying that politicians or personalities of cultural and scientific life who were enemies and opponents of National Socialism in the Third Reich are also the first targets of the "Gehlen organization" for "Communists".

Thus, in the archive material is a carefully-managed dossier on the lawyer and political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth, who obtained a professional ban in 1933 as a legal trainee because of his socialist sentiment, drafted a few years later to a punitive battalion of the Wehrmacht and used in the war in Greece. Because he has deserted there and has joined the Greek resistance movement and beyond 1947 also as a lecturer at the University of Leipzig is called, he belongs in the first series of Gehlen's "enemies of the state". He is surrounded by his agents, who diligently send Gehlen their observations and protocol notes - to be found again in the 100,000 files of his private archive.

An open question is how many other cases of persecution and harassment of Nazi opponents, socialists and even Trotskyists by the BND can be found in the file Bergberg documents.

"Uncontrolled co-regent of the Federal Republic of Germany"

Probably the most spectacular discovery when scanning the archive material for the first time is the evidence that the BND implanted an informant and probably a provocateur in the leadership of the SPD very early on. With his help he observed over years his most prominent victim, the party leader Willy Brandt, from 1966 Foreign Minister of the Grand Coalition and from 1969 Chancellor of the Small Coalition with the FDP. The Foreign Minister is under surveillance by his own foreign intelligence service.

The BND collects photos and other material about Brandt's private life, which could make him blackmailable - and with which he was brought down in May 1974 as chancellor also. BKA President Horst Herold has a dossier compiled from this material. After the disarming of Chancellor co-worker Günter Guillaume and his wife as a GDR agent, this is presented to the FDP and SPD leadership and Willy Brandt to prove its alleged blackmailability and depict his resignation as inevitable.

The BND has known since 1954 of the role of the married couple Guillaume as a GDR agent, but retains this knowledge for himself, to use it 20 years later to initiate the fall of Brandt a decisive turn in West German politics. His most important agent at the head of the SPD for these operations "behind the enemy lines" is the SPD Information Director (!) Fried Wesemann. As the archive footage shows, this Gehlen transmits information about the internal discussions, decisions and personal details of the SPD leadership and can of course also influence its position.

This revelation is not just another colorful anecdote from a long-gone story. Rather, it is a serious warning of the deadly dangers for the working class and its democratic rights emanating from the BND today. The SZ authors rightly draw from their documentary evidence the conclusion: the organization Gehlen has risen to the "uncontrolled co-regent of the Federal Republic". It is a state within the state, founded and built by high officials and low Nazi regime criminals, who recruited his staff, agents and workers without the trace of democratic control for his reactionary operations of mass surveillance, provocations, repression and political influence trained.

Today, the BND resides no longer secluded in a Bavarian forest settlement, but in the middle of the capital Berlin with over 6,500 "office workers" in a newly built complex of buildings, which is larger than the Federal Chancellery and Bundestag building together. The thousands of field agents are not counted.

And he keeps evading any control. Just yesterday, on December 8, the SZ reported on a 39-page, secret report by the "Independent Body" to control the BND, which was deployed in the spring, after it became known that the BND, in collaboration with the American NSA, had billions of Internet data had been illegally tapped, stored and evaluated. The top lawyers - two federal judges and one federal prosecutor - complain in the report that they are unable to fulfill their mission because they block access to important information and deny access to important events.

Tradition line of the BND leads back to the Holocaust

Evidence can now be with documents of the Archives, what reputable historians have always suspected, the CDU and the Federal Chancellery but still deny that the Adenauer government was directly involved in the connection to Alois Brunner, one of the largest Nazi criminals to keep and use for yourself.

Brunner was deputy and right-hand man of Adolf Eichmann in the organization of the Holocaust. He distinguished himself through the arrangement of mass deportations and mass executions through a very personal sadistic cruelty in the detection, hunting, torturing and murder of Jews, especially of Jewish women and children in Austria, France, Italy and Greece. After the war, he worked under a false name for the US occupation forces, later in Essen at the Carl Funke colliery.

When his identity threatens to flare up in 1954, Gehlen helps him with his apparatus to flee to Syria, where he lives under a false name again, presumably until 2009 or 2010. In 1961, he believes he has an opportunity to make himself useful to the German government and thereby be To be able to terminate imprisonment under a false name in a foreign country: In the course of the trial of Adolf Eichmann abducted by the Israeli intelligence service in Argentina in 1960, Hans Globke, who heads the chancellery of Konrad Adenauer (CDU), is in the greatest danger, reputation and position to lose.

Globke is responsible for the personnel policy as well as for the alignment and coordination of the daily policy of the Federal Cabinet and thus the closest confidant of the Federal Chancellor. As the author of the racial laws of 1936 and of the "jurisprudence" of the Nazis relevant commentary on it, he has always been in public criticism. Adenauer still holds him in office on the grounds that "you do not throw away dirty water, as long as you do not have clean." But now Globke threatens to be exposed in the trial of Eichmann as his henchman and invited as a witness before the court.
Gehlen can enforce with the support of Adenauer in Israel at the prosecutor that it does not come to that. The SZ quotes Gehlen's note: "Attorney General Hausner already told me on the third day of the trial that Dr. Globke is taboo. "

But then the testimony of the former Wehrmacht officer Max Merten is published in several newspapers: Globke personally ordered the deportation of about 20,000 Jews from the Greek Thessaloniki, so he was also directly involved in the mass murder of the Holocaust. In this critical situation, Alois Brunner offers as "relief witness" for Globke. Gehlen establishes contact with the Federal Chancellery, discusses the pros and cons, organizational and legal issues several times with acceptance of the offer.

In the end, you decide to use another weapon from the arsenal of the BND, which promises more sustainable success and is less risky: a targeted media campaign. Gehlen noted in his files: "Secretary of State (Globke) agreed to the recited idea, regardless of the truth content to make the attempt, on the basis of existing findings Merten as an agent of Eastern propaganda pointed out."

Influence on the media

This method, a serious opponent who threatens to uncover the truth about the role of Globke in the Third Reich, in the media to slander as "agents of Pankow" - Pankow is then the seat of government of the GDR government - and to drive into financial ruin, This method is also used against another source of danger: Reinhard Strecker, who since 1958 has documented with a touring exhibition "Ungeschuptte Nazijustiz" throughout Germany, how countless Nazi judges in the Federal Republic under Adenauer and Gehlen have come back to office and dignity or stayed in it , Based on intensive archival research in Poland and Czechoslovakia published in 1961 a book entitled "Dr. Hans M. Globke. Filing statements. Documents ", in which Globke is exposed as an active co-organizer of the Holocaust.

The BND sets in motion a huge media campaign for the defamation of Streckers and uses hundreds of thousands of euros - converted into today's monetary value - to successfully prevent the publication from spreading. The BND pursued Strecker for decades, according to Streckers own statements until 2014, but over this time, of course, no new findings from the files can be expected.

What can be clearly visualized in the new files from Gehlen's term of office, however, is how, in the editorial offices of German and probably also foreign media, a network of complacent scribblers, informants and informers builds up and uses them over and over again to influence the To take politics.

Thus, the SZ authors report on the struggle of the BND against Willy Brandt, as this is set up in the early 1960s by the SPD as chancellor candidate against Adenauer and first reflections on a "detente policy" against the Soviet Union and the GDR brings into play: "In The records in Gehlen's secret documents repeatedly raise the question of whether Brandt can somehow be discredited. "

A means to defame him in the eyes of Catholic, strongly conservative or by Nazi ideology contaminated sections of the population is finally found: Brandts origin as an illegitimate child - his name was originally Herbert Frahm - is as "shady," "sinful," on all Cases not respectable. His involvement in his youth as a socialist against the Franco regime in Spain and against Hitler as well as his exile in Norway, where he takes the political name Willy Brandt, are denounced as "treason". The author of this article can still remember the infamous election campaign speeches by Konrad Adenauer, who repeatedly speaks of "Brandt alias Frahm". Today we can read in the files: Adenauer plays the violin that his shadow man Gehlen has voted for him.

In all major daily newspapers, the BND has its spies and mouthpieces, called by Gehlen "special compounds". From the publisher of the weekly newspaper D ie time , Marion Countess of Dönhoff, we read in the files that they are "old European manners overwhelmed" is the charm of the Hitler-General Gehlen and his care. The Countess retaliates with particularly slimy eulogies on Gehlen and his honorable service in the critical year of 1963, when his reputation was particularly badly affected by the Globke affair.

The following passage in the report by Willi Winkler and Uwe Ritzer is of highly topical importance in this context: "The documents from Gehlen's estate document how well the collaboration with German journalists went, which could readily be harnessed as a contributor to the Pullacher Brotherhood. The most important connection was soon to the news magazine Der Spiegel , this also confirm the documents. Again and again, Gehlen's service praises in his reports, how many Spiegel stories have been fed, rewritten or completely prevented. "

With justification and right one can then probably call the mirror the central organ of the Federal Intelligence Service . Slavish devotion to the BND is shown by, for example, Hans Detlev Becker, leading editor and later publishing director. But also the founder, owner and editor-in-chief Rudolf Augstein has important articles read out by himself from the BND. So also the famous report about the condition of the Federal Armed Forces "conditionally defensive ready" in the year 1962, which triggers the mirror affair . Three additional agents in the Spiegel editors are cited in Gehlen's notes for the fifties and early sixties.

If the number of field service or unofficial employees of the BND in the media editors since that time has grown as dramatically as that of the "office workers", then one can imagine the extent of infiltration of the media by the BND for opinion and policy making.

In this context, it is extremely remarkable that the revelations of the Süddeutsche Zeitung are ignored by all the other daily newspapers with meaningful silence. Only in the world Felix Kellerhoff, who has often excelled as a warm advocate of Globke, reports five days later with a comment to word. In it he says that the alleged new findings are nothing special.

That Willy Brandt has been spied on as foreign minister and chancellor like a public enemy? That's not surprising. Adenauer asked the BND very early on the career of the then governing mayor of Berlin. Since the BND had to follow the argument of Kellerhoff, resort to such means. One could only describe this as "consistent" and "consistent".

That Gehlen protected and defended Globke? Kellerhoff: "Even with the CIA there were considerations to protect Globke against the constant attacks from East Berlin, as can be read for everyone on the Internet since 2006 - which, however, did not lead to anything." According to Kellerhoff, CIA Considerations alone are a justification for an uncontrolled state in the state and its illegal operations.

"The fact that the BND or the CIA would have protected Eichmann, as is occasionally assumed by authors, the just cited documents for this just do not show." The authors of the SZ have neither made this claim nor submitted documents that should prove that , But they have spoken of a smooth cooperation of the BND with willing journalists, who are willing to be harnessed as informers and mouthpieces of the Nazi-founded and established intelligence service - and of countless evidence they have found to it. Felix Kellerhoff does not take a position on this.

https://www.wsws.org/de/articles/2017/1 ... l-d09.html

How former Nazi official Reinhard Gehlen erected a state within a state in post-war Germany
By Wolfgang Weber
27 December 2017

Over 100,000 pages of documents relating to the post-World War II former head of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) Reinhard Gehlen (1902-1979) have been leaked to the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ). In its edition of December 1, SZ reporters Uwe Ritzer and Willi Winkler devote four pages to an overview of the documents.

The archive includes reports from spies, political “situation reports,” dossiers on politicians, artists and personalities from the academic world, correspondence and personal records. All of this material was unknown to historians until now.

Much of it appears to be historically worthless snippets such as receipts for daily expenses, condolences and greeting cards, but there is also information of major importance. Over the course of two decades, Gehlen meticulously collected everything and placed it under wraps in a private archive when he retired in 1968, thus ensuring its secrecy even after his death.

The material confirms and embellishes well known facts with many photos, film footage, documents recorded on microfilm, names and detailed information. According to the SZ, it explains how Gehlen prepared for “the period after” just weeks before the capitulation of the German Army (Wehrmacht) at the end of World War II.

Reinhard Gehlen

During the war, Gehlen was head of the Foreign Army East Division of the General Staff, in charge of collecting information on the social, economic and political life of Nazi Germany’s main target in the war, the Soviet Union. His role in the war was crucial to his career after it.

The SZ documents reveal how Gehlen and his closest associates secretly buried the files in the mountains of Upper Bavaria to be used as a bargaining chip for his personal negotiations with the victorious Allied powers. Shortly after Germany’s surrender, Gehlen was feted by the US Army for his “expert knowledge” and was flown to the United States. There he struck a deal that allotted him the task of heading a secret service in Germany at the behest of the CIA. In this way, the SZ reporters write, Gehlen rose to become “one of the most powerful men in the Federal Republic… without any break in his biography.”

A “transfer company” for former Nazis and right-wing Wehrmacht officers

It is already known that after the war, Gehlen worked with Nazi criminals, generals and Wehrmacht officers as well as former SS and Nazi Secret Service officers. Details of such collaboration were revealed by the historical commission set up some years ago to investigate the history of the BND. What is new is the documentation of the systematic character and scale of his activities—and the extent to which he was supported and protected by
Germany’s first post-war government under the Christian Democratic leader Konrad Adenauer.

The SZ authors write that the “Gehlen Organization,” as the BND was called before 1956, was “the best conceivable job-creation office for ex-officers and old Nazis” following the downfall of the Nazi dictatorship. Equally fitting would be the designation “transfer company.”

However, in contrast to today’s transfer companies, Gehlen’s apparatus did not serve to smooth the path of employed workers to unemployment, but rather facilitated the smooth transfer of the repressive apparatus and leading staff of the Third Reich to the post-war German Federal Republic.

In keeping with its continuity with the Nazi apparatus, the Gehlen Organization moved its operations in December 1947 (70 years ago) to the Reichssiedlung Rudolf Heß—a secluded residential quarter in the community of Pullach in the forests to the south of Munich that had housed high-ranking Nazis.

The driving force behind this apparatus was a profound hatred of communism. For Gehlen, this meant not so much the Stalinist rulers in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. As the documents show, at a later stage Gehlen helped his close confidant Berthold Beitz, representing the Krupp Group, to establish economic contacts with Eastern countries in the face of opposition from the German government. In return, Beitz operated as an informant for the BND, reporting extensively after every one of his visits abroad.

For Gehlen’s apparatus, “communism” was everything relating to the working class—its organizations, political leaders and parties, and the October Revolution and Soviet Union, which continued to exist despite its Stalinist degeneration. Gehlen’s conception corresponded exactly to what Adolf Hitler designated in Mein Kampf as Marxism or Bolshevism, and which Hitler declared to be the main enemy of the National Socialists.

Hence, it goes without saying that politicians and personalities from the sphere of cultural and academic life who were opponents of National Socialism during the Third Reich were among the first targets of the Gehlen Organization’s persecution of communists.

The archive material includes a carefully composed dossier on the lawyer and political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth, who was banned from working as a legal trainee in 1933 due to his socialist leanings. A few years later, Abendroth was sent into a punishment battalion of the Wehrmacht active in the war in Greece. He deserted from the Army and joined the Greek resistance movement.

After the war, he commenced teaching as a lecturer at the University of Leipzig. This was sufficient to place him in the first ranks of Gehlen’s list of “enemies of the state.” Abendroth was surrounded by Gehlen’s agents, who diligently sent their observations and notes to Gehlen, all of which are found in the 100,000 files of his private archive.

An open question is how many other cases of BND persecution and harassment of Nazi opponents, socialists and Trotskyists are to be found in the mountain of files.

“Uncontrolled co-ruler of the German Republic”

Probably the most spectacular discovery in this initial review of the archive material is the evidence that the BND planted an informant and probably a provocateur in the leadership of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) at a very early stage. Through the work of his agent, Gehlen was able to observe over many years his most prominent target, SPD leader Willy Brandt, who was foreign minister in the grand coalition (SPD and Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union) from 1966 and in 1969 chancellor of the coalition between the SPD and the Free Democratic Party (FDP). As foreign minister, Brandt was spied upon by his own foreign intelligence service.

The BND collected photos and other material about Brandt’s private life, which it used to blackmail him and subsequently engineer his resignation as chancellor in May 1974. Federal Police (BKA) Chief Horst Herold had an entire dossier compiled on the basis of this material. The unmasking of Chancellor Brandt’s confidante Günter Guillaume and Guillaume’s wife as agents of the East German Stalinist regime was passed on to the FDP and SPD leadership and to Brandt himself to prove the latter’s susceptibility to blackmail and make his resignation appear inevitable.

The BND had known that Guillaume and his wife were East German agents since 1954 but had kept this knowledge to itself, only to use it 20 years later to initiate Brandt’s downfall and a decisive turn in West German politics. Gehlen’s most important agent in the SPD leadership for this operation “behind enemy lines” was SPD Information Director Fried Wesemann. As the archive footage shows, Wesemann passed on to Gehlen information about the internal discussions, decisions and personal details of the SPD leadership and was able to influence them by virtue of his position within the party.
This revelation is not just a colorful anecdote from a story long past. Rather, it is a serious warning of the dangers to the working class and its democratic rights emanating from the BND today. The SZ authors rightly draw the conclusion from the documentary evidence that the Gehlen Organization had risen to become an “uncontrolled co-ruler of the German Republic.” It became and remains a state within the state, founded and built by former Nazi functionaries and fascist criminals who recruited and trained its staff and agents without a trace of democratic control over its reactionary operations, involving mass surveillance, provocations, repression and manipulation of political life.

Today, the BND no longer resides in a secluded Bavarian forest. It recently moved to a huge new complex in the middle of the capital, Berlin, with a staff of over 6,500 “office workers,” which does not even count the agency’s thousands of agents. The complex of buildings is larger than the federal Chancellery and the German parliament (Bundestag) combined.

The BND is still beyond any democratic control. On December 8, the SZ reported on a 39-page secret report by an “independent body” set up last spring to control the BND, after it became known that it, in collaboration with the US National Security Agency (NSA), had illegally tapped, stored and evaluated billions of items of internet data. The lawyers leading the investigating body—two federal judges and one federal prosecutor—complained in their report that they were unable to complete their work because they were denied access to important information.

BND traditions rooted in the Holocaust

Based on the archive documents, it is now possible to confirm a long-standing suspicion of reputable historians, but one that the Christian Democrats and the German Chancellery continue to deny—namely, that the Adenauer government was involved in maintaining links and utilizing a relationship with one of the main criminals of the Nazi period, Alois Brunner.

Brunner was the deputy and right-hand man of Adolf Eichmann in the organization of the Holocaust. He personally oversaw mass deportations and mass executions and exhibited exceptional sadistic cruelty in detecting, hunting down, torturing and murdering Jews, especially Jewish women and children, in Austria, France, Italy and Greece. After the war, he worked under a false name for the US occupation forces, and later in Essen at the Carl Funke mine.

When his true identity threatened to emerge in 1954, Gehlen used his apparatus to help Brunner flee to Syria, where he again lived under a false name, presumably until 2009 or 2010.

In 1961, Brunner believed he had detected an opportunity to make himself useful to the German government and thus end his life in a foreign country under a false name. In the course of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had been abducted by the Israeli intelligence service in Argentina in 1960, Hans Globke, head of the Chancellery of Adenauer, was in great danger of losing his reputation and position.

Globke was responsible for both the personnel and day-to-day policy of the federal cabinet. He was the closest confidant of the chancellor. He was also the author of the Nazi race laws of 1936 and a leading commentator on Nazi “jurisprudence.”

These facts were well known and Globke had been the target of public criticism for his role under the Nazis, but Adenauer insisted that he remain in office with the argument that “You can’t throw away dirty water as long as you don’t have any clean water.” But now Globke had been requested to appear as a witness in the Eichmann trial, which would have made his role as the latter’s henchman a matter of public record.

With the support of Adenauer, Gehlen was able to persuade the prosecutor in Israel that Globke should not take the stand. The SZ quotes Gehlen’s note: “Attorney General Hausner already told me on the third day of the trial that Dr. Globke is taboo to him.”

However, a number of daily papers cited the trial testimony of former Wehrmacht officer Max Merten, who had stated that Globke personally ordered the deportation of about 20,000 Jews from Thessaloniki in Greece, thereby confirming that he was directly involved in the Holocaust.

It was at this critical point that Alois Brunner offered his services as a “witness for the defense” of Globke. Gehlen helped establish the contact with the German chancellor’s office and discussed with Globke multiple times all the pros and cons, along with the organizational and legal issues involved in accepting Brunner’s offer.

In the end, they decided to use another weapon from the arsenal of the BND, which promised more success and less risk: a targeted media campaign. Gehlen noted in his files: “Secretary of State (Globke) agreed to the idea cited, to attempt, regardless of the truth, to present Merten as an agent of Eastern propaganda, on the basis of existing findings.”

Influence on the media

The method of denouncing in the media any serious opponent who threatened to reveal the truth about the role of Globke in the Third Reich as an “agent of Pankow” (Pankow in East Berlin was at that time the seat of government of the Stalinist regime in East Germany) was also used against other opponents.

Beginning in 1958, Reinhard Strecker had organized an exhibition titled “Unatoned Nazi Justice,” which toured throughout West Germany. The exhibition documented the manner in which innumerable Nazi judges had been retained or restored to their exalted positions in the post-war Federal Republic under Adenauer and Gehlen. Based on intensive archival research in Poland and Czechoslovakia, Strecker published a book in 1961 titled Dr. Hans M. Globke—Statements from the Files. Documents, in which he exposed Globke as an active organizer of the Holocaust.

The BND set in motion a huge media campaign, using what would today equal hundreds of thousands of euros to defame Strecker and (successfully) prevent the further distribution of his book. The BND continued to persecute Strecker for decades (according to Strecker himself, until 2014), but from this time period we, of course, cannot expect new findings from these files.

However, what can be clearly studied from the files from Gehlen’s term of office is how a network of compliant scribblers and informers was set up in the editorial offices of German and probably also foreign media and deployed time and again to directly influence politicians and policies.

Thus, the SZ reporters describe the campaign set in motion by the BND against Willy Brandt when Brandt stood as the SPD’s choice as chancellor against Adenauer in the early 1960s and first raised the notion of a “policy of détente” relating to the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany): “The notes in Gehlen’s secret documents repeatedly raise the question of whether Brandt could somehow be discredited.”

Eventually they found a means to defame Brandt in the eyes of Catholic, arch-conservative layers of the population and those who were still shaped by Nazi ideology: Brandt’s origins as an illegitimate child—his original name was Herbert Frahm—were portrayed as “shady,” “sinful” and dishonorable. His involvement in his youth as a socialist against the Franco regime in Spain and against Hitler, as well as his exile in Norway, where he adopted the political name of Willy Brandt, were denounced as evidence of “treason.”

The author of this article can still remember very well the infamous election campaign speeches by Adenauer, who repeatedly referred to “Brandt alias Frahm.” Today we can read in the files: Adenauer was citing from the script provided him by his man in the shadows, Gehlen.

The BND has its spies and mouthpieces in all of the major daily newspapers, referred to by Gehlen as “special connections.” One can read in the files that Marion Gräfin von Dönhoff, the editor of the weekly Die Zeit, was overwhelmed by the charm of Hitler’s General Gehlen and his “old-style European manners.” The countess responded with a number of particularly obsequious tributes to Gehlen and his honorable services in the critical year of 1963, when Gehlen’s reputation had suffered badly as a result of the Globke affair.

In this context, the following passage in the SZ report by Winkler and Ritzer is highly relevant: “The documents left behind by Gehlen show the extent of the collaboration with German journalists, who willingly made their contribution to the Pullach brotherhood. The most important connection was soon established with the news magazine Der Spiegel, and this is also confirmed by the documents. Time and time again Gehlen’s service takes pride in the number of Spiegel stories that had been deliberately leaked to the editorial board, rewritten or stopped before publication.”

One can justifiably claim that Der Spiegel was the most important organ of the Federal Intelligence Service. Hans Detlev Becker, the magazine’s editor and later publishing director, showed slavish devotion to the BND. The founder, owner and Editor-in-Chief Rudolf Augstein also requested that important articles be read beforehand by the BND, including his famous report from 1962 about the condition of the Federal Armed Forces titled “Partially Operative,” which triggered the so-called Spiegel affair of the same year. Three other agents on the Spiegel editorial board are cited in Gehlen’s notes from the 1950s and early 1960s.

If one assumes that the number of BND field staff and unofficial collaborators on media editorial boards has grown in line with its army of “office workers,” one has an idea of the extent of the BND’s infiltration of the media and influence on policy-making.

In this respect, it is telling that the revelations published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung have been ignored by Germany’s other major daily newspapers. Only one report appeared five days later in Die Welt, authored by Felix Kellerhoff, who in the past has often found appreciative words for Globke. In his comment, Kellerhoff claimed that the latest batch of files produced nothing new.

That Willy Brandt had been spied on as foreign minister and chancellor and treated like a public enemy? That’s not surprising, according to Kellerhoff. At a very early stage, Adenauer had requested information from the BND about the career of the then-mayor of Berlin.
According to Kellerhoff’s line of argumentation, the intelligence services were obliged to intervene. Their procedure could be described only as “logical” and “consistent,” he writes.

The fact that Gehlen protected and defended Globke? Kellerhoff responds: “Even the CIA considered protecting Globke from constant attacks from East Berlin, as everyone has been able to read on the internet since 2006—but these attacks did not lead to anything.” In other words, CIA approval is sufficient to warrant a state within a state and all of its illegal operations.

“However,” Kellerhoff continues, “that the BND or CIA would have protected Eichmann, as is occasionally assumed by authors, is not backed up by the evidence cited.” In fact, the SZ reporters never make this claim or attempt to provide evidence to support it. However, they do reveal the smooth cooperation between the BND and journalists ready and willing to function as informers and mouthpieces for an intelligence service founded and run by Nazis. On this issue Felix Kellerhoff has nothing to say.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/1 ... m-d27.html

[blindpig]

Some obvious problems with the not so subtle swipes taken by the folks at WSWS but for the info

Distempered dogs marking territory who just hadda include that irrelevant commentary in an useful, if redundant, article.