The Gehlen Organization, Part 1: Doctor Schneider | Historical
44:24 Share

And what would you do...

in their position. This is True Spies. We all hope for justice, that justice is done and served. But that's not what happened. That's a reality that's hard to swallow. I'm Daisy Ridley, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. The Galen Organization. Part One. Dr. Schneider. New York City, October 10th, 1951.

Over 60,000 baseball fans are packed into Yankee Stadium to watch the sixth and final game of the World Series. Arch rivals the Yankees and the Giants are facing off in what would be legendary player Joe DiMaggio's last major league match. Like many at the game, players and fans alike, DiMaggio's life was upended by World War II as he swapped the baseball plate for military bases around the US.

But among the adoring crowd, there's a man experiencing his first ever American sporting event. Slim, receding hairline, moustache and dark glasses, he could have been anyone. But this man's experience of war was very different to the illustrious centerfielders. In fact,

He wasn't even on the Allies' side. He was a captain in 1936 when Germany started expanding. In 1940 he became the adjutant to the chief of general staff. And as the war progressed, he advised the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, personally, on Soviet military positions.

By the spring of 1945, even when defeat was certain, he considered joining a guerrilla outfit to fight the Allied occupation of Germany. These people were people who thought, this isn't over yet, right? We think of World War II as ending in 1945, and that's it, done, Nazi Germany is over. But these were nationalists. Some of them were very sympathetic to the old idea of Nazism.

And yet, some six and a half years later, here this former Nazi general was, enjoying that most American of pastimes, baseball, among his former foes. But he wasn't alone. Standing on one side was a Nazi comrade, and on the other, an officer from the CIA, which had invited the two Germans to the US. How is this possible? It's just mind-blowing.

In this two-part special, True Spies tells the story of the Galen Organization, the clandestine German intelligence network that sprang out of the cinders of the Third Reich. Initially, one could see this as kind of a stopgap measure during a period of geopolitical uncertainty in Central Europe. But it winds up becoming something that gets out of control.

You'll hear how the Americans sponsored the very same men they had fought against just months before. And what's more, the worst of the worst. They were hiring members of organizations that were in the process of being declared criminal. The SS.

members of the Gestapo, personnel who had been on roving shooting squads on the Eastern Front, who had killed large numbers of Jews in these operations. And you'll hear about the man behind it all, the man at Yankee Stadium, Reinhard Galen. Galen built himself up as sort of a master spy and master intelligence officer.

An enigmatic figure, Galen abstained from alcohol, laughed little, and carried himself like an aristocrat. But some of the conversations Galen had seemed completely unhinged. It's early April 1945, six years before the baseball game at Yankee Stadium. The end of the Nazi regime is only weeks away.

With the Soviet army advancing on Berlin, Adolf Hitler retreats to the Führerbunker. There he is briefed on the strength of the Russian forces. The Soviets will soon have the capital surrounded, one of his advisors says. Defeat is inevitable. But Hitler rejects that verdict and fires the man who delivers it: Reinhard Galen for his defeatist attitude.

As head of the intelligence unit Foreign Armies East, Galen was responsible for building a picture of the Soviet forces on the Eastern Front. And now he's cast aside. Not that his post was needed by April 1945. Any Germans who wanted to see the Red Army could pretty much see them in their living rooms by that point. This is Norman Goder, professor of history and Holocaust studies at the University of Florida.

As Gode notes, Galen knew the Third Reich's demise was now certain. And so he crafted an insurance policy. He started making plans for the post-war world. He began having caches of documents hidden in various places in Bavaria. What were these documents?

intelligence files on the Soviet military that Galen's department had gathered throughout the war. After being banished by Hitler in April 1945, Galen retreated to Bavaria with his family. Then, on May 23rd, he came down from his mountain hideout and surrendered to an American officer. Easy, buddy.

When the US 12th Army Group's Intelligence Division heard of Galen's capture, it had him transferred to its own interrogation center in Wiesbaden. There, Galen meets a captain tasked with debriefing persons of interest, and he is stunned by what Galen has to say.

Galen shows up claiming to have tremendous caches of valuable information on the Red Army itself. To the Americans, this is gold dust.

The US Army knew almost nothing about the Soviets or the Red Army or Soviet intentions. The Soviets had been an ally and even OSS had not thought it ethical to spy on the Soviets. The two US officers sense an opportunity both for their own careers and for broader US intelligence.

The captain goes to the camp's commanding officer with news of the hidden cache of files. While the US and the Soviets were technically still allies in 1945, there were many on both sides who thought a war between these two ideological foes was inevitable. Germany was destroyed. The factories were destroyed. The cities were destroyed. This is Gerald Steinacker.

Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. But the German know-how was still there. The German experts were still there. And everybody wanted to have access to this German expert, mostly for the military industry. There was kind of a competition, international competition, you know, who gets the best experts? So the two U.S. officers agree to Gehlen's demands.

In exchange for giving up the files, Galen was to be treated less like a prisoner than as an employee of the Americans. They began sort of protecting Galen. They took his name off of the prisoner list and they encouraged him to reestablish contact with other officers from foreign armies east.

Over the next month, Galen tracks down all of the key members of his staff, including one Hermann Baun. One of the most important officers in armed forces intelligence for gathering information from the Eastern Front. Meanwhile, his U.S. handlers retrieved nearly all of the intelligence files Galen had buried across southern Germany. But they weren't finished there.

After learning that the Pentagon had ordered the retrieved files to be flown to Washington DC for evaluation, they pitched the idea of Galen himself going too. The Pentagon agreed.

And so, on August 21st 1945, less than four months after VE Day, the Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen and five of his officers boarded a DC-3 military plane belonging to General Eisenhower's Chief of Staff and flew to America.

where they were technically prisoners of war, but were treated very well with picnics and excursions into Washington and that sort of thing. To avoid detection by the Soviets, who were looking for Galen, he traveled under the pseudonym Richard Garner. For Gerald Steinacker, the bizarre scene had a logic to it, albeit a crude one.

One of the challenges that the Allies faced was, as I call it, an intelligence gap between 1945 and 1947. The Americans had a wartime secret service, the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, and that became a very powerful and a huge organization.

But already by the end of 1945, the Americans decided to shut down the organization. The idea was, yeah, now the war is over, we don't need such huge foreign intelligence service anymore. The Soviets had a very good intelligence service and the Americans did not. So they had to improvise. Based at Fort Hunt, Virginia, codename P.O. Box 1142.

Galen and his men got to work. They were asked to start writing reports on the Red Army. And together they wrote about 350 reports amounting to something like 4,500 pages. And all of this was considered very valuable.

Alongside his intelligence reports, Galen starts to charm his American handlers. Galen, he knew the language to adopt, you know, namely, "I'm working for you, I'm working with you, I will be fully cooperative. You know, we want our operations to be helpful to the Americans because we have this common enemy in the Soviets."

He even won over his direct supervisor at Fort Hunt, an Austrian-born U.S. Army captain whose father had been killed by the Gestapo. While the top generals were besmirched by Hitler's war and while a number of field marshals and colonel generals were tried at Nuremberg, people like Galen never were. He represented the myth of the clean army. And there's another myth about Galen.

one that his initial US Army handlers bought into completely. He more or less reinvented himself as the official in German intelligence who knew the things that the Americans didn't know about the Soviets. But the reality was quite different. There's no nice way to put this.

Galen got every major projection wrong in his capacity as the head of Foreign Armies East.

He did not see the Soviet pincer movement coming at Stalingrad in late 1942, which was a complete disaster for the Germans. The German offensive at Kursk in July of 1943, Galen completely misjudged the strength of Soviet armor.

Indeed, Galen predicted a quiet summer on the Eastern Front in 1944, only for the Soviets to launch their biggest offensive of the entire war. He had no training in real intelligence. And in the case of Galen's group, they depended on what different armies saw at the front. Anything that they couldn't see, Galen didn't really know.

There were some in US intelligence who knew about the incompetence of men like Galen, but they knew nothing of his work at Fort Hunt, a classified military base. The US Army was in sole charge of the American occupied zone in Germany itself, and they kept competing US intelligence organizations out of the loop, allowing Reinhard Galen to continue building his legend.

He learned more and more how to play the role, not of a staff officer who only made the rank of general in December of 1944, but a spy master of sorts who had all the answers and could get more.

Meanwhile, Galen's point man, Hermann Bowne, was reassembling his network of agents in Germany's Soviet zone. Bowne was fluent in Russian. Most Germans, including Galen, did not know a word of Russian. So he was very useful. Codenamed Operation Rusty, after his U.S. handler's newborn son, Bowne's network, though, was soon growing out of control.

Bowne had a very decentralized way of hiring. He would hire people who would then recruit people who would then recruit people. And as you got further and further down the line, it sort of wound up being friends recruiting friends. You know, people who after the war were suddenly without employment. You couldn't go back to your old job in the SS or the Gestapo.

In a German economy decimated by the war, trade was largely done through barter. And by January 1946, Baun was asking his US handlers for a monthly allowance of 300 kilograms of coffee, 25,000 cigarettes and 10,000 matchboxes, all to pay for his swelling network of unvetted spies in the Soviet zone.

The problem with that was that the hires, generally speaking, used false names. The US unwittingly became the sponsor of many of the same SS and Gestapo officers that they had fought against just months previously. Even the US Army's own intelligence branch, the CIC, was at first unaware of Operation Rusty.

Indeed, one of the CIC's main tasks immediately after the war was to arrest Nazi officers. And soon they were increasingly coming across such officers carrying American intelligence documents. The CIC became only more startled when ordered to simply release these men.

we have to say, cynical cost-benefit analysis. The American intelligence at that point said, "Well, is this person, this Nazi Wachrimel, more useful for us as an intelligence source now?" Because he claims to be an expert on Soviet communism.

Or should we put him on trial for the crimes that he committed? And in many cases, they decided to use this person, to recycle this person for early Cold War purposes and shield him from prosecution and use him as an intelligence asset. And it was Reinhard Galen who was about to profit the most from this American cynicism.

In July 1946, he flew back to Germany with authorization to formally reconstitute his former Foreign Army's East Network along with Hermann Bauer's spy ring. Before long, it was being called the Galen Organization.

The Galen organization was expected to get intelligence on the Soviet occupation forces in the eastern zone of Germany. They also got a fair amount of signals intelligence from Soviet radio traffic concerning the movement of aircraft and that sort of thing, which you needed Russian speakers for. And again, this is done at a time

When American intelligence officers are being reintegrated into civilian life and you have new intelligence officers showing up who don't even know German, much less Russian,

Given the cover of the humdrum-sounding South German industrial development organization, Operation Rusty had become the Americans' eyes and ears in Germany's Soviet zone. Initially, one could see this as kind of a stopgap measure during a period of geopolitical uncertainty in Central Europe, right? But it winds up becoming something that gets out of control.

Hello, True Spies listener. This episode is made possible with the support of June's Journey, a riveting little caper of a game which you can play right now on your phone. Since you're listening to this show, it's safe to assume you love a good mystery, some compelling detective work,

and a larger-than-life character or two. You can find all of those things in abundance in June's Journey. In the game, you'll play as June Parker, a plucky amateur detective trying to get to the bottom of her sister's murder. It's all set during the roaring 1920s,

And I absolutely love all the little period details packed into this world. I don't want to give too much away because the real fun of June's journey is seeing where this adventure will take you. But I've just reached a part of the story that's set in Paris.

And I'm so excited to get back to it. Like I said, if you love a salacious little mystery, then give it a go. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.

On December 19th, 1946, Edwin Sibbert, a major general in the US 12th Army, was in New York. Despite the festive atmosphere ringing throughout the city, Sibbert was anxious. Heading to a classified location, he met with two associates he had called to see urgently. There, he shared his concerns. Operation Rusty, aka the Galen Organization, was out of control.

Reinhard Gehlen and his right-hand man, Hermann Bowne, claimed to be running over 500 agents in the Soviet zone. And yet… U.S. Army oversight personnel was generally between two and ten. We don't know nearly enough about who they're hiring and what those hires are doing, Sibbets said.

The two men sat opposite him were from the Central Intelligence Group or CIG, a newly formed agency that would be renamed the CIA the following year. One of them was Alan Dulles, soon to become head of the CIA. Dulles had met Galen during the latter's time at Fort Hunt and was impressed by what he saw. Sibbott, who was now working for the CIG, suggested to Dulles that they take over the Galen organization

perhaps even relocate it to US soil.

And what's more, the cash-strapped US Army was desperate to get Galen off its books. Very quickly it became unaffordable because Galen wanted a yearly outlay of $2.5 million and the US Army at best could do like half a million dollars. But listening to Sibbet's proposal, Dulles and his colleague were unsure, pointing out the dangers of the operation.

The following May, the report landed on their desks. It read:

The tactical intelligence in the Soviet zone is good. The problem is that this organization is not really an American subsidiary. The organization exists for Galen's own interests, which meant German interests, which at that time meant the interests of a bunch of people who were not necessarily committed to the idea of democracy.

Despite these misgivings, the report's author recommended the CIG, soon to become the CIA, take over the organization.

The problem for any US intelligence organization that wanted to oversee the Galen organization was that the Galen organization already existed. You couldn't put it back into the bottle, right? It was already active. It already had thousands of members. If the Americans simply cut Galen adrift then, that would likely do even more damage.

This could possibly be the germ of a resistance association. If it's a tiger, then you have to hold the tiger by the tail as best you can. And again, Galen had charmed his U.S. overseers. The report recommended he become sole head of the organization, sidelining his right-hand man, Herman Bowne. Galen was the officer.

Galen was the one with the bona fides that a guy like Bowne simply never had. And when Galen was talking to the CIA about sponsorship, he sort of half admitted, yeah, there might be some bad apples in the organization, but those guys were all hired by Hermann Bowne. They weren't hired by me.

And if you sponsor me, I will be a good scout and I will root these elements out. Despite the recommendation, the CIG's stool

No decision is made to take on Galen, who continues to operate as he pleases. Only now, he's in sole charge. When the US authorities in the army wanted to talk to the top person in the Galen organization, of course they talked to Galen. With Bowne now a junior player, Galen built his spymaster myth further, giving himself a new cover name: Dr. Schneider.

It wasn't long before he encountered more problems, though. By the fall of 1947, there was a new sheriff in town. He got another overseer, an officer by the name of Liebel.

And Liebel was not charmed by Galen. A brash US combat veteran, Liebel lectured the German on the stupidity of his superiors during the war. And Liebel wanted names. He wanted to know who Galen was hiring.

The U.S. Army really didn't want to have an intelligence organization that was riddled with SS and Gestapo, and he wanted to figure out how many of these were in there because at the very least it could become an embarrassment to the U.S. Army.

But Galen doesn't play ball. He flatly refuses to give up any names. This is an issue of German sovereignty, he tells Colonel Liebl. Which is a very interesting thing to say in 1947 because Germany was not a sovereign state. It was completely occupied by the four powers. Liebl persists while taking every opportunity to remind Galen who's in charge.

But while not a brilliant spy, Galen was a canny operator. And one of the things Galen did at this particular juncture, aside from just being obstreperous, was to find dirt on Liebel. Galen discovers that Liebel's wife was doing deals on the black market, an offense for any American citizen. And Galen had written proof of this and sort of showed it to Liebel, and Liebel backed off.

Soon after, Galen gets Liebel transferred. And not only that, his new overseer is one of his first supporters, the colonel he first revealed his trove of buried files to. In this way, Galen sort of maintained a hands-off relationship with the U.S. Army. By now, the Galen organization had moved out of military barracks to more opulent surroundings.

The former villa of Hitler-confidant Martin Bormann, just outside Munich. In a place called Puhlach. Filled with reminders of the Third Reich, even the German eagle over the villa's front door was still in place. Although no longer holding the swastika it had once carried, American visitors noted it as an apt motif for Gehlen's headquarters.

Once settled in, Galen set his sights on his next prize: CIA sponsorship. Much of the new agency was opposed to Galen outright. But soon, events turned in the latter's favor.

In the spring of 1948, the Soviet Union announced its withdrawal from the four-power administration of Berlin, blocking land access to the capital and sparking one of the first flashpoints of the Cold War, the Berlin Airlift. By the 28th of June, the only way into Berlin was by air, and the first RAF aircraft started this colossal undertaking.

according to many predictions an impossible one to maintain for any length of time especially during winter with allied military efforts now stretched the u.s army was more desperate than ever to unload responsibility for galen

And this is where the army pressure comes in because the army told the CIA, look, we're done with this thing. We're cutting ties. We can no longer do this. You either want it or you don't. To sweeten the offer, the army even embellished Galen's record, saying it was the pillar of all US intelligence work in East Germany. Many in the CIA weren't exactly keen on Galen though. There were people within the CIA

who said this is a risky idea because from what we hear, this organization is not made up of the good Germans, right? We really don't know what is going on within this organization. But even Galen's critics couldn't deny that the situation had changed drastically. The new enemy...

is the Soviet Union and communism. Gerald Steinecker again. And we need all the resources we get to fight this new enemy. And nobody knew what Soviet intentions were.

You know, you really had to have the tactical intelligence from the Soviet occupation zone. So the CIA sends another man to evaluate the Galen organization, a colonel named James Critchfield. And James Critchfield had all of a month to make a study of this. And Galen, of course, said all the right things because he wanted CIA sponsorship. He certainly came to understand how one got their bread buttered.

Critchfield makes no mention of the former SS and SD suspected to be operating within Galen. The US authorities who oversaw Galen were kind of hard-boiled officials. They wanted the intelligence, they wanted an organization that would serve US purposes, and whether people were Nazis or not was kind of secondary to that.

Critchfield recommends that the CIA take Galen on. He too came to the conclusion the organization cannot be disbanded. It's better to have control than not. Backed up by the chief of staff of the US Army and the Secretary of Defense, the CIA agrees to Critchfield's proposal.

On July 1, 1949, the Galen Organization officially came under CIA sponsorship. But it had several stipulations. And this is what they communicated to Galen: "We will take you on, but

You will cooperate, not like you did with the army. You will cooperate. You will hand over personnel files when we want to see them. You will limit your operations to the things that are useful to us. Anything else, we will allow you to do only on a case-by-case basis. Galen agrees to every demand.

And so what the CIA kind of thought it was getting in 1949 was a valuable tactical intelligence unit. Once under its control, though, the CIA finds a very different organization to the high-functioning intelligence outfit portrayed by the army.

The other Galen operations, there were about 120 of these, the CIA thought, that were not in East Germany. And of those 120, the CIA very quickly concluded that about 90 were completely useless. Critchfield, Galen's new handler, confronts him.

and was basically trying to tell Galen, "Look, you know, for all of your talk about being a master spy and how we don't know what we're doing and you do, this is a second-rate organization." Those were the words he used. But soon after, Galen responds, telling Critchfield,

Look, we understand this business better than you do. And we can't run for your approval and ask for your approval of every single little thing. We're going to hire who we hire and we're going to run the operations that we want to run because we're on the front lines, right? We're staring down the Soviets right now. We have to make snap decisions. We don't have time for all of your red tape.

I mean, this is someone who's getting a more and more inflated picture of himself. And so Galen sort of goes, "Well, who the hell are you? You know, you're just an overseer. You're an office boy." Which was quite a thing to say coming from someone who had gotten every single intelligence assessment wrong during every critical period of World War II.

With CIA pressure coming to bear though, Galen knows he needs leverage. But he also knows where to get it. Germany became a sovereign state in October of 1949. And just when this relationship with the CIA is getting very difficult, he starts cozying up with the most important people in the new state. And one of them is a man named Hans Globke.

Globka himself was a compromised figure. He was an interior ministry official who had written legal opinions on the Nuremberg laws from 1935. He said that Jews could not be citizens. But Globka is now Secretary of State.

right-hand man to the West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Galen started to get appointments with Globka, and he actually did become personal friends with Globka as well. And more and more, Adenauer and Globka had confidence in him. Globka starts to buy into the myth Galen has built up around himself.

In Globka's calendar, Galen was always referred to as Dr. Schneider. This was the cover name that he used, which sort of suggests that Globka was much more taken with the game of spycraft than he ever was with really providing oversight. And again, geopolitical events played right into Galen's hands. And this is Korea.

A peaceful land once, until the ruthless red hand of communism reached out to snatch it. In June 1950, Soviet-backed North Korea invaded the US-backed South. The first major military confrontation between the blocs. And that confrontation threatens to escalate into direct conflict.

The worry was, if North Korea is attacking South Korea with the blessings of Joseph Stalin, then how long can it be before East Germany attacks West Germany? Encouraged by the Allied powers, the West German government presses ahead with remilitarizing. It even has designs on joining a new Western military alliance: NATO.

NATO was formed in 1949, but the Korean War sort of put the "O" in NATO, right? Adenauer really wanted to take advantage of this because a military commitment would tie West Germany to the Atlantic Alliance. They begin thinking in terms of a defense establishment, which means that they start thinking in terms of an intelligence establishment. This was music to Reinhard Gehlen's ears.

And so when Galen goes to the office of the German chancellor and starts talking about the importance of his organization and the benefit that it can be geopolitically to the new Germany, he's really pushing on an open door.

Despite Galen's cavalier attitude to his U.S. superiors then, the latter knew that cutting ties with him may prove counterproductive in the future. The problem, again, is you can't put this particular genie back in the bottle. So Critchfield and the CIA take another approach to grappling with Galen. And so this is when...

This is when the CIA decides to start spying on the Galen organization. Next time on True Spies, the cat and mouse between Reinhard Galen and his American sponsors heats up. Camera equipment was set up so that the CIA could see who was going in and coming out of Galen's headquarters because they still did not know the real names.

And before long, disaster strikes. There were moles in the Galen organization. Including one of the most notorious double agents of the 20th century. This is really one of the most incredible spy stories of the Cold War. It's almost unbelievable. That's next time on True Spies.