CIA Memo Reveals Agency Sanitized Gestaapo Leader’s File & Recruited Him

Franz Josef Huber (in doorway) with Heinrich Himmler, August Eigruber and other SS officers, at Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, June 1941.

In the years following World War II, the United States and West Germany jointly worked to conceal a high-ranking Nazi official's role in deporting tens of thousands of Jews, newly disclosed intelligence records obtained by German public broadcaster ARD reveal, per The New York Times.

Franz Josef Huber led a large section of the Gestapo — Adolf Hitler's secret police — that stretched across Austria, and his forces worked closely with Adolf Eichmann on the coordination of the deportation of Jews to concentration and extermination camps. Eichmann, famously, was tried and executed in Israel in 1962 for his role in the Holocaust, but Huber dodged that fate, even though he was arrested by American forces in 1945. He was released in 1948 and continued to live out his days in Munich, seemingly avoiding responsibility altogether because he was seen as a potential Cold War asset.

The CIA, for example, believed he could help recruit agents in the Soviet bloc. As one memo from 1953 reads, the agency was "by no means unmindful of the dangers involved in playing around with a Gestapo general," but "we also believe, on the basis of the information now in our possession, that Huber might be profitably used by this organization." The West German intelligence service, the BND, gave him a cover story, and it took 20 years before the agency decided "they could no longer tolerate the connection," the Times writes.

While Huber's story may stand out because of his significant standing within the Third Reich, Prof. Shlomo Shpiro of Israel's Bar-Ilan University explained that "Western intelligence services struggled to recruit reliable anti-communist contacts," which meant they frequently ignored the backgrounds of potential assets. "Many former Nazis took advantage of the new communist threat to secure for themselves both immunity from war crimes prosecution and hefty salaries from U.S. and West German intelligence agencies," he said.

Read more at The New York Times. "... The German intelligence service, known by the initials BND, employed Huber full-time for nearly a decade, giving him a cover story that made him appear to work for a private business. It was nearly 20 years after the war before agency bosses decided they could no longer tolerate the connection. A December 1964 memo warned that disclosure of the secret would 'frustrate the efforts of the service’s leadership to build confidence with the federal government and the public.' ... ”