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THE RISE OF THE FOURTH REICH
for any data on Kammler had failed to locate a single entry for him,β wrote Cook. βGiven Kammlerβs range of responsibilities in the final months of the war, this absence of evidence was remarkable; so much so, that one archivist at Modern Military Records, College Park, Maryland, said . . . Somebody . . . had been in and cleaned up [the records].β
THE N A ZI ORGA NI ZAT ION that may have made the greatest impact on the United States was not a ratline but a spy network created by Generalmajor Reinhard Gehlen. This Nazi network was to become Americaβs eyes and ears in the early days of the Cold War. The son of a Catholic bookshop owner, Gehlen was born in 1902 and joined the German Army in 1920. His middle-class family nevertheless boasted military officers on both sides. In the 1930s, Gehlen moved from the German Staff College to the Army General Staff with the rank of captain. In 1940, he was promoted to major and served on the staffs of two German generals. By 1942, Gehlen, now a Lieutenant colonel, became the head of Fremde Heere Ost, or Foreign Armies East (FHO), a curious title for the section of the German General Staff analyzing all intelligence on the Russian Front. In an attempt to avoid conflicts with the Abwehr, Germanyβs counterintelligence service, Gehlen created his own network of spies and informers. This system soon began making major contributions to the Nazi war effort by upgrading the level of intelligence on the Soviets. Gehlen made use of whatever anticommunists could be found and in particular the anti-Soviet spy network of Russian general Andrei Vlasov, a Russian officer who began working with Gehlen and the Nazis against the Stalin regime. (With Germanyβs defeat, the Allies turned Vlasov and his βRussian Liberation Armyβ over to Stalin, who had them all executed.) Gehlen soon put together a remarkable network of agents and spies, all sworn to utmost secrecy, even from their own families. This combined Vlasov/ Gehlen operation became known as the Gehlen Organization, a spy network that was continued by U.S. authorities long after the war. But Gehlenβs accurate and realistic intelligence soon rankled Hitler, who toward the end of the war cried, βGehlen is a fool!β Such vitriol may