West German spy agency ‘employed about 200 former Nazi criminals’
The German spy service has admitted that it employed about 200 former Nazi criminals for at least 15 years after the end of the Second World War.
Some had been involved in massacres in Poland and Russia, others were Ges-tapo torturers; all found a berth in the West German intelligence service. The cases have been brought to light because the Federal German Intelligence Service (BND) is compiling a history of its espionage activities since 1956 — and so polishing up its image, in the manner of MI6.
There was never any attempt to hide the fact that the BND employed Nazis — it was set up in a hurry, with US help, to create spying networks against the Soviet Union — but it has always been vague about its war records.
Now the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper has been given access to files from the 1960s that detail how the BND tried, belatedly, to weed out suspected war criminals. Potted biographies of the agents, with lightly disguised names, have been published at www.faz.net/bnd....
Read entire article at Times Online (UK)
Some had been involved in massacres in Poland and Russia, others were Ges-tapo torturers; all found a berth in the West German intelligence service. The cases have been brought to light because the Federal German Intelligence Service (BND) is compiling a history of its espionage activities since 1956 — and so polishing up its image, in the manner of MI6.
There was never any attempt to hide the fact that the BND employed Nazis — it was set up in a hurry, with US help, to create spying networks against the Soviet Union — but it has always been vague about its war records.
Now the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper has been given access to files from the 1960s that detail how the BND tried, belatedly, to weed out suspected war criminals. Potted biographies of the agents, with lightly disguised names, have been published at www.faz.net/bnd....