|
|
 |
WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
| |
|
| |
 |
Back |
 |
Contents |
Page 161 |
|
Home
Page |
Forward |
 |
| |
| |
criminals that all Frenchmen so rightly demanded. My
research led to the following:
When the Wehrmacht withdrew from French
territory, the German police officers, who would have been the principal
defendants in a French trial, withdrew along with the German troops. These
included the leaders of the S.D.-Security Police.
The S.D.-Security
Police had been modeled on its superior department the RSHA, which Reinhard
Heydrich created and directed until 1942. In Occupied France the S.D.-Security
Police included, as did the RSHA, a Department IV, the Gestapo, whose function
was the suppression of terrorists and Jews. The Gestapo's sinister reputation
spread so rapidly that the French incorrectly applied the name to the entire
S.D.-Security Police.
The very few German criminals who were
apprehended were tried by a French military tribunal, but others wisely kept
out of the French Occupation Zone in Germany, frequently living under a false
name. Many had been policemen or intelligence agents before 1939; after 1945
they were protected by their former colleagues who remained in or returned to
the postwar German police force.
The new government intelligence bureau
in West Germany, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, which, due to the cold war, was
concerned with fighting communism, recruited – with the blessing of the
United States – as many experts in anti-subversive activities as it could.
These experts were by and large former members of the Gestapo and the S.D. That
explains why the Gestapo members not only had no need to hide, but also had no
trouble getting their jobs back.
Those who went underground in the
Soviet Zone flocked into the American Zone where, after 1948, they could as a
general rule expect impunity and a job quite in their line. For example, Franz
Six, an S.S.-general who had been sentenced to twenty years at hard labor at
Nuremberg for massacres of Jews and civilians in the USSR, was soon released
from prison. Reinhard Gehlen, the "gray general," whom the Americans installed
as chief of West German intelligence, had not forgotten that Franz Six had been
one of the S.D.-Security Police chiefs in Russia; he made him one of his
principal deputies.
There is a tendency to believe that men like Six
were not capable of re employment after the war because they were too old. They
|
|
| |
| |
| |
WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
|
Back |
Page 161 |
Forward |
|
|
