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It is ironic, then, that the same institution was knowingly responsible for the escape of a substantial number of Nazis, including Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons,” and, in fact, organized entire paramilitary brigades made up of Nazi collaborators. But the
pursuit
of fugitive Nazis and facilitating their
escape
were not really two separate phenomena. These two apparently opposite policies were actually connected and are found interlocked at the heart of many army intelligence operations in Europe following the war.
Army projects such as CROWCASS—the central registry for tracing war crimes suspects—and the big U.S. interrogation center at Camp King were officially used to hunt Nazi fugitives. At the same time, however, they were secretly employing and protecting some of the very men whose names were on their wanted lists.

During these first years after the war one of the most important interfaces between the army and fugitive Nazis—and a good example of how they gradually became connected—was the Central Registry of War Crimes and Security Suspects, known as CROWCASS. CROWCASS cross-referenced the names of fugitive war crimes suspects, on the one hand, with the rosters of the more than 8 million people being held in POW and DP camps at the war's end. Although it was in operation for only three years, the CROWCASS system proved to be a singularly effective tool for locating tens of thousands of suspects, several thousand of whom were eventually tried for war crimes by national authorities in Europe or at the tribunals at Nuremberg. It was the CROWCASS registry, for example, that helped locate men who had committed atrocities at Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Dachau, a number of whom were subsequently found guilty and executed.

The CROWCASS operation began in May 1945, following a call by General Dwight Eisenhower, then supreme Allied commander in Europe, for international cooperation in hunting and prosecuting war criminals. By the time it suspended operations in 1948, CROWCASS had processed 85,000 wanted reports, transmitted 130,000 detention reports to investigative teams from a dozen countries, and published a total of 40 book-length registries of persons being sought for crimes against humanity—probably the most extensive data base on such suspects ever created.
¹

But the CROWCASS system, like many intelligence projects, had a dual personality. The same cross-checking capabilities that permitted the location of thousands of fugitive Nazis also created a pool from which the names of thousands of “suspects” who might be useful for police or intelligence work could be drawn. The operations chief of CROWCASS, Leon G. Turrou, coordinated that task.

Turrou had served in the czarist army during the First World War but had found his way to the United States and begun a modest living as a translator for the anti-Communist “White” Russian émigré newspaper
Slovo
after the Bolshevik Revolution. During the 1920s he joined the FBI, specializing in countersubversion investigations in New York City's large Eastern European immigrant
community. By all accounts Turrou did well at his job, and by 1938 he had gained fame by breaking up a large spy ring run by undercover German Abwehr (military intelligence) agents based in New York.

Turrou joined the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID)—the investigative arm of the military police—in 1942. There he caught the eye of General Eisenhower's chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, and was appointed chief investigator and assistant director of, first, the CID's North African division and, by 1945, of the CID's combined European and African theater operations. Smith personally selected Turrou to head operations for CROWCASS in early 1945.
²

“Under Turrou, CROWCASS … operated on two distinct levels,” writes intelligence veteran and historian William Corson: “[first], to catalog war crimes and the locations of war criminals; and [secondly] to recruit former Nazis to serve as U.S. intelligence agents and sources.” Turrou became the contact man inside CROWCASS for American intelligence agencies that wished to frustrate unauthorized attempts to locate Nazis who had gone to work for the West. Concealment of a recruited agent was generally achieved by simple deletion of the suspect's name from the list of those in U.S. custody, thus ensuring that the new employee would be officially considered missing. Vienna OSS chief Charles Thayer acknowledges that he did just that for German political warfare expert Hans Heinrich Herwarth in 1945. And Reinhard Gehlen himself chuckled over the irony that he was still officially a “fugitive” as late as 1949 owing to the fact that notice of his surrender had been intentionally deleted from POW lists with Turrou's assistance. As will be seen, CROWCASS intelligence “assets”—meaning agents or sympathizers who could be tapped for clandestine missions—eventually became an important element in many U.S. intelligence operations in Europe during the late 1940s.
³

In the first months after Germany's surrender the relationship between army counterintelligence agents in Europe and their targets had been clear enough. U.S. investigators hunted down fugitive Nazis in order to penetrate and destroy any underground Fascist movements that had survived the collapse of the Hitler government. The army took the threat of such movements quite seriously. Germany had, after all, risen from the ashes of World War
I and evaded the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty through use of a variety of underground organizations, and Hitler and his top lieutenants had repeatedly pledged that they would do it again if Germany fell to the Allies. Detection of underground Nazi groups, therefore, became a high-priority task.

Most of these investigations were conducted by the Army Counterintelligence Corps. This agency worked closely with CROWCASS and served as a political police, in effect, in the U.S.-occupied zone of Germany during the first few years after the war.

CIC investigations into underground Nazi activity became some of the first Nazi recruitment operations. This paradox is similar in many respects to the situation often faced in more conventional police work; destruction of a ring of criminals sometimes requires enlistment of one of them as an informer against the others. This enrollment of criminals, which is the daily bread of most civilian detectives and district attorneys, is typically carried out through harsh threats of punishment, followed by soothing offers of protection if a suspect cooperates. The object, at least ideally, is to bring an entire group of suspects to justice, even if that entails special leniency for a few of them. Not surprisingly, U.S. investigators frequently cut deals with some Nazis in order to land more important fugitives.

As the cold war congealed, however, the targets of the investigations shifted from underground Nazis to underground Communists and to persons viewed as sympathetic to the USSR. Many CIC investigators filed away their dossiers on war crimes suspects or let such cases slip to the bottom of the list of high-priority projects that never seemed to get any shorter. On an administrative level, the leadership and drive needed to trace and prosecute war crimes suspects were eroded.

Meanwhile, the CIC's networks of recruited informants and contract agents consisting of former Nazis and so-called minor war criminals largely remained in place. In several documented cases the CIC undertook efforts to enlist the help of the Nazis' own experts like Gestapo veteran Klaus Barbie in tracking down Communist intrigue.

But it is at that point that the similarity between conventional police work and the security efforts of the CIC ended. No longer were the CIC's Nazis used primarily to trace war criminals, nor were those informers enjoying CIC protection forced to pay some
sort of penalty for their role in war crimes and crimes against humanity. As the cold war became an institution, the Nazis were simply turned loose.

The great majority of early (i.e., 1944 to 1947) recruitment and protection of Nazis by the U.S. government was the product of what many people would term “police informer” types of relationships. Gene Bramel, a young CIC agent who worked with SS man Klaus Barbie after the war, summarizes the CIC's point of view neatly: “They say, ‘[W]hy did you use Nazis?' That is a stupid question. It would have been impossible for us to operate in southern Germany without using Nazis. We were Americans. I spoke pretty good German, but by the time I got through ordering dinner they would have suspected I was American. And who knew Germany better than anyone else? Who were the most organized? Who were the most anti-Communist? Former Nazis. Not to use them would mean complete emasculation. And we used them, the British used them, the French used them, and the Russians used them.”
⁴

“You deal all the cards and play them as they come,” reflects Herb Brucher, a former special agent with the 970th CIC detachment, which handled thousands of former Nazis as informers and contract agents between 1945 and 1949. “We dealt with Communists; we dealt with Nazis.… I never held that against the guy—though if you had something you could hold over a guy's head, then you could use that like a form of blackmail to get information.” Brucher, like most CIC veterans, has few regrets about his work, which included efforts to locate German scientists for transfer to U.S. laboratories as well as a major campaign utilizing ex-Nazis to penetrate the German Communist party. Use of ex-SS men in such circumstances “never bothered me at all,” he comments. “I guess it was all that training, but I personally took to it like a duck to water.”
⁵

It is clear that a Catch-22, rather than some vast conspiracy, is what accounts for the army's policy toward most Nazi fugitives, at least in the early years. Protecting war crimes suspects from arrest was, of course, banned; one important function of the CIC was, after all, the pursuit and arrest of underground Nazis. There was one hitch, however. A few selected Nazis could be protected or even paid off if doing so led to the arrest of more important fugitives.

At the same time the main type of payment available for the Nazis the 970th had recruited was “an allowance of soap, razors,
chewing gum, and a little tobacco,” as Brucher puts it, “and who the hell wants to work for that?” Many American agents turned to trading these items on the black market to obtain German currency for paying their informers. But when that failed to yield enough money, the Americans offered their wards the only thing the CIC had that was cheap and plentiful: protection. The more protection the American agents offered, the bigger the network of subagents they could run. The bigger the net, the more information that came in. And the more information that came in, the more successful the American agent was considered. No matter if the information the Nazis were providing was little more than clippings from Czech or Polish newspapers; there was no way to check it anyway, at least not at first. What mattered was volume, and protection equaled volume.
⁶

The dusty, sprawling U.S. interrogation center at Camp King, near Oberusel, was apparently the most active recruiting center for ex-Nazis interested in throwing in their lot with the Americans. Commanded by Colonel William R. Philp and later by Colonel Roy M. Thoroughman, Camp King was a striking example of the blurring of the lines between the hunter and the prey.

Camp King had been the Luftwaffe's primary interrogation center for captured American and British fliers during the war, and it was there that the Germans developed highly effective interrogation techniques utilizing the latest breakthroughs in human psychology. Contrary to the stereotyped Nazi use of rubber hoses, the Luftwaffe's approach combined meticulous cross-referencing of every known fact about any given Allied air force unit, on the one hand, with subtle attempts to gain the respect of their prisoners, on the other. The results had been spectacular: Virtually every Allied airman let slip some fragment of information that, when combined with what the Germans already knew, proved to be of intelligence value. “Poker-faced Scharff,” by all accounts the best German interrogator, testified later that “all but about 20 out of more than 500 I interviewed did talk, and told me exactly the things I was trying to find out.”
*
⁷

In mid-1945 the United States seized the Luftwaffe center and
transformed it into a holding tank for a number of the highest-ranking Nazis in captivity, including General Gehlen, Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, and Julius Streicher, as well as military leaders such as Field Marshal Albert Kesselring; Hitler's successor, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz; and scores of others. Some trusted Luftwaffe interrogators who had once translated English into German for the Nazis were even put back to work translating German into English for the Allies.

Camp King, however, was not simply a high-level POW camp. Its unique mission was, as an internal history of the camp puts it, to “utilize the knowledge and abilities of the former German intelligence personnel to collect information of interest to the United States.” About 200 SS, SD, and Abwehr men were assigned to write “histories” of their wartime experiences. Some of these studies concerned Nazi command structures and were subsequently used in connection with postwar trials. But the majority of the studies, even in 1945, were designed to produce information about the USSR, not Nazi Germany, and the authors of such studies were in many cases quietly let out of prison and placed on U.S. or British intelligence payrolls.

The activities at Camp King, although approved by the army's chief of intelligence in Europe, General Sibert, often ran directly counter to the publicly announced policy of the United States. Once, for example, the American zone provost marshal rejected a proposal from Colonel Philp that a systematic screening and interrogation of German POWs released from Russian custody be undertaken to gather intelligence on potential military targets in the Soviet-occupied zone. The provost marshal objected to the fact that Abwehr and SS officers were to be employed as interrogators and analysts in the effort. (Philp's proposal, in fact, had originated with Reinhard Gehlen, who had, as noted earlier, begun his secret spy organization under Philp's patronage at Camp King.) Despite the prohibition, Colonel Philp remained convinced that unless this information was collected at the time the POWs returned to Germany it would be lost forever. Philp, therefore, secretly obtained permission from General Sibert and proceeded. “Screening teams were established within the German refugee processing camps at Hersfeld, Hof, Ulm and Giessen,” according to the unpublished history of Camp King.
⁸
“[A]pproximately 300,000 POWs were screened and carded. In many cases, exploitation [i.e., use as an
informer or contract agent] was made at the processing camps.”