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The actual issuance of visas for Bloodstone recruits was handled by Robert C. Alexander, then second-in-command of the State Department Visa Division. Alexander was appointed the State Department representative to the interagency Bloodstone committee as the project moved into its implementation stage in June 1948.
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Many of the crucial intelligence analysis aspects of Bloodstone, however, were handled by another man: Evron M. Kirkpatrick, then chieft of the State Department's External Research Staff, a
special team of scholars operating under the auspices of the Office of Intelligence and Research.

Kirkpatrick had come up with the idea for systematic use of scholarly defectors based on his wartime experience in the OSS. “The [State] Department and foreign policy in general did not make as much use as they should have of scholars and foundations on the outside,” Kirkpatrick remembered during an interview with the author. “So we [the External Research Staff] would pull in two or three people at a time for discussions for the benefit of Department of State and other foreign policy organizations such as Defense, intelligence, et cetera.” ÉMigré scholars and former Eastern European political leaders were hired as consultants or given funding for study of U.S. foreign policy objectives.

According to Kirkpatrick's former assistant and longtime colleague Howard Penniman, “my job was to find out what the agencies wanted in the way of information. Then I would retail that to [Frederick] Barghoorn and [Francis] Stevens,” who worked for the External Research Staff at the time. They, in turn, would comb the displaced persons camps for émigrés who might be able to answer sensitive questions about the USSR and Eastern Europe. “During 1948, '49, and '50 there were some interesting people coming out of the USSR and Eastern Europe. We were responsible for two things as far as they were concerned,” according to Kirkpatrick. “Number one, to learn as much as we could. Number two, to find them places, find them jobs at universities.” Kirkpatrick mentioned Nikolai N. Poppe in particular as one such scholar whom he assisted in placing.

It is difficult to determine today just what Kirkpatrick did or didn't know about the defectors and émigrés placed under his care in the early days. “I don't think I had any cases of those who had cooperated with the Germans,” he commented in an interview. “But of course, you always heard about that. After all, you even had Jews that cooperated with the Nazis.”

Kirkpatrick's recollection of the Poppe case is intriguing. As he remembered it, Poppe was the “Soviets' head of intelligence for the whole Asiatic USSR” before he came to the United States, and he had supposedly defected directly from the USSR to the United States. In reality, however, Poppe had been one of the
Nazis'
senior intelligence analysts “for the whole Asiatic USSR,” and he had spent considerable time working for them in Berlin before striking a deal with the Americans.
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Who, then, entered the United States under Operation Bloodstone? Which specific Nazis or Nazi collaborators? And where are they today?

The Immigration and Naturalization Service was ordered to keep detailed monthly reports on each person brought to the United States under the program. Unfortunately the agency claims it is unable to locate those records, thus making it impossible, at least for the moment, to construct a comprehensive list of persons with Nazi or Nazi collaborationist backgrounds who were brought to the United States under Bloodstone.

But just as it is sometimes possible to assemble a jigsaw puzzle despite a missing piece, so it is possible to discover a number of Bloodstone's recruits from other government documentation without an official list of their names. A careful examination of the surviving file of Bloodstone records makes it clear that candidates for the program had to meet at least five restrictive criteria that set them apart from the thousands of other refugees who entered the United States following World War II. With those criteria as a guide, it is possible to uncover a number of high-level Nazi collaborators, including some responsible for serious crimes against humanity, who entered the United States under Bloodstone. The criteria used to identify Bloodstone recruits in the pages that follow may be summarized as follows:

First, the recruits had to be leaders of anti-Communist organizations or scholars (especially linguists and social scientists), or skilled propagandists.

Second, they had to have specialized or unique knowledge about the Soviet bloc or skills as an organizer of refugees from countries in the bloc.

Third, they had to have entered the United States between June 1948, when the program was approved, and mid-1950, when changes in U.S. immigration law superseded the effort.

Fourth, they had to have actively cooperated with, or been employed by, U.S. intelligence agencies or the Department of State, particularly in programs such as Radio Free Europe, the Defense Language School at Monterey, California, or the recruitment of émigrés for covert warfare operations.

Fifth—and very important—they had to have enjoyed a direct and documented intervention on their behalf during the immigration process by the political warfare specialists at the State Department who were in charge of the Bloodstone program.
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It was
not
necessary that every person brought in under Bloodstone be a former Nazi or Nazi collaborator. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that the cover story of importing “socialist, labor union, intellectual, moderate right-wing groups and others” was, like most cover stories, at least partially true. Bloodstone's ability to circumvent U.S. immigration law, however, appears to have only one reasonable explanation: to permit immigration of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators who would otherwise be barred by the Displaced Persons Act.

The German diplomat Gustav Hilger was only one of many Bloodstone beneficiaries, but he deserves special mention here because of his close friendship with the Americans from the old Moscow embassy circle and the influential (but until now secret) role he played in formulation of U.S. foreign policy toward Germany and the Soviets in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

During the war Hilger had gone directly from the German Embassy in Moscow to service in the personal secretariate of Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, becoming the chief political officer for eastern front questions in the German Foreign Ministry. There Hilger led the Russland Gremium, a group of senior experts on Soviet affairs. Hilger, it is true, had initially opposed the German invasion of the USSR in 1941 and had mentioned this to Hitler during a private conference on the eve of the blitzkrieg. Hilger's advice was rejected, however, and he continued to serve the Reich dutifully throughout the war.

Among his duties at the Nazi Foreign Office was liaison with the SS concerning the Nazi occupation of the USSR, a job which included the processing of SS
Einsatzgruppen
reports on the mobile killing operations in the East. The following is a translated excerpt from one such SS report that was entered into evidence at Nuremberg. The processing marks on the cover letter of this document indicate that it crossed Hilger's desk in April 1942. Similar bulletins followed throughout the war.

OPERATIONAL SITUATION REPORT USSR NO. 11 TOP SECRET

C. JEWS

In Riga, among others, three Jews who had been transferred from the Reich to the ghetto and who had escaped were recaptured and publicly hanged in the ghetto.

In the course of the greater action against Jews, 3,412 Jews were shot in Minsk, 302 in Vileika and 2,007 in Baranovichi.…

Besides the measures taken against individual Jews operating in a criminal or political manner, the tasks of the security police and the SD in the other areas of the Eastern Front consisted in a general purging of larger localities. Alone in Rakov, e.g., 15,000 Jews were shot, and 1224 in Artenovsk, so that these places are now free of Jews.

In the Crimea 1,000 Jews and gypsies were executed.
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Clearly, these SS communiques left no question about the scale of the Holocaust that was taking place on the eastern front, yet Hilger took no action to protest or to remove himself from the bureaucratic machinery of destruction in which he found himself entangled. The diplomat had a small, but direct, role in the murder programs in Hungary. There he helped coordinate the Foreign Office's successful efforts to obtain sanctuary in Germany for several Hungarian army officers responsible for the 1942 murder of 6,000 Serbs and 4,000 Jews. Asylum for the Hungarian killers had been decreed by Hitler himself as a message to every Axis country that Germany would protect those who carried out anti-Semitic murders on behalf of the Reich.
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Finally, Hilger played a significant part in SS efforts to capture and exterminate Italian Jews. The Nazis had considerable difficulty deporting Italian Jews to the death camps throughout the war, largely because Italy's early status as a full Axis partner somewhat restricted the power of the Nazis in that country. In December 1943, however, Hilger led the German Foreign Office's effort to convince the Italian government to force that country's Jewish community into work camps, on the condition that no further measures would be taken against Italy's Jews. The Italian government cooperated with Hilger's work camp plan, and many Jews were driven into barracks during the winter of 1943–1944. In reality, however, the Nazis had planned all along to deport to the extermination centers in the East any Italian Jews who entered these camps regardless of what the Italians tried to say about it, and during the spring of 1944 several trainloads of these Jews were shipped to Auschwitz.
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The exact number of victims of this joint Foreign Office-SS program in Italy is unknown, but it certainly totals several thousand innocent people.

Hilger was also a central figure in the German political warfare
faction. The Nazi Foreign Office assigned him to be its chief liaison with Vlasov within a few days of the Russian general's surrender in 1942, and Hilger participated in the various psychological warfare and intelligence schemes that swirled around the Vlasov headquarters throughout the war. By 1944 Hilger had completely integrated himself into the command structure of the Vlasov group.
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After the war Hilger was officially being sought by U.S. war crimes investigators for “Torture” (as his wanted notice reads),
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a catchall charge sometimes used for people sought in connection with the administration of crimes against humanity, as distinct from the actual murders themselves. Officially Hilger remained a fugitive from these charges until the day he died.

Hilger's work in Germany's political warfare program, along with his great expertise in Soviet affairs, won him asylum in the United States after the war. He surrendered to U.S. forces in May 1945 and was briefly interned in the Mannheim POW camp. Charles Thayer, apparently acting on a tip from Hans Heinrich Herwarth, intervened on Hilger's behalf, and the Americans quietly shipped the former diplomatic official to Washington, D.C., for debriefing at Fort Hunt (as Gehlen had been) and for secret employment as a high-level analyst of captured German records on the USSR. Hilger resurfaced briefly in the spring of 1946, when former Nazi Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, then on trial for his life at Nuremberg, called on him as a defense witness during the war crimes proceedings. After considerable wrangling, the United States conceded that Hilger was indeed in Washington but was “too ill to travel.”
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Hilger's legal status at that point is foggy. He had technically been a prisoner of war since his surrender in May 1945, but his wanted notice on the war crimes charge remained on the books as an open case. It is certain, however, that he was never actually arrested on the war crimes charges, nor was he forced to face a trial for his wartime activities.

For the next several years Hilger shuttled back and forth between the United States and Germany under the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department, and he is known to have been in Berlin during the spring crisis of 1948. As the East-West tension that led to the famous Berlin airlift heated up during the summer and fall of that year, the State Department was faced with the tricky problem of evacuating a number of ex-Nazis and collaborators, including fugitives such as Hilger, who were working under U.S. sponsorship in Germany at the time.

George Kennan intervened with the U.S. political adviser in Germany, Robert Murphy, on Hilger's behalf in late September 1948. In a series of telegrams marked “Personal for Kennan” and carrying Kennan's hand-scrawled initials, Murphy's and Kennan's deputies proceeded to argue over the best method to bring Hilger into the United States. Murphy noted that the army intelligence men in Germany wanted “visas for five persons [Hilger and his family] and travel arrangements … made under assumed names”—an apparent violation of U.S. law.
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State Department headquarters favored bringing him in under his real name aboard a U.S. military aircraft, then providing him later with a false identity if necessary. That was the alternative backed by Kennan, and it was eventually implemented.
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It is worth noting that the arrangements for Hilger were handled directly by Kennan's Policy Planning Staff,
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while the Visa Division, which is ordinarily responsible for issuing entry documents to the United States, was provided with only vague verbal reports. All of Hilger's travel expenses were paid by the U.S. government.

Hilger soon became an unofficial ambassador to the United States from Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democratic party in West Germany. “Hilger was negotiating with the U.S. government and was instrumental in the creation of the Adenauer regime,” says Nikolai Poppe, a Bloodstone recruit with whom Hilger worked in Washington. “In the very beginning, when Adenauer wished to become head [of the new Federal Republic of Germany], some American officials did not regard him as suitable.… But Adenauer was eventually permitted to form a government in 1949. This was due in part to Hilger's contacts with the U.S. State Department. Hilger had great influence there.”
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Of course, Poppe is overstating the
case: U.S. government support for Adenauer was built upon the chancellor's cooperation with U.S. strategic plans in West Germany, not simply on Hilger's personal influence. Even so, Hilger did play a role in securing support for Adenauer among the Americans.