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When Skorzeny continued to balk, Gehlen brought pressure to bear on Skorzeny's father-in-law and chief financial sponsor, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht, who had been Hitler's financial genius of clandestine rearmament, had only recently avoided an eight-year
prison sentence when his conviction under denazification laws had been quashed by John McCloy, the U.S. high commissioner in Germany. When Schacht, too, stressed the usefulness of helping the Americans, Skorzeny came around at last. He agreed to take the Egyptian training mission, on the condition that his stay in Cairo be limited.

Over the next eighteen months Skorzeny used CIA money to recruit for the Egyptian security services about 100 German advisers, many of whom he reached through neo-Nazi organizations and SS escape networks. Among his wards were Hermann Lauterbacher, an SS man and former deputy leader of the Hitler Youth, and Franz Buensch, a Goebbels propagandist best known for his pornographic work
The Sexual Habits of Jews
. Buensch, Gehlen's resident chief in Cairo, was a veteran of Eichmann's SS “Jewish Affairs” office.
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This “talented” group was later joined by Alois Brunner. As “Georg Fischer,” Brunner moved to Cairo in the midst of the Skorzeny project in Egypt and quickly integrated himself into that effort. He remained in Cairo until 1962, when an exploding Israeli letter bomb tore off several of his fingers. The Israeli intelligence service Mossad has claimed—unofficially, of course—that after Brunner's stint with Skorzeny he enjoyed a second Egyptian contract under which he helped recruit a corps of German rocket experts on behalf of the Egyptian government.
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Israeli secret agents are said to have undertaken the letter bomb campaign that very nearly killed Brunner.

The
Times
of London reports that Brunner returned to Syria after the bomb attack. He lives today in the prosperous Abu Rumaneh district of Damascus.
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What the CIA knew, if anything, of the background of “Georg Fischer” will remain a mystery until its files on the Skorzeny operation are opened. Considering, however, that American tax money was underwriting both Gehlen and the Skorzeny project, and considering Skorzeny's frequent efforts to promote himself as an international neo-Nazi leader and benefactor of SS fugitives, it is reasonable to ask just what steps, if any, the CIA took to determine who it was it had hired to train Nasser's secret service.

A good place to begin such an inquiry is with the former CIA agent Miles Copeland, who worked closely with the German advisers assembled by Gehlen and Skorzeny in Egypt. Copeland's writings do not discuss Brunner, but he confirms that it was Skorzeny
who did the contracting for the Egyptian project and that he brought in about 100 German advisers. The hirelings “were not—or in some cases
not quite
—war criminals,” Copeland writes.

Copeland insists that the men he worked with were not “unrepentant Nazis.” Their rejection of neo-Nazi ideology might actually be considered unfortunate in a certain sense, in Copeland's opinion, “because as mere survivalists rather than men of principle, even wrong principle,” he writes, “they find no difficulty in adjusting to Leftish influences in Nasser's government.”
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Copeland's frank comment is a revealing illustration of a much broader trend of thinking in U.S. government security circles during the 1950s. Because the Soviets were also recruiting selected former Nazis after the war, Copeland argues, “we simply could not bring ourselves to let valuable non-Anglo-American assets (who, as Nazis, were under perfect ‘cover') go to waste.” He continues: “It was to our advantage to have [Nazi intelligence specialists] absorbed, with a minimum of fuss and embarrassment, by various countries of the world where they could live inconspicuously and earn a living.” This policy was the necessary “amorality of power politics,” he argues. “Believe it or not”—Copeland approvingly quotes an unidentified U.S. Army intelligence colonel—”some of us are still able to put future American interests ahead of the delights of revenge.”
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The story of U.S. intelligence relations with criminals such as Brunner is of necessity fragmentary, for both the CIA and Brunner himself have taken extensive measures to keep such affairs hidden. It is clear, however, that Brunner was not an exception to the rule who managed to ingratiate himself with the Americans through guile or through an oversight. There is, in fact, at least one other known case of U.S. recruitment of another SS veteran of Adolf Eichmann's “Jewish Affairs” office, the elite committee that served as the central administrative apparatus of the Nazis' campaign to exterminate the Jews.

That recruit's name is Baron Otto von Bolschwing. Supremely opportunist, von Bolschwing succeeded in traversing the whole evolution of U.S. policy toward Nazi criminals. He had profited during the war from the Nazi confiscation of Jewish property, then later from the defeat of Nazi Germany itself. Von Bolschwing enlisted as a CIC informer for the Americans in the spring of 1945, and before two years were out, CIA agents in Vienna, Austria, had
recognized his skills and recruited him for special work on some of the most sensitive missions the agency has ever undertaken. These included running secret agents behind the Iron Curtain and even spying on Gehlen himself on behalf of the Americans.

Von Bolschwing was deeply involved in intelligence work—and in the persecution of innocent people—for most of his adult life. He had joined the Nazi party at the age of twenty-three, in 1932, and had become an SD (party security service) informer almost immediately.
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In the years leading up to 1939, von Bolschwing became a leading Nazi intelligence agent in the Middle East, where he worked under cover as an importer in Jerusalem. One of his first brushes with Nazi espionage work, according to captured SS records, was a role in creating a covert agreement between the Nazis and Fieval Polkes, a commander of the militant Zionist organization Haganah, whom von Bolschwing had met through business associates in the Mideast. Under the arrangement the Haganah was permitted to run recruiting and training camps for Jewish youth inside Germany. These young people, as well as certain other Jews driven out of Germany by the Nazis, were encouraged to emigrate to Palestine. Polkes and the Haganah, in return, agreed to provide the SS with intelligence about British affairs in Palestine. Captured German records claim that Polkes believed the increasingly brutal Nazi persecution of the Jews could be turned to Zionist advantage—at least temporarily—by compelling Jewish immigration to Palestine, and that the Haganah commander's sole source of income, moreover, was secret funds from the SS.
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It was in the course of these negotiations that the young Baron von Bolschwing gained the trust of Adolf Eichmann, who was at the time an obscure SS functionary specializing in intelligence on Freemasonry and Jewish affairs for the Nazi party. The acquaintance was more than a casual one, for von Bolschwing went on to play a central role in arranging conferences between Eichmann and Polkes in Vienna and Cairo, contacts that established Eichmann as the SS's “Jewish affairs expert” and laid the foundation for his later career as the architect of the extermination of European Jewry.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Eichmann—ever the plodding, careful clerk—would have learned about Jewry and Zionism from someone. But as fate would have it, it was Otto von Bolschwing who became Eichmann's teacher. “The first time I was occupied with Jewish matters,” Eichmann testified under interrogation prior to
his 1962 trial for crimes against humanity, “was when [Nazi agent Theodor von] Mildenstein visited me at my workplace together with von Bolschwing—never before that.”

Thereafter “Herr von Bolschwing would often drop in at our office and talk to us about Palestine,” Eichmann recalled. “He spoke so knowledgeably of the aims and situation of Zionism in Palestine and elsewhere that I gradually became an authority on Zionism.… I kept in touch with Herr von Bolschwing … because no one else could give me firsthand information about the country I was most interested in for my work.”
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Von Bolschwing teamed up with Eichmann in 1936 and 1937 to draw up the SS's first comprehensive program for the systematic robbery of Europe's Jews. “The Jews in the entire world represent a nation which is not bound by a country or by a people but [rather] by money,” von Bolschwing argues in a pivotal SS policy study. “Therefore they are and must always be an eternal enemy of National Socialism … [and they] are among the most dangerous enemies.” The whole point of his plan, he notes, was to “purge Germany of its Jews.”
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Of course, von Bolschwing was not the only Nazi to come up with schemes for persecution of Europe's Jews, nor was he the first. His techniques, however, were uniquely practical and well suited for implementation by Germany's modern bureaucratic state machine. Within months after von Bolschwing's proposals had circulated through the SS “Jewish affairs” apparatus, the SS implemented a series of aryanization measures in Austria that institutionalized many of the measures that von Bolschwing had outlined. These tactics then became a model for anti-Semitic persecution throughout Nazi-dominated Europe.
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The SS soon appointed von Bolschwing to a prestigious post as SS and SD clandestine operations chief in Bucharest, Romania. There, according to captured German war records, he personally helped organize a coup attempt and pogrom led by the Romanian Iron Guard, a Fascist organization that maintained fraternal ties with the German Nazi party.

Iron Guardists stormed into the Jewish sector of Bucharest on January 20, 1941, burning synagogues, looting stores, and destroying residences. Hundreds of innocent people were rounded up for execution. Some victims were actually butchered in a municipal meat-packing plant, hung on meathooks, and branded as “kosher meat” with red-hot irons. Their throats were cut in an intentional
desecration of kosher laws. Some were beheaded. “Sixty Jewish corpses [were discovered] on the hooks used for carcasses,” U.S. Ambassador to Romania Franklin Mott Gunther wired back to Washington after the pogrom. “They were all skinned … [and] the quantity of blood about [was evidence] that they had been skinned alive.” Among the victims, according to eyewitnesses, was a girl no more than five years old who was left hanging by her feet like a slaughtered calf, her body bathed in blood.
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Von Bolschwing helped arm and instigate the rebels by giving them the secret blessing of the SS, according to German records.
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Later he smuggled a dozen of their top leaders out of Bucharest when the rebellion was put down by a rival faction of Romanian rightists. About 630 people were killed during the violence, according to contemporary reports, with another 400 reported missing. “In the Bucharest morgue, one can see hundreds of corpses,” a Nazi military attache cabled back to headquarters in Berlin. “But they are mostly Jews.”
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At the end of the war von Bolschwing abandoned his SS comrades to their fates as soon as it became profitable to do so. He began active—one might even say enthusiastic—collaboration with the Allies at least as early as the spring of 1945, when American troops swept through western Austria. Von Bolschwing's new alliance with U.S. intelligence proved to be deep and abiding. “I agreed to obtain for them information concerning the movements and strengths of the German military, including German rocket research at Camp Schlatt,” von Bolschwing explained later. “After the German surrender, I continued working for the U.S. forces, first in the capacity of the military government, and then starting in 1947 in intelligence activities with the U.S. forces.… I had continuous service with U.S. intelligence until my departure [for America] in January 1954.
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“In 1947, 1948 and early 1949, I was assigned [by the CIA] to the Gehlen Organization … primarily in offensive intelligence against the East Bloc,” he asserted in a secret interview with investigators from the U.S. Air Force. The CIA provided him with money, a top secret security clearance, and travel privileges throughout Europe.
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Officially von Bolschwing worked for Austria Verlag in Vienna, a branch of the Austrian League for the United Nations, according to records found in his archives. He used that position—along with the active intervention of U.S. intelligence agencies—to apply for
Austrian citizenship in 1948 and to win clearance for his Nazi activities from an Austrian denazification court.
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Otto von Bolschwing became one of the highest-ranking CIA contract employees in Europe after the war. His responsibilities included spotting and recruiting agents, and he specialized in cross-border operations infiltrating spies into Hungary and Romania.

There can be little doubt that the U.S. intelligence agencies that made extensive use of von Bolschwing were aware of his role in the Bucharest pogrom. At the end of the war, the United States had captured the SS and German Foreign Office files in Bucharest nearly intact, including extensive SS files concerning the 1941 pogrom. The seizure of these records was regarded by the OSS as one of the most important intelligence triumphs of the war, and they were rapidly analyzed by a team of American experts. According to the official war report of the OSS, the records permitted the identification of more than 4,000 Axis intelligence agents, about 100 subversive organizations, and some 200 firms used as commercial covers by Nazi spies. The files were transmitted to Allied headquarters, according to the OSS report, and were used in the Nuremberg investigations into Nazi war crimes.
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There is another important bit of evidence concerning American awareness of von Bolschwing's relationship with the Iron Guard leadership and the 1941 pogroms. According to a sworn deposition von Bolschwing gave to the U.S. Justice Department in June 1979, he was utilized by U.S. intelligence
precisely because
of his Iron Guard connections. “In the summer of 1948, at the height of the Civil War in Greece, I was asked by my American courier officer to make contact with the Romanians, who might influence the Greek situation,” von Bolschwing asserted in the interview. “In the course of that endeavor, I visited with Mr. Constantin Papanace [a top Iron Guard minister whose life von Bolschwing had saved during the war], who was residing under the presumed auspices of the Vatican in or near Rome.…” Von Bolschwing's contacts in the Iron Guard, some of whom were still inside Romania at the time, became central figures in the espionage network he was running for the CIA.
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