In March 1945, Gehlen and his officers microfilmed the extensive documentation on the U.S.S.R., concealed the film, and buried it at the Austrian alps.
Finally, on May 22nd, 1945, Gehlen and his top aides surrendered to the Counter Intelligence Corps of the U.S. Army, and were then taken to Fort Hunt, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. Along with him, the U.S., through Operation Paperclip, also brought people like [Axis] rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who would later work for NASA.
A year later, Gehlen and his staff were brought back to Germany at Camp King in Oberursel, near Frankfurt, for interrogation and dealmaking. American interrogators were delighted when Gehlen eventually provided them with the hidden records.
The CIA remained vague about where Gehlen got that information from. In fact, he got much of it through his rôle in one of the most vicious atrocities of the war; the interrogation, torture, and murder (by starvation), of approximately four million Soviet prisoners of war.
But there was an annoying problem with this plan: the Yalta Agreements obligated the U.S. to surrender Axis officers involved in Eastern Area Activities to the Soviets, but the Americans didn’t really bother. The U.S. acknowledged Gehlen’s potential as an exceptional spymaster and hunter of communists, equipped with a network of anticommunist intelligence contacts.
Gehlen struck an attractive deal with the Americans: in return for his freedom, he would assist them in the fight against communism. So basically, a deal with no downsides for either party.
Click here for events that happened today (July 19).
1888: Enno Lolling, Fascist doctor, was born.
1940: As the Royal Navy and the Regia Marina battle in Cape Spada, the Axis light cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni sinks, with 121 casualties. Coincidentally, the Third Reich held its first wartime Field Marshal ceremony, in which Adolf Schicklgruber appointed field marshals due to military achievements. (Meanwhile, army order 112 formed the Intelligence Corps of the British Army.)
1942: The ‘Second Happy Time’ of the Third Reich’s submarines came to an end, as the Allied convoy system compelled them to return to the central Atlantic.
1943: More than five hundred Allied aircraft heavily bombed Rome, inflicting thousands of casualties.