The Bedbug (27 page)

Maybe there was not enough time. The interrogators were under increasing pressure to hand over their star witness to the Nuremberg prosecutors and in the autumn of 1945 they were obliged to comply. Schellenberg’s first appearance at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal was as a witness against his former boss, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was hanged on 16 October 1946. Schellenberg then appeared in the ‘Wilhelmstrasse Case’, one of
twenty-one defendants from different German government offices and organisations. Although acquitted of complicity in atrocities against civilians by Heydrich’s special task forces, who murdered hundreds of thousands, he was found guilty of the extermination of Russian prisoners who had been forced to work as saboteurs and spies against their country, and of membership of a criminal organisation – the SS. He was eventually sentenced in 1949 to six years in prison but was already too ill to attend court. He was soon released and spent his last days receiving medical treatment in Switzerland and Italy. Coco Chanel, in voluntary exile in Switzerland to escape the opprobrium of her French countrymen for collaborating with the SS, paid his medical expenses. He died of liver and gall bladder problems in 1952.
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The questioning of Schellenberg about German intelligence assessments of the Soviet Union seems to have stirred something in Klop’s memory. At the end of July 1945, sitting in Guy Liddell’s office discussing future candidates for questioning, he asked Liddell if he knew the whereabouts of Gustav Hilger, his saviour in Russia in 1920.

Hilger had stayed in Russia and become Germany’s most influential diplomat and leading Soviet strategist. When Hitler invaded in 1941 he returned to Berlin and became part of a small group of experts, known as the
Russland-Gremium
, on Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop’s immediate advisory staff. He explained later:

I spent the war years in Berlin watching with dismay the horror and muddle of German occupation policies in the conquered territories in the East … I had never believed that Russia could be defeated. My apprehensions turned into more concrete visions of utter defeat and destruction owing to our mistakes.
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In March 1945, Ribbentrop had suggested that Hilger should go to Stockholm to try to get in touch with the Soviet Mission to sound them out about a separate peace.

Klop’s fellow interrogator Stuart Hampshire established that Hilger was being held in the American Zone but it had not occurred to anyone to question him. It was only when Hampshire began trying to arrange for him to be sent to Britain that the Americans recognised the importance of their captive and refused to let him out of their clutches. It was decided that Klop should do a tour of Germany, under Dick White’s direction, to capture the prevailing mood in the defeated country. White was based at Eisenhower’s headquarters and involved in arranging interrogations of the major figures of the Nazi regime and investigating Hitler’s last days in his Berlin bunker.

Klop was already in the process of interrogating Ernst Kaltenbrunner when White phoned on 24 August to say that the Americans were on the point of shipping Hilger back to Washington. Klop flew straight to Germany and managed to get three days’ uninterrupted discussion with his old friend at Bad Oyenhausen, headquarters of the British Zone of Occupation.
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He reported back:

Gustav Hilger has probably more right than any other German today to speak with authority on German-Russian affairs during the last twenty-five years … a living encyclopaedia on Russia and Russians … the indispensable adviser of and interpreter to German Ministers and Ambassadors. Hilger’s account and interpretation of events … deserve close attention. The fact that Hilger has been neither a soldier nor a member of the National Socialist Party adds to the soundness of his views.

He looks at the developments that led to Germany’s downfall with the sad resignation of a man whose constant advice to his superiors: ‘Do not underestimate Russian strength’ was not heeded, who has lost his only son during Hitler’s invasion of Russia and who, after passionate protests to his Foreign Office against the treatment reserved for Russian prisoners of war and civilians alike, knows [that] his wife, daughter and grandchildren [are] in Russian hands.
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Over fifteen close-typed pages Klop gave Hilger’s account of the economic and military interdependence of Russia and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, even after the advent of a Nazi regime that was ideologically totally opposed to Communism. There were eyewitness accounts of Ribbentrop’s meeting with Stalin in August 1939 that led to the non-aggression treaty and Foreign Minister Molotov’s return visit to Hitler, in November 1940, where it was clear the agreement was already beginning to unravel amid Russians territorial demands and Germany’s increasing military prowess. Hitler had tried to divert Russia’s military aspirations towards Iran and the Persian Gulf while he seized control of Western Europe.

Hilger predicted that Stalin would see the destruction and subjection of Germany as vital to the Soviet Union’s future security. Hilger spent the rest of 1945 and part of 1946 at the US interrogation centre at Fort Meade, near Washington, but was returned to Germany in 1946 to help supervise the setting up of the Gehlen organisation, which eventually became the West German intelligence service, under the command of Major General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s head of military intelligence on the Eastern Front. The Soviet Union were so keen to get Hilger over to their side that they held his wife, daughter and two granddaughters hostage until a successful CIA undercover operation succeeded in releasing them and bringing them to the West. Although Hilger was suspected of complicity in war crimes, through his knowledge of the death squads that operated in conquered territories in Eastern Europe, his expertise was considered invaluable and he continued to work for the CIA up until 1953 when he accepted a job in the German Foreign Office.
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The America-backed Gehlen, who recruited SS and Germany Army officers for his anti-Soviet operations, found himself in direct competition with the British-backed Office for the Protection of the Constitution led by Otto John, who had been a part of the anti-Hitler German resistance.

Despite all this frantic activity, there is still the nagging question
of what Klop was doing in early June 1945 that was so important that MI6 could not spare him to interrogate Walther Schellenberg. It is possible that Klop was deeply implicated in one of the most shameful incidents of the post war era – the escape, via the Vatican, of one of the worst Nazi war criminals to evade justice.

Ante Pavelić was the founder of the Croatian Liberation movement or
Ustashe
– meaning rebels – who were behind the assassination of the Serbian King Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1934. Pre-war they were backed by Fascist Italy and Hungary. When Germany seized control of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Pavelić was declared chief of an extended vassal state that included Bosnia-Herzegovina. He introduced a wave of ethnic cleansing, against Jews, gypsies and ethnic Serbs who were terrorised, driven from their homes, raped and massacred. Some Orthodox Serbs were given the choice of conversion to Catholicism or death. Catholic clergy were implicated in the massacres and the Vatican has been accused of turning a blind eye. Estimates of the number of dead vary from four hundred thousand to one million. News of these atrocities had reached the Allies long before the end of the war and was certainly known to Marshal Tito’s Communist Partisans who, with British support, had helped drive the Germans out of Yugoslavia. With the Russian Red Army advancing from the east, and the certainty that the Partisans would wreak terrible revenge, Pavelić and his Ustashe leaders decided early in May 1945 to flee westwards, taking with them the contents of the Croat Treasury and the proceeds of looted gold and valuables from their victims. US Intelligence estimates put the total of the Croat Treasure at eighty million US dollars, some of which had already been transferred to Swiss bank accounts and more found its way to Spain and Argentina to facilitate the escape of Nazi war criminals. But a substantial part of it was with the Pavelić convoy which set out on 8 May from their temporary headquarters in the castle of Novi Dvor, near the Slovenian border, heading for the Austrian city of Klagenfurt with the intention of surrendering to the British
and Americans. They were still nursing the hope that they could continue the fight against Communism from there.
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No exact record of their surrender is available but an investigation into Nazi looted gold by President Bill Clinton’s deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart Eizenstat in 1998 concluded:

US Intelligence reports indicate that the fleeing Ustashe leaders carried at least part of the Croatian Treasury with them into the British zone of occupation in Austria where it was seized by the British authorities. The British occupation authorities in Austria acknowledged no recovery of any monetary gold or non-monetary gold originating with the puppet Croatian Ustashi regime, and no gold attributed to the Croatian regime was transferred to the Tripartite Gold Commission.
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Part of the basis of Eizenstat’s conclusion was a five-page report by Special Agents William Gowen and Louis Caniglia of the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps, written in August 1947 but only released as a result of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in America. Quoting ‘very reliable sources’ they averred that when Pavelić fled into Austria he was ‘protected by the British in British-guarded and requisitioned quarters for a two-week period’. Thereafter, to avoid the outcry that would be caused if their hospitality became public knowledge, Pavelić was allowed to find his own safe hideaway within the British zone of occupation in Austria. They went on to reconsider the many rumours surrounding the treasure that Pavelić and his entourage had brought out of Croatia and came down firmly on what they believed to be the version closest to the truth:

British Lt Colonel Jonson was placed in charge of two trucks laden with the supposed property of the Catholic Church in the British zone of Austria. These two trucks, accompanied by a number of priests and the British officer, then entered Italy and went to an unknown destination. This treasure is reputedly financing the Croat resistance movement in Yugoslavia. The resistance forces using the Croat Cross (similar to the Cross of Lorraine) as their symbol, go by the name of Krizari (Crusaders) and are under the command of former Ustashe General Boban.
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Jonson is not a common English name and there is no officer of that name, nor a Lt Col. Johnson, in the official British Army List for 1945-6. But we do know that Johnson was Klop’s pseudonym and, according to his wife’s account, he was permitted to use the rank of colonel and wear the uniform.
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It wasn’t unusual for members of the intelligence services to be permitted a courtesy military rank: Dick White began as a major and rose to the title of brigadier during his service as a liaison officer with General Eisenhower’s intelligence staff. Moreover, the time scale of mid-May to early June fits very closely with the period when MI6 was arguing that Klop was too busy to interrogate Schellenberg.

It was Helenus Milmo at MI5 headquarters who spoke to his counterparts at MI6 on 9 June, on instructions from Dick White, about arrangements for Klop to conduct the interrogation of Schellenberg. He recorded:

I undertook to put the matter up to Section V [of MI6] with the view to U35’s recall from overseas for the purpose of proceeding to Frankfurt. I spoke to Major [Felix Cowgill] who felt that he could give no final decision … but asked me to telephone Colonel White suggesting that U35 could be made available within a week to ten days, if this were acceptable to SHAEF [Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force]. He stated, however, that if a compromise of this kind could not be reached the Section V interest in allowing U35 to complete his present work before returning to the UK would have to give place to the major interest of ensuring that no stone is left unturned to make the exploitation of Schellenberg’s case a success.
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Since there has never been any official British acknowledgement of involvement in Pavelić’s escape and disappearance it is impossible to confirm Klop’s involvement, if any. The extent to which the Krizari, and their pro-Nazi predecessors in Croatia led by Pavelić, had tacit support or even active encouragement from the Catholic Church, in particular Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac of Zagreb and the priest Krunoslav Draganović, remains a hugely controversial subject. It became known that the college and church of San Girolamo dei Croati in the Via Tomacelli in Rome was being used by Draganovic as a holding station for wanted Nazis escaping through the ‘Ratlines’ to South America.

The two American agents remained very firmly of the view that Britain was not only shielding Pavelić but deliberately assisting the
Krizari
. This was considered to be part of a policy of distancing Britain from the Communist President of Yugoslavia, General Tito, despite having supported him wholeheartedly in his guerrilla campaign against Nazi occupation of his country.

Gowen and Caniglia pointed out that Pavelić was certainly getting help from someone and it was not the Russians or the Americans. He was hardly likely to receive sympathy from the French because he was held responsible for the political assassination of the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou along with King Alexander of Yugoslavia before the war. And while the Vatican might shield him they would not be able to support his wife and family, whose whereabouts the British must surely know. They pointed out that in August 1946 pamphlets, bearing Pavelić’s signature and pledging ceaseless warfare against the Communists, were dropped over Croatia by aircraft apparently flying from the British zone of Austria. They also accused Britain of an anti-American propaganda campaign implying that the US authorities were extraditing more people to face war crimes trials in Tito’s courts than was Britain.