David Talbot - The Devil’s Chessboard - Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

In the end, Pell would triumph. Because of the uproar in the press over his dismissal, the State Department was finally forced to recognize the inevitability of a war crimes trial. In a statement released in the midst of the Pell melee, the department acknowledged that President Roosevelt had repeatedly made clear his intention. As the first war crimes trial got under way in Nuremberg in November 1945, the spirit of FDR and the president’s justice warriors—men like Pell and Morgenthau—hovered over the legal forum.

But the political foes who had opposed Roosevelt’s day of reckoning for the Nazis did not fully surrender. They remained determined to control the proceedings at Nuremberg and to protect valued members of Hitler’s hierarchy.

In May 1945, Allen Dulles and OSS chief Bill Donovan met in Frankfurt with Supreme Court associate justice Robert Jackson, who had just been named chief U.S. war crimes prosecutor by the new president, Harry S. Truman. During their meeting, Dulles underlined the various ways that he could be of use as Jackson prepared his case, including providing German witnesses for the prosecution as well as secret enemy documents. Jackson was delighted by Dulles’s offer of assistance, noting in his diary that it was a “God send.” Donovan further reinforced the relationship with Jackson’s team by putting a number of OSS agents on his staff. But as the weeks went by, Jackson developed the sinking feeling that he had fallen into an OSS“trap.” It became clear to the Nuremberg prosecutor that Donovan and Dulles harbored ulterior motives and agendas that did not always mesh with the interests of justice at Nuremberg.

The tensions between Donovan and Jackson began to grow in July when the OSS chief moved to take over what Nuremberg prosecutors referred to as the trial’s “economic case.” As Wall Street lawyers, Donovan and Dulles considered themselves uniquely equipped to take charge of the case against the industrialists and bankers who had financed Hitler’s regime. But such a role would have given the two OSS men the ability to control the legal fates of German business figures who had strong ties to their own Wall Street circles—including infamous former clients of the Dulles brothers.

Robert Jackson was a strong New Dealer who had risen through FDR’s Justice Department, where he had taken on powerful corporate interests like the Mellon family and fought tax evasion and antitrust battles. Well aware of the corporate conflicts of interest that Donovan and Dulles brought to the Nuremberg case, Jackson stunned the OSS chiefby informing him that he would not be leading the prosecution of Hitler’s financiers at Nuremberg.

Jackson quickly discovered that his concerns had been well founded. As the trial’s start date approached that fall, Donovan began communicating with Goering and Schacht, whom he recognized as the two most financially astute men among the accused. Goering had amassed huge economic power under Hitler’s regime, organizing state-run mining, steel, and weapons enterprises and taking control of heavy industries in the countries overrun by the Nazis. And Schacht, for his part, had remained a well-respected figure in New York, London, and Swiss banking circles even after selling his soul to Hitler. (Schacht later fell out with the Führer and spent the final days of the war in the VIP section of Dachau, where prisoners received relatively lenient treatment.) The banker knew where much of Nazi Germany’s assets were hidden, which continued to make him a valued man in global financial circles.

Behind the scenes, Donovan took the shameless step of working out a deal with these two prominent defendants, offering them leniency in return for their testimony against the other accused Hitler accomplices. When the OSS chief informed Jackson and his legal team that he had cut a tentative deal with Schacht and with—of all people—Goering, the prosecutors were aghast. Telford Taylor, Jackson’s assistant prosecutor, later called Donovan’s actions “ill conceived and dangerous … Goering was the surviving leader and symbol of Nazism. To put him forward as the man who could tell the truth about the Third Reich and lay bare the guilt of its leaders, as Donovan appeared to expect, was nothing short of ludicrous.”

On November 26, a few days after the trial began, Jackson wrote a letter to Donovan, making it clear that their views were “far apart” and there was no role for the OSS chief on the Nuremberg team. By the end of the month, Donovan was gone.

But Allen Dulles was a more subtle practitioner of the art of power than Wild Bill Donovan. He would continue to play a crafty role in the dispensation of justice—or its opposite—not only during the first trial but through the eleven subsequent Nuremberg trials, which stretched from 1946 to 1949. In all, some two hundred accused German war criminals were prosecuted at Nuremberg, and hundreds more would be tried in military and civilian courts over the following decades. But due to Dulles’s carefully calibrated interventions, a number of Europe’s most notorious war criminals—men who should have found themselves in the dock at Nuremberg, where they almost certainly would have been convicted of capital crimes—escaped justice. Some were helped to flee through “ratlines” to Franco’s Spain, the Middle East, South America, and even the United States. Others were eased into new lives of power and affluence in postwar West Germany, where they became essential confederates in Dulles’s rapidly growing intelligence complex.

Near the end of 1945, Dulles returned home to New York, where, on December 3—a few days before leaving government service—he was asked to talk about postwar Germany at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. He felt at home in the council’s headquarters in the historic Harold Pratt House on Park Avenue, and his remarks were frank and unfiltered that day. The first Nuremberg trial had just begun and Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech was months in the future, but Dulles was already sounding the themes of the future Cold War era.

The United States must not go too far in its efforts to cleanse Germany of its Nazi past, Dulles told the meeting. “ Most men of the caliber requiredto [run the new Germany] suffer a political taint,” he said. “We have already found out that you can’t run railroads without taking in some [Nazi] Party members.”

Dulles went on to explain why it was essential to ensure a strong West Germany. Signs of Soviet perfidy were already glaringly apparent. In Poland, he warned, “The Russians are acting little better than thugs … The promises at [the Allied leaders’] Yalta [conference] to the contrary, probably eight to ten million people are being enslaved.”

For Dulles, the wartime alliance that had defeated Hitler was already dead. In fact, he had been planning throughout the war for this moment when the Western powers—including elements of the Third Reich—would unite against their true enemy in Moscow.

On October 1, 1946, after nearly a yearlong trial, the fates of the twenty-one Nuremberg defendants were finally read aloud in the stuffy courtroom. Three were acquitted, including the well-connected Schacht. Seven received prison sentences ranging from ten years to life. Like many convicted Nazi criminals in the early Cold War years, a number of the Nuremberg defendants sentenced to prison were later the beneficiaries of politically motivated interventionsand early releases; few of the some five thousand convicted Nazis were still in prison after 1953. A number of the interventions on behalf of fortunate war criminals could be traced to the quiet stratagems of Allen Dulles.

Eleven of the original Nuremberg defendants did face swift and final justice, sentenced to hang by the neck until dead. Among them was Goering, whom not even Bill Donovan had been able to save. The Reichsmarschall had predictably proclaimed his innocence to the end. “ The only motive which guidedme was my ardent love for my people,” he told the court in his bombastic final statement. This proved too much even for one of his fellow defendants, Hitler’s former vice chancellor, Franz von Papen, who angrily confronted Goering later during a court lunch break: “ Who in the world is responsiblefor all this destruction if not you? You haven’t taken the responsibility for anything!” Goering simply laughed at him.