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

While Allen Dulles was using his OSS post in Switzerland to protect the interests of Sullivan and Cromwell’s German clients, his brother Foster was doing the same in New York. By playing an intricate corporate shell game, Foster was able to hide the U.S. assets of major German cartels like IG Farben and Merck KGaA, the chemical and pharmaceutical giant, and protect these subsidiaries from being confiscated by the federal government as alien property. Some of Foster’s legal origami allowed the Nazi regime to create bottlenecks in the production of essential war materials—such as diesel-fuel injection motors that the U.S. military needed for trucks, submarines, and airplanes. By the end of the war, many of Foster’s clients were under investigation by the Justice Department’s antitrust division. And Foster himself was under scrutiny for collaboration with the enemy.

But Foster’s brother was guarding his back. From his frontline position in Europe, Allen was well placed to destroy incriminating evidence and to block any investigations that threatened the two brothers and their law firm. “ Shredding of captured Nazirecords was the favorite tactic of Dulles and his [associates] who stayed behind to help run the occupation of postwar Germany,” observed Nazi hunter John Loftus, who pored through numerous war documents related to the Dulles brothers when he served as a U.S. prosecutor in the Justice Department under President Jimmy Carter.

If their powerful enemy in the White House had survived the war, the Dulles brothers would likely have faced serious criminal charges for their wartime activities. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who as a young lawyer served with Allen in the OSS, later declared that both Dulleses were guilty of treason.

But with Franklin Roosevelt gone from the arena, as of April 1945, there was not enough political will to challenge two such imposing pillars of the American establishment. Allen was acutely aware that knowledge was power, and he would use his control of the country’s rapidly expanding postwar intelligence apparatus to carefully manage the flow of information about him and his brother.

FDR announced the Allied doctrine of “unconditional surrender” at the Casablanca Conference with British prime minister Winston Churchill in January 1943. The alliance’s third major leader, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, was unable to attend the conference because he was still contending with the horrific Nazi siege of Stalingrad. The Red Army would finally prevail at the Battle of Stalingrad, and the epic victory shifted the war’s momentum against the Third Reich. But the costs were monumental. The Soviet Union lost over one million soldiers during the struggle for Stalingrad—more than the United States would lose during the entire war.

The Casablanca Conference, held January 12–23, 1943, at a barbed wire–encircled hotel in Morocco, would sorely aggrieve the missing Russian leader by concluding that it was too soon to open a second major front in France. But Roosevelt’s unconditional surrender declaration, which took Churchill by surprise, was FDR’s way of reassuring Stalin that the Americans and British would not sell out the Soviet Union by cutting a separate peace deal with Nazi leaders.

The Casablanca Conference was a major turning point in the war, sealing the fate of Hitler and his inner circle. As Roosevelt told the American people in a radio address following the conference, by taking an uncompromising stand against the Third Reich, the Allies made clear that they would not allow Hitler’s regime to divide the antifascist alliance or to escape justice for its monumental crimes. “ In our uncompromising policy,” said Roosevelt, “we mean no harm to the common people of the Axis nations. But we do mean to impose punishment and retribution in full upon their guilty, barbaric leaders.”

With his close ties to Germany’s upper echelons, Dulles considered the unconditional surrender declaration a “disaster” and was quick to let his Nazi contacts know what he thought about it. Shortly after the Casablanca Conference, Dulles sat down one wintry evening with an agent of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, an oily Mittel-European aristocrat who had flitted in and out of Dulles’s social circle for many years. Dulles received his guest, who was known as “the Nazi prince,” at 23 Herrengasse, treating him to good Scotch in a drawing room warmed by a fire. The Casablanca Declaration had clearly unnerved Himmler’s circle by making it clear that there would be no escape for the Reich’s “barbaric leaders.” But Dulles took pains to put his guest’s mind at rest. The Allies’ declaration, Dulles assured him, was “ merely a piece of paperto be scrapped without further ado if Germany would sue for peace.”

Thus began Allen Dulles’s reign of treason as America’s top spy in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Maximilian Egon von Hohenlohe, the Nazi prince, was a creature of Europe’s war-ravaged landed aristocracy. Prince Max and his wife, a Basque marquesa , had once presided over an empire of properties stretching from Bohemia to Mexico. But two world wars and global economic collapse had stripped Hohenlohe of his holdings and reduced him to playing the role of Nazi courier. The prince had first met Dulles in Vienna in 1916, when they were both young men trying to make a name for themselves in diplomatic circles. During the 1930s, after he fell into the less refined company of the SS thugs who had taken over Germany, Hohenlohe popped up as an occasional guest of Allen and Clover in New York.

Hohenlohe was just one more member of the titled set who saw advantages to Hitler’s rise, and was quite willing to overlook its unpleasant side, which the prince explained away as rank-and-file Nazi Party excesses that would inevitably be sorted out. The Hohenlohe family was filled with ardent Nazi admirers. Perhaps the most bizarre was Stephanie von Hohenlohe, who became known as “Hitler’s princess.” A Jew by birth, Stephanie found social position by marrying another Hohenlohe prince. In the years before the war, she became one of Hitler’s most tireless promoters, helping to bring British press magnate Lord Rothermere into the Nazi fold. Stephanie took Hitler’s handsome, square-jawed adjutant Fritz Wiedemann as a lover and laid big plans for their rise to the top of the Nazi hierarchy. But it was not to be. Jealous of her favored position with Hitler, SS rivals plotted against her, spreading stories about her Jewish origins. Her aunt died in a concentration camp, and Stephanie was forced to flee Germany.

But Prince Max suffered no such fall from grace. He roamed Europe, feeling out British and American diplomats on a possible deal that would sacrifice Hitler but salvage the Reich. Wherever he went, Hohenlohe got a brusque reception. British foreign secretary Anthony Eden warned against even speaking with the prince: “ If news of such a meetingbecame public … the damage would far exceed the value of anything the prince could possibly say.” American diplomats in Madrid, who were also approached by Hohenlohe, dismissed him as a “ flagrant” liarand a “totally unscrupulous” schemer whose overriding concern was “to protect his considerable fortune.”

Dulles brushed aside these concerns; he had no compunctions about meeting with his old friend. The truth is, he felt perfectly at ease in the company of such people. Before the war, Dulles had been an occasional guest of Lord and Lady Astor at Cliveden, the posh couple’s country home along the Thames that became notorious as a weekend retreat for the pro-Nazi aristocracy. (There is no getting around this unwelcome fact: Hitler was much more fashionable in the social settings that men like Dulles frequented—in England as well as the United States—than it was later comfortable to admit.)