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

It pained Schulte, who had a close Jewish friend while growing up, to see Jews being made scapegoats. He was a tall, outgoing, assertive businessman, but he had a feeling for the underdog that might have been reinforced by his own physical disability. At the age of eighteen, while going to the aid of some railroad workers, Schulte’s left leg was crushed under the wheel of a freight car and had to be amputated. Outfitted with an artificial leg, he continued to get around with vigorous determination for the rest of his life, although with an obvious limp.

When Schulte heard about the unfolding horror at Auschwitz, he knew he had to act. From what he could piece together, the macabre display of German efficiency overseen by Himmler that day was part of an official policy of mass extermination that was now under way in the Nazi empire. The policy had been formally approved earlier that year by the Nazi high command at a conference held on January 20, 1942, in an SS villa on Lake Wannsee in suburban Berlin. The Wannsee Conference, run by Himmler’s ambitious deputy Reinhard Heydrich, laid out a plan for the elimination of Europe’s Jewry through a network of death factories. By lending the proposal a legal veneer, Heydrich assured the complete administrative cooperation of the German bureaucracy. Even the title assigned to the program of mass butchery—the Final Solution—conjured a civil servant’s dream of a job well done.

Heydrich, who called himself “the chief garbage collector of the Third Reich,” saw his gas ovens as a humane solution to the “Jewish problem.” He considered himself a cultured man. The night before he was assassinated by Czech partisans, who threw a bomb into his open car as it slowed for a hairpin curve, Heydrich attended a performance of a violin concerto written by his father, Richard Bruno Heydrich, a highly regarded German opera singer and composer.

The Final Solution was meant to remain secret, with most of the death camps located in remote outposts of the Nazi empire. But as the systematic killing got under way, many people became aware of the mounting barbarity. One day in early 1942, an IG Farben official named Ernst Struss was returning home on a train after inspecting the company’s factory that was affiliated with Auschwitz. A German worker also riding on the train began talking loudly about the nightmare at the camp. Great numbers of people were being burned in the compound’s crematoria, he said. The smell of incinerated flesh was everywhere. Struss jumped up in a rage. “These are lies! You should not spread such lies.” But the worker quietly corrected him: “No, these are not lies.” There were thousands of workers like himself at Auschwitz, he said. “And all know it.”

Eduard Schulte was not one of those men who could deny or hide from such a truth. On July 29, 1942—within twenty-four hours of learning about the assembly line of death at Auschwitz—the mining executive was on a train to Zurich, determined to put the information in the hands of the Allies. The trip across the border carried a high degree of risk. And Schulte, a prosperous, fifty-one-year-old businessman with a wife and family back in Breslau, had much to lose. But the revelations about Auschwitz and the Final Solution that Schulte was carrying to Zurich filled him with an overriding sense of urgency.

After arriving in Zurich, Schulte kept to his normal routine when doing business in Switzerland, checking into the Baur-au-Lac, a luxury hotel on the lake where he was an honored guest. He then phoned Isidor Koppelman, a Jewish investment adviser he knew whose services his company had used. Schulte was determined to get his information in the hands of international Jewish organizations, which he thought could prevail on the Allied governments to take action. The next day, meeting in his hotel room, Schulte gave Koppelman his shocking report. The investment adviser sat in silence, taking it all in. Schulte said he realized what he was reporting seemed too outrageous to believe, but it was absolutely true. And if the Allies failed to act, there would be few Jews left in Europe by the end of the year. Schulte discussed the next steps that Koppelman should take to get the word out, then checked out of the hotel and returned to Germany.

The circuitous and troubled route that Schulte’s critical message took over the next several weeks through diplomatic and political channels reveals much about the failure of this bureaucratic labyrinth to confront the war’s soaring humanitarian crisis. And, once again, at the core of this failure was the poisonous culture of the U.S. State Department.

Through Koppelman’s efforts, Schulte’s message was delivered to Gerhart Riegner, the young Geneva representative of the World Jewish Congress. Riegner, in turn, was intent on relaying the information to the president of the World Jewish Congress in New York—none other than Rabbi Stephen Wise, FDR’s confidant and the leading voice of alarm in the United States about the Jewish crisis. The problem for Riegner was that he was compelled to use the services of the American Legation in Bern to dispatch the confidential cable to Wise. The U.S. diplomats in Switzerland thought young Riegner seemed to be in a state of “great agitation” as he related Schulte’s story. U.S. minister to Switzerland Leland Harrison, an old colleague of Dulles’s who was soon to be reunited with him in Bern, took a decidedly skeptical view of the account; in his dispatch to Washington, Harrison dismissed it as nothing more than “war rumor inspired by fear”—although he did concede that some Jews were dying due to “physical maltreatment … malnutrition, and disease.”

The State Department later sent the OSS a summary of the report that had originated with Schulte. Allen Dulles, still working out of the OSS offices in New York at the time, was one of those who received the message. The State Department flatly refused to believe Schulte’s account, calling it a “wild rumor inspired by Jewish fears.” Even Harrison’s concession that some Jews were dying as a result of the “privations” of war was stripped out of the State Department memo.

The State Department decided not to notify Rabbi Wise—whom Foggy Bottom officials considered a thorn in their side—about his Geneva deputy’s efforts to reach him. It took a full month for Rabbi Wise to receive Riegner’s report. When the telegram finally arrived in New York on August 28, it came not through U.S. diplomatic channels, but British. The State Department also did not see fit to pass along the Schulte revelations to President Roosevelt.

In frustration with the information bottleneck, Rabbi Wise finally held a press conference two days before Thanksgiving, announcing that Hitler had already killed about two million European Jews and had plans to exterminate the rest. The New York Times buried the story on page 10, The Washington Post on page 6. The press was reluctant to highlight such an explosive story since it lacked official government sources.

Dulles, who was soon headed to Switzerland, could have been one of these sources for the U.S. press. While still stationed in New York, he began sending out veteran reporters—under diplomatic cover—to gather intelligence in various forward posts in the European war zone. One of these reporters, a thirty-seven-year-old, Berlin-born, multilingual, former NBC correspondent named Gerald Mayer, was sent to Bern in April 1942. Soon after Schulte’s report began circulating, Mayer also began filing stories about the Final Solution with the New York OSS office. “Germany no longer persecutes the Jews,” began Mayer’s first stark dispatch. “It is systematically exterminating them.”

But Dulles did nothing to publicize Mayer’s reports. They, too, remained buried in the government bureaucracy. Along with the Schulte bombshell, these alarms would have made a loud noise, particularly in the New York echo chamber. They might have finally blown apart Washington’s institutional inertia on the refugee question. But this was not part of Dulles’s agenda.

History would give Dulles one more chance to alert the world to the ongoing genocide. In Switzerland, he would hear directly from men like Schulte and others who had risked their lives to save the Jews. In Bern, the evil was not so remote—it was all around.

After arriving in Switzerland, Dulles took his time setting up a meeting with Eduard Schulte. When the two men finally did come together in spring 1943 for a furtive meeting in Zurich, it was an amiable enough occasion; they had met fifteen years earlier, they realized, in the New York offices of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented Anaconda Copper, a partner of Schulte’s mining firm.

The fate of the Jewish people was still of great urgency to Schulte—likely made even more urgent by the fact that during his trips to Switzerland, he had fallen in love with a younger Jewish woman who lived in Zurich. But Dulles expressed little interest in Schulte’s information about the Final Solution. More intrigued by the political and psychological mood of the German people and how they could be won over by the Allies, Dulles asked Schulte to write up a memo on the state of the German nation. It was Hitler’s people, not his victims, whom the intelligence official thought important to understand.

This was characteristic of Dulles’s meetings with German informants while he was stationed in Bern. Fritz Kolbe, an efficient foreign service official who kept rising to higher posts in the German government despite his stubborn refusal to join the Nazi Party, was another mole who risked his life to give the United States rare insights into the operations of the Reich. One night, with documents stuffed down the front of his pants, Kolbe crossed into Switzerland and made his way to Dulles’s residence in Bern. Like Schulte, Kolbe was well aware of the risk he was taking. After this first meeting with the American spy, Kolbe drew up his will. He also left Dulles a letter for his young son in case he was caught and executed. Dulles was untouched by Kolbe’s request. The OSS agent sized him up as “somewhat naïve and a romantic idealist,” which was not good for Kolbe, since Dulles always regarded these types as expendable.

But Kolbe had important information to impart, and he kept risking his life to smuggle Nazi documents across the border. During another meeting with Dulles, in April 1944, Kolbe handed over a thick sheaf of Nazi cables revealing that Hungary’s Jews, who had remained secure late into the war, were about to be rounded up and deported to the death camps. Dulles’s report on this meeting was one of the few from Bern that ended up on the president’s desk in the White House. But there was nothing in Dulles’s communiqué about the imminent fate of Hungary’s Jews. And there was nothing about the possibility of bombing rail lines to the death camps—and even the camps themselves—as informants like Schulte were urging the Allies to do.

Instead, Dulles chose to focus the president’s attention on another topic that he had discussed with Kolbe over glasses of Scotch in his drawing room. Underground Communist organizing seemed to be gaining strength in Germany as the Nazi war effort faltered, Kolbe had informed the U.S. agent. This was the emergency that Dulles thought the White House needed to hear about.

Dulles continued to receive Nazi documents about the fate of Hungary’s Jews from Kolbe over the next seven months. One German cable reported that 120,000 Jews in Budapest, including children considered unfit for work, were soon to be “taken to the Reich territory for work in the labor service.” The Nazis were always careful to use euphemisms like “labor service” in their communications. By this date, Washington was well aware that Hungary’s Jews were headed to Auschwitz. And yet Dulles’s communiqués to OSS headquarters used the same banal language as the Nazis, referring blandly to the “conscription” of Hungary’s Jews.

When Dulles’s communications from Bern to Washington were declassified decades later by the government, scholars were able to decipher his wartime obsessions. Dulles’s interest was absorbed by psychological warfare tricks, such as distributing counterfeit stamps behind enemy lines depicting Hitler’s profile as a death’s skull, and other cloak-and-dagger antics. He was also deeply engaged with mapping out grand postwar strategies for Europe. But few of his more than three hundred communiqués mentioned the killing of Jews—and none carried a sense of urgency about the Final Solution.

This glaring blank spot in Dulles’s wartime record continues to confound academic researchers decades later, though they remain reluctant to pass judgment on the legendary spy. “Why did Dulles choose not to emphasize the Holocaust in his reports to Washington?” wondered World War II historian Neal H. Petersen in his edited collection of Dulles’s OSS intelligence reports. Petersen clearly struggled to answer his own question. “Whatever his reasoning,” Petersen concluded with scholarly restraint, “his reticence on this subject is among the most controversial and least understandable aspects of his performance in Bern.”

In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba, a nineteen-year-old Jew from a village in Czechoslovakia who had survived for nearly two years in Auschwitz, escaped from the camp with Alfred Wetzler, a childhood friend, by hiding in a pile of wood planks for three days and nights without food or water. They tied rags across their mouths to muffle the coughs that would have betrayed them to the SS patrols that were methodically searching the camp for them. On the third night, when they finally felt it was safe to make their escape, Rudi and Fred emerged from the pyramid of wood and began crawling under the moonless sky across a muddy field toward a cluster of birch trees in the distance. The two friends were determined to return home, not just to save their own lives but to bear witness to what was happening inside Auschwitz.

Their journey was harrowing. At one point, they were chased up a mountainside by a German patrol, with dogs snarling and bullets flying behind them. Along the way, they were helped by Polish peasants, who fed the famished teenagers potatoes and coffee and guided them toward the Slovak border. Two weeks after crawling out of the woodpile in Auschwitz, they were home and—after being put in touch with Oskar Neumann, the chairman of the local Jewish Council—they began telling their horrific tale. While the fundamental facts about the death camps were widely known by then, Rudi and Fred’s forty-page report was the most thorough and specific to emerge from Auschwitz up to that point. It described the management and daily routine of the camp, and included haunting details about how the prisoners were killed: “The unfortunate victims are brought into Hall B, where they are told to undress. To complete the fiction that they are going to bathe, each person receives a towel and a small piece of soap issued by two men clad in white coats.”

In mid-June, nearly two months after the escapees wrote down their account, the Vrba-Wetzler report was finally smuggled into Switzerland. A British correspondent named Walter Garrett got his hands on a copy, which he took to Allen Dulles on June 22. While the journalist sat with Dulles in his apartment on Herrengasse, the spy read the entire report. “He was profoundly shocked,” Garrett later recalled. “He was as disconcerted as I was and said: ‘One has to do something immediately.’”

Dulles’s pantomime of concern clearly convinced the British reporter. But in fact Dulles had begun receiving reports about the mass extermination of Jews over two years earlier, before he even left the United States for Switzerland. Authoritative reports on the Holocaust had continued to flow into his hands ever since his arrival in Bern, from informants like Schulte and Kolbe.

“One” should indeed have finally taken drastic action. At that point, many of Hungary’s Jews might still have been saved if Allied will had been sufficiently marshaled. Instead, Dulles sent off a routine cable on the Vrba-Wetzler report to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, a man Dulles knew would not lift a finger to help the Jews, even though he was married to a Jewish woman. It was Hull who had advised FDR to reject the ill-fated passengers of the St. Louis. And it was Hull who had blocked Schulte’s report from getting to Rabbi Wise through State Department channels.

Through the efforts of an exiled Jewish businessman in Geneva and a group of students he recruited to make fifty mimeograph copies of the Vrba-Wetzler report, the eyewitness account of life and death inside Auschwitz finally broke in the Swiss press and was then picked up by The New York Times and the BBC. In the ensuing uproar, President Roosevelt and other world leaders successfully pressured the Hungarian government to stop the deportations of its Jewish citizens. But the reprieve didn’t last long; in October 1944 Hitler ordered a Nazi takeover of the government in Budapest and the death trains soon began rolling again.

In the final months of the war, as the United States and Britain finally opened a second front in the war, and Hitler’s forces were caught in an inexorable vise between the Red Army in the east and the Anglo-American military machine in the west, Roosevelt and close advisers like Morgenthau began contemplating the Nazi regime’s postwar fate. The glory that was European civilization had gone up in “human smoke,” in Nicholson Baker’s words. But FDR was determined to keep the vow that he made repeatedly throughout the war. He would bring to justice the perpetrators of this unprecedented degradation of life. The Third Reich would be put on trial and its reign ground to dust.

Once again, however, Allen Dulles and his allies had other plans.

3

Ghosts of Nuremberg

Nuremberg was a haunted city in November 1945 as teams of Allied prosecutors and the world press converged on its bombed-out ruins for the first in a series of historic war crimes trials. The Allies had chosen Nuremberg to put the Third Reich on trial for its aggression and crimes against humanity because the city had been the main stage for Hitler’s pageantry, playing host each year to the Nazi Party’s extravagant propaganda spectacles. Film director Leni Riefenstahl memorialized the 1934 Nuremberg festival in Triumph of the Will, her paean to Hitler’s highly choreographed militarism. In Riefenstahl’s film, the city of medieval spires and cobblestone streets was transformed into a fascist fairyland. Every building was draped with exquisite precision in Nazi bunting. Every golden youth in the teeming crowd was filled with adoration as Hitler rode by, standing erect in his open car and returning the lusty cheers with his own rather limp salute.

But by 1945, Nuremberg had been reduced to rubble. On January 2, Royal Air Force and U.S. Army Air Force bombers swarmed over the city and destroyed the glories of its medieval center in just one hour. More raids followed in February. And then, in April, U.S. infantry divisions attacked the heavily defended city, finally taking it after fiery building-to-building fighting.

When Rebecca West arrived in Nuremberg that fall to cover the war crimes trial for The New Yorker, she found only a ruined landscape and hordes of scavengers. Making her way over the rubble one day, she was forced to hold her breath against “the double stench of disinfectant and of that which was irredeemably infected, for it concealed 30,000 dead.” There was little food or fuel to buy in the shops—and no money for transactions, only cigarettes. At night, a Stygian blackness fell over the ghost city, relieved only by an eerie constellation of flickering candles in shattered windows.

That November, twenty-one prominent representatives of the Nazi regime that had brought Europe to this ruin faced their own moment of retribution as they sat in the defendants’ galley in Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice, one of the few official buildings left standing in Germany. Hitler and Himmler were already gone, as was the Reich’s master propagandist Joseph Goebbels, escaping the executioner by their own hands. But the Nuremberg prosecutors had managed to assemble a representative spectrum from Hitler’s glory days, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, at one time the second-highest-ranking member of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s designated successor. Goering was joined in the dock by dignitaries such as Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s half-mad deputy who had flown to Scotland in 1941 in a wild bid to cut a peace deal with Britain; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Himmler’s grim, scar-faced executioner, the highest-ranking SS leader to be tried at Nuremberg; Hjalmar Schacht, the brilliant and arrogant international banker who had financed Hitler’s military rise; Albert Speer, the architect of Hitler’s imperial dreams and master of his weapons assembly line; and Julius Streicher, the unhinged politician and publisher who had parlayed his virulent brand of anti-Semitism into a thriving media empire based in Nuremberg.

Nuremberg, which enshrined the legal principle of personal responsibility for one’s actions, even in war, was a showcase of Nazi denial. When Hitler’s wily foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was asked by an interrogator whether he was aware that millions had been murdered in the Nazi death camps, he had the gall to exclaim, “That … is an astounding thing to me … I can’t imagine that!” It was as if he were suddenly waking from the bad dream of his own life. The defendants had long before abdicated all of their will to the Führer. As defendant Wilhelm Frick, the Reich’s minister of the interior, declared in 1935, “I have no conscience; Adolf Hitler is my conscience.”

The most egotistical defendants, like Goering and Schacht, struck defiant poses. At times, Reichsmarschall Goering mugged for the courtroom, laughing at the prosecutors’ mispronunciation of German names and puffing his cheeks indignantly when they made errors about the Nazi chain of command.

The Reichsmarschall had not even bothered to run from the advancing American troops in the war’s final days, convinced that he would be treated as the eminent representative of a defeated but noble people. His first hours in captivity surely encouraged his optimism, as the U.S. 36th Infantry Division soldiers who came for him at his quarters in southern Bavaria chatted amiably with him and treated the well-fed Nazi to one of their chicken and rice dinners from a tin can. Goering had no idea that he would be tried as a war criminal. At one point he blithely asked an American commander, “Should [I] wear a pistol or my ceremonial dagger when I appear before General Eisenhower?”

But the Reich’s crimes would not be easily dismissed at Nuremberg. The very name of the city conjured not only Nazi triumphalism, but the race laws that Hitler ordered to be written in 1935—laws that, by criminalizing Jewishness, led inexorably to the butchery that followed. The city and its Palace of Justice had long been drenched with blood.

Nine days into the trial, the dead would make a dramatic appearance in the courtroom, conjured in a twenty-two-minute documentary called Death Mills. The documentary was made by Hollywood director Billy Wilder, an Austrian-born Jew who had fled Hitler, who compiled it from scraps of film taken by U.S. Army Signal Corps cameramen during the liberation of several Nazi concentration camps. In his opening statement, Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, warned the courtroom that the film “will be disgusting and you will say I have robbed you of your sleep.”

But nothing could prepare those who viewed the film for what they would see that day: the piles of shriveled corpses and the walking skeletons that greeted the stunned and sickened American liberators, the mangled remains of someone who had been experimented on by Nazi doctors (“This was a woman,” intoned the narrator), the mounds of human ash to be sold as farm fertilizer, the pyramids of human hair and boxes of gold dental fillings to be sold for wigs and jewelry—the final value extracted from the victims of the Reich. One of the most punishing images was not grisly, but it would stay fixed in the mind’s eye—a close-up shot that lingered on a bin of children’s shoes, well worn from play.