The Splendid Blond Beast by Christopher Simpson

Author:Christopher Simpson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504043496
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-01-24T05:00:00+00:00

* The Nazis had pledged to wipe out the existing social structure in these countries in order to increase German Lebensraum (“living space”), and were thus much less willing to encourage collaboration from prewar elites in either state.

14

Sunrise

Shortly before he took up his OSS post in Berlin, Allen Dulles guaranteed de facto asylum to SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff—the highest-ranking SS officer to survive the war—and to a collection of Wolff’s most senior aides. The details of Dulles’s deal with this particular Nazi have remained buried in classified U.S. government files for more than forty years.1 But the record is clear. Whether Dulles intended it or not, his strategy for exploiting former Nazi leaders to advance purported U.S. interests had sweeping implications for U.S.-Soviet relations, U.S.-German relations, for war crimes prosecutions and the UN War Crimes Commission, and even for world peace.

Allen Dulles’s pivotal role in this hidden but crucial phase of European politics is at the core of Operation Sunrise—the secret negotiations in 1945 for a German surrender in northern Italy. This stepping-stone for Dulles’s postwar intelligence career was his covert diplomacy bringing together Western intelligence agencies, fugitive Nazis, and certain leading Vatican officials of the day.

In late 1944, Pope Pius XII and Ildefonso Cardinal Schuster of Milan had contacted the SS, the German military command in Italy, and OSS agent Dulles in Switzerland, offering to serve as intermediaries in negotiations to ease the surrender of German forces in northern Italy. In a confidential memo, Cardinal Schuster stressed that the Italian Communist party would likely gain from continued fighting between the U.S. and the Germans on the Italian peninsula. “The Catholic Church regards the systematic destruction of public utility installations [gas and electric works, etc.] together with that of industrial plant [that would come from fighting in northern Italy], as a prerequisite of Bolshevik infiltration into Italy. This threat to living conditions on the one hand and industrial potential on the other is intended to create disorder and unemployment. This is the basis upon which [the Italian Communists’ hope] the masses are to be won, first for Communism and then for Bolshevism,” Schuster wrote. He stated that a negotiated German withdrawal, on the other hand, would stabilize the economic situation, undermine the popularity of the Communist resistance, and reduce the possibility that German military leaders would be tried for war crimes once the conflict was over.2 Schuster and his senior assistant, Monsignor Don Giuseppe Bicchierai, stood ready to help negotiate a suitable agreement between the Germans and the Americans, the note concluded.

There was more to the Vatican initiative, strategically speaking, than simply the rescue of factories in northern Italy. The Vatican proposal would give U.S. and British forces control of the important port city of Trieste on the border of Italy and Yugoslavia. This position would permit them to rapidly enter Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria in advance of the Red Army, which was then approaching from the east. These historically Catholic territories had been Axis strongholds for much of the

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