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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 meeting became 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” liar and 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.)

      Royall Tyler, the go-between who set up the Bern reunion between Dulles and Hohenlohe, was cut from similar cloth. Born into Boston wealth, Tyler traipsed around Europe for most of his life, collecting Byzantine art, marrying a Florentine contessa, and playing the market. The multilingual Tyler and his titled wife led a richly cultured life, with Tyler haunting antique shops and private collections in search of Byzantine treasures and restoring a château in Burgundy where he showed off his rare books and art. “Traveling with Tyler,” noted London OSS chief David Bruce, “is like taking a witty, urbane, human Baedeker as a courier.” The contessa, who was equally sophisticated, moved in artistic and literary circles. She was at the bedside of Edith Wharton in 1937 when the novelist expired at her villa outside Paris.

      Tyler was another one of those refined men who glided smoothly across borders and did not think twice about doing business with Nazi luminaries. During the war, he moved to Geneva to dabble in banking for the Bank for International Settlements. Tyler’s virulent anti-Semitism made him a congenial colleague when the Reich had business to conduct in Switzerland. Well connected in the enemy camp, Tyler was among the first people whom Dulles sought out after arriving in Switzerland.

      Now Dulles and Hohenlohe, and their mutual friend Royall Tyler, were gathered amiably around the OSS man’s fireplace at 23 Herrengasse. Dulles broke the ice by recalling old times with Prince Max in Vienna and New York. Then the men quickly got down to business—trying to determine whether a realpolitik deal could be struck between Germany and the United States that would take Hitler out of the equation but leave the Reich largely intact. As they spun out their visions for a postwar Europe, there was much common ground. Dulles and Hohenlohe clearly saw the Soviet Union as the enemy, with a strong Germany as a bastion against the Bolshevik and Slavic menace. The two old friends also agreed that there was probably no room for the Jewish people in postwar Europe, and certainly they should not return to positions of power. Dulles offered that there were some in America who felt the Jews should be resettled in Africa—an old dream of Hitler’s: the Führer had once fantasized about sending the pariah population to Madagascar.

      The two men were too worldly to engage in any emotional discussion about the Holocaust. Dulles put the prince at ease by telling him that he “was fed up with hearing from all the outdated politicians, emigrants and prejudiced Jews.” He firmly believed that “a peace had to be made in Europe in which all of the parties would be interested—we cannot allow it to be a peace based on a policy of winners and losers.”

      Instead of Roosevelt’s “unconditional surrender,” in which the Nazi leadership would be held accountable for their crimes against humanity, Dulles was proposing a kind of no-fault surrender. It was a stunningly cynical and insubordinate gambit. The pact that Dulles envisioned not only dismissed the genocide against the Jews as an irrelevant issue, it also rejected the president’s firmly stated policy against secret deal making with the enemy. The man in the White House, clinging to his anti-Nazi principles, was clearly one of those “outdated politicians” in Dulles’s mind. While boldly undermining his president, Dulles had the nerve to assure Hohenlohe that he had FDR’s “complete support.”

      The fireplace meeting was, in fact, a double betrayal—Dulles’s of President Roosevelt, and the Nazi prince’s of Adolf Hitler. Hovering over the tête-à-tête at 23 Herrengasse was the presence of Heinrich Himmler. He was the Reich’s second most powerful man, and he dared to think he could become number one. With his weak chin, caterpillar mustache, and beady eyes gazing out from behind wire-rim glasses, Himmler looked less an icon of the master race than an officious bank clerk. The former chicken farmer and fertilizer salesman inflated himself by claiming noble heritage and was given to explorations of the occult and other flights of fantasy. But Himmler was a steely opportunist and he ruthlessly outmaneuvered his rivals, rising to become Hitler’s indispensable deputy and the top security chief for the Nazi empire.

      It was Himmler whom the Führer had entrusted with the Final Solution, their breathtaking plan to wipe the Jewish people from the face of the earth. It was Himmler who had the nerve to justify this plan, standing before his SS generals in October 1943 and assuring them that they had “the moral right to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us,” to pile up their “corpses side by side” in monuments to the Reich’s power. As Hannah Arendt later observed, Himmler was the Nazi leader most gifted at solving the “problems of conscience” that sometimes nagged the Reich’s executioners. With his “winged words,” as his diligent administrator of death, Adolf Eichmann, put it, Himmler transformed his men’s gruesome work into a grand and secret mission that only the SS elite were capable of fulfilling. “The order to solve the Jewish question, this was the most frightening an organization could ever receive,” Himmler told the leaders of his killing teams. He knew how to appeal to his men’s sense of valor and vanity, telling them, “To have stuck it out and, apart from exceptions caused by human weakness, to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”

      And, in the end, it was Himmler who—despite his long enchantment with the Hitler cult—had the brass to consider replacing his Führer when he realized that the war could not be won militarily. Prince Max was only one of the emissaries Himmler dispatched across Europe to seek a separate peace deal with the United States and England. At one point, Himmler even recruited fashion designer Coco Chanel, bringing her to Berlin to discuss strategy.

      Himmler knew he was playing a very dangerous game, letting Hitler know just enough about his various peace feelers, but not enough to arouse suspicion. Dulles, too, understood that he was playing with fire by defying presidential orders. After receiving a warning from Washington about the perils of fraternizing with Hohenlohe, Dulles sent back a cagey reply, cabling that he realized the prince was a “tough customer and extreme caution required,” but he might prove “useful.” Dulles did not find it necessary to inform his superiors just how deeply involved he was with Himmler’s envoy.

      Dulles and Tyler met with Hohenlohe on several other occasions over the next few weeks, from February into April. And even as late as November 1943, Dulles continued to forward to Washington Prince Max’s reports on Himmler’s frame of mind. Dulles regarded the prince as a serious enough СКАЧАТЬ