Guido room

Guido Zimmer (born November 18, 1911 in Buer (Westphalia) ; † December 6, 1977 in Villa General Belgrano ) was a German SS-Obersturmführer and foreign agent for the security service of the Reichsführer SS (SD) who was involved in Operation Sunrise .

Life

He was in the Holocaust in Italy and in the NS - espionage involved. His notebooks, which were translated into the files of the CIA , offer an insight into the activities of the SD in 1944, in particular into the efforts of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) to either negotiate a separate peace with the West or to inform the Allies on the question of the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht , which in the Tehran conference had been agreed to split. Zimmer's notebooks (the original in German shorthand), which covered his activities from May 1944 to March 1945, contained new information about the contacts of the SS with Allen Dulles as head of the OSS office in Switzerland, leading to an armistice on May 2, 1945 led. The story of the secret American-German negotiations in Switzerland in March and April 1945 was revealed in a series of magazine articles in the Saturday Evening Post in 1947. With the publication, the view of the OSS was added to the Italian reports on the armistice. Therefore, new knowledge about the background of Operation Sunrise is historically of great importance. Another important element in Zimmer's file is that he was able to evade prosecution as a war criminal by taking advantage of his intelligence contacts and dealing with OSS officials who stood up for him after the war. In this sense, his story mirrors the experience of some other Nazi officials. Guido Zimmer was a slim, athletic man of medium height with dark brown hair and a high voice. In 1932 he joined the NSDAP and in 1936 the SS and the security service of the Reichsführer SS. In 1940 he was transferred to Rome as a member of RSHA Office VI ( Foreign Intelligence Service ). After Zimmer's camouflage legend was accidentally exposed, he was called back to Berlin. In September 1943, after Mussolini was overthrown and an attempt by a new Italian government to sign an armistice, Allied troops landed in southern Italy. Germany intervened with its own troops, SS and police and took control of most of the country. The murder and deportation of Jews in Italy began. Zimmer was transferred to Genoa, where he tracked down Jews, then to Milan. His commander in Milan was SS-Standartenführer Walter Rauff , chief of the security police and SD of the Northern Italy West group. Zimmer led a small team in Milan that confiscated Jewish property and lived on the proceeds. He also received political information from abroad and built a network of agents who were supposed to provide the SD with information if they were overrun by the Allies. Like Rauff, Zimmer was involved in both war crimes and espionage in Italy.

As part of the Sunrise operation, he hid an Allied radio operator in his house in Milan and introduced his informant Luigi Parrilli to the highest SS and police leader in Italy, Karl Wolff . During the negotiations he was repeatedly in Switzerland.

After May 8, 1945 he was still in contact with the Office of Strategic Services and its successor organizations, the Strategic Services Unit (SSU). In 1946 the Zimmer family settled in Erlangen for a short time . Richard Cutler from the SSU stood up for the children from Zimmer who had tuberculosis and applied for 2000 USD in Washington for travel and treatment of the children in Switzerland. The SSU had 114 sources and 44 sub-sources.

In 1948 Luigi Parrilli visited him in Erlangen , who was on his first business trip in post-war Germany. Parilli offered his former leader a job as a private secretary in Italy. Zimmer accepted the offer and applied for Italian citizenship. Zimmer feared legal prosecution after his former boss Herbert Kappler was sentenced on July 20, 1948 by an Italian military court to 15 years for extorting Jewish gold and to life imprisonment for the massacre in the Ardeatine caves . Until 1955, Zimmer was wanted by the Dortmund public prosecutor's office for his involvement in the deportation of Jews in Genoa. Zimmer contacted Reinhard Gehlen in December 1948 . He arrived in Buenos Aires on October 22, 1949, coming from Genoa with Motonave Paolo Toscanelli , where he posed as an agricultural specialist. In 1950 he established relationships with former SS officers. He lived in seclusion in Ciudad Evita, later Ciudad General Belgrano.

literature

• Carlo Gentile : Intelligence e repressione politica. Appunti per la storia del servizio di informazioni SD in Italia 1940–1945. In: Paolo Ferrari, Alessandro Magnani (eds.): Conoscere il nemico. Apparati di intelligence e modelli culturali nella storia contemporanea. Franco Angeli, Milan 2016, ISBN 978-88-568-1761-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gerald Steinacher : Nazis on the run. How war criminals escaped overseas via Italy. StudienVerlag, Innsbruck-Wien-Bozen 2008, ISBN 978-3-7065-4026-1 , p. 201
2. ↑ Peter Dale Scott: Why No One Could Find Mengele: Allen Dulles and the German SS. In: The Threepenny Review No. 23 (Autumn, 1985) pp. 16-18 [1]
3. ↑ RG 263 Detailed Report, Guido Zimmer, Records of the Directorate of Operations, Analysis of the Name File of Guido Zimmer, By Professor Richard Breitman , American University, IWG Director of Historical Research, [2]