Gustav Hilger

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Gustav Hilger (born September 11, 1886 in Moscow , † July 27, 1965 in Munich ; pseudonyms: Stephen H. Holcomb, Arthur T. Latter) was a German diplomat . He was best known as an employee of the German embassy in Moscow until the beginning of the Russian campaign in World War II and as an adviser on Russian policy to the Foreign Office during the war and to the German and US governments of the 1950s and 1960s.

Live and act

Early years (1886 to 1923)

Hilger was born in Moscow in 1886 as the son of German businessman Otto Hilger (1857-1945) and Luise Julie Rabeneck (1860-1924), where he spent most of his life. Hilger first came to Germany on a visit in 1904.

After training as a civil engineer, which he completed from 1903 to 1908 in Darmstadt (engineering diploma), Hilger was employed in 1910 by the company of the fittings manufacturer Friedrich Hackenthal (F. Hackenthal & Co.) as their representative in Moscow. In 1912 he married Marie Hackenthal (1893–1969), the daughter of his employer. The marriage resulted in the son Andreas (1913), who died in World War II, and a daughter (1916).

During the First World War he was interned as an enemy foreigner by the Tsarist government in Vologda from August 1914 to December 1917. After the official end of the German-Russian War in March 1918, he was active in the German Main Commission for Prisoners of War and Civilian Prisoners from April. Until the resumption of diplomatic relations between Germany and Russia in December 1922, Hilger was an important link between Berlin as head of the prisoner-of-war welfare office in Moscow ( representative of the Reich Central Office for prisoners of war and civilian prisoners , also authorized representative of the Reich for the repatriation of German prisoners of war and civil internees ) and Moscow. In this capacity, Hilger worked with the Red Cross to organize the return of German citizens from Russia to Germany.

In 1922 Hilger came into close contact with German foreign policy as a contact person for Chancellor Joseph Wirth , whom he advised on the question of the extension of the German-Soviet trade agreement of May 6, 1921.

Diplomat in Moscow (1923 to 1941)

Gustav Hilger (second from right) during the visit of the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov in Berlin. Also in the picture: Molotow (2nd from left) and Joachim von Ribbentrop (far right).

In 1923, after diplomatic relations had been established between the German Reich and the Soviet Union , he was brought to the German embassy in Moscow . There he served as a civil servant under four ambassadors ( Brockdorff-Rantzau , Herbert von Dirksen , Rudolf Nadolny and von der Schulenburg ) until 1941 and rose to the rank of legation councilor. In the interwar period, Hilger, who regarded Germany as his fatherland and Russia as his homeland, played an intermediary role in German-Soviet relations during the interwar period. As a supporter of the Rapallo course of rapprochement between the two states and as one of the best experts on Soviet economic conditions (especially industry, finance and trade), he played a key role in the work on the German-Soviet economic agreement of August 1939.

In October 1924 Hilger got into the center of a German-Russian affair through no fault of his own, which could easily have meant the end of his career.

The accusations made against him, which the German side raised to the rank of an honorary question , could only be viewed as unfounded after lengthy diplomatic negotiations and thus no longer as a burden on German-Soviet relations.

As a “Muscovite” from 1917 to 1941, Hilger experienced the explosive political events in the Soviet capital up close. For example the emergence of the Soviet system, the death of Lenin, the rise and fall of Trotsky , the triumph of Joseph Stalin , the Moscow show trials , etc. The acquaintance with George Kennan and Charles Bohlen , two young employees of the American embassy in Moscow, was to be significant for Hilger's future . with whom he became close friends in the years before 1941.

Due to his good knowledge of Russian, Hilger was often used as an interpreter for political negotiations and discussions between German diplomats and representatives of the Soviet government. In this capacity Hilger was also involved as an interpreter in the negotiations on the German-Soviet non-aggression pact in August 1939 . As a link between the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the German Ambassador von der Schulenburg on the one hand and the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and his Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov on the other hand, he translated, together with his Soviet counterpart Vladimir Pavlov , the statements of both sides from German into Russian and vice versa . On August 23, Hilger finally took part in the signing of the non-aggression treaty in Moscow. His task was primarily is to read the Soviet (Russian-speaking) copy of the contract text one last time trial before the German representatives their signatures to this affigierten . Due to the potential and reserves of the Soviet Union, Hilger was convinced that a war against the Soviet Union would end in disaster. Therefore, in May 1941, he wished that the Soviet Union could initiate talks.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, an exchange took place via Turkey with the Soviet diplomats in the German sphere of influence, including their followers. This is how Hilger returned to Germany.

Eastern expert in the war years (1941 to 1945)

In July 1941, Hilger came to Ribbentrops' office, where he became the chief political advisor for Eastern issues ("Russia expert"). During the war against the Soviet Union , he acted in this capacity, among other things, as a liaison between the Foreign Office and the responsible authorities of the SS. Of the eleven so-called "Einsatzgruppen reports" that circulated for coordination purposes in the higher levels of the SS and the corresponding regular ministries , Hilger received at least five to read.

In 1942 Hilger coordinated the transfer of Hungarian officers who were involved in the murder of Serbs and Jews to the German Reich. The action took place on instructions from Hitler, who wanted to show that the Reich cared about those who had campaigned for Germany. As a representative of the Foreign Office, he was then involved in coordinating the deportation of Italian Jews from 1943 onwards.

As an expert on Eastern issues, Hilger was particularly noticeable for his support for the formation of the anti-Bolshevik Vlasov army, which consisted of Russian prisoners of war . In this context he took part in the founding of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia in Prague in 1944. In connection with the establishment of the Vlasov Army , Hilger came into close contact with Reinhard Gehlen and his Foreign Armies East department , for whom Hilger conducted interviews with captured Russian officers.

Following Hilger's repeated recommendation that the war in the East could only be won politically, but not militarily, Adolf Hitler did not accept. Hitler rejects the idea that one has to act as a liberator towards the Soviet population in order to induce them to defeat en masse to the German side and to fight against the Soviet system, in line with his racist ideology.

In the early 1960s, Hilger's activities during World War II sparked discussions about how much Hilger was involved in the crimes of the Nazis and whether he himself was a war criminal. Jörn Happel answers this question in his Hilger biography as follows:

“Hilger knew about the murders of the Jews of Europe. He must also have had information about the consequences of the deportations for the people. According to the files, however, he did not directly commission murders by signing deportation orders or, like other diplomats, actively participating in the murders through close cooperation with the SS. Hilger only held out at his post. The historians Conze, Frei, Hayes and Zimmermann described this attitude of numerous German diplomats as a ›perverted form of the fulfillment of duties, which ensured the continued existence of most of the German occupation administrations until the end of the war and encouraged the persecution and murder of the local population, including millions of Jews, to the end ‹."

From the Gehlen Organization to the CIA

Gustav Hilger spent the last weeks of the war together with other employees of the Foreign Office in Fuschl near Salzburg , while his family continued to live on the Sonnenhof estate in Molchow . Knowing that the Soviet secret service was looking for him, he surrendered to the US armed forces on May 19, 1945 in Salzburg. Due to the close cooperation between Hans-Heinrich Herwarth von Bittenfeld and the American Charles W. Thayer , who worked for the Office of Strategic Services , he received preferential treatment from the Americans, who needed him as an expert on East and Russia.

Hilger was first interned in a POW camp in Seckenheim near Mannheim , where he was also subjected to the first interrogations - conveniently by an old friend from Moscow's days, De Witt Clinton Poole, who headed the Department of State Interrogation Mission to Germany . The Americans were so impressed by Hilger's statements about the Soviet Union and Soviet politics that they did not want to forego his continued participation in their service. He was flown to the USA in secret and under a false name in October 1945. Until June 1946 he lived in Fort Hunt near Washington DC. One of his acquaintances, whom he met there again: Reinhard Gehlen.

Hilger wrote numerous analyzes of the Soviet Union and characteristics of leading Russian politicians in Fort Hunt . As an advisor to the CIA and the State Department, the US State Department, Gustav Hilger exerted influence on the makers of American foreign policy until his death, particularly through his friendship with George F. Kennan and Charles Bohlen . Hilger positioned himself again as a non-political expert and advanced to become an important Eastern expert in the Cold War. “Having lived in the USA from autumn 1945, Hilger no longer had to justify himself for participating in the Second World War. His knowledge of the Soviet Union legitimized a new life - again as an expert. The US was officially looking for Hilger on charges of “torture”. This was a common charge for potential war criminals who had been active in German authorities in the administration of crimes against humanity - as distinct from the actual murderers. Seen in this way, Hilger remained a fugitive until his death; the search for him was officially never stopped. ”But his past did not interest anyone in Washington.

Hilger never appeared in the trial of the main war criminals in Nuremberg; although he was requested a number of times, he was never summoned. In this trial, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe said verbatim: "I believe the witness (Hilger) is in the United States and there is a report that he is too sick to travel". Hilger was probably already staying in Silver Spring, where he lived for a few years.

Reinhard Gehlen, who was flown to Fort Hunt on August 21, 1945 together with many members of his General Staff , also accepted Gustav Hilger into his staff there. In June 1946 the Gehlen people were officially released from captivity, and Hilger returned to Europe with them. The men were flown to Frankfurt from Le Havre . Gehlen and some confidants moved to Camp King near Oberursel, Hilger and others moved to Kransberg Castle near Usingen . “On July 15, 1946, the Gehlen Organization began in Hesse. Hilger was still officially interned in the USA - nobody was allowed to know anything about his stay in Germany. "

Gustav Hilger played a double game. He worked for the Gehlen organization , for which he interrogated deserted officers of the Soviet army, among other things. But he was also an informant for the CIA and informed them about people who were hired by Gehlen and their areas of responsibility. The Americans were also aware that Hilger Gehlen, in turn, provided Gehlen with information that arose from his diverse contacts with Americans.

On May 28, 1947, the Soviets demanded Gustav Hilger's extradition. The Americans refused, claiming that Hilger was missing. They still wanted to get him out of danger and considered his repatriation to the USA. However, Hilger did not want to get involved because his family was still in Molchow in the Soviet zone of occupation. The importance the US government attached to Hilger is clear from Operation Fireweed, which has now started . In a night-and-fog operation, American intelligence agents succeed in getting Hilger's wife Mary, daughter Isika and their two daughters to West Berlin and from there to the American-occupied zone. Operation Fireweed was a risky undertaking, as Hilger's relatives were under constant surveillance by the Soviet secret police and were in turn massively urged to persuade Hilger to relocate to the Soviet zone.

On October 16, 1947, Mary Hilger and her daughter Isika are flown from Berlin to Frankfurt; Isika's two daughters follow in an American military train. On October 18, the whole family meets in Oberursel and then moves into the von Opel family's hunting lodge near Neu-Anspach in the Taunus. The family still spent Christmas here, as Veronika Keller, Hilger's granddaughter, remembered, before moving to Pullach .

Since there was still the danger that the Soviets might try to get hold of him, the option of returning to the USA came back to the fore for Hilger. On the mediation of his old friend George F. Kennan, Hilger and family were brought to the USA in October 1948 by an organization belonging to the CIA. As an adviser on Eastern issues, he worked for the Office for Policy Coordination (OPC), the CIA and the Eastern Department of the State Department . He produced material on the Soviet Union, conducted systematic research and worked as an analyst. In order to shield his person from the public, he was first given the code name Stephen H. Holcomb and later Arthur T. Latter. With regard to Germany, he came to the opinion that an independent policy of objective cooperation with the Soviet Union was no longer possible for the Federal Republic of Germany , that it could only assert itself on the basis of the western powers. A disarmed, neutralized Germany would induce the Soviet Union to make it its vassal state through a kind of popular front government.

Worked in the Federal Foreign Ministry and retired (1953–1965)

In May 1951, with assistance from the CIA, Mary and Gustav Hilger were granted permanent residency in the United States. Hilger continued to work for the CIA, but was also a kind of party ambassador of the CDU for Konrad Adenauer in Washington, DC . During this time his book The Incompatible Allies was written , which later appeared in German under the title Wir und der Kremlin and in which he presented himself as an apolitical expert for the time of the Second World War.

After a revision of the occupation statute of the Federal Republic of Germany was allowed to re-establish a Foreign Office on March 15, 1951, many diplomats from the Nazi era quickly found management positions there, including many friends and acquaintances of Gustav Hilger . One of them was Peter Pfeiffer , who in 1952 had become head of the personnel and administration department of the new office. The first attempt to persuade Hilger to return to Germany and to work in the Foreign Office came from Pfeiffer. Another proponent of Hilger's return was Walter Hallstein , for whom Hilger worked as a consultant for two months in the summer of 1953 with special permission from the US government. He then returned to the USA once more to finally retire from the service of the USA. On October 1, 1953 Hilger officially became an employee in the service of the Foreign Office. Shortly before his departure from the USA, Gustav Hilger accepted an invitation to the private home of CIA Director Allen Dulles , who obliged Hilger to work with the American secret service. As the transcript of a CIA agent shows, Hilger readily agreed to this request.

One of the deciding factors for his return to Germany was that the Adenauer government found a generous arrangement for Hilger's pension entitlements by recognizing that he would have had uninterrupted activity in the foreign service from 1923 onwards. From 1953 to 1956 Hilger then worked as an embassy counselor (advisor for Eastern issues) in the Foreign Office in Bonn. In 1957 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his work .

In the 1950s and 1960s he published several books on the Soviet Union, on the person of Stalin, as well as on the most expedient policy towards the "East" to be taken in the future.

Evaluation by contemporaries and posterity

When assessing Hilger as a person, a distinction is often made between his (value-neutral) manual skills as a diplomat on the one hand - which are almost without exception rated as excellent - and the moral quality of his actual actions. The latter is sometimes very controversial.

Klaus Mehnert , an employee of the Moscow embassy, ​​recalled in an article in 1982 that “our embassy was envied by the other representations” in particular by three employees, including Hilger. Historians have made judgments like that Hilger was " the prototype of the technically competent, conscientious" diplomat.

On Hilger's moral guilt in connection with the war of extermination of the German armed forces in Eastern Europe, as well as on his involvement in the persecution of Jews and other groups, the judgments vary. According to Wolfe, however, it remains to be said: "It is thus beyond dispute that Hilger criminally assisted in the genocide of Italy's jews."

About the decision of the US government to employ Hilger despite his questionable past, Wolfe wrote: “His employment during the Cold War seems a rare case where the value of the intelligence he supplied appeared to the US government to override his warcriminal service to the Third Reich. "George Kennan defended the recruitment of a former Nazi functionary as a source of intelligence with the words:" He was one of the few outstanding experts on Soviet economy and [...] politics, [who] had long practical experience in analyzing and estimating Soviet operations on a day-to-day basis. "

American and British government agencies learned around 1945 that Stalin allegedly said of Hilger: "German heads of State and German Ambassadors to Moscow came and went - but Gustav Hilger remained."

Fonts

  • Diplomatic and Economic Relations Between Germany and the USSR, 1922 to 1941 , October 1946. Study for the US State Department.
  • We and the Kremlin. German-Soviet relations 1918–1941. Memories of a German diplomat , Frankfurt a. M. 1955.
    • The Incompatible Allies. A Memoir-History of German-Soviet Relations 1918–1941 . Translation by Alfred G. Meyer. New York, 1953.
  • Problems of German Ostpolitik , 1957.
  • Stalin. Rise of the USSR to a world power , Göttingen 1959. (Translations into English, Dutch and Spanish.)

literature

Web links

Commons : Gustav Hilger  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Date of birth according to personnel files at the Foreign Office. Also on September 10 with Robert Wolfe: Gustav Hilger: From Hitler's Foreign Office to CIA Consultant , p. 2. Place of birth after the editorial note in: Gustav Hilger: Comrade-in-arms of Lenin. In: Die Zeit of August 22, 1957.
  2. ↑ Of the first sixty years of his life, he spent only ten outside of Russia.
  3. ↑ Lecture by Ulrike Hörster-Philipps at the event organized by the Joseph Wirth Foundation of the City of Freiburg and the West-Ost-Gesellschaft Südbaden on October 19, 2007 in Freiburg's town hall on the subject of “From Rapallo to German-Russian Relations Today”.
  4. ↑ Leonid Mletschin: Заговор послов? (in German: A conspiracy of ambassadors? ) , in: Novaja Gaseta , May 24, 2019 (In Russian).
  5. ^ Jörn Happel: Der Ost-Expert: Gustav Hilger , p. 295
  6. ^ Jörn Happel: Der Ost-Expert: Gustav Hilger , p. 285
  7. ^ Jörn Happel: Der Ost-Expert: Gustav Hilger , p. 296
  8. ↑ Jörn Happel: Der Ost-Expert: Gustav Hilger , pp. 302-304
  9. ↑ Hilger gave Fort George G. Meade as his postal address to his family , but actually lived in the nearby Fort Hunt, which had served as an interrogation center for captured Germans since 1942. (Jörn Happel: Der Ost-Expert: Gustav Hilger , p. 314) Fort Hunt is also known as 1142 or Eleven Forty-Two , which is derived from the official address of the secret camp: PO Box 1142, Postfach 1142. An insight into Bastian Berbner describes the secret service work there in his detailed article Imagine you are a Jew. And you have to make friends with a Nazi. , Zeit Online, No. 50, 2016.
  10. ^ Jörn Happel: Der Ost-Expert: Gustav Hilger , pp. 305-311
  11. ↑ Jörn Happel: The East Expert: Gustav Hilger , p. 312
  12. ^ Jörn Happel: Der Ost-Expert: Gustav Hilger , p. 319
  13. ↑ Jörn Happel: The East Expert: Gustav Hilger , p. 320
  14. ↑ Robert Wolfe: Gustav Hilger , see From Hitler's Foreign Office to CIA Consultant (PDF; 596 kB) on fas.org (English) , accessed April 15, 2008. Jörn Happel: Der Ost-Expert: Gustav Hilger , p. 13 –24, has documented Operation Fireweed in detail. In doing so, he relies on the protocol of the operation drawn up by the Hermann Baun involved in it . Under Gehlen, Baun was already an employee in the Wehrmacht Department of Foreign Armies East and then in the Gehlen Organization .
  15. ↑ A visit in the past ( memento of the original from April 23, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Frankfurter Neue Presse, December 27, 2011. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fnp.de
  16. ^ Jörn Happel: Der Ost-Expert: Gustav Hilger , p. 345
  17. ^ Jörn Happel: Der Ost-Expert: Gustav Hilger , p. 349
  18. ↑ Jörn Happel: Der Ost-Expert: Gustav Hilger , p. 355
  19. ↑ Jörn Happel: Der Ost-Expert: Gustav Hilger , pp. 360–361
  20. ↑ Jörn Happel: Der Ost-Expert: Gustav Hilger , P. 364–365
  21. ↑ Klaus Mehnert: In the fight against two devils. Patriot to the bitter end: Hans von Herwarth's memories of the years 1933 to 1945. In: The time of June 25, 1982.
  22. ↑ Quotations from pipl.com , accessed April 15, 2008.
  23. ^ Robert Wolfe: Gustav Hilger….
  24. ^ Robert Wolfe: Gustav Hilger.… . In the same place he writes that the Hilger case is an excellent case study of how politics overrides security requirements over moral considerations. ( "A case study where security needs outweighed moral considerations." )
  25. ↑ Quoted from Robert Wolfe: Gustav Hilger. … , P. 1. Printed there in full on p. 7.
  26. ↑ cit. according to Wolf, Thomas: The beginnings of the BND. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 64/2 (April 2016). P. 204, FN 49.
  27. ↑ For the background to the publication, see: Federation of American Scientists (FAS): SECRECY NEWS from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
personal data
SURNAME Hilger, Gustav
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Holcomb, Stephen H. (pen name); Latter, Arthur T. (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH September 10, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow
DATE OF DEATH July 27, 1965
Place of death Munich