Ludwig Albert

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Ludwig Albert (born July 8, 1900 in Frankfurt am Main , † July 15, 1955 in Bruchsal ) was a senior German police officer and from 1940 a member of the Secret Field Police . From the late 1940s until his death he was an intelligence officer for the Gehlen organization .

Life

Until 1945

Little is known about Ludwig Albert's biography up to 1945. The essential files of the Secret Field Police have been lost since the end of the war, and the American secret service does not refer to any Nazi documents in its documents on Albert. Albert's German personnel files from the post-war period have not yet been scientifically evaluated.

According to the little information available, Albert was a criminal police officer in the 1930s , most recently at the criminal police headquarters in Halle (Saale) . In 1940 he became a member of the Secret Field Police (GFP) , the "Gestapo of the Wehrmacht ". In 1941 he was a member of a task force of the Security Police and the SD in the occupied Soviet Union and thus involved in war crimes and the extermination of Jews . Albert, who was the commander of a GFP group, held the rank of detective commissioner until at least August 1944 , after which he was promoted to criminal inspector. In the summer of 1944 he received the War Merit Cross, First Class. According to a CIA report, Albrecht was a member of the NSDAP .

After 1945

Ludwig Albert was denazified as a Nazi “ fellow traveler ” and joined the Gehlen Organization (OG) , the forerunner of the Federal Intelligence Service, before 1949 . There he had the code names Anders and Arthur . The US secret service described Albert, who lives in Frankfurt am Main, as one of the most capable criminologists who could be used to set up a possible West German political police force .

In 1950, Albert became head of the regional office BV 2600 / Nord in Frankfurt within the OG general agency L , which was responsible for monitoring legal and illegal communist activities of the KPD and its organizations in Hesse and the British occupation zone . In 1952 he was head of BV 2600 / West and from April 1953 the general manager of BV 2600 . In December 1953 Albert became one of the heads of the internal security group Waldkapelle at the headquarters of the general agency L in Karlsruhe . In 1954, Albert became deputy head of the general agency, which was now renamed department 142 .

At the same time Albert worked for years for the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), which wanted to track down Eastern agents in the German secret organization with its operation "Campus" - without informing the CIA . Albert provided the CIC with information on staff and other internal issues of the organization for a fee.

Arrest and suicide

After a former agent of the State Secretariat for State Security was arrested for black market deals, he accused Ludwig Albert, among others, of working with the East German secret service during his interrogations. Thereupon Albert , who had lived in Neu-Isenburg since 1951, was arrested on July 4, 1955 by the Bonn security group . When his house was searched, incriminating evidence was found, including numerous OG files and an allegedly East German microfilm reader. But Albert denied any betrayal of secrets to an Eastern service. On July 15, 1955, he hanged himself in his cell in the Bruchsal State Penitentiary .

To the relief of the Gehlen organization, the case was not made public. Only after the publication of US intelligence files under the Freedom of Information Act and Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act was the Albert case mentioned in a Spiegel article in 2006 . Whether Ludwig Albert actually worked for an Eastern secret service is still controversial today. Long-time CIA employee James H. Critchfield came to the conclusion in his later evaluation of the documents that Albert had worked as a triple agent. In the German investigations after Albert's death, however, they also checked whether the suspicion of espionage against him had been controlled by the KGB - without the investigations leading to a clarification.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Peter-Ferdinand Koch: Unmasked. Double agents: names, facts, evidence. Salzburg 2011, p. 132.
  2. ^ A b Klaus Geßner: Secret Field Police - the Gestapo of the Wehrmacht. In: Hannes Heer , Klaus Naumann (ed.): War of Extermination - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941-1944. Hamburg 1995, pp. 343-356, here: p. 343.
  3. ↑ NWCDA 1/1, Albert, Louis, from 0001 to 0064; CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room, Special Collection Nazi War Crimes Declassification Act (CIA approved documents; accessed September 2, 2014).
  4. ↑ a b c cf. Bundesarchiv B 206/1977 Suicide of BND employee Ludwig Albert (cover name 'Arthur') .
  5. ↑ a b Command sheet of the chief of the security police and the SD. Edition A. No. 33 v. August 19, 1944, p. 179.
  6. ↑ a b c d NWCDA 1/1, Albert, Ludwig, 0027: UJ-Dredger Report Albert, Ludwig 1955 (released document from the holdings of the CIA; PDF 4 MB, accessed on September 2, 2014).
  7. ↑ Research Aid: Cryptonyms and Terms in Declassified CIA Files Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Disclosure Acts (IWG, June 2007), p. 50 ( PDF 412 kB; accessed on September 2, 2013).
  8. ↑ To the general agency L s. Heinz Felfe: In the service of the enemy. Autobiography. Berlin (East) 1988, pp. 194ff., 271ff.
  9. ↑ a b NWCDA 1/1, Albert, Ludwig, 0064: Memorandum v. August 27, 1976 (released document from the CIA holdings; PDF 483 kB, accessed on September 2, 2014).
  10. ↑ a b James H. Critchfield, KGB-Felfe documents . James H. Critchfield Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Swem Library, College of William & Mary , esp. Part 5 (4.5 MB) & Part 8 (6.3 MB) (accessed September 2, 2014); James H. Critchfield: Order Pullach. The Gehlen Organization 1948-1956. Hamburg 2005; s. a. Reinhard Leube: The silent affair Ludwig Albert. In: Ders .: Intimate enemies. Part 2: 1950 to 1959. Mering 2009, pp. 542f.
  11. ↑ Axel Frohn, Georg Bönisch: Pig dogs welcome . In: Der Spiegel No. 13 v. March 27, 2006, p. 32f.
  12. ↑ cf. Harold Jackson: Obituary James Critchfield . In: The Guardian v. April 26, 2003.
personal data
SURNAME Albert, Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German criminal police officer and secret service employee
DATE OF BIRTH July 8, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH July 15, 1955
Place of death Bruchsal