43 Facts About Reinhard Gehlen

Reinhard Gehlen led the Gehlen Organization, which worked with the CIA from its founding, employing former SS and Wehrmacht officers, and later became the first head of West Germany's Federal Intelligence Service.

The son of an army officer and World War I veteran, in 1920 Gehlen joined the Reichswehr, the truncated army of the Weimar Republic, and was an operations staff officer in an infantry division during the invasion of Poland in 1939.

Reinhard Gehlen had a significant role in planning the German operations in Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union.

Reinhard Gehlen achieved the rank of major general before he was dismissed by Adolf Hitler in April 1945 because of the FHO's alleged "defeatism" and accurate but pessimistic intelligence reports about Red Army military superiority.

Reinhard Gehlen obeyed a direct order from West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and hired former counterintelligence officers of the Schutzstaffel and the Sicherheitsdienst, in response to an alleged avalanche of covert ideological subversion hitting West Germany from the intelligence services behind the Iron Curtain.

Reinhard Gehlen was instrumental in negotiations to establish an official West German intelligence service based on the Reinhard Gehlen Organization of the early 1950s.

In 1956, the Reinhard Gehlen Organization was transferred to the West German government and formed the core of the Federal Intelligence Service, the Federal Republic of Germany's official foreign intelligence service, with Reinhard Gehlen serving as its first president until his retirement in 1968.

Reinhard Gehlen was born 1902 into a Protestant family in Erfurt and had two brothers and a sister.

Reinhard Gehlen's father was Walther Gehlen, an officer in the Imperial German Army during World War I, and his mother, Katharina Margaret Gehlen, was a Flemish noblewoman.

Reinhard Gehlen grew up in Breslau, where his father, a former army officer, was a publisher for the Ferdinand-Hirt-Verlag, a publishing house specializing in school books.

Reinhard Gehlen wanted to follow his father's path and become an army officer, despite the recent defeat of Germany in World War I and the reduction in the size of the army.

In 1920, at the age of eighteen, Reinhard Gehlen completed his Abitur and joined the Reichswehr.

Reinhard Gehlen received an assignment at the cavalry school in Hanover in 1926, where spent two years before requesting a transfer, and in 1928 he was sent to back to his original unit in Schweidnitz.

Reinhard Gehlen was a member of an aristocratic Prussian military family.

That same year in October, Reinhard Gehlen began attending the "Commander Assistants Training," the equivalent of the German staff college during the Weimar Republic, and in June 1935 he graduated as second in his class.

In November 1938 Reinhard Gehlen was again posted to an artillery regiment.

At the time of the Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, Reinhard Gehlen was a major and an operations staff officer in the 213th Infantry Division.

Reinhard Gehlen was still awarded the Iron Cross, second class.

Reinhard Gehlen was sent as his liaison officer to several German units that were involved in the Battle of France in May 1940, and in October of that year he was assigned to the Eastern Group of the Operations Section, led by Colonel Adolf Heusinger.

From late 1940 Reinhard Gehlen worked on operational planning for Germany's movement east.

In late 1941 Reinhard Gehlen was being considered to replace Colonel Eberhard Kinzel as the head of Foreign Armies East, the Army Staff section responsible for analyzing the Soviet Union, on the recommendation of Colonel Heusinger.

Halder was dissatisfied with Kinzel's performance and was looking for a replacement, though he thought that the 40-year old Reinhard Gehlen was too young for such an important role and had no previous intelligence background.

Heusinger believed that Reinhard Gehlen was a good manager, and on his advice, Reinhard Gehlen was appointed the head of FHO on 1 April 1942.

In spring of 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Reinhard Gehlen assumed command of the Foreign Armies East after the dismissal of Colonel Kinzel.

Understanding that the Soviet Union would defeat and occupy the Third Reich, Reinhard Gehlen ordered the FHO intelligence files copied to microfilm; the FHO files proper were stored in watertight drums and buried in various locations in the Austrian Alps.

On 22 May 1945, Gehlen surrendered to the Counter Intelligence Corps of the US Army in Bavaria and was taken to Camp King, near Oberursel, and interrogated by Captain John R Boker.

In exchange for his own liberty and the release of his former subordinates, Reinhard Gehlen offered the Counter Intelligence Corps access to the FHO's intelligence archives and to his intelligence gathering abilities aimed at the Soviet Union, known later as the Reinhard Gehlen Organization.

In July 1946, the US officially released Reinhard Gehlen and returned him to occupied Germany.

Reinhard Gehlen initially selected 350 ex-Wehrmacht military intelligence officers as his staff; eventually, the organization recruited some 4,000 anticommunist secret agents.

Reinhard Gehlen resented this arrangement and in 1947, the year after his Organization was established, Gehlen arranged for a transfer to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Between 1947 and 1955, the Reinhard Gehlen Organization debriefed every German PoW who returned to West Germany from captivity in the Soviet GULAG.

The security and efficacy of the Reinhard Gehlen Organization were compromised by East German and Soviet moles within it, such as Johannes Clemens, Erwin Tiebel and Heinz Felfe who were feeding information while in the Org and later, while in the BND that was headed by Reinhard Gehlen.

Reinhard Gehlen was the president of the BND as an espionage service until his retirement in 1968.

BND covert activities in the Third World laid the groundwork for friendly relations that Reinhard Gehlen attempted to use to steer local governments into taking an anti-Soviet and pro-NATO stance during the ongoing Cold War and further assisted the West German economic miracle by both encouraging and favoring West German trade and corporate investment.

Abdication of responsibility by Reinhard Gehlen was the malignancy; bureaucracy and cronyism remained pervasive, even nepotism.

Only slowly did the younger generation then advance to substitute new ideas for some of the bad habits caused mainly by Reinhard Gehlen's semi-retired attitude and frequent holiday absences.

Reinhard Gehlen was forced out of the BND due to "political scandal within the ranks", according to one source, He retired in 1968 as a civil servant of West Germany, classified as a Ministerialdirektor, a senior grade with a generous pension.

Several publications have criticized the fact that Reinhard Gehlen allowed former Nazis to work for the agencies.

The authors of the book A Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe stated that Reinhard Gehlen simply did not want to know the backgrounds of the men whom the BND hired in the 1950s.

Critchfield added that Reinhard Gehlen hired the former Sicherheitsdienst men "reluctantly, under pressure from German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to deal with 'the avalanche of subversion hitting them from East Germany'".

Reinhard Gehlen's memoirs were published in 1977 by World Publishers, New York.

Reinhard Gehlen was never a good clandestine operator, nor was he a particularly good administrator.

Reinhard Gehlen was characterized as "essentially a conservative", who refrained from entertaining and drinking, was fluent in English, and was at ease among senior American officials.