| The Service - The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen (1972) |
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| Notes/Review |
| Sometimes I have to be careful that I'm writing a review of the book I just read, rather than a review of the subject. In the case of a memoir, it's a bit simpler. Here we have a book about a man, written by the man. I really dislike this man, and that flows through to the book. I don't think Gehlen ever comes right out and says that he wasn't a Nazi. I've read several memoirs of German WWII officers. I'm pretty sure every one of them denied being a Nazi. They also all denied having anything to do with Nazi atrocities. "My unit didn't participate; we weren't there. I knew nothing about any atrocities. I'm innocent." There are no words like that in this book. But you don't even need to read between the lines in this book. Gehlen was either a Nazi or Nazi adjacent. Some select quotes: "We had realized that this vast country, rich in manpower and raw material resources, could in the final analysis only be conquered - or, rather, liberated from communism - with the help of the Russian peoples themselves ... [snip] We could have won the Russians over because of their instinct for national self-preservation alone" "In retrospect we can only agree that it is a matter for regret that Hitler did not follow [Clausewitz'] teachings more closely and act accordingly." "After twenty years of arbitrary injustice and terror, the reestablishment of elementary human rights such as the dignity of man, liberty, justice, and the sanctity of property united every inhabitant of the Soviet empire in a common readiness to support the Germans. What could be more natural for us than to exploit this readiness?" "... Sefton Delmer had pumped out vitriolic propaganda against Hitler's Germany." He complains at one point that he couldn't work with a German officer who broke his personal oath to Hitler. Gehlen couldn't trust such a disloyal man. To suggest that readers of this book "can only agree that it is a matter of regret" that Hitler wasn't a better strategist is bizarre. The book was written 25 years after the war. If he was unaware of the Nazi atrocities during the war, he certainly had ample time before writing the book to learn about them. And yet, he calls the Nazi attack on Soviet Russia "a war of liberation". To say that people liberated from the Soviet Communists would be granted by the Germans "dignity of man, liberty, justice, and the sanctity of property" is risible. The Nazis liberated 27 million Soviets from Communism. By killing them. Does one need to "pump out vitriolic propaganda" against Nazi Germany? It seems to me that simply telling the truth is good enough. Although nothing jumped out at me as anti-Semitic, Gehlen doesn't hide his racism. On West German arms exports to Israel: "These exports provoked violent controversy and minatory reactions from the Arab states, and ignited a dangerous fanaticism which can only be explained by the Arab mentality." On the anti-Communist purge in Indonesia: "the liquidization of the Communists, including Aidit himself, who was executed, was carried out with a harshness and thoroughness typical of the Asian mentality." How do you suppose he would react if someone described the systematic slaughter of millions of innocents and the theft of their properties as "typical of the German mentality"? No doubt he'd make some hand-waving rationalization. So much for the man. What about the book? It is broken down into four parts: his time running Foreign Armies East (the intelligence unit operating on the Eastern front), setting up and running the Gehlen Organization with the Americans on behalf of West Germany, converting that organization into the BND, and finally, some predictions of the future. The first part is somewhat interesting. The second and third parts don't go into enough detail to be very fulfilling. He basically tells us that he made no mistakes and his team predicted all the major worldwide events of the time. In the fourth part, he manages to get every prediction wrong. (In his defense, it is really hard to predict the future.) |