US and West Germany protected Gestapo general who sent thousands to their deaths

A former Gestapo general who sent tens of thousands of Jews to their deaths was protected from prosecution by US and West German intelligence after World War II, it has emerged.

SS-General Franz Josef Huber served as head of the Gestapo in Vienna and much of Austria following the Nazi takeover. He worked closely with Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, and ordered the deportation of Austrian Jews to concentration camps.

Yet while Eichmann was captured by Israel and sentenced to death – next weekend marks the 60th anniversary of his trial – Huber was released by US forces after the war and spent the rest of his life as a free man in his native Munich, where he was a minor employee at a local business.

Newly declassified documents obtained by a German documentary make clear that was a cover arranged for him by West German intelligence. It now appears Huber was protected by the US as they believed he could be a useful asset against the Soviet Union.

“Although we are by no means unmindful of the dangers involved in playing around with a Gestapo general, we also believe, on the basis of the information now in our possession, that Huber might be profitably used by this organisation,” a CIA memo from 1953 obtained by the New York Times reads.

Files seen by ARD television’s Munich Report show US and West German intelligence conspired to hide Huber’s past and protect him from prosecution.

He was arrested by US forces in 1945 and held for more than two years, but US military intelligence prevented his extradition to Austria, where he was a wanted war criminal, and arranged for him to be dealt with leniently by the West German authorities.

He was released in 1948 with a fine and a suspended sentence following a “denazification” process.

In 1955 he joined the Gehlen Organisation, the West German intelligence service built up by the US as a counterweight to the Soviets. It is no secret that the organisation was riddled with former Nazis: its founder and leader, Reinhard Gehlen, was the former head of Nazi military intelligence on the Eastern Front.

“The background is that at this time in the emerging Cold War, people were looking for tough anti-communists, and unfortunately they all too often found them in former Nazis,” Bodo Hechelhammer, official historian of Germany’s BND foreign intelligence service, told the documentary makers.

The policy was not limited to Germany. In the US, the CIA and FBI recruited more than 1,000 former Nazis as agents in the years after the war.

When the Gehlen Organisation was replaced in 1956 by the BND, Huber remained on the books. He served with the service until 1967, although his bosses were well aware of his Nazi past. (© Telegraph Media Ltd 2021)

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]