He Led Hitler’s Secret Police in Austria. Then He Spied for the West. (original) (raw)
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Franz Josef Huber, responsible for deporting tens of thousands of Jews, escaped punishment with U.S. backing and went on to work for West German intelligence, newly disclosed records reveal.
Franz Josef Huber, front row center, holding gloves, and his Vienna Gestapo team in an undated photograph.Credit...National Archives of Slovenia
April 5, 2021
TEL AVIV — A top commander in Hitler’s secret police, responsible for deporting tens of thousands of Jews, was shielded by the U.S. and German authorities after World War II and later joined West Germany’s foreign intelligence service, which knew about his wartime role, newly disclosed records reveal.
By the war’s end the official, Franz Josef Huber — who also held a general-level rank in the SS, the Nazi paramilitary organization — led one of the Gestapo’s largest sections, stretching across Austria and with roles out to the east. In Vienna after the Nazi takeover, his forces worked closely with Adolf Eichmann on deportations to concentration and extermination camps.
Eichmann would eventually be executed for his role in coordinating the murder of millions of Jews. Next Sunday is the 60th anniversary of the opening of his trial in Jerusalem. But Huber never had to hide or to escape abroad, as many other top Third Reich commanders did.
He spent the final decades of his life based in his hometown, Munich, with his family, under his own name. And the explanation for this strange immunity appears to lie in his usefulness in the spying conflicts of the Cold War.
U.S. intelligence documents show that there was strong interest in drawing on Huber’s wartime network to recruit agents in the Soviet bloc, even as Austria was seeking to have him tried for war crimes.
“Although we are by no means unmindful of the dangers involved in playing around with a Gestapo general,” a C.I.A. memo from 1953 stated, “we also believe, on the basis of the information now in our possession, that Huber might be profitably used by this organization.”
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