Western Intelligence Services and Former Members of Waffen-SS, Gestapo, and German Wehrmacht in the early Cold War: Cooperation, Networks, and Strategies of Communication

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Wala
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 389340318

To acquire dependable information about the USSR and activities of Communist groups in Western Europe, Western intelligence services after 1946 increasingly cooperated with a large number of former members of SS, Gestapo, and German Wehrmacht. These were consequently often able to escape prosecution, but the Western need for information also enabled them to utilize knowledge they had constructed before 1945 and adapt it to the period of occupation to serve their own needs and goals. This cooperation extended far beyond a simple exchange of information or of a utilization of Germans for stay-behind networks, it led to substantial exchange of ideas and visions about the political future, rationalizations and theories about the ideological enemy.Recently declassified documents in American, European, and German archives now make it possible to open the Black Box of internal structures of communication and decision-making in these relationships and related networks encompassing victors and vanquished and to research the terms of exchange. The market for information and knowledge thus originating, can be analyzed, the modifiability of agency researched, thus shedding light on how the anti-Bolshevism of the NS-period affected the post-war Western security architecture. This allows for an analysis of changes of perception of the relative other and of the production of knowledge about the now common enemy, knowledge that helped to legitimize the new transatlantic Cold War anti-Soviet security paradigm. The research project will thus provide important insight into a missing dimension of the history of the early Cold War, the nascent Federal Republic of Germany, and the intertwined beginnings of the transatlantic security cooperation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants