Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

Anti-Fascist Archives  

AFA 3: Reinhard Gehlen & His Organization

Part 1 45:14 | Part 2 41:09 | Part 3 46:10 | Part 4 47:15
(Record­ed June 21, 1984)

The third pro­gram in the series focus­es on the piv­otal role Hitler’s top spy­mas­ter (Gen­er­al Rein­hard Gehlen) and his orga­ni­za­tion played in post-World War II his­to­ry. In charge of all intel­li­gence on the East­ern Front dur­ing the war, Gehlen’s orga­ni­za­tion was adopt­ed by U.S. intel­li­gence after the war and became, in turn, the CIA’s intel­li­gence eyes and ears on the Sovi­et Union and East­ern Europe, the de-fac­to NATO intel­li­gence orga­ni­za­tion and the intel­li­gence ser­vice of the Fed­er­al Repub­lic of Ger­many, the BND. In this capac­i­ty, Gehlen was able to exert a pro­found influ­ence on the course of world events.

Despite a pledge to his Amer­i­can spon­sors not to employ war crim­i­nals, from the first, Gehlen did not hes­i­tate to uti­lize some of the worst offend­ers. SS colonel Otto Sko­rzeny put his post-war ODESSA net­work of SS men to work for Gehlen as part of the lat­ter’s oper­a­tion. This broad­cast doc­u­ments Gehlen’s use of Sko­rzeny and a force com­posed large­ly of vet­er­ans of Hitler’s “Final Solu­tion” to train the Egypt­ian intel­li­gence ser­vice, hav­ing under­tak­en the mis­sion on behalf of the CIA.

Pro­gram high­lights include: Gehlen’s cen­tral role in the cre­ation of Radio Free Europe; Gehlen’s employ­ment of Eich­man’s supe­ri­or in the Final Solu­tion, Otto Von Bolschwing; the BND’s employ­ment of Eich­man­n’s deputy Alois Brun­ner; the appoint­ment of Von Bolschwing asso­ciate Helene Von Damm to serve as White House spe­cial­ist for Pres­i­den­tial per­son­nel; Sko­rzeny’s cre­ation and train­ing of the first Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ist groups while serv­ing on the Gehlen-CIA mis­sion in Egypt in the 1950’s; Gehlen’s use of Adolph Eich­man in the Skorzeny/CIA/Gehlen mis­sion in Egypt; text of a rare inter­view with Gehlen, in which he demon­strat­ed his unre­con­struct­ed Nazi sym­pa­thies; Gehlen’s piv­otal role in the estab­lish­ment of Radio Free Europe; a his­to­ry of Gehlen oper­a­tive Hel­mut Stre­ich­er, a for­mer SS offi­cer, whose intel­li­gence activ­i­ties ranged from the East­ern Front in World War II to the Bay of Pigs inva­sion; Gehlen’s work as a min­is­ter in “the Evan­gel­i­cal Church,” fol­low­ing his alleged retire­ment from the BND (Ger­many’s intel­li­gence ser­vice and the final incar­na­tion of Gehlen’s Nazi spy out­fit.

Discussion

5 comments for “AFA 3: Reinhard Gehlen & His Organization”

  1. Almost 30 years have passed since then, and it’s still an excit­ing lis­ten­ing. Thanks!

    On a side-note, call­ing Russ­ian White move­ment “tzarist” is an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of actu­al his­to­ry. Sim­ply put, the White =/= Impe­r­i­al. Many lead­ers of the Whites have par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Feb­ru­ary rev­o­lu­tion and forced Alex­ei’s abdi­ca­tion.
    The Whites, gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, were a com­bi­na­tion of great mul­ti­tude of groups, unit­ed only by their descent and a com­mon cause — oppos­ing the Reds. It does­n’t mean that there was­n’t any inter­nal strife between and among their var­i­ous fac­tions.
    Truth be told, most of the exiles who asso­ci­at­ed them­selves with the Whites, actu­al­ly sup­port­ed USSR in World War 2.

    Also I may be wrong, it seems like there’s a seri­ous mis­con­cep­tion about Impe­r­i­al Rus­sia in the West — just like about the USSR.

    Posted by Vitaly | April 24, 2013, 9:18 am
  2. http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/German-court-blocks-release-of-secret-Eichmann-files-318088

    Ger­man court blocks release of secret Eich­mann files
    By JPOST.COM STAFF
    28/06/2013

    Clas­si­fied doc­u­ments report­ed­ly reveal West Ger­many intel­li­gence knew Eich­mann was in Argenti­na as ear­ly as 1952.

    The Ger­man Fed­er­al Admin­is­tra­tive Court vetoed a bid to release clas­si­fied for­eign intel­li­gence doc­u­ments that would reveal west­ern spies knew where Nazi war crim­i­nal Adolf Eich­mann escaped to after World War II, British media report­ed on Fri­day.

    The doc­u­ments are also thought to con­tain details about Eich­man­n’s kid­nap­ping from Argenti­na by Israeli Mossad agents in 1960, as well as details about a pos­si­ble col­lab­o­ra­tion between Israel and West Ger­many to pull the oper­a­tion off, accord­ing to reports.

    Eich­mann was respon­si­ble for the Nazi exter­mi­na­tion pro­gram that killed six mil­lion Jews in the Holo­caust. He coor­di­nat­ed the depor­ta­tion of Jews from across Europe to the exter­mi­na­tion camps.

    After his abduc­tion to Israel, he was put on tri­al and found guilty of war crimes. He was sen­tenced to death and hanged in 1962 — the sole exe­cu­tion in the State of Israel’s his­to­ry.

    The court deter­mined the Ger­man for­eign intel­li­gence agency was with­in its rights to black out pas­sages from the doc­u­ments, that were request­ed by Ger­man dai­ly Bild. The rul­ing fol­lowed a deci­sion from last year in which the court ordered the Fed­er­al Intel­li­gence Ser­vice to release clas­si­fied doc­u­ments.

    Bild report­ed that West Ger­man intel­li­gence knew Eich­mann was in Argenti­na as ear­ly as 1952.

    The CIA wrote to its West Ger­man coun­ter­part in 1958 that it had infor­ma­tion that Eich­mann is report­ed to live in Argenti­na under the alias ‘Clemens’ since 1952, doc­u­ments released in 2006 revealed. Eich­man­n’s actu­al alias was Ricar­do Kle­ment.

    The Ger­man intel­li­gence ser­vice said in response to the request to release the doc­u­ments that most of the files on Eich­mann were already pub­lic and only a small por­tion is blacked out due to laws on “pro­tect­ing state secu­ri­ty inter­ests,” accord­ing to reports in the British media.

    Posted by Vanfield | June 28, 2013, 1:13 pm
  3. Anoth­er Clas­sic episode check out my take on the top­ic based on Christo­pher Simp­son’s book ” Blow­back” I’m read­ing Simp­son’s sci­ence of coer­cion right now inspired by the great inter­views you did with him. The mass media and acad­e­mia one big psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare oper­a­tion
    Nazis & the CIA
    http://anti-imperialist‑u.blogspot.com/2014/06/nazis-and-cia.html

    Posted by Hugo Turner | June 18, 2016, 2:48 pm
  4. Rather amaz­ing sto­ry, though prob­a­bly has a lim­it­ed hang­out ele­ment as it is the Wapo. Copy­ing whole thing to avoid any pay­wall issues.

    Most inter­est­ing to me is that they main­tained the fronts through Leicht­en­stein.

    excerpts:

    ...But what none of its cus­tomers ever knew was that Cryp­to AG was secret­ly owned by the CIA in a high­ly clas­si­fied part­ner­ship with West Ger­man intel­li­gence. These spy agen­cies rigged the company’s devices so they could eas­i­ly break the codes that coun­tries used to send encrypt­ed mes­sages.

    ....Crypto’s prod­ucts are still in use in more than a dozen coun­tries around the world, and its orange-and-white sign still looms atop the company’s long­time head­quar­ters build­ing near Zug, Switzer­land. But the com­pa­ny was dis­mem­bered in 2018, liq­ui­dat­ed by share­hold­ers whose iden­ti­ties have been per­ma­nent­ly shield­ed by the byzan­tine laws of Liecht­en­stein, a tiny Euro­pean nation with a Cay­man Islands-like rep­u­ta­tion for finan­cial secre­cy.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-security/cia-crypto-encryption-machines-espionage/

    For more than half a cen­tu­ry, gov­ern­ments all over the world trust­ed a sin­gle com­pa­ny to keep the com­mu­ni­ca­tions of their spies, sol­diers and diplo­mats secret.

    The com­pa­ny, Cryp­to AG, got its first break with a con­tract to build code-mak­ing machines for U.S. troops dur­ing World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dom­i­nant mak­er of encryp­tion devices for decades, nav­i­gat­ing waves of tech­nol­o­gy from mechan­i­cal gears to elec­tron­ic cir­cuits and, final­ly, sil­i­con chips and soft­ware.

    The Swiss firm made mil­lions of dol­lars sell­ing equip­ment to more than 120 coun­tries well into the 21st cen­tu­ry. Its clients includ­ed Iran, mil­i­tary jun­tas in Latin Amer­i­ca, nuclear rivals India and Pak­istan, and even the Vat­i­can.

    But what none of its cus­tomers ever knew was that Cryp­to AG was secret­ly owned by the CIA in a high­ly clas­si­fied part­ner­ship with West Ger­man intel­li­gence. These spy agen­cies rigged the company’s devices so they could eas­i­ly break the codes that coun­tries used to send encrypt­ed mes­sages.

    The decades-long arrange­ment, among the most close­ly guard­ed secrets of the Cold War, is laid bare in a clas­si­fied, com­pre­hen­sive CIA his­to­ry of the oper­a­tion obtained by The Wash­ing­ton Post and ZDF, a Ger­man pub­lic broad­cast­er, in a joint report­ing project.

    The account iden­ti­fies the CIA offi­cers who ran the pro­gram and the com­pa­ny exec­u­tives entrust­ed to exe­cute it. It traces the ori­gin of the ven­ture as well as the inter­nal con­flicts that near­ly derailed it. It describes how the Unit­ed States and its allies exploit­ed oth­er nations’ gulli­bil­i­ty for years, tak­ing their mon­ey and steal­ing their secrets.

    The oper­a­tion, known first by the code name “The­saurus” and lat­er “Rubi­con,” ranks among the most auda­cious in CIA his­to­ry.

    “It was the intel­li­gence coup of the cen­tu­ry,” the CIA report con­cludes. “For­eign gov­ern­ments were pay­ing good mon­ey to the U.S. and West Ger­many for the priv­i­lege of hav­ing their most secret com­mu­ni­ca­tions read by at least two (and pos­si­bly as many as five or six) for­eign coun­tries.”

    From 1970 on, the CIA and its code-break­ing sib­ling, the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency, con­trolled near­ly every aspect of Crypto’s oper­a­tions — pre­sid­ing with their Ger­man part­ners over hir­ing deci­sions, design­ing its tech­nol­o­gy, sab­o­tag­ing its algo­rithms and direct­ing its sales tar­gets.

    Then, the U.S. and West Ger­man spies sat back and lis­tened.

    They mon­i­tored Iran’s mul­lahs dur­ing the 1979 hostage cri­sis, fed intel­li­gence about Argentina’s mil­i­tary to Britain dur­ing the Falk­lands War, tracked the assas­si­na­tion cam­paigns of South Amer­i­can dic­ta­tors and caught Libyan offi­cials con­grat­u­lat­ing them­selves on the 1986 bomb­ing of a Berlin dis­co.

    The pro­gram had lim­its. America’s main adver­saries, includ­ing the Sovi­et Union and Chi­na, were nev­er Cryp­to cus­tomers. Their well-found­ed sus­pi­cions of the company’s ties to the West shield­ed them from expo­sure, although the CIA his­to­ry sug­gests that U.S. spies learned a great deal by mon­i­tor­ing oth­er coun­tries’ inter­ac­tions with Moscow and Bei­jing.

    There were also secu­ri­ty breach­es that put Cryp­to under clouds of sus­pi­cion. Doc­u­ments released in the 1970s showed exten­sive — and incrim­i­nat­ing — cor­re­spon­dence between an NSA pio­neer and Crypto’s founder. For­eign tar­gets were tipped off by the care­less state­ments of pub­lic offi­cials includ­ing Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan. And the 1992 arrest of a Cryp­to sales­man in Iran, who did not real­ize he was sell­ing rigged equip­ment, trig­gered a dev­as­tat­ing “storm of pub­lic­i­ty,” accord­ing to the CIA his­to­ry.

    But the true extent of the company’s rela­tion­ship with the CIA and its Ger­man coun­ter­part was until now nev­er revealed.

    The Ger­man spy agency, the BND, came to believe the risk of expo­sure was too great and left the oper­a­tion in the ear­ly 1990s. But the CIA bought the Ger­mans’ stake and sim­ply kept going, wring­ing Cryp­to for all its espi­onage worth until 2018, when the agency sold off the company’s assets, accord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer offi­cials.

    The company’s impor­tance to the glob­al secu­ri­ty mar­ket had fall­en by then, squeezed by the spread of online encryp­tion tech­nol­o­gy. Once the province of gov­ern­ments and major cor­po­ra­tions, strong encryp­tion is now as ubiq­ui­tous as apps on cell­phones.

    Even so, the Cryp­to oper­a­tion is rel­e­vant to mod­ern espi­onage. Its reach and dura­tion helps to explain how the Unit­ed States devel­oped an insa­tiable appetite for glob­al sur­veil­lance that was exposed in 2013 by Edward Snow­den. There are also echoes of Cryp­to in the sus­pi­cions swirling around mod­ern com­pa­nies with alleged links to for­eign gov­ern­ments, includ­ing the Russ­ian anti-virus firm Kasper­sky, a tex­ting app tied to the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates and the Chi­nese telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions giant Huawei.

    This sto­ry is based on the CIA his­to­ry and a par­al­lel BND account, also obtained by The Post and ZDF, inter­views with cur­rent and for­mer West­ern intel­li­gence offi­cials as well as Cryp­to employ­ees. Many spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty, cit­ing the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of the sub­ject.

    It is hard to over­state how extra­or­di­nary the CIA and BND his­to­ries are. Sen­si­tive intel­li­gence files are peri­od­i­cal­ly declas­si­fied and released to the pub­lic. But it is exceed­ing­ly rare, if not unprece­dent­ed, to glimpse author­i­ta­tive inter­nal his­to­ries of an entire covert oper­a­tion. The Post was able to read all of the doc­u­ments, but the source of the mate­r­i­al insist­ed that only excerpts be pub­lished.

    The CIA and the BND declined to com­ment, though U.S. and Ger­man offi­cials did not dis­pute the authen­tic­i­ty of the doc­u­ments. The first is a 96-page account of the oper­a­tion com­plet­ed in 2004 by the CIA’s Cen­ter for the Study of Intel­li­gence, an inter­nal his­tor­i­cal branch. The sec­ond is an oral his­to­ry com­piled by Ger­man intel­li­gence offi­cials in 2008.

    The over­lap­ping accounts expose fric­tions between the two part­ners over mon­ey, con­trol and eth­i­cal lim­its, with the West Ger­mans fre­quent­ly aghast at the enthu­si­asm with which U.S. spies often tar­get­ed allies.

    But both sides describe the oper­a­tion as suc­cess­ful beyond their wildest pro­jec­tions. At times, includ­ing in the 1980s, Cryp­to account­ed for rough­ly 40 per­cent of the diplo­mat­ic cables and oth­er trans­mis­sions by for­eign gov­ern­ments that crypt­an­a­lysts at the NSA decod­ed and mined for intel­li­gence, accord­ing to the doc­u­ments.

    All the while, Cryp­to gen­er­at­ed mil­lions of dol­lars in prof­its that the CIA and BND split and plowed into oth­er oper­a­tions.

    Crypto’s prod­ucts are still in use in more than a dozen coun­tries around the world, and its orange-and-white sign still looms atop the company’s long­time head­quar­ters build­ing near Zug, Switzer­land. But the com­pa­ny was dis­mem­bered in 2018, liq­ui­dat­ed by share­hold­ers whose iden­ti­ties have been per­ma­nent­ly shield­ed by the byzan­tine laws of Liecht­en­stein, a tiny Euro­pean nation with a Cay­man Islands-like rep­u­ta­tion for finan­cial secre­cy.

    Two com­pa­nies pur­chased most of Crypto’s assets. The first, CyOne Secu­ri­ty, was cre­at­ed as part of a man­age­ment buy­out and now sells secu­ri­ty sys­tems exclu­sive­ly to the Swiss gov­ern­ment. The oth­er, Cryp­to Inter­na­tion­al, took over the for­mer company’s brand and inter­na­tion­al busi­ness.

    Each insist­ed that it has no ongo­ing con­nec­tion to any intel­li­gence ser­vice, but only one claimed to be unaware of CIA own­er­ship. Their state­ments were in response to ques­tions from The Post, ZDF and Swiss broad­cast­er SRF, which also had access to the doc­u­ments.

    CyOne has more sub­stan­tial links to the now-dis­solved Cryp­to, includ­ing that the the new company’s chief exec­u­tive held the same posi­tion at Cryp­to for near­ly two decades of CIA own­er­ship.

    A CyOne spokesman declined to address any aspect of Cryp­to AG’s his­to­ry, but said the new firm has “no ties to any for­eign intel­li­gence ser­vices.”

    Andreas Linde, the chair­man of the com­pa­ny that now holds the rights to Crypto’s inter­na­tion­al prod­ucts and busi­ness, said he had no knowl­edge of the company’s rela­tion­ship to the CIA and BND before being con­front­ed with the facts in this sto­ry.

    “We at Cryp­to Inter­na­tion­al have nev­er had any rela­tion­ship with the CIA or BND — and please quote me,” he said in an inter­view. “If what you are say­ing is true, then absolute­ly I feel betrayed, and my fam­i­ly feels betrayed, and I feel there will be a lot of employ­ees who will feel betrayed as well as cus­tomers.”

    The Swiss gov­ern­ment announced on Tues­day that it was launch­ing an inves­ti­ga­tion of Cryp­to AG’s ties to the CIA and BND. Ear­li­er this month, Swiss offi­cials revoked Cryp­to International’s export license.

    The tim­ing of the Swiss moves was curi­ous. The CIA and BND doc­u­ments indi­cate that Swiss offi­cials must have known for decades about Crypto’s ties to the U.S. and Ger­man spy ser­vices, but inter­vened only after learn­ing that news orga­ni­za­tions were about to expose the arrange­ment.

    The his­to­ries, which do not address when or whether the CIA end­ed its involve­ment, car­ry the inevitable bias­es of doc­u­ments writ­ten from the per­spec­tives of the operation’s archi­tects. They depict Rubi­con as a tri­umph of espi­onage, one that helped the Unit­ed States pre­vail in the Cold War, keep tabs on dozens of author­i­tar­i­an regimes and pro­tect the inter­ests of the Unit­ed States and its allies.

    The papers large­ly avoid more unset­tling ques­tions, includ­ing what the Unit­ed States knew — and what it did or didn’t do — about coun­tries that used Cryp­to machines while engaged in assas­si­na­tion plots, eth­nic cleans­ing cam­paigns and human rights abus­es.

    The rev­e­la­tions in the doc­u­ments may pro­vide rea­son to revis­it whether the Unit­ed States was in posi­tion to inter­vene in, or at least expose, inter­na­tion­al atroc­i­ties, and whether it opt­ed against doing so at times to pre­serve its access to valu­able streams of intel­li­gence.

    Nor do the files deal with obvi­ous eth­i­cal dilem­mas at the core of the oper­a­tion: the decep­tion and exploita­tion of adver­saries, allies and hun­dreds of unwit­ting Cryp­to employ­ees. Many trav­eled the world sell­ing or ser­vic­ing rigged sys­tems with no clue that they were doing so at risk to their own safe­ty.

    In recent inter­views, deceived employ­ees — even ones who came to sus­pect dur­ing their time at Cryp­to that the com­pa­ny was coop­er­at­ing with West­ern intel­li­gence — said the rev­e­la­tions in the doc­u­ments have deep­ened a sense of betray­al, of them­selves and cus­tomers.

    “You think you do good work and you make some­thing secure,” said Juerg Spo­erndli, an elec­tri­cal engi­neer who spent 16 years at Cryp­to. “And then you real­ize that you cheat­ed these clients.”

    Those who ran the clan­des­tine pro­gram remain unapolo­getic.

    “Do I have any qualms? Zero,” said Bob­by Ray Inman, who served as direc­tor of the NSA and deputy direc­tor of the CIA in the late 1970s and ear­ly 1980s. “It was a very valu­able source of com­mu­ni­ca­tions on sig­nif­i­cant­ly large parts of the world impor­tant to U.S. pol­i­cy­mak­ers.”

    A denial oper­a­tion

    This sprawl­ing, sophis­ti­cat­ed oper­a­tion grew out of the U.S. military’s need for a crude but com­pact encryp­tion device.

    Boris Hagelin, Crypto’s founder, was an entre­pre­neur and inven­tor who was born in Rus­sia but fled to Swe­den as the Bol­she­viks took pow­er. He fled again to the Unit­ed States when the Nazis occu­pied Nor­way in 1940.

    He brought with him an encryp­tion machine that looked like a for­ti­fied music box, with a stur­dy crank on the side and an assem­bly of met­al gears and pin­wheels under a hard met­al case.

    It wasn’t near­ly as elab­o­rate, or secure, as the Enig­ma machines being used by the Nazis. But Hagelin’s M‑209, as it became known, was portable, hand-pow­ered and per­fect for troops on the move. Pho­tos show sol­diers with the eight-pound box­es — about the size of a thick book — strapped to their knees. Many of Hagelin’s devices have been pre­served at a pri­vate muse­um in Eind­hoven, the Nether­lands.

    Send­ing a secure mes­sage with the device was tedious. The user would rotate a dial, let­ter by let­ter, and thrust down the crank. The hid­den gears would turn and spit out an enci­phered mes­sage on a strip of paper. A sig­nals offi­cer then had to trans­mit that scram­bled mes­sage by Morse code to a recip­i­ent who would reverse the sequence.

    Secu­ri­ty was so weak that it was assumed that near­ly any adver­sary could break the code with enough time. But doing so took hours. And since these were used main­ly for tac­ti­cal mes­sages about troop move­ments, by the time the Nazis decod­ed a sig­nal its val­ue had like­ly per­ished.

    Over the course of the war, about 140,000 M‑209s were built at the Smith Coro­na type­writer fac­to­ry in Syra­cuse, N.Y., under a U.S. Army con­tract worth $8.6 mil­lion to Cryp­to. After the war, Hagelin returned to Swe­den to reopen his fac­to­ry, bring­ing with him a per­son­al for­tune and a life­long sense of loy­al­ty to the Unit­ed States.
    Even so, Amer­i­can spies kept a wary eye on his post­war oper­a­tions. In the ear­ly 1950s, he devel­oped a more advanced ver­sion of his war-era machine with a new, “irreg­u­lar” mechan­i­cal sequence that briefly stumped Amer­i­can code-break­ers.
    2:11

    Marc Simons, co-founder of Cryp­to Muse­um, a vir­tu­al muse­um of cipher machines, explains how secret mes­sages were cre­at­ed using the Hagelin CX-52. (Stanislav Dobak/The Wash­ing­ton Post)Alarmed by the capa­bil­i­ties of the new CX-52 and oth­er devices Cryp­to envi­sioned, U.S. offi­cials began to dis­cuss what they called the “Hagelin prob­lem.”

    These were “the Dark Ages of Amer­i­can cryp­tol­ogy,” accord­ing to the CIA his­to­ry. The Sovi­ets, Chi­nese and North Kore­ans were using code-mak­ing sys­tems that were all but impen­e­tra­ble. U.S. spy agen­cies wor­ried that the rest of the world would also go dark if coun­tries could buy secure machines from Hagelin.

    The Amer­i­cans had sev­er­al points of lever­age with Hagelin: his ide­o­log­i­cal affin­i­ty for the coun­try, his hope that the Unit­ed States would remain a major cus­tomer and the veiled threat that they could dam­age his prospects by flood­ing the mar­ket with sur­plus M‑209s from the war.

    The Unit­ed States also had a more cru­cial asset: William Fried­man. Wide­ly regard­ed as the father of Amer­i­can cryp­tol­ogy, Fried­man had known Hagelin since the 1930s. They had forged a life­long friend­ship over their shared back­grounds and inter­ests, includ­ing their Russ­ian her­itage and fas­ci­na­tion with the com­plex­i­ties of encryp­tion.

    There might nev­er have been an Oper­a­tion Rubi­con if the two men had not shak­en hands on the very first secret agree­ment between Hagelin and U.S. intel­li­gence over din­ner at the Cos­mos Club in Wash­ing­ton in 1951.

    The deal called for Hagelin, who had moved his com­pa­ny to Switzer­land, to restrict sales of his most sophis­ti­cat­ed mod­els to coun­tries approved by the Unit­ed States. Nations not on that list would get old­er, weak­er sys­tems. Hagelin would be com­pen­sat­ed for his lost sales, as much as $700,000 up front.

    It took years for the Unit­ed States to live up to its end of the deal, as top offi­cials at the CIA and the pre­de­ces­sor to the NSA bick­ered over the terms and wis­dom of the scheme. But Hagelin abid­ed by the agree­ment from the out­set, and over the next two decades, his secret rela­tion­ship with U.S. intel­li­gence agen­cies deep­ened.

    In 1960, the CIA and Hagelin entered into a “licens­ing agree­ment” that paid him $855,000 to renew his com­mit­ment to the hand­shake deal. The agency paid him $70,000 a year in retain­er and start­ed giv­ing his com­pa­ny cash infu­sions of $10,000 for “mar­ket­ing” expens­es to ensure that Cryp­to — and not oth­er upstarts in the encryp­tion busi­ness — locked down con­tracts with most of the world’s gov­ern­ments.

    It was a clas­sic “denial oper­a­tion” in the par­lance of intel­li­gence, a scheme designed to pre­vent adver­saries from acquir­ing weapons or tech­nol­o­gy that would give them an advan­tage. But it was only the begin­ning of Crypto’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with U.S. intel­li­gence. With­in a decade, the whole oper­a­tion belonged to the CIA and BND.

    brave new world

    U.S. offi­cials had toyed since the out­set with the idea of ask­ing Hagelin whether he would be will­ing to let U.S. cryp­tol­o­gists doc­tor his machines. But Fried­man over­ruled them, con­vinced that Hagelin would see that as a step too far.

    The CIA and NSA saw a new open­ing in the mid-1960s, as the spread of elec­tron­ic cir­cuits forced Hagelin to accept out­side help adapt­ing to the new tech­nol­o­gy, or face extinc­tion cling­ing to the man­u­fac­tur­ing of mechan­i­cal machines.

    NSA cryp­tol­o­gists were equal­ly con­cerned about the poten­tial impact of inte­grat­ed cir­cuits, which seemed poised to enable a new era of unbreak­able encryp­tion. But one of the agency’s senior ana­lysts, Peter Jenks, iden­ti­fied a poten­tial vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty.

    If “care­ful­ly designed by a clever cryp­to-math­e­mati­cian,” he said, a cir­cuit-based sys­tem could be made to appear that it was pro­duc­ing end­less streams of ran­dom­ly-gen­er­at­ed char­ac­ters, while in real­i­ty it would repeat itself at short enough inter­vals for NSA experts — and their pow­er­ful com­put­ers — to crack the pat­tern.

    Two years lat­er, in 1967, Cryp­to rolled out a new, all-elec­tron­ic mod­el, the H‑460, whose inner work­ings were com­plete­ly designed by the NSA.

    The CIA his­to­ry all but gloats about cross­ing this thresh­old. “Imag­ine the idea of the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment con­vinc­ing a for­eign man­u­fac­tur­er to jim­my equip­ment in its favor,” the his­to­ry says. “Talk about a brave new world.”

    The NSA didn’t install crude “back doors” or secret­ly pro­gram the devices to cough up their encryp­tion keys. And the agency still faced the dif­fi­cult task of inter­cept­ing oth­er gov­ern­ments’ com­mu­ni­ca­tions, whether pluck­ing sig­nals out of the air or, in lat­er years, tap­ping into fiber optic cables.

    But the manip­u­la­tion of Crypto’s algo­rithms stream­lined the code-break­ing process, at times reduc­ing to sec­onds a task that might oth­er­wise have tak­en months. The com­pa­ny always made at least two ver­sions of its prod­ucts — secure mod­els that would be sold to friend­ly gov­ern­ments, and rigged sys­tems for the rest of the world.

    In so doing, the U.S.-Hagelin part­ner­ship had evolved from denial to “active mea­sures.” No longer was Cryp­to mere­ly restrict­ing sales of its best equip­ment, but active­ly sell­ing devices that were engi­neered to betray their buy­ers.

    The pay­off went beyond the pen­e­tra­tion of the devices. Crypto’s shift to elec­tron­ic prod­ucts buoyed busi­ness so much that it became addict­ed to its depen­dence on the NSA. For­eign gov­ern­ments clam­ored for sys­tems that seemed clear­ly supe­ri­or to the old clunky mechan­i­cal devices, but in fact were eas­i­er for U.S. spies to read.
    Ger­man and Amer­i­can part­ners

    By the end of the 1960s, Hagelin was near­ing 80 and anx­ious to secure the future for his com­pa­ny, which had grown to more than 180 employ­ees. CIA offi­cials were sim­i­lar­ly anx­ious about what would hap­pen to the oper­a­tion if Hagelin were to sud­den­ly sell or die.

    Hagelin had once hoped to turn con­trol over to his son, Bo. But U.S. intel­li­gence offi­cials regard­ed him as a “wild card” and worked to con­ceal the part­ner­ship from him. Bo Hagelin was killed in a car crash on Washington’s Belt­way in 1970. There were no indi­ca­tions of foul play.

    U.S. intel­li­gence offi­cials dis­cussed the idea of buy­ing Cryp­to for years, but squab­bling between the CIA and NSA pre­vent­ed them from act­ing until two oth­er spy agen­cies entered the fray.

    The French, West Ger­man and oth­er Euro­pean intel­li­gence ser­vices had either been told about the Unit­ed States’ arrange­ment with Cryp­to or fig­ured it out on their own. Some were under­stand­ably jeal­ous and probed for ways to secure a sim­i­lar deal for them­selves.

    In 1967, Hagelin was approached by the French intel­li­gence ser­vice with an offer to buy the com­pa­ny in part­ner­ship with Ger­man intel­li­gence. Hagelin rebuffed the offer and report­ed it to his CIA han­dlers. But two years lat­er, the Ger­mans came back seek­ing to make a fol­low-up bid with the bless­ing of the Unit­ed States.

    In a meet­ing in ear­ly 1969 at the West Ger­man Embassy in Wash­ing­ton, the head of that country’s cipher ser­vice, Wil­helm Goe­ing, out­lined the pro­pos­al and asked whether the Amer­i­cans “were inter­est­ed in becom­ing part­ners too.”

    Months lat­er, CIA Direc­tor Richard Helms approved the idea of buy­ing Cryp­to and dis­patched a sub­or­di­nate to Bonn, the West Ger­man cap­i­tal, to nego­ti­ate terms with one major caveat: the French, CIA offi­cials told Goe­ing, would have to be “shut out.”

    West Ger­many acqui­esced to this Amer­i­can pow­er play, and a deal between the two spy agen­cies was record­ed in a June 1970 memo car­ry­ing the shaky sig­na­ture of a CIA case offi­cer in Munich who was in the ear­ly stages of Parkinson’s dis­ease and the illeg­i­ble scrawl of his BND coun­ter­part.

    The two agen­cies agreed to chip in equal­ly to buy out Hagelin for approx­i­mate­ly $5.75 mil­lion, but the CIA left it large­ly to the Ger­mans to fig­ure out how to pre­vent any trace of this trans­ac­tion from ever becom­ing pub­lic.

    A Liecht­en­stein law firm, Marx­er and Goop, helped hide the iden­ti­ties of the new own­ers of Cryp­to through a series of shells and “bear­er” shares that required no names in reg­is­tra­tion doc­u­ments. The firm was paid an annu­al salary “less for the exten­sive work but more for their silence and accep­tance,” the BND his­to­ry says. The firm, now named Marx­er and Part­ner, did not respond to a request for com­ment.

    A new board of direc­tors was set up to over­see the com­pa­ny. Only one mem­ber of the board, Sture Nyberg, to whom Hagelin had turned over day-to-day man­age­ment, knew of CIA involve­ment. “It was through this mech­a­nism,” the CIA his­to­ry notes, “that BND and CIA con­trolled the activ­i­ties” of Cryp­to. Nyberg left the com­pa­ny in 1976. The Post and ZDF could not locate him or deter­mine if he is still alive.

    The two spy agen­cies held their own reg­u­lar meet­ings to dis­cuss what to do with their acqui­si­tion. The CIA used a secret base in Munich, ini­tial­ly on a mil­i­tary instal­la­tion used by Amer­i­can troops and lat­er in the attic of a build­ing adja­cent to the U.S. Con­sulate, as the head­quar­ters for its involve­ment in the oper­a­tion.

    The CIA and BND agreed on a series of code names for the pro­gram and its var­i­ous com­po­nents. Cryp­to was called “Min­er­va,” which is also the title of the CIA his­to­ry. The oper­a­tion was at first code-named “The­saurus,” though in the 1980s it was changed to “Rubi­con.”

    Each year, the CIA and BND split any prof­its Cryp­to had made, accord­ing to the Ger­man his­to­ry, which says the BND han­dled the account­ing and deliv­ered the cash owed to the CIA in an under­ground park­ing garage.

    From the out­set, the part­ner­ship was beset by pet­ty dis­agree­ments and ten­sions. To CIA oper­a­tives, the BND often seemed pre­oc­cu­pied with turn­ing a prof­it, and the Amer­i­cans “con­stant­ly remind­ed the Ger­mans that this was an intel­li­gence oper­a­tion, not a mon­ey-mak­ing enter­prise.” The Ger­mans were tak­en aback by the Amer­i­cans’ will­ing­ness to spy on all but its clos­est allies, with tar­gets includ­ing NATO mem­bers Spain, Greece, Turkey and Italy.

    Mind­ful of the lim­i­ta­tions to their abil­i­ties to run a high-tech com­pa­ny, the two agen­cies brought in cor­po­rate out­siders. The Ger­mans enlist­ed Siemens, a Munich-based con­glom­er­ate, to advise Cryp­to on busi­ness and tech­ni­cal issues in exchange for five per­cent of the company’s sales. The Unit­ed States lat­er brought in Motoro­la to fix balky prod­ucts, mak­ing it clear to the company’s CEO this was being done for U.S. intel­li­gence. Siemens declined to com­ment. Motoro­la offi­cials did not respond to a request for com­ment.

    To its frus­tra­tion, Ger­many was nev­er admit­ted to the vaunt­ed “Five Eyes,” a long-stand­ing intel­li­gence pact involv­ing the Unit­ed States, Britain, Aus­tralia, New Zealand and Cana­da. But with the Cryp­to part­ner­ship, Ger­many moved clos­er into the Amer­i­can espi­onage fold than might have seemed pos­si­ble in World War II’s after­math. With the secret back­ing of two of the world’s pre­miere intel­li­gence agen­cies and the sup­port of two of the world’s largest cor­po­ra­tions, Crypto’s busi­ness flour­ished.

    A table in the CIA his­to­ry shows that sales surged from 15 mil­lion Swiss francs in 1970 to more than 51 mil­lion in 1975, or $19 mil­lion. The company’s pay­roll expand­ed to more than 250 employ­ees.

    “The Min­er­va pur­chase had yield­ed a bonan­za,” the CIA his­to­ry says of this peri­od. The oper­a­tion entered a two-decade stretch of unprece­dent­ed access to for­eign gov­ern­ments’ com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

    Iran­ian sus­pi­cions

    The NSA’s eaves­drop­ping empire was for many years orga­nized around three main geo­graph­ic tar­gets, each with its own alpha­bet­ic code: A for the Sovi­ets, B for Asia and G for vir­tu­al­ly every­where else.

    By the ear­ly 1980s, more than half of the intel­li­gence gath­ered by G group was flow­ing through Cryp­to machines, a capa­bil­i­ty that U.S. offi­cials relied on in cri­sis after cri­sis.

    In 1978, as the lead­ers of Egypt, Israel and the Unit­ed States gath­ered at Camp David for nego­ti­a­tions on a peace accord, the NSA was secret­ly mon­i­tor­ing the com­mu­ni­ca­tions of Egypt­ian Pres­i­dent Anwar Sadat back to Cairo.

    A year lat­er, after Iran­ian mil­i­tants stormed the U.S. Embassy and took 52 Amer­i­can hostages, the Carter admin­is­tra­tion sought their release in back-chan­nel com­mu­ni­ca­tions through Alge­ria. Inman, who served as NSA direc­tor at the time, said he rou­tine­ly got calls from Pres­i­dent Carter ask­ing how the Aya­tol­lah Khome­inei regime was react­ing to the lat­est mes­sages.

    “We were able to respond to his ques­tions about 85 per­cent of the time,” Inman said. That was because the Ira­ni­ans and Alge­ri­ans were using Cryp­to devices.

    Inman said the oper­a­tion also put him in one of the trick­i­est binds he’d encoun­tered in gov­ern­ment ser­vice. At one point, the NSA inter­cept­ed Libyan com­mu­ni­ca­tions indi­cat­ing that the president’s broth­er, Bil­ly Carter, was advanc­ing Libya’s inter­ests in Wash­ing­ton and was on leader Moam­mar Gaddafi’s pay­roll.

    Inman referred the mat­ter to the Jus­tice Depart­ment. The FBI launched an inves­ti­ga­tion of Carter, who false­ly denied tak­ing pay­ments. In the end, he was not pros­e­cut­ed but agreed to reg­is­ter as a for­eign agent.

    Through­out the 1980s, the list of Crypto’s lead­ing clients read like a cat­a­logue of glob­al trou­ble spots. In 1981, Sau­di Ara­bia was Crypto’s biggest cus­tomer, fol­lowed by Iran, Italy, Indone­sia, Iraq, Libya, Jor­dan and South Korea.

    To pro­tect its mar­ket posi­tion, Cryp­to and its secret own­ers engaged in sub­tle smear cam­paigns against rival com­pa­nies, accord­ing to the doc­u­ments, and plied gov­ern­ment offi­cials with bribes. Cryp­to sent an exec­u­tive to Riyadh, Sau­di Ara­bia, with 10 Rolex watch­es in his lug­gage, the BND his­to­ry says, and lat­er arranged a train­ing pro­gram for the Saud­is in Switzer­land where the par­tic­i­pants’ “favorite pas­time was to vis­it the broth­els, which the com­pa­ny also financed.”

    At times, the incen­tives led to sales to coun­tries ill-equipped to use the com­pli­cat­ed sys­tems. Nige­ria bought a large ship­ment of Cryp­to machines, but two years lat­er, when there was still no cor­re­spond­ing pay­off in intel­li­gence, a com­pa­ny rep­re­sen­ta­tive was sent to inves­ti­gate. “He found the equip­ment in a ware­house still in its orig­i­nal pack­ag­ing,” accord­ing to the Ger­man doc­u­ment.

    In 1982, the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion took advan­tage of Argentina’s reliance on Cryp­to equip­ment, fun­nel­ing intel­li­gence to Britain dur­ing the two coun­tries’ brief war over the Falk­land Islands, accord­ing to the CIA his­to­ry, which doesn’t pro­vide any detail on what kind of infor­ma­tion was passed to Lon­don. The doc­u­ments gen­er­al­ly dis­cuss intel­li­gence gleaned from the oper­a­tion in broad terms and pro­vide few insights into how it was used.

    Rea­gan appears to have jeop­ar­dized the Cryp­to oper­a­tion after Libya was impli­cat­ed in the 1986 bomb­ing of a West Berlin dis­co pop­u­lar with Amer­i­can troops sta­tioned in West Ger­many. Two U.S. sol­diers and a Turk­ish woman were killed as a result of the attack.

    Rea­gan ordered retal­ia­to­ry strikes against Libya 10 days lat­er. Among the report­ed vic­tims was one of Gaddafi’s daugh­ters. In an address to the coun­try announc­ing the strikes, Rea­gan said the Unit­ed States had evi­dence of Libya’s com­plic­i­ty that “is direct, it is pre­cise, it is irrefutable.”

    The evi­dence, Rea­gan said, showed that Libya’s embassy in East Berlin received orders to car­ry out the attack a week before it hap­pened. Then, the day after the bomb­ing, “they report­ed back to Tripoli on the great suc­cess of their mis­sion.”

    Reagan’s words made clear that Tripoli’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions with its sta­tion in East Berlin had been inter­cept­ed and decrypt­ed. But Libya wasn’t the only gov­ern­ment that took note of the clues Rea­gan had pro­vid­ed.

    Iran, which knew that Libya also used Cryp­to machines, became increas­ing­ly con­cerned about the secu­ri­ty of its equip­ment. Tehran didn’t act on those sus­pi­cions until six years lat­er.

    Cryp­to

    AG

    Unit­ed States

    ers

    Doc­u­ments indi­cate that more than 120 coun­tries used Cryp­to AG

    encryp­tion equip­ment from the 1950s well into the 2000s. The files don’t

    include a com­pre­hen­sive list but iden­ti­fy at least

    62 cus­tomers.

    THE AMERICAS

    EUROPE

    AFRICA

    MIDDLE EAST

    REST OF ASIA

    Argenti­na

    Aus­tria

    Alge­ria

    Iran

    Bangladesh

    Brazil

    Ango­la

    Iraq

    Bur­ma

    Czecho­slo­va­kia

    India

    Egypt

    Chile

    Jor­dan

    Greece

    Indone­sia

    Gabon

    Colom­bia

    Kuwait

    Hun­gary

    Japan

    Ghana

    Hon­duras

    Lebanon

    Ire­land

    Malaysia

    Guinea

    Oman

    Mex­i­co

    Italy

    Pak­istan

    Ivory Coast

    Qatar

    Nicaragua

    Por­tu­gal

    Philip­pines

    Libya

    Sau­di Ara­bia

    Peru

    Roma­nia

    South Korea

    Syr­ia

    Mau­ri­tius

    Uruguay

    Spain

    Thai­land

    Moroc­co

    U.A.E.

    Venezuela

    Turkey

    Viet­nam

    Nige­ria

    Vat­i­can City

    Rep. of the Con­go

    Yugoslavia

    South Africa

    Sudan

    Tan­za­nia

    Tunisia

    WORLDWIDE

    ORGANIZATION

    Zaire

    Unit­ed Nations

    Zim­bab­we

    The records show that at least four coun­tries — Israel, Swe­den, Switzer­land and the Unit­ed King­dom — were aware of the oper­a­tion or were pro­vid­ed intel­li­gence from it by the Unit­ed States or West Ger­many.
    The irre­place­able man

    After the CIA and BND acqui­si­tion, one of the most vex­ing prob­lems for the secret part­ners was ensur­ing that Crypto’s work­force remained com­pli­ant and unsus­pect­ing.

    Even while hid­den from view, the agen­cies went to sig­nif­i­cant lengths to main­tain Hagelin’s benev­o­lent approach to own­er­ship. Employ­ees were well-paid and had abun­dant perks includ­ing access to a small sail­boat in Lake Zug near com­pa­ny head­quar­ters.

    And yet, those who worked most close­ly with the encryp­tion designs seemed con­stant­ly to be get­ting clos­er to uncov­er­ing the operation’s core secret. The engi­neers and design­ers respon­si­ble for devel­op­ing pro­to­type mod­els often ques­tioned the algo­rithms being foist­ed on them by a mys­te­ri­ous exter­nal enti­ty.

    Cryp­to exec­u­tives often led employ­ees to believe that the designs were being pro­vid­ed as part of the con­sult­ing arrange­ment with Siemens. But even if that were so, why were encryp­tion flaws so easy to spot, and why were Crypto’s engi­neers so rou­tine­ly blocked from fix­ing them?

    In 1977, Heinz Wag­n­er, the chief exec­u­tive at Cryp­to who knew the true role of the CIA and BND, abrupt­ly fired a way­ward engi­neer after the NSA com­plained that diplo­mat­ic traf­fic com­ing out of Syr­ia had sud­den­ly became unread­able. The engi­neer, Peter Frutiger, had long sus­pect­ed Cryp­to was col­lab­o­rat­ing with Ger­man intel­li­gence. He had made mul­ti­ple trips to Dam­as­cus to address com­plaints about their Cryp­to prod­ucts and appar­ent­ly, with­out author­i­ty from head­quar­ters, had fixed their vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties.

    Frutiger “had fig­ured out the Min­er­va secret and it was not safe with him,” accord­ing to the CIA his­to­ry. Even so, the agency was livid with Wag­n­er for fir­ing Frutiger rather than find­ing a way to keep him qui­et on the com­pa­ny pay­roll. Frutiger declined to com­ment for this sto­ry.

    U.S. offi­cials were even more alarmed when Wag­n­er hired a gift­ed elec­tri­cal engi­neer in 1978 named Men­gia Caflisch. She had spent sev­er­al years in the Unit­ed States work­ing as a radio-astron­o­my researcher for the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land before return­ing to her native Switzer­land and apply­ing for a job at Cryp­to. Wag­n­er jumped at the chance to hire her. But NSA offi­cials imme­di­ate­ly raised con­cerns that she was “too bright to remain unwit­ting.”

    The warn­ing proved pre­scient as Caflisch soon began prob­ing the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties of the company’s prod­ucts. She and Spo­erndli, a col­league in the research depart­ment, ran var­i­ous tests and “plain­text attacks” on devices includ­ing a tele­type mod­el, the HC-570, that was built using Motoro­la tech­nol­o­gy, Spo­erndli said in an inter­view.

    “We looked at the inter­nal oper­a­tions, and the depen­den­cies with each step,” Spo­erndli said, and became con­vinced they could crack the code by com­par­ing only 100 char­ac­ters of enci­phered text to an under­ly­ing, unen­crypt­ed mes­sage. It was an aston­ish­ing­ly low lev­el of secu­ri­ty, Spo­erndli said in an inter­view last month, but far from unusu­al.

    “The algo­rithms,” he said, “always looked fishy.”

    In the ensu­ing years, Caflisch con­tin­ued to pose prob­lems. At one point, she designed an algo­rithm so strong that NSA offi­cials wor­ried it would be unread­able. The design made its way into 50 HC-740 machines rolling off the fac­to­ry floor before com­pa­ny exec­u­tives dis­cov­ered the devel­op­ment and stopped it.

    “I just had an idea that some­thing might be strange,” Caflisch said in an inter­view last month, about the ori­gin of her sus­pi­cions. But it became clear that her prob­ing wasn’t appre­ci­at­ed, she said. “Not all ques­tions appeared to be wel­come.”

    The com­pa­ny restored the rigged algo­rithm to the rest of the pro­duc­tion run and sold the 50 secure mod­els to banks to keep them out of the hands of for­eign gov­ern­ments. Because these and oth­er devel­op­ments were so hard to defend, Wag­n­er at one point told a select group of mem­bers of the research and devel­op­ment unit that Cryp­to “was not entire­ly free to do what it want­ed.”

    The acknowl­edg­ment seemed to sub­due the engi­neers, who inter­pret­ed it as con­fir­ma­tion that the company’s tech­nol­o­gy faced con­straints imposed by the Ger­man gov­ern­ment. But the CIA and BND became increas­ing­ly con­vinced that their rou­tine, dis­em­bod­ied inter­fer­ence was unsus­tain­able.

    Cryp­to had become an Oz-like oper­a­tion with employ­ees prob­ing to see what was behind the cur­tain. As the 1970s came to a close, the secret part­ners decid­ed to find a wiz­ard fig­ure who could help devise more advanced — and less detectable — weak­ness­es in the algo­rithms, some­one with enough cryp­to­log­i­cal clout to tame the research depart­ment.

    The two agen­cies turned to oth­er spy ser­vices for poten­tial can­di­dates before set­tling on an indi­vid­ual put for­ward by Sweden’s intel­li­gence ser­vice. Because of Hagelin’s ties to the coun­try, Swe­den had been kept apprised of the oper­a­tion since its out­set.

    Kjell-Ove Wid­man, a math­e­mat­ics pro­fes­sor in Stock­holm, had made a name for him­self in Euro­pean aca­d­e­m­ic cir­cles with his research on cryp­tol­ogy. Wid­man was also a mil­i­tary reservist who had worked close­ly with Swedish intel­li­gence offi­cials.

    To the CIA, Wid­man had an even more impor­tant attribute: an affin­i­ty for the Unit­ed States that he had formed while spend­ing a year in Wash­ing­ton state as an exchange stu­dent.

    His host fam­i­ly had such trou­ble pro­nounc­ing his Swedish name that they called him “Hen­ry,” a moniker he lat­er used with his CIA han­dlers.

    Offi­cials involved in Widman’s recruit­ment described it as almost effort­less. After being groomed by Swedish intel­li­gence offi­cials, he was brought to Munich in 1979 for what was pur­port­ed to be a round of inter­views with exec­u­tives from Cryp­to and Siemens.

    The fic­tion was main­tained as Wid­man faced ques­tions from a half-dozen men seat­ed around a table in a hotel con­fer­ence room. As the group broke for lunch, two men asked Wid­man to stay behind for a pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion.

    “Do you know what ZfCh is?” asked Jel­to Burmeis­ter, a BND case offi­cer, using the acronym for the Ger­man cipher ser­vice. When Wid­man replied that he did, Burmeis­ter said, “Now, do you under­stand who real­ly owns Cryp­to AG?”

    At that point, Wid­man was intro­duced to Richard Schroed­er, a CIA offi­cer sta­tioned in Munich to man­age the agency’s involve­ment in Cryp­to. Wid­man would lat­er claim to agency his­to­ri­ans that his “world fell apart com­plete­ly” in that moment.

    If so, he did not hes­i­tate to enlist in the oper­a­tion.

    With­out even leav­ing the room, Wid­man sealed his recruit­ment with a hand­shake. As the three men joined the rest of the group at lunch, a “thumbs up” sig­nal trans­formed the gath­er­ing into a cel­e­bra­tion.

    Cryp­to installed Wid­man as a “sci­en­tif­ic advi­sor” report­ing direct­ly to Wag­n­er. He became the spies’ hid­den inside agent, depart­ing Zug every six weeks for clan­des­tine meet­ings with rep­re­sen­ta­tives of NSA and ZfCh. Schroed­er, the CIA offi­cer, would attend but tune out their tech­ni­cal bab­ble.

    They would agree on mod­i­fi­ca­tions and work up new encryp­tion schemes. Then Wid­man would deliv­er the blue­prints to Cryp­to engi­neers. The CIA his­to­ry calls him the “irre­place­able man,” and the “most impor­tant recruit­ment in the his­to­ry of the Min­er­va pro­gram.”

    His stature cowed sub­or­di­nates, invest­ing him “with a tech­ni­cal promi­nence that no one in CAG could chal­lenge.” It also helped deflect the inquiries of for­eign gov­ern­ments. As Wid­man set­tled in, the secret part­ners adopt­ed a set of prin­ci­ples for rigged algo­rithms, accord­ing to the BND his­to­ry. They had to be “unde­tectable by usu­al sta­tis­ti­cal tests” and, if dis­cov­ered, be “eas­i­ly masked as imple­men­ta­tion or human errors.”

    In oth­er words, when cor­nered, Cryp­to exec­u­tives would blame slop­py employ­ees or clue­less users.

    In 1982, when Argenti­na became con­vinced that its Cryp­to equip­ment had betrayed secret mes­sages and helped British forces in the Falk­lands War, Wid­man was dis­patched to Buenos Aires. Wid­man told them the NSA had prob­a­bly cracked an out­dat­ed speech-scram­bling device that Argenti­na was using, but that the main prod­uct they bought from Cryp­to, the CAG 500, remained “unbreak­able.”

    “The bluff worked,” the CIA his­to­ry says. “The Argen­tines swal­lowed hard, but kept buy­ing CAG equip­ment.”

    Wid­man is long-retired now and liv­ing in Stock­holm. He declined to com­ment. Years after his recruit­ment, he told U.S. offi­cials that he saw him­self as “engaged in a crit­i­cal strug­gle for the ben­e­fit of West­ern intel­li­gence,” accord­ing to the CIA doc­u­ment. “It was, he said, the moment in which he felt at home. This was his mis­sion in life.”

    That same year, Hagelin, then 90 years old, became ill on a trip to Swe­den and was hos­pi­tal­ized. He recov­ered well enough to return to Switzer­land, but CIA offi­cials became wor­ried about Hagelin’s exten­sive col­lec­tion of busi­ness records and per­son­al papers at his office in Zug.

    Schroed­er, with Hagelin’s per­mis­sion, arrived with a brief­case and spent sev­er­al days going through the files. To vis­i­tors, he was intro­duced as a his­to­ri­an inter­est­ed in trac­ing Hagelin’s life. Schroed­er pulled out the doc­u­ments “that were incrim­i­nat­ing,” accord­ing to the his­to­ry, and shipped them back to CIA head­quar­ters “where they reside to this day.”

    Hagelin remained an invalid until he died in 1983. The Post could not locate Wag­n­er or deter­mine whether he is still alive. Schroed­er retired from the CIA more than a decade ago and teach­es part-time at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty. When con­tact­ed by a reporter from The Post, he declined to com­ment.
    The Hydra cri­sis

    Cryp­to endured sev­er­al mon­ey-los­ing years in the 1980s, but the intel­li­gence flowed in tor­rents. U.S. spy agen­cies inter­cept­ed more than 19,000 Iran­ian com­mu­ni­ca­tions sent via Cryp­to machines dur­ing that nation’s decade-long war with Iraq, min­ing them for reports on sub­jects such as Tehran’s ter­ror­ist links and attempts to tar­get dis­si­dents.

    Iran’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions were “80 to 90 per­cent read­able” to U.S. spies, accord­ing to the CIA doc­u­ment, a fig­ure that would like­ly have plunged into the sin­gle dig­its had Tehran not used Crypto’s com­pro­mised devices.

    In 1989, the Vatican’s use of Cryp­to devices proved cru­cial in the U.S. man­hunt for Pana­man­ian leader Manuel Anto­nio Nor­ie­ga. When the dic­ta­tor sought refuge in the Apos­tolic Nun­cia­ture — the equiv­a­lent of a papal embassy — his where­abouts were exposed by the mission’s mes­sages back to Vat­i­can City.

    In 1992, how­ev­er, the Cryp­to oper­a­tion faced its first major cri­sis: Iran, belat­ed­ly act­ing on its long-stand­ing sus­pi­cions, detained a com­pa­ny sales­man.

    Hans Buehler, then 51, was con­sid­ered one of the company’s best sales­men. Iran was one of the company’s largest con­tracts, and Buehler had trav­eled in and out of Tehran for years. There were tense moments, includ­ing when he was ques­tioned exten­sive­ly in 1986 by Iran­ian offi­cials after the dis­co bomb­ing and U.S. mis­sile strikes on Libya.

    Six years lat­er, he board­ed a Swis­sair flight to Tehran but failed to return on sched­ule. When he didn’t show, Cryp­to turned for help to Swiss author­i­ties and were told he had been arrest­ed by the Ira­ni­ans. Swiss con­sular offi­cials allowed to vis­it Buehler report­ed that he was in “bad shape men­tal­ly,” accord­ing to the CIA his­to­ry.

    Buehler was final­ly released nine months lat­er after Cryp­to agreed to pay the Ira­ni­ans $1 mil­lion, a sum that was secret­ly pro­vid­ed by the BND, accord­ing to the doc­u­ments. The CIA refused to chip in, cit­ing the U.S. pol­i­cy against suc­cumb­ing to ran­som demands for hostages.

    Buehler knew noth­ing about Crypto’s rela­tion­ship to the CIA and BND or the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in its devices. But he returned trau­ma­tized and sus­pi­cious that Iran knew more about the com­pa­ny he worked for than he did. Buehler began speak­ing to Swiss news orga­ni­za­tions about his ordeal and mount­ing sus­pi­cions.

    The pub­lic­i­ty brought new atten­tion to long-for­got­ten clues, includ­ing ref­er­ences to a “Boris project” in Friedman’s mas­sive col­lec­tion of per­son­al papers, which were donat­ed to the Vir­ginia Mil­i­tary Insti­tute when he died in 1969. Among the 72 box­es deliv­ered to Lex­ing­ton, Va., were copies of his life­long cor­re­spon­dence with Hagelin.

    In 1994, the cri­sis deep­ened when Buehler appeared on Swiss tele­vi­sion in a report that also fea­tured Frutiger, whose iden­ti­ty was con­cealed to view­ers. Buehler died in 2018. Frutiger, the engi­neer who had been fired for fix­ing Syria’s encryp­tion sys­tems years ear­li­er, did not respond to requests for com­ment.

    Michael Grupe, who had suc­ceed­ed Wag­n­er as chief exec­u­tive, agreed to appear on Swiss tele­vi­sion and dis­put­ed what he knew to be fac­tu­al charges. “Grupe’s per­for­mance was cred­i­ble, and may have saved the pro­gram,” the CIA his­to­ry says. Grupe did not respond to requests for com­ment.

    Even so, it took sev­er­al years for the con­tro­ver­sy to die down. In 1995, the Bal­ti­more Sun ran a series of inves­tiga­tive sto­ries about the NSA, includ­ing one called “Rig­ging the Game,” that exposed aspects of the agency’s rela­tion­ship with Cryp­to.

    The arti­cle report­ed NSA offi­cials had trav­eled to Zug in the mid-1970s for secret meet­ings with Cryp­to exec­u­tives. The offi­cials were pos­ing as con­sul­tants for a front com­pa­ny called “Inter­comm Asso­ciates,” but then pro­ceed­ed to intro­duce them­selves by their real names — which were record­ed on notes of the meet­ing kept by a com­pa­ny employ­ee.

    Amid the pub­lic­i­ty onslaught, some employ­ees began to look else­where for work. And at least a half-dozen coun­tries — includ­ing Argenti­na, Italy, Sau­di Ara­bia, Egypt and Indone­sia — either can­celed or sus­pend­ed their Cryp­to con­tracts.

    Aston­ish­ing­ly, Iran was not among them, accord­ing to the CIA file, and “resumed its pur­chase of CAG equip­ment almost imme­di­ate­ly.”

    The main casu­al­ty of the “Hydra” cri­sis, the code name giv­en to the Buehler case, was the CIA-BND part­ner­ship.

    For years, BND offi­cials had recoiled at their Amer­i­can counterpart’s refusal to dis­tin­guish adver­saries from allies. The two part­ners often fought over which coun­tries deserved to receive the secure ver­sions of Crypto’s prod­ucts, with U.S. offi­cials fre­quent­ly insist­ing that the rigged equip­ment be sent to almost any­one — ally or not — who could be deceived into buy­ing it.

    In the Ger­man his­to­ry, Wol­bert Smidt, the for­mer direc­tor of the BND, com­plained that the Unit­ed States “want­ed to deal with the allies just like they dealt with the coun­tries of the Third World.” Anoth­er BND offi­cial echoed that com­ment, say­ing that to Amer­i­cans “in the world of intel­li­gence there were no friends.”

    The Cold War had end­ed, the Berlin Wall was down, and the reuni­fied Ger­many had dif­fer­ent sen­si­tiv­i­ties and pri­or­i­ties. They saw them­selves as far more direct­ly exposed to the risks of the Cryp­to oper­a­tion. Hydra had rat­tled the Ger­mans, who feared the dis­clo­sure of their involve­ment would trig­ger Euro­pean out­rage and lead to enor­mous polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic fall­out.

    In 1993, Kon­rad Porzn­er, the chief of the BND, made clear to CIA Direc­tor James Woolsey that sup­port in the upper ranks of the Ger­man gov­ern­ment was wan­ing, and that the Ger­mans might want out of the Cryp­to part­ner­ship. On Sept. 9, the CIA sta­tion chief in Ger­many, Mil­ton Bear­den, reached an agree­ment with BND offi­cials for the CIA to pur­chase Germany’s shares for $17 mil­lion, accord­ing to the CIA his­to­ry.

    Ger­man intel­li­gence offi­cials rued the depar­ture from an oper­a­tion they had large­ly con­ceived. In the Ger­man his­to­ry, senior intel­li­gence offi­cials blame polit­i­cal lead­ers for end­ing one of the most suc­cess­ful espi­onage pro­grams the BND had ever been a part of.

    With their depar­ture, the Ger­mans were soon cut off from the intel­li­gence that the Unit­ed States con­tin­ued to gath­er. Burmeis­ter is quot­ed in the Ger­man his­to­ry won­der­ing whether Ger­many still belonged “to this small num­ber of nations who are not read by the Amer­i­cans.”

    The Snow­den doc­u­ments pro­vid­ed what must have been an unset­tling answer, show­ing that U.S. intel­li­gence agen­cies not only regard­ed Ger­many as a tar­get, but mon­i­tored Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel’s cell­phone.
    Alive and well

    The CIA his­to­ry essen­tial­ly con­cludes with Germany’s depar­ture from the pro­gram, though it was fin­ished in 2004 and con­tains clear indi­ca­tions that the oper­a­tion was still under­way.

    It notes, for exam­ple, that the Buehler case was “the most seri­ous secu­ri­ty breach in the his­to­ry of the pro­gram,” but wasn’t fatal. “It did not cause its demise,” the his­to­ry says, “and at the turn of the cen­tu­ry Min­er­va was still alive and well.”

    In real­i­ty, the oper­a­tion appears to have entered a pro­tract­ed peri­od of decline. By the mid-1990s, “the days of prof­it were long past,” and Cryp­to “would have gone out of busi­ness but for infu­sions from the U.S. gov­ern­ment.”

    As a result, the CIA appears to have spent years prop­ping up an oper­a­tion that was more viable as an intel­li­gence plat­form than a busi­ness enter­prise. Its prod­uct line dwin­dled and its rev­enue and cus­tomer base shrank.

    But the intel­li­gence kept com­ing, cur­rent and for­mer offi­cials said, in part because of bureau­crat­ic iner­tia. Many gov­ern­ments just nev­er got around to switch­ing to new­er encryp­tion sys­tems pro­lif­er­at­ing in the 1990s and beyond — and unplug­ging their Cryp­to devices. This was par­tic­u­lar­ly true of less devel­oped nations, accord­ing to the doc­u­ments.

    Most of the employ­ees iden­ti­fied in the CIA and BND his­to­ries are in their 70s or 80s, and some of them have died. In inter­views in Switzer­land last month, sev­er­al for­mer Cryp­to work­ers men­tioned in the doc­u­ments described feel­ings of unease about their involve­ment in the com­pa­ny.

    They were nev­er informed of its true rela­tion­ship to intel­li­gence ser­vices. But they had well-found­ed sus­pi­cions and still wres­tle with the eth­i­cal impli­ca­tions of their deci­sions to remain at a firm they believed to be engaged in decep­tion.

    “Either you had to leave or you had to accept it in a cer­tain way,” said Caflisch, now 75, who left the com­pa­ny in 1995 but con­tin­ues to live on the out­skirts of Zug in a con­vert­ed weav­ing fac­to­ry where she and her fam­i­ly for many years staged semi­pro­fes­sion­al operas in the barn. “There were rea­sons I left,” she said, includ­ing her dis­com­fort with her doubts at Cryp­to and her desire to be home more for her chil­dren. After the lat­est rev­e­la­tions, she said, “It makes me won­der whether I should have left ear­li­er.”

    Spo­erndli said he regrets his own ratio­nal­iza­tions.

    “I told myself some­times it may be bet­ter if the good guys in the Unit­ed States know what is going on between these Third World dic­ta­tors,” he said. “But it’s a cheap self-excuse. In the end, this is not the way.”

    Most of the exec­u­tives direct­ly involved in the oper­a­tion were moti­vat­ed by ide­o­log­i­cal pur­pose and declined any pay­ment beyond their Cryp­to salaries, accord­ing to the doc­u­ments. Wid­man was among sev­er­al excep­tions. “As his retire­ment drew near, his covert com­pen­sa­tion was sub­stan­tial­ly increased,” the CIA his­to­ry says. He was also award­ed a medal bear­ing the CIA seal.

    After the BND’s depar­ture, the CIA expand­ed its clan­des­tine col­lec­tion of com­pa­nies in the encryp­tion sec­tor, accord­ing to for­mer West­ern intel­li­gence offi­cials. Using cash amassed from the Cryp­to oper­a­tion, the agency secret­ly acquired a sec­ond firm and propped up a third. The doc­u­ments do not dis­close any details about these enti­ties. But the BND his­to­ry notes that one of Crypto’s long­time rivals — Gre­tag AG, also based in Switzer­land — was “tak­en over by an ‘Amer­i­can’ and, after a change of names in 2004, was liq­ui­dat­ed.”

    Cryp­to itself hob­bled along. It had sur­vived the tran­si­tions from met­al box­es to elec­tron­ic cir­cuits, going from tele­type machines to enci­phered voice sys­tems. But it strug­gled to main­tain its foot­ing as the encryp­tion mar­ket moved from hard­ware to soft­ware. U.S. intel­li­gence agen­cies appear to have been con­tent to let the Cryp­to oper­a­tion play out, even as the NSA’s atten­tion shift­ed to find­ing ways to exploit the glob­al reach of Google, Microsoft, Ver­i­zon and oth­er U.S. tech pow­ers.

    In 2017, Crypto’s long­time head­quar­ters build­ing near Zug was sold to a com­mer­cial real estate com­pa­ny. In 2018, the company’s remain­ing assets — the core pieces of the encryp­tion busi­ness start­ed near­ly a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er — were split and sold.

    The trans­ac­tions seemed designed to pro­vide cov­er for a CIA exit.

    CyOne’s pur­chase of the Swiss por­tion of the busi­ness was struc­tured as a man­age­ment buy­out, enabling top Cryp­to employ­ees to move into a new com­pa­ny insu­lat­ed from the espi­onage risks and with a reli­able source of rev­enue. The Swiss gov­ern­ment, which was always sold secure ver­sions of Crypto’s sys­tems, is now CyOne’s only cus­tomer.

    Giu­liano Otth, who served as CEO of Cryp­to AG from 2001 until its dis­mem­ber­ment, took the same posi­tion at CyOne after it acquired the Swiss assets. Giv­en his tenure at Cryp­to, it is like­ly he was wit­ting to the CIA own­er­ship of the com­pa­ny, just as all of his pre­de­ces­sors in the job had been.

    “Nei­ther CyOne Secu­ri­ty AG nor Mr. Otth have any com­ments regard­ing Cryp­to AG’s his­to­ry,” the com­pa­ny said in a state­ment.

    Crypto’s inter­na­tion­al accounts and busi­ness assets were sold to Linde, a Swedish entre­pre­neur, who comes from a wealthy fam­i­ly with com­mer­cial real estate hold­ings.

    In a meet­ing in Zurich last month, Linde said that he had been drawn to the com­pa­ny in part by its her­itage and Hagelin con­nec­tion, a past that still res­onates in Swe­den. Upon tak­ing over oper­a­tions, Linde even moved some of Hagelin’s his­toric equip­ment from stor­age into a dis­play at the fac­to­ry entrance.

    When con­front­ed with evi­dence that Cryp­to had been owned by the CIA and BND, Linde looked vis­i­bly shak­en, and said that dur­ing nego­ti­a­tions he nev­er learned the iden­ti­ties of the company’s share­hold­ers. He asked when the sto­ry would be pub­lished, say­ing he had employ­ees over­seas and voic­ing con­cern for their safe­ty.

    In a sub­se­quent inter­view, Linde said his com­pa­ny is inves­ti­gat­ing all the prod­ucts it sells to deter­mine whether they have any hid­den vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. “We have to make a cut as soon as pos­si­ble with every­thing that has been linked to Cryp­to,” he said.

    When asked why he failed to con­front Otth and oth­ers involved in the trans­ac­tion about whether there was any truth to the long-stand­ing Cryp­to alle­ga­tions, Linde said that he had regard­ed these as “just rumors.”

    He said that he took assur­ance from the fact that Cryp­to con­tin­ued to have sub­stan­tial con­tracts with for­eign gov­ern­ments, coun­tries he assumed had test­ed the company’s prod­ucts vig­or­ous­ly and would have aban­doned them if they were com­pro­mised.

    “I even acquired the brand name, ‘Cryp­to,’ ” he said, under­scor­ing his con­fi­dence in the company’s via­bil­i­ty. Giv­en the infor­ma­tion now com­ing to light, he said, this “was prob­a­bly one of the most stu­pid deci­sions I’ve ever made in my career.”

    The company’s liq­ui­da­tion was han­dled by the same Liecht­en­stein law firm that pro­vid­ed cov­er for Hagelin’s sale to the CIA and BND 48 years ear­li­er. The terms of the 2018 trans­ac­tions have not been dis­closed, but cur­rent and for­mer offi­cials esti­mat­ed their aggre­gate val­ue at between $50 mil­lion and $70 mil­lion.

    For the CIA, the mon­ey would have been one final pay­off from Min­er­va.

    Report­ing for this sto­ry was done in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Peter F. Mueller, a jour­nal­ist and doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er based in Cologne, Ger­many. Julie Tate in Wash­ing­ton con­tributed to this report.

    Posted by CinqueAnon | February 14, 2020, 9:50 am
  5. Behind every great for­tune there is a crime. The say­ing may not be true 100% of the time, but as the fol­low­ing Van­i­ty Fair piece reminds us, there real­ly are some seri­ous crimes behind many of the largest for­tunes on the plan­et. It’s a theme the US is now famil­iar with the law-break­ing-in-real-time nature of Don­ald Trump and the his­to­ry of the Trump fam­i­ly for­tune. But while Trump is more or less open­ly crim­i­nal in his behav­ior, the fol­low­ing sto­ry is about a crime still being cov­ered up from the pub­lic. The mas­sive crime behind the for­tune held by the wealth­i­est per­son in Ger­many, Klaus-Michael Kuehne, worth an esti­mat­ed $44 bil­lion.

    Kuehne’s for­tune is based on the Kuehne + Nagel, the largest freight for­warder in the world. He’s also the largest share­hold­er of Lufthansa, ship­ping giant Hapag-Lloyd, chem­i­cals dis­trib­u­tor Bren­ntag, the Ham­burg soc­cer club HSVA, and own­er of Grey­hound bus lines in North Amer­i­ca. And Kuehne’s for­tune poised to keep grow­ing giv­en the $4.5 bil­lion Kuehne earned in div­i­dends in 2023 alone.

    The 87 year old does­n’t have an heir. Instead, he appears to be like­ly to give his for­tune to the Kuehne fam­i­ly foun­da­tion, which will become one of the world’s largest pri­vate char­i­ties by endow­ment size. The foun­da­tion focus­es on logis­tics, med­i­cine, cli­mate, and cul­ture. It’s that cul­ture part of the mis­sion where that should be of poten­tial con­cern. At least when it comes to Ger­many’s cul­tur­al norms around Ger­many’s col­lec­tive nar­ra­tive of what hap­pened dur­ing WWII. Because as we’re going to see, Klaus-Michael Kuehne has zero inter­est in open­ing those his­to­ry books when it comes to his fam­i­ly’s busi­ness. Well, not so much an oppo­si­tion to open­ing those his­to­ry books. In 2014, Kuehne com­mis­sioned the Han­dels­blatt Research Insti­tute to study the fir­m’s his­to­ry for Kuehne + Nagel’s 125th anniver­sary, with access being grant­ed to the com­pa­ny archive. A year lat­er, the study was fin­ished. Kuehne refused to pub­lish it, say­ing “my father wasn’t a Nazi” dur­ing a phone con­fer­ence. Of course, his father was very much a Nazi. Along with his uncle. In fact, the firm end­ed up mak­ing a for­tune dur­ing the Naz­i’s time in pow­er, part­ly due to the key role Kuehne + Nagel played in the ship­ment of loot­ed fur­ni­ture for Jew­ish fam­i­lies. Loot­ed works of art were also trans­port­ed by the firm.

    While the busi­ness of trans­port­ing loot­ed Jew­ish fur­ni­ture ensued fol­low­ing the out­break of war in 1939, Kuehne’s father and uncle, Afred and Wern­er, actu­al­ly joined in Nazi par­ty six years ear­li­er. The two joined just nine days after com­plet­ing the “Aryaniza­tion” of their com­pa­ny in 1933, a process that required kick­ing out their Jew­ish co-founder, Adolf Maass. While the Kuehne broth­ers went on to become “high-rank­ing Nazi indus­tri­al­ists” and “big time Nazis”, accord­ing to Allied inves­ti­ga­tors, Maass and his wife even­tu­al­ly died at Auschwitz in 1944.

    And as we should expect, despite their ‘big time Nazi’ sta­tus as, the Kuehne broth­ers were giv­en the same incred­i­bly gen­tle treat­ment so many oth­er promi­nent Nazis and Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors received under the guise of ‘help­ing the West fight the Com­mies’. Post war, Kuehne + Nagel went on to act as a front for what is described in the arti­cle as “a CIA-backed pre­cur­sor of West Germany’s for­eign intel­li­gence agency”. In oth­er words, the Gehlen Orga­ni­za­tion. In Afred Kuehne’s denaz­i­fi­ca­tion file, a let­ter from British intel­li­gence to the Amer­i­can denaz­i­fi­ca­tion com­mit­tee dat­ed Feb­ru­ary 17, 1948, and marked “top secret”, implores the com­mit­tee to rein­state the Kuehne broth­ers as exec­u­tives of their firm. As the let­ter puts it, “It is con­sid­ered vital for oper­a­tions which are already in hand that Mr. Alfred Kuehne be denaz­i­fied in such a cat­e­go­ry so that he is able to retain his business...We would be very grate­ful to you if you could aid us in this mat­ter since it con­cerns the secu­ri­ty of the British and Amer­i­can zones.” The broth­ers were soon rein­stat­ed as exec­u­tives of their firm and had all of their assets unfrozen and returned.

    Final­ly, as the arti­cle notes, Kuehne’s refusal to allow the Nazi ori­gins of the fam­i­ly’s for­tunes isn’t just a sto­ry about this promi­nent Ger­many fam­i­ly. Kuehne’s insis­tence that these events all ‘in the past’ and have no rel­e­vance today plays right into the hands of the his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ist agen­da of the AfD and grow­ing Ger­man far right move­ment to throw off any sort shame over Ger­many’s actions in WWII. That’s part of why it’s going to be grim­ly inter­est­ing to see sorts of cul­tur­al ini­tia­tives the Kuehne fam­i­ly foun­da­tion ends up financ­ing after the Kuehne dies and leaves his mas­sive for­tune to the foun­da­tion. Will his­toric white­wash­ing be part of the foun­da­tion’s mis­sion state­ment going for­ward? Let’s hope not, because the Kuehne fam­i­ly foun­da­tion is going to be work­ing to shape soci­ety into the future and it clear­ly has at last one very big nasty secret to hide. Even though it’s most­ly an open secret by now:

    Van­i­ty Fair

    The Rich­est Man in Ger­many Is Worth $44 Bil­lion. The Source of His Fam­i­ly For­tune? The Nazis Know.

    Klaus-Michael Kuehne, born in 1937, has more mon­ey than Ken Grif­fin, MacKen­zie Scott, or François Pin­ault. Just don’t ask him how he got so rich.

    By David de Jong
    Sep­tem­ber 12, 2024

    I. A DIRTY BUSINESS

    On a Thurs­day after­noon in mid-Novem­ber 2023, an elder­ly man was walk­ing through Hamburg’s Ohls­dorf Ceme­tery, the world’s fourth-largest grave­yard, to vis­it the bur­ial place of his favorite soc­cer play­er when he noticed some­thing very wrong. Some­one had sprayed “Nazi Kap­i­tal” (“Nazi for­tune”) on the Kuehne family’s tomb­stone, in red and black, while the cryp­tic term “M‑Aktion” was tagged on Alfred Kuehne’s tomb­stone.

    These weren’t just any fam­i­ly tombs: The Kuehne dynasty is indus­tri­al roy­al­ty in Ger­many. Klaus-Michael Kuehne, the only child of Alfred and Mer­cedes Kuehne, is the country’s wealth­i­est per­son, with a for­tune esti­mat­ed at $44 bil­lion, accord­ing to the Bloomberg Bil­lion­aires Index. The 87-year-old bil­lion­aire owes his for­tune to Kuehne + Nagel, the world’s largest freight for­warder, found­ed by Kuehne’s grand­fa­ther and Friedrich Nagel in 1890. Kuehne has used his wealth to build up a glob­al trans­porta­tion empire. He is also the largest share­hold­er of the Ger­man air­line Lufthansa, ship­ping behe­moth Hapag-Lloyd, chem­i­cals dis­trib­u­tor Bren­ntag, Ham­burg soc­cer club HSV, and the com­pa­ny that owns North America’s Grey­hound bus lines. In 2023 alone, accord­ing to Bloomberg, he stood to pock­et $4.5 bil­lion in div­i­dends from his empire.

    In the con­text of Germany’s dis­creet but club­by old mon­ey, where aris­to­crat­ic and indus­tri­al­ist heirs min­gle at hunt­ing par­ties or go ski­ing in the Alps, Kuehne is a lon­er. Despite his bil­lions, he remains out­side Germany’s pow­er cir­cles and is only spot­ted occa­sion­al­ly at financier and mer­chant hang­outs such as Hamburg’s Übersee-Club, a cen­tu­ry-old pri­vate mem­bers estab­lish­ment found­ed by the city’s War­burg bank­ing dynasty. Kuehne, who once described him­self as “exhaust­ing, impa­tient, and unpleas­ant” to work with, prefers to keep to him­self, either at his estate and office near Lake Zurich, at his chalet in the Swiss Alps, on his yacht, or at his vil­la on Mal­lor­ca, to which he flies com­mer­cial. Despite hav­ing been based in Switzer­land for almost 50 years, Kuehne has said his roots remain in his home­town, Ham­burg, where he was born and raised.

    ...

    The only per­son he reveres more than his wife is his late father, Alfred, whom he suc­ceed­ed as Kuehne + Nagel CEO when he was 29. In 1975 Klaus-Michael and his father moved Kuehne + Nagel’s cor­po­rate seat and head­quar­ters from Ger­many to Schin­del­le­gi, a Swiss hill­side ham­let near Zurich, for tax rea­sons. The only dec­o­ra­tion on the wall of the Kuehne + Nagel board­room is a por­trait of Alfred. “I learned the most from him,” Kuehne has said about his father. “Com­pa­nies have to be man­aged individually—like a fam­i­ly busi­ness.”

    The thing about Alfred is that he built part of the fam­i­ly busi­ness prof­it­ing from the Nazi regime’s per­se­cu­tion and geno­cide of Euro­pean Jews. After Adolf Hitler seized pow­er in Ger­many, Alfred and his broth­er Wern­er, Klaus-Michael’s uncle, oust­ed their Jew­ish share­hold­er from Kuehne + Nagel. Dur­ing World War II, Kuehne + Nagel, led by Alfred and Wern­er, trans­port­ed loot­ed Jew­ish prop­er­ty, pri­mar­i­ly fur­ni­ture, books, and art, from occu­pied West­ern Europe to Nazi Ger­many as part of the so-called “M‑Aktion,” an abbre­vi­a­tion of “Möbe­lak­tion,” which trans­lates to “fur­ni­ture oper­a­tion.” Over two years, between 1942 and 1944, almost 70,000 homes belong­ing to Jews in the Nether­lands, France, Bel­gium, and Lux­em­bourg were sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly loot­ed after their inhab­i­tants had been deport­ed by train to ghet­tos and death camps. The task force over­see­ing the oper­a­tion was part of a Nazi orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to appro­pri­at­ing prop­er­ty dur­ing the war, named after Alfred Rosen­berg, the Nazi Party’s chief ide­o­logue. After the war, the Kuehne broth­ers may have escaped pun­ish­ment for their activ­i­ties dur­ing the Third Reich because of their ties to Amer­i­can, British, and Ger­man intel­li­gence agen­cies.

    Kuehne + Nagel had a qua­si-monop­oly on the fur­ni­ture oper­a­tion, accord­ing to Frank Bajohr, head of the Cen­ter for Holo­caust Stud­ies at the Insti­tute of Con­tem­po­rary His­to­ry in Munich. “Even in the most remote places, the com­pa­ny doing the fur­ni­ture trans­ports was always Kuehne + Nagel,” says Bajohr. “Kuehne + Nagel is in the same cat­e­go­ry of firms like the ones that sold Zyk­lon B for use in the gas cham­bers or that built the cre­ma­to­ria in the exter­mi­na­tion camps. Trans­port­ing the stolen goods of peo­ple after they were deport­ed,” he adds, “is a kind of dirty busi­ness far beyond any­thing I can com­pre­hend.” Yet the role of Klaus-Michael Kuehne’s firm and fam­i­ly in the Third Reich is lit­tle known to the out­side world.

    Big Ger­man firms such as Deutsche Bank, Volk­swa­gen, and Ber­tels­mann opened their archives years ago to allow his­to­ri­ans to exam­ine their own lucra­tive Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tions. The com­mis­sioned stud­ies unearthed that Deutsche Bank aid­ed the expro­pri­a­tion of hun­dreds of Jew­ish-owned busi­ness­es and helped finance the con­struc­tion of Auschwitz; that tens of thou­sands of men and women were used as forced and slave labor­ers to mass-pro­duce weapons at the Volk­swa­gen fac­to­ry; and that Ber­tels­mann pub­lished anti­se­mit­ic lit­er­a­ture and exploit­ed Jew­ish slave labor. In 2000 the three firms joined more than 6,500 Ger­man com­pa­nies, includ­ing Kuehne + Nagel, in agree­ing to pay about $2.5 bil­lion to a repa­ra­tions fund that pro­vid­ed finan­cial com­pen­sa­tion to sur­viv­ing forced and slave labor­ers. But Kuehne + Nagel has nev­er opened its archives.

    In 2022 Kuehne told the Swiss news­pa­per Son­ntagsZeitung that no com­pa­ny doc­u­ments from the Nazi era were avail­able, claim­ing that the com­pa­ny archives in Ham­burg and Bre­men were destroyed by Allied bomb­ings in World War II. An index of Ger­man com­pa­ny archives from the 1990s shows that at least 10 meters (30 feet) of archival files should be present at Kuehne + Nagel. This most like­ly includes mate­r­i­al from before and dur­ing World War II, as the col­lec­tion begins in 1902, accord­ing to Kuehne + Nagel’s index page. “Use only pos­si­ble with man­age­ment approval,” it says on the page.

    Kuehne also said in the Son­ntagsZeitung inter­view that he finds com­mis­sion­ing inde­pen­dent his­to­ri­ans to inves­ti­gate his com­pa­ny his­to­ry akin to black­mail. “We were approached by some who would have liked to do this and they asked for sev­er­al hun­dred thou­sand euros. They said we were oblig­ed to do it. I found that almost a bit extor­tion­ate,” Kuehne told the Swiss news­pa­per. “So I said, ‘We won’t do that. We have noth­ing to hide, we acknowl­edge our guilt.’ ”

    What Kuehne has not explained is why he won’t release the study that sources say he com­mis­sioned.

    In ear­ly 2014 Kuehne com­mis­sioned Han­dels­blatt Research Insti­tute, the inde­pen­dent research arm of Ger­man news­pa­per Han­dels­blatt, to con­duct a study of his fam­i­ly firm’s entire his­to­ry for Kuehne + Nagel’s 125th anniver­sary in July 2015. Researchers were even giv­en access to the com­pa­ny archive in Ham­burg and a guar­an­tee of aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom and inde­pen­dence, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter. But when the final result was sent to Kuehne in ear­ly 2015, includ­ing a chap­ter on the activ­i­ties of his father, uncle, and firm dur­ing the Third Reich, he refused to have the study pub­lished. Kuehne reject­ed the study by say­ing “my father wasn’t a Nazi” dur­ing a phone con­fer­ence, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with the con­ver­sa­tion. When the researchers refused to change the chap­ter, accord­ing to these sources, Kuehne said the study wouldn’t be pub­lished and end­ed the call. The 180-page study, con­trac­tu­al­ly owned by Kuehne + Nagel, remains unpub­lished and inac­ces­si­ble. Jan Kleib­rink, the man­ag­ing direc­tor of Han­dels­blatt Research Insti­tute, would nei­ther con­firm nor deny Kuehne’s com­mis­sion­ing and shelv­ing of the study.

    ...

    II. THE POLITICS OF MEMORY

    For decades Germany’s polit­i­cal lead­ers have accept­ed moral respon­si­bil­i­ty and acknowl­edged the sins of the Nazi past, cen­ter­ing remem­brance as a com­po­nent of Ger­man soci­ety. But recent­ly the coun­try has seemed to regress. As the last wit­ness­es to the Nazi era die and the cul­tur­al mem­o­ry of the Third Reich fades, the right wing, increas­ing­ly main­stream, has attacked Germany’s pro­gres­sive ideals. For much of 2023, the far-right Alter­na­tive for Ger­many (AfD) polled as the largest par­ty, hit­ting an all-time high of 23 per­cent in the polls in Decem­ber. In June 2024 the AfD won a record num­ber of votes in the Euro­pean par­lia­ment elec­tions. The par­ty cap­tured 16 per­cent of the Ger­man vote and came in sec­ond in the elec­tions as con­cerns about immi­gra­tion and the econ­o­my fanned vot­er dis­con­tent.

    “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird sh it in over a thou­sand years of suc­cess­ful Ger­man his­to­ry,” the AfD’s then coleader Alexan­der Gauland said in a 2018 speech. The AfD’s extrem­ist wing is asso­ci­at­ed with anti­semitism, Islam­o­pho­bia, and his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism, includ­ing the down­play­ing of Nazi crimes and den­i­gra­tion of the Holo­caust. In May and July 2024, Björn Höcke, a lead­ing AfD politi­cian and founder of its extrem­ist wing, was fined twice by a Ger­man court for using the banned Nazi slo­gan “Every­thing for Ger­many!” in his cam­paign speech­es. Höcke has lament­ed the con­struc­tion of a Holo­caust memo­r­i­al in cen­tral Berlin. Call­ing Ger­mans “the only peo­ple in the world who plant­ed a memo­r­i­al of shame in the heart of their cap­i­tal,” he has demand­ed a “180-degree turn” in the country’s “pol­i­tics of mem­o­ry.”

    Kuehne’s pol­i­tics could be described as free-mar­ket con­ser­v­a­tive. “I believe that sup­port for the AfD will dwin­dle again,” he told Ger­man news­pa­per Welt in 2017. “Right-wing move­ments have no foothold in Ger­many.” Since 2021 he has donat­ed about 200,000 euros ($220,000) to the Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive CDU, the estab­lish­ment par­ty for Ger­man busi­ness and of for­mer chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel. Kuehne even once said he could envi­sion him­self vot­ing for the left-wing Green Par­ty.

    But Kuehne’s refusal to more pub­licly reck­on with his fam­i­ly and firm’s Nazi past plays into the hands of the revi­sion­ist move­ment, says Hen­ning Bleyl, direc­tor of the Hein­rich Böll Foun­da­tion in Bre­men, a think tank affil­i­at­ed with the Ger­man Green Par­ty. He has been inves­ti­gat­ing Kuehne + Nagel’s wartime activ­i­ties since 2015. These revi­sion­ist nar­ra­tives of Germany’s past are promi­nent­ly embod­ied by the AfD, but the far right in Ger­many, Aus­tria, France, and many oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries use his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism to manip­u­late the nar­ra­tive around the Nazi era and World War II to advance their polit­i­cal agen­da.

    “Even in past decades, it was unac­cept­able that Kuehne refused to deal hon­est­ly with his family’s actions dur­ing the Nazi era,” said Bleyl in an inter­view on the roof ter­race above his office in Bre­men. “Now it is even more of an issue because, as I view it, Kuehne’s stance places him in the ranks of those who want to ‘exon­er­ate’ Ger­man his­to­ry from its Nazi past.”

    III. “A SO-CALLED ARYANIZATION”

    Inter­views and new­ly unearthed archival mate­r­i­al by VF in Ams­ter­dam, Bre­men, Ham­burg, Munich, Mon­tre­al, and Wash­ing­ton, DC, detail the extent of Nazi prof­i­teer­ing by the Kuehne broth­ers and firm. Alfred and Wern­er Kuehne began prof­it­ing from the per­se­cu­tion of Jews much ear­li­er than is known: years before World War II and mere months after Hitler seized pow­er in Ger­many on Jan­u­ary 30, 1933.

    In late April of that year, the Kuehne broth­ers oust­ed their Jew­ish part­ner and co-own­er Adolf Maass after he’d spent more than 30 years at the firm. Maass, 57 at the time, owned 45 per­cent of the Ham­burg branch of Kuehne + Nagel, which he had found­ed in 1902 and which was the largest and most prof­itable part of the firm. When Friedrich Nagel died heir­less in 1907, his shares went to his cofounder, August Kuehne, the father of Alfred and Wern­er. He died in 1932.

    Accord­ing to a signed and dat­ed con­tract in the Maass fam­i­ly archive in the Mon­tre­al Holo­caust muse­um, Maass signed over his shares and claims to the Kuehne broth­ers on April 22, 1933, for no com­pen­sa­tion. The rea­son? An alleged inabil­i­ty “to ful­fill his cap­i­tal oblig­a­tions” to the Kuehnes and the com­pa­ny. Such accu­sa­tions became a com­mon method in Nazi Ger­many to oust Jew­ish share­hold­ers from their own firms. “This wasn’t a free and reg­u­lar busi­ness con­tract,” says Frank Bajohr. “The Kuehnes used the polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion for their own ben­e­fit. It’s no acci­dent that this con­tract was for­mu­lat­ed in spring 1933. Maass wouldn’t have signed this con­tract in the years before Hitler took pow­er. This was a so-called Aryaniza­tion.”

    ...

    Nine days after oust­ing Maass, the Kuehne broth­ers became Nazi Par­ty mem­bers, accord­ing to their denaz­i­fi­ca­tion files in the Bre­men state archive. In the fol­low­ing years the Kuehnes devel­oped their firm into a “nation­al-social­ist mod­el com­pa­ny,” an hon­orary title that the Nazi regime award­ed to Kuehne + Nagel in 1937, the year that Klaus-Michael was born. The Kuehne broth­ers would declare in their denaz­i­fi­ca­tion pro­ceed­ings that Maass’s “Jew­ish ori­gin caused seri­ous trou­ble” for the firm and them­selves. The sib­lings claimed that Maass left vol­un­tar­i­ly and that they “derived no per­son­al eco­nom­ic advan­tage from dis­solv­ing the part­ner­ship.”

    In 1938 Kuehne + Nagel acquired the Ham­burg sub­sidiary of the Czech trans­port com­pa­ny Alfred Deutsch. The own­er was Leo Lewi­tus, a Jew­ish entre­pre­neur forced to sell his firm by the Nazi author­i­ties in tan­dem with the Kuehne broth­ers. In 180 pages of cor­re­spon­dence dur­ing the acqui­si­tion dis­cov­ered by VF in the Ham­burg state archive, Kuehne + Nagel man­agers wrote mat­ter-of-fact­ly that the takeover was an Aryaniza­tion.

    The start of World War II offered the Kuehne broth­ers the first oppor­tu­ni­ty for for­eign expan­sion. In the foot­steps of the Wehrmacht’s mil­i­tary con­quest of Europe, Kuehne + Nagel grew rapid­ly: The trans­porta­tion firm went from sev­en branch­es in Ger­many in ear­ly 1939 to 26 branch­es across Nazi-occu­pied Europe by late 1944, accord­ing to a com­par­i­son by VF of com­pa­ny let­ter­head from the years before and dur­ing the war list­ing all the offices. The com­pa­ny says it deliv­ered sup­plies to the Ger­man army. Anoth­er dri­ver of growth for Kuehne + Nagel was an agree­ment with Nazi author­i­ties to ship loot­ed Jew­ish-owned prop­er­ty from West­ern Europe to Ger­many as part of the fur­ni­ture oper­a­tion, which took place from spring 1942 through July 1944.

    ...

    A ledger from a Rot­ter­dam freighter, dis­cov­ered by VF in the archive of the Nether­lands Insti­tute for War, Holo­caust, and Geno­cide Stud­ies in Ams­ter­dam, pro­vides a glimpse of the enor­mous size of the oper­a­tion. The ledger lists 360 ships com­mis­sioned by Kuehne + Nagel’s Ams­ter­dam office between June 1942 and August 1943 on behalf of the Nazi author­i­ties, which trans­port­ed fur­ni­ture across Ger­many stolen from Jews, accord­ing to a hand­writ­ten note accom­pa­ny­ing the ledger. One bill of lad­ing, for exam­ple, record­ed 307 box­es of cut­lery and chi­na, 105 beds, 93 bed­steads, 91 stoves, 62 bed­side tables, 32 clocks, 17 iron­ing boards, 11 umbrel­la stands, 10 deck chairs, and 2 baby car­riages being shipped from Ams­ter­dam to Bre­men in Decem­ber 1942.

    “The man­age­ment at Kuehne & Nagel was well informed about the ongo­ing dis­pos­ses­sion of the Jews. It is pos­si­ble that the man­agers did not know that the own­ers of the prop­er­ty they were trans­port­ing were to be mur­dered. But they nev­er­the­less facil­i­tat­ed the eco­nom­ic destruc­tion of Euro­pean Jew­ry,” writes his­to­ri­an Johannes Beer­mann-Schön of Frankfurt’s Goethe Uni­ver­si­ty.

    Kuehne + Nagel also trans­port­ed loot­ed art. It didn’t always arrive at its des­ti­na­tion. The Office of Strate­gic Ser­vices, the CIA’s pre­de­ces­sor, dis­cov­ered months after the war end­ed that Kuehne + Nagel had lost a 1944 ship­ment of 14 paint­ings en route from Paris to Ger­many. Gus­tav Rochlitz, a Ger­man art deal­er in Paris who acquired loot­ed art dur­ing the war, had bought the paint­ings from the Nazi task force in charge of the fur­ni­ture oper­a­tion. The miss­ing ship­ment con­tained, among oth­er works, sev­en paint­ings by Matisse and one each by Picas­so, Modigliani, Gau­guin, Cézanne, Manet, and Pis­sar­ro, accord­ing to an OSS doc­u­ment from August 1945 found by VF in the Nation­al Archives in Wash­ing­ton. Pub­lic auc­tion records sug­gest that if all of these works were gen­uine, they would be worth tens if not hun­dreds of mil­lions in today’s art mar­ket.

    The Third Reich and the trans­port of loot­ed prop­er­ty dur­ing World War II made the Kuehne broth­ers very rich. After oust­ing Maass in 1933, Alfred and Wern­er began earn­ing on aver­age around 175,000 reichs­marks annu­al­ly, accord­ing to their denaz­i­fi­ca­tion files—about $3.4 mil­lion today. By 1942, when the fur­ni­ture oper­a­tion began, the broth­ers had hit their peak earn­ings: the equiv­a­lent of about $4.6 mil­lion each.

    Even though the Kuehne broth­ers were con­sid­ered “high-rank­ing Nazi indus­tri­al­ists” by Amer­i­can inves­ti­ga­tors and “big time Nazis” by the British author­i­ties after the war, both end­ed up being judged as mere “fel­low travelers”—Nazi fol­low­ers who weren’t involved in the regime’s crimes—in denaz­i­fi­ca­tion pro­ceed­ings in 1948. No reper­cus­sions fol­lowed. Their denaz­i­fi­ca­tion files in the Bre­men state archive con­tain no men­tion of the fur­ni­ture oper­a­tion.

    After the war, Kuehne + Nagel front­ed a CIA-backed pre­cur­sor of West Germany’s for­eign intel­li­gence agency, the Ger­man news­pa­per Welt report­ed in 2015. The Ger­man spy agency used some of the trans­port firm’s offices as cov­er for key oper­a­tives. Alfred Kuehne’s denaz­i­fi­ca­tion file includes a let­ter, marked “top secret” and dat­ed Feb­ru­ary 17, 1948, from British intel­li­gence to the Amer­i­can denaz­i­fi­ca­tion com­mit­tee in Bre­men. “It is con­sid­ered vital for oper­a­tions which are already in hand that Mr. Alfred Kuehne be denaz­i­fied in such a cat­e­go­ry so that he is able to retain his busi­ness,” wrote a chief of British intel­li­gence, who pro­vid­ed his rank, major-gen­er­al, in the let­ter, but not his name. “We would be very grate­ful to you if you could aid us in this mat­ter since it con­cerns the secu­ri­ty of the British and Amer­i­can zones.”

    Soon after the let­ter was sent, the Kuehnes’ busi­ness­es and oth­er assets, which had been frozen as part of their denaz­i­fi­ca­tion pro­ceed­ings, were returned to them and they were rein­stat­ed in their exec­u­tive posi­tions at Kuehne + Nagel.

    Alfred became the company’s major share­hold­er in 1952 after Wern­er, a life­long bach­e­lor, moved to South Africa, where he died in the mid-1950s. Klaus-Michael, Alfred’s only child and anoint­ed suc­ces­sor, began work­ing at the firm in 1958, when he was 21, and took the helm eight years lat­er.

    IV. KUEHNE’S BRAZEN REQUEST

    Klaus-Michael has built Kuehne + Nagel into a glob­al logis­tics behe­moth in the six decades since, relo­cat­ing the com­pa­ny seat and head­quar­ters to Switzer­land, sell­ing a stake to shore up liq­uid­i­ty and save the firm before buy­ing back the shares to retake con­trol. In 2023 the firm had about $30 bil­lion in rev­enue, more than 80,000 employ­ees, and 1,300 offices across about 100 coun­tries. “I have worked far too much in my life,” the bil­lion­aire told Swiss mag­a­zine Bilanz. He has also spo­ken about neglect­ing his pri­vate life, includ­ing not hav­ing any chil­dren with Chris­tine. That they have remained child­less is “sad of course,” Kuehne told Son­ntagsZeitung. “The third gen­er­a­tion is the last in the fam­i­ly. As a fam­i­ly entre­pre­neur, I think it’s a shame that I can’t pass on the busi­ness per­son­al­ly.”

    Per­haps because of that, the octo­ge­nar­i­an is busy focus­ing on his legacy—in par­tic­u­lar how he will be remem­bered in Ham­burg, the country’s largest port and main gate­way to the world.

    Through 2023, Kuehne was the main spon­sor of Hamburg’s Har­bour Front Lit­er­a­ture Fes­ti­val. The main lit­er­a­ture prize, endowed with 10,000 euros, even bore his name, the Klaus-Michael Kuehne Prize. That was until 2022, when two nom­i­nees for the prize with­drew because of Kuehne’s refusal to deal with his firm and family’s Nazi past, and the prize was renamed. Kuehne’s foun­da­tion felt it was “treat­ed extreme­ly unfair­ly in the mat­ter,” a spokesper­son told the Ger­man news­pa­per Taz at the time. It soon stopped spon­sor­ing the fes­ti­val. It didn’t take place this year because the fes­ti­val wasn’t able to find a major spon­sor to replace the foun­da­tion.

    Author Sven Pfizen­maier was the first of the two nom­i­nees to with­draw from the prize. “I’m no fan of bil­lion­aires in gen­er­al and bil­lion­aires who prof­it­ed from Nazism, deny it, and white­wash them­selves by fund­ing art seems very bad, so that’s why I did it,” Pfizen­maier says by phone from Berlin.

    “We believe that being open, hon­est, and trans­par­ent in every­thing we do will build trust with our stake­hold­ers,” reads the open­ing sen­tence on Kuehne + Nagel’s investor rela­tions page. When it comes to the company’s dark his­to­ry, Kuehne is any­thing but open and trans­par­ent. In April 2015 a region­al TV chan­nel in Ger­many broad­cast a short doc­u­men­tary about Kuehne + Nagel’s role in the fur­ni­ture oper­a­tion. Short­ly before the film aired, Kuehne wrote to the chan­nel direc­tor, ask­ing that the out­let recon­sid­er broad­cast­ing the 22-minute doc­u­men­tary, because “old wounds are being reopened.”

    Kuehne’s brazen request, which was declined, came only months after he had shelved the Han­dels­blatt Research Insti­tute study sources say he had com­mis­sioned for Kuehne + Nagel’s 125th anniver­sary.

    In the run-up to the broad­cast, the trans­porta­tion firm pub­lished a defen­sive state­ment on its web­site. “Like oth­er com­pa­nies that already exist­ed before 1945, Kuehne + Nagel was involved in the war econ­o­my and had to main­tain its exis­tence in dark and dif­fi­cult times,” wrote the com­pa­ny in the Ger­man-only state­ment. “Kuehne + Nagel is aware of the shame­ful events dur­ing the Third Reich and deeply regrets that it car­ried out some of its activ­i­ties on behalf of the Nazi regime. The con­di­tions under the dic­ta­tor­ship at the time and the fact that Kuehne + Nagel sur­vived the tur­moil of war with all its strength and secured the company’s exis­tence must be tak­en into account.” It remains the sole acknowl­edg­ment to date by the firm about its Nazi activ­i­ties. Oth­er than the state­ment, Kuehne + Nagel’s web­site doesn’t men­tion the past, as it doesn’t have a his­to­ry sec­tion.

    While the firm has stayed silent on its past since 2015, Kuehne has since respond­ed to the crit­i­cism that he and his com­pa­ny have not suf­fi­cient­ly addressed the company’s past involve­ment in Nazi crimes. “I would have under­stood if peo­ple had ques­tioned these things 10 or 20 years after the war. Every­thing was still fresh in people’s minds then. The peo­ple who were respon­si­ble at the time were still alive. But to come back to it 70 years lat­er. I find that strange,” Kuehne said in the Son­ntagsZeitung inter­view from Jan­u­ary 2022. “At some point, one has to let the dust set­tle on things. That’s my basic atti­tude. It’s impor­tant to learn lessons from what hap­pened back then.”

    V. THE TRUTH NEEDS TO BE TOLD

    On a swel­ter­ing Sun­day morn­ing in ear­ly Sep­tem­ber 2023, about 300 peo­ple gath­ered on the water­front in Bremen’s his­tor­i­cal city cen­ter. The crowd was there for the inau­gu­ra­tion of a mon­u­ment com­mem­o­rat­ing the sys­tem­at­ic loot­ing of Euro­pean Jews by Nazi Ger­many through the prac­tice of Aryaniza­tion. The memorial’s cho­sen loca­tion was no acci­dent. High above the water­front, over­look­ing the mon­u­ment, tow­ered the Ger­man head­quar­ters of Kuehne + Nagel.

    Down below, Bar­bara Maass sat near the front row. The grand­daugh­ter of Adolf and Käthe Maass had come from Mon­tre­al for the memorial’s inau­gu­ra­tion. After Adolf Maass was oust­ed from Kuehne + Nagel in 1933, the cou­ple sent their three chil­dren abroad: their eldest son to Eng­land, their daugh­ter to the US, Barbara’s father to Cana­da. Adolf and Käthe weren’t able to escape Nazi Ger­many in time. They were mur­dered in Auschwitz in May 1944. Leo Lewi­tus, who also lost his firm to the Kuehne broth­ers, did sur­vive the Holo­caust and immi­grat­ed to Israel.

    Bar­bara Maass dis­agrees with Klaus-Michael Kuehne’s notion that it’s time to move on. “I believe per­haps naive­ly that we can learn from the past, but to do so means know­ing what actu­al­ly hap­pened in the past,” Maass said in an inter­view at her home in Mon­tre­al. “Crimes against human­i­ty are always rel­e­vant. There are moral deci­sions to be made today, much as there were in the past. I’m pro­found­ly con­vinced that the truth needs to be told.”

    ...

    Thomas Sorg worked at Kuehne + Nagel Ger­many for 45 years and spent years bat­tling with the bil­lion­aire as chair­man of the firm’s work­ers coun­cil. Sorg doesn’t believe Kuehne will reck­on with his firm’s Nazi past before he dies. “If Klaus-Michael Kuehne doesn’t want to do some­thing, then he doesn’t do it. Peri­od,” said Sorg at a recep­tion in Bre­men after the cer­e­mo­ny. “Kuehne will do every­thing he can to pro­tect the mem­o­ry of his father, whom he revered beyond all mea­sure.”

    When Kuehne dies, he’ll leave his hold­ing com­pa­ny, which con­trols his $44 bil­lion for­tune, includ­ing the major­i­ty of Kuehne + Nagel shares, to his fam­i­ly foun­da­tion. The Kuehne foun­da­tion will become one of the world’s largest pri­vate char­i­ties by endow­ment size, focus­ing on logis­tics, med­i­cine, cli­mate, and cul­ture.

    When he dies, Kuehne knows where he’ll be buried, he told a Ger­man mag­a­zine. He has reserved a place at Hamburg’s Ohls­dorf ceme­tery, next to his father.

    ———-

    “The Rich­est Man in Ger­many Is Worth $44 Bil­lion. The Source of His Fam­i­ly For­tune? The Nazis Know.” By David de Jong; Van­i­ty Fair; 09/12/2024

    “These weren’t just any fam­i­ly tombs: The Kuehne dynasty is indus­tri­al roy­al­ty in Ger­many. Klaus-Michael Kuehne, the only child of Alfred and Mer­cedes Kuehne, is the country’s wealth­i­est per­son, with a for­tune esti­mat­ed at $44 bil­lion, accord­ing to the Bloomberg Bil­lion­aires Index. The 87-year-old bil­lion­aire owes his for­tune to Kuehne + Nagel, the world’s largest freight for­warder, found­ed by Kuehne’s grand­fa­ther and Friedrich Nagel in 1890. Kuehne has used his wealth to build up a glob­al trans­porta­tion empire. He is also the largest share­hold­er of the Ger­man air­line Lufthansa, ship­ping behe­moth Hapag-Lloyd, chem­i­cals dis­trib­u­tor Bren­ntag, Ham­burg soc­cer club HSV, and the com­pa­ny that owns North America’s Grey­hound bus lines. In 2023 alone, accord­ing to Bloomberg, he stood to pock­et $4.5 bil­lion in div­i­dends from his empire.”

    The wealth­i­est per­son in Ger­many, accord­ing to the Bloomberg Bil­lion­aires Index real­ly does­n’t want to talk about the source of his fam­i­ly for­tune. What’s hid­ing under that rock? A sto­ry about mas­sive Nazi plun­der­ing thanks to a qua­si-monop­oly on the Nazi loot­ing of Jew­ish fur­ni­ture. A sto­ry Kuehne clear­ly does­n’t want told. Ever:

    ...
    The only per­son he reveres more than his wife is his late father, Alfred, whom he suc­ceed­ed as Kuehne + Nagel CEO when he was 29. In 1975 Klaus-Michael and his father moved Kuehne + Nagel’s cor­po­rate seat and head­quar­ters from Ger­many to Schin­del­le­gi, a Swiss hill­side ham­let near Zurich, for tax rea­sons. The only dec­o­ra­tion on the wall of the Kuehne + Nagel board­room is a por­trait of Alfred. “I learned the most from him,” Kuehne has said about his father. “Com­pa­nies have to be man­aged individually—like a fam­i­ly busi­ness.”

    The thing about Alfred is that he built part of the fam­i­ly busi­ness prof­it­ing from the Nazi regime’s per­se­cu­tion and geno­cide of Euro­pean Jews. After Adolf Hitler seized pow­er in Ger­many, Alfred and his broth­er Wern­er, Klaus-Michael’s uncle, oust­ed their Jew­ish share­hold­er from Kuehne + Nagel. Dur­ing World War II, Kuehne + Nagel, led by Alfred and Wern­er, trans­port­ed loot­ed Jew­ish prop­er­ty, pri­mar­i­ly fur­ni­ture, books, and art, from occu­pied West­ern Europe to Nazi Ger­many as part of the so-called “M‑Aktion,” an abbre­vi­a­tion of “Möbe­lak­tion,” which trans­lates to “fur­ni­ture oper­a­tion.” Over two years, between 1942 and 1944, almost 70,000 homes belong­ing to Jews in the Nether­lands, France, Bel­gium, and Lux­em­bourg were sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly loot­ed after their inhab­i­tants had been deport­ed by train to ghet­tos and death camps. The task force over­see­ing the oper­a­tion was part of a Nazi orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to appro­pri­at­ing prop­er­ty dur­ing the war, named after Alfred Rosen­berg, the Nazi Party’s chief ide­o­logue. After the war, the Kuehne broth­ers may have escaped pun­ish­ment for their activ­i­ties dur­ing the Third Reich because of their ties to Amer­i­can, British, and Ger­man intel­li­gence agen­cies.

    Kuehne + Nagel had a qua­si-monop­oly on the fur­ni­ture oper­a­tion, accord­ing to Frank Bajohr, head of the Cen­ter for Holo­caust Stud­ies at the Insti­tute of Con­tem­po­rary His­to­ry in Munich. “Even in the most remote places, the com­pa­ny doing the fur­ni­ture trans­ports was always Kuehne + Nagel,” says Bajohr. “Kuehne + Nagel is in the same cat­e­go­ry of firms like the ones that sold Zyk­lon B for use in the gas cham­bers or that built the cre­ma­to­ria in the exter­mi­na­tion camps. Trans­port­ing the stolen goods of peo­ple after they were deport­ed,” he adds, “is a kind of dirty busi­ness far beyond any­thing I can com­pre­hend.” Yet the role of Klaus-Michael Kuehne’s firm and fam­i­ly in the Third Reich is lit­tle known to the out­side world.
    ...

    In fact, as Kuehne described to a Swiss news­pa­per in 2022, he con­sid­ers the idea that the com­pa­ny should appoint inde­pen­dent his­to­ri­ans to inves­ti­gate the com­pa­ny’s his­to­ry as akin to black­mail. Not that the Kuehne has nev­er com­mis­sioned such a his­tor­i­cal review. He did so in 2014, but then reject­ed their find­ings and refused to allow them to be pub­lished, insist­ing “my father was­n’t a Nazi”:

    ...
    Big Ger­man firms such as Deutsche Bank, Volk­swa­gen, and Ber­tels­mann opened their archives years ago to allow his­to­ri­ans to exam­ine their own lucra­tive Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tions. The com­mis­sioned stud­ies unearthed that Deutsche Bank aid­ed the expro­pri­a­tion of hun­dreds of Jew­ish-owned busi­ness­es and helped finance the con­struc­tion of Auschwitz; that tens of thou­sands of men and women were used as forced and slave labor­ers to mass-pro­duce weapons at the Volk­swa­gen fac­to­ry; and that Ber­tels­mann pub­lished anti­se­mit­ic lit­er­a­ture and exploit­ed Jew­ish slave labor. In 2000 the three firms joined more than 6,500 Ger­man com­pa­nies, includ­ing Kuehne + Nagel, in agree­ing to pay about $2.5 bil­lion to a repa­ra­tions fund that pro­vid­ed finan­cial com­pen­sa­tion to sur­viv­ing forced and slave labor­ers. But Kuehne + Nagel has nev­er opened its archives.

    In 2022 Kuehne told the Swiss news­pa­per Son­ntagsZeitung that no com­pa­ny doc­u­ments from the Nazi era were avail­able, claim­ing that the com­pa­ny archives in Ham­burg and Bre­men were destroyed by Allied bomb­ings in World War II. An index of Ger­man com­pa­ny archives from the 1990s shows that at least 10 meters (30 feet) of archival files should be present at Kuehne + Nagel. This most like­ly includes mate­r­i­al from before and dur­ing World War II, as the col­lec­tion begins in 1902, accord­ing to Kuehne + Nagel’s index page. “Use only pos­si­ble with man­age­ment approval,” it says on the page.

    Kuehne also said in the Son­ntagsZeitung inter­view that he finds com­mis­sion­ing inde­pen­dent his­to­ri­ans to inves­ti­gate his com­pa­ny his­to­ry akin to black­mail. “We were approached by some who would have liked to do this and they asked for sev­er­al hun­dred thou­sand euros. They said we were oblig­ed to do it. I found that almost a bit extor­tion­ate,” Kuehne told the Swiss news­pa­per. “So I said, ‘We won’t do that. We have noth­ing to hide, we acknowl­edge our guilt.’ ”

    What Kuehne has not explained is why he won’t release the study that sources say he com­mis­sioned.

    In ear­ly 2014 Kuehne com­mis­sioned Han­dels­blatt Research Insti­tute, the inde­pen­dent research arm of Ger­man news­pa­per Han­dels­blatt, to con­duct a study of his fam­i­ly firm’s entire his­to­ry for Kuehne + Nagel’s 125th anniver­sary in July 2015. Researchers were even giv­en access to the com­pa­ny archive in Ham­burg and a guar­an­tee of aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom and inde­pen­dence, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter. But when the final result was sent to Kuehne in ear­ly 2015, includ­ing a chap­ter on the activ­i­ties of his father, uncle, and firm dur­ing the Third Reich, he refused to have the study pub­lished. Kuehne reject­ed the study by say­ing “my father wasn’t a Nazi” dur­ing a phone con­fer­ence, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with the con­ver­sa­tion. When the researchers refused to change the chap­ter, accord­ing to these sources, Kuehne said the study wouldn’t be pub­lished and end­ed the call. The 180-page study, con­trac­tu­al­ly owned by Kuehne + Nagel, remains unpub­lished and inac­ces­si­ble. Jan Kleib­rink, the man­ag­ing direc­tor of Han­dels­blatt Research Insti­tute, would nei­ther con­firm nor deny Kuehne’s com­mis­sion­ing and shelv­ing of the study.
    ...

    And yet, despite those “my father was­n’t a Nazi” protes­ta­tions, it turns out his father and uncle both joined the Nazi par­ty just nine days after kick­ing out their Jew­ish co-founder, Adolf Maass, as part of the “Aryaniza­tion” of the Ger­man econ­o­my. This was in 1933, years before the out­break of WWII:

    ...
    Inter­views and new­ly unearthed archival mate­r­i­al by VF in Ams­ter­dam, Bre­men, Ham­burg, Munich, Mon­tre­al, and Wash­ing­ton, DC, detail the extent of Nazi prof­i­teer­ing by the Kuehne broth­ers and firm. Alfred and Wern­er Kuehne began prof­it­ing from the per­se­cu­tion of Jews much ear­li­er than is known: years before World War II and mere months after Hitler seized pow­er in Ger­many on Jan­u­ary 30, 1933.

    In late April of that year, the Kuehne broth­ers oust­ed their Jew­ish part­ner and co-own­er Adolf Maass after he’d spent more than 30 years at the firm. Maass, 57 at the time, owned 45 per­cent of the Ham­burg branch of Kuehne + Nagel, which he had found­ed in 1902 and which was the largest and most prof­itable part of the firm. When Friedrich Nagel died heir­less in 1907, his shares went to his cofounder, August Kuehne, the father of Alfred and Wern­er. He died in 1932.

    Accord­ing to a signed and dat­ed con­tract in the Maass fam­i­ly archive in the Mon­tre­al Holo­caust muse­um, Maass signed over his shares and claims to the Kuehne broth­ers on April 22, 1933, for no com­pen­sa­tion. The rea­son? An alleged inabil­i­ty “to ful­fill his cap­i­tal oblig­a­tions” to the Kuehnes and the com­pa­ny. Such accu­sa­tions became a com­mon method in Nazi Ger­many to oust Jew­ish share­hold­ers from their own firms. “This wasn’t a free and reg­u­lar busi­ness con­tract,” says Frank Bajohr. “The Kuehnes used the polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion for their own ben­e­fit. It’s no acci­dent that this con­tract was for­mu­lat­ed in spring 1933. Maass wouldn’t have signed this con­tract in the years before Hitler took pow­er. This was a so-called Aryaniza­tion.”

    ...

    Nine days after oust­ing Maass, the Kuehne broth­ers became Nazi Par­ty mem­bers, accord­ing to their denaz­i­fi­ca­tion files in the Bre­men state archive. In the fol­low­ing years the Kuehnes devel­oped their firm into a “nation­al-social­ist mod­el com­pa­ny,” an hon­orary title that the Nazi regime award­ed to Kuehne + Nagel in 1937, the year that Klaus-Michael was born. The Kuehne broth­ers would declare in their denaz­i­fi­ca­tion pro­ceed­ings that Maass’s “Jew­ish ori­gin caused seri­ous trou­ble” for the firm and them­selves. The sib­lings claimed that Maass left vol­un­tar­i­ly and that they “derived no per­son­al eco­nom­ic advan­tage from dis­solv­ing the part­ner­ship.”

    In 1938 Kuehne + Nagel acquired the Ham­burg sub­sidiary of the Czech trans­port com­pa­ny Alfred Deutsch. The own­er was Leo Lewi­tus, a Jew­ish entre­pre­neur forced to sell his firm by the Nazi author­i­ties in tan­dem with the Kuehne broth­ers. In 180 pages of cor­re­spon­dence dur­ing the acqui­si­tion dis­cov­ered by VF in the Ham­burg state archive, Kuehne + Nagel man­agers wrote mat­ter-of-fact­ly that the takeover was an Aryaniza­tion.

    The start of World War II offered the Kuehne broth­ers the first oppor­tu­ni­ty for for­eign expan­sion. In the foot­steps of the Wehrmacht’s mil­i­tary con­quest of Europe, Kuehne + Nagel grew rapid­ly: The trans­porta­tion firm went from sev­en branch­es in Ger­many in ear­ly 1939 to 26 branch­es across Nazi-occu­pied Europe by late 1944, accord­ing to a com­par­i­son by VF of com­pa­ny let­ter­head from the years before and dur­ing the war list­ing all the offices. The com­pa­ny says it deliv­ered sup­plies to the Ger­man army. Anoth­er dri­ver of growth for Kuehne + Nagel was an agree­ment with Nazi author­i­ties to ship loot­ed Jew­ish-owned prop­er­ty from West­ern Europe to Ger­many as part of the fur­ni­ture oper­a­tion, which took place from spring 1942 through July 1944.
    ...

    And also note how the firm did­n’t just make a for­tune trans­port­ing loot­ed fur­ni­ture. They were in the busi­ness of traf­fick­ing stolen works of art too:

    ...
    Kuehne + Nagel also trans­port­ed loot­ed art. It didn’t always arrive at its des­ti­na­tion. The Office of Strate­gic Ser­vices, the CIA’s pre­de­ces­sor, dis­cov­ered months after the war end­ed that Kuehne + Nagel had lost a 1944 ship­ment of 14 paint­ings en route from Paris to Ger­many. Gus­tav Rochlitz, a Ger­man art deal­er in Paris who acquired loot­ed art dur­ing the war, had bought the paint­ings from the Nazi task force in charge of the fur­ni­ture oper­a­tion. The miss­ing ship­ment con­tained, among oth­er works, sev­en paint­ings by Matisse and one each by Picas­so, Modigliani, Gau­guin, Cézanne, Manet, and Pis­sar­ro, accord­ing to an OSS doc­u­ment from August 1945 found by VF in the Nation­al Archives in Wash­ing­ton. Pub­lic auc­tion records sug­gest that if all of these works were gen­uine, they would be worth tens if not hun­dreds of mil­lions in today’s art mar­ket.

    The Third Reich and the trans­port of loot­ed prop­er­ty dur­ing World War II made the Kuehne broth­ers very rich. After oust­ing Maass in 1933, Alfred and Wern­er began earn­ing on aver­age around 175,000 reichs­marks annu­al­ly, accord­ing to their denaz­i­fi­ca­tion files—about $3.4 mil­lion today. By 1942, when the fur­ni­ture oper­a­tion began, the broth­ers had hit their peak earn­ings: the equiv­a­lent of about $4.6 mil­lion each.
    ...

    But this isn’t just a sto­ry about a Ger­man com­pa­ny get­ting away with its Nazi loot­ing. It’s also about the incred­i­bly gen­tle treat­ment of so many top Nazis, like the Kuehne broth­ers, after the war. In this case, it appears Kuehne + Nagel end­ed up serv­ing as a front for West Ger­man intel­li­gence. In exchange for this coop­er­a­tion, the ‘denaz­i­fi­ca­tion’ of the com­pa­ny con­sist­ed of return­ing all their seized assets and rein­stat­ing the Kuehne broth­ers in their exec­u­tive posi­tions. As British intel­li­gence put it, “It is con­sid­ered vital for oper­a­tions which are already in hand that Mr. Alfred Kuehne be denaz­i­fied in such a cat­e­go­ry so that he is able to retain his busi­ness.” Also keep in mind that we are talk­ing about the Gehlen Orga­ni­za­tion when we are talk­ing about “a CIA-backed pre­cur­sor of West Germany’s for­eign intel­li­gence agency”. So while the fam­i­ly’s Nazi his­to­ry is obvi­ous­ly a chap­ter Kuehne wants to see buried for­ev­er, it’s worth keep­ing in mind that the fir­m’s post-war activ­i­ties as part of the Gehlen Orga­ni­za­tion could eas­i­ly con­tain all sorts of scan­dals too. The kinds of scan­dals that won’t just embar­rass Kuehne + Nagel:

    ...
    Even though the Kuehne broth­ers were con­sid­ered “high-rank­ing Nazi indus­tri­al­ists” by Amer­i­can inves­ti­ga­tors and “big time Nazis” by the British author­i­ties after the war, both end­ed up being judged as mere “fel­low travelers”—Nazi fol­low­ers who weren’t involved in the regime’s crimes—in denaz­i­fi­ca­tion pro­ceed­ings in 1948. No reper­cus­sions fol­lowed. Their denaz­i­fi­ca­tion files in the Bre­men state archive con­tain no men­tion of the fur­ni­ture oper­a­tion.

    After the war, Kuehne + Nagel front­ed a CIA-backed pre­cur­sor of West Germany’s for­eign intel­li­gence agency, the Ger­man news­pa­per Welt report­ed in 2015. The Ger­man spy agency used some of the trans­port firm’s offices as cov­er for key oper­a­tives. Alfred Kuehne’s denaz­i­fi­ca­tion file includes a let­ter, marked “top secret” and dat­ed Feb­ru­ary 17, 1948, from British intel­li­gence to the Amer­i­can denaz­i­fi­ca­tion com­mit­tee in Bre­men. “It is con­sid­ered vital for oper­a­tions which are already in hand that Mr. Alfred Kuehne be denaz­i­fied in such a cat­e­go­ry so that he is able to retain his busi­ness,” wrote a chief of British intel­li­gence, who pro­vid­ed his rank, major-gen­er­al, in the let­ter, but not his name. “We would be very grate­ful to you if you could aid us in this mat­ter since it con­cerns the secu­ri­ty of the British and Amer­i­can zones.”

    Soon after the let­ter was sent, the Kuehnes’ busi­ness­es and oth­er assets, which had been frozen as part of their denaz­i­fi­ca­tion pro­ceed­ings, were returned to them and they were rein­stat­ed in their exec­u­tive posi­tions at Kuehne + Nagel.
    ...

    And as the arti­cle points out, this isn’t just a sto­ry about Ger­many’s wealth­i­est per­son refus­ing to acknowl­edge the ugly ori­gins of that mas­sive wealth. Kuehne’s insis­tence that all of this stuff is ‘in the past’ and not rel­e­vant today is very con­sis­tent with the his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism at the heart of the AfD’s polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy. So when we see how Kuehne has made large invest­ments in var­i­ous phil­an­thropic ini­tia­tives and plans on leav­ing all of his for­tune to the Kuehne foun­da­tion, mak­ing it one of the largest char­i­ties in the world, keep in mind that pro­tect­ing the his­toric lega­cy of the Kuehne fam­i­ly for­tu­nate is pre­sum­ably going to be part of the foun­da­tion’s mis­sion:

    ...
    For decades Germany’s polit­i­cal lead­ers have accept­ed moral respon­si­bil­i­ty and acknowl­edged the sins of the Nazi past, cen­ter­ing remem­brance as a com­po­nent of Ger­man soci­ety. But recent­ly the coun­try has seemed to regress. As the last wit­ness­es to the Nazi era die and the cul­tur­al mem­o­ry of the Third Reich fades, the right wing, increas­ing­ly main­stream, has attacked Germany’s pro­gres­sive ideals. For much of 2023, the far-right Alter­na­tive for Ger­many (AfD) polled as the largest par­ty, hit­ting an all-time high of 23 per­cent in the polls in Decem­ber. In June 2024 the AfD won a record num­ber of votes in the Euro­pean par­lia­ment elec­tions. The par­ty cap­tured 16 per­cent of the Ger­man vote and came in sec­ond in the elec­tions as con­cerns about immi­gra­tion and the econ­o­my fanned vot­er dis­con­tent.

    “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird sh it in over a thou­sand years of suc­cess­ful Ger­man his­to­ry,” the AfD’s then coleader Alexan­der Gauland said in a 2018 speech. The AfD’s extrem­ist wing is asso­ci­at­ed with anti­semitism, Islam­o­pho­bia, and his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism, includ­ing the down­play­ing of Nazi crimes and den­i­gra­tion of the Holo­caust. In May and July 2024, Björn Höcke, a lead­ing AfD politi­cian and founder of its extrem­ist wing, was fined twice by a Ger­man court for using the banned Nazi slo­gan “Every­thing for Ger­many!” in his cam­paign speech­es. Höcke has lament­ed the con­struc­tion of a Holo­caust memo­r­i­al in cen­tral Berlin. Call­ing Ger­mans “the only peo­ple in the world who plant­ed a memo­r­i­al of shame in the heart of their cap­i­tal,” he has demand­ed a “180-degree turn” in the country’s “pol­i­tics of mem­o­ry.”

    Kuehne’s pol­i­tics could be described as free-mar­ket con­ser­v­a­tive. “I believe that sup­port for the AfD will dwin­dle again,” he told Ger­man news­pa­per Welt in 2017. “Right-wing move­ments have no foothold in Ger­many.” Since 2021 he has donat­ed about 200,000 euros ($220,000) to the Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive CDU, the estab­lish­ment par­ty for Ger­man busi­ness and of for­mer chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel. Kuehne even once said he could envi­sion him­self vot­ing for the left-wing Green Par­ty.

    But Kuehne’s refusal to more pub­licly reck­on with his fam­i­ly and firm’s Nazi past plays into the hands of the revi­sion­ist move­ment, says Hen­ning Bleyl, direc­tor of the Hein­rich Böll Foun­da­tion in Bre­men, a think tank affil­i­at­ed with the Ger­man Green Par­ty. He has been inves­ti­gat­ing Kuehne + Nagel’s wartime activ­i­ties since 2015. These revi­sion­ist nar­ra­tives of Germany’s past are promi­nent­ly embod­ied by the AfD, but the far right in Ger­many, Aus­tria, France, and many oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries use his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism to manip­u­late the nar­ra­tive around the Nazi era and World War II to advance their polit­i­cal agen­da.

    “Even in past decades, it was unac­cept­able that Kuehne refused to deal hon­est­ly with his family’s actions dur­ing the Nazi era,” said Bleyl in an inter­view on the roof ter­race above his office in Bre­men. “Now it is even more of an issue because, as I view it, Kuehne’s stance places him in the ranks of those who want to ‘exon­er­ate’ Ger­man his­to­ry from its Nazi past.”

    ...

    Through 2023, Kuehne was the main spon­sor of Hamburg’s Har­bour Front Lit­er­a­ture Fes­ti­val. The main lit­er­a­ture prize, endowed with 10,000 euros, even bore his name, the Klaus-Michael Kuehne Prize. That was until 2022, when two nom­i­nees for the prize with­drew because of Kuehne’s refusal to deal with his firm and family’s Nazi past, and the prize was renamed. Kuehne’s foun­da­tion felt it was “treat­ed extreme­ly unfair­ly in the mat­ter,” a spokesper­son told the Ger­man news­pa­per Taz at the time. It soon stopped spon­sor­ing the fes­ti­val. It didn’t take place this year because the fes­ti­val wasn’t able to find a major spon­sor to replace the foun­da­tion.

    Author Sven Pfizen­maier was the first of the two nom­i­nees to with­draw from the prize. “I’m no fan of bil­lion­aires in gen­er­al and bil­lion­aires who prof­it­ed from Nazism, deny it, and white­wash them­selves by fund­ing art seems very bad, so that’s why I did it,” Pfizen­maier says by phone from Berlin.

    “We believe that being open, hon­est, and trans­par­ent in every­thing we do will build trust with our stake­hold­ers,” reads the open­ing sen­tence on Kuehne + Nagel’s investor rela­tions page. When it comes to the company’s dark his­to­ry, Kuehne is any­thing but open and trans­par­ent. In April 2015 a region­al TV chan­nel in Ger­many broad­cast a short doc­u­men­tary about Kuehne + Nagel’s role in the fur­ni­ture oper­a­tion. Short­ly before the film aired, Kuehne wrote to the chan­nel direc­tor, ask­ing that the out­let recon­sid­er broad­cast­ing the 22-minute doc­u­men­tary, because “old wounds are being reopened.”

    Kuehne’s brazen request, which was declined, came only months after he had shelved the Han­dels­blatt Research Insti­tute study sources say he had com­mis­sioned for Kuehne + Nagel’s 125th anniver­sary.

    In the run-up to the broad­cast, the trans­porta­tion firm pub­lished a defen­sive state­ment on its web­site. “Like oth­er com­pa­nies that already exist­ed before 1945, Kuehne + Nagel was involved in the war econ­o­my and had to main­tain its exis­tence in dark and dif­fi­cult times,” wrote the com­pa­ny in the Ger­man-only state­ment. “Kuehne + Nagel is aware of the shame­ful events dur­ing the Third Reich and deeply regrets that it car­ried out some of its activ­i­ties on behalf of the Nazi regime. The con­di­tions under the dic­ta­tor­ship at the time and the fact that Kuehne + Nagel sur­vived the tur­moil of war with all its strength and secured the company’s exis­tence must be tak­en into account.” It remains the sole acknowl­edg­ment to date by the firm about its Nazi activ­i­ties. Oth­er than the state­ment, Kuehne + Nagel’s web­site doesn’t men­tion the past, as it doesn’t have a his­to­ry sec­tion.

    ...

    When Kuehne dies, he’ll leave his hold­ing com­pa­ny, which con­trols his $44 bil­lion for­tune, includ­ing the major­i­ty of Kuehne + Nagel shares, to his fam­i­ly foun­da­tion. The Kuehne foun­da­tion will become one of the world’s largest pri­vate char­i­ties by endow­ment size, focus­ing on logis­tics, med­i­cine, cli­mate, and cul­ture.

    When he dies, Kuehne knows where he’ll be buried, he told a Ger­man mag­a­zine. He has reserved a place at Hamburg’s Ohls­dorf ceme­tery, next to his father.
    ...

    The Kuehne foun­da­tion clear­ly isn’t going to be lack­ing in resources to car­ry out its agen­da. And while cov­er­ing up and white­wash­ing the Kuehne fam­i­ly’s Nazi his­to­ry is like­ly to be part of that agen­da, much of that fam­i­ly his­to­ry is now pub­licly known. That’s part of what’s going to be make it grim­ly inter­est­ing to see how the foun­da­tion approach­es this issue going for­ward. There’s undoubt­ed­ly plen­ty of fam­i­ly secrets yet to be revealed, and yet it’s also obvi­ous that Kuehne would strong­ly pre­fer that Ger­many and the world adopt a ‘the past is dead and buried’ atti­tude, at least when it comes to what is already known about Kuehne + Nagel. It’s a nasty recipe for the pro­mo­tion of Nazi white­wash­ing revi­sion­ism. Financed with the largest per­son­al for­tune in Ger­many.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 2, 2024, 4:00 pm

Post a comment