by proldic » Tue Aug 09, 2005 7:31 pm
From Sunday Times Magazine (UK):<br> <br>The Gestapo killer who lived twice<br>By Sarah Helm<br><br>He was a notorious Nazi war criminal, responsible for countless gruesome slaughters. But Horst Kopkow cheated the gallows when Britain's spymasters put him on their payroll...<br> <br>He had almost certainly cheated the gallows: a war-crimes trial would have heard evidence of murders as brutal and heinous as any in the second world war. Kopkow, a brilliant counterintelligence officer, was ruthless, cruel and cold-blooded. His victims were routinely tortured, sometimes bound and beaten to a pulp, executed with a coup de grace in the back of the head or by lethal injection and even thrown alive into the furnaces of concentration camps. And many were women.<br><br>Women like the heroine Violette Szabo, posthumous winner of the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre, whose courage and murder were the subject of the now-famous film Carve Her Name with Pride. Kopkow was responsible for the capture and murder of at least 100 agents trained by Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) and parachuted behind enemy lines. Almost always, investigators learnt, responsibility for their gruesome end lay at Kopkow's door. In the three years since the war ended, those who had trained and sent the agents on their missions had investigated and pieced together the fate of the agents and were determined to make Kopkow pay for his crimes. They must have felt cheated by his death; what they didn't know was that their own colleagues had cheated them...<br><br>...on the day [the British Government claimed Kopkow was buried], the Nazi was beginning a new life, with a new identity, as a servant of the crown. MI6 had decided Kopkow was an asset to be protected and employed; it had faked his death and his internment. He became Peter Cordes, a factory manager and, by the time Elizabeth II was enthroned, a spy in the employ of Her Majesty's secret service. Free to be reunited with his family, free to travel extensively in the employ of his new masters, free even to philander on numerous holidays in the Alps or the Mediterranean with his mistresses, leaving his wife and family at home.<br> <br>In her living room in the north German town of Gelsenkirchen, [Kopkow's wife] Gerda...peers at the official British letter written 58 years ago...aged 92, [she] has never seen the letter before, but she knows it is an official lie. "Ja, ja, das ist mein Mann," she says eagerly as she begins to read. "But he died here in Gelsenkirchen in 1996," declares Gerda with a half-smile.<br><br>Kopkow had convinced the British secret services that he had valuable information about communists, and in the post-war scramble to secure intelligence about Soviet spies, that information saved him from the hangman's noose...<br> <br>In the 1980s the world was scandalised by revelations that the US protected Nazis like Klaus Barbie, the so-called "Butcher of Lyons". Public anger in the US resulted in the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosures Act. It is now known that the CIA protected and employed dozens of Nazi war criminals during the cold war, but the British have always concealed any such duplicity...<br><br>[Kopkow] trained as a pharmacist but like many young Germans he became a teenage convert to fascism. By the age of 21, [he] was a leader of the local branch of the National Socialist Party and Gerda was a leader of a Nazi women's group. Gerda said: "We were proud to have believed it all before even Hitler became popular. We were young. It was exciting for us."<br><br>By 1933, when Hitler came to power, Kopkow had joined the SS... <br><br>In 1937, Kopkow was promoted...to Berlin to do intelligence work in the nerve centre of the Nazi security police — the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA). First directed by Reinhard Heidrich, the leading planner of Hitler's "final solution", the RSHA was the central SS department from which all official and secret police and security organs of the Third Reich were led. By 1939, Kopkow was a Kriminalkommissar in department IV of the RSHA, responsible for the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), headed by the notorious Obergruppenführer Heinrich Mueller. Part of department IV was the subsection IV-2-A, where Kopkow was responsible for capturing enemy spies and saboteurs. Hitler himself set out the objectives of his spy-hunters in his "commando order", which stated that "all so-called commando missions, even if they are to all appearances soldiers in uniform, whether armed or unarmed, in battle or in flight, are to be slaughtered to the last man".<br><br>Once interrogated, agents were disposed of under the Nacht und Nebel decree. They were literally to "disappear" as if into the "night and fog". They were sent to concentration camps to be hanged, shot, gassed or injected with a lethal substance, and their bodies burnt so no trace of them or the way they died could be found.<br><br>But traces of the British agents were found at the first concentration camp liberated by the allies in April 1945. When US troops entered Buchenwald, survivors revealed that British agents had been slowly hanged by wire attached from meat hooks in the crematorium basement.<br><br>The SOE cases became the focus of a war-crimes investigation led by Vera Atkins, the SOE leader who had briefed agents and felt a personal bond with many. Under the auspices of the judge advocate general's department of the war office, she was assisted by specialist Nazi hunters, mostly German or Austrian-Jewish exiles, who were members of "Haystack" — so named because finding Nazi war criminals amid the devastation of post-war Germany was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Scouring the allied-occupied zones of Germany, by mid-1946 Atkins established that four British women — captured behind the lines in occupied France — were among 90,000 women murdered at Ravensbruck women's concentration camp.<br><br>One of the SOE women, Cicely Lefort, was taken to Ravensbruck's extermination sub-camp and gassed in a van. Her fellow agents Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch were worked to exhaustion, imprisoned in a punishment block and shot in the back of the head. Their bodies were burnt immediately.<br><br>Then Atkins investigated the identities of four blackened female corpses seen by a camp crematorium stoker in the oven at a little-known concentration camp called Natzweiler, in Alsace. Evidence showed that although the women had been given lethal injections, groans were heard as they were undressed and dragged towards the furnace. One woman woke up as she was being shoved into the flames and scratched her executioner's face. Eventually, Atkins established that the dead women were Diana Rowden, Vera Leigh, Sonia Olschanesky and Andrée Borrel, all agents with the French section of SOE.<br><br>Evidence then emerged that at Dachau three more SOE women were beaten and then shot. A fourth woman, Noor Inayat Khan, also died at Dachau. After first being shackled in chains for months, she was beaten "until she was a bloody mess" and shot. Her last word was "liberté".<br><br>At the end of the war, the names of the biggest war criminals were already known to the allies...<br><br>When Atkins began her investigation she had no reason to know about Horst Kopkow. But as she interrogated more and more Gestapo staff, she kept hearing Kopkow's name. A middle-ranking Gestapo man called Walter Herberg volunteered that agents and infiltrators were taken directly to a man called Kopkow in Berlin and then "disappeared". He mentioned two Russian women dropped by the British. "These two were taken to Kopkow's office and delivered to him personally. They were never seen again." He mentioned a Dutchman called Van de Velde. Kopkow had ordered a "harsh" interrogation, "which meant 12 strokes with an ox-hide whip".<br><br>Atkins was told by other Gestapo men that Kopkow was the man who sent out the Sonderbehandlung, or "order for special treatment", for captured spies. Kopkow kept a low profile and his name rarely appeared on the actual execution orders. But day-to-day contact with Berlin went through Kopkow, who handled all the paperwork. He insisted on "receipts" for bodies.<br><br>In the Natzweiler case, it emerged that local Gestapo officers had twice sought instructions from Kopkow's dept IV-2-A about where to take the women prisoners, and were instructed to take them to the concentration camp. A Gestapo man called Wassmer said all instructions for the transport of SOE women to Dachau came from Berlin, and he specified Kopkow Horst, dept IV-2-A. The Vollzugszettel (execution chit) was also received from Berlin, said Wassmer. Otto Preis, whom Atkins identified as the Karlsruhe Gestapo's "professional bumper-off", said orders for execution arrived by urgent letter from the RSHA in Berlin, countersigned by the chief and head of department (Kopkow) and then passed onto the local office handling the case. Even Sturmbannführer Hans Kieffer, counterintelligence chief in Paris, was eventually captured and told Atkins that every decision about the agents' interrogation and imprisonment — including the timing and destination of the transports to Germany — was authorised by Kopkow.<br><br>By the end of the summer of 1946, not only did Atkins wish to bring Kopkow to trial but she wanted to secure vital information from him. The fate of a number of missing agents was still unknown. But, though more and more senior SS officers implicated in the case were being run to ground, Atkins could find no trace of Kopkow.<br><br>On August 23, 1946, as she wound up her German investigation and left for England, Atkins issued a last urgent "wanted" note to "Haystack" saying: "Kopkow is wanted in connection with deaths of British agents in Nazi concentration camps, particularly Natzweiler and Dachau. All reports and documents of captured agents were sent to Kopkow. And he ordered their removal to concentration camps and liquidation. If arrested please advise VMA [Vera May Atkins] in the UK. He was last known at the Reichsicherhautsauptampt [RSHA] Amt IV".<br><br>Then, in September 1946, after interrogating a suspect held in London called Dr Josef Goetz, Atkins picked up an astonishing tip. Dr Goetz told her Horst Kopkow was in British hands.<br><br>She fired off a note to her Haystack colleagues: "I imagine he must be at Bad Nenndorf," said Atkins, referring to a top-secret facility in the British zone run by MI5 and used by all British intelligence services to screen important prisoners, including informants or Nazi die-hards suspected of continuing underground resistance.<br><br>Even before the German surrender in May 1945, Britain's two intelligence services, MI6 and MI5, were preparing to fight a new war against the Soviet Union...their priority now was not to bring Nazi intelligence chiefs to justice but to pick their brains about communist networks. While Kopkow's name meant nothing at first to war-crimes hunters, it was widely known by senior intelligence staff who had access during the war to signals decodes, known as Ultra, taken from German police traffic. Kopkow's name cropped up on the decodes relating to movements of captured parachutists or saboteurs.<br><br>Unknown to Atkins, and to war-crimes investigators, on May 29, 1945, British intelligence had its first coup. "To: War Room", says the telegram announcing Kopkow's capture. "Detailed interrogation of Kopkow commencing shortly at CSDIC" — a reference to the special interrogation centre at Bad Nenndorf.<br><br>On his arrest, Kopkow told his British interrogators the dramatic story of his last days of flight. When defeat was inevitable, he had headed north with colleagues to the Baltic coast, where Himmler, the Reichsführer (head of the SS), had set up a base at Flensburg...<br><br>...the British allowed Kopkow to dictate his statements to her. The information concerned, almost exclusively, his knowledge of Soviet espionage operations, and it was "encyclopaedic". "As he has a very methodical brain, the structure of these statements was left to him and is his responsibility," noted an interrogator. "He was allowed almost complete freedom and was seldom interrupted."<br><br>From time to time, however, direct questions were put to Kopkow from one particular MI6 staff officer in London. The officer, who signed his name on the briefing document H Philby, took a close interest in Kopkow's case and wanted to know more about specific communist agents he named who were working against western governments. Kim Philby, as Kopkow's questioner is better known, was then head of London's MI6 Soviet desk. It was not until 15 years later that Philby himself was exposed as a Soviet spy.<br><br>As Kopkow's interrogations continued, his MI6 minders were more and more impressed with him. One said: "It was realised that it would be hardly possible to catch K out on contradictions, etc, through cross questioning as he is too intelligent for that . . . and knows all the tricks of the trade." One of Kopkow's "tricks of the trade" was to avoid self-incrimination. Happy to tell the British about communists who might now be targeting Britain, he feigned ignorance of any wartime operations involving western agents. "His knowledge of the west is far inferior [to his knowledge of communism], often secondhand with few exceptions," said one interrogator.<br><br>The "stories" of communist agents continued to spill out, and in 60 pages of interrogation Kopkow was hardly asked about his war crimes against British agents and was certainly not pressed on their fate. There is little doubt that, early in his interrogation, a deal was done with him. "His attitude is that his only chance for a milder judgement is to tell as much as possible. He also declares he is fully prepared to make any declaration of loyalty required," an interrogator noted. Gerda recalls that he was promised immunity within months of his arrest. Gerda and Horst were even allowed to meet during his captivity, in a house provided by the British. "They were very kind to us," Gerda said... <br><br>"He always told us he'd been freed because of the help he gave a British major," said Gerda, who could not recall the British major's name. There is no trace of such a story in the files, but one British major Kopkow was closely associated with was Frank Chamier...<br> <br>The war-crimes case against Kopkow was now closed. What happened to him next is unclear, as the files on his case remain closed beyond 1948. It is likely, though, that his real work for MI6 now began. And he was soon sent back to continue this work in the British zone of occupied Germany, where he could live as a normal citizen with a new ID and a new name.<br><br>"We didn't see him again until 1950," said Gerda...Then Horst Kopkow miraculously reappeared and told his family he was now Peter Cordes. "I think the British fixed it all," said Gerda...<br><br>How long "Peter Cordes" worked for British intelligence after the war, or what this work involved, is also murky. His family today cannot say. Nor can anyone else. When Kopkow's family wrote to the German military archives for information in 1986, they received a letter saying the request had been passed to the secret state archives for Prussia and no more was heard. And Kopkow himself destroyed his papers before he died, leaving only a carefully sanitised CV for his family to hand out after his death, should questions be asked. Intelligence sources do not deny, however, that Kopkow continued to work for British intelligence into the 1950s, when numerous operations were launched to build up spy networks inside the eastern bloc.<br><br>As cover, Kopkow found regular employment with a textile manufacturer...He also travelled widely, but always alone and was careful where he went. "He liked the Mediterranean and Egypt," says Gerda...<br><br>Then, in 1956, Kopkow decided to take back his old name, now calling himself Horst Kopkow-Cordes... <br><br>The length of his intelligence service for Britain is unclear, but Kopkow was evidently protected by the British for the rest of his life. He was never questioned again about his past or asked to give evidence at later war-crimes trials. And although scores of those who carried out Kopkow's orders had by now been executed, MI6 continued to sanitise his story...<br><br>Richard Breitman, professor of modern German history at Harvard, who is directing research into American recruitment of Nazis, believes that by employing war criminals like Kopkow, both Britain and the US began the post-war era "tainted by the worst crimes of the century". They also obstructed justice.<br><br>And Kopkow could have had no defence in pleading ignorance of Nazi crimes. The evidence against him is overwhelming. Gerda Kopkow herself declares that her husband knew all about the concentration camps... <br><br>Nazi-hunters are now calling for complete disclosure of post-war British intelligence documents along the lines of the US initiative. "There is no question that Horst Kopkow was a war criminal and should have faced trial," said Eritz Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem. "The question is, how many more cases lie in British files?"<br><br>Kopkow died of pneumonia in October 1996...with his family at his side. It's more than can be said for his victims...But his work for the British secret service and the "knowledge" he traded for his life mainly stays locked in classified files... <br><br>Sarah Helm is the author of A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (Little, Brown)<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <p></p><i></i>
