Gehlen Research: Primary Documents Jackpot

Reinhard Gehlen

As I have discussed before, I am doing a research project on the former German spymaster Reinhard Gehlen and the organization that he established after the second World War which eventually became the West German (and now just German) Bundesnachrichtendienst, or Federal Intelligence Service. The relationship between Gehlen and his spy ring had with the United States, in particularly the CIA, was extremely controversial as the American public would have been horrified to know that their government had employed former Nazis in their attempt to gather intelligence on the Soviets.

Because of the controversy of their relationship many officials in the CIA, the American military and the American government did not trust Gehlen or the intelligence gathered by his organization during the Cold War. This is going to be the focus of my research project. From a post-Soviet era, 21st century vantage point, I want to know if the intelligence gathered by Gehlen’s spy ring was — as many Americans claim — actually inaccurate and deceiving or if that was simply something that the Americans unjustly accused the Gehlen Organization of. I watched a History Channel special about Reinhard Gehlen which presented Gehlen in a very negative light, claiming that his intelligence was falsified and incorrect. I guess we will see though.

Today I spent most of the morning and early afternoon researching at the university library. I have already spent quite a bit of time there this week, but this time I spent it looking for primary documents related to Gehlen and his organization. It turns out that the CIA declassified a huge number of documents in the late 90’s and in 2004. That’s lucky, but unfortunately it would require a trip to the National Archives in Washington DC, which I am unwilling to spend the money and time to do for a short undergraduate research paper. I was quite discouraged by this, but after a bit more looking around on the internet, I came across a site from The George Washington University which has all of the released documents in handy PDF files I can download for free. Needless to say, that pretty much made my day. I am now in over my head with primary documents on the organization and can’t wait to start sifting through them.

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LibraryThing

So I broke down and decided to catalog my ever-growing personal library. I chose to use an online tool called LibraryThing because it seemed like a good way of keeping track of everything. There are other tools out there that I considered, many of which are offline, however most of the cost money and I didn’t want to spend money on something when I can get it for free. LibraryThing seems like a good tool. I haven’t cataloged my entire library yet, only what I happen to have on hand with me at the moment. All 38 books. I have a much larger collection of books that I still need to move to my apartment at some point.

If you are interested, you can view my library here. I will also be putting a link to my library catalog as a button on the right side of the blog so readers can view it at anytime.

If you have any books that you think I should add to my library or any comments, feel free to leave me a comment on this post or any other post.

Here is a widget with some of my books:

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Oldest English Words

The BBC is running an interesting article about the oldest words in the English language. Researchers are currently saying that they believe the oldest words still in use in modern English are “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” which date back tens of thousands of years. They also cite words such as “squeeze”, “guts”, “stick” and “bad” as words that will go extinct. Here is a portion of the article:

Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say.

Reading University researchers claim “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.

Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.

The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct – citing “squeeze”, “guts”, “stick” and “bad” as probable first casualties.

“We use a computer to fit a range of models that tell us how rapidly these words evolve,” said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading.

“We fit a wide range, so there’s a lot of computation involved; and that range then brackets what the true answer is and we can estimate the rates at which these things are replaced through time.”

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David Irving's Translation of Der Dienst: Erinnerungen 1942-1971

For anyone who is going to be working with the memoirs of Reinhard Gehlen, do not use David Irving’s translation of it, entitled: The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen. For a project I am working on, I have been dealing with both Irving’s translation as well as the original book in German written by Gehlen himself (Der Dienst: Erinnerungen 1942-1971). I read the German version cover to cover for this project and have been attempting to use Irving’s translation as a quick reference to check for facts, however, as I have been using the translation, not only is information missing from the original in his translation (I’ve had to check the original multiple times to verify it was actually there), but there are actually pages and pages of accounts and “memories” that don’t exist anywhere in the original!

The accounts may be true for all I know, but they are presented as though Gehlen told them (though he did not in his memoirs) and there are no references cited. It has been most frustrating and I do intend to report this inaccuracy to the university. Perhaps they will dispose of the book as anyone who is unable to read the German version would have no idea otherwise, possibly leading to inaccuracy.

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"Beware the Inventor"

1911 Telephone Ad

I found something quite amusing from an 1865 Boston newspaper:

A man about 43 years of age giving the name Joshua Coppersmith has been arrested for attempting to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people by exhibiting a device which he says will convey the human voice any distance over metallic wires. He calls the instrument a ‘telephone,’ which is obviously intended to imitate the word ‘telegraph’ and win the confidence of those who know the success of the latter instrument. Well informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires, as may be done by dots and dashes and signals of the Morse Code. The authorities who apprehended this criminal are to be congratulated and it is hoped that punishment will be prompt and fitting, and that it may serve as an example to other conscienceless schemers who enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow creatures.

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Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln!

Abraham Lincoln

Today marks the 200th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s birth. He was born on February 12, 1809 in a one-room cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky.

Lincoln's One Room Cabin

If you are interested there is some interesting information regarding some photos recently of Lincoln’s second inauguration. I’ve written about it before.

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Contact is important, but what about the other tens of thousands of years?

I have to say that I am quite disappointed with my Native American Studies class this semester. I was (apparently naively) assuming that we would focus more on Native American culture and more on the history of the Native American peoples before first contact with the European nations. I was, however, wrong.

We spent the first two weeks covering the pre-contact era and have now suddenly began talking about the first encounters with the Spanish in Mexico. I understand that there is not really a whole lot known about the Native Americans before contact, but there is certainly plenty of available knowledge out there to fill a semester-long course! Of course I also understand that the first contact with Europeans is extremely important because of the incredibly devastating effects it had on Native American culture and society, but I have already heard so much about it, that I really don’t want to spend another semester discussing it.

My hope was to learn something of the vast variety of cultures in the Americas before the Europeans destroyed all of them. I have to say I am extremely disappointed in that.

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Reinhard Gehlen

This semester I am taking a historical methods class in which the focus is the history of espionage. In this class, we are required to choose a topic related to the history of intelligence and do a research paper based on that. The topic I have chosen to do is Reinhard Gehlen who held a high rank in the German military as an intelligence gatherer during World War II and then was used by the CIA after the war to collect intelligence on the Soviet Union in East Germany.

Reinhard Gehlen in 1945

Gehlen was instructed to create a spy ring based in West Germany that would gather intelligence on Soviet affairs. Because of this he was excused from any warcrimes he had committed during the Nazi era. His spy ring became known as the “Organisation Gehlen” and included many of his former colleagues whom he worked with during the second World War. The Organisation Gehlen essentially became the forerunner for the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), or the Federal Intelligence Bureau, which is in many respects the German equivalent of the CIA. Gehlen served as the BND’s first president.

For more about Reinhard Gehlen, see the Reinhard Gehlen article on Wikipedia.

As part of this particular assignment, we have to include memoirs from the person involved. Reinhard Gehlen wrote his memoirs in 1971 under the title of Der Dienst: Erinnerungen 1942-1971 (The Service: Memoirs 1942-1971). The library here does not have a copy of the book in English, so I have to resort to reading it in German. It shouldn’t really be a problem, but it will take a little longer to plough through all 400 pages of it.

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Translation Services

This really has nothing to do with history, but I thought I would be a staunch self-promoter here as well as my other blogs:

As part of my on going adventures with the German language, I provide translation services from both German to English and English to German. If you are looking for someone who can translate any length of document for relatively cheap, then look no further!

English is my native language and I have 9 years of experience with the German language. I have lived, worked and studied in Germany. For typewritten or digital documents, websites or anything else digital, I charge US $0.08 or 0.06 euros a word. For handwritten documents, I will need to see the document before I can provide a price as handwritten documents can be far more difficult to decipher.

Please contact me at seifertalex [at] gmail [dot] com. If you would prefer to contact me by phone, please first contact me by e-mail and I will send you my phone number.

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