Abstract

Abstract:

The 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act made accessible a large volume of CIA and FBI records, much still unexplored. The following utilizes this and other literature to examine the postwar activities of Ferdinand Ďurčanský, a former collaborator who had served in a number of high-ranking posts in the Slovak state that emerged from the September 1938 Munich Agreement, the extension of autonomy to Slovakia later that year, and the 1939 partition of Czechoslovakia. Most scholarship on postwar Slovak separatism details former collaborators' efforts to recreate that state, but little is written on its connections to Cold War intelligence agencies such as the so-called Gehlen Organization, established in 1946 by the U.S. Army and later to become the foreign intelligence service of West Germany. Newly available records illustrate how men such as Ďurčanský sought to exploit American and German intelligence while delivering little useful information in return. More intense U.S. monitoring of the Gehlen Organization followed the 1949 shift to CIA sponsorship. But if intelligence professionals objected to Ďurčanský's employment, Gehlen's increased stature within the new Federal Republic of Germany prevented termination of his employment.

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