Free The Nazis Next Door by Eric Lichtblau

implicated in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews.
    It was Allen Dulles, predictably, who first pursued Höttl as an American spy. At the same time that Dulles was working with General Wolff in Italy at the close of the war, he was also authorizing separate talks with Höttl in Austria. “H. is, of course, dangerous. He is a Nazi,”an American intelligence officer wrote to Dulles in 1945, in reference to Höttl. As a result, any contact with him should be “as indirect as possible,” the officer said. Still, Höttl made a “favorable impression” and appeared sincere and trustworthy, the officer wrote; using him as an American spy, even at a distance, seemed worth the risk.
    Dulles agreed,echoing the assessment: “This type of source requires utmost caution.” Höttl’s wartime record with the SS “is, of course, bad,” Dulles added. “But I believe he desires to save his skin and therefore may be useful.”
    As the delicate dance between Höttl and his handlers continued in the months after Germany’s surrender, it was difficult to tell who had the upper hand—the Americans who had just won the war, or the vanquished Nazi officers who wanted to sell them their spy services. The Americans were desperate for intelligence on the Communists, and Höttl knew precisely which weak spots to hit in his dealings with Dulles. The British, he told one American interrogator, had a “well-established” intelligence operation in Europe, while the Americans clearly did not. Their intelligence operations in Europe were weak, he said, and they would inevitably have to turn to ex-Nazis like himself for information. “I believe that I can be of considerable benefit to the interests of the USA,” Höttl said, sounding like an eager job applicant; his knowledge of the Soviets, he added, should not “be left unused in an internment camp.”
    Dulles and American intelligence officials took the bait. Even Höttl’s Nazi bosses had not trusted him—one SS man in 1941 had declared him “a liar, a toady, a schemer, and a pronounced operator”—but the Americans were willing to take a chance on the man. Freed from custody, Höttl was entrusted by military intelligence and CIA officials over the next few years to run secret spy rings in Austria and Hungary that relied on former Nazi officers like himself. Other American officials who knew of Höttl’s reputation were aghast to find out he was now working on their side. While there were “a few decent representatives of the former SD,” Höttl was surely not one of them, a military official warned in an internal memo. “Should it eventually become known that Höttl is being used by the Americans, this would be incomprehensible to all decent Germansand Austrians.”
    For those who knew of Höttl’s secret past, it was almost inevitable that the Americans’ partnership with the ex-Nazi would implode. The intelligence he sold the CIA and the U.S. Army, based on his highly touted Soviet contacts, was often pedestrian, sometimes dead wrong, and occasionally even bogus. Public reports from newspaper or radio reports were passed off to the Americans as top-secret intelligence. Höttl could churn out much of the prized intelligence he was selling America, one U.S. assessment concluded derisively, “without interrupting his regular pattern of coffee house conversations.”
    His paltry output soon became the least of the Americans’ concerns. Höttl, despite his claims to Dulles of “altruistic” motives, was plainly a man out for himself. At the end of the war, Höttl was negotiating with fellow Nazis to claim a share of the gold and jewelry looted from Jews in Hungary and hidden away via the so-called Hungarian gold train. There were reports that he had stashed looted Nazi assets in Switzerland as well. Once he started working for Washington, Höttl seized on the Americans as his next big moneymaker. He began embezzling massive amounts of cash from the Army,