862.20235/8–3047
The United States Political Adviser for Germany (Murphy) to the Secretary of State
No. 10826
Sir: I have the honor to refer to the Department’s telegraphic instruction no. 1556, dated July 28, 1947,63 and to the series of previous communications recently exchanged on the subject of eight Germans deported aboard the SS Río Teuco in June of this year from Argentina. Signed affidavits from five of the deportees who were deemed of little importance—namely Georg Heinrich Richter, Hans Lieberth, Hans Napp, Albert Treusch, and Anna Assmann—have already been obtained and forwarded to the Department (cf. despatches nos. 10523, 10549, 10576, 10577, and 10588, dated July 23, 25, 30, 31, 31, respectively65). [Page 210] The questioning of the remaining three, Hans Harnisch, Wolf Franczok alias Gustav Utzinger, and Josef Schröll alias Alfonso Chantrain, is still going on; and these interrogations have now reached a sufficiently advanced stage to warrant the present interim report of progress.
The five “quota-fillers” named above, Georg Heinrich Richter, Hans Lieberth, Hans Napp, Albert Treusch, and Anna Assmann, have been moved to Ludwigsburg following the Department’s approval indicated in telegram no. 1556 of July 28. It is probable that they will soon have been released from the Repatriation Center. Their interrogation was based principally on the directives outlined in the Department’s telegraphic instruction no. 3055 of December 28, 1946, and reaffirmed in telegram no. 1244 of June 12, 1947.66 While nothing of basic importance was gleaned from these five their statements brought out several details which may serve to bolster and corroborate certain aspects of the declarations of Harnisch and Utzinger. The testimony of the five will, of course, be in the Department’s hands before reception of the present despatch.
Harnisch and Utzinger, and to a lesser extent Chantrain, are by far the most interesting and fertile subjects made available to date for interrogation on the subject of the Farrell and Perón régimes. Nevertheless, many misunderstandings regarding the real nature and extent of their activities must be corrected, since any information which originated from Argentine sources should now be regarded a priori as highly colored and in many instances outright false. All in all, a synthesis of the current testimony presents a very sorry picture of wilful deception and plain double dealing.… The latter had one purpose in their investigations: to suppress all evidence of political collusion between Argentine officialdom and the German agents and to present the espionage cases in a purely technical context. There is overwhelming evidence that with the exception of a favored group oriented around the Freudes, father and son, and Werner Koennecke, the large majority of the German prisoners were cajoled or forced—with empty promises that they would go free and/or avoid deportation—into putting their signatures to a specious tissue of half-truths and lies. That this whole fabrication obeyed a basic design laid out by Ludwig Freude—abetted by Juan D. Perón—appears to the interrogator to have been established beyond a reasonable doubt.
The whole handling of the espionage cases by the Argentine government was, in the words of Gustav Utzinger, a juridical farce. Dossiers of favored individuals disappeared from the police files, dates [Page 211] were altered and names suppressed, deals were made between the police and the prisoners, confiscated funds disappeared into the pockets of the Coordinación Federal. Shortly after the Utzinger group was broken up and its members arrested in August 1944, Perón, then Minister of War, came to the Coordinación and explicitly instructed Major Oscar Contal as to the line which must be followed in the prisoners’ statements. All reference to collusion was to be suppressed, and only the technical aspects of espionage allowed to remain; and even many of the latter were made taboo. Contal thereupon concluded a “gentleman’s agreement” with Utzinger, who instructed his group to eliminate from their declarations all reference to the following points: contact with Argentine or other South American political and military personalities; contact with other intelligence groups; money matters; contact with German firms; landing of agents; chemicals and microphotographs; contents of radio messages transmitting experiments, wave lengths, and coding messages. As a quid pro quo, the Argentines engaged to spare to the best of their ability the German commercial and financial interests vested in the country. After all the resultant statements had been shoehorned into a pattern which satisfied the requirements of Argentine policy, the prisoners were made to sign them. Then, when Johannes Siegfried Becker had been caught, many prisoners had to revise whole pages of their testimony in order that the allover story might dovetail with Becker’s statement. The latter had to be entirely refabricated and cut from 300 to about 50 pages in order to eliminate the many embarrassing declarations the SD chief had made in the first flush of his anger at having been apprehended.
A first brief factual statement made by Hans Harnisch following his arrest in early 1944 was immediately destroyed, even the carbons being burned, and a second and third were later prepared along lines laid down by the Coordinación Federal. As Harnisch pointed out, the police went into excruciatingly minute detail in such irrelevant matters as when and under what circumstances he had met and dealt with a host of unimportant people, but at the same time they dismissed with a vague phrase or two such subjects as his implication in the Hellmuth affair and his intimate associations with high-ranking Argentine and Paraguayan officials.
For the rest, the Argentine Government has evidently played a captious and legalistic game with the lists of German agents demanded by the United States for deportation. By using these specific lists as a basis for bargaining over their “international obligations” and by eventually surrendering a limited number of the “wanted” individuals, the Argentines were able at the end to get what they wanted—participation in the Rio Conference—without being seriously challenged [Page 212] on the score of the potentially far more dangerous Nazi nucleus of former NSDAP leaders. Harnisch and Utzinger were, after all, cogs in a wartime organization the reason for which has now ceased to exist; and, although these two have naturally tried to minimize their individual importance under interrogation, to view them and their kind as the most likely focal point for a resurgence of Nazism in Argentina would be a disorienting mistake.
Owing to the extreme length which the current interrogations are expected to reach by the time they are finished, it is planned to incorporate the results into a series of affidavits, arranged by subjects, with accompanying third-person interrogation reports to cover less controversial matters (biographical sketches, et cetera). Some of these affidavits have already been drawn up and signed, but it is believed that to submit them before the completion of the series would disturb the pattern of the all-over picture. In the meanwhile, excerpts have been made dealing with the two groups of specific topics suggested in the Department’s telegraphic instructions nos. 3055 of December 28, 1946, and 1556 of July 28, 1947 (enclosures nos. 1 and 2, herewith).67
Respectfully yours,