reSee.it Video Transcript AI Summary
In 1948, I was a special agent with CIC (counterintelligence corps) in occupied Germany, stationed in Augsburg, handling a network of German informants, among them Klaus Barbie. I later discovered that he was wanted for murder by the French, and I reported this to my superiors; they told me to keep nice and quiet, saying he was still valuable, and that when he was no longer valuable, we’d turn him over to the French. I thought I would get a promotion for reporting Barbie, but they told me to keep quiet.
Colonel Gunther Bernal was an agent informant working for military intelligence in Stuttgart. We provided him a home, a safe house in Ludwigsburg, and I met him three times a week; he brought us information about communists and whatever we wanted to hear. He was certainly a very strong Nazi. I sat in his office one day and opened his album of pictures from the war; in the middle of the album, there was a nice picture of Adolf Hitler. Several other high ranking SS officers came to visit him at the safe house we provided.
He told me that if for any reason he needed help, by one telephone call he could contact 200 former SS leaders from Hamburg to Munich. I remember him taking me to a particular spot we uncovered and dug out; there were rifles, small arms, grenades, all nicely wrapped in cosmoline. He said he had thousands of these all over the country, and that sort of made me a little suspicious, and I reported it. They said, well, we know this—they're all working for us in case the communist come across the Iron Curtain.
A former SS general, Paul Houser, was a frequent visitor at Bernhaus House, and they worked together hand in glove on certain programs which we didn’t know anything about, and I wasn’t even asked to find out more about it. Somebody above me must have been running this network already at that time.