Berlin: In the Underground War against Russia and China (II)
Commentary by Hans-Rüdiger Minow
In the underground war against Russia and China, material constraints determine the order of precedence: Russia is a neighbor and geographically much closer. Logistically it seems to be manageable, as far as the western region's technical density is compatible with that of Germany (road, rail and flight standards), militarily containable, once threat potential to Moscow can be permanently deployed at its borders, and economically exploitable, if the reserves of raw materials can be procured from the Far East (also by sea), at a low price. However, the further Berlin reaches beyond Moscow, the more complicated the underground becomes.
Russia's southern borders, verging on oil deposits of neighboring Asia, extend to China in the Far East at the Ussuri border river. Whoever seeks to operate there, needs Asian means and Asian intermediaries. Here, the priority Russia had assumed in German history, is becoming Asian. With China added, both are objects of German global policy's material necessities: to expand unrestrained access to markets and, in case of resistance, use force - covertly or openly.
Illegal Weapons Exports
The "Reich" mainly operated covertly during the interbellum years (1919 - 1939). Agents sought to carry out their underground operations on both targets of German global policy - Russia and China - simultaneously. They commuted between Moscow and Peking.
In concert with state authorities, Max Bauer participated in the putsch of the extreme right against democratic forces of the postwar government in the Germany of the Weimar Republic. Formerly an agent at the general staff level with covert contacts to armament companies (Gas & Guns industries), Max Bauer helped those industries export their weapons bypassing the arms ban after the lost war. He successfully offered German war materials to military authorities in the Soviet Republic and recommended himself to the war lords in China. Testing poison gas was his mission in Russia, under cover and with the knowledge of the Berlin government, a breach of international law with deadly consequences, but, as a successful agent, it made him useful - also beyond Moscow.
The poison gas agent traveled on to China, became advisor to the Kuomintang, the extreme right wing in the turmoil of the civil war over China's national unity. Max Bauer ordered officers from Berlin to train Chiang Kai-shek's civil war troops in tactics - on exported German arms.
Lasting Alliance
The advantages were multiple: Weapons from Germany aided in permanently treating China as a colony, a country torn apart by internal struggles, and from those struggles, to reap immediate profits. The Kuomintang promptly paid Rheinmetall, Junkers und Messerschmitt in Reichsmark and dollars.
The direct contacts between extreme right-wing German putschists and the nationalist staff of General Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang were intensified. Chiang's son Wego graduated form the Nazi War Academy in Munich, enlisted in the Gebirgsjäger (mountain infantry) in Garmisch and participated in the invasion of Austria. On a photo, he can be seen in the Wehrmacht uniform adorned with the swastika. A lasting ideological and political alliance developed between Berlin, its foreign policy Nazi agents and the Kuomintang.
Covered by the milieu of military supporters (Georg Wetzell, Hermann Kriebel) more German companies settled in the Kuomintang areas: Siemens, AEG, MIAG, Otto Wolff, Mercedes and I.G. Farben - the latter with am interest in a mustard gas factory to store the banned ordnance in China. Trade relations followed the same pattern that had always entangled Russia: technological supremacy (machines) for raw material deposits (antimony, tungsten).
Protective Power for Tibet
When the Hitler government intensified its racist global policy, it needed an ideological object in the east that could transfigure the economic interests for the homeland, would be acceptable for Asian partners and would confirm the primacy of Germanic Germans in the alliance. A European myth was revived: in the Mongolian-Chinese Himalayan highlands resides an aboriginal people. Their western heritage is growing stronger in Germany - in the Aryan blood of the Nazi SS. The movie theatres screened an enormously popular documentary epos, ("Geheimnis Tibet" "Secret Tibet") depicting German race experts as they examined aboriginal people and their bodies. The Tibetan landscape, close to the heavens, was suitable to chastise with disgust the antithesis, the racist ostracized from the abyss of hell.
The vitae of the researchers, who were ethnologically measuring the heads and bodies in the Tibetan highlands (Bruno Beger) and thereafter, when fleeing British troops, became the preferential guests of the god-king, Dalai Lama, brutally demonstrates how racial construction conditions the deconstruction of its shadows. After his return from Tibet, Beger had ("inner Asian") test persons delivered to him in Auschwitz, whose heads had been severed from their bodies, to serve as specimens for "Verrassung" ("race-ification").
German global policy's racist aspect created an ethical mandate in China - the protective power for Tibet. Depending on the development of its economic interests, Germany was prepared (and with the Kuomintang had had enough experience) to even operate militarily, at least covertly, in an underground war.
Nazi Reserves
For this option, Germany had reserves. In the STALAG, the POW camps, there were thousands of "Western Asian" soldiers from the Soviet military, Kazakhs, Kirghiz, Tajiks. Here, Bruno Beger, back from Auschwitz and with the experience of Tibet, also measured Muslim groups, considered suitable for use in the underground war. They were already collaborating in SS divisions (Turkmen), others were with the Vlasov Army, an anti-Soviet support contingent commissioned by the Nazis. The reserves operated under the command of Major General Reinhard Gehlen - a member of the Nazi General Staff - and his intelligence service against Russia and China (Fremde Heere Ost). Toward the end of the war, Gehlen offered his supply of agents to the victors. The USA accepted.
Meeting Point Munich
The US army of occupation concentrated the East European and Western Asian supply of agents, there, where, prior to the war, Chiang Kai-shek's son Wego had served in the Gebirgsjäger at the Nazi base in the vicinity of Mittenwald, Garmish and Sonthofen - under Gehlen's command.
Surrounded by criminal anti-Semites and other racists from the Nazi era (von Mende, Seraphim), financed with millions from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the West Germany's chancellery, Gehlen mounted a network of German and foreign hirelings.
Agents of Turkmen origin and their deployment in Asia were handled in Munich ("Spiritual Administration of Muslim Refugees"), where the BND predecessor, named after Gehlen (Organization Gehlen) had set up its headquarters. The proximity to the supply of agents located in Mittenwald, including the "West Asians" cared for by Beger, made Munich the meeting point of western intelligence services in the underground war against Russia and China. When planning for "Radio Free Europe" an aggressive CIA propaganda operation with antennas to Asia, the choice of location fell on Munich.
Atomic Bombs on China
Even the Kuomintang, which had been going by the name of "China" since Chiang Kai-shek fled the Chinese mainland to the island of Taiwan (1949), was represented in Munich - using channels under Gehlen's control. With Gehlen as mediator, Chiang Kai-shek's son, Wego, Munich's Nazi War Academy graduate, and, meanwhile, highly decorated in the Taiwanese military, was permitted to recruit Wehrmacht officers as advisors.
The clandestine ties were strengthened, even though Chiang Kai-shek's troops had already been planned for the war with Korea, as the vanguard for the invasion of China, as soon as the Hiroshima-class bombs - albeit, with nearly the double explosive power (Mark 4) - would have been dropped on civilian targets in the People's Republic of China.
Date of delivery: April 6, 1951. Expected victims: several million.
Part three to follow soon.
Please take note of our video column "War Against China" and Berlin: In the Underground War against Russia and China, Commentary by Hans-Rüdiger Minow.