Reinhard Gehlen - Early Life and Military Service

Early Life and Military Service

Reinhard Gehlen was born into a Roman Catholic family in Erfurt, the son of a bookstore owner. He joined the Reichswehr in 1920. He attended the German Staff College, graduating in 1935, after which he was promoted to captain and attached to the Army General Staff.

Gehlen was on the General Staff from 1935-1936 and in 1939, Gehlen was promoted to Major. At the time of the 1939 German attack on Poland he was a staff officer of an infantry division. In 1940, Gehlen became liaison officer to Army Commander-in-Chief Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch. He was later transferred to the staff of Army Chief of Staff General Franz Halder.

In July 1941, Gehlen was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, sent to the Eastern Front and assigned to the German General Staff, section Fremde Heere Ost, FHO or Foreign Armies East as a senior intelligence officer.

In the watershed year of 1942, according to Gehlen's memoir, he was approached by Colonel Henning von Tresckow, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and General Adolf Heusinger to participate in an assassination attempt on German head of state Adolf Hitler. His role was to be minor. When the plot culminated in the failed bomb plot of 20 July 1944, Gehlen's role was covered up and he escaped Hitler's retaliation against the conspirators. Throughout his years at FHO, Gehlen allowed determined opponents of the National Socialist government to hold conspiratorial discussions inside his section and he was present at Berchtesgaden in the final days before 20 July when details of the assassination attempt were discussed.

In the spring of 1942 Gehlen took over FHO from Colonel Eberhard Kinzel. Even before the disaster of Stalingrad, Gehlen realized that FHO must be fundamentally reorganized and he methodically set about finding the right personnel. Gehlen scoured army personnel files, searching for linguists, geographers, anthropologists, lawyers and junior officers who had recently joined FHO. He accepted anyone who seemed suitable to him and who would be likely to raise the intellectual level of FHO. A stream of fresh and energetic officers and experts flowed in. It was this cadre that amassed a comprehensive data file on the Red Army, producing assessments and "defeatist reports" that reached Hitler. Their discouraging accuracy eventually resulted in his dismissal in April 1945, but not before his last promotion, to the rank of Major General.

During the war, Gehlen's organization accumulated a great deal of information about the Soviet Union and the battlefield tactics of the Red Army. When the Iron Curtain descended in 1946, leaving the Western Allies with virtually no intelligence sources in the East, Gehlen’s vast store of knowledge made him very valuable.

Realizing early on that Germany would ultimately be defeated, Gehlen made preparations to ensure his own survival after the fall of the Third Reich. He ordered the microfilming of the holdings of Fremde Heere Ost and had them placed in watertight drums, which he buried in several places in the Austrian Alps. He had fifty cases of archives buried at the Elendsalm in the mountains of Upper Bavaria, planning to sell them after the end of hostilities.