Western Intelligence Services and Former Members of Waffen-SS, Gestapo, and German Wehrmacht in the early Cold War: Cooperation, Networks, and Strategies of Communication

为了获得关于苏联和西欧共产主义组织活动的可靠信息，1946年之后，西方情报机构越来越多地与党卫军、盖世太保和德国国防军的大量前成员合作。因此，这些人往往能够逃脱起诉，但西方对信息的需求也使他们能够利用他们在1945年之前构建的知识，并使其适应占领时期，为自己的需要和目标服务。这种合作远远超出了简单的信息交换或利用德国人建立留守网络的范围，它导致了关于政治未来的思想和愿景、关于意识形态敌人的合理化和理论的大量交流。最近在美国、欧洲和德国的档案中解密的文件使我们有可能打开这些关系和包括战胜国和战败国在内的相关网络中沟通和决策的内部结构的黑匣子，并研究交换条件。由此产生的信息和知识市场可以分析，可以研究机构的可修改性，从而揭示国安局时期的反布尔什维主义如何影响战后西方安全架构。这使得我们可以分析对相对他者的看法的变化，以及对现在共同敌人的认识的产生，这种认识有助于使新的跨大西洋冷战反苏安全范式合法化。因此，该研究项目将对冷战早期历史、新生的德意志联邦共和国以及跨大西洋安全合作相互交织的开端的缺失方面提供重要的见解。

To acquire dependable information about the USSR and activities of Communist groups in Western Europe, Western intelligence services after 1946 increasingly cooperated with a large number of former members of SS, Gestapo, and German Wehrmacht. These were consequently often able to escape prosecution, but the Western need for information also enabled them to utilize knowledge they had constructed before 1945 and adapt it to the period of occupation to serve their own needs and goals. This cooperation extended far beyond a simple exchange of information or of a utilization of Germans for stay-behind networks, it led to substantial exchange of ideas and visions about the political future, rationalizations and theories about the ideological enemy.Recently declassified documents in American, European, and German archives now make it possible to open the Black Box of internal structures of communication and decision-making in these relationships and related networks encompassing victors and vanquished and to research the terms of exchange. The market for information and knowledge thus originating, can be analyzed, the modifiability of agency researched, thus shedding light on how the anti-Bolshevism of the NS-period affected the post-war Western security architecture. This allows for an analysis of changes of perception of the relative other and of the production of knowledge about the now common enemy, knowledge that helped to legitimize the new transatlantic Cold War anti-Soviet security paradigm. The research project will thus provide important insight into a missing dimension of the history of the early Cold War, the nascent Federal Republic of Germany, and the intertwined beginnings of the transatlantic security cooperation.