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Reinhard Gehlen (3 April 1902 – 8 June 1979) was a German general who served as chief of the Foreign Armies East (FHO) military intelligence unit during the Second World War and who later became leader of the Gehlen Organization and the first president of the Federal Intelligence Service during the Cold War. Gehlen is considered one of the most legendary Cold War spymasters. He was appointed chief of FHO, the German Army's military intelligence unit on the Eastern Front, in 1942. As an officer in the German Wehrmacht, he reached the rank of major general just before being sacked by Hitler for his accurately pessimistic intelligence reports. As the Cold War began, he was recruited by the United States military to set up a spy ring directed against the Soviet Union (known as the Gehlen Organization) which employed numerous former SS, SD and Wehrmacht officers, and eventually became head of the West German intelligence apparatus. He served as the first president of the Federal Intelligence Service until 1968. As president of the Federal Intelligence Service, itself a civilian office, he was promoted to lieutenant-general of the Reserve in the West German Bundeswehr and thus became the country's highest-ranking reserve officer.〔Magnus Pahl, ''Fremde Heere Ost: Hitlers militärische Feindaufklärung'', p. 32, Ch. Links Verlag, 2013, ISBN 3862842037〕 ==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.〔(Reinhard Gehlen – Biografie WHO'S WHO )〕 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.〔FHO was organized in 1938 (on the break-up of section "Foreign Armies") with the task to prepare situation maps of the Soviet Union, Poland, Scandinavia and the Balkans and to assemble information on potential adversaries〕 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.〔Höhne & Zolling, p. 10〕 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.〔Höhne & Zolling, p. 13〕 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.〔Höhne & Zolling, p. 44〕 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 Eastern Europe, 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.〔Christopher Simpson: ''BLOWBACK: The First Full Account of America's Recruitment of Nazis, and its disastrous Effect on our domestic foreign policy''. Collier Books, New York 1988, ISBN 0-02-044995-X, pp. 41.〕 He had fifty cases of archives buried at the ''Elendsalm'' in the mountains of Upper Bavaria,〔Höhne & Zolling, p. 52〕 planning to sell them after the end of hostilities. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Reinhard Gehlen」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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