Editing Federal Intelligence Service (section)

=== The BND and the Gestapo ===
Several publications have criticized Gehlen and his organizations for hiring ex-Nazis. An article in ''[[The Independent]]'' on 29 June 2018 made this statement about some of the BND employees:<ref>{{Cite web |date=2018-06-29 |title=Himmler's daughter worked for Germany's foreign intelligence agency in 1960s, officials admit |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/himmler-daughter-germany-bnd-foreign-intelligence-ss-nazi-hitler-war-criminals-evaded-justice-a8422726.html |access-date=2022-08-07 |website=The Independent |language=en}}</ref> <blockquote>"Operating until 1956, when it was superseded by the BND, the Gehlen Organisation was allowed to employ at least 100 former Gestapo or SS officers. ... Among them were [[Adolf Eichmann]]'s deputy [[Alois Brunner]], who would go on to die of old age despite having sent more than 100,000 Jews to ghettos or internment camps, and ex-SS major [[Emil Augsburg]]. ... Many ex-Nazi functionaries including [[Karl Silberbauer|Silberbauer]], the captor of [[Anne Frank]], transferred over from the Gehlen Organisation to the BND. ... Instead of expelling them, the BND even seems to have been willing to recruit more of them – at least for a few years".</blockquote>

The authors of the book ''A Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe'' state that Reinhard Gehlen simply did not want to know the backgrounds of the men that the BND hired in the 1950s.<ref>{{cite book | last1=Messenger | first1=D.A. | last2=Paehler | first2=K. | title=A Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe | publisher=University Press of Kentucky | series=EBL-Schweitzer | year=2015 | isbn=978-0-8131-6057-3 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MrONBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA288 | page=288}}</ref> The American [[National Security Archive]] states that "he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals".<ref>https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB146/index.htm, The CIA and Nazi War Criminals, 2005, Released Under Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 146</ref>

[[James H. Critchfield]] of the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] worked with the Gehlen Organization from 1949 to 1956, and defended Gehlen. In 2001, Critchfield wrote in ''[[The Washington Post]]'' that "almost everything negative that has been written about Gehlen [as an] ardent ex-Nazi, one of Hitler's war criminals ... is all far from the fact." Critchfield added that Gehlen hired former [[Sicherheitsdienst]] (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS) men "reluctantly, under pressure from German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to deal with 'the avalanche of subversion hitting them from East Germany.'"<ref>{{Cite news |last=Lardner |first=George Jr. |date=2001-03-18 |title=CIA Declassifies Its Records On Dealings With Ex-Nazis |language=en-US |newspaper=The Washington Post |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/03/18/cia-declassifies-its-records-on-dealings-with-ex-nazis/2fa93bad-62ee-42f2-833a-b1d04bc63079/ |access-date=2022-08-07 |issn=0190-8286}}</ref>

From 2011 to 2018, an independent commission of historians studied the history of the BND in the era of Reinhard Gehlen. The results are published in comprehensive studies. So far (as of April 2020) eleven volumes have been published.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Wolf|first=Thomas|year=2020|title=The origins of the BND and "official history" in Germany|url=https://perspectivia.net/publikationen/ausgewaehlte-vortraege-dhimoskau/wolf_origins|journal=Selected Lectures of the German Historical Institute Moscow|volume=2020|issue=1}}</ref>