The Kemritz Affair

During the fall and winter of 1945-46, 14 men and three women picked their way through the snow-sprinkled ruins of East Berlin to the law offices of one Dr. Hans Kemritz. Each came in answer to an innocent-sounding summons; but when they got there, they were grabbed by the Russians. Four later died in Red concentration camps. One was an unsavory character named Hans-Juergen von Hake, whom the Danes might have hanged for war crimes, had the Russians not gotten him first.

Soon after Hake was hustled away, Kemritz himself moved to safer territory in West Germany. Hake's vengeful widow trailed him. Eventually she sued Kemritz in West Berlin court, accused him of causing her husband's death, and won damages of 11,640 marks ($2,770) plus a $70 monthly allowance. At this point, U.S. occupation authorities stepped in, ruled that the German courts had no jurisdiction in the matter. Besides, Kemritz had performed "valuable services" for the U.S.

Double Agent. That made everyone take a second look at Dr. Kemritz, and the second look made him no more attractive than the first. Kemritz was, in fact, a double agent. A Nazi since 1933, an ex-major of German army intelligence, he first turned in some of his fellow officers to the Russians, then went to work spying for the U.S. from his East Berlin office. His service: furnishing Americans with names of West Germans on the Russian's secret "wanted" lists. Thus tipped off, hundreds who might otherwise have been nabbed by the Reds were able to lie low and escape. But to keep up the double game (this is the story U.S. authorities believe), Kemritz had to produce occasional results for the Reds. The 17 Germans, Hake included, were such results.

U.S. handling of the Kemritz affair touched off a noisy display of anti-occupation feeling in West Germany. The Bundestag (Parliament) spent one whole day wrangling over it, and demanded that the Americans "cease interfering with German justice." The New York Times's Drew Middleton solemnly cabled that "the whole structure of German friendship and sympathy toward Americans . . . has been fractured." It wasn't as bad as that, though a lot of Germans were delighted to see the Americans stuck defending a stool pigeon.

"Valuable Services." U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy, arriving back on the scene from a U.S. visit, tried to retrieve the initial blunder. Police decoys, he admitted, are unloved characters anywhere. But the U.S. intervened in his case not for "valuable services" rendered the West, but because Kemritz had only aided an occupation power (Russia) in its legal right to arrest a suspected war criminal. To let a German court sentence him for doing so, said McCloy, would only encourage old Nazis to come out of their holes, start endless legal proceedings. It was a legalistic argument, and an unpopular one, but McCloy was determined to stick to it.

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