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Oral history interview with Robert E. Matteson

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1993.A.0097.5 | RG Number: RG-50.043.0005

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    Oral history interview with Robert E. Matteson
    Transcript
    --national redoubt area where Hitler was supposed
    to make his last stand.
    Kaltenbrunner was an Austrian.
    Hitler was an Austrian.
    They were born in villages not too far apart.
    And Kaltenbrunner had been the head of the SS
    and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt
    in Austria prior to Reinhard Heydrich,
    the "Hangman's" assassination in Prague, in June of 1942.
    Kaltenbrunner took over from Heydrich
    the "Hangman," who, by that time,
    had become the most powerful man, under Hitler,
    in the Nazi Reich.
    And he controlled the Nazi Gestapo, and the Kripo,
    which is the Kriminal police, the intelligence
    service, and also the military intelligence service.
    He had under him Adolf Eichmann, who
    was in charge of the extermination of the Jews.
    And he had--
    Kaltenbrunner and Heydrich before him
    had had responsibility for the putting of people
    into the concentration camps.
    Kaltenbrunner was an SS general.
    And at the end of the war, in March and April of 1945,
    he was, in effect, with Martin Bormann,
    they were the two most powerful people in the Nazi Reich
    under Hitler.
    His name was kept out of the newspapers, out of the press,
    out of all publications.
    And the only photograph that the Americans had,
    toward the end of the war, was of a man
    that they resurrected from someplace,
    who was HV Kaltenborn.
    The name was close enough so they got him mixed up
    with Kaltenbrunner.
    And they didn't have any picture of Kaltenbrunner,
    so the photograph that went into the papers
    was of HV Kaltenborn, who was a radio announcer at that time.
    Didn't look anything like him.
    Well, I was in the General Patton's Third Army
    and was head of a Counterintelligence Corps unit
    that was operating under the 80th Infantry Division.
    Toward the end of the war, we met the Russians
    in Steyr, Austria.
    And then we withdrew to a little town north of the Autobahn
    that goes between Salzburg and Vienna.
    And it was, at that time, in a little town of Gmunden,
    south of the Autobahn, that I got the first lead
    on Ernst Kaltenbrunner.
    We didn't know where he was.
    They'd searched everywhere.
    And he disappeared into the woodwork.
    And we also had, at that time, a lead on Robert Ley, L-E-Y,
    who was the Nazi labor leader.
    And they were both supposed to have been in Gmunden about four
    or five days before I got there, with an interpreter named
    Sidney Bruskin, who went to Yale and is,
    today, living in New Haven, Connecticut.
    When we got that first lead, we then proceeded toward--
    the story that we got was that he
    was proceeding south toward Hitler's national redoubt,
    where all of our intelligence indicated, at that time,
    that Hitler was coming to make his last Wagnerian last stand
    in the fortified mountains that included his hideout,
    but also included as far east as Altaussee and Gmunden
    and Bad Ischl in Austria.
    When we got down, a little farther south,
    one morning we ran into the first concentration camp
    that I-- not that I'd been at, but that I
    had been the first at and had to break the lock to get into.
    The SS guards had left the night before.
    And this was Ebensee, which is outside
    of this little town of Ebensee.
    We broke the lock.
    And the interpreter and I went in.
    The SS guards had gone.
    The inmates came to the barbed wire fence,
    put out their hands for food.
    And they were-- they looked-- they were dressed in rags
    and looked like skeletons.
    We went, first, to the crematorium, where
    the bodies were piled high.
    They couldn't burn them fast enough.
    Naked bodies lying in piles next to the crematorium,
    where they had these furnaces that they burnt them in.
    Behind the crematorium was a chemical ditch.
    And some of these, they would-- some of the inmates,
    they would line up in front of the chemical ditch
    and shoot through the back of the head.
    And their bodies would fall into the chemical ditch
    and decompose.
    That was the other way of getting rid of them.
    We went there.
    And the next place we went was into the so-called hospital.
    In the hospital, there were two or three
    on each of these boards, lying in tiers.
    And they were emaciated skeletons, covered with rags,
    with lice on them, and not yet dead.
    But their next stop was to be the crematorium
    or the chemical ditch.
    They pleaded for food.
    We didn't have food.
    All we could do was radio back and say what we found
    and tell the Americans, who were coming behind us,
    to get there fast with medics and food.
    We went on from there to the town
    of Bad Ischl, which is the summer
    home-- was the summer home of the Emperor Franz Josef.
    And in this town was the home, also,
    of Franz Lehar, the man of great music fame.
    There, I ran into a member of the Austrian freedom
    movement, a man named [PERSONAL NAME],,
    who was a communist.
    And he'd been fighting in the Spanish Civil War
    in '36 and '7.
    He came from this area.
    And he was organizing the resistance-- had
    been organizing underground, for two years, the resistance
    against the Nazis.
    He had a pretty good intelligence in that set up.
    And through this intelligence net,
    we found out that Kaltenbrunner had gone, a few days before,
    west to the town of Strobl.
    So I got permission, from my headquarters,
    to go west, on this road, with Germans who had been
    in the German Army, actually.
    And one of the ones was a member of the Habsburg nobility.
    And we went out to this little town of Strobl.
    And there we found the burgermeister,
    who had been the leading Nazi in that town.
    And I interrogated him.
    And he said that Kaltenbrunner was
    in a villa on the outskirts of the town of Strobl.
    And I asked him to show me where it was.
    And he said, I won't go that far.
    But I'll go within a few blocks, and I'll
    point out how you get there.
    And he was obviously frightened, because it
    was toward the end of the war.
    He knew that we knew that he would be arrested.
    And he didn't know what was going to happen to him.
    So we went out to this villa on the outskirts of the town.
    And you couldn't drive up to the villa, itself.
    You had to park your car about a city block from the walk-up
    through the woods.
    As I walked up with an interpreter--
    my German is terrible.
    I needed an interpreter--
    to the house, out of the woods came
    men, men who followed me up to the door.
    And I found out later that they were part of the Dienststelle.
    It was the bodyguard of the Kaltenbrunner family.
    I knocked on the door.
    And a large blonde lady, with dark glasses, came to the door.
    And it turned out to be the wife of SS General Ernst
    Kaltenbrunner.
    She said that Kaltenbrunner wasn't there,
    that he had left a day before.
    She wouldn't say where he had gone.
    But I then walked into the house and found a photograph,
    the first real photograph that we'd
    had of SS General Kaltenbrunner, there on a bookcase.
    And I took the photograph.
    She went upstairs.
    I didn't know why.
    But she came down.
    I told her, she was under arrest.
    That we had to take her back for questioning.
    So we walked down to the car.
    And as we walked toward the car, these men,
    who were in the bodyguard, came up.
    And their leader spoke to me.
    And he said, you can see, we have no weapons.
    We heard General Eisenhower's broadcast over the radio,
    that we should hand in our weapons.
    And we did this yesterday.
    So they didn't bother me in any way.
    And I went on back to Bad Ischl.
    And I saw [PERSONAL NAME],, the head
    of the Austrian, Freiheitsbewegung, Austrian
    Freedom Movement, underground.
    He said they'd had more recent information that Kaltenbrunner
    had gone up, into the mountains, to a little town of Altaussee,
    the last little mountain village up in the Totes Gebirge,
    the Dead Mountains in the Salzkammergut.
    Well, I took Frau Kaltenbrunner back
    to the 80th Division headquarters for interrogation.
    And then got permission to go outside of our area,
    follow the lead up into Altaussee.
    In the meantime, unbeknownst to me, at that time,
    a message had come from that area saying
    that the great European art treasures were up,
    in that same area, in the salt mine,
    and that they'd been brought there
    over a period of three months, the last three months
    in early 1945.
    So they were sending a detachment up there
    to safeguard the art treasures, which were the greatest art
    collection of Nazi art loot in the world
    and, particularly, in Europe.
    Had the altar-- had many priceless statues and paintings
    and other types of artwork.
    We got up into the town of Altaussee.
    We started out, Sid Bruskin and I, at 4 o'clock in the morning.
    And we got up there at about 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning.
    And the first man we ran into, as we walked, came into, drove
    into Altaussee was a man who turned out
    to be Prince Chlodwig Hohenlohe-Schillingsfurst, who
    was the grandson of the last great emperor
    or one of the last great emperors of Germany,
    chancellors of Germany.
    And he had a hunting lodge there.
    And I asked him if there was a place that we could stay.
    And he took us over to the house, Eibl,
    which was on the main street.
    And he gave us a place to stay.
    There we set up an information network.
    And the man that we had our first contact with--
    principle contact was a man named
    Albrecht Gaiswinkler, who had been in the German Army,
    had deserted, and had gone over to the British.
    And the British had trained him, sent him down to Italy.
    And then he was brought in a Nazi uniform, parachuted
    into the Salzkammergut area, along with a couple
    of other people.
    He finally made his way back.
    He originally came from Bad Aussee, a little village
    that was four kilometers down the mountain from Altaussee.
    He'd set up a network there.
    And he had pretty good information.
    He'd set up a radio station.
    And after three days, the word came through Johann Brandauer,
    who was the assistant burgermeister,
    that Kaltenbrunner was up, in a hut,
    above the town, a six-hour climb from Altaussee.
    So I asked Johann Brandauer if he
    would provide me with a guide, who knew the mountains.
    And that we would start out at 12 o'clock,
    at midnight, that night to get up to the cabin,
    still under cover of darkness, while the snow was still
    had a crust on it, before the sun got on it.
    And he said that, rather than give me one guide,
    he would give me four guides.
    Because he didn't know what we were
    going to run into up there.
    And they would be armed.
    So we met about 11 o'clock, before we started out,
    in this little house, on the main street, that was 45,
    number 45 on the Hauptstrasse.
    And this had been the Ortsgruppenleiter's, Nazi Party
    headquarters.
    They brought me Austrian clothes and spiked shoes.
    And they came dressed in their Austrian outfits and mountain
    climbing outfits.
    And they each had a rifle, with telescopic sights.
    And we also had with us--
    in the meantime, this man had been sent up
    to safeguard the art treasures and had
    found the art treasures.
    And the miners, who worked in the salt mine, there,
    had saved the art treasures.
    They didn't want-- wasn't that they cared so much
    about the art treasures, but they
    cared about their place of occupation, the salt mine.
    So they made a deal to transfer the dynamite out of the cases,
    that the Gauleiter was going to use to blow up the art
    treasures, put dummies in, and the art treasures were saved.
    And Kaltenbrunner, as I found out later,
    had negotiated with the head of the salt mine workers
    that, in exchange for protection and removal
    of the dynamite, that they would provide him
    with mountain guides that would take him up to this place
    he wanted to hide out.
    He knew the area, because he was from a little town,
    not too far away, that was near the city of Linz.
    And so we started off at 12 o'clock.
    And well, the man, who was the officer in charge
    of the military detachment, had the responsibility
    for any military in that area.
    When he found out-- we had to tell him
    what we were going to do.
    But I didn't tell him the details
    because of the leakage, always, out of the system.
    He said, I have responsibility for your life,
    so I'm going to provide you with a squad
    that you can use in any way you want.
    The squad then assembled with us.
    And I told them that-- they had rifles
    and they had hand grenades and ammunition belts.
    I told them that they had to stay behind us and out
    of sight, because if anybody saw them,
    it would create a situation for a firefight.
    So they stayed well behind us, but,
    usually, within sight of where we were, so that they
    could see what was happening.
    Got up within about 500 yards of the cabin.
    By that time, the sun was coming up.
    It was about 7 o'clock in the morning.
    It had taken us an hour longer to get up there,
    because these people were carrying weapons.
    I wasn't carrying any.
    And they were breaking through the snow up to their knees,
    in places, and it took longer.
    And there were trees down over the path that had come down
    in snow avalanches.
    And we finally got up to where I can see
    the cabin through binoculars.
    And it was a small cabin, that was below a ridge, that
    had about three rooms in it, with a covered
    porch in front of it.
    Time was running out.
    And I knew that if they were there, they'd be getting up.
    And we had to get up there while they were still in bed.
    And so instead of following a more circuitous route
    along the edge of the mountain wall, on up to the cabin,
    I made a beeline for the porch.
    Told the four Austrians, with rifles, with telescopic sights
    to keep me covered down the slope,
    and where they could see me and see whatever was going on.
    And behind them, further down the mountain
    would be this squad.
    In the meantime, some of the squad
    had dropped out, because they had the wrong kind of shoes.
    They were carrying-- one of them was carrying a submachine gun.
    And so only, I think, about six of them got up to the point
    where they could see us.
    I heard a bird whistle as I started my lonely walk up
    to the porch.
    And I thought it was a signal that
    was, to alert, from an outpost.
    But I then saw a bird.
    And it was actually a bird and not a signal.
    I got up on the porch, and I knocked on the door.
    There wasn't any response.
    And I went over to a blind that was
    over a window to the left of the door, and I knocked on that.
    And I could hear heavy breathing.
    People were still asleep inside.
    Somebody got out of bed.
    And they came across.
    I had had this picture of Kaltenbrunner
    and gotten a description of him from his wife.
    And he was 6 feet 4.
    He weighed 220 pounds, 43 years old,
    and had dueling scars on each side of his face
    from the University of Graz dueling society.
    And this person that came across the floor and opened the blind
    didn't fit the description of Kaltenbrunner.
    And I could, looking behind him, see one other person
    behind him.
    But I couldn't make out who it was.
    He asked me what I wanted.
    And in my very poor American-sounding-German,
    I said I wanted to come in.
    I was cold.
    I was going from one valley to the other.
    And the transportation had been knocked out.
    And I'd been walking all night.
    He took a look at me and said, I couldn't come in.
    And I then handed him a note that I'd gotten the day before,
    when I knew I was going to do this,
    from what turned out to be the mistress of Kaltenbrunner,
    a blonde, blue-eyed, 22 year old countess named Gisela von
    Westarp, who was from a landed-family in Prussia,
    who had worked in Himmler's headquarters in Berlin,
    where she had become acquainted with SS General Kaltenbrunner.
    And while Kaltenbrunner was married
    and had this wife in Strobl and three children by him,
    she had become his mistress for the two years he
    was up there, from '43 to '45.
    And they had produced twins, Ursula and Wolfgang,
    who were born on March 15, 1945, she always liked to say,
    in the cowshed of Prince Hohenlohe.
    Because, as we found out, Prince Hohenlohe
    had given them a place to stay, when they came up,
    in March of 1945, toward the end of the war
    and knowing that Kaltenbrunner was
    going to come up there and be in charge of the national redoubt
    area for Hitler.
    And so I handed this man this note.
    He read the note, slowly.
    It seemed like it took him five minutes.
    And the note said, please come down
    with the bearer of this note to Altaussee.
    The Russians are coming in from the other side.
    And they were scared to death of the Russians.
    And they knew, if the Russians got them,
    that they'd get much rougher treatment, probably,
    than from the Americans.
    So this man, who was reading it, who turned out
    to be one of Kaltenbrunner's guides,
    said he didn't know who Kaltenbrunner was.
    And he then looked down past me, down the slope of the mountain.
    And these four Germans came out from behind--
    four Austrians, who had been in the Wehrmacht,
    came out from behind the rocks that they were hiding behind.
    So I found out later they thought
    it was a false lead, because nothing was happening.
    So they came up to see what was happening.
    When he saw them, with their rifles,
    he whirled around and went over to a pair of trousers
    hanging beside the bed, took a revolver out
    and came toward me.
    And when I saw the revolver, and I didn't have a weapon,
    I got off the porch and went over
    to the blind side of the cabin.
    I beckoned to the four to signal the six who
    were below them, the military.
    And they came up in a semicircle around the cabin.
    We shouted for them to come out.
    One man came to the door, opened it quickly,
    took a look at what was happening, and went back
    and slammed and bolted the door.
    And after about 10 minutes of waiting,
    we then went up, from either side of the porch,
    onto the porch, and started knocking down the door.
    When we did that, they opened the door and came out.
    And four men came out with their hands over their heads.
    And I could see, right away, one was
    Kaltenbrunner, the only one that was
    6 feet 4, with dueling scars.
    He looked he fitted the description--
    220 pounds and about in his early 40s.
    But he had the uniform on not of an SS general
    but of a medical officer in the Wehrmacht,
    and he had a medical kit.
    I put them under guard, in one room,
    and began to search the cabin.
    And I found, in the ash receptacle of the stove,
    this badge, which was Kaltenbrunner's Kriminalpolizei
    badge number two.
    Himmler had number one.
    Himmler had taken poison up in northern Germany.
    And his number one badge was never found.
    And with this Kriminalpolizei badge,
    I found also Kaltenbrunner's silver, number two, Gestapo
    badge, Geheime Staatspolizei.
    But as I was telling Steve before we walked in here, when
    I went to Mount Everest, in, I think it was 1979 or '78,
    I had with me a friend who was on the trip.
    And he was Jewish.
    And he wanted to see the highest Gestapo badge in existence.
    And I brought it along for that purpose.
    So I gave it to him when we were eating.
    He had put it down beside my plate.
    When we had finished, I went up to pay the bill,
    and I forgot to pick up the Gestapo badge.
    So I tried later, through CIA, to find out
    if they could find out where it was.
    But I don't think--
    I don't know what happened to it.
    But I still had the other one.
    I have a picture of the other one.
    But I don't have it.
    I found these in the ash receptacle of the stove.
    And then we found the last communication
    that Kaltenbrunner had sent to Himmler and Hitler
    in the Führerhauptquartier in Berlin.
    And it said, I'm taking care of the concentration camps
    by using Stuka dive bombers to dive bomb them,
    so there won't be any trace when the Americans and the Russians
    come in.
    But the war-- the sands were running out too fast on him.
    And he had to beat a hasty retreat to Strobl, then
    up to Altaussee, and then to take--
    after he spent two days in Altaussee, as I found out
    later, and then took off for the mountains.
    And his whole plan was to hide out until things quieted down,
    and then come down and offer his services to the Americans.
    And his idea was that he, as the head
    of an independent Austrian state,
    would join forces with the Allies in a final war
    against the Soviet Union.
    You know, it was fantastic.
    And why he thought he could get away with this, I don't know.
    But that was his plan.
    And it came out in the Nuremberg trial
    that that was what he was trying to do.
    He'd been in touch with Allen Dulles, who was in Bern.
    And he used a man named Willy Hoettl, Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl,
    who'd been a professor of history
    at the University of Vienna, to carry out
    the liaison with Allen Dulles in his headquarters.
    Allen Dulles, in the meantime, had
    been arranging for the early surrender of the German forces
    in northern Italy.
    And they succeeded in this.
    And a few days before the final surrender
    of the Nazis in Germany, which took
    place when Jodl signed the surrender on May 7th,
    there was a surrender of the northern Italy forces.
    And Dulles had engineered that.
    Kaltenbrunner thought that he could do the same thing
    with the Austrian forces, that he would then
    be used as an ally against the Soviet Union.
    Well, after we had found these documents,
    found a lot of tax-free American cigarettes,
    empty case of champagne bottles, a submachine gun stuck up
    in the chimney, weapons and ammunition,
    we loaded what was important on their backs
    and started down the mountain.
    When we got down there, a crowd started
    to gather on the main street of the little town of Altaussee.
    And the first man that came up to me
    was Prince Chlodwig Hohenlohe-Schillingsfurst.
    And he said, I see you got your man.
    And he pointed to Kaltenbrunner.
    We hadn't let Kaltenbrunner know that we
    knew who he was until we got him down into the village.
    And about that time, Gisela von Westarp, the mistress,
    and the wife of Kaltenbrunner's adjutant,
    Scheidler, Arthur Scheidler, who was also
    up there and one of the four that we arrested,
    Iris Scheidler broke out of the crowd
    and came up and threw their arms around their respective men.
    And they knew then that we knew who they were.
    So we interrogated them and sent them back
    to the 12th Army Group headquarters for interrogation.
    Kaltenbrunner, then, was one of the few that was sent to Camp
    020 in England, outside of Richmond,
    where he was submitted to unusual treatment
    by the British.
    The British you know are very civil people.
    But when they get somebody like this, who's
    a war criminal, on their hands?
    It was a guy named Tin-Eyed Stephens, who had a riding crop
    and wore a monocle.
    And he treated them roughly to exact confessions.
    And I only found this out through Trevor-Roper,
    when I went over in 1979 and spent a term
    at Oxford, the Michaelmas term, working
    with Trevor-Roper and Sir Michael Howard
    on the Kaltenbrunner story.
    And I found out, from them, what had happened.
    Kaltenbrunner was held there under a hot spotlight.
    Reminds me of this.
    [LAUGHTER]
    And he was given very little food, walked up and down
    without any rest.
    And despite that kind of treatment, he refused to break
    and refused to tell his story.
    He claimed-- he acknowledged that he was-- we had the badge,
    and we had his picture--
    that he was head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt,
    the Reich main security office, within which
    was the Gestapo and the Kripo, within which
    was Adolf Eichmann, within which was
    the extermination, the Einsatzkommandos,
    the extermination squads that took care of Gypsies and Jews.
    And that he said he did have a connection
    with the concentration camps, but he
    had nothing to do with the inhuman treatment.
    That this was under SS General Pohl.
    He was responsible for arresting people,
    who were against the Nazi Reich, and putting them into prison.
    And what happened to them after that, he said,
    wasn't his business.
    He refused to admit any war crimes.
    And he said his main interest was in intelligence.
    And he had the--
    after Admiral Canaris, he had had his [GERMAN]
    had been consolidated with Kaltenbrunner's
    office in early 1945.
    He had that, plus the internal and external intelligence
    service of the Nazi Reich, the Sicherheitsdienst.
    He said his main interest was in the intelligence
    part not in the Gestapo and the Kripo or the Einsatzkommandos.
    He then went to a collecting point,
    in Luxembourg, in handcuffs, the only one
    that was taken in handcuffs to the Nuremberg trial.
    And he was put in a cell, there.
    And I was transferred, in November of 1945,
    to be in charge of personnel security,
    for the higher ups in the trial and the visitors
    to the trial and the judges, to the Palace of Justice
    in Nuremberg.
    The day that I got there, I decided
    I'd test the security of the cell block myself.
    And I dressed in an officer's uniform,
    with Counterintelligence Corps insignia,
    walked up to guardpost one, showed them my pass.
    And they allowed me to go through.
    Guardpost one, the next guard post
    was two, three, four, till I got up to the iron grill gate
    guarding the door, into the cell block, where the 22 major Nazi
    war criminals were imprisoned.
    I got up to the cell block, to the iron grill gate.
    And there was a bell to push.
    I rang the bell.
    Man opened a little Judas door to see who I was.
    I showed him the same identification card.
    But it wasn't the one that should have allowed me in.
    The only pass that should have allowed me in
    was a red interrogation pass signed by Colonel Amen
    of Justice Jackson's staff.
    And they let me in.
    I didn't know the procedure.
    I walked down the cell block.
    Captain of the guard came after me,
    and he asked me what prisoner I wanted to see, sir.
    And I said, I wanted to see--
    the first one I asked to see was Hermann Goering--
    not Hermann Goering but Julius Streicher,
    who was the labor leader and Jew-baiter
    and the editor of Der Stürmer.
    And he was one of the 22.
    They took me into his cell.
    He had each of the prisoners asked
    to stand at attention when somebody comes in.
    He stood up and stood at attention.
    And he started talking about how bad the food was
    and how he had a hole in his trousers,
    and it hadn't been sewed.
    And I left.
    Tried this again an hour later to see
    if the security was that bad.
    Again, they let me through, and I asked to see Hermann Goering.
    Goering stood at attention.
    I asked him a few questions.
    And I then went back and reported
    that the security was not good, that they were letting people
    in who didn't have the proper identification.
    So the man in charge, who had been an old cavalry
    general and a friend of Eisenhower,
    but I think he'd had a little brain damage,
    allowed that there should be a shake up.
    So they shook up the whole place.
    And I was staying in the only hotel in Nuremberg
    that still had not been bombed.
    And during this period, I had contact with the Russians,
    who were also there.
    And one night, about 6 o'clock, a Russian
    came into the lobby of the hotel and fell,
    in a pool of blood, at my feet.
    He'd been shot by somebody on the outside.
    And when the Russian general, who
    was in charge of the Russians who were there,
    heard about this, he called me out to his villa.
    The problem was that there were people coming out
    of the catacombs of Nuremberg at night.
    And if they saw a Russian or an American uniform,
    they'd shoot at them.
    There was no way of rooting these out
    of the catacombs underneath the city of Nuremberg.
    There were tunnels that went for miles in all directions, sewers
    and passageways and caves and everything else.
    And so I went out to the Russians' villa.
    And we were standing there, in a living
    room, on the first floor, and the garden was outside,
    and, all of a sudden, a car backfired out in the driveway.
    And the Russians jumped out of the window into the garden.
    They thought that the place was being attacked.
    He said, if you can't take care of security
    better than you are, and one of my men is shot,
    then we're going to bring in our own security detachment.
    And he got on the phone to Moscow, when I was there.
    And he ordered-- he asked them for another--
    for a security detachment, out of Berlin, to come down.
    Kaltenbrunner had a cerebral hemorrhage during the trial.
    He was out on the opening day.
    I had a wife and a child at home.
    I had enough points to go home.
    I didn't see much point in staying on
    for the rest of the trial.
    But I stayed until Kaltenbrunner came back
    into the dock on December 10th.
    He pleaded not guilty in the sense of the indictment.
    He was found guilty on two of the four counts.
    And in October 1946, he was one of the 11 of the 21
    that was hung by his neck until he was dead.
    They cremated him and threw the ashes into the Isar River.
    And I guess that's a good place to stop
    on the capture of Kaltenbrunner.
    There's more that goes on and on and on.
    If you have any questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them.
    Did you have an opportunity to talk
    with any of the other big Nazis, at length,
    beyond what you mentioned with Goering and Streicher?
    How about Speer, for example?
    I saw Speer not then but later.
    I went to see him in Heidelberg, in 1978, I think it was.
    And he invited me in and for two hours.
    He invited me for lunch.
    And it was not too long before he died.
    He'd just completed a third book.
    He was a very intelligent, very civil person,
    who was Hitler's architect.
    And he had been given 20 years, I think it was, in prison,
    and had come out.
    He was not guilty of any of the atrocious war crimes
    that Kaltenbrunner and some of the others had been guilty of.
    Did you have an opportunity to speak with him about Hitler
    at length?
    Yeah, well it's--
    One of the things he mentioned is
    that he never read Mein Kampf.
    He claimed that he knew nothing about concentration camps.
    He claimed that he knew nothing about the dark side
    of the moon.
    He said that he and Hitler only talked about their great plans
    for the city of Linz, which was going
    to be the capital of the greater Reich.
    And the last time he saw Hitler was in the bunker, when
    they went over in April 1945.
    These elaborate plans that Speer had
    drawn for rebuilding Linz and beautiful buildings
    and broad avenues and art museums and everything else,
    but he said that he could go along with Hitler until later
    on in the war, when he began to have his doubts about Hitler.
    He saw Hitler as a genius in his field,
    a man who had great ideas and great conceptual power,
    a great innovator, and a man who was fanatic with reference
    to his feeling about the Jews and their treatment
    and their eradication.
    But as an architect, did he ever talk
    about the use of slave labor, for example,
    by the industrial firms, by Farben and Sauer
    and the other companies and the whole relationship of slave
    labor to the projects that he was, in fact, involved in?
    He didn't.
    I can't remember, now, how much, about that, he did talk about.
    He did talk about the thing that I asked him about,
    which was the counterfeit money operation to buy art objects
    and also to sink the Bank of England
    and to use to pay for intelligence operations.
    And they were printing, in the Ebensee concentration
    camp, money that was so good, English 5-pound notes,
    for example, that even the Swiss banks
    couldn't distinguish between that and the real thing.
    And you may remember operation Cicero
    in Turkey, where the valet of the British ambassador
    was being paid by Kaltenbrunner and the SD
    to take documents away from the British ambassador
    and feed them to Berlin.
    And they were doing this.
    And the valet was cooperating.
    And he was called--
    there was a movie on this, Operation Cicero,
    and another name, Five Fingers, and a book.
    And he couldn't distinguish.
    You know, and he was accepting this.
    And people that he was using the money with
    were accepting this money.
    But this was an operation that was under Professor Wilhelm
    Hoettl, who was under Kaltenbrunner,
    who was part of the SD operation covering
    the Austrian and the Balkan Peninsula.
    And Speer knew about that and knew about Ebensee.
    I mean, he knew about people who had been
    trained to print the money.
    And I don't know whether he'd had--
    there's a book by Willi Hoettl, Wilhelm Hoettl,
    called Hitler's Paper War, that tells about this under the pen
    name of Walter Hagen.
    You were in the field before Germany fell, is that right?
    I was in the field before Germany fell.
    How aware were you or other military people
    of what was going on in concentration/extermination
    camps.
    We weren't really aware.
    We'd heard about a little about them.
    People who lived, for example, in the town of Ebensee,
    two kilometers away or three kilometers away
    from the Ebensee quarry, which is where they used
    the concentration camp inmates to carry this marble,
    from the quarry, up these 42 stone
    steps carrying slabs of marble on their back.
    And they send them up.
    And they'd send them down.
    And they'd send them up, and they'd send them down.
    And under a hot sun, after a while, they just collapsed.
    Some of them died of a heart attack.
    And people in that village--
    I interrogated an awful lot of people
    there, including the Nazi Ortsgruppenleiter.
    And I took a group of them, the next day,
    out to the Ebensee concentration camp.
    And he, the Nazi Ortsgruppenleiter,
    didn't know what was going on inside of the camp.
    And the next day, he committed suicide
    when he found out that it was in his area.
    On this question of the national redoubt,
    how pervasive was that in the American military mind?
    And was it genuine?
    And would you go over that whole thing?
    I'm a little foggy on that.
    Yeah.
    The national redoubt was the thing
    that, up until about April 25, 1945, Eisenhower still
    believed was a real thing, that it was a place that Hitler
    was going, that they were beginning to transfer factories
    there.
    We had photo intelligence that they had caves
    that they were beginning.
    They were going to begin to produce weapons.
    They were producing, in that area,
    V1 weapons and then its successor, the V2 weapon,
    which was an advanced model.
    And they had the plans for a V3 weapon.
    Up until that time, it was very real.
    And so real that Eisenhower diverted Patton's army down,
    in that direction, be the assault force
    on the national redoubt.
    But after that, more information began
    to come in from prisoners that had been taken.
    And we found that Hitler was still in the bunker in Berlin.
    And that he had not come down there,
    even though there was the information that he
    had intended to go down there and have sort of a Wagnerian
    stand, in the mountains, in his home area.
    And not much was known about Kaltenbrunner.
    Quite a bit was known about Reinhard Heydrich.
    And it was because of Heydrich's assassination,
    by Czech partisans working for the British intelligence,
    that they then put Kaltenbrunner under heavy cover.
    They didn't know where he was.
    And they didn't know that he was in command
    of the national redoubt area.
    He was in command of it up until about,
    I think it was April 28, when SS Berger, SS General Berger,
    because of infighting in the Führerhauptquartier,
    they decided to divide the command
    and give Kaltenbrunner the Austrian part and Berger
    the German part.
    Well, in answer to your question,
    it was very much in the minds of the Allies
    and of Eisenhower headquarters.
    How much of that proved to be true by the end, when
    you really took a look at it?
    Were there military forces or was this kind of--
    I read, one place, that it was mainly German propaganda trying
    to draw us out.
    Yeah.
    No, there is that.
    I think, well, as it turned out, they really
    hadn't developed much in the area.
    Some say it was because the war came to an end
    more quickly than they anticipated.
    But there was a lot--
    there was a whole line of information
    that was coming to Allen Dulles.
    And that was coming from the Gauleiter, one
    of the four Gauleiters of Austria,
    who had this as a plan, working with the Hitler forces
    in the headquarters, to divert the Americans and the Allies
    from the attack on Berlin.
    And they succeeded in dividing the Allied forces,
    with the British and others going for Berlin,
    and part of the American forces going for the national redoubt.
    But we soon found out that there was nothing really there,
    except that, into this town of Altaussee,
    because they knew about this plan
    for this being the last stand headquarters.
    You had people who were puppet governors of all
    of the Eastern European countries,
    and of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania.
    You had the ambassadors.
    You had a lot of the people from Vienna,
    who were in the Nazi party and who
    were leaders, in the Nazi party, in Austria, coming there.
    The place was overcrowded.
    And they thought that this was the safest place to go.
    And they had the idea, because they thought
    it would be well fortified.
    But it wasn't.
    They had tank traps on the couple
    of roads that led up into this little town of Altaussee.
    But it was a strange and fascinating group
    of people that were there.
    There were artists.
    There were musicians.
    There were people of the nobility.
    There were people who were there in connection with the salt
    mine and the art treasures.
    The day before we arrived, they heard that we--
    I don't know how they heard, but they got wind
    that the Americans had found out about Altaussee.
    And the SS took off the day before we
    came, just as they had taken off from Ebensee before we
    got there.
    Did you have time to talk with any
    of the other people about race theory and some of their ideas,
    which led to all these events?
    Did any of them try to, for example,
    talk to you about their views or convince you
    that they were still right?
    This whole issue of Himmler conceivably trying
    to make a separate peace with the Western Allies
    against the Soviet Union, sort of
    looms in the background of this.
    Was there any experience you had with this?
    Well, the only part of that question that I had contact
    with was that--
    you remember the name count Folke Bernadotte,
    who was the head of the Swedish Red Cross?
    And he'd been sent down, on a special mission, in connection
    with the camps, the military end there,
    to see what he could do to free the prisoners.
    And he had come down and wanted to see Himmler.
    And Himmler, I know, had him see Kaltenbrunner.
    And in his book, The Curtain falls,
    Count Folke Bernadotte writes about his meetings
    with Kaltenbrunner.
    And I saw Count Folke Bernadotte, in fact,
    when he came to Minneapolis, I think, it was in 1946,
    in the spring, in June.
    Or I think what they call [NON-ENGLISH],,
    the national day, and they celebrate it in Minnehaha park.
    I was asked.
    You know, there were 10,000 people there
    that he was going to talk to.
    I was asked to introduce him at that.
    And I had a chance to talk to him further.
    And then I visited him, in his home, in [NON-ENGLISH],,
    in Stockholm, at one point after the war--
    soon after the war.
    And then he was killed, as you know, in Palestine,
    where he was the UN mediator.
    But I didn't get into, with him or with any of the Nazis
    that I talked with, the race theory.
    As far as the camp goes, do you see anything
    that the US military could have done
    to prevent the camps operating until 1945, such as bombing
    of the railways?
    That reminds me.
    I'm glad you mentioned that.
    I don't know whether it will answer your question.
    But I went back in 1985, the 40th anniversary
    of the capture of Kaltenbrunner, to have
    a reunion with the Austrian guides who
    had been in the Wehrmacht, who led me up to the cabin.
    Three out of four of them were still there.
    And we had a dinner.
    But on the way through, from Vienna
    by car, up the Autobahn to Linz, and then to Ebensee,
    and into Altaussee, I stopped, first.
    I wanted to meet the son of Kaltenbrunner.
    And he'd refused to meet me.
    His mother, Kaltenbrunner's wife, had said,
    never see that man.
    He's the man that's responsible for your father's death.
    And so whenever I called him on the telephone,
    he would hang up the telephone.
    And his mother would, too.
    So I probably shouldn't have done it, but I did it anyway.
    I just barged into his office.
    He was a lawyer, there, in Linz.
    And he had an office overlooking the main square.
    And I walked in with my wife.
    And he said, who are you?
    And I introduced myself as Robert Matteson.
    He said, oh, you're the man, my mother has told me about,
    that found my father up in the mountain,
    and then my father was hung.
    I said, yeah, that was part of my duty.
    And that's what I was doing.
    You're right, I was that person.
    He said my mother has told me never to speak to you.
    And then I said, well, I hope you can understand
    that this was part of my job.
    He said, well, would you like to have a cup of coffee?
    And so we sat down and we talked for about an hour and a half.
    And when we went out, we found we had a flat tire.
    And he was watching us from the window.
    And he very nicely got one of these little Autobahn help cars
    to come and fix the tire.
    But I went on then to Ebensee, went to the concentration camp.
    And today it's a memorial park.
    There's still gravestones in the park,
    but parts of the old structure are still there.
    I and my wife were the only ones in it,
    except for one man, who was over in the corner
    of the concentration camp, near the hospital crematorium area.
    And he was standing there making notes.
    So I went over to him.
    And I said, why are you here?
    He said it's the 40th anniversary of my
    being freed from this camp.
    And his name was George Havas, H-A-V-A-S, who was a Czech.
    And he was 15 years old.
    And he said that he was in the hospital
    when I came in May of 1940-- early May of 1945.
    I said, what happened to you after that?
    And he said, well, we weren't treated.
    We thought we were going to get very good treatment after we
    were freed.
    But we were told that we should live off
    the land, in other words, get help from people in the village
    and from the farmers in the surrounding area.
    And they gave us these Red Cross supplies,
    but it wasn't very good.
    He said, when it came, they kept us there for about six months.
    And then they sent us.
    They sent me back on a freight train to Prague.
    We were packed like sardines.
    And it was very hot.
    And he said, I don't have very good feelings
    about the Americans.
    And he said, but I'm willing to talk to you.
    So we talked and he described the camp
    and showed me where he'd been and everything else
    in the quarry and the 42 steps that they
    had to carry the slabs up from.
    But he was very distant.
    And I wrote him after that.
    And it turned out that he came to the United States
    and has a, job, today in the Library of Congress.
    And so I said to him, in one of my letters,
    I'll be coming to Washington one of these days,
    can we get together?
    And this was after a few months, maybe
    even a year or two had gone by.
    And I was going to Washington.
    And I got in touch with him.
    And he said he'd like to have lunch.
    And so my wife and I had--
    maybe it was breakfast or coffee or something.
    But we saw him.
    And he turned out, his attitude had changed by then.
    And he had a better understanding,
    from my letters, of what I was doing
    and that I didn't have a responsibility
    for the bad conditions.
    That I was first in there.
    I'd reported it back.
    They had asked me for food.
    And I didn't-- all I had with me was a couple of these rations
    that I was eating and the interpreter was.
    And I told him what we'd done.
    And it wasn't-- he knew it wasn't I or the interpreter who
    had been the cause of what happened after that.
    And we've now become good friends.
    And he's writing something, I guess.
    And I sent him things that I'd written,
    that had described my experience.
    And I forget the rest of your question.
    But--
    Well, it just seems that he came from Czechoslovakia.
    If Germany had been dismembered from the rest of Europe,
    the European rail system, it seems to me,
    a lot of these things just couldn't have happened.
    Because there wouldn't have been a way of moving the people
    the great distances that they did.
    Yeah, well they could still move.
    In fact--
    They could, during the war, very much so.
    Yeah.
    I mean after everything else.
    After that, they couldn't.
    But it seems to me, we didn't concentrate on the rail system
    like we might have.
    No.
    They were asked to do that, the Americans.
    I think President Roosevelt was asked
    to do that or the State Department or the Defense
    Department.
    I don't know.
    And they refused to do it.
    Jews wanted the railroad tracks to the concentration
    camp bombed or the concentration camp stopped in some way.
    And they said, after we win the war,
    then we'll take care of that.
    Yeah.
    While all these millions were dying.
    Yeah, well, in this case, there was one single track railroad.
    It wasn't for passenger trains, but to carry the marble out
    of the quarry.
    And that wasn't it wasn't running any longer.
    But there were other forms of transportation
    from nearby areas.
    This wasn't one of the big six camps, one of the big--
    This is part of the Mauthausen subsystems.
    And Mauthausen was--
    I went to-- not then, but I went there after the war.
    And I'd come in to Ohrdruf.
    That was the only other one that I'd come into.
    And on the way down, to meet the Russians, on the river
    Enns at Steyr.
    I think it was we met them May 3 or something like that.
    From a military point of view, by this time,
    we were well on the continent.
    What provisions were made, if any,
    to take care of any civilians, barring nationality or anything
    else like that?
    Was the army, in any way, charged with
    taking care of civilians or was it just military
    take care of the military, and let everybody else fend
    for themselves?
    Well, I can't remember too much.
    I mean, I think I've forgotten a lot of what I knew about that.
    Because it wasn't in my area.
    But the military government, of course, had a prime role.
    And there were civilians that we're beginning to come in.
    But I can't give you chapter and verse on what was being done.
    I've had citizens of Dachau tell me they didn't know
    what was going on.
    And from the town of Dachau, you could look down
    into the concentration camp.
    I'd always assumed that they didn't
    want to be accused, maybe, of complicity in the thing.
    Yeah, that's true in lots of cases.
    And in some cases, I don't know.
    You know, I just don't know.
    But I think that--
    I don't either.
    Yeah.
    Whether you can see, from some high building looking down
    into a concentration camp, the bad things that are going on,
    I don't know.
    You could smell it.
    You could smell it, from the stench of the--
    Ebensee was a few kilometers away.
    And they couldn't see into it.
    I don't know, I suppose they could,
    if the wind was in the right direction,
    they could smell things coming out of Ebensee, too.
    These hospitals that you mentioned,
    were they actually treating the prisoners for their ills
    or were they experimenting on them?
    I didn't see.
    I wasn't there long enough to see
    enough of what they were doing.
    All I saw was the horrible conditions
    under which they were kept.
    And I didn't see any medics around doing anything
    to anybody.
    And they obviously weren't getting enough food.
    They weren't getting proper medical treatment.
    And they were starving to death.
    They were skeletons.
    [INAUDIBLE] had lost, I don't know-- he
    said he was down to 86 pounds.
    One survivor of a concentration camp
    told me that when the American troops came in,
    they were just amazed to see the condition of the people,
    and they immediately ran and got food and brought it back
    to them.
    And he said, but I didn't eat it.
    I just asked for tea.
    And he said, most of the people who
    ate the food died, because they were so unaccustomed.
    Yeah, I heard stories like that, too.
    When I got to the Ebensee camp, my mission
    was to find the guy who put them in there.
    And so I couldn't hang around or the lead would get cold,
    and I had to keep moving.
    This maybe this isn't a fair question,
    but concerning the preliminaries and then
    eventually the whole Yalta agreement of dividing up
    Europe, temporarily at least, how precise was that?
    Kind of in response to some of these questions,
    I guess, about bombing, would we,
    as the Western or Americans, be allowed to cross
    into Russian airspace--
    you know what I mean by Russian airspace-- to bomb these camps.
    Because most of them would have been in the East.
    The only thing I can remember, now,
    and my only experience in that connection
    was when, with the 80th Infantry Division of Patton's Third
    Army, we had calls over the radio to come in to--
    I think, it was Prague.
    They sent back for permission to do that.
    And because of that agreement, we
    weren't allowed to go over the dividing line
    into the Russian territory, even though the Russians
    hadn't gotten there yet.
    This is a little bit off the subject,
    but while I've got you here, I to have to ask you this.
    I know you were in Moscow, with Harold Stassen, and met Stalin.
    Could you reflect on that a little bit?
    This is on April 9th, 1947.
    And Stassen was starting-- had started a two-year quest
    for the Republican nomination.
    And I was director of his research staff.
    And he invited me to go with him and a man
    named Jay Cook, of Philadelphia, on a 16 nation tour of Europe.
    And we met all of the crowned heads, all of the chancellors,
    all of the presidents, all of the prime ministers,
    Tito, Molotov, Khrushchev, Zhdanov, Voznesensky, Pope Pius
    XII, the King of Greece, the King of--
    Churchill, Attlee, everybody.
    But the climax of the whole thing
    was we wanted to see Stalin.
    And we had been in--
    Stassen had been one of the signers--
    one of the members of the US delegation to the UN Charter
    conference appointed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
    He'd been there from April to June
    when the charter was signed.
    And he met Molotov there.
    And Molotov invited him to come to the Soviet Union,
    as he invited others to see Russia at first hand.
    So Stassen took him up, not right away, but in 1947,
    on this European trip.
    It was the education of Harold Stassen.
    He was a farm boy from south of Saint Paul.
    But he'd been governor of Minnesota three--
    elected three times and in the Pacific and then the charter
    conference in 1945.
    And when we saw Molotov, it was right during the middle
    of the foreign ministers' conference.
    And our Secretary of State, at that time,
    was George Marshall, who was there.
    And Marshall had not seen Stalin.
    But a couple of days after we'd been there,
    we got word that Stalin would see us at 11 o'clock
    in the Kremlin.
    And we were staying at the Hotel National on Red Square.
    And a large ZIS limousine came over and picked us up
    at quarter of 11:00.
    We went up to the gate two of the Kremlin.
    And as we went through, alarm bells sounded.
    We were stopped, went on through and finally got up
    to where Stalin had his office.
    We got out of the car and went into this first floor
    of the building.
    Stalin's office was up on the second floor.
    And the elevator was so small, that you
    had to go two at a time, with a guard,
    up to the second floor, where we congregated and then
    walked down this zigzag hall, where, at each bend,
    a guard was standing.
    Got into the outer office about five minutes before 11:00,
    and there was Pavlov, the interpreter.
    And one of the interesting things I saw,
    right away, was that the table in front of me
    was covered with English language newspapers,
    from Britain and the United States.
    I don't know why, but they were there.
    And precisely as the clock struck 11:00,
    we were ushered through a couple of outer waiting offices
    into Stalin's office.
    And there was Stalin, standing behind a table,
    at the end of the table.
    And with him was Molotov.
    And Pavlov, of course, entered with us.
    And that began then with a question by Stassen.
    Stassen had told me, who doesn't take shorthand,
    if it seemed appropriate to take notes,
    because this was going to be the basis of articles
    for Ladies' Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post.
    And the good thing about the way the Russians handled
    it is that the interpreter, you know,
    writes down everything that's said.
    It gives you time to catch up with the translation.
    And he said, take a good look at the room,
    at Stalin and Molotov, and see how much of the conversation
    you can write down.
    I got it pretty much verbatim.
    But anyway, Stassen started out with the question of,
    Generalissimo Stalin, do you think
    that it's possible for you and your very different system
    to coexist in peace in the same coming
    nuclear world as our Democratic peoples' capitalism?
    And Stalin said, of course.
    Why not?
    People who thought differently were Trotskyites,
    and you know what happened to them?
    And Stassen said-- he went on to say,
    but Marx and Engels and Lenin have
    indicated that thing, and at the 37th plenum in '39
    Congress Party, there were talks quoting these people
    about capitalistic encirclement and how funeral bells will toll
    over one system or the other.
    And Stalin said, it's not possible
    that I could, at any time, have said that the two couldn't
    co-exist in harmony.
    He said, they're very different systems.
    But while they're very different,
    it pertains to the desire to cooperate.
    And if you have the desire, on both sides, to cooperate
    and live in peace, it's possible.
    Stassen then quoted Stalin.
    And Stalin again denied that he could have said anything
    like that.
    And I felt, at that point, that we
    were going to be thrown out into the snow, which
    was surrounding the Kremlin, by this guy, who
    was like Genghis Khan.
    He was even, according to George Kennan,
    probably responsible for the death of his first wife,
    and even for Lenin, and for Trotsky, and Zhdanov,
    and Voznesensky, and the leadership,
    in the late '30s, in these purges, of the members--
    many members of the Central Committee and the Party
    Congress.
    Stassen then thought it'd be best
    to move to another subject.
    And so--
    [LAUGHTER]
    --he moved over to freedom of the press.
    [LAUGHTER]
    And he said, why is it that, in your system,
    you can't allow people to come in and report freely?
    And Stalin said, down at the conference
    in Tehran or someplace, your Western press
    reported that I hit Marshal Timoshenko with my fist.
    He said Churchill was there, Roosevelt. Everybody
    knew that this was a falsehood.
    He said when I was taking a vacation at Sochi
    and Molotov was sitting back in Moscow,
    your Western press was saying that--
    describing our Soviet state as a sort
    of zoological garden, in which the monkeys were
    fighting with the baboons.
    And he said, it wasn't true.
    Molotov wasn't forcing me out of power.
    I was down there on a vacation.
    He said, it's for these kinds of reasons
    that we can't allow your Western or the outside reporters
    to report freely on what goes on in the Soviet Union.
    Stassen then asked him whether it
    was possible to accredit the New York Herald Tribune
    correspondent, who'd been cooling his heels in Paris
    waiting to be accredited to come into Moscow.
    It's the only time during an hour and a half conversation
    that Stalin turned to Molotov.
    And he was asking him, I guess, whether it was true
    that they hadn't accredited the New York Herald Tribune
    correspondent.
    And when Stalin came back, he said--
    to the conversation, he said, well,
    it is true that we haven't accredited him.
    It's a mistake.
    It's not our policy.
    He'll be accredited tomorrow.
    And he was.
    The New York Herald Tribune was forever in Stassen's debt.
    And they printed an editorial on this.
    After that, they turned to the subjects
    of the difference between the economic systems
    and the Soviet system.
    And Stassen made a great defense of what
    he called "people's capitalism," that's regulated.
    It isn't the kind described in Soviet publications,
    where you have monopoly capitalism, he was talking,
    he was saying.
    And that the ups and downs of the business cycle
    were moderated.
    They turned from that.
    And he made a great defense of democracy.
    And they turned from that to peaceful uses of atomic energy.
    And when the thing was over, Stassen said, Stalin,
    is it possible for me to make public the transcript
    of our conversation?
    And Stalin said, of course.
    Why not?
    You are our guests.
    We Russians have nothing to hide.
    He turned to Pavlov and said make available,
    to Governor Stassen, the transcript of this conference.
    So Pavlov came over to me, and he had
    seen that I was making notes.
    And he said, can you give me your notes.
    And I said, I can't even read my own notes.
    [LAUGHTER]
    I have to go back and look over my terrible handwriting.
    And I'll get something to you in the morning,
    if it's all right with Governor Stassen.
    Stassen said, OK.
    So I worked all night and finally put them all together.
    And we were leaving at 6 o'clock,
    for Kyiv, to see Khrushchev.
    And we stopped by and gave them to Pavlov.
    When we came back three days later,
    we were invited by Ambassador Bedell Smith
    to Spaso House, where Secretary of State George Marshall
    was having dinner.
    And we were invited to dinner with him.
    Telephone rang during that dinner.
    All of these important people, you
    would think the call would be for, it wasn't for them.
    It was for me.
    And it was Pavlov, on the other line, saying,
    I've gone over your notes.
    I've got something that should be released.
    Can you come over, right away?
    So I said this to Ambassador Smith.
    And he said, you're an American.
    Don't go running out.
    You know who he was?
    He was Eisenhower's chief of staff during World War II.
    And he was CIA.
    And he was ambassador in Moscow.
    And he said, don't go running out of here for any Russian.
    I said, well, this transcript is more important to us
    than it is to other people, because this
    is going to be the basis for articles that
    are going to pay for our trip.
    And so Mrs. Smith said, well, at least finish your dessert.
    And so I took a couple of mouthfuls,
    and I went to the door and got in this large, Russian car,
    with a Russian chauffeur.
    And I said, Pavlov.
    And he knew what I meant.
    He knew what he was supposed to do.
    And he took me up to the gate of the Kremlin
    and got to the telephone booth.
    And I didn't have a passport, because you
    have to hand in your passport at the hotel
    before you make your next trip out of Moscow.
    Finally, he found out that Pavlov
    was in the Foreign Ministry Building
    outside of the Kremlin.
    And he took me over there.
    And I was late by about 20 minutes.
    Pavlov said-- I don't know whether it was true
    or not-- said that he had another meeting coming up,
    and he could only go over what Stalin said.
    He didn't care what Stassen said.
    He wanted to make sure that we had what Stalin said.
    We took the transcript and took a look at it
    and saw that it wasn't an accurate transcript.
    And so we released our transcript and not
    their transcript.
    When the press got hold of this, and TASS put it out,
    they found a difference between the two transcripts.
    And it wasn't until 1985, in research done by a young guy,
    I think, at MIT, who was only about 32 or 33,
    whom I never met, but whose father
    I met at an International Institute of Strategic Studies
    conference in The Hague, Gabriel [PERSONAL NAME],, who
    had gone into this in depth.
    And it turned out that the Stassen-Stalin transcript
    became a key factor in the succession debate,
    after that, as to who the successor should be to Stalin.
    And at that time, there was the war going on
    between Voznesensky and Zhdanov, on the one hand,
    and Malenkov on the other.
    And Malenkov held to this theory that Stalin
    had proposed, according to our transcript,
    that the two could cooperate in peace,
    and that the Russians, as Stalin said,
    did not propose to wage war.
    And those were key words.
    And I heard that in the English TASS radio broadcasts,
    they put out our version.
    But in the inside Russia Pravda, Russian transcript,
    which Stalin would read, they put out his transcript.
    But that was an interesting experience.
    And this guy, who he was shorter than I thought.
    At that time, he was 68 years old.
    Stassen, at that point, was 39 years old.
    And the crimes that he committed were equaled only
    by those that were committed by Hitler.
    In light of your success in testing the prison system
    at Nuremberg, have you ever thought
    about going to the Moscow embassy and testing their--
    [LAUGHTER]
    You know what I tried to do?
    I've been on a project, I call it US-Cuba photo diplomacy.
    I've been trying to improve relations with Cuba.
    And I've been back there five times, in two years,
    using my uncle's photographs of 1904, when
    he, on a bicycle, a pony, a train, and a boat,
    went the length and breadth for four months
    and took 650 pictures of Cuba.
    One of the pictures that he took was
    of General Maximo Gomez, who is the George Washington of Cuba.
    And he was one of the ones during what they called
    the Cuban War of Independence, that we
    call the Spanish American War, was one of the leaders.
    And they wanted him to be the first president,
    after the Spanish-American War, after the Cuban War
    of Independence, of Cuba.
    But he refused.
    He was older, and he died the next year, actually.
    And he was-- this was in 1904.
    And he was a Dominican and not a Cuban,
    and he thought a Cuban ought to be the first president of Cuba.
    But my uncle took a photograph of General Maximo Gomez,
    his wife, and children, in his courtyard,
    in the city of Havana, in 1904.
    And the Cubans had never seen this picture.
    So they wouldn't give me a visa until I showed them
    this photograph.
    And they sent this back to Havana.
    And they had known, I think--
    if they didn't, they should have--
    that I'd been in CIA.
    I was on the Board of Estimates, from '59 to '62,
    and had chaired the first estimate on Castro.
    And I had, on my panel, Admiral Sherman,
    who'd been head of Naval Intelligence,
    and a guy named Forrest Van Slyke, who had been in OSS.
    And we came up with an estimate that Castro, at that time,
    was not a Moscow-oriented communist.
    He was a Marxist-Leninist.
    We were overruled by Allen Dulles,
    who was looking toward another Guatemala invasion-type thing.
    And he wanted to get in and knock Castro off.
    And so then Castro--
    this was a predecessor to Castro's visit
    in April of 1959.
    The reason for the estimate was because of his visit.
    Eisenhower took off to play golf in Augusta.
    And they turned him over to Richard Milhous
    Nixon, up in the Senate Office Building on Sunday afternoon.
    And Nixon and he had a three hour conversation.
    It wasn't long after that that Nixon prepared
    a memorandum that became the basis, a year later,
    for a memorandum that Eisenhower signed,
    that was the basis of the Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961.
    And CIA has tried to kill Castro.
    When I mentioned this to Ricardo Alarcon,
    the deputy foreign minister of Cuba,
    and asked him whether he knew I'd been in CIA, he said, no.
    He didn't know that I'd been in CIA.
    He turned to Felipe Alvarez, who was sitting next to him.
    He said he didn't know.
    And then he turned to Ronaldo Gonzales,
    who was the head for ICAP, the North American department.
    And I asked, and he said, yes.
    We know that he was in CIA, but that he was not
    on the covert side.
    He was on the overt side.
    And so I said, during that conversation,
    I asked whether it was possible to go into the Cuban prisons.
    And Ricardo Alarcon said, first time I've been asked that.
    But he said, let me check to see whether it is possible.
    He said, do you have any prison particularly in mind?
    And I said Combinado del Este or that's close to it
    if it isn't it.
    That is the main prison for political prisoners.
    I went out then and went out to Oriente Province,
    to Baracoa, out to a mud river, to the Yumuri River mud house
    villages, where my uncle had been, in 1904, and came back.
    And I asked whether it was possible.
    But we were leaving the next day,
    and they obviously didn't want me
    to go in there for some reason.
    But as a result of that-- and that's a longer answer
    to the question than I anticipated--
    after five trips, it finally resulted in the Cuban baseball
    team coming up, in April of this year,
    to play the University of Minnesota
    in the General Mills tournament.
    And they played in the Metrodome on April 1
    through the 4th, and the University of California,
    University of Michigan, the University of Maine,
    all of the best college teams from last year.
    We told the Cubans they had to keep the age limit down to 22,
    but they came up.
    And they had a team that hadn't played together, much.
    But they beat-- they won the tournament.
    And we had an art exhibit and a photo exhibit
    and a series of lectures.
    So US-Cuban photo diplomacy in the same kind of mode
    that US-China ping-pong diplomacy was carried on.
    We hope will begin the beginning of a break that
    will lead to something that will resume
    normal diplomatic relations.
    We have normal diplomatic relations
    with Russia, China, Yugoslavia.
    Even in Nicaragua, we have diplomatic ambassador,
    but not Cuba, 90 miles off our shore.
    And my thesis is one of dialogue and communication
    not confrontation or increased pressure.
    And I believe that, on the basis of my knowledge of Cuba,
    that we have driven Castro, who wouldn't particularly like us
    anyway, into the arms of the Soviet Union
    and made him dependent on them, whereas he
    might have pursued a middle course,
    not allied with us but trading with us to some extent,
    accepting aid from us to some extent,
    but also accepting it from the Soviet Union
    and from third world countries.
    That's another subject.
    Did you do this as a private citizen?
    Yeah.
    I did it as a private citizen, having been in the government
    and making sure that the State Department knew
    what I was doing.
    They didn't like it.
    But under the US Licensing Act, I
    was accredited by our little newspaper,
    up in northern Wisconsin, the Ashland Daily Press.
    And I met the requirements for the US Licensing Act,
    so they had to give me a letter of accreditation.
    I had the visa from Cuba due to this first picture
    that my uncle had taken.
    And I reported to them what I'd done,
    so that they are aware of it.
    They don't like it.
    And Kenneth Skoug, who's the head
    of the Cuban desk in the State Department,
    we invited to come out to show him
    how balanced we were in our approach,
    in terms of hearing both sides.
    He gave the last lecture at the university, on May 27,
    just recently.
    But we had Tad Scholz, and we had
    Wayne Smith, who had been our last head of the US interest
    section.
    We even had Valladares, who was in the Castro prison,
    and who'd been held for 22 years,
    and has written a book, Beyond All Hope.
    We had eight of these people.
    And I have people in the State Department,
    who I know sympathize with my point of view.
    And it helps.
    There are a lot of other people, like Elliott Abrams and Kenneth
    Skoug, and there's a man who's Under Secretary of State,
    Mike Armacost, for Political Affairs in the State
    Department, whom you may have seen, recently,
    in regard to the Gulf situation, who went where I went
    to college, Carleton College.
    And I had a brother who died at Carleton, in whose memory
    a basketball cup is given.
    And Michael Armacost won that Madison basketball trophy
    in 1958.
    So it's a bond between us.
    And we both went to the same college,
    and he won that trophy.
    Not that he will say that he favors what I'm doing,
    but he will listen to what I say and will give me
    some indirect guidance about, maybe, somebody
    I should talk to.
    That's how it works.
    But I'm not a member of CIA.
    That's what they all say.
    [LAUGHTER]
    That's true, scout's honor.
    Are there any last questions--
    I don't even have my fingers crossed.
    --about subjects we've talked about or anything else?
    I beg your pardon.
    I'm just asking the group for any last questions.
    Well, if there aren't any, I'd like
    to thank Bob for coming to talk with us,
    about these interesting personal events,
    as well as very important events in world history.
    Thank you very much.
    Thank you.
    [APPLAUSE]

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Robert E. Matteson describes capturing Obergruppenführer Ernest Kaltenbrunner; being in the Third Army head of a counter-intelligence unit under the 80th Infantry Division; coming upon the concentration camp Ebensee; the conditions in the camp; his travels through Austria looking for Kaltenbrunner; tracking Kaltenbrunner to a remote cabin in the mountains; being in charge of security at the Nuremberg trials; visiting some infamous Nazis in their cell blocks, including Herman Goerring and Julius Streicher; the hanging of Kaltenbrunner for his crimes; meeting Albert Speer in Heidelburg, Germany in 1978 and his discussion with him; his 1947 trip with Harold Stassen to Moscow, Russia and meeting with Stalin; and his most recent diplomatic mission trying to open up communications between the US and Cuba.
    Interviewee
    Robert E. Matteson
    Date
    interview:  1982 June

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    1 videocassette (VHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
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    No restrictions on use

    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The interview with Robert E. Matteson was conducted in June 1982 by the University of Wisconsin, River Falls, in conjunction with a summer teacher's workshop taught at the school. The video contains a spoken testimony in front of an audience followed by a question and answer session filmed in the university's TV studio. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received a copy of the testimony in October 1993.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:08:53
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    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn512456

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