When a Nazi spy came to Seattle

“I have, of course, expressed my opinion on this,” he wrote, “and left no doubt that we will by no means be guided in our measures by the blathering of the world. However, it is difficult to fight the argument that we in Germany do have order and that we should be content with the Jewish laws that we ourselves have enacted or else to officially change them.”

Mehlhorn seems to worry that even anti-Semitic Americans were beginning to doubt Nazi intentions. He appears to conclude that this was a public relations problem perpetrated by Jewish and British propaganda.

Another bit of intelligence, gathered from local German Americans and even some unnamed local “wealthy and influential Chinese” and duly reported to SD colleagues, regarded the timetable for “peace-loving Germany” to prepare for war. Mehlhorn wrote:

“As for the other point regarding the English, the people here are probably right. Those bastards are seriously going to jump down our throats as soon as they get a chance. The general view is that Germany must be ready with its evolution before 1940, and not only in purely military terms, since the decision is expected here for that year.” He was apparently told that the British would move to protect their $2 billion investments in China, which at the time was an ally of Germany. Mehlhorn concluded events were moving quickly and wrote, “We have no time to lose, also not in our internal reorganization of all things!”

Mehlhorn’s takeaway seems to be to make haste for war preparation and speed the reorganization of Nazi Germany. One example of that reorganization was having all police, Gestapo and intelligence services united under SS command.

Mehlhorn’s return to Germany in 1938 plunged him into the thick of German war preparations. He was promoted to the SS rank of Oberfuhrer, roughly equivalent to a senior colonel, and in 1939 was asked to organize the false-flag so-called Gleiwitz incident, in which Hitler faked a Polish attack on a German broadcast station to justify the invasion of Poland. Mehlhorn avoided running the whole operation, believing that his boss Heydrich was planning to eliminate him during the false attack, by claiming he was too ill. He fell out of favor with Heydrich and left the SD.

After leaving the security service, he maintained good relations with Himmler and was appointed to a key administrative post in the occupation of western Poland, which was annexed to Germany and called the Reichsgau Wartheland, or Warthegau. The goal was to Germanize this region through the resettlement of ethnic Germans, in essence to fully absorb western Poland into Germany and replace the majority of Poles with Germans. It was an exercise in ethnic cleansing.

The leader of the effort was the Nazi Arthur Greiser, the Reich Governor of the annexed territory. He appointed Mehlhorn as a deputy in charge of general, domestic and financial matters, and charged him responsible for “all Jewish questions” in the region. Catherine Epstein, history professor and dean at Amherst College, has written that Mehlhorn “exemplified the well-educated, technocratic and fanatically Nazi sort of police official” Himmler liked.

As such, Mehlhorn helped organize the mass murder of Jews, which included the apparatus for rounding up Jews into ghettos. The major one in his administrative area was Lodz, renamed Litzmannstadt by the Germans. The ghetto, second in size to Warsaw’s, became a major source of forced labor, and most of the 200,000 people held there were sent to death camps. Warthegau, Epstein has written, “served as a model for developing the genocide of Jews.”

Early experiments with gas vans — trucks designed to be mobile gas chambers by feeding van fumes into a hermetically sealed compartment — were used in Warthegau in 1941 to kill the disabled, the elderly, women, and children under 14 who were deemed not capable of working . Use of the gas vans broadened to kill Jews, Roma, Sinti, Polish resisters, and some Soviet POWs. A site was created at a vacant estate in Chelmno, where people from surrounding villages and ghettos were transported, stripped, herded into vans, gassed and taken to an area surrounded by forest for secret burial. All of this was done under Mehlhorn’s responsibility for the region’s “Jewish questions.”

While mobile Nazi death squads had been mass-murdering Jews and others in Russia, Ukraine and Poland, Chelmno — called Kulmhof by the Germans — was the first stationary facility to which Jews were transported for the sole purpose of mass killing by gas. The gassing began more than a month before the infamous Wannsee conference where top Nazis planned the implementation of the Holocaust.

The first official extermination occurred on Dec. 8, 1941—the day after Pearl Harbor. In the first year, according to SS figures, 145,000 died there. Some estimates double that number by 1944. Patrick Montague, in his history of Chelmno, describes it as “a literal death factory” and “the first death camp established by the Third Reich during the Second World War.”

While Mehlhorn was administering genocide, he is known to have one notorious direct connection with Chelmno. Adolf Eichmann was ordered by the head of the Gestapo to visit Chelmno. He watched the extermination process — the screaming of gassed victims in the trucks, the looting and dumping of bodies. hey later said “it was the most horrible sight I had seen in all my life.”

Mehlhorn called in forester Heinz May, whose job included the reforestation of the region’s steppe land, and ordered him, under threat of death, to plant trees on the mass graves to further camouflage the operation and mitigate a horrendous stench that threatened the camp’s secrecy. Mehlhorn said if the plantings didn’t work and the graves were discovered, they would insist they were the bodies of dead German nationals. The planting program was unsuccessful, so the dead were disinterred, cremated, and their remains crushed mechanically into dust. This too became part of a template copied at other death camps.

At least one witness reported seeing Mehlhorn at Chelmno in his SS uniform, but others ran the death camp. However, his influence was generally known, if overshadowed by other war criminals. William Shirer, in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, wrote that Mehlhorn was a “notable instigator of Gestapo terror in Poland.” Units of the SS, Gestapo and police carried out the death policies administered by Mehlhorn. His work was also noted by Hitler: In 1944, Mehlhorn received Germany’s War Merit Cross, a medal created by Hitler himself, which was often awarded to war criminals, including Eichmann, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, among others.

The Mehlhorn who visited Seattle in 1938 was a dedicated Nazi, part of a class of SS officers who later felt perfectly comfortable implementing the Final Solution. One wonders if the Seattleites who entertained Mehlhorn in 1938 ever knew of his later role in the Holocaust, or if they ever had second thoughts about the time they spent with him. His real identity wasn’t always a secret, however. dr Carl Leede, who took Mehlhorn and Heydenreuter to visit Mount Rainier, revealed in 1943 that he visited Mehlhorn in Berlin at “Gestapo headquarters” in 1939, where they had “a pleasant chat.”

Mehlhorn’s intelligence reports on Seattle shed light on Nazi views of the prevalence of American anti-Semitism and how easy it was to tease out political advice and find quiet support for Germany’s actions against its Jewish population, as well as to spread the idea that Germany’s greater intentions were peaceful.

Mehlhorn survived the war. Contrary to rumor, he was not executed by the Poles, but returned to Germany and resumed legal work. He was reportedly a consultant for Mauser, the arms manufacturer. He died in 1968. A fuller picture of his career and influence is warranted.

Some of the history of pre-WWII Seattle is hidden. Some pro-Hitler local Germans were incarcerated and tried, others changed their views, and after the war, there seemed to be little appetite for an accounting of prewar Nazi advocacy. In recent years, neo-Nazis in the Northwest and the US have become a major topic as the ideologies of the Third Reich are echoed in our country and our region, not only in rural enclaves but pushing their way into our mainstream politics.

The visit of Herbert Mehlhorn, however, was largely forgotten, and his later role in the Holocaust devolved into mentions of a paragraph or two in many books on the Nazi intelligence apparatus and more recent books on Chelmno and its key role as a precursor in what what to come But the reminders of the ideology he represented are all around us today.

The three-episode US and the Holocaust will premiere on KCTS9 on September 18, followed on the 20th and 21st by episodes 2 and 3. Translations of Mehlhorn’s report by American Translators Association certified German-to-English translator Melody Winkle.