Allen Dulles Brokered Secret Peace With Nazi SS
By Desmond Okafor ·
Victims of war crimes and dying agents in Burma were reduced to administrative entries alongside secret March 1945 negotiations between Allen Dulles and the Nazi SS.
The Caserta records are where the bookkeeping of brutality resides. According to a US National Archives catalogue entry for the "Mediterranean and Burma Operations Records," the files maintained at the Caserta station cover a range of activities that move abruptly from the technical to the visceral. The series includes "radio intelligence," "installations," and "supplies," but it also explicitly lists "atrocities," "war crimes," and "partisan and resistance groups."
This is the ledger of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as it navigated the collapse of Fascist Italy. The inclusion of "Italian City Teams" and "post-hostility plans" suggests a focused effort to map the urban centers of Italy not just for liberation, but for the management that follows. When a catalogue lists "atrocities" alongside "decorations and awards," it reveals the cold arithmetic of paramilitary operations: the documentation of horror is simply another administrative category, filed next to the medals given for the work of overseeing it.
Italian City Teams
The Caserta files do not stand alone. The National Archives also lists a related series regarding the "United Nations War Crimes Commission," consisting of evidence files and communications forwarded through the State Department. The crossover is evident. The OSS was not merely fighting a war; it was building a database of culpability and control. In the Mediterranean theater, this extended to the Bari station, where the catalogue entry records "team operations," "recruiting," and "evaluations," with a specific focus on Albania.
In the Balkans, the OSS operated in a landscape of shifting loyalties and ethnic conflict. The Bari files, focusing on "assignments" and "procedures," mask the reality of the ground: the recruitment of local assets and the evaluation of partisan reliability. The "evaluations" mentioned in the catalogue are the precursors to the intelligence profiles that would define the early Cold War, where the value of a resistance fighter was measured by their utility to Washington's long-term strategic map.
Casualties in Burma
While the Mediterranean files lean toward political management and war crimes, the records for the Burma station read like a medical chart of a failing campaign. The catalogue entry for the Burma operations lists "assignments, travel, pay, organization, security, intelligence, personnel, casualties, promotions, awards and decorations, and medical information."
The inclusion of "medical information" and "casualties" as primary categories speaks to the environmental toll of the China-Burma-India theater. This was a war fought in jungles and mountains, where disease often claimed more lives than the Japanese Imperial Army. This operational footprint extends into China; a related series of photographs from the OSS field station at Kunming shows unidentified buildings that may have served as the headquarters for Detachment 202, established in 1944.
For the agents in Burma, the administrative trail—the "pay" and the "travel"—ended in the medical files. The juxtaposition of "promotions" and "casualties" in the same series captures the indifference of the organization. The machine continued to function, promoting some while archiving the deaths of others in the same set of folders.
Operation Sunrise
In Bern, the OSS was playing a different game entirely. The catalogue entry for the Bern station lists "administration, Operation Sunrise/Crossword, intelligence, military objectives, military targets, and propaganda."
Public record establishes that Operation Sunrise involved secret negotiations in March 1945 in Switzerland. Elements of the Nazi German SS sought a separate peace with the Allies, facilitated by Allen Dulles of the OSS. This was not a standard military operation; it was a back-channel deal conducted while the war was still raging, involving some of the most murderous elements of the Third Reich.
The Bern files, according to the archive's description, track these negotiations alongside "propaganda" and "military targets." The fact that the dealings with the SS are filed in the same series as "administration" shows how quickly the exceptional became routine. The Dulles-led negotiations in Switzerland created a template for the American intelligence community: the belief that the most useful allies are often the most morally compromised, provided they have the right intelligence on "military objectives."
This pattern of pragmatic betrayal and strategic recruitment is the ghost in the machine of the OSS. From the "Italian City Teams" in Caserta to the SS negotiators in Bern, the records describe a transition from wartime liberation to the establishment of a global surveillance state. The London office, as noted in related series, managed the "Morale Operations Branch" and the "Secret Intelligence Branch," coordinating this sprawl from the heart of the empire.
Across these different stations—Athens, Bari, Bern, Burma, Cairo, Caserta, and Paris—the common thread is the reduction of human conflict to "personnel" and "administrative matters." In the case of the Paris station, the catalogue entry is the most skeletal of all, listing only "personnel." It leaves open whether the Paris office was a mere waypoint or a place where the files were simply thinner, leaving the nature of the OSS's final European foothold a gap in the record.