After brief spells first in the army, and then the Luftwaffe, Dohse was posted back to the Gestapo as a sergeant in the spring of 1941. Now married and with two young children, he was sent on 15 June to Paris. Here he was seconded to the counter-espionage section of the newly established German directorate of security (the BdS), headquartered at 82–84 Avenue Foch – an address which was already becoming one of the most feared in France. At the time the Gestapo was not formally permitted to operate in France, making Dohse one of the first Gestapo officers to work on French soil.
It was this posting, more than any other event of his young life, which transformed Dohse from a junior up-and-coming member of the Gestapo into a subtle, cunning and accomplished counter-intelligence operator. For it was here that he met the man who would become both the mentor from whom he learnt his skills and the protector who would cover his back in the dangerous times ahead.
Karl Bömelburg, aged fifty-six in 1941, was the son of a pastry cook and a man of many skills, disguises and aliases (including ‘Charles Bois’, ‘Herr Bennelburger’ and ‘Colonel Mollemburg’). According to both Paris rumour and British intelligence records, he was also – very unusually for a high-ranking Nazi – known to have homosexual proclivities. Elegant and cultivated, Bömelburg was a notable bon viveur, fluent in French, an enthusiastic Francophile and a master of the art of spying. ‘Though not a political Nazi,’ according to his superior in Berlin, ‘he was completely loyal and a committed anti-communist.’ According to one account, he had spent eight years before the war operating undercover as a silk merchant in Lyon. Other records suggest that he was part of the German embassy in Paris in 1938, where, with the knowledge of the French government, he was tasked with rooting out communist subversives from the German immigrant population in France. During these interwar years, under the cover of his anti-communist work, Bömelburg built a German spy network which extended deep into French society and commercial life.
Regarded by his close colleagues as a ‘little God’, Bömelburg seems to have immediately spotted something unusual and appealing – a kindred spirit perhaps – in the new arrival from Schleswig-Holstein. He dispatched Dohse first to the Berlitz school in Paris to perfect his French, and then on a month’s detachment to each of the departments in the Avenue Foch to get him acquainted with every part of the German security apparatus in Paris. His initiation complete, Bömelburg appointed his young protégé as his personal secretary and, though Bömelburg would not have needed it, his official interpreter.
It was in this capacity that, in July and August 1941, Dohse accompanied his chief and another senior SS intelligence officer on a two-month tour across occupied and Vichy France and into Italy. The three men travelled in some state in Bömelburg’s pride and joy, a requisitioned armour-plated Cadillac chauffeured by his personal driver. The main purpose of the tour was for Bömelburg to reactivate and debrief his old spy network, but the trio did not ignore the opportunity to have fun as well. Their itinerary included Vichy, Dijon, Lyon, Saint-Étienne, Montélimar, Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Toulon, Saint-Raphaël, Cannes, Ventimiglia, San Remo and Monte-Carlo, where Dohse won 25,000 francs at the gaming tables (enough to have a fur coat made up in Paris and sent to his wife in Elmshorn).
What Bömelburg taught Dohse during their escapade of the summer of 1941, and in the months which followed at BdS Paris, is that counter-espionage is an art in which the techniques of subtlety and persuasion are more important, and usually more successful, than those of brutality and threat. Dohse was neither squeamish about torture, nor morally opposed to it. He argued that ‘enhanced interrogation’ – a euphemism used by the Nazis which is still in active use today – could be ‘necessary … in situations where the lives of German soldiers were at imminent threat’. Dohse had, moreover, no qualms at all about leaving brutality to others if it meant that he could use the techniques of persuasion, personal charm and the disarming power of an act of kindness to better effect. In his own words: ‘I didn’t need to dirty my hands – others did that.’ Later, after the war, Dohse was to invest this way of working with moral principle, claiming that it was all intended to ‘humanise’ (his word again) the struggle against Resistance ‘terrorists’.
What, above all, Dohse the interrogator learnt from Bömelburg was the importance of knowing his subjects and their psychologies, weaknesses and desires, the better to turn them to his purpose. As one commentator later put it, Dohse ‘did not terrify, he demobilised’.
Neither these more subtle skills – nor Dohse’s habit of easy superiority, nor his elegant style of dress, nor his cultivated tastes, nor his pragmatic, non-ideological approach to his task; nor his Francophilia, nor his preference for French company over that of many of his German colleagues (he was referred to disparagingly as ‘half French’); nor the high level of protection he enjoyed in Paris made the young, pushy, newly arrived Gestapo officer at all popular amongst his more hardline colleagues in Bordeaux. He was, in many ways, a man apart amongst the more traditional Nazis who dominated the German security structures of the time. His loyalty to the German cause was unchallenged – and unchallengeable – at this stage of the war. His pride in his professionalism as a police officer, his sense of personal honour and his duty of loyalty to his superiors made it easy for him to be ambivalent to the excesses of National Socialism. Nazi politics and prejudices held no interest for him, beyond the point that they were necessary for the pursuit of his ambition and his ability to serve his country. Dohse was not intelligent in the intellectual sense of the word. But he was wily and clever and quick to win people to his point of view. Nor was his spirit a heroic one. He liked Bordeaux because it was congenial, and because he liked France. But he liked it most of all because it was not the Russian front.
Dohse’s arrival in Bordeaux in January 1942 coincided with the centralising of the city’s security structure – chiefly the SS and the police – into the one new grouping known for short as ‘KdS Bordeaux’. The organisation would eventually grow to around a hundred German officers, assisted by a large number of French men and women in various supporting roles. They were housed in four large requisitioned residential properties in what was virtually a KdS colony, stretching along a 200-metre section of the Avenue du Maréchal Pétain in the northern Bordeaux suburb of Bouscat. The new office was split into seven departments: I: Administration; II: Liaison with the French authorities and Jewish matters; III: Political affairs (also including Jewish matters); IV: Intelligence-gathering and the suppression of the Resistance; V: Economic crime and the black market; VI: Internal security; and, last but not least, Department VII: Archives and Records. The site also boasted a canteen converted from an old casino, indoor and outdoor recreation areas and staff accommodation.
When Dohse arrived, the commander at KdS Bordeaux was twenty-nine-year-old SS-Sturmbannführer Herbert Hagen, a close friend of Adolf Eichmann’s. Dohse was given command of Department IV: ‘Intelligence and the suppression of the Resistance’. His remit was the elimination of all threats to German troops, organisations and installations, and his department was the largest and – by common acceptance – the most important of the newly fledged organisation.
This irked his new colleagues even more. Before the formation of KdS Bordeaux, security in the region had been more or less the exclusive preserve of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). Now the long-established SD officers would have to share the role with the uppity Gestapo man with well-connected friends in Paris. To make matters worse, Dohse’s initial role in Bordeaux was hazy. He was not at first sent to the city as a member of the KdS, but as