Thank you, I had some facts mixed up in my head.

From the FIS Wikipedia page:

On the other hand, Gehlen himself was cleared by James H. Critchfield of the Central Intelligence Agency who worked with the Gehlen Organization from 1949 to 1956. In 2001, he said that "almost everything negative that has been written about Gehlen, [as an] ardent ex-Nazi, one of Hitler's war criminals ... is all far from the fact," as quoted in the Washington Post. Critchfield added that Gehlen hired former Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS) men "reluctantly, under pressure from German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to deal with 'the avalanche of subversion hitting them from East Germany'" [9]

From Adenauer's Wikipedia page:

Adenauer was imprisoned for two days after the Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934; however, on 10 August 1934, maneuvering for his pension, he wrote a ten-page letter to Hermann Göring (the Prussian interior minister). He stated that as Mayor he had violated Prussian laws in order to allow NSDAP events in public buildings and Nazi flags to be flown from city flagpoles and that in 1932 he had declared publicly that the Nazis should join the Reich government in a leading role.[23][24] At the end of 1932, Adenauer had indeed demanded a joint government by his Zentrum party and the Nazis for Prussia.[25]

During the next two years, Adenauer changed residences often for fear of reprisals against him, while living on the benevolence of friends. With the help of lawyers in August 1937 he was successful in claiming a pension; he received a cash settlement for his house, which had been taken over by the city of Cologne; his unpaid mortgage, penalties and taxes were waived. With reasonable financial security he managed to live in seclusion for some years. After the failed assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944, he was imprisoned for a second time as an opponent of the regime. He fell ill and credited Eugen Zander, a former municipal worker in Cologne and communist, with saving his life. Zander, then a section Kapo of a labor camp near Bonn, discovered Adenauer's name on a deportation list to the East and managed to get him admitted to a hospital. Adenauer was subsequently rearrested (as was his wife), but in the absence of any evidence against him, was released from prison at Brauweiler in November 1944.

So, he wasn't exactly a Nazi, but he was a coward and sometime collaborator. His (and those like him's) anticommunism put the Nazis in power. A communist saved his life, and he still devoted the postwar years to anticommunism.

The Soviets had the right idea on how to accomplish denazification. :stalin-gun-1: :stalin-gun-2: