John O. Koehler (June 11, 1930 – September 28, 2012) was a German-born American journalist and executive for the Associated Press, who also briefly served as the White House Communications Director in 1987 during the Reagan administration.
It had just appeared in the media that Koehler had been forcibly trained as a child soldier by the Deutsches Jungvolk, a Nazi Party extreme youth paramilitary wing, when he was ten years old and delivered ammunition to anti-aircraft crews during the 1945 incendiary Bombing of Dresden by the Royal Air Force.
[1] Koehler insisted that his coercive training and use as a child soldier was not the reason for his resignation and dismissed the Jungvolk as "the Boy Scouts run by the Nazi party".
[1] On 9 December 1988, Koehler was appointed by President Reagan to a position in the National Commission for Employment Policy of the United States Department of Labor.
[3] At the time he acted as one of two triggermen in the 1931 cop killings, Mielke had been a young street-fighter in the Parteiselbstschutz, the paramilitary wing of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which bore strong similarities to the Nazi stormtroopers.
[8] Koehler also accused Erich Mielke, Markus Wolf, and the Stasi military advisors they assigned to Ethiopia to assist Far Left dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam of complicity in genocide.
Beginning with the execution of Monsignor Konstanty Budkiewicz in the basement of Moscow's Lubyanka Prison on Easter Sunday 1923, Koehler documented how the religious persecution of the Catholic Church in Russia began almost immediately after the October Revolution.
Dąbrowski's sources, the council had been called at the urging of anti-Communist Catholic clergy in West Germany, with the intentions of both strengthening the Church internally and going upon the offense in response to the global rise of both Marxism and Communism.
Dąbrowski's reports on the council were considered so important that Yuri Andropov was briefed upon them immediately after taking command of the KGB in 1967 and cited them as grounds to order a mass offensive against the Catholic Church beginning in 1969.
Even though the Second Vatican Council had allegedly been called to strengthen the Church as an ally of the Free World in the ongoing Cold War, after its completion, according to Koehler, the KGB was easily able to recruit moles inside every Department of the Roman Curia.
[13] During the early 1970s, Koehler alleges that a highly placed mole inside the Vatican's diplomatic service was secretly recording conversations between Pope Paul VI and foreign dignitaries.
At the time, a north–south ceasefire was in effect, but Minister Trần was expressing to the Pope in vain the mounting terror of his Government about what was seen as South Vietnam's abandonment by its allies.
In a document that still survives, all members of the Party Central Committee, including future Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, co-signed the orders.