Hitler's Nest of Vipers: The Rise Of The Abwehr

HITLER’S NEST

OF VIPERS

HITLER’S NEST

OF VIPERS

THE RISE OF THE ABWEHR

NIGEL WEST

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

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Copyright © Nigel West, 2022

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CONTENTS

List of Plates

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Glossary and Abbreviations

Reich Security Agency (RSHA) Organisation after 1941

Introduction

Dramatis Personae

Chapter I Pre-War

Chapter II   The Buro Jahnke

Chapter III  Nest Bremen

Chapter IV  GOLFPLATZ

Chapter V   The Front Line

Chapter VI  German Intelligence in the Middle East

Chapter VII South American Intrigue

Chapter VIII    The Western Campaign

Appendices

I Abstellen in Germany

II   MI5 Assessment of German Activity in the Iberian Peninsula

III  German Penetration of SOE, SIS and Allied Organisations

Source Notes

LIST OF PLATES

1.Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.

2.Erich Pfeiffer.

3.Thomas Ludwig.

4.Josef Ledebur.

5.Colonel Rudolf.

6.Carl Eitel.

7.Kuno Weltzien.

8.Otto Mayer.

9.Paul Fidrmuc.

10.Gottfried Paul-Taboschat.

11.Nikolaus Ritter.

12.Emile Kliemann and Lily Sergueiev.

13.Bertie Koepke.

14.ISOS.

15.Kriegs Organisation Portugal (KOP).

The Abwehr files … deserved more than the attention they got from historians and imaginative writers.

Gerold Guensberg, Studies in Intelligence Vol. 21 No. 3 (1977)

The Abwehr is the German equivalent of our own Secret Service. It is a military organisation under the direct control of the German High Command. An Abwehrstelle is a station of the Abwehr.

Major Anthony Blunt to the Prime Minister, MI5 briefing on HARLEQUIN, April 1943

Deception of the enemy is a weapon which is too little employed in the German conduct of war. Our enemies, especially the British, occupy themselves with it and with more success.

General Alfred Jodl, Chief of OKW Operations Staff, 5 March 1945.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author acknowledges his debt of gratitude to those who have assisted his research, among them the late Bill Williams, Roger Hesketh, David Strangeways, Noel Wild, Juan Pujol (GARBO), Roman Garby-Czerniawski (BRUTUS), Harry Williamson (TATE), Frano de Bona (FREAK), Ib Riis (COBWEB), Dusan Popov (TRICYCLE), Ivo Popov (DREADNOUGHT), Eugn Sostaric (METEOR), John Moe (MUTT), Tor Glad (EFF), Elvira de la Fuentes (BRONX), Lisel Gärtner, Hugh Astor, Len Burt, Christopher and Pam Harmer, Cyril Mills, John Maude, Gerald Glover, Peter Ramsbotham, Tommy and Joan Robertson, Enriquetta Harris, Sarah Bishop, Joanna Phipps, Peter Hope, Jim Skardon, Eric Goodacre, John Gwyer, Dick White, Victor and Tess Rothschild, and Bill Magan. Russell Lee, Michael Ryde, Rupert Speir, Bill Luke, who shared their wartime MI5 experiences; and the late Sigismund Best, Philip Johns, Cecil Gledhill, Nicholas Elliott, Felix Cowgill, Peter Falk, Desmond Bristow, Rodney Dennys, Cecil Barclay, John Bygott, Eddie Boxshall, Euan Rabagliati, Charles Seymour, Andrew King, George Blake, Lionel Loewe, Walter Bell, Kenneth Benton, John Codrington, Lord Tennyson, George Young, Robin Cecil, John Cairncross, who all served in SIS. Also, from SOE, Ronnie Seth, Peter Kemp, Jack Beevor, Brian Stonehouse, Tony Brooks and Peter Wilkinson; Al Ulmer, Bill Hood, Peter Sichel and Hugh Montgomery from OSS, Ken Crosby, formerly of the FBI Special Intelligence Service; Cleve Cram from the CIA and John Taylor from NARA. Finally, Halina Szymanska, Martin and Kim Dearden, Bill Kenyon-Jones, Gunter Peis, Rob Hesketh, Erich Vermehren, David Mure, Jock Colville, and Bill Cavendish-Bentinck, David Kahn, Marco Popov, Roger Grosjean, Ladislas Farago, John Taylor, Jennifer Scherr, Sebastian Cody, Kim and Marton Dearden, Christian Linde, Frederick Solms-Baruth, Kathleen Ritter, Otto Weltzien, Charles Byford, Nicholas Reed, Jim Lee and Christopher Risso-Gill.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Many of the documents reproduced in this volume originate from official files and have been redacted during the declassification process. Where possible the redactions have been restored, but where this has not been possible the redaction is indicated thus: [XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]

The author has retained the convention of printing codenames in capitals but, for ease of reading, has restored capitalised surnames to ordinary lower case.

In the interests of consistency, some American-month/day style dates have been altered to the European day/month convention.

Many Allied and German military ranks have been deliberately omitted as they can be somewhat misleading for the uninitiated as they do not always accurately reflect seniority. In the German system the status of specialist (Sonderführer) was often granted to civilians who had no military background. The five designations (Sondeführer G, Z, K, B and R) were the equivalent, respectively, of an NCO, lieutenant, captain, major and colonel.

GLOSSARY AND ABBREVIATIONS

REICH SECURITY AGENCY (RSHA) ORGANISATION AFTER 1941

VI-A Administration

VI-B Western Europe

1. Holland

2. Belgium

3. France

4. Spain

5. Portugal

6. Scandinavia

VI-C Central Europe. Near & Far East

1–2. Russian & Baltic States

3. Ukraine

4–6. Japan

7–8. China

9. Manchuko & Mongolia

10. Thailand & French Indo-China

11. Dutch East Indies & Philippines

12. Iran, Turkey & Afghanistan

13. Arab Countries

VI-D United Kingdom and the American Continent and British Empire

1. Canada

2. United States

3. Mexico

4. South America

5. United Kingdom

VI-E Italy, Switzerland & Balkans

VI-F Training

VI-G Documentary. (Falsification of documents, photography, copying, etc.)

VI-H Greece and Balkans

VI-I (Function unknown.)

VI-S: Special Enterprises. (Training of agents, W/T operators and saboteurs.)

V1-Z: Russia and Africa. Perhaps also India and China

VI-Wi: Economics. (Wirtschaft.)

7: Transportation Section. (Fahrbereitschaft)

Department Function

INTRODUCTION

Our knowledge of the German Intelligence Service, its organisation, its personnel and its activities against the Western powers and in the Balkans is very imperfect from 1939 to 1940, adequately representative from 1940 to 1943, and from 1943 to 1945 probably complete. (Our knowledge of its activities on the Russian Front is less satisfactory.)

SHAEF Report, December 1945

Modern historians have consistently condemned the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst as incompetent and corrupt organisations. However, even the most recent analysts have not had the benefit of newly declassified MI5, CIA and US Counter-Intelligence Corps files which shed a very different light on the structure, control and capabilities of the German intelligence machine in Europe, South America, the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

The quantity of German records seized during the Allied occupation was immense, literally tons of military files and the entire Foreign Ministry archive which dated back to 1870. However, between 1958 and 1962 the US Government sponsored a declassification programme which transferred the material onto film and concluded with the return of the documents to the Federal Republic for permanent storage. But according to the CIA’s Paul Hartman, who worked on this project,

The exploitation should have taken place sooner and with, a greater sense of urgency. When the sheer mass of captured paper is taken into account, it is to the credit of the armed forces, OSS, CIC, and CIA that the documents were exploited to a fairly high degree. The early exploitation was done by the OSS Cl War Room in London. Later came efforts by the CIC, ONI, G-2, and others. Allied powers also began their exploitation, and the Soviets were not excluded from access in the very early post-war period.

The biggest flaw in these early efforts was that the records were not examined systematically. In 1956, then DDO, Frank Wisner obtained approval from the then-DCI Allen Dulles to have the Cl Staff conduct a systematic analysis. All but a small portion of this study was concluded by 1964, and work on the remaining segment, continuing at a slower pace, was concluded in 1967. Each captured record deemed to contain intelligence data was summarised, indexed, and included in the records of the Directorate of Operations. Much of the same information was also fed into appropriate computerised data banks. Items of interest to other US agencies or certain foreign governments were forwarded to them. As a result of this effort, more than 1,250,000 names of persons of intelligence interest – including all of the names on the filmed index of Nest Bremen – were recorded in the DDO’s Main Index.¹

Altogether, some sixty-five reels of microfiche, amounting to the entire wartime existence of the Nest Bremen, subordinate to the Ast Hamburg, which had been captured by the US Navy in 1945, was accidentally retained, and discovered in a facility in Alexandria, Virginia, when transferred to the National Archive, to be copied by an assiduous researcher, Ladislas Farago.

This windfall discovery, which did not undergo declassification until December 1976, formed the basis of Farago’s The Game of the Foxes, perhaps the first history of wartime intelligence operations to be based on officially-released documents.² Initially Farago took his apparent treasure-trove at face value, but his publishers alerted him to plans by the Yale University Press to produce a sanitised version of Sir John Masterman’s account of The Double Cross System of the War of 1939-45,³ which revealed that some of the most active spies run by Ast Hamburg, including Wulf Schmidt, whose mission lasted from his insertion by parachute in September 1940 and continued until the German collapse, had actually been a double agent controlled throughout by MI5.⁴ Similarly, a spy codenamed EDDA in Iceland, who transmitted nearly 400 reports between May 1942 and June 1944, was actually Ib Riis, a double agent better known to MI5 as COBWEB.⁵ Most importantly, Farago asserted that he had acquired a key index which had enabled him to link individual Abwehr codenames to code-numbers, and then to the real names of agents.

In the light of these revelations, Farago hastily amended his manuscript to accommodate the hitherto secret information, but nevertheless provided a somewhat self-congratulatory perspective on the Abwehr’s performance. He took the view that if Nest Bremen’s reach, as far as the United States and the Middle East, was indicative of operations conducted by the organisation’s other sub-branches, the Abwehr had been grossly underestimated. He took as an example S-2118, codenamed TURCO, who submitted forty-four reports in 1940 and more than a hundred in 1941, mainly from the ports of Istanbul, Alexandria, Port Said and the Suez Canal. Farago disclosed that this hitherto unknown spy was actually Tekin Saygin, a Polish Jew, born Liehtenthal, who had moved to Turkey, converted to Islam and in 1938 volunteered his services to the Abwehr.

Farago’s uncritical approach attracted much adverse comment from the US intelligence community, represented by Gerold Guensberg who, contributing to Studies in Intelligence in October 1977, pointed out that the Farago cache may have included payment and reporting files, but not the operational material. While he had broken through the protection designed to conceal true identities, the Nest had destroyed the associated message copies, thus making a balanced judgment more difficult.

The few Allied intelligence officers who gained access to the post-war interrogation reports of their captured adversaries soon came to realise that the enemy had constructed a huge organisation which had been largely underestimated. For example, in November 1945 the American captors of Erwin Lahousen, a senior Abwehr officer and one of Admiral Canaris’s closest supporters, who had only narrowly escaped the Gestapo’s ruthless purge after the 20 July plot by being wounded on the Russian Front a couple of days before the attempted putsch, noted that

The Abwehr was not weak and ineffective because of corruption, defeatism, personal politics and superannuation, but that even before the war it was a principal center of opposition to the Nazi Regime with the aim of sabotaging a German victory. On this basis our views of the German Intelligence service, and specifically of the failures and inertia of the Abwehr need serious revision.⁶

In November 1946 MI5’s Klop Ustinov made this very compelling appeal for his cooperation while questioning Richard Kauder, a key figure, in an attempt to solve one of the war’s remaining mysteries, relating to the infamous MAX–MORITZ radio traffic in the Balkans: ‘As you will realise, the Allied victory over Germany has been so complete that not only every single official and in many cases unofficial German document, but also all the persons connected with those documents who are still alive have fallen into Allied hands.’⁷ Ustinov’s tactic, which almost always worked, was to spell out to prisoners that the Nazi defeat had been so comprehensive that it was in the interests of individual prisoners to give their full assistance to their captors as obfuscation and obstruction was bound to fail.

In the decade following the German surrender British and American intelligence agencies were preoccupied by the Cold War and the retention of records became an administrative nuisance. While the CIA catalogued some of its holdings for future exploitation and put the rest into long-term storage, the British seem to have mislaid large quantities of paper records, and made little effort to preserve them. In the absence of any external pressure, such as the Public Record Act, which was not enacted until 1958, the files of Security Intelligence Middle East were squirreled away in Nicosia, and documents entrusted to the Colonial Office were consigned to Hanslope Park, an isolated secure facility in the Buckinghamshire countryside. This was an era in which the term ‘declassification’ hardly existed and sensitive security and intelligence issues were not considered suitable for public debate.

In February 1956, in preparation for awkward Parliamentary Questions in the House of Commons concerning the 1951 defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, the Home Secretary Gwilym Lloyd George was briefed by officials that ‘we now know from captured German records that the number of German agents operating against the United Kingdom during the war was 201. And the number detected and arrested by our Security Service was 200.’⁸ But was this really true, or another example of the unjustified hyperbole associated with the victors’ view of their vanquished opponent?

By the outbreak of war MI5 had accumulated some knowledge about the Abwehr, mainly from information acquired from the interrogation of a small number of spies arrested within their jurisdiction, such as Hermann Goertz and Mrs Jessie Jordan; reports from foreign liaison partners, such as the French Service de Renseignements and Deuxième Bureau; and the American FBI; and early operational experience developed during the management of double agents, among them the pilot Christopher Draper, the Welsh businessman Arthur Owens, and the reluctant co-opteee, Hans George. Additionally, MI5 had run some penetration agents against the German embassy in London, including the anti-Nazi diplomat Wolfgang zu Putlitz and the Austrian agent provocateur Lisel Gaertner, to learn more about German espionage methodology.

As hostilities began in September 1939 both sides were unprepared for the conflict. MI5 had established an elaborate counter-espionage programme involving the creation of an entirely new organisation, the Radio Security Service, which was intended to monitor the airwaves and detect the tell-tale illicit transmissions of enemy spies equipped with wireless sets. As it turned out, the only illegal traffic to be monitored was that of double agents operating under MI5’s control. Evidently the Germans had learned the lessons of the First World War by reading about British success in the COMINT field and had learned the necessary lessons.⁹

The inescapable weakness of any intelligence network, as the Germans fully understood, was the requirement for spies to deliver their messages in sufficient time for the information to be acted upon. Surface mail addressed to an intermediary in a neutral country was a lengthy and unreliable conduit, but the use of even miniaturised transmitting apparatus was almost bound to attract unwelcome attention. Accordingly, most of the agents active in England during the summer of 1939 were withdrawn before hostilities commenced, leaving behind a single clandestine transmitter and a very busy wireless in the German legation in neutral Dublin.

Whereas the Abwehr’s British target did not have a large pool of pro-Nazi sympathisers to engage in espionage, the story was very different in the United States and much of South America. The spy-rings headed by Guenther Rumrich and Frederick Duquesne, which consisted mainly of German émigrés, demonstrated that the Hamburg and Bremen Abstellen enjoyed the full support of the government which had exercised influence on the management of the transatlantic shipping lines to facilitate the networks’ couriers.

By the end of hostilities the Allied security and intelligence services had learned vastly more about their adversaries, and had exploited four sources in particular that had not been available previously: intercepted radio traffic exchanged between headquarters and the various outstations spread across the globe, captured documents, defectors, and prisoner interrogation.

The wireless messages revealed a complex spider’s web of individual agents, transmitters operating from commercial, diplomatic and consular premises, usually linked to major regional hubs such as those located in Madrid, Sofia and Istanbul, and a further network of smaller, subordinate stations which maintained regular contact with the mainline centres.

The study of captured documents began in earnest during the Battle of Britain, when enemy aircrew often flew on their missions in possession of manuals and other supposedly restricted material. There were plenty of other ‘pinches’ too, such as the seizure of Enigma codebooks during the brief occupation of the Lofoten Islands in March 1941, and the tragic raid on Dieppe in August 1942 which yielded a copy of Das Brittische Kriegheer, the first solid evidence that the Allies’ strategic deception campaign to exaggerate its military strength was really working.

As for high-level defectors, they were as a commodity something of a double-edged sword, as those with a current knowledge of intelligence activities were likely to compromise Allied deception operations. Some were deterred (such as ARTIST, in April 1944, when he unintentionally jeopardised several controlled double agents), while others were accepted, among them Erich Vermehren, Hans Ruser, Willi Hamburger, Hans Zech-Nennwich, Georg Kronberger, Richard Wurmann, Otto John, Josef Ledebur, Herbert Berthold, Peter Schagen and Carl Marcus.

The final source was the reporting from captives who underwent intensive interviews in an effort to build a comprehensive picture of the enemy’s intelligence activities, to identify the personalities involved, and to validate data already on file. Most of the prisoners were very cooperative, mainly because they acknowledged the scale of the defeat, and hoped to win their freedom by manifesting candour. They must also have realised, from the sophisticated nature of the questions put to them (despite a strict rule not to refer to especially sensitive sources), that there was little point in concealment. Too many of their colleagues had talked already and the jointly-coordinated Anglo-American interrogations followed a pattern which was based on the triangulation technique, comparing each assertion to the statements of others. Prisoners, uncertain of the likely length of their captivity, saw the futility of obfuscation and abandoned any inhibitions about describing their personal experiences and providing personality profiles of their colleagues, which were filed and cross-referenced by the MI5 – Section V – OSS X-2 counter-intelligence War Room in London. As each dossier was created, the relevant passages were duplicated into the existing Personal Files which had been built on intercepts, double agent reports and defector debriefings. What emerged, overall, was a thoroughly comprehensive analysis of the enemy’s order-of-battle, solving the puzzles of codenames and alias identities, together with offering opportunities to tie up the thousands of loose ends left after the surrender.

Some of these sources, such as the senior defectors, would remain unknown for decades, their information attributed to codeword-protected sources such as PRECIOUS, JUNIOR, COLOMBINE, JIGGER and DICTIONARY. Similarly, even after the first disclosures about MI5’s programme of controlled enemy agents, managed by the XX Committee, the true identities of the individual double agents remained secret, although TRICYCLE, ZIGZAG, TREASURE, COBWEB, BRUTUS, MUTT and GARBO chose to write about their experiences.¹⁰

The full picture of Nazi Germany’s intelligence structure, and its scale and scope, only began to emerge after the study of the Abt. IIIF records for the period 1935–9 captured in Thuringia at Bad Blankenburg and the Abwehr administrative archive retrieved from Bad Sulza. Both collections were flown to the US Army’s intelligence training depot at Camp Ritchie in Maryland. Abt. III was the counter-intelligence branch, and the ‘F’ stood for Fremde (‘enemy’), and its operations had been among the Abwehr’s most secret.

Initially, it appeared that the Germans had done a typically efficient job at destroying their intelligence records, as was described by an SD officer, Eugn Steimle, who was interrogated in December 1945.¹¹ He recalled the first major file-destruction operation which was conducted at Camp WALDBURG that took place in January 1945 as the Red Army approached Frankfurt an der Oder. A repetition of the housecleaning of the files was completed at the end of the month at Lauenstein, with another conflagration at Rottach-Egern. Finally, the very last card-indices and notes relating to the most important current cases were incinerated at Lufer, near Salzburg.

The surviving files were important because so much had been deliberately obliterated by the Germans, or fallen into Soviet hands, in the last days of the war, and the other major eradication of Ast Hamburg files, ended up at the British Army Records Centre in Hayes, where they were shredded from April 1958, leaving just 3,000 personal and subject files, which were incinerated in 1960. Ironically, there survives in MI5’s records a large file containing the correspondence exchanged between MI5’s organisation in Germany, the British Services Security Organisation, and MI5 in London which itemises the collection, listing such intriguing titles as The Manufacture and use of Counterfeit Currency by the RSHA and German Intelligence Service – Use of Deception as an Aid to Military Operations. In retrospect, from a historian’s viewpoint, this destruction amounts to wanton vandalism.

Study of the files created immediately post-war, by the very few officers authorised to access them, showed that initial assessments of German incompetence, especially in the counter-intelligence sphere, needed to be revised, as MI5’s Ian Wilson minuted in August 1945, referring to the Bad Blankenburg archive

While we are well informed about almost all activities of the German Intelligence Service in the latter stages of the war, we have still very little knowledge of their counter-espionage work before and at the beginning of the war

It is slowly becoming apparent from captured documents and elsewhere that the German counter-espionage service at this period was far more efficient than other activities of the German Intelligence Service. It is clear that III/F was controlling a number of British agents and was engaging upon an ambitious policy of deceiving this and other countries by feeding false information through such double agents and through other channels.¹²

In many ways III/F was of particular interest to its declared targets, Allied intelligence agencies. It had been headed by the genial ‘Uncle Richard’ Protze, one of Canaris’s closest colleagues, who was later succeeded in 1939 by Joachim Rohleder. The Abt. was divided into geographic sections, III/F-1 (England, Holland, Belgium and Denmark); III/F-2 (France, Switzerland and Sweden); III/F-3 (Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union); and III/F-4 (Balkans and later the Soviet Union). Upon reorganisation in 1944 the entire III/F would become Mil Amt’s VI/Z under Georg Hansen and Walter Schellenberg.

Other useful material that fell into Allied hands included an Abt. II telephone directory for the ADOLF internal communications system dated October 1941 and recovered from France in 1944, containing over a hundred names and their departments; an Abwehr headquarters telephone directory dated March 1943 seized in Wiesbaden in April 1945; an alphabetical list of Abwehr officers in France in June 1942, together with their ranks, seniority and postings, recovered in Paris in September 1944; and a complete set of agent reports from Ast Dijon from between late 1942 and 1944, discovered in Stuttgart. Other valuable contributions were the Kassel staff roster, captured in April 1945, and a photo album of the Abwehr’s senior staff.

An Allied summary of reports and interviewees dated February 1945 listed some of the highlights, with ten items allegedly selected arbitrarily:

(i)   Reports on Weber, Aberle, Eppler and Sandstede: These give an account of the Abwehr work in Libya and Egypt.

(ii) Reports on Gottfried Müller and the MAMMUT undertaking. These describe an Abw. II expedition against Iraq and Persia.

iii) Reports on Mirko Rot and Andre Gyorgy. These deal with the Abwehr’s chief source of operational intelligence from Russia and the British Mid-East area, i.e. the Luftneidekopf Sofia of Richard Kauders @ KLATT. As KLATT is under interrogation, these reports may soon be replaced by his information; also Oberst Wagner @ Dr Delius, who was head of KO Bulgaria from 1941-1944, should throw further light on the subject.

(iv) Report on Willy Goertz. This gives details of the Abwehr’s stations in Vienna and Budapest and of the technical/military (IH/t.) section of Abwehr HQ.

(v) Report on Hens Salzinger. Salzinger was an officer in the Abwehr’s CE section for Scandinavia (III F. 6). He gives a full list of the important officers at work in this period.

(vi) Reports on Meisstueffen and Poils. Those two men were agents of Nest Cologne and give details of its personnel and activities.

(vii) Reports on Delgrande, D’Hooghe, Hagemann, and Werner Unversagt. These reports, taken together, give a complete picture of the activities of Ast Brussels in the period. Werner Unversagt is the only officer among them and is probably the most reliable. He was an I/H specialist and he covers military espionage cases. Hagemann deals mainly with Ast Brussels’ station in Paris. D’Hooghe was a naval specialist and describes Ast Brussels’ coastal network. Delgrande is useful for his list of personnel.

(viii)  Reports on Kliemann, Cloeren and Speck. This is a selection of reports covering Abwehr activities in France during this period. They are all officers of the Abwehr. Kliemann covers the work of I/Luft in Paris, Cloeren of I/H. at Angers and Speck of III/F also at Angers.

(ix) Report on the German deserter Luipold Haffner. Haffner was employed by the I/M section of KO Spain and gives details of its Gibraltar reporting services as well as of its main: personalities.

(x) Reports on Christensen @ Lucassen; Engels @ ALFREDO; Ottokat Mueller, and Walter Napp. These four were the Abwehr’s chief agents in Brazil in 1941-42. Their stories properly belong to the early war years, but they were not rounded up and interrogated until 1942. Christensen was an agent of Ast Kiel I/N; Engels, by far the most important and dangerous of the batch, represented the economic espionage department (I/Wi) of Abwehr headquarters. Mueller and Napp were part of Ast Hamburg’s network run by [Friedrich] Obladen and described by [Herbert] Wichmann.

Two other sources are available for this period. The first is the information given by the deserters Vermehren and Hamburger on the work of the Abwehr in Turkey and the Near East. Their evidence greatly expands Ludwig’s story which is restricted to counter-espionage.

Vermehren also discusses the decline of the Abwehr in these years and Hansen’s efforts to arrest it. His information on this aspect of the Abwehr supplements that of Ledebur and Kuebart. The second source for this period, which does not fall into the class of ordinary interrogations, is the commentary made on the Abwehr by several officers of the Italian intelligence services who surrendered in

September 1943. The best accounts are given by Major Nani on the Abwehr’s work in Tripoli and Tunisia, Colonel di Carlo on the Abwehr in Spain and Spanish Morocco, Major Vaciago on work of Abwehr II and Max Ponzo on Abwehr I/M.¹³

The analysts who collated the files were astonished to discover that the Abwehr employed a staff of more than 20,000 and was a much larger and more complex organisation than had been hinted at in previous MI-14 assessments. The new evaluations also had the benefit of the interrogation reports completed after lengthy interviews with key personnel, principal among them Walter Schellenberg, Erich Pfeiffer, Laurentius Ludwig (Belgrade), Carl Eitel (Berlin), Otto Meissner (Oslo, Angers and Paris), Herbert Wichman and Nikolaus Ritter (Hamburg).

As well as these interviewees, there was supporting testimony from Wurmann (Athens, Berlin, Biarritz and North Africa); Hans Scharf (Spain); Hans Kautz (Berlin and Paris); Ernst Behrens (Hannover, Warsaw and Kassel); Peter Schagen (Lisbon and Paris); Wilhelm Leisner and Ernst Kleyenstuber (Madrid). What emerged from their accounts would change post-war perceptions of the conflict, although few outside the intelligence community would ever be indoctrinated into the full details.

Nigel West

DRAMATIS PERSONAE