Under Canaris Before World War II īefore he took over the Abwehr on 1 January 1935, the soon-to-be Admiral Canaris was warned by Patzig of attempts by Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich to take over all German intelligence organizations. His replacement was another Reichsmarine captain, Wilhelm Canaris. Patzig was fired in January 1935 as a result, and sent to command the new pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee he later became Chief of Naval Personnel. Adolf Hitler ordered the termination of the overflights in 1934 after he signed a nonaggression treaty with Poland since these reconnaissance missions might be discovered and jeopardize the treaty. Army leaders also feared that the flights would endanger the secret plans for an attack on Poland. His successes did not stop the other branches of the military services from developing their own intelligence staffs.Īfter the Nazis seized power, the Abwehr began sponsoring reconnaissance flights across the border with Poland, under the direction of Patzig, but this led to confrontations with Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. Proving himself quite a capable chief, Patzig swiftly assured the military of his intentions and worked to earn their respect he established good connections with the Lithuanian clandestine service against the Soviets, forged relations with other foreign agencies-except for Italy, whose cipher he distrusted. In the 1930s, with the rise of the Nazi movement, the Ministry of Defence was reorganised surprisingly, on 7 June 1932, a naval officer, Captain Conrad Patzig, was named chief of the Abwehr, despite the fact that it was staffed largely by army officers. While the Treaty of Versailles forbade Germany from engaging in any form of espionage or spying, during the Nazi era the Abwehr disregarded this prohibition, as they saw it as hypocritical. The Reichsmarine intelligence staff merged with the Abwehr in 1928. By the 1920s, the slowly growing Abwehr was organised into three sections: Many members of the Reichswehr (a significant portion of them Prussian) declined when asked to consider intelligence work, since for them, it was outside the realm of actual military service and the act of spying clashed with their Prussian military sensibilities of always showing themselves direct, loyal, and sincere.
When Gempp became a general, he was promoted out of the job as chief, to be followed by Major Günther Schwantes, whose term as the organization's leader was also brief.
COUNTER ESPIONAGE WW2 PLUS
At that time it was composed of only three officers and seven former officers, plus a clerical staff. The first head of the Abwehr was Major Friedrich Gempp, a former deputy to Colonel Walter Nicolai, the head of German intelligence during World War I, who proved mostly ineffectual. The Abwehr was created in 1920 as part of the German Ministry of Defence when the German government was allowed to form the Reichswehr, the military organization of the Weimar Republic. The Abwehr had its headquarters at 76/78 Tirpitzufer (the present-day Reichpietschufer) in Berlin, adjacent to the offices of the OKW. The OKW formed part of the Führer's personal "working staff" from June 1938 and the Abwehr became its intelligence agency under Vice-Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. On 4 February 1938, the Ministry of Defence-renamed the Ministry of War in 1935-was dissolved and became the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) with Hitler in direct command. Under General Kurt von Schleicher (prominent in running the Reichswehr from 1926 onwards) the individual military services' intelligence units were combined and, in 1929, centralized under Schleicher's Ministeramt within the Ministry of Defence, forming the foundation for the more commonly understood manifestation of the Abwehr.Įach Abwehr station throughout Germany was based on the local army district ( Wehrkreis) more offices opened in amenable neutral countries and (as the greater Reich expanded) in the occupied territories. The initial purpose of the Abwehr was defence against foreign espionage: an organizational role which later evolved considerably.
Although the 1919 Treaty of Versailles prohibited the Weimar Republic from establishing an intelligence organization of their own, they formed an espionage group in 1920 within the Ministry of Defence, calling it the Abwehr. The Abwehr ( German for resistance or defence, but the word usually means counterintelligence in a military context pronounced ) was the German military-intelligence service for the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht from 1920 to 1945.
0 kommentar(er)
