[AGL] What goes round goes round

[Byron Allen Black]

Reading David Irving's excellent biography of Reichsmarschall Hermann
Goering. Turns out ole Hermann had his own version of a [lo-tech] NSA.
Eerily familiar:

a ‘nazi nsa’ – from david irving’s göring biography



It will be appropriate at this point to contemplate Göring’s other finely
sinewed and highly intelligent animal, his Forschungsamt (literally,
Research Office). Created on April 10, 1933, the Forschungsamt (FA) was
perhaps the least known, but most significant, of all his agencies. Its
role in entrenching his position in Hitler’s power structure, surrounded by
increasingly envious

enemies, was considerable; and its extraordinary output over the next
twelve years – nearly half a million reports, coyly termed “research
results,” on intercepted telephone conversations and

deciphered signals – would affect the political history of the Reich.



Small wonder that Göring jealously guarded access to this agency. He had,
like Hitler, a healthy contempt for the other Nazi intelligence-gathering
agencies like the Abwehr. (He once said, correctly, that Admiral Wilhelm
Canaris and his “boatload of pirates” had contributed nothing.) With the
possible exception of the Foreign Ministry’s code-breaking section
(Pers-Z), Göring’s FA was unquestionably Hitler’s best general intelligence
agency, with cryptanalytical sources ranging from the Vatican to
Switzerland. Thus the FA read the cipher of the U.S. legation in

Berne continuously until 1942, when one of his Prussian officials, the
traitor Hans-Bernd Gisevius, sold the information to the U.S. government
and the leak was plugged. Instinctively neither Hitler nor Göring trusted
human agents. When military code-breakers Gottfried Schapper and Georg
Schröder had first proposed a “Reich Intelligence Agency,” Hitler had
turned the project over to Göring, stipulating only that the agency was to
make no use of agents, but to

rely exclusively on what is today called signals intelligence (wiretapping
and cryptanalysis). This was clear evidence of the trust that he reposed in
Göring: It was like the absolute trust a blind man must have in his guide
dog. Funded initially by Göring’s Prussian state government, the
harmless-sounding Forschungsamt began with four code-breakers, expanded to
twenty by July 1933, and employed thirty-five hundred or more, operating
throughout Germany and the occupied countries, over the next twelve years.
Its senior officials were dedicated Nazis, and only one FA employee –
Oberregierungsrat
Hartmut Plaas, a close friend of Canaris and the former adjutant of
Freikorps Commander Ehrhardt – was caught leaking FA secrets (he was shot).



Soon after it was set up, Göring handed over general supervision of the
Forschungsamt to Paul Körner. Körner approved its budget and staff
appointments.
When the FA moved into its first cryptanalytical workshop, in an attic in
Behren Strasse in the heart of the government district, the FA chief was
Hans Schimpf, a quiet navy lieutenant commander who had until recently been
attached to the army’s code office.



All except Schimpf survived the coming war, but after the surrender they
lay low, scared of being treated as Nazi agents. They volunteered little
information, and the records of that era

vanished. Scattered around the world, however, are a few items that clearly
betray FA provenance, and they show beyond a doubt that it was one of the
most efficient and accurate intelligence-gathering agencies of its time,
its integrity guaranteed by the rigid civil-service standards imposed on
its staff and by the extraordinary character of Hermann Göring as its
ultimate master.



Hitler had granted to him the absolute Reich monopoly on wiretapping.
Göring protected this monopoly fiercely. A big “G” scrawled at the foot of
a warrant, forwarded to him by Pili

Körner, would suffice for the tap to be applied. But that “G” was not
easily attained, and he gave Himmler’s Gestapo a particularly hard time.
“If,” recalled one FA official, “as was usually the

case with the Gestapo’s applications, the reason given for the wiretap was
too vague, then the minister Göring simply disallowed it; and if he did
permit it, he forbade any results to be

forwarded [to the Gestapo] until he had given his express authority in each
case.”



Walter Seifert, head of the FA’s evaluation section, who had joined
straight out of Jüterbog Signals School in August 1936, would recall that
Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Gestapo

under Himmler, hated having to submit every wiretap application to Göring.
“But without that ‘G’ on it I wasn’t allowed to order the tap.” Over the
years he and Himmler would advance

every possible argument for taking over the Forschungsamt. The Führer
merely told them to take it up with Göring.



The first chief, Schimpf, lasted only two years. A cheerful womanizer, he
became amorously entangled with a lady in Breslau; he solved the matter by
shooting her and then (being a

gentleman) himself on April 10, 1935. Göring appointed Prince Christoph of
Hesse (Born in 1901, he had married Sophie Battenberg, one of the six
German sisters of the present duke of Edinburgh (who fought against the
Germans in WWII), and he retained this top Nazi intelligence job for the
next eight years.



During Göring’s regime, the Forschungsamt moved into magnificent new
premises in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district. Housed in a sprawling complex
of former residential buildings set discreetly back from Schiller Strasse,
near what Berliners call “the Knee,” the hundreds of specially sworn officials
and language specialists sat at their equipment in halls patrolled by

armed guards and subject to the most stringent security regulations.



Every scrap of paper, from the duplicate pads used by the telephone
monitors to the brown paper of the “research results,” was number-stamped
and logged. Recipients of the Brown Pages signed oaths of secrecy
subjecting them to the death penalty in the event of violation. The Brown
Pages were conveyed only in red double-thickness envelopes inside locked
pouches or pneumatic-mail canisters; handled only by special FA couriers;
signed for in triplicate by their authorized recipients. (Milch signed for
his new pouch key on April 27, 1936, promising “in the event of loss to
notify the FA immediately and pay all costs for the replacement of the
pouch.”)



“The work of the FA,” warned Prince Christoph, who had the rank of
Ministerialdirektor in Göring’s Prussian Ministry, “will have both point
and profit only if its secrecy is safeguarded by every possible means.
Inadequate security will result in the enemy,” whom these February
1938 security
regulations did not identify, “taking precautions, and our sources drying
up.” Thus the “results” were never to be explicitly referred to in
documents, nor discussed by phone except on the special secure telephone
network installed by the FA throughout the government district, or on the
secure teleprinter system. Recipients, regardless of rank, had to return
each and every Brown Page intact to the FA. Even Hitler had to toe this
line. FA chief Gottfried Schapper wrote to Hitler’s adjutant Paul Wernicke
in May 1938 peremptorily demanding the return of seven numbered “results”
delivered to the Führer on the day that German troops entered Austria.



By 1937 the FA had grown so costly that Göring switched it to the budget of
his Air Ministry, where secrecy was easier. As camouflage, all FA officials
now wore air-force uniforms. The FA

maintained five hundred wiretaps around the clock in Berlin alone,
primarily on foreign embassies, legations, journalists, and suspected
enemies of the Reich. The Charlottenburg rooms were divided into “regions” (
*Bereiche*) – one each for English, American, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch,
Polish, Czech, and the other languages of the moment. Dr. Gerhard Neuenhoff,
one linguist who was assigned to the French (and Belgian) “region” on
September 15, 1936, found himself just one of a thousand other specialists,
strictly limited in their mobility in the FA complex: He was never allowed
up to the top floor, where Section IV’s codebreakers

were at work with the Hollerith punched-card computers and the other tools
of their trade.



Neuenhoff was set in front of a standard hotel-type switchboard, monitoring
forty lines including the Belgian legation, the French military attaché,
and French correspondents in Berlin. He soon learned to recognize who was
speaking – the French ambassador André François-Poncet, with his slow,
pedantic enunciation, or the French journalist Madame Tabuis, with her
shrill tones.



It is important to accept that these FA monitors were incorruptible civil
servants, with neither the means nor the motive to falsify “results.” They
jotted down what they heard on paginated

duplicate pads, in longhand, or recorded it on wire recorders; tossed the
completed note, already headed “State Secret” (*Geheime Reichssache*) onto
a conveyor belt; within minutes it was typed up, evaluated, cross-indexed,
and issued – either by FA dispatch rider or vacuumed with the speed of a ri
fle bullet through Berlin’s pneumatic-mail system into the very anteroom of
the authorized minister or his Staatssekretär. Each canister had its own
address code on it – three narrow rings in blue guided it, for example, to
Milch’s private office at the secret Air Ministry building.



The Forschungsamt gave Göring an edge over every rival contender for power
in Germany. Not one international cable crossed Reich territory or its
adjacent waters without being tapped by the FA. There were FA field units
in every amplifier station. Fifty synchronous teleprinters installed in the
cavernous basement at Charlottenburg churned out “results” twenty-four
hours a day.



Göring’s SigInt specialists “looped into” the great Indo-Cable that carried
all London’s telegraphic traffic with India. (“At first,” recalled FA
specialist Walter Seifert, “that was

quite bountiful.”) The cable from Paris, France, to Tallin, Estonia,
navigated the Baltic Sea; Göring’s frogmen tapped that, and of course the
landlines between Vienna, Prague, Moscow, and

London – all of which crisscrossed Reich territory.



The biggest customers for the Brown Pages were Hitler’s new Propaganda
Ministry and the Ministry of Economics. An intercept of any story being filed
by a foreign correspondent in

Germany enabled Goebbels to plant an immediate reply in rival foreign
newspapers overnight. The FA could also supply inside economic information
with a speed and reliability that assisted

Göring and the Reich to make dramatic “kills.” Seifert’s evaluation section
built up a card index of names and subjects; his subsection 12-C kept tabs
on every spoken or enciphered reference

to vital raw materials like rubber, nonferrous metals, wood, and newsprint.
Göring’s secret agency made him an expert in everything from international
egg prices to the yield of low-grade

iron ores. He had laid down two rules: He was to be supplied automatically
with copies of everything; and all FA intercepts of his conversations were
to be drawn to his attention to enable him to check his own phone security.
Surviving data shows that he used the system well, as a routine check on
the Reich’s ponderous and inefficient bureaucracy. Two typical Brown Pages
that came rattling through the pneumatic tube in December 1944 were number N
400,611 about German explosives manufacture, entitled, “Managing Director
Dr. Müller complaining about lack of official cooperation from Berlin”; and
N400,784 about aircraft production: “Ernst Heinkel Aircraft Works, Vienna,
having serious problems getting raw materials for He 219 construction.”



There were those who considered such eavesdropping not *korrekt *– somehow
ungentlemanly. And often there was a prurient element. When Mussolini paid
his first state visit to Berlin

in September 1937, an FA team manning the switchboard at Castle Belvedere
monitored his calls to his mistress, Clara Petacci. When the duke of
Windsor came to Salzburg with his American

duchess a month later, Hitler ordered Göring to tap their phones as well.



Such tidbits lightened the darker watches of the night at Charlottenburg. A
monitor would cry out “*Staatsgesprach!*” (“State talks!”) and throw the
switch that poured the intimate

conversation into every switchboard in the room. Down the tube came
transcripts of the titillating conversations between one of the most
eminent Catholic prelates in Berlin and a nun –“Compared with him,” Milch
snickered, “Casanova was a wimp!”



Göring had ordered General von Schleicher’s phone tapped, of course. “What
is it?” the general’s wife was heard teasing a friend. “With an *i *everybody
wants to be it. Without an *i*, nobody!”



“Give up? *Arisch!*” she triumphed. “Aryan!”



Göring read it out to Gestapo Chief Rudolf Diels, roaring with laughter,
and ordered the wiretap continued. His Forschungsamt gave to Hitler and his
experts a certain deftness, a sureness of touch when they played their
diplomatic poker. A French trade mission arrived: An FA “flying squad” took
over the switchboard at the Hotel Bristol, monitored even their
room-to-room calls, a Brown Page reporting the rock-bottom price they had
instructions from home to accept was

blow-piped across Berlin to the Ministry of Economics in time for the
afternoon’s vital conference. After Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in
1936, Chief Evaluator Seifert took to

Hitler the Brown Pages (numbered around N34,500 now) reporting the
hysterical foreign-press reaction; Hitler said calmly, “They’ll settle down
again.” In 1938 the FA intercepts (numbered

around N83,000) would tell him that Britain was not coming to the aid of
Austria in March, nor Czechoslovakia in September.



The sense of sovereign power that this quiet agency gave to Göring cannot
be underestimated. It put him a cut above the rest of Hitler’s henchmen.
Noiseless taps were put on the phones of Gauleiter Julius Streicher, the
widely disliked gauleiter of Franconia; on Hitler’s female English admirer
Unity Mitford; on his talkative adjutant Fritz Wiedemann, and Wiedemann’s
globe-trotting girlfriend Princess Stefanie von Hohenlohe; and on
Goebbels’s bedmate, the lovely Czech actress Lida Baarova.



After obtaining clear proof from the FA of the intrigues of Roosevelt’s
ambassadors in Warsaw, Brussels, and Paris, Göring instructed the
Forschungsamt department chief Dr. W. Kurzbach

to publish a stinging but anonymous exposé in Berlin’s authoritative
newspaper, *Börsenzeitung*.

Seifert, who often had to deliver the Brown Pages to Göring in person,
found him a hard but not unfeeling employer.



On the one hand, he had no sense of time or place. He might summon Seifert
at dawn to Budapest, then leave him waiting for hours without any
breakfast. But, Seifert found, the

minister sometimes gained as much pleasure from distributing his growing
wealth as from accumulating it. One FA courier could not afford the
treatment needed for his child’s infantile

paralysis. Seifert wrote a message for Göring on that day’s FA summary, and
it came back that night with a scrawled reply: “Of course I shall pick up
all the bills.”



Once, Seifert took the locked pouch in person to Göring’s new domain,
“Carinhall,” in the forests outside Berlin. Göring left him standing in
front of the mammoth desk for longer,

perhaps, than was polite. As Seifert waited patiently to begin the FA briefing,
he felt something nibbling at his leg: It was a lion cub, its fangs still
fortunately petite.



“Proceed!” roared Göring enjoying the situation. The lion was a pet that he
could openly display; the Forschungsamt, however, was a pet that he could
not.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.pairlist.net/pipermail/austin-ghetto-list/attachments/20140104/f52c8d18/attachment-0001.htm>