[AGL] What goes round goes round

[TeleBob]

Fascinating stuff Byron.  From whence does this history emerge?  I don't
know the book... I guess I can look it up....  Amazon carries?


On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 12:59 PM, Byron Allen Black <
englishcorrection at gmail.com> wrote:


> 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 Neuenho

> ff, 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 rifle 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 N400,611 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 brie

> fing, 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.

>

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