Why were the Germans so bad at espionage?

[MikeKardec]

Something I sort of alluded to above: The Germans were up to their ears in internal security issues of their own making. There is no question that this reduced the manpower and brain power they could devote to foreign intelligence.

There's also a point that others have touched on the edges of: It's what I call traction. You can have the most intelligent person in the world but if they are easily distracted or have psychological issues, they just spin their wheels. Nazi ideology, especially in that it had been made up from whole cloth in the previous few decades (meaning it was still requiring a good deal of thought as opposed to simple reaction) must have acted like a giant oil slick when it came to people having traction. Anytime you have to double think around ideology you lose traction. I suspect that's a factor in what eventually brought down the USSR and during the war one of the intelligent moves the Soviets made was to decrease certain aspects of their ideology and to morph others into more traditional roles. That said, they probably would have fared as poorly as the Germans, given all the Russian internal security/ideology issues, if they had been fighting a two front war (like Germany) with the Japanese. There's only so much you can take on before your head explodes!

 

[Edward]

@Edward, interesting post. I'd assumed that was always just gossip/myth/rumor but is it actually a known fact in the the U.K.?

It's been confirmed in recent years. (Broadly speaking, once all the pro-Hitler aristos with any influence died out!) The only thing that really remains speculative is whether Wallace Simpson wanted to marry David (Edward VIII) at all. One school of thought suggests that just as this was the only way the government could push abdication through the establishment (as oppose to the Nazi link, given many were sympathetic to Hitler at this point in time), the couple only very reluctantly agreed to marry as they were backed into a corner with it all. It is known that Wallace Simpson kept up a very intimate correspondence with her first husband until one of them died.

Winston Churchill wanted “to destroy all traces” of telegrams revealing a Nazi plot to reinstate the former King Edward VIII to the British throne in return for his support during the second world war, according to released cabinet papers it has been revealed.

The telegrams document Nazi plans to kidnap the Duke of Windsor – the title granted to Edward following his abdication in 1936 – and his wife, Wallis Simpson, when they reached Portugal after fleeing their Paris home when France fell to German forces in 1940.

The Cabinet Office file published by the National Archives reveals how Churchill appealled to the US president, Dwight Eisenhower, and the French government to prevent publication of the intercepted German telegrams for “at least 10 or 20 years”.

Churchill, the UK prime minister at the time, said the captured German telegrams offering Edward the British throne in the event of a Nazi invasion of Britain were “tendentious and unreliable” and likely to leave the misleading impression that the duke “was in close touch with German agents and was listening to suggestions that were disloyal”.

Churchill made his appeal to Eisenhower after learning that a microfilm copy of the telegrams, which were found in German archives at the end of the war, had been sent to the US State Department and were being considered for inclusion in the official US history of the conflict.

Eisenhower told Churchill on 2 July 1953 that US intelligence shared his assessment that the communications were “obviously concocted with some idea of promoting German propaganda and weakening western resistance” and were “totally unfair” to the duke.

Churchill told the US president that fears for the duke’s safety had led to his appointment as governor of the Bahamas, part of “strenuous efforts to get him away from Europe beyond the reach of the enemy”.

To clarify, cabinet papers means the minutes taken at cabinet meetings. The Cabinet is the group of senior ministers and chaired by the prime minister. As it's now in the public arena you can access the information via the UK National Archives.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

Whereas in reality, the now former Edward VIII only turned Hitler's offer of a puppet throne in an occupied Britain, ruled from Berlin, because he could see that the tide was turning and he didn't want to be associated with the losing side.

Churchill's manoeuvring in this context is fascinating; on the one hand, he was the warmonger who wanted to declare war on Nazi Germany much, much earlier, on the other he was doggedly loyal to Edward VIII through the whole mess, and, if memory serves, even wanted to avoid the abdication, despite what they all knew at the time.

I had the pleasure (?) of knowing a few people who had been involved in early post-war espionage in Europe. The American said "we were all bastards: the Germans who worked with us deserved to be shot and knew it". The Germans said they had the advantage of knowing "where the bodies were buried" and were basically able to blackmail the nationals of other countries who helped bury them.

Quite so. On a purely utilitarian level, the German spies, as well as their rocket scientists and others, were far too useful as a resource simply to see pay for war crimes, but had this been public knowledge at the time it would not have gone down well.

From everything I've read, German intelligence suffered due to a highly decentralized structure that, when combined with inter-organizational rivalry and distrust, created gross inefficacy. The Abwehr was competent, but focused heavily on pure military intelligence at the expense of broader geopolitical matters, and also suffered from organizationally-rooted aristocratic snobbishness. The SD and Gestapo both fell under the umbrella of the SS, but were distrustful of each other and loathed the Abwehr. The SD was fanatically loyal to the the regime, but was comprised of amateurs, and spent a lot of time and energy on ideologically motivated intelligence activities. The Gestapo on the other hand was made up in large part of experienced police officers. Its role, at which it excelled, was limited mostly to counterintelligence work in Germany and occupied countries. However, the Gestapo was likewise tasked with lots of ideologically motivated counterintelligence work that was not a productive use of its time.

Very much a factor in so many aspects of Nazi Germany. Many of the military top brass truly struggled with the affront of being ruled over by the 'jumped-up corporal' - all the more so with the indignity of being expected to fight alongside his private army. It's no coincidence that aristocratic, military men were involved in more than one plot to kill Hitler once they saw that his leadership was losing them the war.

This is a fascinating discussion and I would like to share two very different historical sources that might add some insight.

1. According to the official history of MI5 (written by historian Christopher Andrew, who was given complete access to MI5’s records) senior MI5 officer Guy Liddell travelled to Germany in late March 1933 “to establish contact with the German Political Police”. Liddell’s hosts were very welcoming and showed him records they had seized from the German Communist Party headquarters following the Reichstag fire. They also told him that Communism was a movement controlled by the Jews and showed him a map that purported to show that “International Jewry” was controlled from London. This suggests to me that German intelligence activities were led by ideology and conspiracy theories more than facts, which can only have impaired their effectiveness.

I think this is bang on the money. Hitler also, as time went on, dabbled with all sorts of occult stuff thinking that would provide the answer. Lucky for the free world that he did go off the deep end or he might have been even more formidable an enemy.

2. According to Peter Wright (from his controversial book Spycatcher), a postwar counterintelligence officer at MI5, Vladimir Von Petrov, a Russian émigré living in Paris, was used as a source by both the Abwehr and the Russian GRU (unbeknownst to the Abwehr). Von Petrov was also used as a source by MI6 but managed to blackmail his handler, an officer called Charles Ellis, into divulging sensitive British intelligence. According to Wright, Ellis confessed to this in the 1960s (by which time he had retired). No action was taken against Ellis to avoid further scandal or embarrassment for MI6.

So if Wright’s account is to be believed (some historians consider him an unreliable source) it appears that Nazi German intelligence did manage to recruit an agent in British intelligence during the war.

My impression has always been that Wright was pretty accurate - though I may be biased; I've always had a soft spot for the book as the resulting legal case established both the importance of the public interest as a defence to breach of confidence, as well as clarifying the notion of when something ceased to be confidential and became simply common public knowledge. I remember well the book being published, and the number of copies that it sold which would inevitably remain unread, purchased only for its controversy. Plus ca change...

As a more general issue I think that Hitler and the Nazi Party didn’t view intelligence as a priority, as it didn’t fit in with the grandiose view of warfare that they had. Even when the Nazis did secure a victory on the allied intelligence services in the “Venlo Incident” they did so by brute force rather than superior intelligence abilities.

Certainly, the Ayan Supermen were warriors that should triumph in battle, not sneaking around as spies.

 

[filfoster]

The Nazis were as adept at espionage as they were with diplomacy, weren't they?

 

[Tiki Tom]

Slightly off topic, but related...

Kim Philby’s granddaughter is publishing a spy novel this week. Not sure if this is simply an attempt to “cash in” or if she is working through some issues handed down. Or both.

https://intelnews.org/2019/07/15/01-2588/

 

[p51]

The German agents in America were pretty awful, too.

Yeah, but most (if not all) of them had lived or visited the US before the war. There was probably either a sense of appreciation for US culture or an appreciation that Germany was never going to defeat a combined Allied force.
I once talked with a U-boat vet who was captured during the war and spent time in a POW camp. He said before he was captured, the crew openly discussed how unlikely it would be for a permanently victorious Germany and how happy they were to survive and be nabbed by the Americans. He described the POW camp as being a better life than he'd had even in training posts in the German Navy. He was disappointed (as many German POWs were, I've read) that he couldn't stay in the US after 1945 and came back for good when he was allowed.
I've always suspected a similar mindset of the spies that came to the US.

 

[Shangas]

Historian Ben McIntyre said in his various books on WWII espionage, that the Germans were so appalling because they, and in his words: "thought in straight lines". They had no imagination, basically. And because of that, they were extremely predictable. Which is what led to their downfall.

By comparison, he said, the British thought in what Churchill called "corkscrew lines". It gets there - but it takes a longer, more twisted, round-about way of doing it. Because it keeps twisting and turning, there's no way to pin down what's happening, and therefore, it's harder to predict the enemy's movements.

 

[Trenchfriend]

A good example came to my mind.

When German Navy started the basically very risky Operation Rheinübung with Bismarck and Prinz Eugen on 18th May 1941 (without Hitler's knowing), they had simply NO IDEA about the powerful, superior RADAR systems, Royal Navy already had!

HMS Norfolk and Suffolk were send into the Denmark Strait, very early because of the sighting of B and PE by the swedish Gotland in the Kattegat. Suffolk had the newest evolution of their RADAR-devices.

And the Germans just ran directly into the RADAR-trap and rest of the story is known...