Journal of Intelligence History

MARKUS PÖHLMANN
Towards a New History of German Military Intelligence
in the Era of the Great War: Approaches and Sources
The history of German military intelligence (MILINT) during the First World War has yet to be written in full. Such a direct claim may seem at first glance to be somewhat overstated; it is nonetheless fully justified. Not least of all when one compares the few serious, scholarly studies to the piles of popular literature. These popular works, which began to appear almost immediately after the war itself, have examined intelligence operations and the key individuals with either strong apologetic tendencies or the desire to demonize, depending on each respective author’s political or military viewpoint. The bizarre political pulp fiction of a William Le Queux, who wrote in the hysterical pre-1914 atmosphere about the infiltration of Great Britain by sinister legions of Teutonic spies, has itself become a topic of cultural history. The books by Curt Riess, a refugee from Nazi Germany, or the French writer Jean Bardanne on the head of German MILINT of 1914-18, Colonel Walter Nicolai, are as breath-taking as they are erroneous in their claims.1 Likewise, there are the autobiographical writings of former intelligence officers that make us wonder how the Reich could ever have lost the war given the splendid operations of those heroic ‘Dark Invaders’.2 In short, our knowledge of German military intelligence in the era of the Great War is not only extremely limited, but it is also chronically distorted.
The distortion which one encounters in the available literature is, of course, a general and well-known problem in intelligence history in its broadest sense.
However, in the case of the German Empire, a specific, national bias, compounded by the fact that in 1918 Germany found itself on the losing side, have added further to the historian’s difficulties. It has often been the case following wars in the twentieth century that even the most taciturn intelligence services have tended to reveal some of the reasons for their supposed share in the victory (not least of all because it aids the service’s own institutional standing); but for the defeated the reverse is true, as any form of ‘talkativeness’ is unlikely to assist in preserving the service for future wars. This phenomenon can be seen most clearly in the wake of the peace treaty of Versailles 1919.
However, the lack of serious academic research cannot only be attributed to the specific circumstances following the First World War. In Germany at any rate, the fact that the history of military intelligence is first of all military history has not helped matters, mainly because military history has suffered from a severe ‘image problem’ at German universities since 1945. Fortunately, this situation has begun to change over the last two decades, and it can be expected that the remarkably active and methodically innovative new military history in Germany will soon begin to produce some interesting results with regard to the history of military intelligence.3 A further reason for the neglect of German intelligence in the First World War is that intelligence history has long focused on the Second World War. Wherever the war of 1914-18 has been examined, there has been a tendency to treat events or tactics as mere antecedents of the conflict of 1939-45, or as one part of a much wider picture.4 A further obstacle has been, and indeed still is, the availability of the archival sources. They have not been simply inaccessible due to the policies of non-disclosure of large bureaucracies, but they have also fallen a victim to physical destruction, first during the days of the German revolution in November 1918, later as result of one RAF-air-raid on Potsdam in March 1945 which destroyed the bulk of the files held at the German army archives.5
Given all these reasons why research on German military intelligence in the First World War has not enjoyed the attention it deserves, there would seem therefore to be little requirement to justify any further the decision to devote a special issue of the Journal of Intelligence History to the subject. Moreover, claims about the ‘lack of primary sources’ should always set alarm-bells ringing. They often mean simply that historians have not mastered those disparate sources which are available, or that they have been asking the wrong questions in relation to the material which is accessible. This special issue will try to demonstrate that by a judicious use of sources from different places, and by posing new questions, new light can be thrown on many aspects of the history of German military intelligence.
Is though the situation in relation to archive material really not as dark as it is sometimes portrayed? What are the most important sources? In the first instance, there is a voluminous – but as yet unpublished – official history, the "Gempp-report". This series was written between 1928 and 1944 by a former high-ranking intelligence officer, Major-General (ret.) Friedrich Gempp (1873-1945). 14 volumes can be consulted at the German Federal Archives in Freiburg, and I had the pleasure of stumbling across a further volume covering the operations in 1918 in the Moscow Centre for the Collection and Preservation of Historical Documents archive in 1997.6 This multi-volume study offers an informative insight into the organisation and the operations of the General Staff’s intelligence department IIIb. The fact that the Gempp-report was planned as a classified after-action report and as a lessons-learned study, guarantees a number of critical assessments. On the other hand, it would be naive not to acknowledge that the report is also a monument erected by IIIb for IIIb, that it argues apologetically, and that the historian has to be aware of all the methodical difficulties posed by an official history. It has not been possible to establish whether or not an equivalent study on naval intelligence was written.7
A second important source is represented by the papers of the former head of IIIb, Walter Nicolai, papers which also came to Moscow in 1945 as war booty.8 Accessible since the early 1990s, these papers have not been seriously examined since they first became available. They consist essentially of a multi-volume-compilation of excerpts from Nicolai’s war diaries, and his war letters to his wife, interspersed with later, interpretative remarks. Despite the methodological problems of such a compilation, the papers provide an interesting insight into the work of IIIb and the Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL, the Supreme Army Command), and they complement and in fact correct Nicolai’s publications in many significant details.9 Furthermore, the records of naval intelligence have survived without serious losses and are also available at the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg.
Other groups of records owe their survival to the military constitution of the German Empire, as it provided the armed forced of the Kingdoms of Bavaria, Saxony, and Wuerttemberg, plus the Grand Duchy of Baden, with the right to maintain their own military archives. Where these records have survived, whether in archives in Munich, Dresden, Stuttgart, or Karlsruhe, they include useful and often detailed information on topics such as tactical MILINT, the interrogation of prisoners of war, air reconnaissance, propaganda, technical and counter-intelligence.10 The records of the civilian institutions, especially the law enforcement agencies, the Ministry of the Interior and of the German Foreign Office, provide further sources.11 Accepting that war is always a mutual contest of ideas and resources, the archival records of Germany’s former enemies also have to be taken into account for any deeper study.12
Of course, not all the secondary sources from the years following the Great War have the questionable quality of a Le Queux, a Riess, or a Bardanne. But the historical value is often reduced by the fact that these books were written on occasions as commercial, popular war literature, and that the documentation of the sources was never intended to meet academic standards.13 Many contributions are not free from a revisionist and anti-French tendency, and some – namely the Weltkriegsspionagewerk – offer ample evidence for any modern gender-based history of intelligence, with seductive topics like "Women and Diseases as Weapons" or "Eros and Duty".14 The more serious contributions nevertheless provide further pieces in the larger jigsaw puzzle.
For a deeper understanding of the intelligence war of 1914-18, it might be helpful to interpret it according to the following six premises.
First, it was a highly symmetric war. All military powers involved fought – despite all differences in quantity – with similar weapon arsenals and force structures, applying similar doctrines, and relying on similar professional outlooks among their military elites. Under these circumstances, strategic surprise was hard to achieve (among the few exceptions was the employment of German reserve corps as first-line units in the initial attack in the West in August 1914, and the introduction of the British tank in September 1916).
Second, during its preparation and during its first phase, the First World War was a timetable war, delivering Germany’s decision-makers into the hands of operational and logistic compulsions. Given this ‘stress situation’, good intelligence was the one that supported the consumer’s expectation, and not one that dared to question it.
Third, wherever 1914-1918 turned into a war of manoeuvre, the employment of the traditional weapon of battlefield intelligence, the cavalry, failed (with exceptions on the Eastern and on the Balkan Fronts) to achieve any results of consequence.
Fourth, the dominant feature of the Great War was trench warfare. The impossibility to penetrate the enemy line resulted in a dramatic decline of the importance of military espionage. At sea, the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet found themselves in a similar situation. Here, the two enemies tried to avoid the big battle (at least, under unfavourable circumstances), and operated across distant and invisible front lines. The possibility to bypass these fronts was why the remaining neutral states became more and more important for MILINT. On the other hand, stalemate offered the opportunity to set up static intelligence structures, and it multiplied the value of new intelligence technologies, such as the radio, photography, or the aeroplane. The war took place in clearly defined geographic zones, thus tracking the opponent’s order of battle in these zones became the most important mission for MILINT.
Fifth, from 1916 onwards, the conflict turned into an industrialized war of attrition. Economic factors became the basis for strategic decisions. MILINT was faced with questions which it had seldom had to deal with before. In December 1916, the German Chancellor and the OHL posed a very precise question to the Admiralty: How many months will it take to force Britain into a separate peace by reopening the unrestricted U-boat-campaign? The answer decided Germany’s grand strategy for 1917.
Sixth, the more the war dragged on, the more it turned into a war of ideologies. Of course, political hatred and national/ethnic bias had been an aspect of the conflict from its very outset. But with old regimes tumbling and societies disintegrating under the burden of total war, new ideological paradigms began to evolve.
By way of conclusion, a number of brief remarks need to be made about the concept and the definition of German military intelligence. First and foremost, MILINT can be said to have comprised the intelligence collation and analysis conducted by of the German army and the German navy. The ‘intelligence’ work carried out by the German Foreign Office has been included only with regard to the military and naval attachés, as they operated within a peculiar area of dual responsibility between the military and the diplomatic spheres.
The German terms Nachrichten and Nachrichtendienst are not easy to translate. Nachricht can mean "news", "information", "message", but also "intelligence". In the era discussed here, a Nachrichtendienst can mean a news agency as well as an intelligence service. The contemporary military terminology was confusing as well. While the secret intelligence department of the OHL was called Sektion, later Abteilung IIIb, the department responsible for intelligence assessment was referred to as Nachrichtenabteilung. IIIb’s intelligence officers attached to the armies were the Nachrichtenoffiziere, while the armies’ G2-officers were (mostly) listed as the Generalstabsoffizier Ic. The technical progress of the signals troops – the Nachrichtentruppe – resulted in a general shift in the use of the term Nachrichten from intelligence to signals. Consequently, in 1917 the Nachrichtenabteilung was renamed Fremde Heere (Foreign Armies), and the Nachrichtenoffiziere had to rename themselves Nachrichtenoffiziere der OHL in order not to be confused with the Nachrichten-Referenten, the Staff Officers Signals, who in the meantime had become attached to the armies on a permanent base. Put another way, there might be many cases in the history of intelligence where the renaming of institutions simply served the purpose of masking institutional continuities. But in the cases discussed here, the shift in terminology is an excellent indicator for the profound and rapid changes which the military institutions underwent between 1914 and 1918.
In this special issue of the Journal of Intelligence History, the articles range from pre-war planning to the end of the Great War. In the first article, Robert Foley examines the German intelligence assessment of France before 1914. He focuses on the question, what knowledge the General Staff possessed about its potential enemies in the West and what conclusions were drawn from this with regard to tactics and the war plan. The guest editor’s contribution deals with the organisation and the development of German MILINT at the fronts in the West and East, and in the occupied territories. Florian Altenhöner demonstrates how far the missions of IIIb shifted during a war that – increasingly as the months passed – took possession of the home front: censorship, propaganda, and internal intelligence became integral parts of the work of the General Staff. Jürgen W. Schmidt’s piece introduces us to the interesting topic of open source intelligence against Russia and the history of the Stellvertretende Abteilung IIIb in Berlin. To save us from too much in the way of military and organisational history, Hanne Hieber tells the true story of one of Germany’s most successful intelligence officers, the mysterious Elisabeth Schragmüller, or "Mademoiselle Docteur", as she was known in the French press.
 
Given the distortions, omissions and misperceptions which have detracted for so long from a proper understanding of the role and significance of German military intelligence during the First World War, the Guest Editor hopes that this special issue of the Journal of Intelligence History can contribute in some way, however modest, toward the development of a better historical appreciation of this important chapter in the history of intelligence. He would like to thank the Editorial Board of the Journal of Intelligence History, and its Managing Editor, Michael Wala in particular, for their help and advice.
Markus Pöhlmann
Munich
NOTES:
[1] See Nicholas Hiley, “Decoding German Spies: British Spy Fiction, 1908-18,” in Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence, ed. Wesley K. Wark (London: Frank Cass, 1991), 55-79; Curt Riess, Total Espionage (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1941); Jean Bardanne, Le colonel Nicolaï [sic]: Espion de génie: Le véritable Organisateur de la révolution bolchevique et de l'Hitlérism, son succédané (Paris: Éditions Sibouey, 1947).
[2] See Captain von Rintelen (Franz Rintelen von Kleist), The Dark Invader, ed. Wesley K. Wark (London: Frank Cass, 1998, reprint, 1st edit. 1933).
 
[3] For an overview of the current state of the academic discipline see Thomas Kühne and Benjamin Ziemann, eds., Was ist Militärgeschichte? (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 2000).
[4] See e. g. David Kahn, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II (New York: Macmillan, 1978), and Gert Buchheit, Der deutsche Geheimdienst: Geschichte der militärischen Abwehr (München: Paul List, 1967).
[5] For the army archives and the German official history see Markus Pöhlmann, Kriegsgeschichte und Geschichtspolitik: Der Erste Weltkrieg: Die amtliche deutsche Militärgeschichtsschreibung 1914 bis 1956 (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 2002).
 
[6] See in RW 5, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg; see also Generalmajor a. D. Gempp, Geheimer Nachrichtendienst und Spionageabwehr des Heeres. 11. Bd, 2. Teil, Der Weltkrieg 1914-1918, 10. Abschnitt. Die Abteilung IIIb im letzten Kriegsjahr (1944), 545-3-343, Centr Chranenija Istoriko-Dokumental’nych Kollekcij (CChIDK), Moscow.
[7] The project of an official history of German naval signals intelligence is mentioned in Heinz Bonatz, Die deutsche Marine-Funkaufklärung 1914-1945 (Darmstadt: Wehr und Wissen, 1970), 73. According to the author, the study is presumed lost.
 
[8] See 1414, CChIDK.
[9] See Jürgen W. Schmidt, “Tales from the Russian Archives: Walter Nicolai’s Personal Document Collection,” Newsletter of the International Intelligence History Study Group 7, 2 (Summer 1998): 10-14.
 
[10] For IIIb’s propaganda efforts see Wilhelm Deist, “Zensur und Propaganda in Deutschland während des Ersten Weltkrieges,” in Militär, Staat und Gesellschaft: Studien zur preußisch-deutschen Militärgeschichte, ed. Wilhelm Deist (München: Oldenbourg, 1991), 153-163, and more recently Anne Lipp, Meinungslenkung im Krieg: Kriegserfahrungen deutscher Soldaten und ihre Deutung 1914-1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2003) and Florian Altenhöner, Kommunikation und Kontrolle: Gerüchte und städtische Öffentlichkeiten in Berlin und London, 1914/1918, PhD diss., Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, 2005.
[11] For the records of Prussian law enforcement and counter-intelligence agencies see Jürgen W. Schmidt, Gegen Frankreich und Russland: Der deutsche militärische Geheimdienst 1890-1914 (Ludwigsfelde: Ludwigsfelder Verlagshaus, 2005); diplomatic records are central to Friedhelm Koopmann, Diplomatie und Reichsinteresse: Das Geheimdienstkalkül in der deutschen Außenpolitik 1914 bis 1917 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1990) and Reinhard R. Doerries, Prelude to the Easter Rising: Sir Roger Casement in Imperial Germany (London: Frank Cass, 2000).
 
[12] See e. g. Patrick Beesly, Room 40: British Naval Intelligence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982); Burkhard Jähnicke, Washington und Berlin zwischen den Kriegen: Die Mixed Claims Commission in den transatlantischen Beziehungen (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2003); Thomas Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser: German Covert Operations in Great Britain during the First World War Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Jean-Pierre Turbergue, ed., Mata Hari: Le Dossier Secret Du Conseil de Guerre (Paris: éditions italiques, 2001).
[13] See the two books by Walter Nicolai, Nachrichtendienst, Presse und Volksstimmung im Weltkrieg (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1920) and Geheime Mächte: Internationale Spionage und ihre Bekämpfung im Welt und heute (Leipzig: K. F. Koehler, 1923); Engl.: The German Secret Service: Translated, with an additional chapter, by George Renwick (London: S. Paul & Co., 1924) – A popular account by an junior intelligence officer on the Eastern Front is Agricola [alias Oberleutnant Bauermeister], Spione durchbrechen die Front (Berlin: Vorhut-Verlag Otto Schlegel, 1933); Engl.: Spies break through: Memoirs of a German secret service officer (London: Constable, 1934).
 
[14] A popular anthology with the typical anti-Versailles-rhetoric is Hans Henning Freiherr Grote, ed., Vorsicht! Feind hört mit! Eine Geschichte der Weltkriegs- und Nachkriegsspionage (Berlin: Neufeld und Henius, 1930); a heavy book with a complicated title is the anthology by Generalmajor von Lettow-Vorbeck, ed., Die Weltkriegsspionage (Original-Spionage-Werk): Authentische Enthüllungen über Entstehung, Art, Arbeit, Technik, Schliche, Handlungen, Wirkungen und Geheimnisse der Spionage vor, während und nach dem Kriege auf Grund amtlichen Materials aus Kriegs-, Miliär-, Gerichts- und Reichs-Akten: Vom Leben und Sterben, von den Taten und Abenteuern der bedeutendsten Agenten bei Freund und Feind (München: Verlag Justin Moser, 1931); Friedrich Felger, ed., Was wir vom Weltkrieg nicht wissen (Leipzig: Ludwig Andermann Verlag, 1929) is useful and programatic in its titel; Max Gunzenhäuser, Geschichte des geheimen Nachrichtendienstes: Literaturbericht und Bibliographie (Frankfurt/Main: Bernhard und Graefe, 1968) is an ambitious bibliographical project that covers the literature until the late 1960s.