Codeword Overlord

by Nigel West

  To win the support of the Requetes, Stokes promised them trade privileges with England and England’s support of their attempts to restore the Spanish Monarchy. About three thousand Spaniards throughout many towns and villages of Northern Spain were won over to support the British. Auxiliary airfields, landing strips, and ammunition and fuel dumps were prepared for British airborne troops in the event that the Germans crossed the Pyrenees.

  Gensorowsky, the chief of III-F San Sebastian, was told of the existence of the organization. Through chance, Gensorowsky was able to obtain from a member of the Requetes all details about the organization and the plans concerted by it and the British. This information was given to Rohrscheidt, who turned it over to Arrese, an agent of the Falange. Arrese reported the matter to the Spanish police and to the Spanish General Staff. The police found and confiscated the supplies of the Requetes, including W/T transmitters, which were hidden in churches, and ammunition and fuel dumps.

  Heliodoro

  Heliodoro, one of Rohrscheidt’s V-men and a member of the Falange, obtained from friends in the Spanish State Department, possibly from someone in the decoding office, copies of almost every secret telegram sent to the Spanish State Department. Heliodoro delivered these copies to the Alemania Travel Bureau in Madrid, where they were picked up by one of Rohrscheidt’s employees. Heliodoro was not personally known to Rohrscheidt.

  German Agents Turned by the Allies

  During the last years of the war, Rohrscheidt’s principal work included checking on German agents suspected of dealing with the Allies.

  Scholz, Guenther Hermann

  In 1943 Guenther Hermann Scholz and an assistant named Muth were sent by Abwehr I Berlin to Spain. Both men had been in the pay of the Abwehr for a number of years and were considered reliable.

  For some months after their arrival, they were checked by Rohrscheidt. From an informant, a German with the cover name Smile and possessing a Norwegian or Swedish passport, Rohrscheidt learned that Scholz was giving information to the Allied intelligence services. Rohrscheidt intercepted some of the Scholz reports and photostated them before permitting them to go forward to the Allies.

  According to Rohrscheidt, Scholz’s reports to the Allies were a dangerous mixture of truths and untruths shaped to suit the desires of the Allies. The reports contained information of a political nature and information about the rivalry between the Abwehr and the SD. Rohrscheidt says that since he was not in a position to do anything about Scholz, he gave orders to let some of the reports go to the Allied intelligence services.

  Rohrscheidt also learned that Scholz planned to steal the secret documents of the German Embassy in Madrid. However, this plan was never carried out.

  Meywald, Martin, @ Koymann

  In 1944 Amt VI of the RSHA sent O/Stubaf Meywald to Spain to work as an agent. Meywald’s contact in Madrid was Sra de Pombo, who was also working for Amt VI. For cover status, de Pombo ran a fashion shop which was financed by Amt VI on Schellenberg’s order. In the summer of 1944 Rohrscheidt’s postal surveillance organization intercepted a letter without signature, addressed to the British Embassy, which revealed that both Meywald and de Pombo were working for the American Intelligence Service. Another agent of Rohrscheidt, Madeleine Montfort, confirmed this when she found out that Meywald and de Pombo were submitting intelligence to Jeanette, an agent of Colonel Hoffman, the American. Rohrscheidt could not ascertain the nature of the contents of the reports sent to Hoffman.

  Faller (fnu [First Name Unknown])

  In 1943 Bremen sent the German agent Faller to Spain. His presence became known to Rohrscheidt, when Colonel Juste of the Spanish General Staff told him about a letter Faller had written to the Spanish General Staff, requesting their aid in obtaining intelligence. Rohrscheidt suggested that Faller be deported, but Faller remained.

  In 1944, Juste informed Rohrscheidt that the Spanish police had arrested Faller en route from Barcelona to Zaragoza. Rohrscheidt learned from Conrado, who was his agent and also a member of the Spanish police force in Madrid, that Faller had admitted to the Spanish police that he had been working for the American Intelligence Service.

  Minameyer (fnu)

  About the end of 1943 Rohrscheidt learned from Spanish informants of Minameyer’s presence in Spain. Rohrscheidt knew that Minameyer worked in cooperation with Faller, but he could learn nothing about Minameyer’s mission in Spain. Rohrscheidt also learned that Minameyer was in close contact with Jeanette, the chief female agent for Colonel Hoffman. Rohrscheidt suspects that Minameyer informed Jeanette about personalities of the German Intelligence Service, and that he helped to compile lists of names of Germans whom the Americans wanted deported from Spain.

  Haffner (fnu)

  Haffner, a German who had lived in Spain for many years, was employed in 1942 as chauffeur for I-M KO Spain. Kapitan Gude, the chief of I-M, learned that Haffner had expressed an intention to sell information to the Allies. Before Gude could take steps to check on Haffner’s loyalty, Haffner disappeared. A few weeks later, Rohrscheidt learned from the Spanish police that Haffner had committed suicide the moment a Spanish policeman entered his hideout.

  Ledebour (fnu)

  To make arrangements for German peace overtures to England, Rittmeister von Ledebour was sent in 1944 by Colonel Hansen of OKW Berlin to establish relations with the British Embassy in Madrid. The British, however, refused to enter into any peace discussions with Ledebour.

  A few weeks after Ledebour’s failure to interest the British, Rohe, a friend of Ledebour and an employee of the Sofindus firm who had been told by Hanson to support Ledebour in his role of special agent for Hansen, reported to Rohrscheidt that Ledebour was now working for British Intelligence. Rohrscheidt was unable to uncover more details about Ledebour’s defection.

  Rohrscheidt’s Relations With Spanish Officials

  Shortly after his arrival in Madrid in January 1942, Rohrscheidt made the acquaintance of Colonel Juste, a General Staff officer and the head of the Spanish Counterespionage Service. Unlike Colonel Hein, Rohrscheidt was soon able to develop a close friendship with Juste, and sometime later Juste informed Rohrscheidt that he would be glad to obtain for Rohrscheidt any information about persons of interest to the Germans. Without offending Juste, Rohrscheidt avoided committing himself about this offer. He felt that Juste was trying to be not only friendly but also clever, for Juste could learn from Rohrscheidt’s questions just where German interest was directed. Also, Rohrscheidt did not wish to place himself under any obligations.

  Rohrscheidt says that Juste would never have undertaken anything against the Allied services in the interests of Germany alone. Juste was not on friendly terms with the British, but he was not anxious to make matters worse. During the war Juste tried to establish close relations with the American Intelligence Service, and Rohrscheidt believes that he would not have undertaken anything against the Americans. Rohrscheidt thinks that Juste believed he could serve Spanish interests by calculated vacillations in all official relations with other countries.

  Rohrscheidt maintains that routine information of an insignificant nature was exchanged between his office and Juste’s. For instance, on a number of occasions Rohrscheidt submitted requests for the expulsion of Germans whose behaviour was considered harmful to Germany’s interest. Such requests were granted only in individual cases, and then only if the person in question had acted against Spanish interests, especially in a political way.

  Rohrscheidt denies having dealt with any other Spanish office or having had access to any Spanish records, but he admits that his agents sometimes supplied him with excerpts from the records of the Spanish police and the Falange. The information obtained from the police records was sometimes valuable, but that from the Falange was useless for Rohrscheidt’s purposes, because it consisted mostly of highly exaggerated deductions. Rohrscheidt denies having had direct contact with the Spanish General Staff, and states that on his express order no member of his organization was permitted
to offer any kind of compensation to a member of the Staff.

  After the Allies landed in North Africa, pressure began to be exerted on Spanish officialdom to make matters difficult for the Germans in Spain. This pressure could be eased by the Germans only by strengthening personal relations with the Spaniards, and Rohrscheidt did everything possible to strengthen the relations existing between his office and Juste’s, although he knew that as early as 1942, Juste considered the war lost for Germany. Through this friendship, Rohrscheidt obtained a degree of protection against Allied demands for the expulsion of Germans from Spain.

  Penetration of Spanish National Services

  Spanish Post Office

  At the beginning of 1942, a Spanish post-office official (@ Martino I) who probably worked in the Madrid Central Post Office, offered to hand over to Referat III-F all mail of interest to the office. Rohrscheidt accepted the offer and was able to read all the correspondence of Germans suspected of contacts with the Allied intelligence services. Letters written to the American and British Consulates and correspondence between Allied agencies were also handed over to Rohrscheidt.

  Rohrscheidt recalls reading a number of letters written by an anonymous German, who probably worked for the SD or KO Spain, divulging information to the British and American Consulates. The letters revealed how Sofindus, a German export and import firm in Madrid, and Obermueller, the Chief of I-M KO Spain, bought food and medical supplies in Spain and sent them by neutral ships to German-controlled French ports, such as La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Cherbourg, for delivery to the German occupation forces in France.

  Another letter sent through normal post-office channels by the British Military Attaché in Lisbon to the British Military Attaché in Madrid revealed that newly-built British battleships were being given the names of sunken battleships.

  A letter mailed from an unknown source to the offices of the American Marine Attaché in Madrid was also intercepted and turned over to Rohrscheidt. This letter, which was classified secret, contained the fiscal accounts of an American paymaster and the complete roster of the personnel in the office of the American Marine Attaché in Madrid.

  In autumn 1943 Rohrscheidt obtained possession of a letter to Ebright, the assistant to the American Military Attaché in Madrid, written by a German telephone operator in the German Embassy at Madrid. Rohrscheidt concluded that the telephone operator was in the pay of the American Intelligence Service, and she was sent back to Germany without further action being taken against her by Rohrscheidt.

  The Spanish Telephone Company

  Telefonica, the Spanish telephone company, used women operators to monitor telephone calls to and from Portugal. Toward the end of 1943, Rohrscheidt was able with the help of a V-man (@ Alonzo) to bribe two women employees of the telephone company to hand over the text of all conversations recorded by them. Most of the calls were made from the Palacio Hotel, Madrid, to Lisbon.

  According to Rohrscheidt, no valuable information was obtained in this way, but he was able to check on the business connections of many people, and to determine the future plans of these people.

  Through this monitoring system, a Frenchman employed since 1941 by the Abwehr in Paris was exposed in Madrid as a double agent. This Frenchman disappeared from Madrid. Rohrscheidt says that he does not know any particulars.

  Surveillance Organization Referat III

  Hotel Employees

  An excellent source of information from 1941 until the end of the war was the surveillance system maintained in the largest hotels of Madrid by Referat III-F. This system, which was started by Hauber when he was chief of Referat III-F and which was expanded under Rohrscheidt, included employees of the Palacio, the Ritz, and the Capitol Hotels.

  In general, those informants eavesdropped on conversations, identified every hotel guest, pilfered letters or documents deemed to be of intelligence value, tried to make photostatic copies of the passports of hotel guests, and tried to obtain a copy of the certificate of arrival which the hotel management was required by law to make out and send to the police when a guest registered. From those informants, Rohrscheidt learned that Ebright and Hoffman had met an Italian military mission to prepare first peace feelers for Italy; and that Sleator, an English agent attached to the British Consulate in Madrid, had met a Colonel Begbeder of the Spanish Army; and that Count Poniatowsky, the Polish Ambassador and a former supporter of the Spanish Republic Government, had become very friendly with the Franco regime and the Catholic Church.

  In the Hotel Palacio, Gumersindo, the head waiter, was one of Rohrscheidt’s best informants. Gumersindo’s aides included the assistant hotel manager, a bartender, a room-service waiter, the woman receptionist, a bellhop, and three chambermaids. The woman receptionist played a very important role: each morning it was her duty to deliver to the Spanish police the passports of newly registered hotel guests. On her way to the police, she stopped at a Hungarian photographer’s place on the Gran Via to have the passports photostated, after which she delivered the passports to the police. In this way, Rohrscheidt obtained a complete photographic file of the passports of all the guests in the Hotel Palacio. Gumersindo compiled information and passed it on to Hauber, who translated it into German and handed over the results to Rohrscheidt.

  The procedure at the Ritz and the Capitol was much the same as at the Palacio. At the Ritz, the chief informant was a waiter with the alias Ana, whose assistants were three chambermaids, a bartender, and a waiter in the dining room, who spoke French and English also. At the Hotel Capitol, which was visited almost entirely by Englishmen, a janitor’s helper and two or three chambermaids were Rohrscheidt’s principal informants, as well as a penniless count with the alias Prinz, whose living expenses at the hotel were paid by Rohrscheidt.

  In 1942 the Count identified and watched Sleator and his mistress Madame Bach. Prinz informed Rohrscheidt that Sleator was an attaché of the British Embassy in Madrid, and that Sleator had an agent net which was operating in France. Prinz could not obtain any other information about Sleator, except that Sleator was running agents for the British Intelligence Service.

  Shadowers

  In 1943 Rohrscheidt hired about twelve men to work as shadowers. These men, whose real names Rohrscheidt claims not to know or remember, were Falangists and former members of the Blue Division.

  In general, these men shadowed persons suspected by Rohrscheidt, and they tried to discover the intentions of these persons. Agents of other intelligence services were kept under observation. These shadowers also watched the building where KO Spain had its offices, in order to check whether agents of other intelligence services were keeping it under observation.

  The von Rohrscheidt interrogation report, compiled by the US CIC based on a British questionnaire, was circulated within the post-war Anglo-American intelligence community and was considered to be candid and comprehensive, and he remained in American custody in Heidelberg.

  Von Rohrscheidt had developed a warm business relationship with his Spanish counterparts, Colonel Juste, the Falange’s Camisas Viejas, and the DGS’s Colonel Pardo. Referat III’s brief was counter-espionage, but this amounted to concerted efforts by the KO to plant agents in British networks and infiltrate double, and even triple, agents into Gibraltar. In particular, the sub-section designated III-F aggressively concentrated on Allied personnel thought to be engaged in espionage outside Germany and employed conventional tradecraft to identify and neutralise suspect British and American diplomats and consular officials. From 1943, when the Spanish came under increasing pressure from the Allies to restrict rather blatant Axis abuses of neutrality, Referat II acquired some Abt. III functions, and these included the preparation of stay-behind organisations as part of Berlin’s contingency planning for an anticipated likely Allied occupation of southern Spain.

  The KO’s stay-behind Reucksugs-Netz (R-Netz), initiated in 1943, was directed by an I-M officer, Kapitän Werner von Geldern (code-named GABERS) and supported by Leutnant Sick and a te
am of radio operators. The R-Netz was allocated its own radio channels connected to a central station code-named SONJA at Sigmaringen in Bavaria. All this traffic, of course, became the subject of comprehensive interception and analysis by the British Y services.

  In Barcelona the KO had established two commercial covers away from the consulate: one, a printing business code-named ZARAGOZA, the other a supposedly legitimate news agency, the Archivo de Informacion Acrual (ARDIA), headed by Dr Karl Panhorst, which consumed a large investment of cash but did not appear to produce any reports. Ostensibly a branch of a respected publisher run from Vienna by Baron Heinrich Siegler von Eberswald, ARDIA was owned by a Dutch family, the Keesings. According to Panhorst, who, like some of his colleagues preferred not to return to Germany, the Keesings, also Jewish, were unaware of the Abwehr’s involvement in their business, but had been assisted in leaving the Netherlands and emigrating to the United States in 1942.

  ZARAGOZA turned out to be a company, Lindina, managed by the head of the local Lufthansa office, Gerhard Lindenberg, who shared an apartment with the Abwehr’s Colonel Kleyenstüber. Lindina, which also received covert German funding, was supposedly intended to participate in post-war civil aviation but never actually traded.

  A well-known historian and an acknowledged expert on Spanish history, Panhorst had family in Brie, Pennsylvania, and had travelled widely in South America and the United States before the war. When interviewed in Madrid by OSS he claimed to have been closely associated with an anti-Nazi, Prince Karl Auresperg.