Walter Nicolai

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Walter Nicolai
Walter nicolai.png
Born(1873-08-01)1 August 1873
Braunschweig, Germany
Died4 May 1947(1947-05-04) (aged 73)
Moscow, Soviet Union
NationalityGerman
OccupationIntelligence officer
Espionage activity
Allegiance German Empire
 Weimar Republic
Service branchAbteilung IIIb
Service years1906–1919
RankColonel

Walter Nicolai (August 1, 1873 – May 4, 1947) was the first senior IC (Intelligence) Officer in the Imperial German Army. He came to run the military secret service, Abteilung IIIb, and was an important pro-war German leader during the First World War.[1] According to Höhne and Zolling, he helped to found the German Fatherland Party.[2]

Early life[]

Nicolai was the son of a Prussian Army captain and a farmer's daughter in Braunschweig. In 1893, he selected a military career. He studied from 1901 to 1904 at the War Academy in Berlin. Shortly before his appointment as Chief of the Intelligence Service of the German High Command, he is known to have taken trips to Russia and spoke fluent Russian. Nicolai was considered to be ultraconservative, monarchist and nonpolitical.[3]

In 1906, Nicolai began his career in Abteilung IIIb and took over the news station in Königsberg.[4] He built up the news station in Königsberg to a major centre for espionage against the Russian Empire. After two years of service in early 1913, he was named the head of Abteilung IIIb, which helped to inform others of the Austrian espionage case against Captain Alfred Redl.

First World War[]

Nicolai led the German secret service between 1913 and 1919 and directed Abteilung IIIb intensively during the First World War. He wrote, "Before each new acquisition, delivery pp. to ask the I.O., what benefits it brings for the war".[5]

Information about Nicolai's employment of Mata Hari (7 August 1876 – 15 October 1917) can to be found in the so-called Gempp Report, which became public only in the 1970s.[6] The papers also contain information from former officers of Abteilung III b about the "Agent H 21", who was Mata Hari. The papers prove that she had entered the service of the German Secret Service in late fall 1915. In May 1916, IIIb chief Nicolai had her asked to come to Cologne. After a conversation there, he decided to have her trained as an agent and assigned Major Roepell to her as commanding officer. Roepell had taught her "on long walks on the outskirts of the city the basics of the agent's job", and an expert in cipher writing practiced "chemical writing" with her. The "training" took seven days. Mata Hari's mission was to reconnoiter the enemy's next offensive plans from Paris, travel through militarily interesting-areas of France and maintain contact with the Kriegsnachrichtenstelle West in Düsseldorf, whose director was Roepell, and the agent headquarters in the German embassy in Madrid, whose director was Major Arnold Kalle. Mata Hari was then subordinated to Captain Hoffmann, who gave her the codename H 21.[7]

In January 1917, Major Kalle transmitted radio messages to Berlin that described the helpful activities of a German spy codenamed H-21 whose biography so closely matched Mata Hari's that it was patently obvious that she had to be the agent.[8] The Deuxième Bureau intercepted the messages, and from their content, identified H-21 as Mata Hari. The messages were in a code that German intelligence knew to have been broken by the French, which suggests that the messages were contrived to have Mata Hari arrested by the French.[9] In early 1917, General Nicolai had grown very annoyed that Mata Hari had provided him with no intelligence worthy of the name but sold the Germans mere Paris gossip about the sex lives of French politicians and generals. He decided to terminate her employment by exposing her as a German spy to the French.[10]

Another famous female spy that Nicolai was assigned to was Elsbeth Schragmüller. For many years, she was invariably known as Mademoiselle Docteur or Fräulein Doktor, her actual name being revealed only in 1945 from German intelligence documents captured by the Allies after the Second World War. In 1915, Nicolai, assigned her as the chief of the Kriegsnachrichtenstelle Antwerpen.[11]

When Erich Ludendorff became first quartermaster general at the end of August 1916, there was an expansion of military intelligence for the secret police. Nicolai saw himself as having a relentless will to win and as being a military educator, a supervisor and an initiator of patriotic self-discipline. His officers took part in the promotional work for war bonds, and he helped to found the ultranationalist German Fatherland Party.

Later life[]

After the end of World War I, Nicolai retired as a colonel. His deputy and then successor in 1920 was Major Friedrich Gempp. Nicolai published two postwar books about his activities.

Under Nazi Germany, he belonged to the expert advisory board of the Imperial Institute for the History of the New Germany.[12]

After the Second World War, Nicolai was arrested by the Soviet SMERSH under the personal order of Stalin,[13] deported from Germany and interrogated in Moscow. He died in custody on 4 May 1947 in the hospital of Moscow's Butyrka Prison. His body was cremated and buried at the necropolis of the Donskoy Monastery in a mass grave. It was only in 1999 that Russian military prosecutors formally exonerated Nicolai of all charges.[14]

References[]

  1. ^ see Höhne and Zolling, p 286 onwards.
  2. ^ Höhne and Zolling, p. 290
  3. ^ Heinz Höhne: Canaris – Patriot im Zwielicht. p. 149.
  4. ^ Heinz Höhne: Canaris – Patriot im Zwielicht. p. 150f.
  5. ^ Heinz Höhne: Canaris – Patriot im Zwielicht. p. 150.
  6. ^ A 14-part field report on the German military intelligence service in the First World War, written under the direction of Major General Friedrich Gempp, which was first taken by the US occupying power to Washington, DC in the National Archives and Records Administration, and was returned to Germany in the mid-1970s. It can be viewed in the Freiburg military archive as machine scripts and microfilms: Bundesarchiv, Abteilung Militärarchiv, https://www.bundesarchiv.de/DE/Navigation/Meta/Ueber-uns/Dienstorte/Freiburg-im-Breisgau/freiburg-im-breisgau.html.
  7. ^ Hanne Hieber, "Mademoiselle Docteur", in Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992–1995 (Münster LIT 2003), pp. 91–95 (a report about details of Elsbeth Schragmüller's agent activities in the Gempp Report).
  8. ^ Norman Polmar & Thomas Allen, The Spy Book (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 358.
  9. ^ Russel Warren Howe, Mata Hari: The True Story (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1986), p. 143.
  10. ^ Norman Polmar & Thomas Allen, The Spy Book (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 394.
  11. ^ Michael Epkenhans (ed.), Geheimdienst und Propaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg. Die Aufzeichnungen von Oberst Walter Nicolai 1914 bis 1918 (Berlin: de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019), pp. 258–261. (In German.)
  12. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Kulturlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 433.
  13. ^ Official information from Russian government (see the Russian page for sources)[full citation needed]
  14. ^ Jürgen Schmidt: Spionage: Mata Haris erfolgloser Chef, Tagesspiegel, 7. Oktober 2001

Sources[]

  • Höhne, Heinz, and Zolling, Hermann (1972). The General Was a Spy. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc, New York.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) (Published in Germany as Pullach Intern, 1971, Hoffman and Campe Verlag, Hamburg.)
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