Overseas radio center

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Soldiers from the OKW's secret radio reporting service encrypting or decrypting messages using the ENIGMA key machine
Soldier of the secret radio reporting service of the OKW office abroad / defense
Secret radio reporting service from the Wehrmacht High Command

The overseas radio center in Wohldorf was in Hamburg in World War II next to the radio station in Belzig southwest of Berlin, the second major communication hub for wireless radio of OKW - Office foreign / defense in the German Reich . It was subordinate to Abwehrstelle X in General- Bone- Hauer-Strasse (named after one of the first German generals to fall in World War II, today: Sophienterrasse ).

Thanks to the strong transmitters in Wohldorf, some of which may have come from the equipment of the cruiser SMS Scharnhorst (this is very doubtful, since the Scharnhorst mentioned was sunk more than twenty years earlier), it was possible to exchange messages over great distances. Wohldorf out was a big part of the shortwave -Funkverkehrs with German agents ( agents radio - Afu) and other branches of the Wehrmacht overseas, the Americas, conducted the Middle East. In Arcachon in France on the Atlantic coast was a relay station for the radio to South America. The radio center played a major role in the occupation of Norway.

The station was built in early 1940 by Major Werner Trautmann, and young radio amateurs from the Hamburg area were specifically drafted as employees and radio operators . The station had up to 25 directional antennas, 24 transmitters and 30 receivers. While the administration and the receiving stations were in the old manor on the Kupferredder, the transmission masts were just under two kilometers away in a south-westerly direction on Diestelstrasse. The assertion made in some Anglo-Saxon books that the radio station was blown up at the end of the war (such as Ken Follett and Ladislas Farago ) does not correspond to the facts. The radio station had several assigned relay stations and was able to broadcast very far. The relay station near Arcachon, for example, established the connection to the “Bolivar network” in South America. No other radio station in the Abwehr had anywhere near such a range.

The radio station was extremely successful in terms of radio technology, but the results of the agents controlled via the station were low. For example, the last agent Josef Jakobs to be shot dead in the Tower of London was controlled from Wohldorf. Other agents who were brought ashore in a submarine in Ireland near the Dingle Peninsula asked for the next train and were then immediately arrested because there had been no trains there for 14 years. Some actions that were taken from Wohldorf have still not been fully clarified, such as a trip with a small cutter to the Arctic Ocean in 1941 to - disguised as fishermen - make weather observations and listen to the radio messages of the Americans.

The largest German radio station was in Nauen . The area of ​​their antenna systems exceeded that of the Principality of Monaco . In contrast to the Wohldorf radio station, this radio station transmitted in the long or longest wave range. With it she could reach submerged submarines.

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Individual evidence

  1. ^ Uwe Brammer: Counter-espionage and "Secret Intelligence Service". The defense post in the military district X Hamburg 1935–1945. Rombach, Freiburg 1989. p. 51