Defense department
The Department of Defense was on 1 January 1921, the then Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Gempp from remnants of the former b Division III as military - intelligence service of the Reichswehr and individual intelligence officers from the Group Command formed after after the proclamation of the Republic in November 1918 and formation of the Weimar Republic no longer existed an official military secret service of the Army in Germany .
The "Abwehr" was integrated into the troop office TA of the Reichswehr Ministry, the disguised General Staff of the Reichswehr, under the camouflage name of the Army Statistics Department T 3. This department included the areas of "Foreign Armies", press work, the organizational area for the military attachés and the area "Defense". Between 1927 and 1928 the "Abwehr" was restructured and the naval intelligence service, which had been operating separately until then, was incorporated into it. Due to clear violations of the law by individual leaders within the Reichswehr, from April 1, 1928, the area of the military intelligence service was directly subordinate to the Reichswehr Minister Wilhelm Groener (1867-1939).
From this point on, the "Abwehr" was briefly in the military area solely responsible for intelligence gathering information, questions of internal secrecy, counter-espionage and international espionage . But as early as 1931 there was a separation of news gathering from news evaluation. In the course of this, the naval intelligence service was separated again as an independent unit. It was not until 1938, with the establishment of the Foreign / Defense Ministry of War , that the two military intelligence services were brought together again.
Head of Defense Department
- Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Gempp (1921–1927)
- Lieutenant Colonel Günther Schwantes (1927–1930)
- Colonel Ferdinand von Bredow (1930 to mid-1932)
- Sea captain Conrad Patzig (mid-1932 to late 1934)
- Rear Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (January 1935–1938), then until 1944 head of the Defense Office and the Foreign Office / Defense
literature
- Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of the secret services in the 20th century . Herbig-Verlag, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2317-9 .