Foreign armies division
The Foreign Armies Department was a service established in May 1917 to assess the hostile situation of the German Army . After the defeat in 1918 with the Reichswehr , the position was continued under a cover name . She was also in the Wehrmacht in the Nazi era . In 1938 two General Staff Departments were formed, one for Foreign Armies West and one for Foreign Armies East . The head of the latter, Reinhard Gehlen , worked for the US occupation forces after the Second World War. His organization Gehlen became the nucleus for the later Federal Intelligence Service , the German foreign secret service.
history
The Foreign Armies Department was set up in the Great General Staff of the German Army during the First World War . During the First World War, the agency primarily evaluated information supplied by enemy situation officers on the fronts and by Division IIIb. It emerged in May 1917 from the previous "news department".
After the First World War, the department was formally dissolved (like other offices, because of the provisions of the Versailles Treaty ), but continued to operate under the cover name “Army Statistics Department” as “Department T 3” of the Army Office of the Reichswehr . This department was affiliated to the " Defense Group " until 1928 , which was then directly subordinated to the Reichswehr Minister as an independent department . This change was made to separate the collection and analysis of messages. In 1931 it was officially renamed the Foreign Army Department .
In 1938 there was internal restructuring, which led to the division of the General Staff into two separate departments, namely Foreign Heere West (3rd Department) and Foreign Heere East (12th Department). Both departments were together with the Attaché group under the direction of the Quartermaster IV (O Qu IV) in the General Staff of the Army. The Foreign Armies East department was headed from 1942 to April 1945 by Reinhard Gehlen , who last held the rank of major general .
Shortly after the end of the Second World War , Gehlen surrendered to the US Army , entered its service and a little later took over the order from the occupation authorities in the American occupation zone to set up a secret service based on the American model with German personnel. He was later named Gehlen after its head of organization . In this capacity, Gehlen won a considerable number of his former employees to work for this new service. When the non-governmental organization Gehlen was taken over into the federal German administration, the Federal Intelligence Service was created in 1956 .
Head of the Foreign Armies Department
Department at the Great General Staff
- Colonel Leopold von Rauch (1917–1918)
Department T 3 / Foreign Armies
- Colonel Friedrich von Boetticher (1920–1924)
- Colonel Curt Liebmann (1924–1928)
- Colonel Erich Kühlenthal (1928–1930)
- Colonel Herbert Fischer (1930–1932)
- Major General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel (1932–1936)
- Colonel i. G. Kurt von Tippelskirch (1936–1938)
Head of the FHO
- March 1, 1939 to March 31, 1942 Colonel i. G. Eberhard Kinzel
- April 1, 1942 to April 10, 1945 Major General Reinhard Gehlen
- April 10 to May 1945 Lieutenant Colonel i. G. Gerhard Wessel (commissioned)
Head of FHW
- 1938 to March 1, 1943 Colonel i. G. Ulrich Liß
- March 1, 1943 to July 1944 Colonel i. G. Alexis Freiherr von Roenne
- 1944 to May 1945 Colonel i. G. Wilhelm Bürklin
literature
- David Thomas: Foreign Armies East and German Military Intelligence in Russia 1941–45. In: Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 22, No. 2, 1987, ZDB -ID 790667-5 , pp. 261-301.
- Reinhard Gehlen : The service. Memories 1942–1971. von Hase & Köhler, Mainz et al. 1971, ISBN 3-920324-01-3 .
- Magnus Pahl : Foreign Armies East. Hitler's military enemy reconnaissance . Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-86153-694-9 .
- Spencer C. Tucker (Ed.): The European Powers in the First World War. To Encyclopedia. 1996, p. 337.