Hermann J. Giskes

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Hermann Giskes (1945)

Hermann Josef Giskes (born September 28, 1896 in Krefeld , † August 28, 1977 there ) was a German soldier and lieutenant colonel in the Wehrmacht . From 1941 to 1944 he was head of the German military counter-espionage in the occupied Netherlands and one of the main participants in the " Englandspiel ". After the war, Giskes worked for the Gehlen organization and the Federal Intelligence Service .

Life

Until 1938

Hermann Giskes was born in Krefeld, the third of four children of Wilhelm and Maria Giskes. The father was a businessman and owner of a tobacco factory. After attending elementary school, he first attended grammar school in Krefeld from 1905 and then in 1911/12 in Karthaus-Konz . In 1913/14 he attended the commercial college in Krefeld.

On October 1, 1914, Giskes volunteered for the Field Artillery Regiment 31 in Hagenau in Alsace for military service in the First World War . In December 1914 he was transferred to snowshoe battalion No. 2 , with which he took part in battles in the Carpathian Mountains, South Tyrol and Serbia. In 1916 Giskes was deployed with his unit on the Western Front, where he was wounded several times and received the Iron Cross, 2nd class. In March 1917 he became a lieutenant in the reserve and, as he was unfit for front duty, was an instructor in the mountain hunter replacement battalion in Immenstadt im Allgäu until April 1918 . From April 1918 Giskes was again on the Western Front with the 471 Infantry Regiment , where he was taken prisoner by the French on October 12, 1918.

Released from captivity in March 1920, Giskes went back to Krefeld and initially worked as a tobacco dealer for his father. Hermann Giskes had been married since 1925 and had no children. In 1926 he started his own business as a tobacco importer and dealer. Since 1929 lieutenant in the reserve, he took part in reserve exercises from 1936 and became captain of the reserve in 1938.

1939 to 1945

In August 1938, the Canaris nephew, Captain Adolf von Feldmann , offered him to return to the army and work for counter-espionage at the branch office (Ast) Hamburg of the OKW office abroad / defense . Since Giskes tobacco trade was in economic difficulties, he accepted the offer on January 1, 1939. From spring 1939 he headed Division III C 2 (counter-espionage) at Ast Hamburg.

After the outbreak of war in 1939, Giskes set up a mobile "Abwehrkommando" in Münster , which was supposed to capture and sift through important files during the Western campaign . When the beginning of the western campaign was postponed, he returned to Ast Hamburg in January 1940, which had been responsible for Belgium and Denmark since the summer of 1939 . In June 1940, Giskes was transferred as major and head of Section III F2 (defense against foreign services / counter-espionage) to the defense control center in France , which was housed in the Hôtel Lutetia in Paris . In August 1941, as a lieutenant colonel at Ast Netherlands in The Hague, he became head of counter-espionage sub-group III F.

The fall of Icarus in Van Stolkpark in The Hague by Titus Leeser (1980) in memory of the victims of the "England game".
Behind the detention building of the Mauthausen concentration camp there has been a memorial since 1968 for the SOE agents liquidated there by the SS .

Between 1942 and 1944 Giskes was responsible for the " Englandspiel ", a joint operation of the Abwehr and the Abwehr Department of the Security Police (SIPO) in the Netherlands , headed by Joseph Schreieder . By misleading the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) between March 1942 and May 1943, over fifty Dutch SOE agents trained in England for espionage and sabotage operations fell into the hands of the Germans during their parachute landing, as well as tons of weapons, ammunition, explosives and other things Sabotage material.

In June 1942, Giskes had the Reich Security Main Office assured him in writing that the captured agents would not be sentenced to the maximum penalty and would thus remain alive. After the England game was stopped, when Giskes' reasoning that he had to have the men available to answer questions at all times, the prisoners were transferred to the Rawicz concentration camp in Poland, where several perished. In September 1944 they were taken to Mauthausen concentration camp , where thirty-five of the Dutch SOE agents captured during the England game were liquidated by the SS on September 6 and 7, 1944 . In 1968 a memorial was erected for them there.

During the reorganization of the military defense and its partial subordination to the Reich Security Main Office , Giskes remained a member of the Wehrmacht and, as Lieutenant Colonel, was commander of the "Front Reconnaissance Command 307", which was formed from the III F offices in Holland, Belgium and Northern France and the control center III West for Front reconnaissance under Lieutenant Colonel Oskar Reile was subordinated. Giskes still managed to recruit the double spy "King Kong" with Christiaan Lindemans , but after the Allied invasion the counter-espionage options were lost when the German Wehrmacht withdrew. "King Kong" was supposed to let the advancing allied troops roll over it and operate behind their lines. Lindemans played a role in the betrayal of Operation Market Garden , committing suicide while in custody in July 1946.

From 1945

At the end of April 1945 Giskes was taken prisoner in the Abwehr Agent School in Wiehl and, after brief interrogation by the US Army, was taken to the British interrogation center Camp 020 on May 24, 1945 , where he was interrogated for several months. According to a report by the "Information Organ for Members of the Former Military Defense" The Rear Guard , Giskes was transferred to the Netherlands in March 1946, where he was held until September 1946. Then he was deported to Germany.

In 1946 Reinhard Gehlen , the former head of the Wehrmacht Department Foreign Army East (FHO ), founded the Gehlen (OG) organization, which worked on behalf of the Americans . Hermann Giskes was one of the first employees of this intelligence service . At the beginning of the 1950s he was in the OG general agency N in Bremen. From 1953 at the latest, Giskes was head of the OG sub- agency XVII in Hamburg under the code name Gisson . From 1955 to the beginning of 1956 he worked in counter-espionage at the Pullach headquarters. Until at least 1963 Giskes headed the BND general agency in Munich, which was responsible for North Africa, among other things. One of his agents at this time was Richard Christmann from Lorraine , who had already worked as a double agent for the Abwehr during World War II. Assigned by Giskes as BND resident in Tunis between 1956 and 1961 , Christmann supported the Algerian independence movement against France and thus worked directly against the official Franco-German reconciliation policy.

Giskes published his memories of the England game, first in the Netherlands in 1949 and then in Germany in 1950 under the title "Spione Dubbing Spione". When his book was published in English in 1953 in New York, the opposition Labor Party in London asked parliament about the truth of the account. The government spokesman announced that the facts were "unhappily true". A parliamentary inquiry was refused on the grounds that it was not in the public interest to publicly debate intelligence matters. His book was also published in Norwegian and French translation and was reissued posthumously in Germany in 1982 under the title “London ruft Nordpol”.

In 1955, Duilio Coletti shot the Italian feature film "Londra chiama Polo Nord" (German: London calls North Pole ), freely based on Hermann J. Giskes' "Spies overplaying spies". The action was moved to Amsterdam and Giskes was cast as "Bernes" by Curd Jürgens "in his best role in a long time". Joseph Schreieder (SIPO) was played as "Hermann" by René Deltgen and a love story with a "Mary" portrayed by Dawn Addams was added.

Work editions

  • Defense III F. De duitse contraspionnage in Nederland . De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam 1949.
  • Spies cover up spies . With an afterword by HMG Lauwers, pp. 305–343 and an afterword by the author, pp. 345–351. Hansa Verlag Josef Toth, Hamburg 1951.
  • London Calling North Pole . British Book Center, New York 1953.
  • London kaller North Pole. Sannheten om krigens annoyed spy coups. Stabenfeldt, Stavanger 1953.
  • Londres appelle Pôle Nord . Plon, Paris 1958.
  • London calls North Pole. The successful radio game of the German military defense . Bastei Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1982, ISBN 3-404-65046-8 (new edition of spies overplaying spies ).

literature

  • Joseph Schreieder : That was the England game. Walter Stutz publishing house, Munich 1950.
  • Michael Graf Soltikow : Reception at midnight. Verlag der Sternbücher, Hamburg 1956.
  • Philippe Ganier-Raymond: Le Réseau Étranglé. Arthème Fayard, Paris 1967.
  • Leo Marks: Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's Story 1941–1945. HarperCollins, New York 1998, ISBN 0-684-86780-X .
  • Hans Schafranek : Company "North Pole". The England game of the German military defense in the years 1942-1944 . In: Hans Schafranek / Johannes Tuchel (ed.): War in the ether. Resistance and espionage in World War II . Picus-Verlag, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-85452-470-6 , pp. 247-291.
  • Matthias Ritzi, Erich Schmidt-Eenboom : In the shadow of the Third Reich. The BND and its agent Richard Christmann. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-86153-643-7 .

Movie

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Camp 020 Interim Report on the Case of Hermann Giskes. 1945. In: The National Archives, Kew, KV 2/962 .
  2. ↑ Ritzi / Schmidt-Eenboom (2011), p. 39.
  3. ↑ Ritzi / Schmidt-Eenboom (2011), p. 39.
  4. ↑ Ritzi / Schmidt Eenboom (2011), p 59th
  5. ↑ The memorial is in the immediate vicinity of the former headquarters of the Dutch branch of Department III F of the Abwehr, which was located in Hogeweg in Scheveningen before III F moved to Driebergen in November 1942 (Giskes (1982), p. 181). The Dutch inscription reads: “You jumped to your death for our freedom. England game 1942-1944. In grateful memories of the 54 Dutch agents and of the many in the news network. "
  6. ↑ Giskes (1982), p. 151f.
  7. ↑ Giskes (1982), p. 210.
  8. ↑ Schafranek (2004), p. 278.
  9. ^ Oskar Reile: The German secret service in World War II. Volume 2: Western Front. Augsburg 1990, p. 332f.
  10. ↑ Giskes (1951), pp. 242ff., 271; Interrogation Files Hermann Giskes 1945. The National Archives, Kew, KV 2/961 .
  11. ^ Body Identified as Dutch Traitor 'King Kong' . In: Los Angeles Times v. June 17, 1986.
  12. ^ Hermann Zolling, Heinz Höhne: Pullach intern. The history of the Federal Intelligence Service . 7. Continuation. In Der Spiegel No. 18 v. Chr. April 26, 1971, pp. 145-161, here p. 145.
  13. ↑ Ritzi / Schmidt-Eenboom (2011), passim, especially p. 165.
  14. ^ Oskar Reile: The German secret service in World War II. Volume 2: Western Front. Augsburg 1990, especially p. 393.
  15. ^ Time, August 10, 1953
  16. ↑ DER SPIEGEL 34/1957.
personal data
SURNAME Giskes, Hermann J.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Giskes, Hermann Josef (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German soldier and lieutenant colonel in the Wehrmacht
DATE OF BIRTH September 28, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Krefeld
DATE OF DEATH August 28, 1977
Place of death Krefeld