Kurt Jahnke

Kurt Jahnke around 1915

Kurt Albert Jahnke , pseudonyms Kort Boder, Jose Iturber, Kurt Jansen (born February 17, 1882 in Gnesen , Province of Posen , † May 1945 in Moscow ) was a German intelligence agent and presumably British and Soviet double agent . He is not to be confused with the Deputy Reich Press Chief Kurt Jahncke .

Life

Jahnke emigrated to the United States in 1899 , where he was naturalized. In 1909 he joined the US Navy in Detroit , with whom he was stationed in the Philippines . Allegedly, he should also have worked for the Pinkerton detective agency , the US border guards and the Secret Service . He was involved in the smuggling of opium and cigarettes, probably in connection with his work for the border guard . He allegedly made a small fortune organizing the transportation of Chinese people who had died in the United States in airtight zinc coffins to their homeland.

Shortly after the outbreak of World War I , Jahnke was recruited as an agent by the German consul general Franz Bopp in San Francisco . On behalf of the German Admiralty , as commissioner for the western half of the USA, he carried out various espionage and sabotage actions on the territory of the United States during the war, which were intended to impair the ability of the United States to carry out the Entente powers from its position as an initially neutral power To support arms and other deliveries of goods. He organized sabotage attacks on British merchant and transport ships, relying in particular on Americans of Irish descent who, because of their efforts to accelerate Irish independence from the United Kingdom , had a particular interest in undermining the British war effort. Following the same line, he tried to stir up labor unrest in war-relevant industrial plants and among dock workers. The latter was particularly successful with the port workers' strike of 1916. Particular attention was paid to an explosives attack organized by Jahnke on the ammunition depot at the Mare Islany Shipyard in San Francisco in March 1917. It was later linked to the explosion in the Black Tom Island depot .

After the United States entered the war on April 6, 1917, Jahnke moved to Mexico City . According to later hearings in the American Senate , Jahnke is said to have forged the plan in Mexico to initiate a war entry by Mexico against the United States: A Mexican army of 45,000 men financed by the German Reich was to deploy against the United States and in this way the social incite disadvantaged black sections of the population to civil war. His involvement in the sinking of the USS San Diego had also been speculated.

After the war ended, Jahnke returned to Germany in 1919. In the following years he was active in the Black Reichswehr , for which he worked as a consultant and political boss. Among other things, he organized acts of sabotage in the Ruhr area during the French occupation . He turned down the offer of the Kapp putschists to become Minister of the Interior. In 1921 and 1923, Jahnke, as a representative of the Black Reichswehr, took part in conferences at Ludendorff in Munich, in which Adolf Hitler also took part, and in 1923 Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter , Walter Buchrucker and Walther Stennes . During the Weimar Republic he was involved in the conspiratorial cooperation of the German and Soviet military and was classified by the British secret service as a spy of the Soviet military defense. From 1924 to 1930 he headed the unofficial political-diplomatic service in the Foreign Office .

From 1929 he built an intelligence service under SA-Obergruppenführer Franz Pfeffer von Salomon . In the 1930s Jahnke ran a private news office named after him (Jahnke Büro), which was added to Rudolf Hess's staff in the second half of the decade . Jahnke became a consultant for secret service issues as a staff director. The reports from the office were submitted to the Reich Ministry of War , Hitler, Hess, Lutze and the Gestapo . Jahnke had been on von Hess's staff since 1935. In February 1938, the Foreign Office ended its collaboration with Jahnke, who was meanwhile also working for Wilhelm Canaris . Jahnke's closest colleague, Carl Marcus, was an informant for the British secret service, possibly even an agent.

Shortly before the start of the Second World War , at the end of August 1939, British authorities tried to conduct explorations through Jahnke with the Nazi regime regarding the feared attack on Poland. During the attack on Poland , he headed a defense command of the Brandenburgers and retired from the Wehrmacht in 1940 . On April 26, 1940, the office was closed at Hitler's instigation because the SS thought he was a British spy. As a result of the flight from Hess to Scotland, Jahnke's files were confiscated by the Gestapo and he was prohibited from further intelligence activities. SS news chief Walter Schellenberg stated in his memoir that Jahnke served as his advisor in the following years. As part of this activity, he temporarily took up residence in Switzerland . Among other things, Jahnke tried in the spring of 1942 to pass on a Japanese offer of mediation regarding a compromise peace between the German Reich and the Soviet Union. He also established contact between Richard Sorge , who is active in Tokyo , and the Soviet secret service.

After returning to Germany in 1943 he retired to Pomerania to his manor in Lübrassen in Alt Kopreiben near Bärwalde . In November 1944 he sent a former employee to the British lines to conduct peace explorations. In January 1945 he met Schellenberg in Berlin. According to Schellenberg Jahnke was in the final stages of the war, a spy ring in Stalin built General Staff of the headquarters of Marshal Rokossovsky was settled.

At the end of the war, Jahnke was arrested on March 23, 1945 together with his wife Johanne-Dorotheja by the Soviet secret service Smersch , taken to Moscow and interrogated about his secret service activities. In May 1945 he and his wife were sentenced to death by a Soviet military tribunal for espionage for Great Britain and executed .

Visually, Jahnke was described as: A heavy-set, thick-skulled Protestant from Pomerania, with a huge, round, bony face, looking impassively at the world with droopy eyes. But under his gruff stolid exterior throved the spirit of grand adventure (A heavy dickschädliger Protestant from Pomerania, with a large, round, bony face, impassive the world looking with drooping eyes. But under his gruff an indifferent exterior of the spirit thrived the great adventure ).

literature

• Reinhard R. Doerries: Tracing Kurt Jahnke: Aspects of the Study of German Intelligence. In: George O. Kent (Ed.): Historians and Archivists. (Fairfax, VA, 1991), 27-44.
• Glenn P Hastedt: Spies, Wiretaps, and Secret Operations: An Encyclopedia of Espionage , 2010, pp. 412f.
• Klaus-Dieter Müller, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Mike Schmeitzner, Andreas Weigelt: Death sentences of Soviet military tribunals against Germans (1944–1947). A historical-biographical study . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-525-36968-5 , short biographies on the accompanying CD, there pp. 292–294.

Individual evidence

1. ^ George J. Albert: California Naval History - The USS San Diego and the California Naval Militia. California Military Department - The California State Military Museum. Retrieved September 2, 2019 . 
2. ↑ Mark Briggs: Why She Sank. In: Endeavors. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , January 1, 1999, accessed September 2, 2019 . 
3. ↑ For the "mysterious" Jahnke see Susanne Meinl : National Socialists against Hitler. The national revolutionary opposition around Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz . Siedler, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-88680-613-8 , p. 262 f.