Office of Strategic Services

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
United States 48United States Office of Strategic Services
- OSS -
Sleeve badge of the OSS

Sleeve badge of the OSS, model for the later badge of SOCOM
Position of the authority Military intelligence
Supervisory authority (s) United States Department of War
Consist from June 13, 1942 to September 20, 1945
Authority management Major General William Joseph Donovan
Employee 13,000 (estimate)

The Office of Strategic Services ( OSS ; German: Office for Strategic Services ) was an intelligence service of the United States Department of War from 1942 to 1945 .

assignment

The tasks of the OSS included the operational procurement of information, disinformation , psychological warfare , partisan support, asymmetrical warfare , sabotage and counter-espionage .

organization

The OSS was directly subordinate to and assisted the United Chiefs of Staff of the War Department . It was in direct competition with the Army's G-2 (Army Intelligence Service) . Although responsible for the reconnaissance abroad, there were regions in which the OSS was not active, e.g. B. Latin America , where the FBI was responsible for overseas espionage. At the same time, the activities of the military intelligence service G-2 and the naval intelligence service were monitored with suspicion and the responsible authorities tried jealously to defend their areas of responsibility, as there were a number of overlaps and parallel tasks.

Recruitment and training

The head of the OSS , Major General Donovan was initially a member of the Rooms have been a monthly conspiratorial meeting participants Geheimloge leading US industrialist who discreetly Business Information exchanged from abroad. The sons of his business friends, who hoped for fame from the OSS, were recruited preferentially.

Known employees

The philosopher Herbert Marcuse worked for the OSS. Other well-known personalities were the Marxist economist Paul Sweezy , the currency expert Charles P. Kindleberger , the historian and economist Jürgen Kuczynski , the historian Barrington Moore Jr. , the spy Fred Mayer , the chemist Hans Wienberg , the writer Carl Zuckmayer and the German-American Political scientist Franz Neumann .

see also

Category: Person (Office of Strategic Services)

equipment

Since one of the main fields of activity was the gathering of secret intelligence and partisan support, Major General Donovan experimented mainly with new technical developments in the field of camouflaged weapons (stabbing and firearms as well as silencers) and equipment, the actual function of which should not be immediately recognizable and which so the agents in a Control behind enemy lines would not betray. Intelligence communication and information transfer techniques (secret ink etc.) were also used and continuously developed.

Passengers arriving from Europe are not only asked about their circumstances, the OSS also buys everyday objects of European origin from them to used clothes that could be of value for underground work.

history

founding

The initially civilian Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on July 11, 1941 , was transformed into the Office of Strategic Services on June 13, 1942 . It was an operational intelligence service that was directly subordinate to and assisted the United Chiefs of Staff in the War Department. All departments already existed in the COI. The British foreign intelligence service MI6 was the inspiration behind the founding of the OSS .

The sole head of the OSS was the reactivated war veteran and Wall Street attorney "Wild Bill" Donovan (1883-1959), a friend of the President who had already headed the forerunner of the agency as Colonel and was promoted to Major General at the end of 1944 . Many plans turned out to be impractical and one had to pay a heavy toll in blood (including local resistance) to gain the experience necessary to optimally conduct a fight behind enemy lines.

Calls

Partisan support operations

The pure reconnaissance work was less successful, since the main burden of information acquisition was carried by the aerial reconnaissance of the US Army Air Force (through aerial photo analysis). In contrast, the OSS achieved quite good results in training, equipping and commanding local partisan groups behind enemy lines and conducted operations in Italy , Greece , Yugoslavia , Norway and France .

Preparations for D-Day

Sun jumped in the months before the Allied landings in Normandy ( Operation Overlord ) some three-man teams, called Jedburgh teams (named after its Scottish Training site Jedburgh ), in German-occupied France from to make contact with the Resistance take and to support them in partisan warfare and in preparation for the invasion. The next larger unit was the Operational Group ( OG ) with 34 men, which could also be split into two 17-man teams if necessary. The OSS-OGs were the direct precursors of the Special Forces of the Green Berets Detachments .

Pacific

General William J. Donovan during a force inspection in Bethesda , Maryland , 1945

The OSS was despite the rejection by General Douglas MacArthur , the supreme commander of the Pacific theater of war , the work of the G-2 preferred, but also in the Southeast Asian and Pacific area actively in which it Mao Zedong's Red Army supported the guerrilla struggle.

Intelligence operations

The most profitable OSS agent was Allen Dulles , who maintained an almost undisguised contact point for defectors in neutral Bern , where u. a. Fritz Kolbe presented himself and Karl Wolff's mediator negotiated the surrender of the German armed forces in Italy. Psychological warfare operations with leaflet and radio campaigns aimed at demoralizing the enemy were more successful. The best- known OSS partner was Marlene Dietrich , who next to the front theater for the Allied troops called on the Germans to surrender over the radio.

From 1943 the OSS was in contact with the Austrian resistance group around chaplain Heinrich Maier . As a result, the exact drawings of the V-2 rocket and the Tiger tank, but also sketches of the location of weapons manufacturing facilities, were sent to Allied General Staffs in order to enable Allied bombers to perform precise air strikes. The group was gradually evicted by the German authorities for a double agent who worked for both the OSS and the Gestapo , and most of the members were executed after the People's Court.

OSS employees included a. also the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse , temporarily head of the European section of the service, and the writer Klaus Mann . A few months after the Allied landing in Sicily , which the OSS had prepared under the code name Operation Husky together with the Naval Intelligence Service (ONI) , he wrote leaflets for the 5th US Army advancing north to drop behind the German lines and texts for trench loudspeakers . During the Italian campaign, he also interrogated German prisoners of war so that the mood in the troops could be analyzed more closely.

In 1944 the London office of the OSS made contact with the Free German Movement in Great Britain in order to recruit suitable candidates from its ranks. The contact was made through Jürgen Kuczynski , the then head of the Free German Movement, and Erich Henschke from the management of the KPD emigrant organization for the United Kingdom. The list of candidates was coordinated with the GRU by the German emigrants . The seven selected candidates were supposed to parachute behind the German lines. Three of the agents, Anton Ruh , Paul Lindner and Kurt Gruber , were posthumously awarded the Silver Star by the US government in 2006 . Historian Brian Nelson Macpherson emphasized in his dissertation: "No other source in the intelligence service was so helpful in the reliable perception of details during the last months of the war." This mission was also known as Operation Hammer . In 1944, the OSS also prepared Operation Iron Cross , which was not used .

With Operation Sunrise , the OSS established an American collaboration with people from what would later become the Federal Intelligence Service . Major General Reinhard Gehlen headed the Foreign Army East espionage department in the Army General Staff from 1942 to 1945 . Immediately after the war, Gehlen and his entire organization (which mainly consisted of SS , SD and Abwehr people ) were placed in the service of the American secret service. Gehlen was commissioned to set up a German foreign intelligence service, which was to be directed primarily against the Soviet Union . The Gehlen organization was later taken over by the CIA .

Department X-2 was responsible for counter-espionage during the war .

Hitler's personality profile

Donovan commissioned the Harvard psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer to create a profile of Adolf Hitler's personality. Langer interviewed people who had come to the United States from the German Reich, for example Eduard Bloch , Klara Hitler's doctor , Ernst Hanfstaengl , the former National Socialist press chief, and William Patrick Hitler . The report from 1943 describes, among other things, "Hitler's likely behavior in the future":

"1. Hitler could die of natural causes. That is only a distant possibility, because as far as we know he is in very good health, except for his stomach ailments, which are probably psychosomatic.
2. Hitler could seek asylum in a neutral country. This is extremely unlikely in view of his deep concern for his immortality. Nothing would destroy the myth more effectively than a leader who runs away at the critical moment.
3. Hitler could be killed in a battle. It is a real possibility. If he is convinced that he cannot win, he could lead his troops into battle and stylize himself as a fearless and fanatical leader. That would be the least desirable from our point of view, because his death would serve as an example for his followers to fight to the bitter end with fanatical, death-despising determination as well.
4. Hitler could be murdered. Although Hitler is extremely well protected, there is a possibility that someone could murder him. Hitler fears this possibility [...] It is also undesirable from our point of view, because it would make a martyr out of him and strengthen the legend.
5. Hitler could get sick. Hitler has many characteristics that border on schizophrenia. It is possible that his psyche will collapse when faced with defeat. From our point of view, that might be desirable, because it would do a lot to undermine the Hitler legend in the minds of the German people.
6. The German military could revolt and disempower him. In view of the unique position that Hitler has in the consciousness of the German people, that seems unlikely ... In the face of defeat, however, the German military could decide that it would be wiser to dethrone Hitler and use a puppet government for peace negotiations. That would probably cause great internal disputes in Germany.
7. Hitler could fall into our hands. That is the most unlikely variant of all.
8. Hitler could commit suicide. That is the most plausible result. He threatened to kill himself several times; based on what we know about his psyche, this is the most likely possibility ...
Whatever happens, we can be relatively certain that Hitler will become more and more neurotic the more defeats Germany has to put up with. Any defeat will shake his confidence and limit his ability to prove his own greatness. As a consequence, he will be more and more vulnerable to attacks from the ranks of his allies and his tantrums will increase. He will probably try to compensate for his vulnerability with increasing cruelty and ruthlessness. His public appearances are becoming rarer because he is unable to endure a critical audience ...
In any case, his mental state will continue to deteriorate. He will fight as long as he can, with every conceivable weapon or technique that seems suitable to stop the impending doom. The course he is following is almost certainly one that will pave his way to immortality and at the same time make the world go up in flames. "

- Walter C. Langer, 1943.

resolution

The OSS , suspected from the start by President Harry S. Truman , was dissolved on September 20, 1945 after the Second World War . The direct successor organization to the OSS was the SSU ( Strategic Services Unit ); Their headquarters in Germany was in Wiesbaden , from where the first successful attempts were made to convert German NKVD agents into double spies.

Some veterans installed an OSS myth through a variety of related adventure novels, comics, and feature films. The takeover of the former OSS agents in the Central Intelligence Agency, founded in 1947, or the American Committee for a United Europe was by no means automatic: many refused and looked for other fields of activity. For some, former membership in the OSS turned out to be a springboard for economic careers - after the end of the war, others looked back rather critically on the historical role of the OSS .

The OSS files were partially released in the 1970s and 1980s. In August 2008, the US National Archives released 35,000 additional personnel files and clandestine operations documents.

Media reception

literature

Web links

Commons : Office of Strategic Services  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lea Haller: Spione Unter Uns , NZZ Geschichte, number 18, October 2018, page 35
  2. ↑ Poster of the CIA Museum on the occasion of the 60th anniversary (PDF; 465 kB) - The illustration shows Donovan in the uniform of a US Brigadier General ( Major General ).
  3. ↑ See Hansjakob Stehle "The spies from the rectory" in Die Zeit from January 5, 1996.
  4. ↑ Peter Broucek: The Austrian Identity in the Resistance 1938-1945. In: Military resistance: studies on the Austrian state sentiment and Nazi defense. Böhlau Verlag , 2008, p. 163 , accessed on August 3, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Andrea Hurton, Hans Schafranek: In the network of traitors. In: derStandard.at . June 4, 2010. Retrieved August 3, 2017 .
  6. ↑ Uwe Naumann: Klaus Mann. RoRoRo, Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-499-50332-8 , p. 114 ff.
  7. ↑ The Legacy of US Officer Gould . On: drafd.de , the homepage of the Association of Germans in the Resistance, in the armed forces of the anti-Hitler coalition and the “Free Germany” movement. V.
  8. ^ Junge Welt , June 13, 2006. See False Friends . In: Der Spiegel . No. 45 , 2004 ( online - 30 October 2004 ).
  9. ↑ Memory of a "German Miner"
  10. ↑ Reproduced from nizkor.org : A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler. His Life and Legend ( Memento of August 28, 2005 in the Internet Archive ).
  11. ↑ Walter C. Langer : "OSS Secret Report on Adolf Hitler". Washington DC 1943, Supplement p. 1. Quoted from: Wolfgang Zdral: Die Hitlers. The Führer’s unknown family. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-593-37457-4 , pp. 192–194.
  12. ↑ see R. Cutler: Counterspy. Memoirs of a Counterintelligence Officer in World War II and the Cold War , pp. 71ff
  13. ^ Max Corvo: OSS in Italy 1942-1945: A Personal Memoir of the Fight for Freedom: 1943-1945. Enigma Books, New York 2005, ISBN 1-929631-45-6
  14. ^ "The Who's Who of Famous US Spies" ( Memento from August 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), Süddeutsche Zeitung , August 14, 2008.