Operation Neptune (espionage)
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The Operation Neptune (Czech: Akce Neptune ) was an action of the Czechoslovak and Soviet intelligence in 1964, were hiding in the Nazi documents, and then "discovered" publicity.
aims
The Czechoslovak secret service StB and the Soviet KGB were in possession of documents from the time of National Socialism . In 1964 they saw the time had come to make these documents accessible to the world public in a spectacular way. They pursued three goals: Since the documents showed that the intelligence services of the FRG are still on a network of agentssupport that had already worked for the National Socialists, West German politicians were to be discredited and the reputation of the FRG in Western Europe damaged. To this end, German agents working in Czechoslovakia should be frightened of being exposed. And finally, the upcoming statute of limitations for Nazi crimes, which should have occurred in Germany from May 8, 1965, was to be torpedoed. This also succeeded, the statute of limitations for murder was first extended, then completely lifted.
The operation
The documents were packed in four metal boxes that were prepared as if they had traces of corrosion from 20 years of storage under water. Since not all of the documents had yet arrived from Moscow , some blank slips of paper were also packed. The boxes were sunk on June 21, 1964 in Černé jezero (German: Black Lake ), near the Czechoslovakian-German border. A group of divers who were on site a few days later for the production of the television program Zvědavá kamera (German: Curious Camera ) recovered the boxes after they had been shown to them by Ladislav Bittman . In fact, Bittman was deputy head of the StB's disinformation department and head of the intelligence operation. As it was thought that files sunk by the National Socialists had been found, the tax office was called to bring the boxes unopened to Prague . In the meantime, the divers found explosives and parts of an airplane from the Second World War in the lake. On July 16, 1964, the Czechoslovak Interior Minister declared that the boxes contained lists of Gestapo collaborators. The "discovery" made headlines around the world.
On September 15, 1964, a press conference was held with representatives from numerous Italian , German and Austrian newspapers. The documents, which have since arrived in full from Moscow, show connections between functionaries of various organizations and even politicians in the West German Bundestag with the Gestapo and the Waffen SS during the Second World War. As a result, some people quietly withdrew from political life, and there are also said to have been suicides. The documents helped trigger a debate on the statute of limitations in the Bundestag. Relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Italy also suffered as the names of people who had worked against Italy during the war became known.
On November 25, 1964, some of the documents in the Academy of Sciences in Prague were handed over by the CSSR historian Antonín Šnejdárek to the Austrian historians Ludwig Jedlicka (as a representative of the Vienna Contemporary History Institute ) and Herbert Steiner (as a representative of the DÖW ). It was the report of the historical commission of the Reichsführer SS on the July coup 1934 and activity reports of the 1st and 2nd SS infantry brigade and other SS units behind the Eastern Front. On March 4, 1965, at an event at the University of Vienna , Šnejdárek handed over further documents to Jedlicka and Steiner, who ensured that these bundles of documents were published. By the way, in 1967 at the latest, Jedlicka took the view that the SS files did not come from the boxes in the lake, but from a secret archive of the Reichsführer SS that had remained in Czechoslovakia. Regardless of these doubts, there continued to be regular friendly correspondence and invitations between Czechoslovak and Austrian historians.
The SS files documented the heavy Nazi burden of the FPÖ politician Friedrich Peter , which was made public by Simon Wiesenthal in 1975 and led to the Kreisky-Peter-Wiesenthal affair .
Becoming aware of the production
The secret service staging of the find was revealed by Ladislav Bittman, who fled to the USA in 1968 and wrote a book (The Deception Game) about his secret service activities in 1972 .
literature
Wolfgang Neugebauer : Ludwig Jedlicka, Herbert Steiner and resistance research. Aspects of the early history of the Institute for Contemporary History and the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance. In: Bertrand Perz , Ina Markova (Eds.): 50 Years Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna 1966–2016. new academic press, Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3-7003-1946-7 , pp. 77-79.
supporting documents
- ↑ a b Dita Asiedu: Details of Czechoslovakia's biggest disinformation operation published on web. In: radio.cz . June 8, 2007, accessed May 13, 2019 .
- ↑ a b c Elizabeth Pond : DISINFORMATION. Truth is the best defense. CASE STUDY: WEST GERMANY. A Czech ploy that worked - but only briefly . In: The Christian Science Monitor . March 1, 1985 (English, article online at csmonitor.com).
- ↑ a b c Claus Wietek: Operation Neptune . In: Straubinger Tagblatt . September 3, 2013 ( article online at waldberge.de).