Walter Nicolai (officer)

The title of this article is ambiguous. For the classical philologist see Walter Nicolai (classical philologist) .

Walter Nicolai, 1914

Walter Nicolai (born August 1, 1873 in Braunschweig , † May 4, 1947 in Moscow ) was a German general staff officer and head of the German military intelligence service III b during the First World War .

Life

Walter Nicolai was born in Braunschweig as the son of a Prussian captain and a farmer's daughter. From 1884 he attended the Stephaneum high school in Halberstadt and in 1893 joined the cadet corps as an officer candidate. Here his military career began in the 2nd Kurhessian Infantry Regiment No. 82 . From 1901 to 1904 he studied at the War Academy in Berlin . Shortly before completing his general staff training, he was assigned to learn Russian as well, as he was scheduled for an assignment to investigate the military experience of the Russo-Japanese war, which had led to a completely new military approach from 1904 to 1905. When that failed, he was deployed as a company commander in the 3rd Thuringian Infantry Regiment No. 71 in Erfurt . He now spoke fluent Russian , as well as English, French and Japanese. Nicolai was described as an ultra-conservative, loyal to the emperor, apolitical, nonetheless an officer representing the politicized officer corps of the empire .

When he was promoted to captain in spring 1906 , it was already clear that his next assignment would be in East Prussia. Since he was planned for a career in the military secret service of the General Staff, he undertook a targeted study trip through Russia before taking up his service in Königsberg in 1905 in order to familiarize himself with the regional conditions and the attitudes of the Russian people. After his return, he took on a position as intelligence officer (NO) in the area of ​​the I. Army Corps, which was based there . The aim in this position was to investigate Russian espionage along the East Prussian border and to create a suitable structure on site. This corresponded to the simultaneous procedure at several locations of the Prussian Army. For example, Nicolai expanded the Königsberg news station into a regional coordination staff for news gathering and counter-espionage against Russia. In the meantime, the General Staff in Berlin realized that more had to be done to counter the ever stronger action of the French and Russian intelligence services. In 1913, at the instigation of Erich Ludendorff, the annual budget for military defense work was increased from 300,000 to 450,000 marks.

In 1912 Nicolai returned to Berlin. Shortly before, he had completed a study trip to France to familiarize himself with the real conditions on site. In March 1913 he was appointed head of Section III B in the General Staff. He replaced the previous head of the section Wilhelm Heye (1869-1947), who was scheduled to start a regular transfer as battalion commander for two years. Originally, Nicolai was only to be used for these two years. But events turned out differently. The areas of responsibility of protecting German military areas and the people working here from enemy spying, obtaining military information from potential enemies of Germany, were primarily directed against France and Russia at that time. It was not until shortly before the outbreak of the First World War that England and at the time of their entry into the war also Italy and later the USA were added as target countries. In the years before 1914 alone, there was an increase of over 250% in the number of people arrested for espionage and the perpetrators convicted by German courts. Of these, 74 were people who had acted on behalf of France and 35 people who had acted on behalf of Russia in this field.

First World War

Nicolai headed the German secret service from the spring of 1913 to 1918. His department III B was in the house of the Great General Staff in Berlin Königsplatz 6, on the 3rd floor and was only accessible to very selected people. Only a small staff worked here until the beginning of 1915, which included two officers as employees and a small number of civilian employees. With the beginning of the war, Nicolai himself moved into the field with the Supreme Army Command in the direction of the western front . Along the German borders, intelligence offices in the respective army corps had already been manned with specially trained officers who were in close cooperation with the head of Dept. III B. In addition, Nicolai was also responsible for working with the Admiralty's counter-intelligence officers. Because there was no central intelligence service in Germany at that time and the tasks of Dept. III B were aimed exclusively at the military sector. In addition to the intelligence-gathering of information, the surveillance of the military mail and radio traffic and the encryption system were located here. With increasing air traffic, the III B also landed the results of military enemy reconnaissance collected from the airship or aircraft for analysis in Berlin. There had been no specific preparation for the conditions that would occur on August 1, 1914 when the war broke out, and so it took almost 1 ½ years for Dept. III b, under the leadership of Nicolai, to deal with the new situations in the war had set. He directed the military intelligence service "Section III b" intensively towards the war. Nicolai wrote, among other things: “Before every new acquisition, delivery, etc. ask the NO [Note: NO = intelligence officer]: What use does it bring for the war ? ” Relatively quickly, posts for targeted intelligence interrogation of the prisoners of war were set up in the individual army corps and the sighting and evaluation of the advancing troops in the hands of fallen military-geographical documents have been organized. But in the first months of the war, the Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke (1848–1916) had also ordered that III B had to take over the war press service to form public opinion under war conditions among its own population. This made it more difficult for the military intelligence service to concentrate on its own tasks.

In the first months of the war, Section III B was able to record as a success that it had managed to liquidate most of the intelligence bases of Russia and France in the cities of Brest-Litovsk, Cracow, Warsaw and Vilnius with the advance of German troops into Polish and Russian territory . From the beginning of 1915, the war press office, which Nicolai had helped to set up, was also able to work and now acted as the chief censorship office for official military reporting. From then on, only reports on military events approved by officers and officials of Section III B were allowed to be published. In Germany, a network of informants has now been built up in companies, authorities and private circles. and led by Dept. III B. In this year alone, 35 people who had worked with the French secret service were caught and tried. When Erich Ludendorff became First Quartermaster General at the end of August 1916 , the military intelligence work was further strengthened. Nicolai saw himself now as a relentless whip in a military will to win, watchdog and initiator of patriotic self-discipline. According to an order of the Supreme Army Command of May 8, 1917, Nicolai created a subordinate propaganda agency that was to operate in the rear of the enemy and organized "patriotic" lessons for the troops of the field army. His officers also took part in promoting war bonds . The assertion that can be found in the older literature that Nicolai was behind the founding of the chauvinist-reactionary Fatherland Party is unfounded. She overestimated Nicolai's influence, which of course coincided with the “Siegfrieden” propaganda of the Fatherland Party. Due to the war press office under his leadership, however, he was responsible for the propaganda against moderate and above all left-wing politicians. In this way he created the espionage hysteria at home as well as a nationalistic “popular outrage” when the Reichstag dared to discuss a “victoryless peace solution”. In the irregular press conferences he demanded the hardest propagandistic support of the German war effort from journalists.

When the USA entered the war in early 1917, the work requirements of Section III B tightened again. In anticipation of the US armed forces landing, V-men were deployed in all western ports and partly on the subsequent transport routes to the country to observe the movement of troops towards the front. The evaluation of the travel activities of foreigners in the area of ​​the front lines was also intensified and a position for microphotography was set up in the area of ​​Dept. III B. Above all, the important documents obtained from spies should be documented more securely and transmitted to headquarters, and captured enemy documents should be available more quickly for further analysis. In addition, Walter Nicolai and his small workforce quickly ensured the security of the conquered territories, especially in Poland and Russia, and supported the establishment of a war intelligence service in the neutral countries along the front line. This took place above all in the area of ​​Serbia and Bulgaria, where Nicolai himself became active on the fringes of political discussions with the respective government circles on his specific counter-espionage issues. From September 1917, due to the increasingly difficult war situation, the counter-propaganda in the area close to the front was intensified to influence the enemy troops and the population in the larger cities of the enemy. Activities focused primarily on the cities of Paris and St. Petersburg. However, since Nicolai's work in Dept. III b referred exclusively to the field of military intelligence gathering and counter-espionage and there was no central office for general intelligence work in Germany at that time, further coordinating activities were necessary. For example, with the “intelligence collection agencies” working in the ministries for war economics to protect the armaments industry and the agency working in the Foreign Office that was responsible for obtaining political news.

post war period

Immediately after the signing of the armistice agreement on November 11, 1918 in the Compiégne forest and the dissolution of the Great General Staff, Nicolai retired as a colonel after the last Chancellor Max von Baden had obtained his leave of absence. His successor Major Friedrich Gempp , who under the terms of the Versailles Treaty of June 28, 1919, had to organize the work of obtaining military intelligence in an absolutely camouflaged manner, Nicolai advised in the following years. He evaluated the experience he had gathered in the years since 1906, initially under the conditions of the very peaceful years before 1914 and then under the conditions of the World War, and above all dealt with the respective framework conditions for his work. As conclusions from these 13 years at the head of a regional office and the department for intelligence gathering and counter-espionage in the General Staff, he judged that under the conditions of such an international war as the First World War it was, as well as the development of war and communications technology that was accelerated the intelligence service's gathering of information in addition to the defense against hostile activities was urgently required. And the cardinal mistake of that time for Germany was that it did not have a central facility in this area and that this work was therefore primarily concentrated on the military area. Well, given the general conditions in the Weimar Republic, so concluded Nicolai, this work stands on the threshold of new tasks and general conditions to organize the "peaceful work" of the intelligence service. He published these findings in two books, in 1920 with the work "News Service, Press and Popular Mood in World War" and in 1923 with the publication of "Secret Powers - International Espionage and Combating them in World War II and Today".

On September 23, 1900, Nicolai married Maria Kohlhoff, the youngest daughter of his regimental commander in Saarburg. In the Weimar Republic he lived with his wife, three daughters and his blind mother on a monthly pension of 430 Reichsmark. In 1929 he moved to Nordhausen am Harz and lived here at Stolberger Straße 58.

Weimar Republic and Third Reich

In the following years Nicolai tried in vain to offer his special experience in Japan , Finland , Turkey and Lithuania to the intelligence services of these countries. In 1929 he took part in a joint publication entitled “What we don't know about the world war”. The editors were the writer Friedrich Felger (1882–1960) and the military journalist Walter Jost (1896–1945). Nicolai's contribution referred here again to the evaluation and evaluation of the secret service work during the First World War. At the end of the 1920s, he is said to have exercised an advisory function in the staff of the media entrepreneur and later Minister of Economics Alfred Hugenberg (1865-1951). To this end, he had his own office in Berlin Viktoriastrasse 31. In early 1935, Nicolai was called to the Ministry of Defense. At this time he was running an office in Berlin-Charlottenburg at Sächsische Strasse 26. At the time of the establishment of the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany on October 19, 1935, under the presidency of Walter Frank (1905–1945), he should be in the fall of the same year as head of the department “Political Leadership in World War I”. For a time he was a member of the Advisory Board of the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany . Since April 1, 1936, he had a research assignment at this institute entitled “Political Leadership in World War I”. To this end, he is said to have collected all available material from the time of the First World War and carried out “systematic surveys of the leading personalities of the time”.

Arrest and death in Moscow

After the Second World War , Nicolai was arrested on September 7, 1945 by a command of the Soviet secret service NKVD on the orders of Colonel General Ivan Alexandrowitsch Serow , the head of the NKVD in the Soviet occupation zone , in Nordhausen, transported to the Soviet Union and interrogated in Moscow . Serow became aware of Nicolai through the book Total Espionage by the German émigré Curt Riess , published in the USA in 1941 . Riess described in the book a global network of a Nazi secret service with Nicolai as a kind of " gray eminence ". During the interrogations, the Soviet intelligence officers did not believe that Nicolai had not worked in the intelligence service since 1919. When the interrogations yielded no further results, he was brought to Moscow on October 30, 1945 and wrote down his memories in a dacha in the Moscow district of Serebryannyi Bor provided by the NKVD. In January 1947 he had a heart attack due to the extraordinary exertion. Nicolai died while imprisoned on May 4, 1947 in the Moscow Butyrka Hospital . His body was cremated and buried in a mass grave in Moscow's Donskoy Cemetery .

It was not until 1979 that the relatives of the Soviet Red Cross received information that Nicolai had died in 1947. The cause and place of death were not disclosed. In 1999 the Russian military prosecutor rehabilitated Walter Nicolai.

Fonts

• News service, press and popular mood in the world war. Mittler, Berlin, 1920.
• Intelligence and education. In: Max Schwarte (Ed.): The world struggle for honor and law. German publishing houses, Stuttgart 1921.
• Secret powers. International espionage and how to combat it during the World War and today. Köhler, Leipzig 1923. Facsimile edition: Verlag für Holistic Research, Viöl / Nordfriesland 1999, ISBN 3-932878-24-8 .
• Insights into the intelligence service during the World War. In: Walter Jost, Friedrich Felger (ed.): What we don't know about the world war. Andermann, Berlin / Leipzig 1929, edition by H. Fikentscher Verlag, 1936 (unchanged reprint of the subscription work from 1929) pp. 101–117.

literature

• Walter Nicolai: Secret Service and Propaganda in the First World War - the records of Colonel Walter Nicolai 1914 to 1918 . Ed .: Michael Epkenhans, Gerhard P. Groß, Markus Pöhlmann , Christian Stachelbeck. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-11-060501-3 .
• Heinz Höhne : Canaris - Patriot in Twilight. Bertelsmann, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-570-01608-0 .
• Jürgen W. Schmidt: Against Russia and France: The German military secret service 1890-1914. 3. Edition. Ludwigsfelder Verlags-Haus, Ludwigsfelde 2009, ISBN 978-3-933022-44-8 .
• Klaus-Walter Frey: Colonel Walter Nicolai, Chief of the German Military Intelligence Service IIIb in the General Staff (1913-1918). Myth and Reality - Biographical Contributions. In: Jürgen W. Schmidt (Ed.): Secret services, military and politics in Germany. 2nd edition Ludwigsfelde 2009, pp. 135–198
• Markus Pöhlmann : German Intelligence at War, 1914-1918. In: Journal of Intelligence History. 5, 2005, pp. 33-62.
• Kenneth J. Campbell: Colonel Walter Nicolai: A Mysterious but Effective Spy. In: American Intelligence Journal 27.1, 2009, pp. 83-89.
• Stadtarchiv Nordhausen, Hans-Jürgen Grönke (Ed.): Nordhausen personalities from eleven centuries. Geiger, Horb am Neckar 2009, ISBN 978-3-86595-336-0 , pp. 223-224.
• Christian Stachelbeck: "Dark Man" or Bureaucrat in Uniform? Walter Nicolai and the military intelligence service in the First World War. In: Military History. Historical Education Journal. Edited by the ZMSBw. Issue 1, 2017 ISSN  0940-4163 , pp. 10-13.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Heinz Höhne: Canaris - Patriot in the twilight. P. 149.
2. ^ Walter Nicolai: Geheime Mächte, Verlag KFKöhler, Leipzig 1923, p. 34f.
3. ↑ Heinz Höhne: Canaris - Patriot in the twilight. P. 150.
4. ↑ Heinz Höhne: Canaris - Patriot in the twilight. P. 150f.
5. ^ Stadtarchiv Nordhausen (ed.): Nordhausen personalities from eleven centuries. Geiger, Horb am Neckar 2009, p. 223.
6. ↑ Walter Nicolai in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
7. ^ Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 433.
8. ^ Anne Christine Nagel (Ed.): The Philipps University of Marburg in National Socialism. Documents related to their history. Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 2000, p. 398.
9. ^ Stadtarchiv Nordhausen (ed.): Nordhausen personalities from eleven centuries. Geiger, Horb am Neckar 2009, p. 224.
10. ↑ Jürgen Schmidt: Espionage: Mata Hari's unsuccessful boss , Tagesspiegel, October 7, 2001

Remarks

1. ↑ the establishment of intelligence work within the tsarist army in Russia had been carried out before 1914 by the instruction of French specialists
2. ↑ published by ES Mittler & Sohn, Berlin 1920.
3. ↑ published by Verlag KF Köhler, Leipzig 1923
4. ↑ The book was published in different editions in the following years 1930, 1934, 1936 and 1938, most recently in 1938 as a reprint by H. Fikentscher Verlag Leipzig.

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Nicolai in the catalog of the German National Library