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Volume 5, Number 2
Winter 2005
-- FULL TEXT AND NOTES -MARKUS PHLMANN
Towards a New History of German Military
Intelligence
in the Era of the Great War: Approaches and Sources
The history of German military intelligence (MILINT)
during the First World War has yet to be written in
full. Such a direct claim may seem at first glance to be
somewhat overstated; it is nonetheless fully justified.
Not least of all when one compares the few serious,
scholarly studies to the piles of popular literature.
These popular works, which began to appear almost
immediately after the war itself, have examined
intelligence operations and the key individuals with
either strong apologetic tendencies or the desire to
demonize, depending on each respective author s
political or military viewpoint. The bizarre political
pulp fiction of a William Le Queux, who wrote in the
hysterical pre-1914 atmosphere about the infiltration
of Great Britain by sinister legions of Teutonic spies,
has itself become a topic of cultural history. The books
by Curt Riess, a refugee from Nazi Germany, or the
French writer Jean Bardanne on the head of German
MILINT of 1914-18, Colonel Walter Nicolai, are as
breath-taking as they are erroneous in their claims.1

Likewise, there are the autobiographical writings of

former intelligence officers that make us wonder how
the Reich could ever have lost the war given the
splendid operations of those heroic Dark Invaders .2
In short, our knowledge of German military
intelligence in the era of the Great War is not only
extremely limited, but it is also chronically distorted.
The distortion which one encounters in the available
literature is, of course, a general and well-known
problem in intelligence history in its broadest sense.
However, in the case of the German Empire, a
specific, national bias, compounded by the fact that in
1918 Germany found itself on the losing side, have
added further to the historian s difficulties. It has
often been the case following wars in the twentieth
century that even the most taciturn intelligence
services have tended to reveal some of the reasons for
their supposed share in the victory (not least of all
because it aids the service s own institutional
standing); but for the defeated the reverse is true, as
any form of talkativeness is unlikely to assist in
preserving the service for future wars. This
phenomenon can be seen most clearly in the wake of
the peace treaty of Versailles 1919.
However, the lack of serious academic research cannot
only be attributed to the specific circumstances
following the First World War. In Germany at any
rate, the fact that the history of military intelligence is
first of all military history has not helped matters,
mainly because military history has suffered from a
severe image problem at German universities since
1945. Fortunately, this situation has begun to change
over the last two decades, and it can be expected that
the remarkably active and methodically innovative
new military history in Germany will soon begin to
produce some interesting results with regard to the
history of military intelligence.3 A further reason for
the neglect of German intelligence in the First World
War is that intelligence history has long focused on the
Second World War. Wherever the war of 1914-18 has
been examined, there has been a tendency to treat

events or tactics as mere antecedents of the conflict of

1939-45, or as one part of a much wider picture.4 A
further obstacle has been, and indeed still is, the
availability of the archival sources. They have not been
simply inaccessible due to the policies of nondisclosure of large bureaucracies, but they have also
fallen a victim to physical destruction, first during the
days of the German revolution in November 1918,
later as result of one RAF-air-raid on Potsdam in
March 1945 which destroyed the bulk of the files held
at the German army archives.5
Given all these reasons why research on German
military intelligence in the First World War has not
enjoyed the attention it deserves, there would seem
therefore to be little requirement to justify any further
the decision to devote a special issue of the Journal of
Intelligence History to the subject. Moreover, claims
about the lack of primary sources should always
set alarm-bells ringing. They often mean simply that
historians have not mastered those disparate sources
which are available, or that they have been asking the
wrong questions in relation to the material which is
accessible. This special issue will try to demonstrate
that by a judicious use of sources from different
places, and by posing new questions, new light can be
thrown on many aspects of the history of German
military intelligence.
Is though the situation in relation to archive material
really not as dark as it is sometimes portrayed? What
are the most important sources? In the first instance,
there is a voluminous but as yet unpublished
official history, the "Gempp-report". This series was
written between 1928 and 1944 by a former highranking intelligence officer, Major-General (ret.)
Friedrich Gempp (1873-1945). 14 volumes can be
consulted at the German Federal Archives in Freiburg,
and I had the pleasure of stumbling across a further
volume covering the operations in 1918 in the Moscow
Centre for the Collection and Preservation of
Historical Documents archive in 1997.6 This multivolume study offers an informative insight into the
organisation and the operations of the General Staff s

intelligence department IIIb. The fact that the Gemppreport was planned as a classified after-action report
and as a lessons-learned study, guarantees a number of
critical assessments. On the other hand, it would be
naive not to acknowledge that the report is also a
monument erected by IIIb for IIIb, that it argues
apologetically, and that the historian has to be aware of
all the methodical difficulties posed by an official
history. It has not been possible to establish whether or
not an equivalent study on naval intelligence was
written.7
A second important source is represented by the papers
of the former head of IIIb, Walter Nicolai, papers
which also came to Moscow in 1945 as war booty.8
Accessible since the early 1990s, these papers have not
been seriously examined since they first became
available. They consist essentially of a multi-volumecompilation of excerpts from Nicolai s war diaries,
and his war letters to his wife, interspersed with later,
interpretative remarks. Despite the methodological
problems of such a compilation, the papers provide an
interesting insight into the work of IIIb and the
Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL, the Supreme Army
Command), and they complement and in fact correct
Nicolai s publications in many significant details.9
Furthermore, the records of naval intelligence have
survived without serious losses and are also available
at the Bundesarchiv-Militrarchiv in Freiburg.
Other groups of records owe their survival to the
military constitution of the German Empire, as it
provided the armed forced of the Kingdoms of
Bavaria, Saxony, and Wuerttemberg, plus the Grand
Duchy of Baden, with the right to maintain their own
military archives. Where these records have survived,
whether in archives in Munich, Dresden, Stuttgart, or
Karlsruhe, they include useful and often detailed
information on topics such as tactical MILINT, the
interrogation of prisoners of war, air reconnaissance,
propaganda, technical and counter-intelligence.10 The
records of the civilian institutions, especially the law
enforcement agencies, the Ministry of the Interior and
of the German Foreign Office, provide further

sources.11 Accepting that war is always a mutual

contest of ideas and resources, the archival records of
Germany s former enemies also have to be taken into
account for any deeper study.12
Of course, not all the secondary sources from the years
following the Great War have the questionable quality
of a Le Queux, a Riess, or a Bardanne. But the
historical value is often reduced by the fact that these
books were written on occasions as commercial,
popular war literature, and that the documentation of
the sources was never intended to meet academic
standards.13 Many contributions are not free from a
revisionist and anti-French tendency, and some
namely the Weltkriegsspionagewerk offer ample
evidence for any modern gender-based history of
intelligence, with seductive topics like "Women and
Diseases as Weapons" or "Eros and Duty".14 The more
serious contributions nevertheless provide further
pieces in the larger jigsaw puzzle.
For a deeper understanding of the intelligence war of
1914-18, it might be helpful to interpret it according to
the following six premises.
First, it was a highly symmetric war. All
military powers involved fought
despite all differences in quantity with
similar weapon arsenals and force
structures, applying similar doctrines, and
relying on similar professional outlooks
among their military elites. Under these
circumstances, strategic surprise was hard
to achieve (among the few exceptions
was the employment of German reserve
corps as first-line units in the initial
attack in the West in August 1914, and
the introduction of the British tank in
September 1916).
Second, during its preparation and during
its first phase, the First World War was a
timetable war, delivering Germany s
decision-makers into the hands of

operational and logistic compulsions.

Given this stress situation , good
intelligence was the one that supported
the consumer s expectation, and not one
that dared to question it.
Third, wherever 1914-1918 turned into a
war of manoeuvre, the employment of
the traditional weapon of battlefield
intelligence, the cavalry, failed (with
exceptions on the Eastern and on the
Balkan Fronts) to achieve any results of
consequence.
Fourth, the dominant feature of the Great
War was trench warfare. The
impossibility to penetrate the enemy line
resulted in a dramatic decline of the
importance of military espionage. At sea,
the British Grand Fleet and the German
High Seas Fleet found themselves in a
similar situation. Here, the two enemies
tried to avoid the big battle (at least,
under unfavourable circumstances), and
operated across distant and invisible front
lines. The possibility to bypass these
fronts was why the remaining neutral
states became more and more important
for MILINT. On the other hand,
stalemate offered the opportunity to set
up static intelligence structures, and it
multiplied the value of new intelligence
technologies, such as the radio,
photography, or the aeroplane. The war
took place in clearly defined geographic
zones, thus tracking the opponent s
order of battle in these zones became the
most important mission for MILINT.
Fifth, from 1916 onwards, the conflict
turned into an industrialized war of
attrition. Economic factors became the
basis for strategic decisions. MILINT
was faced with questions which it had

seldom had to deal with before. In

December 1916, the German Chancellor
and the OHL posed a very precise
question to the Admiralty: How many
months will it take to force Britain into a
separate peace by reopening the
unrestricted U-boat-campaign? The
answer decided Germany s grand
strategy for 1917.
Sixth, the more the war dragged on, the
more it turned into a war of ideologies.
Of course, political hatred and
national/ethnic bias had been an aspect of
the conflict from its very outset. But with
old regimes tumbling and societies
disintegrating under the burden of total
war, new ideological paradigms began to
evolve.
By way of conclusion, a number of brief remarks need
to be made about the concept and the definition of
German military intelligence. First and foremost,
MILINT can be said to have comprised the
intelligence collation and analysis conducted by of the
German army and the German navy. The
intelligence work carried out by the German
Foreign Office has been included only with regard to
the military and naval attachs, as they operated within
a peculiar area of dual responsibility between the
military and the diplomatic spheres.
The German terms Nachrichten and Nachrichtendienst
are not easy to translate. Nachricht can mean "news",
"information", "message", but also "intelligence". In
the era discussed here, a Nachrichtendienst can mean a
news agency as well as an intelligence service. The
contemporary military terminology was confusing as
well. While the secret intelligence department of the
OHL was called Sektion, later Abteilung IIIb, the
department responsible for intelligence assessment was
referred to as Nachrichtenabteilung. IIIb s
intelligence officers attached to the armies were the
Nachrichtenoffiziere, while the armies G2-officers

were (mostly) listed as the Generalstabsoffizier Ic. The

technical progress of the signals troops the
Nachrichtentruppe resulted in a general shift in the
use of the term Nachrichten from intelligence to
signals. Consequently, in 1917 the
Nachrichtenabteilung was renamed Fremde Heere
(Foreign Armies), and the Nachrichtenoffiziere had to
rename themselves Nachrichtenoffiziere der OHL in
order not to be confused with the NachrichtenReferenten, the Staff Officers Signals, who in the
meantime had become attached to the armies on a
permanent base. Put another way, there might be many
cases in the history of intelligence where the renaming
of institutions simply served the purpose of masking
institutional continuities. But in the cases discussed
here, the shift in terminology is an excellent indicator
for the profound and rapid changes which the military
institutions underwent between 1914 and 1918.
In this special issue of the Journal of Intelligence
History, the articles range from pre-war planning to the
end of the Great War. In the first article, Robert Foley
examines the German intelligence assessment of
France before 1914. He focuses on the question, what
knowledge the General Staff possessed about its
potential enemies in the West and what conclusions
were drawn from this with regard to tactics and the
war plan. The guest editor s contribution deals with
the organisation and the development of German
MILINT at the fronts in the West and East, and in the
occupied territories. Florian Altenhner demonstrates
how far the missions of IIIb shifted during a war that
increasingly as the months passed took
possession of the home front: censorship, propaganda,
and internal intelligence became integral parts of the
work of the General Staff. Jrgen W. Schmidt s piece
introduces us to the interesting topic of open source
intelligence against Russia and the history of the
Stellvertretende Abteilung IIIb in Berlin. To save us
from too much in the way of military and
organisational history, Hanne Hieber tells the true
story of one of Germany s most successful
intelligence officers, the mysterious Elisabeth
Schragmller, or "Mademoiselle Docteur", as she was

known in the French press.

Given the distortions, omissions and misperceptions
which have detracted for so long from a proper
understanding of the role and significance of German
military intelligence during the First World War, the
Guest Editor hopes that this special issue of the
Journal of Intelligence History can contribute in some
way, however modest, toward the development of a
better historical appreciation of this important chapter
in the history of intelligence. He would like to thank
the Editorial Board of the Journal of Intelligence
History, and its Managing Editor, Michael Wala in
particular, for their help and advice.
Markus Phlmann
Munich

NOTES:
[1] See Nicholas Hiley, Decoding German Spies:
British Spy Fiction, 1908-18, in Spy Fiction, Spy
Films and Real Intelligence, ed. Wesley K. Wark
(London: Frank Cass, 1991), 55-79; Curt Riess, Total
Espionage (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1941);
Jean Bardanne, Le colonel Nicola [sic]: Espion de
gnie: Le vritable Organisateur de la rvolution
bolchevique et de l'Hitlrism, son succdan (Paris:
ditions Sibouey, 1947).
[2] See Captain von Rintelen (Franz Rintelen von
Kleist), The Dark Invader, ed. Wesley K. Wark
(London: Frank Cass, 1998, reprint, 1st edit. 1933).
[3] For an overview of the current state of the
academic discipline see Thomas Khne and Benjamin
Ziemann, eds., Was ist Militrgeschichte? (Paderborn:
Schoeningh, 2000).
[4] See e. g. David Kahn, Hitler s Spies: German
Military Intelligence in World War II (New York:
Macmillan, 1978), and Gert Buchheit, Der deutsche
Geheimdienst: Geschichte der militrischen Abwehr

(Mnchen: Paul List, 1967).

[5] For the army archives and the German official
history see Markus Phlmann, Kriegsgeschichte und
Geschichtspolitik: Der Erste Weltkrieg: Die amtliche
deutsche Militrgeschichtsschreibung 1914 bis 1956
(Paderborn: Schoeningh, 2002).
[6] See in RW 5, Bundesarchiv-Militrarchiv,
Freiburg; see also Generalmajor a. D. Gempp,
Geheimer Nachrichtendienst und Spionageabwehr des
Heeres. 11. Bd, 2. Teil, Der Weltkrieg 1914-1918, 10.
Abschnitt. Die Abteilung IIIb im letzten Kriegsjahr
(1944), 545-3-343, Centr Chranenija IstorikoDokumental nych Kollekcij (CChIDK), Moscow.
[7] The project of an official history of German naval
signals intelligence is mentioned in Heinz Bonatz, Die
deutsche Marine-Funkaufklrung 1914-1945
(Darmstadt: Wehr und Wissen, 1970), 73. According
to the author, the study is presumed lost.
[8] See 1414, CChIDK.
[9] See Jrgen W. Schmidt, Tales from the Russian
Archives: Walter Nicolai s Personal Document
Collection, Newsletter of the International
Intelligence History Study Group 7, 2 (Summer 1998):
10-14.
[10] For IIIb s propaganda efforts see Wilhelm Deist,
Zensur und Propaganda in Deutschland whrend des
Ersten Weltkrieges, in Militr, Staat und
Gesellschaft: Studien zur preuisch-deutschen
Militrgeschichte, ed. Wilhelm Deist (Mnchen:
Oldenbourg, 1991), 153-163, and more recently Anne
Lipp, Meinungslenkung im Krieg: Kriegserfahrungen
deutscher Soldaten und ihre Deutung 1914-1918
(Gttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2003) and
Florian Altenhner, Kommunikation und Kontrolle:
Gerchte und stdtische ffentlichkeiten in Berlin und
London, 1914/1918, PhD diss., Humboldt-Universitt,
Berlin, 2005.

[11] For the records of Prussian law enforcement and

counter-intelligence agencies see Jrgen W. Schmidt,
Gegen Frankreich und Russland: Der deutsche
militrische Geheimdienst 1890-1914 (Ludwigsfelde:
Ludwigsfelder Verlagshaus, 2005); diplomatic records
are central to Friedhelm Koopmann, Diplomatie und
Reichsinteresse: Das Geheimdienstkalkl in der
deutschen Auenpolitik 1914 bis 1917
(Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1990) and Reinhard R.
Doerries, Prelude to the Easter Rising: Sir Roger
Casement in Imperial Germany (London: Frank Cass,
2000).
[12] See e. g. Patrick Beesly, Room 40: British Naval
Intelligence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1982); Burkhard Jhnicke, Washington und Berlin
zwischen den Kriegen: Die Mixed Claims Commission
in den transatlantischen Beziehungen (Baden-Baden:
Nomos, 2003); Thomas Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser:
German Covert Operations in Great Britain during the
First World War Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004); Jean-Pierre Turbergue, ed., Mata
Hari: Le Dossier Secret Du Conseil de Guerre (Paris:
ditions italiques, 2001).
[13] See the two books by Walter Nicolai,
Nachrichtendienst, Presse und Volksstimmung im
Weltkrieg (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1920) and Geheime
Mchte: Internationale Spionage und ihre
Bekmpfung im Welt und heute (Leipzig: K. F.
Koehler, 1923); Engl.: The German Secret Service:
Translated, with an additional chapter, by George
Renwick (London: S. Paul & Co., 1924) A popular
account by an junior intelligence officer on the Eastern
Front is Agricola [alias Oberleutnant Bauermeister],
Spione durchbrechen die Front (Berlin: Vorhut-Verlag
Otto Schlegel, 1933); Engl.: Spies break through:
Memoirs of a German secret service officer (London:
Constable, 1934).
[14] A popular anthology with the typical antiVersailles-rhetoric is Hans Henning Freiherr Grote,
ed., Vorsicht! Feind hrt mit! Eine Geschichte der

Weltkriegs- und Nachkriegsspionage (Berlin: Neufeld

und Henius, 1930); a heavy book with a complicated
title is the anthology by Generalmajor von LettowVorbeck, ed., Die Weltkriegsspionage (OriginalSpionage-Werk): Authentische Enthllungen ber
Entstehung, Art, Arbeit, Technik, Schliche,
Handlungen, Wirkungen und Geheimnisse der
Spionage vor, whrend und nach dem Kriege auf
Grund amtlichen Materials aus Kriegs-, Milir-,
Gerichts- und Reichs-Akten: Vom Leben und Sterben,
von den Taten und Abenteuern der bedeutendsten
Agenten bei Freund und Feind (Mnchen: Verlag
Justin Moser, 1931); Friedrich Felger, ed., Was wir
vom Weltkrieg nicht wissen (Leipzig: Ludwig
Andermann Verlag, 1929) is useful and programatic in
its titel; Max Gunzenhuser, Geschichte des geheimen
Nachrichtendienstes: Literaturbericht und
Bibliographie (Frankfurt/Main: Bernhard und Graefe,
1968) is an ambitious bibliographical project that
covers the literature until the late 1960s.

The Journal of Intelligence History is published by the International Intelligence

History Study Group, founded in 1993 to promote scholarly research on intelligence
organizations and their impact on historical development and international relations.

Last update 27 March 2006 by Michael Wala