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politician, and army reserve officer from Dessau, Dr. Werner Eisenberg,
who cooperated closely with the special officer responsible for planning
Persia and Afghanistan operations, Dr. Hans-Otto Wagner.^2 Before join-
ing the Abwehr in late 1940/early 1941, Eisenberg had been an ambi-
tious and distinguished public figure. When the Nazis came to power in
1933, forcing his retirement from provincial politics, he was deputy leader
of the conservative-liberal Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party
[DVP]) in the parliament of Anhalt, a DVP member of the Reichstag, and
legal counsel to the Duke of Anhalt.^3 To a large extent, Eisenberg’s activ-
ity within the centrist DVP was concerned with planning campaigns
against the extreme right (Nazis) and the extreme left (communists). An
independently wealthy man, who had served as a signals officer in the
Great War, winning the Iron Cross First Class, Eisenberg had become a
successful corporate lawyer and company director in Dessau, numbering
huge firms like the aircraft manufacturer Junkers among his clients.
However, because the Duke of Anhalt was distrusted by the Nazis,
Eisenberg also fell under suspicion. For this reason, and also because he
had many Jewish businesspeople among his legal clients, he was described
as ‘a man with one foot in the concentration camp.’ He was threatened
with expulsion from the Nationalsozialistischer Rechtswahrerbund
(National Socialist Association of German Legal Professionals [NSRB]),
and, though he was never actually disbarred, Eisenberg’s ambitions waned,
and in 1940 he decided to seek some kind of refuge in the Wehrmacht as
a reserve signals officer.
After a brief refresher course, Eisenberg was posted to a signals HQ in
Normandy, where his work with various intelligence officers facilitated his
transfer to the Abwehr in June 1941. As an intelligence officer with the
rank of captain, after a brief spell at the Abwehr station in Paris, Eisenberg
was permanently appointed to Abw II OR at the Tirpitzufer in Berlin. His
position became especially precarious in July 1944 when the Duke of
Anhalt was arrested and thrown into Dachau concentration camp in the
aftermath of the attempt on Hitler’s life. Eisenberg was placed in the cat-
egory of ‘personnel to be discharged because of unreliability.’ However,
his sheer competence proved to be his salvation. He manifested this not so
much in any specific contribution made to external operations as in the
highly skilled way in which he steered the internal administration of his
branch on a course midway between the machinations of SS bosses like
Heinrich Himmler, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and Walter Schellenberg on the
one hand, and the old Abwehr military caste on the other. Consequently,