November 1942 proved fatal. He died en route when his Soviet ship,
the Donbass, came under German submarine attack in the North Sea
and sank.DEVILLERS, HENRI (1914–1942). An Abwehr spy who penetrated
the ranks of the French resistance, Henri Devillers was born in Vin-
cennes in November 1914. Captured in 1940 during the German
offensive and placed in a prisoner of war camp, he agreed to work
for the Abwehr after learning that his sister had made a similar ar-
rangement in Paris. By posing as a Gaullist, he managed to gain the
confidence of the leaders of the Combat organization—Henri Frenay,
Maurice Chevance-Bertin, and Berthie Albrecht—and became a cou-
rier for the group. Copies of documents entrusted to him, however,
found their way to the Abwehr, and numerous arrests of Combat
members resulted. On 25 February 1942, Devillers was apprehended
in Lyon, having been identified by the Travaux Ruraux, a secret
Vichy counterintelligence network. Much to the anger of German
authorities, a French military tribunal found him guilty and ordered
his execution by a firing squad on 19 June 1942 at Fort Montluc.
DICK TRACY. The retrieval of the Luftwaffe’s wartime aerial pho-
tographs of the western Soviet Union, Operation dick tracy was
conducted jointly by British and American intelligence beginning
in May 1945. Led by Luftwaffe officers following the German sur-
render—and unbeknownst to the Soviet military leadership—the
Anglo-American team succeeded in recovering aerial photographs
and supplementary documents from an air intelligence unit near
Potsdam. Not only did this material prove exceedingly useful to
the Royal Air Force and the United States Air Force, but the opera-
tion foreshadowed later German intelligence cooperation within the
Western alliance.
DIELS, RUDOLF (1900–1957). A key figure in the establishment
of the Gestapo as well as its first head, Rudolf Diels was born in
Berghaus (Hesse) on 16 December 1900, the son of a farmer. After
volunteering for service in the final years of World War I, Diels stud-
ied law at Marburg and joined the Prussian Interior Ministry in 1930.
Clearly ambitious and able, he was appointed two years later to a
82 • DEVILLERS, HENRI