As in other countries, World War I marked a watershed for Germany
in nearly every respect. With the ardent support of Erich Ludendorff
of the General Staff, military intelligence—based in Abteilung IIIb
(Department IIIb) under the direction of Walter Nicolai—gained com-
plete domination over political intelligence and even took on tasks
such as censorship, propaganda, and ideological policing. But Nicolai’s
organization was hardly a monolith. The imperial navy had had sole
responsibility for Great Britain since 1902 through its division simply
called “N,” which was disinclined to share information with its rival
army counterpart. For Russia and the Balkans, Nicolai had to rely on the
cooperation of the Evidenzbüro of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff.
Most puzzling of all was the overall estrangement between those who
collected intelligence and those who evaluated it.
Whereas some exceptional individuals emerged in the course of
the war—Elsbeth Schragmüller, Alexander Bauermeister, and August
Schluga Baron von Rastenfeld to name but a few—German efforts fell
short on many occasions. Already in the opening months, it was the
mistaken intelligence report of Richard Hentsch at the Battle of the
Marne that stopped the German offensive and led to the stalemate in
the trenches, and it was the sinking of the Magdeburg that ultimately
gave the British a working knowledge of the German naval codes. Then
there were missed opportunities, nowhere more so than in the United
States. In sharp contrast to the British, who mounted a brilliant covert
propaganda campaign directed by Gilbert Parker, authorities in Berlin
failed to enlist the sympathy of the large German-American popula-
tion in the United States and instead resorted to such maladroit acts as
the Black Tom Island explosion and the Zimmermann telegram. In a
similar vein, the attempt to foment various native uprisings in Britain’s
colonial empire came to naught. Only Germany’s clandestine support
of the Bolshevik revolutionaries—designed to destabilize the Russian
government and force its withdrawal from the war—met with any no-
table degree of success.
Defeat in World War I brought forth the new military intelligence
organization of the Abwehr. By adopting a name that implied purely
self-defense, it could circumvent the restrictions of the Treaty of Ver-
sailles and operate in the open. As the country quickly became a magnet
for international espionage, the Weimar government faced not only the
presence of the British, French, and Polish services but agents of the
xxviii • INTRODUCTION