Third International, or Comintern—a covert ideological force emanat-
ing from Moscow convinced that the key to world revolution lay in Ger-
many. In fact, the language of the Comintern was German, and words
such as Treff (meeting) and Verbindungsmensch (liaison) came into
regular use throughout the communist underground. Chastened by the
abortive insurrections of 1923 and eager to acquire new technologies,
Soviet military intelligence turned increasingly to industrial espionage
and managed to form a network of more than 3,000 informers in various
German firms. Walter Krivitsky, one of those Soviet officers involved,
later remarked: “Out of the ruins of the Communist Revolution, we built
in Germany for Soviet Russia, a brilliant intelligence service, the envy
of every nation.”^3 It is noteworthy as well that two of the young German
operatives involved—Wilhelm Zaisser and Ernst Wollweber—were
destined to head the East German security apparatus in the 1950s.
Besides crippling communist espionage operations, the Nazi acces-
sion to power in 1933 inaugurated an era of often bewildering com-
plexity regarding the collection of information and the surveillance of
perceived enemies of the Reich. Some older institutions remained intact
along with their personnel. The Foreign Office, for instance, continued
its practices virtually unchanged until the innovations of Joachim von
Ribbentrop in 1936, when he revived its cryptological section under the
name “Pers Z” (Personal Z) and later set up his own espionage service
called “Informationsstelle III.” The Abwehr also continued to function
but underwent major reforms by its new head, Wilhelm Canaris. In the
sprawling empire that he developed at home and abroad, older meth-
ods of collection were combined with more novel forms of irregular
warfare. To a large extent, the organization became Canaris’s personal
instrument, subject to his keen intellect and enigmatic personality. In
addition, it came to harbor many of the most ardent opponents of the
Nazi regime. Hans Gisevius once summed up the Abwehr as perform-
ing “well in small matters and very badly in large.”^4
Its immediate rival was the Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Security Service),
created by Reinhard Heydrich initially to combat enemy infiltration
within the Nazi Party but increasingly bent on total domestic surveil-
lance. Working in concert with SS head Heinrich Himmler, Heydrich
had managed to wrest control of the Gestapo from Hermann Göring
and also eliminate the Sturmabteilung in the Night of the Long Knives.
A collision course with the Abwehr was avoided by a gentlemen’s
INTRODUCTION • xxix