Czechoslovakia, he and his wife resettled near the border in Zille. He
died on 16 May 1961.LINSE, WALTER. See UNTERSUCHUNGSAUSSCHUSS FREI-
HEITLICHER JURISTEN.
LISS, ULRICH (1897–?). The first chief of the Fremde Heere West
(FHW), Ulrich Liss was born in Mecklenburg and served in a front-
line artillery regiment in World War I. He was also a prize-winning
rider and ardent Anglophile, having visited Great Britain on several
occasions. Upon the division of Fremde Heere into two branches
in 1938, Kurt von Tippelskirch appointed Liss to head the FHW,
which had responsibility for military intelligence regarding West-
ern Europe and Britain, the upper Balkans, and the United States.
Although staff officers remained in key positions, Liss additionally
hired civilians with particular skills and knowledge from having
lived abroad; he also broadened the functions of the FHW to include
assessments of a hostile power’s intentions, not just capabilities. In
war games using oversized maps or sand tables at army headquarters,
Liss frequently assumed the role of the enemy commander in chief.
Under his direction, the FHW performed almost flawlessly dur-
ing the campaign against the Low Countries and France in 1940,
especially through its concept of the Ardennes offensive. Yet it later
failed to anticipate the Allied landings in North Africa. Given a field
assignment in March 1943, Liss took command of a regiment on the
eastern front and was promoted to general. He was severely wounded
and taken prisoner by the Red Army in January 1945. Remaining in
Soviet captivity until 1955, Liss returned to Germany and in 1959
published his firsthand account Westfront 1939–1940 (Western Front
1939–1940).
LISSNER, IVAR (1909–1967). A key Abwehr agent based in Man-
churia who gathered information on the Soviet Union, Ivar Lissner
(Robert Hirschfeld) was born in Riga, Latvia, on 10 March 1909,
the son of a Jewish businessman. Immigrating to Germany after
World War I with his parents, he became a Nazi Party member by
1933 and later joined the SS. Despite his legal training, his main
celebrity stemmed from his work as a travel writer. As the principal
268 • LINSE, WALTER