Ritter served as an air force officer in World War I. In 1927, after
completing his university education in Cologne, he was appointed
sales manager of a textile firm in New York. In 1935, Friedrich
von Boetticher, the German military attaché in the United States,
convinced him to leave his position and join the Reichswehr. Based
at the Abwehr substation in Hamburg, Ritter (code name dr. rant-
zau) began to plan air espionage operations directed at Great Britain
and the United States. One of his early and most notable successes
involved Hermann Lang, who acquired drawings that allowed
for the reconstruction of the famous Norden bombsight, one of the
Americans’ most closely guarded secrets. Another of Ritter’s agents
obtained the plans for an advanced automatic pilot device.
Yet there were also major failures, such as the ill-fated U.S. spy
ring led by William G. Sebold and the prompt capture of William
Colepaugh and Erich Gimpel. Even more injurious to Ritter’s later
reputation was the case of Arthur Owens (code name johnny), one
of his first British recruits, who turned out to be a double agent for
MI5 (code name snow) and led to the formation of the Twenty
Committee, the unit of British military intelligence charged with
counterespionage and deception. According to British postwar inter-
rogation reports, Ritter knew as early as 1941 that all German agents
in the country had been compromised, but he refrained from telling
his superiors, presumably to avoid the likely repercussions. In any
event, he was reassigned to North Africa and played a role in Opera-
tion salaam, which also ended in failure. Initially silent after the
war for fear of prosecution, Ritter published his memoirs, Deckname
Dr. Rantzau (code name dr. rantzau), in 1972. Left unmentioned,
however, was any awareness on his part of the elaborate British de-
ception scheme.ROENNE, ALEXIS VON (1903–1944). A senior intelligence officer
with the Fremde Heere Ost and Fremde Heere West as well as a
staunch opponent of the Nazi regime, Alexis von Roenne was born
on 22 February 1903, the son of a Baltic German noble family. Af-
ter Reinhard Gehlen took command of Fremde Heere Ost in April
1942, Roenne headed Desk IIz, which was in charge of the interroga-
tion camps for Russian prisoners of war, and played a key role in the
formation of the anti-Soviet army of liberation led by General Andrei
372 • ROENNE, ALEXIS VON