(literally, Research Office). Created on April , , the For-
schungsamt (FA) was perhaps the least known, but most sig-
nificant, of all his agencies. Its role in entrenching his position in
Hitler’s power structure, surrounded by increasingly envious
enemies, was considerable; and its extraordinary output over the
next twelve years nearly half a million* reports, coyly termed
“research results,” on intercepted telephone conversations and
deciphered signals would affect the political history of the
Reich.
Small wonder that Göring jealously guarded access to this
agency. He had, like Hitler, a healthy contempt for the other
Nazi intelligence-gathering agencies like the Abwehr. (He once
said, correctly, that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and his “boatload
of pirates” had contributed nothing.) With the possible excep-
tion of the Foreign Ministry’s code-breaking section (Pers-Z),
Göring’s FA was unquestionably Hitler’s best general intelligence
agency, with cryptanalytical sources ranging from the Vatican to
Switzerland. Thus the FA read the cipher of the U.S. legation in
Berne continuously until , when one of his Prussian officials,
the traitor Hans-Bernd Gisevius, sold the information to the
U.S. government and the leak was plugged.
Instinctively neither Hitler nor Göring trusted human
agents. When military code-breakers Gottfried Schapper and
Georg Schröder had first proposed a “Reich Intelligence
Agency,” Hitler had turned the project over to Göring, stipu-
lating only that the agency was to make no use of agents, but to
rely exclusively on what is today called signals intelligence
(wiretapping and cryptanalysis). This was clear evidence of the
trust that he reposed in Göring: It was like the absolute trust a
- Each FA intercept had a serial number prefixed N (for Nachrichten, intelli-
gence). Surviving references run from N, in November to N,
in January .