also called by its opponents the “German Cheka,” having been mod-
eled after the Soviet secret police. Its leader was Felix Neumann,
a typesetter by profession, who attempted to assassinate Hans von
Seeckt, the chief of the Army Command. Although the plan failed
when Seeckt’s horse balked, Neumann later killed a communist bar-
ber suspected of being a police informer. His open boast about the
deed led not only to his arrest but also to the apprehension of Peter
Skoblevsky, a key Soviet agent and former commander during the
Russian Revolution. Both were sentenced to death for high treason
in 1925 but later exchanged for several German students imprisoned
in the Soviet Union. Neumann subsequently joined the Nazi Party.
Skoblevsky was executed during the purges of Joseph Stalin.TECHNISCHER DIENST. A secret right-wing, stay-behind army
funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the Technischer
Dienst (Technical Service) was part of the Bund Deutscher Jugend
(Association of German Youth), an anticommunist youth alliance
founded in 1950 as a response to the East German Freie Deutsche
Jugend (Free German Youth). Led by Erhard Peters, the Technischer
Dienst trained young Germans, including many former World War II
soldiers, to be guerrilla fighters in the event of a war with the Soviet
Union. A scandal broke out on both sides of the Atlantic after Hans
Werner Otto, a former SS officer and the group’s security chief,
divulged details to police in Frankfurt am Main in September 1952.
In early January 1953, authorities in Hesse banned both the Bund
Deutscher Jugend and the Technischer Dienst, although no prosecu-
tions resulted.
TEJESSY, FRITZ (1895–1964). An early West German authority in
matters of domestic intelligence, Fritz Tejessy was born in Brünn
(now Brno, Czech Republic), the son of a Jewish merchant. After
serving as an Austrian officer in World War I, he settled in Kassel as
the editor of a local organ of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutsch-
lands. An appointment to the Prussian Interior Ministry in 1928 gave
him responsibility for preventing the subversion of the police by
extremist groups, especially the National Socialists. Following Adolf
Hitler’s rise to power, Tejessy was forced to begin a long odyssey as
an immigrant, first to Czechoslovakia and ultimately to the United
456 • TECHNISCHER DIENST