larly hard time. “If,” recalled one FA official, “as was usually the
case with the Gestapo’s applications, the reason given for the
wiretap was too vague, then the minister Göring simply disal-
lowed it; and if he did permit it, he forbade any results to be
forwarded [to the Gestapo] until he had given his express
authority in each case.”
Walter Seifert, head of the FA’s evaluation section, who
had joined straight out of Jüterbog Signals School in August
, would recall that Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Gestapo
under Himmler, hated having to submit every wiretap applica-
tion to Göring. “But without that ‘G’ on it I wasn’t allowed to
order the tap.” Over the years he and Himmler would advance
every possible argument for taking over the Forschungsamt.
The Führer merely told them to take it up with Göring.
The first chief, Schimpf, lasted only two years. A cheerful
womanizer, he became amorously entangled with a lady in
Breslau; he solved the matter by shooting her and then (being a
gentleman) himself on April , . Göring appointed Prince
Christoph of Hesse,* and he retained this top Nazi intelligence
job for the next eight years.
During Göring’s regime, the Forschungsamt moved into
magnificent new premises in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district.
Housed in a sprawling complex of former residential buildings
set discreetly back from Schiller Strasse, near what Berliners call
“the Knee,” the hundreds of specially sworn officials and lan-
guage specialists sat at their equipment in halls patrolled by
armed guards and subject to the most stringent security regula-
tions. Every scrap of paper, from the duplicate pads used by the
telephone monitors to the brown paper of the “research results,”
- Born in , he had married Sophie Battenberg, one of the six German sis-
ters of the present duke of Edinburgh (who fought against the Germans i n
WW).