can, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Czech, and the other
languages of the moment. Dr. Gerhard Neuenhoff, one linguist
who was assigned to the French (and Belgian) “region” on Sep-
tember , , found himself just one of a thousand other spe-
cialists, strictly limited in their mobility in the FA complex: He
was never allowed up to the top floor, where Section ’s code-
breakers were at work with the Hollerith punched-card com-
puters and the other tools of their trade. Neuenhoff was set in
front of a standard hotel-type switchboard, monitoring forty
lines including the Belgian legation, the French military attaché,
and French correspondents in Berlin. He soon learned to recog-
nize who was speaking the French ambassador André Fran-
çois-Poncet, with his slow, pedantic enunciation, or the French
journalist Madame Tabuis, with her shrill tones.
It is important to accept that these FA monitors were in-
corruptible civil servants, with neither the means nor the motive
to falsify “results.” They jotted down what they heard on pagi-
nated duplicate pads, in longhand, or recorded it on wire re-
corders; tossed the completed note, already headed “State Se-
cret” (Geheime Reichssache) onto a conveyor belt; within min-
utes it was typed up, evaluated, cross-indexed, and issued ei-
ther by FA dispatch rider or vacuumed with the speed of a rifle
bullet through Berlin’s pneumatic-mail system into the very
anteroom of the authorized minister or his Staatssekretär. Each
canister had its own address code on it three narrow rings in
blue guided it, for example, to Milch’s private office at the secret
Air Ministry building.
The Forschungsamt gave Göring an edge over every rival
contender for power in Germany. Not one international cable
crossed Reich territory or its adjacent waters without being
tapped by the FA. There were FA field units in every amplifier
station. Fifty synchronous teleprinters installed in the cavernous