Nazi Secret Warfare in Occupied Persia (Iran)

Nazi Secret Warfare in Occupied Persia (Iran) This page intentionally left blank Nazi Secret Warfare in Occupied Persia (Iran) The Failure of the German Intelligence Services, 1939–45 Adrian O’Sullivan © Adrian O’Sullivan 2014 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-42789-2 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-49127-8 ISBN 978-1-137-42791-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137427915 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. For my daughter, Claire This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Figures viii Preface ix Acknowledgements xiii Abbreviations xv Chronology xxiii Wolf pack in the Zagros Mountains xxv Prologue: MAX and MORITZ Invent Themselves 1 1 Tourists and Businessmen 10 2 Invaders and Occupiers 25 3 Schemers and Planners 34 4 Intelligencers 45 5 Ideologues and Brutes 58 6 Rivals 80 7 Recruiters and Trainers 86 8 MAX 108 9 MORITZ 130 10 SABA 144 11 Parachutes over Persia 158 12 FRANZ, DORA, and BERTA 167 13 ANTON 182 14 Operations and Operatives 191 15 Defects and Deficiencies 216 16 Failure 222 Epilogue: MAX and MORITZ Reinvent Themselves 241 Appendix 252 Select Bibliography 257 Index 271 vii Figures 4.1 Wilhelm Kuebart 46 4.2 Notional meeting at the Tirpitzufer 51 8.1 Franz Mayr 109 9.1 Roman Gamotha 131 9.2 Pierre Sweerts 137 10.1 Berthold Schulze-Holthus and the surviving ANTON parachutists in captivity 144 12.1 Franz Mayr and the FRANZ group in captivity 168 12.2 Junkers Ju 290 173 14.1 Charles and Fern Bedaux with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor 194 15.1 Havel-Institut (LEIT), Berlin-Wannsee 219 15.2 SD receiver and transmitter used by Franz Mayr 220 A.1 Organization of the Abwehr (simplified) 252 A.2 Organization of the RSHA Amt VI (simplified) 253 A.3 Map of German covert initiatives and activities targeting Persia 254 A.4 Assigned and assumed roles of German staybehind agents in Persia 255 A.5 Catalogue of failed German covert operations targeting Persia 256 viii Preface The trouble with writing books about Nazi history is that so much of it makes for harrowing reading, because the Third Reich was drenched in blood, horrific violence, and callous brutality on a colossal, indus- trial scale. Its excesses were such that, as Hannah Arendt has famously pointed out, evil became utterly commonplace under Nazi rule: in a word, banal. Whether about a singular aspect of the Holocaust – for instance, the atrocious misdeeds of the men of Police Batallion 101, as meticulously documented by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in Hitler’s Willing Executioners – or the shocking, vivid chronicles of mass rape, pillage, and antifascist revenge recorded in excruciating detail by Anthony Beevor in The Fall of Berlin 1945, sensitive readers are hardly likely to favour this genre as bedtime reading, or to recommend it to their children. When, a few years ago, I decided to undertake a doctoral disserta- tion on some aspect of Nazi failure in the Second World War, viewed through the prism of intelligence history, I was determined to avoid the bloodshed and brutality that permeates Third Reich historiogra- phy and to seek out some kinder, gentler topic than those that have so often dominated the nonfiction bestseller tables in recent decades. This was partly because I was beginning to realize that, the more I studied the perverse obsession of Hitler’s Herrenvolk – not just the Nazi Party and the SS – with antisemitism and antibolshevism, the less I understood it (or them). I was so deeply troubled by the mur- derous malevolence that ordinary Germans had displayed towards ordinary Jews and members of other minorities that I felt no longer able to write effectively about the Holocaust, for instance. So, during a discussion of my intentions with one of my academic mentors, a fine historian with a comprehensive knowledge of the literature of Nazi intelligence and covert operations, I was delighted when he observed, ‘Adrian, you must remember that the Second World War was a very big war!’ This meant, he insisted, that there was still (some 70 years on) a remarkable abundance of untold stories to tell and unwritten case studies to write. Having always been drawn to the role of the historian as a public narrator rather than a theoretician or an analyst, as I suspect Professor Beevor has been, I quickly warmed to the prospect of filling historio- graphical lacunae as a storyteller. This could be fun: much more ix x Preface useful and better suited to my interest in writing readable history than deconstructing it, encoding my analyses in dense postmodern jargon for transmission to other scholars. ‘How about Persia?’, my mentor continued. ‘No one has done it ... yet. And there’s plenty of raw material lying around in the archives.’ By this he meant of course that, while no monographic archival study had ever been undertaken on covert warfare in the region, I had better get on with it right away before someone pipped me to the post. And so, by coercion rather than design, I happened upon one of the few relatively nonviolent but still viable topics of Third Reich and Second World War history. For in wartime Persia very few shots were ever fired in anger, and certainly no major pitched battles were ever fought, not even when the British and the Russians crashed across the western and northern Persian borders in the late summer of 1941 and occupied the country with lightning speed, to preempt a possible German invasion from Transcaucasia. Perhaps I am fortunate that intelligence history is my chosen discipline, rather than military history, which has few oases of calm to offer the scholar and writer. Real intelligence work, on the other hand – active espionage, counterespionage, security intelligence, political subversion, propaganda, sabotage, and strategic deception – is far less violent than popular fiction and quasi- historical folklore would have us believe. Comparatively few spies actually lost their lives or even used their weapons during the Second World War, contrary to the popular notion that spying is treachery and inevitably leads to the gallows or the guillotine. For instance, of the 423 enemy agents captured between 1940 and 1944 and held at Camp 020 by the Security Service (MI5), only 14 were ultimately put on trial, found guilty, and hanged. For the most part, the world of intelligence operations is a shadowy, silent game of wits, not thuggery. Pistol shots seldom crackle in the night, dumped bodies seldom wash up on canal banks or ocean beaches, and most spies fear isolation or scandalous exposure infinitely more than a bomb beneath the car chassis or a knife between the shoulder blades. Thus, with apologies to Professor Arendt, one might even speak of the ‘banality of treason’: treachery rendered commonplace because it has acquired all the ethical trappings of a relatively honourable profession complete with its own skill sets, honour codes, unique technologies, peculiar linguistic registers, and, not always but often, tacit mutual recognition and respect among its protagonists and antagonists. All these characteristics emerge in this book on clandestine warfare in Persia. On the German side, we witness the banality of the fugitive lives Preface xi of Franz Mayr, Berthold Schulze-Holthus, and Roman Gamotha: long months, years even, during which nothing was achieved operationally, and nothing much happened otherwise. On the British side, we can well imagine the banal drudgery that characterized the daily routine of the security-intelligence system – censoring letters, carding names, interrogating small fry, compensating for the uselessness of the Persian police and gendarmerie, standing endlessly on guard against an enemy who never came, or at least who came too late, in insufficient number, and with mediocre talent, in a shambolic series of pinprick initiatives. However, it would be entirely wrong to assume that the story I have to tell is therefore as dull as the lives it depicts, for this narrative of twilit conflict in a world full of menace and dire strategic consequences con- tains within it an immense potential for catastrophe that was, merci- fully, never fulfilled: the defeat of Soviet Russia; the Nazi invasion and occupation of Persia, Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula; the extension of the Holocaust even to Palestine itself; the loss of India and Britain’s link with the Far East and Australasia; and finally the convergence of German and Japanese forces, in India, Afghanistan, or Siberia perhaps.

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