Churchill's Spy Files
Page 41
d) On what are these installed, ships, aircraft, U-boats?
e) How is the prospect of success of these methods judged?
f) By what firms is the apparatus supplied?
g) Do any research and development centres still engage in the investigation of acoustic underwater problems or study the further development of acoustic apparatus already in use, including Asdic and listening apparatus?
h) What improvements are expected from the innovations?
2) Has the enemy also a method for the location of submerged U-boats, which is not on an acoustic basis (sound measurement) but on an electric or magnetic basis?
3) Is this apparatus already in use or is it still in the research or testing stage?
4) Describe as precisely as possible such apparatus and in addition the method of use.
5) What researchers, discoverers, are taking, or have taken part in this development?
6) What institutions or firms are engaged in the development and manufacture of the apparatus respectively?
7) What importance is attached to this method, first in research work, secondly in actual practice (reports from the personnel who use it, and so on)?
8) What carriers are or will be used, ships, aircraft, U-boats?
9) Sound buoys.
10) What must be aimed at with such buoys?
11) When, where and how are they operated?
12) Account of the sound producing apparatus.
13) Describe as precisely as possible the quality of the noise made (pitch, timbre, volume, secondary noises produced etc.)
14) Are several kinds of noises used?
15) The duration of the noise made, can interruptions (pauses) be made?
16) What firms are employed in the manufacture of this buoy?
17) Do there exist owing to the nature of the sound any possible confusion between a sound buoy and any acoustic means of location?
Underwater Location
a) Will ships sailing alone or in convoy send out into the water alternating currents of very low frequency (under 1 hz)? In case such a procedure exists it is urgent to ascertain what the enemy has in view. The most precise details of the procedure is very much desired.
b) What is known about ‘the ‘Transient’ procedure: does the same apply to U- boat location?
c) Is an electric or acoustic method of underwater location with audible frequencies involved?
d) What is known about the Asdic method of the American (ultra sonorous) location? What frequencies? Is it doubly effective? Does a visual indicator exist? How does this appear?
2) Ultra Red Location
a) Are the screens (Bildwandler) cooled? What means of cooling are used?
b) Up to what wave-lengths etc. up to what smallest differences of temperature respectively, is the observation apparatus for heat rays practicable?
c) Are there sensitive screens in stock (Warmebild-wandler)?
d) What other light converting beams will be used for thermo D.F. sets? What sensitivity have they, up to what wavelengths do these photo cells work?
e) How does the location apparatus work? Which apparently locates U-boats underwater with ultra violet rays; does this apparatus work by television (Abtastung)?
f) Have Anglo-Americans ultra red filters which let through no visible beam?
g) Can Anglo-Americans locate from aircraft a submerged U-boat by means of a strong searchlight (Scheinwerfer)? As many details as possible about it.
h) What ranges are reached with thermal D.F. sets or screens (Bildwardler) against surfaced and submerged travelling U-boats?
i) Do Anglo-Americans use beams of waves long enough to penetrate thick fog?
j) Does the apparatus for the location of the U-boat work with fixed or variable waves?
a) Thermo-sensitive screen (warmebildwandler); Down to how low a temperature can the objects be seen through this apparatus?
b) The most detailed technical information above all about the electric control and the technical composition of those particular parts, through which boat is transformed into light.
c) Are the images formed by reflection which have been observed on aeroplanes and protective units on the front side of the glass or the side opposite to that from which the light emanates.
d) Often, red discs on protective units will be observed from U-boats; such discs apparently alter their shape to crescents when they revolve. Moreover, it has been observed that a bluish-white light lies over the red light. It might be presumed that it was a question of ultra-red reflectors (scheinwerfer) whose filters were not good enough to absorb completely the visible light. As far as we can tell good ultra red filters are known which allow no visible light through are known to the enemy, it may therefore be presumed that insofar as these red discs are concerned, it is a question of secondary apparitions caused by a process which has nothing whatever to do with ultra red.
e) It may probably be presumed that the red discs in conjunction with bluish-white light are concerned with ultra violet beams.
3) Radio Location
a) On what waves below 1m do the English and American radio location apparatus work when they are used in movement? More especially, is something known about radio location apparatus in the wave sphere 12 – 25 cm.
b) What is known concerning image reproduction and image analysis retrospectively in respect of panorama apparatus i.e. apparatus with automatic aerial rotation and visual indicator.
c) What are the working waves of this Panoramic apparatus and which ones are used from aeroplanes against U-boats.
(i) Is something known about a radio-location development in wave sphere 1cm – 5cm.
(ii) Are the installations already in manufacture?
d) Is anything know about the suitability of panoramic location, e.g. 3 cm.
e) Is something known about the possibilities of producing single radio location sets, especially taking into consideration the change of requirements to new types.
f) What radio location observation receivers does the enemy possess?
(i) Wave sphere
(ii) Detector or W/T valves and down to which wavelengths are detectors or W/T valves made use of.
g) Details about short transmissions and their possibilities of direction finding.
h) Do the Anglo–Americans make use of the in itself inconsiderable beam of the German receiver for location finding.
i) When can the 9mm and the 25mm developments respectively of the Americans be expected to reach finality? When may the use of these wavelengths at the front be expected? Will those waves be used against U-boats? Will they be used from the air and/or from ships? What advantages are there as opposed to the 3 cm apparatus? What detectors will be used by this apparatus? How will the W/T aerials appear? Is it a question of panoramic apparatus? What turning velocity has the W/T aerials?
k) What wavelengths of the shortest kind are the USA laboratories studying from the long range point of view?
4) Mine Location
a) Can the enemy detect anchored mines locate barriers by means of underwater listening apparatus? In case there is such a method, have successful results already been obtained? Details about such methods are very desirable. Are our enemies thereby enabled to circumvent such barriers?
b) Is it possible to locate mines lying on the ground? Has the enemy evolved methods to this end? What are the conditions present if success is to be achieved? What influences are of importance and what difficulties have emerged?
c) Can the enemy detect anchored or ground mines from the air, and how?
5) U-boat Combat
From previous reports there is the possibility that the enemy is using torpedoes in the U-boat combat which automatically steer towards a boat after they have been launched from the U-boat chasers or the anti-U-boat aircraft. All obtainable details about this, sketches etc., are urgently desired especially a clarification of the following questions:
a) Size, weight, shape, external markings?
c) Preparations before use?
d) Size of the charge? For what range is it effective?
e) The position on the aircraft? The number per aircraft?
f) The height from which and the direction in which it is launched? The permissible deflection angle between the direction in which it is fired and the direction in which the target is travelling? Time of the course? The extent of the course? Spread? Straight or zigzag?
g) How long after the U-boat has dived can it be used? Are prior location and ascertainment of the depth necessary? By what methods? How precise?
h) Are they effective against stationary targets? At what distance? At what depth?
i) Where must the destination be encountered (stern, midships, or bow)?
When it steers itself acoustically
a) Without wire or by wire?
b) How is the course observed? The track of the bubbles?
c) Is the depth also regulated?
d) How deep?
Ignition. Contact of distant ignition.
In case of distant ignition, at what distance? Magnetic? Electric? Acoustic?
What happens if the torpedo does not hit its target? If the U-boat causes noises or detonations to be made with the object of producing a disturbance? If the U-boat stops?
There is no indication of how valuable this document was regarded by the Admiralty, but quite obviously it provided clues to U-boat vulnerabilities and showed German concerns about the Leigh Light, carried by Coastal Command to mount night attacks by illuminating surface targets, and radar. Direction-finding was also a preoccupation, with the enemy convinced that the Allies had made some scientific breakthroughs in the field of beam technology. In reality, of course, cryptanalysis was playing a major, unsuspected role in betraying the exact location of submarines.
* * *
Fritz Lorenz, who was captured by the Belgian police and handed over to the US Army in Namur as the Allies advanced towards Belgium, was an SD officer, journalist and broadcaster who had worked for Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Dienstelle.
Born in Cuxhaven in 1913 and destined for the merchant marine, Lorenz had gone to sea as a cadet and during seven years aboard various ships, including the training vessel Bremen, had became fluent in French and German. His linguistic skills had attracted the attention of a German passenger on the Norddeutscher Lloyd steamer Stuttgart, who had recommended him to Ribbentrop. In 1935 Ribbentrop employed him as a press officer and used him in London as a confidential courier, carrying the weekly diplomatic pouch to Berlin. Lorenz was called up for national service in September 1939 with the 19th Minesweeper Flotilla in Kiel and then Hennsburg, but in January 1940 was posted to the Reich Security Agency’s Amt VIF, responsible for France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland, and sent on a mission to Paris, adopting the role of an Italian shoe salesman, Giovanni Laini, who had travelled through Switzerland. Established in the French capital, he had negotiated the sale of 300,000 pairs of shoes, at 120 francs each, to a corrupt official at the War Ministry.
While in Milan acquiring samples, Lorenz boasted at a party that he seen the transcript of a telephone conversation conducted on the evening of 30 April between the French premier Paul Reynaud and Neville Chamberlain in which a French plan to invade the Balkans from Syria was alleged to have been discussed. News of this reached Berlin, and the drunken invention was published as fact by the Volkischer Beobachter on 7 May.
After the German occupation of Paris Lorenz joined the staff of the SD chief, Dr Helmut Knochen, and was sent on various assignments to southern France to trace the political exile Dr Fritz Thyssen, and certain German Jewish refugees. However, after a disagreement with Knochen he was transferred to Berlin, where he participated in foreign language radio broadcasts before he was sent with the Waffen SS to Russia as a war reporter. There he was a witness to numerous atrocities committed by the Allgemeine SS Division, including the murder of 5,000 Jews at Mariupol in the Ukraine. Among the crimes he described was the execution of 10,000 Russian PoWs by the Adolf Hitler SS Panzer Division.
In 1942 Ribbentrop engineered Lorenz’s removal from the Eastern front and entrusted him with a delicate mission to Madrid, where he was to investigate rumours about the behaviour of Maria von Günther, the wife of the German ambassador, Eberhard von Stohrer. Upon his arrival in Spain in May he reported to the head of the SD, Hauptsturmführer Pfisterer, and worked with the SD’s embassy informant, Erich Gardemann, but cleared Frau von Stohrer of misconduct.
Once completed, Lorenz was sent to Trieste to supervise propaganda broadcasts for Radio Littoral Adriatico, and in April 1944 transferred to Paris to edit war reporting. As the Allies approached, following D-Day, Lorenz’s unit was evacuated to Chaumont-Gistoux, near Brussels, and he decided to desert. As he was found in civilian clothes, and had been an SD agent of long standing, he was not treated as a PoW but as an enemy spy and, after his arrest in September, was sent for interrogation to Camp 020, where he arrived on 1 October and was judged to be a man of exceptional ability with a very good memory for detail.
Lorenz willingly disclosed a huge amount about the Ribbentrop Dienstelle, the composition of the RHSA, the many SD personalities he had encountered, and described the Foreign Ministry’s highly secret cipher organisation, the Reichsforschungamt, led by a Professor Diettmar.
In April 1945 he was nearly released to the Political Warfare Executive as a contributor to German language programmes that were transmitted as part of a black propaganda campaign intended to undermine enemy morale, but Tom Sefton Delmer changed his mind. Lorenz remained at Camp 020 until the end of August 1945, when he was flown from Hendon accompanied by Alfred Naujocks, Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Wilhelm Kuebart to Nuremburg, where they were handed over to US Army custody to be questioned about war crimes by John Waldron, the US chief prosecutor.
The reason for PWE’s change of heart appears to have been a reluctance to take on new ‘talent’ in the closing stages of the war in Europe, but there was also a lingering doubt avout Lorenz’s motives. He claimed that he had intended to make his way back to Paris and surrender to the Allies, but some suspected that he had hoped to lie low for a period and then quietly return home. In those circumstances there remained an element of risk in giving him his liberty at Woburn, and MI5 was not prepared to guarantee that Lorenz was fully and genuinely committed to the Allied cause. In these circumstances, and with an official request to hear his testimony regarding atrocities on the Russian front, the expedient adopted by MI5 was to turn him over to the Americans.
* * *
BRONX was Elvira Chaudoir, the daughter of the Peruvian ambassador in Vichy. She was well connected in London social circles and communicated with the enemy via secret writing, having been recruited by the Abwehr in October 1942. She played a significant role in the D-Day deception scheme intended to draw attention to Bordeaux as a possible site for an Allied landing in 1944, and continued to send letters containing secret writing under the supervision of MI5’s Hugh Astor, until the end of hostilities.
21
12 DECEMBER 1944
MI5’s twentieth monthly report introduced a double-agent GELATINE, but concentrated on two Abwehr agents in the Netherlands, Cornelis Verloop and Antonie Damen, who under interrogation compromised a third, Christiaan Lindemanns, a man hitherto considered a hero of the resistance. Also captured and questioned was a Sicherheitsdienst officer, Alfred Naujocks, who would acquire considerable notoriety, and a Russian, Elie Golenko, was had been employed by the Abwehr in Paris.
NOVEMBER 1944
An interesting case has recently arisen which indicates with what skill the Germans had succeeded in penetrating resistance movements and Allied escape organisations. A Dutch subject named Cornelis Verloop was sent by the German Secret Service through the Allied lines in Holland to make contact with another agent, Antonie
Damen, who had, in fact, already fallen into our hands and under interrogation had denounced Verloop as a German spy. The latter was arrested and, when questioned, produced the somewhat startling statement that a man named Chris Lindemanns (known in Dutch circles as KING KONG) who had been appointed by Prince Bernhard as liaison officer with the Dutch Forces of the Interior, was also a German spy. Lindemanns was in his turn arrested and despatched for treatment at our special interrogation centre in England. He has now admitted that he has worked for the Germans since the spring of this year and was particularly active in naming an escape route from Holland through Paris.
From the knowledge gained in this work he denounced some forty Allied agents and members of the Dutch Resistance, who were as a result arrested by the Germans. He was in Antwerp when the Allied force arrived, and then obtained his post on Prince Bernhard’s staff. In the middle of September he crossed the enemy lines on behalf of the Allies and went to Eindhoven, where he contacted members of the Dutch Resistance Movement. After his return he was engaged in seeing off Allied agents who were to carry out missions behind the German lines. He has now admitted that, when in Eindhoven, he betrayed to the Germans the names of those directing the enterprise which he was carrying out for the Allies. He has denied giving operational information to the Germans, but there is reason to believe from Most Secret Sources that, before the arrival of the Allies in Brussels, he in fact passed to the enemy operational information which he had obtained from Resistance leaders. Verloop, Damen and Lindemanns have provided us with a very considerable amount of information about the organisation and personnel of the German Secret Service in Holland.
Another recent capture, Alfred Naujocks, a German spy, was arrested while trying to cross the Allied lines. He claimed to be an emissary of an Austrian underground movement but, from his interrogation, it appeared that he had a long history with the German Secret Service and was a personal friend of Heydrich. He has admitted that he was entrusted with three important missions. The first was to kill Otto Strasser in Prague in 1934, in which he failed; the second, given him by Heydrich, was to liquidate a secret W/T transmitter broadcasting anti-Hitler propaganda in Czechoslovakia in 1938; in this case he succeeded in murdering the operator. The third was in August 1939 when he took a considerable part in the creation of Polish frontier incidents.