Or maybe they really were just that stupid? "Germany sent 12 Nazi spies to Britain in September 1940 to gather information ahead of Hitler's planned invasion. But most of the agents who arrived as part of Operation Lena were arrested without having come close to completing their mission 'because of their own stupidity', according to official records. One was arrested when he tried to order cider at 10am - not knowing that he could not be served before lunchtime during the war - while another two were spotted cycling on the wrong side of the road. Their cover was blown when police officers discovered Nivea hand cream and German sausages in their bags. The reason why Germany, known for meticulously-prepared spies, sent such incompetent agents on one of the most important missions of the second world war has remained a mystery. Now historian Monika Siedentopf suggests that the botched mission, part of Operation Sealion - the code name given to Germany's plan to invade - was not a sign of German ineptness but an act of sabotage by anti-Hitler officials. In her book Operation Sealion: Resistance inside the Secret Service, published this summer, Siedentopf traces the mission to a circle of people around Herbert Wichmann, the officer in charge of the Hamburg intelligence unit - one of Nazi Germany's top secret service posts. Wichmann had close ties to spy chief Wilhelm Canaris and to the Stauffenberg group which planned to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. MI5 described Wichmann and his group as 'good Germans, but bad Nazis'." http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2732513/Ordering-cider-10am-cycling-wrong-road-German-sausages-luggage-Were-stupid-Nazi-spies-sent-Britain-war-act-sabotage-anti-Hitler-officials.html#ixzz3BF65tWyH
Awfully thin Gordon. Is it not far more plausible to conclude that the spies were caught quickly and easily due to not enough time to prepare these men before the invasion? The linking of them and Stauffenberg is particularly weak since he was still a loyal officer at this point.
It's pretty old news that Canaris and the Abwehr was working against the Reich on a lot of levels. This was just another one.
I prefer to think they were underprepared. That is in addition to their "stupidity". Plus, the British were alert for anyone who was different. These twelve certainly fit that description.
Aye, fair points. The UK was incredibly insular at this time, there are examples of people being denounced as "spies" because they didn't have the local accent. Lack of preparedness and general stupidity would have played a part too, of course...
The thing is that this book, which I concede I have not read but I have read more than one claiming to expose some new conspiracy, ignores the simple explanation to all this. The final decision would be Hitler's and the efforts of a handful of spies would not stop it. The Luftwaffe was tasked with a job it was not suited for, the Kreigsmarine, had the invasion been launched, would have had a even more impossible task to complete. Both were professional's in their area's, yet the fact that German Military Intelligence was equally unsuccessful in a spur of the moment effort to make this longest of long shots, can be better explained without trying to string together six degrees of separation between Canaris and these unfortunate men. It also ignores the proven success Great Britain had in countering other German intelligence penetrations. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Which is more than questionable: in fact,this is a post war invention when Germany was searching desperately for good Germans .
Other point is that while the German Humint in Britain was worthless, the British Humint in Germany was not much better .I doubt also that the Japanese,US and even Soviet Humint were very good, even good .
German spies were also caught right away by the FBI in America. A few were seen by a horseback-coast guard when they were burying supplies on Long Island and they tried to bribe him. Didn't work. Another set were busted when the FBI had hidden cameras in their hotel room. I believe 6 out of 8 got the chair. J. Edgar Hoover wasn't afraid to use some Gestapo tactics either. secret audio and video taps, ruthless undercover-spying, but no torture.
Reading Schellenberg's memoirs, it seems as though many German spies were unprepared and sloppy in their first encounters on foreign soil. They eventually became an experienced organization which turned out to be somewhat successful. According to him, grain of salt I know, after the initial stages of invasion planning and the pitfalls outweighed, most attention by the Intelligence Services focused on the Soviets.
Off topic-ish but, in regard to Abwehr Agents, I remember reading somewhere that the Gehlen Bureau received messages until the 1950s from agents who were dropped into the USSR or left behind, during WW2. There was also the suggestion that small groups of German soldiers, left far behind the front lines by Operation Bagration, also lived in the Russian forests for some time after the end of the war. The information was vague and I cannot remember where I read it. Perhaps it was in 'Kommando' by James Lucas.
They've got that story slightly wrong. The woman's suspiocions were first raised by him ordering "champagne cider" - having seen an old enamel sign on the wall of the pub - but it hadn't been made since 1936...which of course a local tippler would know As for the time aspect - with upwards of a third of the population of South-East England vanishing to other parts of the island for a "long holiday" in the summer of 1940, I doubt she'd have turned away ANY paying customer at any time of the day just then...as long as she knew the local constable wasn't going to be cycling by... There were some quite large German formations got stuck behind Soviet lines as of May 1945; some were active for another ten years...! Often referred to as a "resistance", they soon degenerated into subsistence brigandage, though, as their "resistance" became raiding convoys and barracks for food and ammunition The classic case of what happens to an insurgency that doesn't have outside support, funding, networking and somewhere to evacuate to if necessary... One of THE big failures of the Cold War was that the West didn't really even attempt to support any of them...but they were happy to cooperate with Gehlen's "Organization"... To return to the topic in hand... A good half of the "spies" don't seem to have been spies in the classic sense; they were simply put ashore with a very limited remit for gathering local information. IIRC two separate parties were put ashore with basic rations and a radio and code book and just told to report on movements. We do the same today - but use Special Forces for the job, not intelligence assets. In effect just a "forward landing party"... Just - in their case the invasion didn't follow!
The Soviets had at least one and possibly two rings in Germany that worked well. One Rote Capelle was discovered, but the other one has never been confirmed.
But, if 70 years later, we look at the hard facts, the plain truth is that the informations from the Rote Kapelle did not help much the Soviets .Rote Kapelle was a spy network in the Air Ministry,which worked only for a short time,ad most informations it gave were meaningless and insignificant trivialities.
