Each Abwehr station throughout Germany was based on the local army district (Wehrkreis); more offices opened in amenable neutral countries and (as the greater Reich expanded) in the occupied territories.

[12] Proving himself quite a capable chief, Patzig swiftly assured the military of his intentions and worked to earn their respect; he established good connections with the Lithuanian clandestine service against the Soviets, forged relations with other foreign agencies—except for Italy, whose cipher he distrusted.

After the Nazis seized power, the Abwehr began sponsoring reconnaissance flights across the border with Poland, under the direction of Patzig, but this led to confrontations with Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS.

Hitler ordered that the German Army staff should be kept in the dark about Stalin's intentions, for fear that they would warn their Soviet counterparts due to their long-standing relations.

Accordingly, special SS teams, accompanied by burglary experts from the criminal police, broke into the secret files of the General Staff and the Abwehr and removed documents related to German-Soviet collaboration.

[20] Before the reorganization of the OKW in 1938, the Abwehr was merely a department within the Reichswehrministerium (Ministry of Armed Forces), and it was not until after Canaris was appointed chief that its numbers increased and it gained some independence.

[26] Before the war began, the Abwehr was fairly active and effective as it built a wide range of contacts; they developed links with the Ukrainians opposed to the Soviet regime, conducted meetings with Indian nationalists working against British rule in India, and established an information-sharing agreement with the Japanese.

[40] Fear over the drastically low levels of available petroleum at the beginning of 1940 prompted activity from the German Foreign Office and the Abwehr in an attempt to ameliorate the problem "by concluding an unprecedented arms-for-oil" deal, brokered to push back the "Anglo-French dominance in the Ploiești oilfield.

Thus the Germans were able to penetrate the Dutch operation and maintained this state of affairs for two years, capturing agents, and sending false intelligence and sabotage reports until the British caught on.

In Bodyguard of Lies Anthony Brown suggests that the British were well aware that the radios were compromised and used this method to feed false information to the Germans regarding the site of the D-Day landings.

[43] Hitler sent Canaris as a special envoy to Madrid during the early summer of 1940 to convince Spain to join in the coming fight against the Allies, for which Gibraltar could have strategic military value.

[47] By the time the reappraisal of the Red Army by German military intelligence occurred in mid-June 1941 (which was about 25 percent higher than previously reported), it was a foregone conclusion that Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union was going to take place.

[50][j] Overestimating their capabilities and trusting their assessments too much, as well as underestimating their enemies (especially the Soviets and the Americans), atop long-standing traditions of unconditional obedience, comprised a historically central weakness in the German system, according to historian Klaus P.

In mid-July 1941, Admiral Canaris ordered Luftwaffe Major Nikolaus Ritter of Abwehr I to form a unit to infiltrate Egypt through the desert to make contact with the Egyptian Army Chief of Staff, el Masri Pasha, but this effort repeatedly failed.

After Ritter was injured and sent away, Almásy took over command and organized the 1942 Operation Salam, which succeeded in transporting two German agents across the Libyan Desert behind enemy lines to Egypt.

[59] The unit included geologists, cartographers, and mineralogists, who were sent into North Africa to study desert topography and assess the terrain for military use, but by November 1942—following the Axis retreat from El Alamein—Sonderkommando Dora along with the Brandenburgers operating in the area, were withdrawn from the Sahara altogether.

From late 1944 until the end of the war, Kiss, who was based out of the intelligence center in Baghdad, provided false information on Soviet and British troop movements in Iraq and Iran to the Abwehr; as directed by his Allied controllers.

For instance, during March 1942, when many Germans still had confidence in their Führer and their army, Canaris saw things differently and told General Friedrich Fromm that there was no way Germany could win the war.

[66] For more than a year and a half, the FBI was able to transmit misleading information via Sebold to German intelligence from a shortwave radio transmitter located on Long Island, NY.

[75][o] Before the invasion of Poland for instance, the Abwehr and SiPo jointly drew up a list of over 60,000 names, people who were to be the targets of Operation Tannenberg, an effort designed to systematically identify and liquidate the Polish elite.

Reprisals against the partisans were carried out under the direction of Major Hans-Wolf Riesen, an Abwehr officer on the Eleventh Army's staff, who oversaw the execution of 1200 civilians, the bulk of whom were Jews.

In January 1944 for example, American statesman Allen Dulles revealed his knowledge of a coalescing resistance against the Nazis, an assemblage of intellectuals from military and government circles; his main contact was Abwehr officer Hans Bernd Gisevius, who was stationed in Zurich as the German Vice Consul.

[92] Dulles communicated with the Abwehr concerning their intrigue against Hitler and even attempted discussions about a separate peace, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt would have none of it, preferring instead a policy of unconditional surrender for the Nazi government.

[97] Likewise, a group of White Russians under General Anton Turkoul [Wikidata] sought asylum in Germany and offered to provide radio intelligence for the Germans and worked with the Abwehr in getting the necessary communication links established.

Careful message trafficking and deception operations by the Soviets allowed them to misdirect the Germans and aided in the strategic surprise they enjoyed against Army Group Center in June 1944.

[100][101] One of those executed was Otto Kiep, an official in the Foreign Office, who had friends in the Abwehr, among whom were Erich Vermehren and his wife, the former Countess Elizabeth von Plettenberg, who were stationed as agents in Istanbul.

[114] During the August and September 1942 engagements in North Africa against Rommel, this Allied capability was a crucial element to Montgomery's success, as British signals intelligence (SIGINT) was superior to that of the Germans.

[118][t] In his book, The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939–1945, historian Max Hastings claims that other than suborning Yugoslav officers ahead of their 1941 emergency mobilization, the Abwehr's espionage operations were "uniformly unsuccessful".

[113] Historian Walter Goerlitz claimed in his 1952 work, History of the German General Staff, 1657–1945, that Canaris and the Abwehr formed the "real center of military opposition to the regime",[120] a view which many others do not share.

[127] Max Hastings makes similar claims about the general nature of totalitarian systems: in Nazi Germany, intelligence assessments required adjustment to fit within the constraints of what Hitler would accept.