The procurement bodies of the German Bureau also evaluated photographs and films in detail, a source of information that carried no risks with it and provided an unexpectedly large amount of useful material, especially after Germany’s invasion of Russia in summer 1941. Even though the battlefields in the east were very far away, it was possible to collect reliable information on the arrangement of the German Army and smaller units in their areas of deployment. By systematically analyzing photographs in the press and clips from weekly shows, the German Bureau obtained conclusive evidence about the structure, organization, and operations of parts of the German Armed Forces. By fall 1941, every film that was distributed in Switzerland was examined; and individual shots were enlarged, copied, and combined into photo albums that served to document the equipment, tactics, and technology of foreign armies.68
The “very surprising and important findings”69 that resulted from this evaluation of photographs and films by the German Bureau caused Army Intelligence to create a special Bureau for Technical Studies, which was integrated into the German Bureau and was headed by Captain Paul Schaufelberger.70 It was put in charge of collecting and evaluating information, particularly through pictures, on weapons and equipment used by the belligerent armies. To Masson, some of the official German films yielded “such interesting and up-to-date information” that he commented, in a secret report to the Chief of the General Staff: “The possibilities that this source of information offered were one of the surprises of this war. It seems that up until the end, neither [warring] party realized how much explosive information [their films] contained. The films of both [the Axis powers and the Allies] were real treasure troves all the way until the armistice was concluded in the West.”71
The fact that no agent structure existed in Germany at the beginning of the war initially made it “tremendously difficult”72 for N.S.1 to accomplish its task. Waibel reported, “In an effort to register all travelers crossing the border with Germany73 and record their stories and observations, immigration forms were created that served to collect information on military, political, and economic issues.”74 On these forms, the travelers75 indicated their itineraries, which allowed Army Intelligence to narrow down the interview process to persons arriving from interesting areas. A carbon copy of the form was sent to the Attorney General’s Office right away,76 and the original was submitted to Army Intelligence. The responsible Head of Bureau77 then forwarded it to the outpost that was to conduct an interview with the traveler. The form was presented to the traveler at the beginning of the interview and sent back to the Bureau together with the interview report. When it was deemed unnecessary to question the traveler a second time, the Bureau destroyed the form.
The other Bureaus took over this simple, plausible procurement method; however, the procedure gave rise to some serious disputes, and it took some time for the immigration forms to be used consistently at all border checkpoints because not all involved bodies seemed to realize right away how important this source of information was. The Swiss Federal Railways refused to offer the officials free train tickets on the southern stretch of the Gotthard route; Army Intelligence consequently had to purchase monthly passes for them.78 It was not until mid-1942 that Intelligence reported that the procedure was being “routinely applied without much trouble in cooperation with the Police Section and cantonal police authorities.” Nevertheless, it added, “Our diplomats and overly fearful Swiss living abroad are regularly up in arms about Swiss immigrants being questioned.”79 Army Intelligence countered these complaints by pointing out that Germans were authorized to leave their home country for Switzerland only after receiving orders from German Intelligence. It said that German Intelligence actually went as far as using threats to force Swiss living in Germany who asked for a German emigration visa in order to temporarily return home, to spy for the Abwehr.80
As soon as a dense network of agents and informants was set up, the interviews with travelers became less important. Due to the decreasing number of travelers and the lower percentage of people arriving at the Swiss border who were interviewed (at first the rate dropped to 10 percent of immigrants, toward the end of the war to as little as 5 percent),81 “luckily the constant complaints by [Swiss] representatives abroad to the Department of Foreign Affairs ceased.”82
Foreign military personnel who arrived in Switzerland were questioned by a group of specially trained officers at N.S.1. However, the pilots of both warring parties who entered Swiss territory because of emergency landings were not very talkative. Army Intelligence reported: “The task was rendered far more difficult because the German pilots were disciplined and kept silent. Nevertheless, the results were satisfactory.”83 At the end of 1942, Group Id chivalrously acknowledged that Allied soldiers had the same attitude, stating: “We would like to commend the members of the English Armed Forces, especially its air force pilots, for their exemplary, unforthcoming attitude during interrogations. With a few exceptions, they refuse to answer questions even about trivial issues.”84
On certain occasions, especially when larger units entered the country at the time the Fascists were ousted in Italy, during the battle at the threshold of Burgundy and in Alsace, and during the advance of the French 1st Army in southern Germany, Swiss Intelligence undertook large-scale efforts to question soldiers; virtually the entire staff of the outposts was involved in these operations. These efforts usually paid off, as the information supplied by the internees made it possible to verify a large number of the agency reports and messages by informants as well as to update and obtain additional details about the composition of the German Army and Air Force. In retrospect, Waibel considered the results to be “extremely satisfactory.”85 Intelligence also collected valuable information through the documents and papers that deserters and internees carried with them. The identification cards and papers of members of the German Armed Forces were invaluable for Switzerland’s agents; they were particularly useful for a connection of the Pfalz sub-office that was operating in southern Germany.
In Switzerland, the interrogation of deserters and internees was equivalent to the interrogation of prisoners of war in the belligerent countries. Rigi quickly realized how much meaningful information it could gather through that channel and deliberately expanded its activities in that area. The results were especially good when the interrogations were conducted over an extended period of time and the interrogated persons were able to take their time thinking about what they knew. Waibel explained that “with a few exceptions, [they] were eager to supply information.”86 In order to create favorable conditions on the psychological level, at Waibel’s initiative a special camp called “Felsberg” was set up for internees in Lucerne. In summer 1940, interned pilots were sent there. Waibel later extended the camp and transferred it to Dietschiberg. Some internees spent a few days at the camp, others several weeks. Officers and other persons whom N.S.1 expected to provide very valuable information because they had been in high-ranking positions in Germany were lodged in guarded rooms in the west wing of the Schweizerhof hotel.87
Over the course of time, Waibel became aware that 80 percent of the quality of any interrogation depended on the quality of the interviewer, and only 20 percent depended on the interrogated person.88
Outposts of Procurement Office 1
Even though, initially, many parties strictly opposed the immigration forms,89 Procurement Office 1 soon received more than 300 forms a day for processing. However, the existing setup did not allow N.S.1 to interview the most important immigrants while their observations were still fresh in mind. In an effort to solve that problem, Waibel came up with the idea of decentralizing the interviewing process. In close cooperation with several cantonal Political Police departments, he started creating a number of sub-offices.90 It soon turned out that sub-offices were also interesting for economic reasons; Waibel observed, “The more restrictions there are on gasoline consumption, the more difficult it becomes to travel, making it clear that regional offices are necessary.”91
The first outpost that was created was the Pfalz sub-office in Basel; it turned into the largest sub-office of Army Intelligence and was headed by Captain Emil Häberli, the Chief of the Political Section of the Basel Police Department.92 Its main tasks consisted of interviewing immigrants, establishing, and making use of, contacts with persons who had connections abroad (which was not very difficult in that border city), procuring intelligence through agents, utilizing its relations with the police for the military, and providing technical assistance to other offices of Army Intelligence by using Häberli’s position on the police force.93
The internal structure of the Pfalz outpost was changed on several occasions; by fall 1942, the number of interviews and interrogations began to drop, whereas the activities involving agents were on the rise. There were several reasons for the decrease in the number of interviews: first of all, Swiss citizens had difficulties obtaining a visa to travel abroad; second, travelers inside Germany were generally allowed to use only the main railroads; and third, because secrecy was enforced more rigorously, travelers in the Third Reich found out “hardly anything anymore about military matters.”94 In order to make up for the lack of information collected from travelers, the operations involving agents had to be expanded and intensified.95 In fact, by that time agents were practically the only means through which information could be procured from southern Germany. A number of successful channels went through the Pfalz sub-office, including four major long-term connections: “Viking,” “L,”96 and two connections to southern Germany.97 Häberli never revealed all the links of a connection to his staff, explaining, “For security reasons, our work was organized according to the principle that there should be only one contact person per agent.”98
Like other Intelligence offices, Pfalz realized that only permanent staff who had been trained could work effectively.99 Their capabilities were more important than their rank in the military. The procurement outpost in Basel was very successful with a highly heterogeneous team, which included one banker, one senior judge, two homemakers, one industrialist, two journalists, one museum curator, three lawyers, one female singer, one state attorney, one student, and one typesetter.100 The staff at Pfalz felt like a team not because they belonged to the same military unit but because they all vehemently opposed National Socialism “in one way or another, depending on their connections with Germany.”101 Moreover, one of the former staff members recalls, “Häberli did not make his presence felt as head of office. He observed his staff very closely, but apart from that he did not get involved in everyone’s day-to-day activities. Once he accepted a staff member, that staff member had a lot of leeway, and Häberli backed his or her actions as a matter of principle.”102
Other outposts were created based on the example of the Pfalz sub-office. In Schaffhausen, the Salm outpost was established. Its head, Captain Strauss, continued working as an engineer while directing the sub-office, and he “successfully set up and organized the entire intelligence network in the canton of Schaffhausen.”103 The outpost was located in suite no. 23 of the Bahnhof hotel in Schaffhausen. Together with the Speer outpost, it was in charge of getting the agents of one of the connections of the Pfalz sub-office into and out of southern Germany. In addition, Salm established its own connection, “Philipp,” with the German Legation in Bern.104
Pfalz and Salm also gathered valuable information from people living in one country and working in another. Moreover, they worked closely with the border patrols and the command post of the city of Basel and border regiment 53, respectively. During times of increased activities in the border area, very good results were obtained by observing road traffic and railroad traffic from specific observation points in Switzerland. At particularly important places, railroad traffic was monitored continuously during the day by taking photographs. These photos yielded interesting information, complementing, or sometimes actually contradicting, eyewitness accounts from military personnel. Shortly after the beginning of the war, Waibel realized that the monitors at the border did not supply very systematic reports and provided imprecise and unreliable information concerning troops because they lacked training.105 Hence, he had the idea of systematically photographing German military trains with Leica zoom lenses in order to get a clear picture of the movements along the Rhine and the Wutach River. After a relatively short period of time, Waibel was pleased to report, “Considering their possibilities, the border patrols have been doing a very good job.”106
In Zürich, Army Intelligence established the Uto outpost. In 1943, Captain Meyer-Schwertenbach was assigned to this sub-office; he “was exclusively in charge of communicating with the [Zürich] city police and was working directly with Colonel-Brigadier Masson.”107
In St. Gallen, the Speer outpost worked with approximately 30-35 agents, most of whom were German railway and customs officials. Other agents included German business people, persons crossing the border several times a month, and business people living in the Rhine Valley south of Lake Constance. The agents transmitted their information to main agents, who in turn passed the information on to communication offices in St. Margrethen and Buchs. The communication offices wrote daily reports to the outpost in St. Gallen for processing, except for important information, which they communicated by telephone. The intelligence activities of the Speer outpost covered the regions of Allgäu, Vorarlberg, and Tyrol, including the garrisons of Bregenz, Landeck, Innsbruck, Feldkirch, Lindau, and Kempten. In addition, Speer monitored railroad traffic across the Arlberg and the Brenner mountains.
Speer was headed by Konrad Lienert, the commander of the St. Gallen cantonal police. Overall, this was a satisfactory solution, even though after three years of experience Lienert was self-critical, remarking, “We are not perfectly pleased with our intelligence service because we have to rely on too many coincidences and have great difficulties procuring the information we absolutely need. Time after time we notice that intelligence activities failed to be organized during times of peace; this handicap is hard to overcome now.”108
By working with the political departments of the St. Gallen cantonal and city police, the passport offices in St. Margrethen and Buchs, police stations in the Rhine Valley, and border patrols, Speer was able to create a dense intelligence network and interview immigrants and refugees within a short period of time. The four staff members who took turns manning the outpost in teams of two were Corporals Rusch and Hedinger, Private 1st Class Kunz, and Auxiliary Service Member Keller. Lienert described his staff as “reliable and industrious.”109 Indeed, they were industrious, as can be seen from the amount of work they did. From September 1942 to December 1943, Speer interviewed 323 Swiss returning from abroad, interrogated 77 deserters and 30 civilian and military refugees, and received, processed, and forwarded 249 reports by agents, as well as an incalculable number of messages concerning positions of foreign units, police reports, and other documents.110
In early January 1941, the Nell sub-office started operating in Lugano under its original cover name “Baro.”111 Its head was Captain Guido Bustelli, a Ph.D. in law who showed a lot of initiative. In May 1941, he succeeded in stationing an agent in Milan who continuously reported on the military, economic, political, and social situation in Italy. The observer worked very well, but for personal reasons112 he was forced to return to Switzerland as early as August 1941. The head of the Italian Bureau remarked, “Hence, we lost our best agent in Italy, [adding] since we have no network of informants in Italy, we have to get the most out of the accounts by travelers returning from Italy, newspapers, agency communiqués, tapped telephone conversations, intercepted radio communications, and censored letters and telegrams.”113 The lack of a network of agents in Italy was all the more noticeable as the outpost in Lugano was able to procure only a very limited amount of military-related information through other means, and, with a few exceptions, that information was rather imprecise.114 Moreover, with the exception of the immediate border area, it was almost impossible to verify the information.115 Intelligence activities in Italy were limited to contacts with Swiss living there. In the course of the war, Bustelli managed to set up a network of close to 300 informants who directly or indirectly cooperated with Nell.116
By the end of wartime duty, the German Bureau/Axis Section had set up the following additional outposts:
The outposts in Brig, Lugano, and Samaden did not report to the same bureau throughout the war. They used their own means for procuring intelligence, sending agents to Italy, observing the border area with binoculars, and evaluating the local press.
Hence, in the course of the first months of wartime duty, a far-reaching intelligence network was created, “frequently in spite of a lot of red tape and resistance by certain people.”117 It collected military and political information from the Axis powers, supplying Alfred Ernst with valuable clues for assessing the events of the war.
Informants and Agents
The most productive way of procuring intelligence was through informants and agents. Eberhard reflected: “Relations with informants in Germany were particularly valuable. Some of them were in key positions. It was not possible to buy or bribe these informants because people in Germany who had a certain status refused to take bribes; moreover, we did not have the means for paying bribes.”118 Swiss Intelligence was lucky to find people who were willing to cooperate with it for ideological reasons.119 Eberhard explained, “In particular, we recruited some senior officers from the former Austrian armed forces who remained Austrian after being incorporated into the German Army and had obligations toward Switzerland.”120 In view of the increasingly short supply of consumer goods in Germany, small favors were more important than money. By the end of the war, people who could not have been tempted at all by money were ready to render considerable services in exchange for some coffee or tobacco. However, Eberhard remarked, “In some cases, the responsible Swiss customs authorities lacked understanding.”121
From the point of view of intelligence, the quality of any information that is received randomly is inferior to information that has been specifically requested, even if its content may be of some importance. Evaluating random information is subject to far more discretionary powers than evaluating messages answering specific questions. The interviews with civilians arriving from abroad revealed a lot of interesting details. However, since this information was unpredictable and could not be scheduled to arrive at any particular time, it could only serve to confirm facts that were already known. (Nevertheless, this information was obviously quite useful because, as a matter of principle, any intelligence service has to try to confirm or invalidate information by collecting additional information.)122
Information that is procured on a regular basis about specific geographic areas or specific subject matters is the most reliable and most profitable information for the evaluation bodies. The only way to obtain such information is by using agents. Hence, agents are indispensable for any intelligence service. In a report in which he talked about the experiences of the Allied Section, Cuénoud remarked, “There are many sources of information, but with the exception of the service provided by agents, only few offer a regular and steady output.”123 In his final report on the activities of the Allied Section during wartime duty, Cuénoud pointed out, “Contrary to what a layperson might believe, we owe more than 75 percent of the reports that we obtained to our agents who had been recruited, trained, and briefed under very difficult conditions and in delicate situations.”124
According to one activity report, it was due to agents that Swiss Intelligence was able “to register and report in time the different stages of the German Reich’s military and political preparations for its campaign against the Soviet Union. Our reports were merely confirmed when the war started. At the same time, it was possible to obtain unambiguous information about the movements [of troops] near our borders. This information was the basis for the Army Command’s decision to drastically reduce the number of troops on duty.”125
The fact that Swiss Intelligence had to pay attention to the war against the Soviet Union was due to the long-distance motorized and airborne operations that became possible in the course of World War II. As a consequence, it had to extend the area that it monitored beyond the 100-or 200-kilometer-wide corridor along the country’s border that had been considered sufficiently large at the beginning of the war. Masson observed, “Even small, seemingly insignificant details had to be reported in order to be able to register any indication of military operations being prepared against our country far away from the usual area of deployment, or to recognize in time that the direction of a military operation had changed.”126 The procurement of intelligence from distant places was intensified above all in 1941 as German operations spread through the Mediterranean and European Russia.
In retrospect, one can say that the performance by agents met expectations and was generally satisfactory.127 Masson added: “[We] were pleased to note that the attitude of the authorities, in particular the Department of Foreign Affairs, did justice to the valuable work that was done by the agents. They willingly and persistently intervened on behalf of members of Army Intelligence who had been imprisoned or even been sentenced to death.128 In most cases, the interventions were successful.”129 Nevertheless, Swiss Army Intelligence lost a total of 48 agents who were verified as killed in the line of duty—31 of them were sentenced to death and executed, 11 died while in prison, and 6 died as a result of accidents.130
Seven of the 48 killed agents were Swiss. During the course of the war, Cuénoud gained the impression that Swiss citizens were generally unfit to work as agents abroad, saying, “It seems to me that Swiss personnel have only a few of the qualities that are required to be a first-rate agent.”131 He expected agents to be “active, wily, alert, daring, cunning, and at the same time honest,”132 a profile that was obviously not easy to fill. Cuénoud knew what he was talking about; during World War II, the Allied Section, which he headed, used a total of more than 1,500 agents.
In spite of the evident risks that were associated with using informants and agents abroad, at the end of wartime duty, Waibel had to acknowledge, “This activity is indispensable for intelligence; it cannot be replaced by anything else.”133 As illustrated by two incidents that occurred in 1940 and that are described below, Procurement Office 1 repeatedly received very valuable information exclusively through agents and informants. Their information turned out to be accurate even though it contradicted the information obtained through Swiss military attachés and other sources that always had a substantial influence on the official opinion.
In mid-March 1940, Rigi was informed through one of its channels that Germany’s first operation in the West would be directed against Norway and Denmark, not against France, and that the operation would be launched in the first half of April. This information contradicted all other reports, making even the Army Command very skeptical about its reliability. As we now know, the information was accurate.
Shortly afterward, on May 1, 1940, Procurement Office 1 was told by the same excellent connection that Germany would launch its campaign in the West “within the coming two weeks”134 and that the attack would be so concentrated and fierce that Germany would subjugate Western Europe within two months. The connection reported that this attack would not affect Switzerland; instead, the bulk of the operation would be conducted on the right wing. Waibel explained, “Due to a special code system, our informant was in constant contact with us over an extended period of time. On the so-called ‘critical day of May 14,’ [1940] he assured us that no operation whatsoever was planned against Switzerland.”135
Rigi received the same reassuring information through one of Waibel’s other informants in Italy who was in close contact with an important Italian personality and sent daily reports to Lucerne. In addition, on the critical day of May 14, when the Swiss Army fully expected to be attacked, another informant of Procurement Office 1 went on a secret reconnaissance mission in the area of Constance, Donaueschingen, Villingen, Tuttlingen, Sigmaringen, and St. Margrethen; he reported that he had noticed no military activities whatsoever in that area, beyond the normal operations at the level of the garrisons. There were no transports, nor did anyone make preparations for taking any military action.
These pieces of information by first-rate informants contrasted sharply with the general opinion about the situation, and above all they contradicted the numerous German and Allied inverted signals that had been leaked into Switzerland through various channels. Waibel commented, “Hence, toward mid-May [1940], strangely, in Worb136 archives were being burnt, whereas the command post of N.S.1 in Lucerne considered the situation as absolutely calm.”137
Throughout the remainder of the war, agents continued providing Swiss Intelligence with important information that could not have been procured in any other fashion. Between the fall of 1944 and early 1945, due to its agents, N.S.1 knew for certain that no sizable combat units were stationed in the Black Forest nor in any other area in southern Germany. This information clearly contradicted other reports received by Army Intelligence according to which Germany was withdrawing major units to a hedgehog position in southern Germany. Based on the reports by his agents, Waibel tirelessly pointed out that southern Germany was manned by a strikingly low number of troops.
Overall, Waibel commented about his sources of information: “We had a relatively large number of good connections all the way to the Führer’s headquarters and the Reich War Ministry. Some of them were actually outstanding. However, this does not mean that we found out everything that happened there; nevertheless, we [received] a lot of very valuable information in time.”138