British military authorities have seldom realised that an Intelligence system cannot be improvised and requires to be built over a period of time.
General Wavell, 1940
As winter merged into spring in 1945, the powerful Red Army took advantage of inadequate occupation provisions and by late March had occupied most of eastern Austria, including the majority of the province of Styria. It then entered Vienna on 13 April and, in spite of objections from the Western Allies, installed the socialist Karl Renner as head of the provisional Communist government. Further Soviet expansion was halted by US forces occupying the northern provinces while the French moved into the western provinces. The British 6th Armoured Division and 55 FSS advanced into Carinthia from Italy but encountered an immediate problem when Tito’s Partisans claimed the province to be Yugoslavian. However, the formidable presence of HQ V Corps and 78th Division, with its 88 FSS, ended their expansionist aspirations by 20 April.
Eighth Army and Partisan leaders had agreed in March that the northern province of Venezia Giulia would be divided by the Morgan Line into two ‘zones of interest’, with the British assuming control of Trieste and its port facilities to support military operations and the occupation of Austria and Yugoslavia occupying the hinterland and the Istrian Peninsula. But the Partisan 4th Army reneged on 1 May and disrupted the entry into Trieste of the 2nd New Zealand Division, with its attached 407 FSS, until the next day by falsely claiming that a bridge over the River Isonzo had been prepared for demolition, and then accused them of entering the city without permission. As 412 FSS followed the New Zealanders and requisitioned a bank for its HQ, Corporal Douglas Lyle took a call from someone saying in halting English, ‘We know all about you’. He focused on a machine gun post manned by the ‘Jugs’, the Army nickname for the Partisans. Having moved to the harbour, 21 (Port Security) Section was soon fully occupied screening Jewish refugees making their way to Palestine and also preventing arms smuggling.
On Luneburg Heath south of Hamburg, the GHQ Liaison Regiment (usually known as ‘Phantom’) detachment attached to the Twenty-First Army Group Tactical Headquarters intercepted a message that Germany wished to capitulate. On 4 May three German staff cars brought three senior officers and a staff officer to negotiate the surrender of all German troops in Northern Germany, including those facing the Soviets. James Ewart, now a colonel and interpreting for General Montgomery, had played a vital role during the advance from the Ardennes by exploiting intelligence assets and regularly liaising with commanders in contact with the enemy, and thus supplied detailed intelligence assessments. Montgomery demanded unconditional surrender but when the delegation said they would have to refer to Admiral Doenitz, after lunch Montgomery showed them a map showing the extent of the Russian advance. The negotiations continued the next day and then at 6.00pm, Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine, initialled the capitulation of the German forces facing Twenty-First Army Group. One of those who witnessed the signing was Sergeant Kirby, whose Field Security detachment had been tasked to protect and administer the ‘German camp’ set up alongside Army HQ. On 7 May, Kirby accompanied a major instructed to deliver the surrender terms to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the Supreme Commander of the German Army, at Flensburg. They were accompanied by the journalist Chester Wilmot. Unfortunately, they were not expected and when faced with considerable hostility, Kirby insisted that the major wished to see Keitel, who was eventually tracked down and presented with the terms. On the same day, Dr Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Governor of Holland, had been detained by two Royal Welch Fusiliers at a bridge over the Elbe near Hamburg and handed over to Field Security.
During the days after the surrender, Sergeant Kirby was fully occupied escorting German liaison officers and also interviewed an Englishwoman who had remained in Germany throughout the war with her German husband. On 14 May, he escorted two German officers in a German staff car to the Headquarters of Colonel General Johannes Blaskowitz in Hilversum, in Holland, to organize the surrender of his Army Group to the Canadians. Captain Norval Rodgers, the 93 FSO, was given a driver and a jeep and instructed to meet three German officers near Hamburg who would take him to General Gunther Blumentritt to deliver the surrender terms of his disparate Army Group. Landing in Normandy in October 1944, 93 FSS had been given Luneburg as its target town, which it reached with a SAS troop ahead of advancing armoured cars. Among others arrested by the section were Field Marshal Erhard Milch, the half-Jewish Luftwaffe commander, and SS-Colonel Baumgarten, who commanded Hitler’s special train. Over the next two years, the section arrested 1,000 suspects in the Luneburg area. After meeting the German officers, there was an uncertain exchange of who should salute who and then Rodgers was taken to a large country house where, in a convivial atmosphere, Blumentritt agreed that German forces had been outnumbered on the Eastern Front. Four days later, General Eisenhower accepted unconditional surrender from Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff to the German High Command, which then precipitated surrenders to the Soviets in Berlin.
An uneasy calm hovered over a Germany battered by defeat for the second time in twenty-seven years. The transport and communication infrastructure was barely functioning after four years of bombing and in Berlin half the homes were ruined while, in Cologne, it was about three-quarters; 20 million people were homeless. About 17 million people – mainly former prisoners of war, forced labourers and concentration camp detainees – were roaming the country seeking food, shelter and revenge. Many of the surviving German men languishing in prison camps were unable to intervene. Add to the mix a further seven million Germans forced from Poland and five million from East Europe. In the Soviet-occupied zone, one tyranny was replaced by another. In the British occupation zone of Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine/Westphalia, where most rail and road bridges were destroyed or badly damaged, the Controller for one million refugees and 90,000 displaced persons in Westphalia was Lieutenant Colonel Frank Davis. Politically, the Soviet Union demanded that Germany be reduced to a pastoral state while France wanted it relegated to a canton. America was ambivalent. The newly-elected Labour Government of Clement Attlee was tempted to punish and dreamt of closer links with Moscow, but Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin recognized, as had Churchill, that if Stalin was left unchecked, Soviet politics posed a significant threat to global security. He hoped that Germany could form a government and buffer Soviet expansionist ambitions.
Among the liberated prisoners of war were several Intelligence Corps. Several others had died in captivity. Corporal John Coulthard was an Oxford University lecturer and member of 32 (45th Division) FSP when he was captured by a German patrol on 20 May 1940 near Amiens on his motorcycle while trying to find Divisional HQ. Sent to Stalag XA near Thorn in Poland, the camp commandant instructed him to disseminate information from German newspapers broadcasting Allied defeats, which he did but added that it was lies. This earned him a fortnight in solitary. In 1942, the Polish Resistance supplied him and another prisoner with civilian clothes and with Coulthard masquerading as ‘Herr Doktor Neumen’ of Siemens, they travelled in style to Munich and reached the Swiss border where Coulthard bluffed his way across. But his companion was questioned by the frontier policeman and when he returned to help, it was then that their passports were exposed as false. In January 1944 the Polish Resistance helped Coulthard to reach the port of Gydia, where he was recaptured while looking for a Swedish ship. Unfortunately, he died, aged 26 years, near Domitz on the banks of the River Elbe from dysentery and exposure in March 1945 when, in the grip of a very severe winter, the Germans marched 100,000 Allied prisoners away from the Soviet advance.
On 9 September 1944, sixteen of the thirty-seven SOE prisoners, including Captains Hubble, Macalister and Pickersgill, had slowly suffocated hung from hooks in the Buchenwald execution cellar. Yeo-Thomas escaped in 1945 but was recaptured near US lines and ended up in a prison camp full of French where the senior NCO suspected him of being a stool-pigeon. Yeo-Thomas satisfied his suspicion by showing him Hubble’s chess set with its inscription ‘Made in England’. It is now on display in the Imperial War Museum. Their murders were commemorated at Buchenwald in October 2010 by representatives of the Corps. Also attending was one of Captain Hubble’s three daughters. Major Philip Chamier, born in Frankfurt to an Australian father and German mother, was educated in Germany. Commissioned into the Intelligence Corps, he was posted to the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, Cairo, in February 1942 and had joined 102 Military Mission with the Libyan Arab Force before joining MI6. Shortly before the Battle of El Alamein, Private Friedrich Reschke walked into the British lines and, talent-spotted by MI6, was sent to England to be trained as a radio operator to Chamier. During the night of 11 April 1944, they parachuted to near the village of Gründingen, west of Stuttgart; however, their 161 (Special Duties) Squadron Halifax had been spotted and they were arrested. Their papers passed scrutinization but as Chamier boarded a train at Pforzheim, Reschke betrayed him to the station master. Post-war investigations into his fate suggest that he sent messages under duress. Was Reschke an Abwehr agent sent to infiltrate a British intelligence organization or was he a genuine escaper, in which case he was the only German to escape from Great Britain? As Germany began collapsing, MI6 despatched several Corps sergeants of Austrian and German extraction to Germany, of which four were captured and executed. Sergeant Frederick Benson was born of German Jewish parents as Fritz Becker. He escaped to England after his parents were arrested and initially enlisted in the Pioneer Corps. Spotted by MI6, he and a radio operator parachuted into Germany in September 1944 and travelled by train and on foot about 250 miles to reach their operational area. Benson was active for several weeks transmitting information to London before he was tracked down by the Gestapo and killed whilst attempting to escape.
During the advance through Europe, Intelligence Corps (Field) had become highly experienced in organizing arrests and raiding homes, factories, warehouses and shops. Factors influencing counter-intelligence included:
• Identification of espionage. Gestapo documents seized in Kiel listing local communists referred to Klaus Fuchs, who later passed Atom bomb secrets to the Soviets.
• Compilation of personality files/cards on each suspect.
• The need to maintain a network that included an interrogation structure linked to an organization capable of collecting, collating and disseminating information.
• The investigation of the Nazi leadership from the Regional, County, Local Group, Cell Leaders and more than 500,000 Block Leaders. Denunciations were rife, even among former colleagues.
• Removal of Nazi Party members from industry.
• Rectification of Nazi Party injustices.
• The prohibition of the Nazi Party and the replacement of propaganda with a programme of re-education in democracy – denazification.
Some information was given to the Special Allied Airborne Reconnaisance Force, which was tasked to search for and interrogate prominent Germans before being disbanded in May. A subtle division of attitude had emerged between the SS accepting capture with some docility while the Gestapo and SD reckoned that they had bargaining chips of knowledge about the Soviet Union likely to be of value. In some respects this was correct. Eventually, about twenty-two train-loads of documents, some historical and others of considerable scientific importance, were collected. Although Allied counter-intelligence had become proficient in interpreting German pay books and identity documents, collators experienced difficulties in cross-checking information but, as always, luck contributed in the hunt, including the find of a detailed Nazi Party card index that a printer had failed to destroy being seized in the American sector. Nearly ninety per cent of SS records were captured by General George Patton’s troops. Radio Hamburg records recovered from a salt mine by Soviet troops listed staff and contributors, including British and Commonwealth broadcasters. The only record missing was that of William Joyce – ‘Lord Haw Haw’.
After the surrender, several FS sections and FSRDs fanned across the area occupied by the British to ‘pinch points’, such as river and canal bridges, to trap those on their Arrest Lists. Politically isolated, Heinrich Himmler advised his supporters at a meeting in Flensburg on 5 May to disperse and avoid capture by mingling with the armed forces. In the belief that he could negotiate a settlement with the Western Allies and offer the German Army to defeat the Russians, he decided to return to Munich. Gathering several close colleagues, including the chief SS surgeon and his personal physician, the chief of Central Security Department III (Internal Security) and an SS escort, he shaved his moustache and covered his left eye with a black patch. Along with others in his party, he dressed in non-descript civilian clothing and equipped himself with a demobilization certificate dated 3 May 1945 in the name of former ‘Sergeant Heinrich Hinzinger’, of a Special Armoured Company, Secret Field Police. Leaving Flensburg on 10 May, his party of nineteen crossed the Elbe and merged with thousands of German prisoners. By 18 May they had reached a farmhouse near Bremervörde on the banks of the River Oste, where a military Bailey Bridge was the only crossing between Hamburg and Bremen. Supported by the Black Watch, 45 FSS and 1004 FSRD, who were based in a mill, were checking documents. Section HQ was at Zeven, several miles to the south. While Himmler and two escorts, both SS, remained at the farmhouse, in the mid-afternoon the remainder aroused suspicion and were escorted to Sergeant Ken Baisbrown in a mill overlooking the bridge, where they said they had left three sick colleagues at the farm. Giving the impression that everything was in order, Baisbrown sent two lorries to collect their three comrades and then advised Staff-Sergeant John Hogg, of 1003 FSRD, about his suspicions of two men he believed to be Secret Field Police. When Sergeant Arthur Britton checked their documents, he noticed that they all bore the same unit and date stamp. Britton and Baisbrown interrogated the youngest, who admitted that his stamp was from SD headquarters and that he was part of the group. When Hogg returned empty-handed, HQ XXX Corps issued an alert that three wanted Secret Field Police were in the area. That night the suspects were transferred to the Internment Camp 031 at Barnstedt, near Westertimke, that was holding German prisoners and about 600 Indian soldiers who served in the German Army.
After several attempts to cross the river, during the afternoon on 22 May, Himmler and the two SS officers walked through Bremerworde toward the bridge, the two escorts dressed in long green military overcoats whilst Himmler was insignificant in a blue raincoat. Both escorts continuously looked behind them. They were stopped by a patrol in Bremervörde’s main street and were taken to the mill. An unsubstantiated account is that the three were picked up by a patrol, made up of five gunners from 73 Anti-Tank Regiment and three former Russian prisoners from Stalag XB at Meinstedt as they tried to cross a bridge three miles south of Bremervörde. When the camp was liberated, its gates were opened. At the mill, while Sergeant Britton was interviewing the ‘sergeant, he noted that underneath the Wehrmacht stamp of his identity document, there was a trace of the Secret Field Police stamp. He also noted that while ‘Hinzinger’ was not particularly soldierly, he maintained military hierarchy by presenting himself before the two escorts. After Corporal Richard Forrest had searched their belongings, they were taken to a bakery for interrogation and then formally arrested, The three spent the night sleeping on the grain on the first floor of the mill. The three prisoners spent most of the next day in the back of the section lorry as Sergeant Britton and two soldiers first drove them to Zeven where Captain Excell, at the HQ 45 FSS, instructed they should be transferred to the internment camp Westertimke for registration before being allocated a camp.
At about 6.30pm, Sergeant Britton arrived at 031 Civil Interrogation Camp at Kolkhagen Camp on the western side of the village of Barnstedt, south of Lüneburg. The former Governor of Hamburg Kaufman was watching the three prisoners being admitted from an inner compound when the insignificant figure went behind a bush and then emerge as Himmler wearing his pince-nez glasses. When the three then insisted on seeing the camp commandant, Captain Thomas Selvester, he sensed something unusual and, having ordered the two officers to be held under close arrest, was then confronted by the third prisoner admitting that he was Himmler. Somewhat nonplussed, Selvester immediately informed HQ 2nd Army and when Major Rice, an intelligence officer, arrived, he confirmed Himmler’s identity by matching his signature and ordered that he be strip-searched, during which two phials of poison were found. Himmler refused to wear the issue British Battledress because he did not want to be shot in a British uniform but under threat of being transferred to Montgomery’s HQ naked, he dressed in a shirt, shorts and socks and was then taken to a house holding important prisoners in Lüneburg. Next day, Colonel Michael Murphy, 2nd Army’s chief intelligence officer, arrived to take personal charge. Major Norman Whittaker, who commanded the HQ 2nd Army’s Defence Company, witnessed Captain C.J. Wells RAMC carry out a thorough medical examination. Wells noted a small blue capsule between Himmler’s cheek and teeth but as he tried to pluck it out, Himmler bit him, snapped the glass capsule, breathed deeply and was pronounced dead within twelve minutes, again admitting that he was Himmler. Determined that hardline Nazis should not find the body, as had happened when Mussolini and his mistress were shot at Mezzegra near Lake Como and then taken to Milan where they were hung upside down, Whittaker and his CSM Edwin Austin wrapped it in an Army blanket and camouflage net and buried it in an unmarked grave on Lüneburg Heath. When, in early 1946, reports reached the War Office that the body had been found, Whittaker, who had been demobbed and was working for the Control Commission, Germany, checked the gravesite and reported that nothing had been disturbed. The cell in which Himmler had been confined was stripped by souvenir hunters, except for his partly-used tube of shaving cream and razor blades. They are now in the Military Intelligence Museum.
At the same time, the existence of the Flensburg Government was under increasing pressure, in particular by the Soviet Union accusing the Western Allies of colluding with Admiral Doenitz until, on 23 May, General Eisenhower announced that it was to be dismantled. With support from 159 Infantry Brigade, CSM William Henry of 61 (11th Armoured Division) FSS arrested Doenitz at his Naval HQ as a war criminal, and not as a prisoner of war, as the Admiral expected, and transferred him and several others to Brigade Headquarters, much to the annoyance of a US officer sent to confine him to a US warship. In October 1944, 61 FSS had lost Sergeant Harry Wheel shot by a sniper while searching a house in Bree, Belgium. Next day, 61 and 41 (XII Corps) FSS arrested Colonel General Arthur Jodl, Chief of Staff of the German Armed Forces, Major General Eric Dethleffsen, who had served on the General Staff at Hitler’s HQ, Admiral Gerhard Wagner, who had negotiated the German surrender, two Reich ministers and six State Secretaries. However, correspondents and observers from the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force ‘lifted’ wallets and other items of intelligence interest as souvenirs. Doenitz was sentenced to ten years while Jodl was hanged.
On 5 June, the Allied representatives signed the ‘Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany and the Assumption of Supreme Authority by Allied Power’, dividing Germany and Berlin into four Zones. HQ 21st Army Group moved from Brussels to Bad Oeynhausen to administer the British Zone of Occupation of North Rhine/Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein. Headquarters Intelligence Corps (Field) established its offices at Parkstrasse 30. In August, Captain Searle arrived in Germany by train:
The HQ was situated in Bad Oeynhausen, a rather dreary little spa town in the middle of the North German plain, made drearier by the fact that the entire German population had been evacuated from it, and the town contained nothing but troops. The work entailed sorting endless information obtained from German prisoners. (Quadrille With a Raven).
Initially, he was involved in tracking down Gestapo and fifty-five German wanted at large but, when Hitler’s will was apparently discovered, he was put in charge of the inquiries until Major Hugh Trevor-Roper arrived to supervise the work. Searle translated Hitler’s personal and political testament and Goebbels’s will, which had been smuggled from the Bunker in Berlin.
When the 136 FSO, Captain Leo Whitely, learnt that Joachim von Ribbentrop, the former ambassador to London and Nazi Foreign Minister from 1938 until 1945, was in lodgings near Hamburg railway station, he contacted 65 (Special Operations Executive) FSS, which had been specially trained to detain German VIPs, and the Belgian Special Air Service. On 14 June, Lieutenant James Adam, CSM Holland, Sergeant Gibson and the Belgian Sergeant Jacques Goffinet arrested him in his bed. Ironically, Adam had heckled him in a pre-war Nuremberg rally. Von Ribbentrop was executed.
At the beginning of July, an officer and four other ranks from Intelligence Corps (Field) were among the first to collect ‘demob’ suits and join the search for employment as the War Office responded to the dire economic circumstances in Great Britain by beginning to disband its wartime Armed Forces and returning requisitioned properties to their owners. Demobilization was based on age and length of service and soon gathered pace, gaps being filled by existing Intelligence Corps and transferees. The Corps establishment stood at 3,027 officers and 6,585 other ranks. The Interrogation Wing in Cambridge closed and the Intelligence School moved from Matlock to Frensham in Surrey, where it remained for a year before moving again to the former Detailed Interrogation Centre at Wilton Park, Beaconsfield. Wentworth Woodhouse was returned to the Fitzwilliam family and to sorry decline. The HQ and Depot moved to Oudenarde Barracks, Aldershot. When the Officers Mess at Oriel College was returned to Oxford University, it was presented with a commemorative silver cup in return for a silver bonbon dish. A permanent invitation was also extended to the Depot, Officer Commanding to be a member of the College Senior Dining Room for as long as the Corps existed. Brigadier Brian Parritt invoked the invitation when he was Director and chatted with a professor who remembered the exchange and commented that the cup was to ‘celebrate our departure!’ The Corps retained its links with Winchester when General Sir Bernard Paget, the first Colonel Commandant (1943-52), lodged the Second World War Roll of Honour of 214 names housed in an oak lectern in the Cathedral. Ten are badged as Corps of Military Police but are listed as Corps. The golden weather vane ‘Angel of Guildford Cathedral’ was presented by the parents of Corporal Reginald Adgey-Edgar, who died during a road crash in January 1944 while serving with 41 FSS. The onestar appointment of Inspector of Intelligence Establishments was discontinued in September.
When its 2 Commando Brigade detachment rejoined 3 Troop, No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando from Italy, the Troop were transferred to form 346, 347, 348, 349 and 350 FSS and the Commando Interrogation Team, which screened 250,000 prisoners in the camps at Rheinburg and Wickwrath. When the release of forced labourers, liberation of Allied prisoners and confinement of German prisoners meant that agricultural output came to a near halt, several Disbandment Camps administered by a trusted German unit and supervised by Field Security began releasing as many prisoners as possible. Sergeant ‘Anson’ worked with the Field Interrogation Agency (Technical) investigating Nazi scientific and medical experiments. Those attached to Public Safety Branches helped reform the police but found investigating Jews profiting from the black market an easy option to ignore. Others interviewed the directors of Krupps and several major companies for evidence of their involvement in using slave labour. Of the German resistance groups, the most well known, the Wehrwolves, was largely ineffectual. However, activists threw a grenade into the 317 (Airborne) FSS office in Wismar. Some commandos were involved in covert operations. A gang planning to assassinate British soldiers using weapons stored in a cache near Hildesheim were infiltrated by Sergeant Ronnie ‘Gilbert’ who ‘agreed’ to use an Army lorry to move the weapons. As he drove toward a planned checkpoint, the leader pointed a pistol at his head and ordered him to ignore the checkpoint, however, ‘Gilbert’ slipped the clutch causing the vehicle to de-accelerate and enabled the soldiers to catch up. The leader was imprisoned for six years. Under the military law then in force, he could have faced a firing squad.
By the time the Allies met at Potsdam in July 1945 to finalize the post-war peace, relations had worsened since Yalta. In March, Stalin had arrested non-Communist Polish leaders. The new, tough talking US President Truman arrived with the knowledge that US development of the Atom bomb gave America strategic advantage and consequently the Soviets were no longer needed to help defeat Japan. Nevertheless, the Conference agreed to four occupation zones within Germany and Austria. A Russian-speaking FS section provided security cover. Within two months of Potsdam and the British Joint Planning Group drafting Operation Unthinkable of ‘total war … to impose our will upon Russia’, on 25 August, 21st Army Group reformed as the second British Army of the Rhine with the three Corps supporting the British Military Government under command. It was also decided that communications between the four Allied Commanders in Chief should be retained. So, on 16 September, Lieutenant General Brian Robertson, the British Deputy Military Governor, and Colonel General M.S. Malinin, Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Forces, agreed to exchange military liaison missions of eleven officers and twenty NCOs, permitted freedom of travel within their respective zones except in Permanent and Temporary Restricted Areas notified in advance. Also guaranteed were radio and telephone communications and diplomatic immunity. The Soviet Military Mission (SOXMIS) was initially based at Bad Salzuflen until it moved to Bunde when Headquarters British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) and RAF Germany moved to Rheindahlen. The British Military Mission (BRIXMIS) was based in Berlin.
In September, the spa complex near Bad Driburg was requsitioned and, once the haughty Baroness von Oeynhausen had been relocated from her rooms, the School of Military Intelligence was opened to cater for the training of transferees and those involved in intelligence activities on ten-week courses that included principles of intelligence, German administration, socio-political aspects of democracy and cultural trips. Competency in German was obligatory. A female instructor teaching the use of explosive to open safes discouraged flagging concentrations by detonating timer fuses under trestle tables. Two villas in Wilmersdorf, Berlin were requisitioned by 23 (Antwerp Port) and 309 (2nd Army) FSS and were followed by 50 FSS in November. Tasked to target Nazi intelligence services, in the event of a Nazi revival, and Soviet scientific and atomic research and technology, Colonel Stevens moved Advanced Camp 020 from Diest to the spa town of Bad Nenndorf where it became No. 74 Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (Western European Area).
Twice within twenty-five years, the British had gone to war with hastily-raised Intelligence Corps and yet, in spite of their success, the Adjutant-General’s 1943 decision that there was no need for a permanent Intelligence Corps was upheld. At the annual Intelligence Directorate dinner in November 1945, General Templer was pessimistic:
Short Service engagement should be accepted as a stop-gap – a temporary expedient to meet the needs of the moment … It is possible that at some future date the Intelligence Corps will continue only on a reserve or Territorial Army basis’.
On 3 January 1946, the War Office committed to the Intelligence Corps existing as a reserve of about 320 officers and 260 other ranks receiving periodic training at the School of Military Intelligence, by attachments and by filling intelligence appointments on exercises. Staff intelligence appointments would be filled by officers from any arm. That most FS sections were not commanded by Intelligence Corps officers meant the vital esprit de corps developed very slowly, although the Intelligence Corps Comrades Association, which had been formed in October 1941, provided linkages. Its members collected about £1,500 for a Corps Chapel. The word ‘Comrades’ was dropped in 1964. Templer’s remarks were reflected in the January to June 1946 Corps Newsletter:
It is possible that at some future date the Intelligence Corps will exist only on a reserve or TA basis. The terms of service for volunteers and TA will be published in due course. Meanwhile, applications are welcomed from would-be volunteers.
Meanwhile in Germany, Supreme Headquarters, Allied Forces in Europe began a census and rebooted education alongside martial law, curfews and non-fraternization, the latter largely disregarded until it was discontinued by 1946. Supplied with pre-war and wartime demographic and political records, the three Corps Headquarters formed Intelligence Teams of pairs of German-speaking Intelligence Corps from their FS sections to undertake one to two week tours in their sectors to assess public opinion and interview politicians, civil servants and industrialists at all levels. Shortage of transport led to Operation Snatch, in which private cars, including VW Beetles manufactured at the British-controlled Wolfsburg factory, were requisitioned. However, few served their purpose and most were returned to their owners. The teams were issued with Special Authorisation Cards that permitted holders to fraternize, and even shake hands, with Germans; they were still being issued in the 1970s. Others interviewed Germans who had spent the war in neutral countries, which included sailors from the German pocket battleship Graf Spee who had remained in Argentina after it had been scuttled in the River Plate in 1939, and deportees sympathetic to the Allied cause.
Although the Allies had issued the Declaration on the Punishment of War Crimes in November 1943, the development of the British War Crimes Commission was slow. The Judge Advocate General’s War Crimes Investigation Unit established at Bad Oeynhausen was supported by the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, which had been established in Paris in February 1945 with the three lists of the wanted, suspects detained for specific crimes and prisoners of war, but attempts to establish an Anglo-American registry was chaotic because agencies failed to exchange information. The lack of linguists, lawyers and suitable investigators hampered inquiries, as did War Office ambivalence. Nevertheless, Internment Centres were established, such as the ‘Dustbin’ for VIPs near Frankfurt/Main, Werl for German hierarchy and at Fallingbostel and Recklinghausen. The ‘Tomato’ Internment Centre in Minden was used to detain important suspects before transfer to Detailed Interrogation Centres in Great Britain.
The aim of the Counter-Intelligence Bureau set out to suppress and prevent the resurgence of military, Nazi or subversive activity. Organized into the Information Section dealing with analysis and assessment, a Case Work Section dealing with cases arising out of arrest or investigation, and the Postal, Frontier and Travel Control Section, it was expected to co-operate with the Corps in the de-Nazification process and exercise control over the civilian population, using appropriate measures, such as interrogation, the exploitation of informants and travel control. The Russian-speaking Lieutenant Colonel Alan Nightingale heading the Investigation Section later claimed that ‘I had to scrape the barrel and still kick out those I could recruit.’ The Registry was discredited because some suspects had adopted false identities and the Russians were not members although, in May 1946, they relented after Nightingale handed over forty-six officers and guards from Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Eventually, the Allies concentrated on crimes against their nationals with the British executing, between 1946 and 1947, about 200 men convicted of crimes against the British, the Dominions and foreign nationals serving with the British.
The lack of interrogators was partly resolved by drafting German speakers from within the Armed Forces and SOE. Captain Harris Cornish was detached from the London Cage and joined RAF investigations into the murders of the fifty Allied air force officers who had escaped from Stalag Luft 3 in the Great Escape. Arriving in Moscow in 1946 to interview SS-Dr Wilhelm Scharpwinkel, the Breslau Gestapo chief suspected of murder, the Soviets allowed him to take just two statements; nevertheless, he collected previously unknown information that implicated the Kiel Gestapo. Border Police Sergeant Erich Zacharias, sent to London Cage, was described by Colonel Scotland as ‘the most uncivilised, brutal, and morally indecent character in the entire story’. Denounced by his wife and recognized from a mural in a Gestapo night club, he was executed in 1948. Scotland investigating the murders of ninety-eight Royal Norfolks near Calais in 1940 by the SS Totenkopfe Division produced two survivors. When the officer responsible, SS-Captain Fritz Knoechlein arrived at The Cage in October 1946, his complaints of violence, deprivation of sleep and rigorous exercise were formally investigated but failed to delay his execution. MI5 always had concerns about the Cage and when Knoechlein alleged that he had signed a confession under psychological duress, Scotland was accused of repeatedly breaching the Geneva Conventions. He refused a Red Cross inspection in March 1946 on the grounds that war crimes investigations followed judicial protocols rather than the Geneva Conventions. A visit eighteen months later found little evidence of ill-treatment but noted that ten prisoners had been transferred to other camps and some lodging complaints risked reprisals, but no action was taken because its closure was imminent. When in 1950, Scotland submitted his manuscript for this book London Cage, the War Office threatened him with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. It was eventually published seven years later.
Perhaps the one arrest that achieved notoriety was the capture of SS-Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Hoess, the Auschwitz commandant, by 92, 270 and 318 FSS. Evading Soviet forces that had liberated Auschwitz on 27 January, Hoess reached Flensburg. He attended the 5 May meeting chaired by Himmler and melted into the masses of prisoners, masquerading as former Petty Officer ‘Franz Lang’ and then found employment on a farm near the town. Meanwhile, the War Crimes Unit had traced his wife and two sons to a house near Belsen where 92 FSS, commanded by Captain William Cross, arrested her and her eldest son on 6 March 1946. Mrs Hoess despised her husband; nevertheless, for five days she refused to answer the only question that she was asked ‘Where is your husband?’ Cross then offered her the option of writing down his aliases and location or bid farewell to her son, who, he said, was about to be put on board a train bound for the Soviet Union. She chose the former and, that night, the three sections surrounded the farmhouse and arrested Hoess but then treated him to the same humiliations to which his guards had subjected new arrivals at Auswitchz, to the extent that the accompanying RAMC medical officer was sufficiently concerned to advise Cross to ‘call his men off unless he wanted to take back a corpse’. Hoess wrote a lengthy deposition and was eventually executed by the Poles outside his Auschwitz office. Among those involved in his interrogation was Private ‘Jackson’, of 3 Troop, No. 10 (Inter Allied) Commando, whose mother had not survived Auschwitz. With Kramer of Belsen, he is estimated to have managed the extermination of about a million people. During the year, 92 FSS also arrested SS-Captain Hans Bothmann, who was in charge of extermination at Chelmo concentration camp and Birkenau and was also head of SD in Poznań, and SS-Captain Rudolf Georg Renner, who was wanted for war crimes in Denmark. CSM Ryan of 39 (15th (Scottish) Division) FSS in Bad Oldesloe, Schleswig-Holstein, arrested Colonel General Kurt von Zeitler, former Chief of Staff to the German High Command, and removed eight diaries.
Although the risk of infiltration by agents and saboteurs into Northern Ireland from Ireland had been mitigated in 1940 by Northern Ireland Command and the Irish Army conducting joint reconnaissances of possible air and sea landing sites, in 1946 an Intelligence Corps officer interviewed the Abwehr Irish desk officer, Kurt Haller. From him he learnt that a 1935 plan to use Irish saboteurs in southern England to support Operation Sea Lion had foundered when attempts to recruit volunteers from Irish prisoners of war failed. The Detailed Interrogation Centre report concluded:
‘The sorry crew of Irish renegades, though willing to betray Great Britain and each other, were judged to be too unreliable to be sent. On top of that the Abwehr were badly misled in that they took the fantastic day-dreams of the IRA at face value…greatly overrated the strength and ability of the organisation.’
By December, HQ Intelligence Corps (Field) was administering 1,500 men divided into eighty-three sections, twenty Interrogation units, an Army Refugee Interrogation Team, a Counter-Intelligence Bureau and Laboratory, sixteen Area Security Officers and a Dutch Security Liaison Mission. A Belgian Mission had been disbanded in October. The aim of the Counter-Intelligence Bureau was to suppress the resurgence of military, Nazi or subversive activity. Organized into the Information Section dealing with analysis and assessment, a Case Work Section dealing with cases arising out of arrests and investigations and the Postal, Frontier and Travel Control Section, it was expected to co-operate with the Corps in the de-Nazification process and exercise control over the civilian population, using appropriate measures, such as interrogation, the exploitation of informants and travel control. Later additions included three Counter-Sabotage Detachments, Port Security Sections and Border Security Sections. In Bremen, a FS detachment seconded to the US Counter-intelligence Corps vetted displaced persons applying to emigrate to the USA.
Censorship played a key role with 2nd Army Counter-Intelligence Instruction No 4 displayed in every post office, warning that mail would be censored. Two months after the surrender, representatives from Great Britain, Belgium, Denmark and Holland established the Censorship Bureau from GS Intelligence (C), Twenty-First Army Group and HQ British Civil Censorship (Germany) of District Censorship Stations of No. 1 (Belgian) in Bonn, No. 2 (Dutch) at Peine and No. 3 (Danish) and a Radio Traffic Station in Berlin. Each was organized into Policy and Liaison, Postal, Electrical, Information and Records, Military, and Administrative branches. The Belgians withdrew in 1947, the Dutch in April 1949 and the Danes in September 1950; nevertheless, the British retained twenty staff until responsibility for counter-intelligence matters in the British zone passed from the Foreign Office to the War Office in 1951.
Meanwhile, the mammoth task of battlefield clearance was underway throughout Europe. In the spring of 1946, Sergeant Bryan Griffith of 342 (Hamburg) Port Security Section was returning to his billet when there was a massive explosion from the docks. Returning to the docks with a highly agitated German docker, Griffith saw a rusty 5ft cylinder embedded in the wreckage of a smoking building. A Royal Engineer bomb disposal sergeant pronounced the device to be a field cooker but was unable to explain why it had become airborne until the sappers pulled it from the rubble and found it was part of a V-1. During his investigation, Griffith interviewed a former member of the Afrika Korps working at a dump of captured equipment, who told that him that he had been instructed to dismantle V-1s using a blow torch and one had reacted to the heat, had slithered across the grass, briefly took off and then buried itself in a building. The incident later rated six lines in the Daily Express.
The confiscation of about ten per cent of the surviving German industrial infrastructure as reparation and the occupation of several Eastern Europe countries and parts of Finland by the Soviet Union, led to Churchill summarizing the threat in his Sinews of Peace speech of 5 March 1946 at Fulton, Missouri:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.
For forty days, the Allied Military Government in Trieste was unable to intervene while the Yugoslav Secret Police and Italian communists conducted a regime of terror, abduction and summary justice. Nevertheless, the Field Security sections stuck to their Security Plans of tracking down stay-behind agents and arresting those on their wanted lists, which included three generals. As the Italian communists became increasingly intolerant of the brutal behaviour of the Partisans, the sections exploited the split to destabilize ‘spontaneous’ communist demonstrations. On 12 June the Partisans withdrew, allowing the Military Government to re-establish confidence with XIII Corps taking control of Venezia Giulia with 56th Infantry Division and its 35 FSS in Trieste. Meanwhile, 411 FSS moved up to the border with Austria while 412 FSS deployed on counter-intelligence activities against Yugoslav Secret Police stay-behind parties and agents masquerading as businessmen and railway employees. The border with Yugoslavia and the Morgan Line was monitored by 419 FSS, who also liaised closely with 47 (Port Security) Section in Venice. One problem was anti-communist Yugoslavs slipping across the border to kill partisans and distribute propaganda. During August and September, 12 FSS was attached to the US 88th Infantry Division and, in addition to normal FS activities, arbitrated in skirmishes between local partisans, local inhabitants and Allied forces. The arrival of the US Counter-intelligence Corps with their telephone-tapping equipment and eavesdropping technology was a novelty for the sections; it was their Human Intelligence expertise that established credibility with the Americans. When Sergeant Tom Norton found the body of an American signalman murdered while repairing telephone lines and then learnt from an informant that two brothers were responsible, a raid was organized, but an excited American accidentally discharged his pistol and they escaped. The Section submitted recommendations firming up the border between Italy and Yugoslavia and was gratified to learn that their report had been read by Ernest Bevin. The current frontier generally conforms to their recommendations. Meanwhile, 429 FSS vetted Allied Military Government local employees. Also in Trieste were a Postal and Telegraphic Censorship Unit, a forward Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre and No. 5 Special Counter-intelligence Unit for specialist operations. The Venezia Giulia Police Force, supported by Field Security acting as Special Branch, maintained law and order.
Under the February 1947 Italian Peace Treaty, the Free Territory of Trieste was formally demarcated into the Allied Zone A to the north and Yugoslav Zone B to the south. The 5,000-strong British Element of the Trieste Force merged with 5,000 Americans. To simplify intelligence operations, intelligence and security functions were integrated, although Major J.D. Gimblett maintained that it was more ‘duplication than integration’. Nevertheless, it was an early example of integrated Allied counter-intelligence staff. The District Security Office was formed by the amalgamation of 411, 412 and 429 FSS, 21 (Port Security) Section and No. 5 Special Counter-Intelligence Unit. However, when its mail was frequently sent to the Duty Signals Officer, the nomenclature was changed to the Trieste Security Office. Consisting of about fifty-five soldiers, some three-quarters were National Servicemen. The Intelligence Corps lived in flats and were supported by Italian house staff and frequently used weekend leave passes to travel to Naples. In addition to attending an intensive Italian course, most spoke another language. Some Regulars were accompanied by their families. Home leave for the National Servicemen was two weeks every six months and for those returning to Great Britain, this meant a road journey to Villach in Austria and then the relatively comfortable thirty-six-hour ‘Mediterranean Locations’ (Medloc) troop train journey. The train plied to and from the Hook of Holland, passing the relatively untouched meadows and mountains of southern Europe through the wreckage in the centre. Trieste and Italy were welcome changes to the austerity of the UK.
With access to a telephone-tapping system installed by the Italians during the war, activities included counter-intelligence on political parties, the Yugoslav Intelligence Service, neo-Fascists and communists; interrogation of frontier crossers and liberation groups; vetting locally employed civilians; and monitoring the transportation of strategic materials, such as chrome from Albania to communist countries in Eastern Europe. Some NCOs were provided with passes by US Customs that enabled them to search ships. Several low level tasks were conducted for MI6, which was half-mockingly known as the ‘Chinese Laundry’, including searching for the Soviet spies, the two British defectors Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, and liaising with the Italian Intelligence Service. During a disagreement between Italy and Yugoslavia over the status of Trieste, in 1952 Captain Dickie Richards organized the smuggling onto a British ship of a defecting Serbian intelligence officer, his wife and family. During 1953, in spite of the UN declaration that Trieste was to be an independent territory, Italy claimed it, by force if necessary. Major G.D. Gimblett remembers:
I therefore found myself in a tent, for ten days, at the side of the main coast road into Trieste at Duino on the frontier with Italy, accompanied by a company of infantry. My brief was to confront any invading troops from Italy, in Italian, with the words, ‘In the name of General Winterton, Commander of Allied Forces in the Free Territory of Trieste, I forbid you to advance further.’ Presumably I was to leap aside in order to avoid the first tanks rumbling forward!”
During this tense period, NCOs scouted north-eastern Italy in civilian cars and wearing civilian clothes, and collected information on the Italian order of battle. On 8 October, the British and US announcement that their troops would be withdrawn from Trieste led to fury in Yugoslavia, nevertheless, a year later, on 25 November 1954, Major Richards disbanded the Trieste Security Office and instructed three NCOs commanded by Sergeant Leighton-Jones to escort their card index to MI5. They travelled by train.
For the occupation of Austria, Major R.E. Johnson commanding HQ Field Security (Central Mediterranean Forces), based in Bouzarea, Tunisia, had used the Intelligence Corps (Field) model to form the Intelligence Organisation (Austria) of three Area Security Offices, each reporting to a provincial Field Security headquarters. The de-Nazification process was eased by the rejection of the Austrian Nazi Party, an ineffectual Communist Party and the absence of other irritants, such as resistance groups. Security Office A based in the former Gestapo offices in Klagenfurt controlled a Detailed Interrogation Centre and 428 FSS, which had joined 6th Armoured Division on 25 May. Arriving at Wolfsberg on 6 May, 16 FSS took custody of John Amery after he had been captured by Italian partisans at the end of April. Sent to England, he was executed for treason. At Millstatt, 88 FSS had, by the end of August, arrested 531 suspects, including Dr Friedrich Rainer, the Nazi Governor of Carinthia. The Castle housed an interrogation centre. Area Security Office B covered the demarcation with the Soviet Zone through 313 FSS at Leibnitz. Area Security Office C operated from Graz with two Field Security sections in the city, two at Leibnitz, one at Bruch, one at Weitz and 418 FSS at Leben. As was customary in Germany and Austria, when the Army Photography Unit filmed concentration camps, Field Security sections forced local inhabitants to attend showings. Most were deeply shocked but anyone showing dissent was ordered to watch the same films for the rest of the day.
A major problem was that the detention camps were full of displaced people, former prisoners of war displaced by the Soviet occupation of their homelands and concentration camp victims, all surviving in overcrowded and unhealthy conditions that bred personal and political disagreements. This made it easier for Field Security to recruit sources and informants. Searching several compounds for East European agitators, 88 FSS unearthed the pro-Nazi Hungarian League of Former Officers. Austrians detained by the Soviets’ occupation proved useful sources of information on communist internal security techniques and political organization. Some inmates found employment with the Allies as drivers, guards, translators and interpreters and domestic staff. While some detainees wanted repatriation to their homelands, others applied for emigration to such countries as the USA, Canada and Australia and, for the Jews, Palestine.
As part of the post-First World War settlements, the League of Nations gave Great Britain a Mandate over Palestine in the expectation that London would create:
such political, administrative, and economic condition as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home … and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.
But, by 1945, policy contradictions had emerged. Cautious about upsetting the Arabs, London rejected linkages between Palestine and European Jews but, faced by the US Congress determined to support a Jewish state in Palestine, the British had little option but agree an annual quota. But this was rejected by Jewish extremists determined to create a home for displaced and destitute European Jews and they opened a campaign of terrorism in Palestine in October 1945. After terrorists attempted to blow up a ‘MedLoc’ troop train en route to Villach in 1947 as it descended the slope near the Mallnitz Tunnel near Spittal, several suspects were sent to Millstatt Castle. In Germany, Major Chaim Herzog, the future Israeli President, was an Area Intelligence Officer covering Brunswick and Hildesheim. When he learnt that Jewish refugees were using mine tunnels near Helmstedt to escape from the Soviet Zone and were making their way to northern ports to embark on ships that would take them to Palestine, he discreetly ensured that the Jewish Brigade replaced Danish border guards.
At the end of June, demobilization saw Major Johnson reduce the Area Security Officers in Austria to two, each covering about fifty per cent of the border with Yugoslavia with Area Office C bordering the Soviet sector. The frontier was designated a Prohibited Area with access controlled by the Border Field Security sections working with military patrols. Duties included interrogating Illegal Frontier Crossers for information on the Yugoslavian military order of battle, monitoring political activity, in particular communist sympathizers, and intercepting smugglers infiltrating the streams of refugees. The Bleiburg FS detachment had its offices above the town prison. In order to deal with the vast numbers of Hungarians, 96 FSS established an interrogation centre at Strass.
Security Office A had three Border Field Security sections, including the 91 FSS Rosenbach detachment located at the main rail crossing point between Yugoslavia and Austria at Klagenfurt, where endless disagreements with the Yugoslavian border police on the validity of refugees and displaced people sometimes led to trains being shunted back and forth through the Rosenbach tunnel connecting the two border posts until compromises were agreed. Sergeant William Otley of the Radkersburg Detachment and Sergeant Peter Dickinson, of 313 FSS, developed close working relationships in the town that lasted fifty years. Relations eased when the US supplied its armed forces with equipment after Tito had split with Stalin. When British military patrols were unable to apprehend a band of Yugoslavians terrorizing the border, the Section ‘turned’ a member, which resulted in a joint Field Security/ Gendarmarie raid arresting the gang, all blissfully drunk after an orgy.
On 1 July, 409 FSS took over security responsibility for the Wolfsberg sector from 313 FSS and deployed to the border but, within the fortnight, two new arrivals, Corporal Mahoney and Private Kenneth Dixon, were arrested by the Yugoslavians after accidentally straying across. Released after eighteen days, both were sentenced at their courts-martial to fifty-six days detention. The severity of the sentence seems not to have worked. Corporal Gordon Watt from the Deutchlandberg Detachment also strayed across the border and spent six months in the forbidding Moribor prison before his release was negotiated. Wolfsberg-based 409 (Lines of Communications) FSS had landed in Brindisi where it requisitioned a launch, formerly owned by King Zog of Albania, fast enough for port security duties and for towing a surf board. Offshore patrols in an Italian Navy trawler were skippered by Sergeants Blanchflower and Norton with an Italian Navy crew; they also supported clandestine operations in Dalmatia. At Leece, when faced by thousands of refugees crossing the Adriatic, the Section arranged for them to be driven by Royal Army Service Corps lorries to the outskirts of the fishing village of Santa Maria al Bagno, where the Intelligence Corps NCOs and the drivers broke into several luxurious holiday villas, arranged for Royal Engineers to rig a field kitchen and persuaded a Royal Marines detachment to patrol the complex. When the Section advanced to Pescara during the summer of 1944, they retrieved about half of fifty Bailey Bridges stolen by locals from river crossings and hidden in undergrowth. In June 1945 the section was earmarked to join the Brazilian Division in Italy; however, it was sent to Austria and took over from 31 FSS in Wolfsberg and commenced frontier duties between the British and Soviet zone. A detachment at Wolfsberg internment camp screened 4,000 Yugoslavs previously imprisoned by the Soviets for information of intelligence interest and exploited violent factional clashes between Chetniks and Partisans. It then settled down to arresting Nazis and collecting political intelligence.
In early July, in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement, Austria and Vienna were divided into four occupation zones, with the Soviets transferring Styria to the British. Vienna soon became a vigorous hive of intrigue as the occupying intelligence agencies competed. The Field Security sections faced the additional problem of subversion through a political ideology about which little was then known, namely Communism. Headquarters Field Security was based in a house in Wenzgasse District. Meanwhile, 291 FSS had been evacuated from Turkey following the debacle to seize the Dodecanese Islands and was placed at the disposal of Security Office (Mediterranean) in Bari where it provided security for the SOE. In early 1945 it was reclaimed by Allied Forces Headquarters to be part of the S Force that entered Padua. Arriving in Vienna, it requisitioned a palatial house in Sebastian Platz that housed the complete section of fourteen soldiers and had interrogation cells, a bar, a Bechstein piano and a garage large enough for six cars. The section was also responsible for airport security at Schwechat, which was then under RAF control but in the Soviet sector. As part of collection information about the Soviets, the section persuaded Austrian women cleaning offices in barracks to pass the contents of wastepaper baskets.
In order to enable it to cover the seven districts of Vienna in the British sector, 20 FSS had been enlarged to fifty soldiers, its principal functions being protective security, censorship and movement control. On one occasion the Section hosted a defecting Bulgarian basket ball player and his wife, two members playing bridge with the couple, all conversing in French. When the time came to exfiltrate the couple, the van was intercepted on the way to the airport and the couple seized.
Formed in Winchester in September 1941, 310 FSS joined Eighth Army in North Africa as it closed on Tunisia. In July, now commanded by Captain Eric Peters, it took part in the invasion of Sicily with XXX Corps and lost Sergeant Rupert Hawley, killed in a German air raid on 10 July 1943. In Perugia in February 1945, it arrested ten security suspects, including an agent dropped by parachute. Handing Vienna to 418 FSS, the Section joined 263 FSS in Klagenfurt and formed exploitation and interrogation teams rounding up those on their Arrests Lists and searching factories and scientific laboratories of intelligence interest. On 13 July, it joined the specialist Counter-Intelligence (Austria) and was instrumental in the arrest of a SS-lieutenant colonel doctor who had conducted medical experiments in concentration camps. In September the Section joined 20 and 291 FSS in Vienna and was located in the Schönbrunn Palace, where it continued counter-intelligence activities that included investigations into several SS sergeant majors, senior directors of aircraft factors, such as Willam Junkers, and denunciations emerging from Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps of several Vienna University professors and the authors of anti-Semitic articles, correspondence and broadcasts. It also kept a close watch on an internment camp outside the city holding Yugoslavian refugees.