Walter Nicolai

Walter Nicolai was the son of a Prussian Army captain and a farmer's daughter in Brunswick. In 1893, he selected a military career. He studied from 1901 to 1904 at the War Academy in Berlin. Shortly before his appointment as Chief of the Intelligence Service of the German High Command he is known to have taken trips to Russia. He spoke fluent Russian. Nicolai was considered ultra-conservative, monarchist, and non-political.[3]

In 1906, Nicolai began his career in Abteilung IIIb, when he took over the news station in Königsberg.[4] He built up the news station in Königsberg to a major center for espionage against the Russian Empire. After two years of service in early 1913, he was named the head of Abteilung IIIb, which helped to inform others of the Austrian espionage case against Captain Alfred Redl. Nicolai led the German secret service between 1913 and 1919. He directed Abteilung IIIb intensively during the First World War. Nicolai wrote: "Before each new acquisition, delivery pp. to ask the I.O., what benefits it brings for the war."[5]

Information about Nicolai's employment of Mata Hari (7 August 1876 – 15 October 1917) can to be found in the so-called Gempp Report, which was only made public in the 1970s.[6] These papers also contain information from former officers of Abteilung III b about the "Agent H 21", who was Mata Hari. The papers prove that Mata Hari had entered the service of the German Secret Service in late fall 1915. In May 1916, IIIb chief Walter Nicolai had Mata Hari asked to come to Cologne, where, after a conversation with her, he decided to have her trained as an agent and assigned Major Roepell to her as commanding officer. Roepell had taught her "on long walks on the outskirts of the city the basics of the agent's job," while an expert in cipher writing practiced "chemical writing" with her. This "training" took seven days. Mata Hari's mission was to reconnoiter the enemy's next offensive plans from Paris, to travel through militarily interesting areas of France, and to maintain contact with the Kriegsnachrichtenstelle West in Düsseldorf (Director: Roepell) and the agent headquarters in the German embassy in Madrid (Director: Major Arnold Kalle). Mata Hari was then subordinated to Captain Hoffmann, who gave her the code name H 21.[7]

In January 1917, Major Kalle transmitted radio messages to Berlin describing the helpful activities of a German spy code-named H-21, whose biography so closely matched Mata Hari's that it was patently obvious that Agent H-21 could only be her.[8] The Deuxième Bureau intercepted the messages and, from the information they contained, identified H-21 as Mata Hari. The messages were in a code that German intelligence knew had already been broken by the French, suggesting that the messages were contrived to have Mata Hari arrested by the French.[9] In early 1917 Nicolai General Walter Nicolai had grown very annoyed that Mata Hari had provided him with no intelligence worthy of the name, instead selling the Germans mere Paris gossip about the sex lives of French politicians and generals, and decided to terminate her employment by exposing her as a German spy to the French.[10]

Another famous female spy that Nicolai was assigned to was Elsbeth Schragmüller. For many years she was invariably known as Mademoiselle Docteur or Fräulein Doktor, her actual name being revealed only in 1945 from German intelligence documents captured by the Allies after World War II. In 1915, Nicolai, assigned her as the chief of the Kriegsnachrichtenstelle Antwerpen.[11]

When Erich Ludendorff became first quartermaster general at the end of August 1916, there was an expansion of military intelligence for the secret police. Nicolai saw himself as possessing a relentless will to win, a military educator, a supervisor and an initiator of patriotic self-discipline. His officers took part in the promotional work for war bonds. Nicolai was behind the founding of the ultra-nationalist Fatherland Party.

After the end of World War I, Nicolai retired as a colonel. His deputy and later successor in 1920 was Major Friedrich Gempp. In his postwar years, Nicolai published two books about his activities.

Under Nazi Germany, he belonged to the expert advisory board of the Imperial Institute for the History of the New Germany.[12]

After the Second World War, Nicolai was arrested by the Soviet SMERSH under personal order of Stalin,[13] deported from Germany, and interrogated in Moscow. He died while in custody on 4 May 1947 at the Hospital of Moscow's Butyrka Prison. His body was cremated and buried at the necropolis of the Donskoy Monastery in a mass grave. It was only in 1999 that Russian military prosecutors formally exonerated Walter Nicolai of all charges.[14]

• Höhne, Heinz, and Zolling, Hermann (1972). The General Was a Spy. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc, New York.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) (Published in Germany as Pullach Intern, 1971, Hoffman and Campe Verlag, Hamburg.)