Richard Sorge, the GRU and the Pacific War 9781912961092

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RICHARD SORGE, THE GRU AND THE PACIFIC WAR

Admiral Paul W. Wenneker (left) and Richard Sorge

Richard Sorge, the GRU and the Pacific War –

by

John W. M. Chapman

RICHARD SORGE, THE GRU AND THE PACIFIC WAR

First published 2021 by RENAISSANCE BOOKS P O Box 219 Folkestone Kent CT20 2WP Renaissance Books is an imprint of Global Books Ltd ISBN 978-1-912961-08-5 [Hardback] ISBN 978-1-912961-09-2 [eBook] © 2021 John W.M. Chapman All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Set in Bembo 11 on 11.5pt by Dataworks Printed and bound in England by CPI Antony Rowe Ltd., Chippenham, Wilts

Contents –

Chart: Organization of the People’s Commisariat for the Defence of the USSR,1941

vi

Preface

vii

Introduction

xi

Abbreviations

xix

List of Illustrations

xxi

1

‘All is Not Well in the Camp of the Axis Powers’

2

‘In the Matter Affecting Ambassador Ott’

15

3

The Purge of German Journalists

27

4

‘Expressions which are Psychologically Dangerous’

42

5

The Bifurcation of Intelligence in Retrospect, 1929–1937

57

The Bifurcation of Intelligence in Retrospect, 1937–1941

74

6 7

1

Conclusions

103

Select Bibliography

113

Source Materials

115

Index of Persons

119

Index

133

v

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RICHARD SORGE, THE GRU AND THE PACIFIC WAR

Preface – RESEARCH ON THIS subject area of relations between Germany and Japan in the first half of the twentieth century was initially begun in 1960, when a choice was being made of a doctoral degree topic for study at the University of Oxford. That it was a researchable topic was confirmed by the availability of verified primary evidence with reference to German military archives held at the US National Archives in Washington DC and diplomatic archives held in the Foreign Office Library in London. With the assistance of the Hon. Dr Margaret Lambert and Professor John Erickson, contact was made with Sir William Deakin and Professor Dick Storry at St Antony’s College, Oxford, who were then preparing a monograph from German and Japanese source materials on the Sorge case. Given the history of the racist fanaticism manifested in the inter-war era by the Nazi Party, the possibility of collaboration with non-Aryan societies was curious, at least superficially, and especially as there were numerous complaints voiced by individuals of Japanese nationality about their treatment on German streets in the early 1930s. Further researches in London, Washington and Tokyo in archives were accompanied by interviews and correspondence with a number of individual witnesses of events between 1930 and 1945. This period of research coincided with extensive press coverage of the trial of Admiral Paul Wenneker in Hamburg, which elicited strong denials of any intentional wrongdoing on the part of a personality whose whole career had hitherto been marked by a widespread recognition of his professional and personal integrity. After his death in 1979, many of Wenneker’s friends and colleagues continued to question the whole basis of the prosecution case and in the course of the publication of the first four volumes of the war diaries of successive German naval attachés in Japan, which had been obtained with the surviving records of the German Navy from Coburg by the British Admiralty in 1945, the family and many of these friends and colleagues kindly provided this author

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with access to reminiscences and photographs relevant to these years. In this phase of research, access was obtained rather slowly to many of the records which were not available to Wenneker’s defence team in the 1960s, who helpfully permitted copies of all the defence documents to be made available to the author. Many individuals involved with the Nazi regime, whether they liked it or not, have made statements or revealed in their own accounts details of their experiences within the context of the reintegration of Germany into the Western alliance and of the evolution of the Cold War. Former officials, such as Ambassador Eugen Ott or Counsellor Karl-Otto Braun, for example, have commented on their interpretation of events at some length, but it has always remained something of a mystery that Wenneker avoided making any public representations about his conduct outside the judicial process. When so many junior officials who worked closely with him asked why he rejected such approaches and remained silent about the past, it remains an unresolved dilemma. These issues, nevertheless, appear not to have given rise to any kind of questioning by other authors who have specifically examined the naval relations of the two countries. In particular, it is quite glaringly clear from the monograph compiled by former German and Japanese officers, Krug, Hirama and Sander-Nagashima that the names of Richard Sorge or Max Clausen do not receive a single mention of any relevance to relations between 1933 and 1941 even though Ambassador Ott himself singled out relations between Sorge and Captain Joachim Lietzmann between 1937 and 1940 as relevant.1 Since this author’s publication of a brief article on ‘Richard Sorge and the Pacific War’ in 1991,2 a much fuller amount of declassified wartime decrypts has been released alongside the author’s edited series of The Price of Admiralty – The War Diary of the German Naval Attaché in Japan, 1939–1943 and associated documents ending in 1945 (POA: Vols.1–7).3 These 1

2

3

See Krug et al. Reluctant Allies – German-Japanese Naval Relations in World War II. Annapolis, Naval Institute Press, 2001; Ott (Tokyo) Tel.No.980 of 29.3.1942 to Foreign Minister Ribbentrop at: Auswärtiges Amt (AA): BRAM: ‘Dr.Richard Sorge.’. ‘Rikhard Sorge i Voina na Tikhom Okeane,’ Problemi Dalnego Vostoka 6 (1991): 122–135. POA 1 (1939–40) is still in print; POA 1 (2nd ed.) is available as a DVD from 2019; POA 2–3 is out of print; POA 4 is still in print; POA 5–7 are available on DVD: see There is a fuller list of the most recent available monographs and source materials of the Sorge Affair, although

PREFACE

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demonstrate conclusively that Admiral Wenneker’s representation of the strategic preferences of the Japanese Navy was entirely at odds with the efforts by Hitler and the Nazi Party to destroy the Soviet Union, but entirely in line with the instructions issued by the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie –‘Chief Intelligence Office’) to the Sorge Ring. Wenneker admitted directly to German Navy heads that he had been as closely connected with Sorge as Eugen Ott, who was dismissed from office in November 1942, though Wenneker was explicitly told by his superiors that it was not an issue that concerned them, not least because it is clear that the German Navy itself was not in favour of the attack on the USSR on 22 June 1941. This central contradiction in the combined conduct of World War II was sustained by the fact that Hitler persisted in believing that Japanese strategy was controlled principally by- the Japanese Army; also in believing the assurances of General Oshima Hiroshi that the Japanese policymakers would act in line with Hitler’s long-held notion that Japan would cooperate with Germany in a joint destruction of the Soviet Union. By contrast, Stalin was briefed to recognise, though he did act only partially upon the advice of his agents in Japan, the need to offer the Japanese a pact of neutrality that would encourage an advance into South-East Asia and thus discourage them from pursuing any previous inclinations to have a showdown in Siberia.The heroic status accorded to Sorge emerged only in 1964, many years after Stalin’s death, but it has also emerged that Stalin paid not the slightest attention to the inside knowledge gained by Sorge about the intention to launch Operation Barbarossa any more than he paid to any of the other purveyors of Hitler’s real intentions. The scale of the movement of reinforcements from the Soviet Far East to the East Front was also limited. In line with Sorge’s earlier revelations to the GRU, some units from Central Siberia were moved in time for participation in the Timoshenko winter offensive, but such movements were geared directly to the fact that military operations in the Soviet Far East could not be conducted effectively by the Japanese Army between October 1941 and May 1942 under prevailing climatic conditions. The evidence from German Army intelligence and consultations with the Japanese confirmed that a number of citations tend to be sloppy and citations of documentary sources are limited and imprecise: see the account by O. Matthews, An Impeccable Spy. London, 2019.

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Soviet forces were held in the Far East, often being reinforced with units that had previously been depleted in frontline operations. It was not until the winter of 1942 that substantial forces were transferred from the Soviet maritime provinces to the west and participated in the decisive Stalingrad offensive.4 Entries in Wenneker’s War Diary for the latter half of 1941 indicate the points at which it was possible to conclude that Japanese strategy was increasingly being geared to an offensive in the Pacific and for the frontiers in the North to be reinforced defensively. These entries reflected Wenneker’s assessment of hints obtained from discussions with Japanese naval officers and were to some extent reflected in the radio signals despatched by Clausen and subsequently decrypted by the Japanese side. It is clear from Clausen’s post-war account that the balance of evidence obtained by members of the Sorge Ring confirmed the smaller number of reinforcements to the Kwantung and Korea Armies, but a larger number of troops and units were designated for operations in the South. When added to the evidence derived from Wenneker and Ott, the conclusions available to Stalin were positive. By contrast, Wenneker’s first indication of the Japanese Navy’s willingness to serve as a mediator between Germany and the Soviet Union, though relayed by Ott to Ribbentrop, was utterly ignored in October 1941 and evaded repeatedly in succeeding years of World War II.

4

The compilation of units appearing on the Eastern Front by the Fremde Heere Ost Section of German Army intelligence is referenced in POA 7 and is linked with the efforts via Ribbentrop and Oshima in Berlin and the enquiries by General Kretschmer with the Japanese General Staff to encourage the Japanese to commit themselves to participation in the German-Soviet war.

Introduction – THE EVENTS IN the spring of 2018 in the quiet rural setting of the city of Salisbury in Wiltshire provided a sharp reminder of the highly significant role accorded by the Russian state apparatus to members of the country’s covert military intelligence agencies over the past millennium and recalled the past achievements of the USSR’s Chief Intelligence Office – the GRU – within the Soviet defence establishment.5 Arguably its most celebrated covert intelligence agent in the twentieth century was Dr Richard Sorge (1895–1944), born in Baku but of German parentage, whose role was only officially recognised in 1964 with his naming as a ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’.6 Knowledge of Sorge’s role initially stemmed from the publication of documentary evidence linked to questioning by officials of the Japanese Tokko-, the Special Higher Police, and of the Japanese Ministry of Justice following the surrender of Japan at the end of the Pacific War in August 1945. Immediate exploitation of Sorge’s activities was available to the US Occupation and was channelled into developments arising from the onset of the American-Soviet Cold War between 1945 and 1991 and also entwined in the domestic US political 5

6

For coverage of some of the history of the complementary covert arrangements involved in Russian codebreaking, see D.Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “Tsarist Codebreaking Some Background and Examples,” Cryptologia 22/4 (October 1998): 342–353. Sorge was credited with gaining access to German enciphered radio signals in China and in Japan, as well as to the early naval war diary for East Asia in World War II until this was withheld by Admiral Wenneker when he returned to Tokyo in 1940. A chart of the position of the GRU in the Soviet hierarchy may be seen on p.vi above. The initial Soviet announcements appeared in Pravda on 4.9.1964 and in Izvestiya on 5.9.64. A monograph by M. Kolesnikov: Takim Byl Rikhard Zorge. Moscow, Voennoe Izdatelstvo Oborony SSSR, 1965 was published shortly afterward and this author was able to borrow a copy from the Soviet mission in Tokyo. Subsequently, the East German state registered its input in a book by Julius Mader et al.: Dr.Sorge Funkt aus Tokyo. East Berlin, Deutscher Militärverlag, 1966, with a second edition, Dr.Sorge Report. East Berlin, 1985, a copy of which was kindly made available to this author by Fräulein Ingeborg Krag.

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controversy surrounding the enquiries into the outbreak of hostilities at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.7 As Sorge himself served in both China and Japan as director of the GRU espionage groups there from 1930 to 1941, there are a large number of individuals with whom he made contact as a journalist and corresponding numbers of personal observations have appeared in print. One of the fullest accounts, based on German and Japanese sources, was published in 1966 by Sir William Deakin and Professor Dick Storry and there is a parallel study by Chalmers Johnson based primarily on Japanese sources on the career of Sorge’s principal informant, Ozaki Hotsumi, which appeared in 1990.8 Some knowledge of Sorge’s activities in Japan between 1934 and October 1941 was clearly also gained from the German and Japanese communities and was of direct significance to members of the German diplomatic and press corps. Perhaps most directly affected was SS-Sturmbannführer Meisinger, the representative of the German secret police within the German Embassy in Tokyo since April 1941. Meisinger had played a significant role at Gestapo headquarters in the cases undertaken against highprofile figures in German political life, such as Ernst Röhm and the associated assassinations of Generals von Schleicher and von Bredow in 1934 and against Field-Marshal von Blomberg and General von Fritsch in 1938. These, of course, took no account of the many other individuals accused of homosexuality or fraud both within and outside the Nazi Party between 1933 and 1939.9 As Meisinger had spent almost six months in China rather 7

8

9

The case was raised in the Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives under the title Hearings on Un-American Aspects of the Richard Sorge Spy Case. Washington DC, USGPO, 1951 and an extensive monograph was published by Major-General C.A. Willoughby (1892–1972), General Macarthur’s chief of intelligence staff, as Shangai Conspiracy – The Sorge Spy Case. Boston, Western, 1952. Willoughby appears to have been of German origin and this was of some value when dealing with the many Japanese Army staff officers seconded to Germany between 1919 and 1945. However, his reputation as an intelligence officer was characterised as low by Macarthur himself and by most more recent analysts. US investigations in Japan went on until at least 1949, as may been seen in CIC questioning of Kawai Teikichi: see National Archives, Washington DC (NAW): RG 319: Kawai dossier, declassified in 1990. F.W. Deakin & G.R. Storry, The Case of Richard Sorge. London: Chatto & Windus, 1966; Chalmers Johnson, Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring. Stanford UP, 1990. Meisinger produced a handwritten account of his police career which was translated and typed up. It indicates the very large numbers of prosecutions in

INTRODUCTION

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than in Tokyo until recalled there in November 1941, he had almost no knowledge of the German community in Japan and was wholly ignorant, until this point in his career, of diplomatic or legal circles in Japan. Meisinger appears to have been recalled from Shanghai by the German ambassador in Tokyo, Major-General Eugen Ott (1889–1977), and his arrival is recorded in the war diary of the German Naval Attaché in Tokyo, Rear-Admiral Paul W. Wenneker (1898–1979).10 Meisinger ordered the detention on the blockade-running ship, Osorno, and the compulsory transport to Europe of the German exchange student, Claus Lenz, who had been working alongside Sorge on the German Embassy’s local newssheet, Deutsche Dienst, which was based on the press cables of the Transocean News Agency.11 When two memoranda written by Sorge in Sugamo prison were supplied to the German Embassy in Tokyo in early January 1942, these were shown to Meisinger, who was reported to have concluded that he was ‘doubtful if the author is knowledgeable about the intelligence service of the Comintern.’12

10

11

12

which he was involved between 1933 and 1941: see NAW: RG 319: Meisinger Dossier: 16–60 & 100–172 and prosecutions are all cited at 290–6. See J.W.M. Chapman, ed., The Price of Admiralty – The War Diary of the German Naval Attaché in Japan, 1939–1943: Ripe, Saltire House Publications, 1990, Vol.4: 744. Vols.1–4 were produced in print versions, but Vol.1 has recently been revised and expanded in electronic form and Vols.5–7 have also been translated with additional central documents: see www.price-of admiralty.com. The background to events in Japan prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor lay in the super-secrecy demanded to achieve surprise at the opening of the Pacific War. The final phase of preparations was marked by the appointment of General Tôjô Hideki in place of Prince Konoe as Premier and this was welcomed by Japanese Navy officers, not least because when he was appointed War Minister in July 1940, Tôjô, a former head of the kempeitai in Manchuria, had been instrumental in ordering the arrest of 12 British nationals as spies. These included the Reuters correspondent, Melville Cox, who jumped to his death while in police custody. The counter-espionage drive was spearheaded by the civilian police and Sorge was tracked down through his contacts with members of the Japan Communist Party and the accusations levelled at the large number of arrestees concentrated on claims that they were agents of the Comintern rather than, as was later discovered, of the Soviet military, as the latter charge would have stimulated demands for control on the part of the Military Police, the kempeitai. Ott (Tokyo) secret Tel.No.60 of 9.1.1942 at: Auswärtiges Amt (AA): BRAM: ‘Dr. Richard Sorge’. The file was initially maintained by Dr Karl-Otto Braun (1910–88), the head of the East Asian Section in the Political Department (Pol VIII) before being transferred to the Press Department in the hands of Secretary

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At this stage, the matter continued to be handled by the Political Department of the German Foreign Ministry and doubt continued to be expressed by Ott about Sorge having a major role in the affair on the ground that ‘the principal role in the pending proceedings is being played by the Japanese Ozaki’. It was not until the end of March 1942 that a claim was made that ‘Sorge was continuously briefed from the best German source about Axis policy and its future course’, that he had been working for the Soviet military intelligence service rather than for the Comintern and that the Japanese had broken the radio code employed by Sorge’s transmitter, Max Clausen.13 But while listing the contradictions that were also contained in this allegation, Ott also offered to resign or to stand back from his position as ambassador and an enquiry was instituted within the Foreign Ministry into ‘the matter affecting Ambassador Ott’. As the allegation had been circulated outside the Ministry to the High Command of the Armed Forces, Ribbentrop intervened as Foreign Minister to advocate caution. He needed to be able to back up his own organisation and to seek to promote ‘discretion’ although this tended to point rather to the desire for a cover-up. Nevertheless, the allegation that Sorge was continuously briefed about Axis policy from the best German sources was upheld, despite Ribbentrop’s scepticism, by October 1942, when Himmler insisted that the allegation was correct and he claimed to have received confirmation that Sorge was employed by the GRU as well as by the Comintern ‘according to information recently received from Tokyo’.14

13

14

of Legation Bassler (PVIII) when its classification rose from Secret to Top Secret and it was passed on to officials in Ribbentrop’s Secretariat in late February 1942. On 20.11.1945, Max Clausen, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1943, made a statement to the International Red Cross in Tokyo claiming that he had had to hold on to copies of his transmissions ‘for some days or even a few weeks in my house’ in case he had to repeat messages affected by the bad atmospheric conditions in East Asia. He took responsibility for the fact that ‘Japanese police inspectors found the unenciphered cables in my house.’ Exh.III in NAW: RG 319, Clausen dossier, Box 31 (declassified on 22.2.1985). Himmler to Ribbentrop Reichsführer-SS IV A 1B.Nr.104/42 gRs of 27.10.1942. This triggered Ribbentrop’s decision for Ott to be replaced by a former member of his Secretariat, Heinrich Stahmer (1892–1978). Another former member of Ribbentrop’s Secretariat was Erich Kordt (1903–1969), who served as German Minister in Japan from April 1941 and was nominated by Ott to undertake liaison with the Japanese Justice Ministry over the Sorge Case. It remains unclear exactly from whom the information had been supplied. Schellenberg blamed Meisinger and Braun claimed that it was pressed by Japanese diplomats in Berlin. Kordt is erroneously described as ‘economic attaché’ in Tokyo in Matthews (2019): 289.

INTRODUCTION

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There is no written evidence in the files to confirm whether the source of this information was German or Japanese but it followed on from news that Sorge and Ozaki had been sentenced to death and it is likely, but unconfirmed, that more detailed information may have been received in the light of fresh data provided by Japanese prosecutors.The fact that the information had first come to Berlin’s attention from an Abwehr agent in Harbin, Ivar Lissner, and that it had been in all probability received from his most important Japanese Army contact, Major-General Yanagida Genzo- (1890–1952), head of the tokumu kikan in Manchuria, in March 1942 suggests that it had been confirmed through the release of hard evidence from intercepted radio signals – an area of technical expertise in which extensive collaboration had existed at least since late 1940 between the Japanese and German armies.15 Lissner in his report had been at pains to argue that some groups in the Japanese Navy in particular had been hostile to Germany and praised the Naval Attaché, Admiral Wenneker, for his ‘magnificent efforts’ in promoting collaboration with Japan. Nothing was ever said by Ambassador Ott about these efforts, but he did admit that Sorge had enjoyed friendly relations with himself and the former naval attaché, Captain Johannes Lietzmann (1894–1959), while denying that he himself had ever passed on any confidential information to Sorge.16 It is clear from Sorge’s statements to his interrogators that he had little if any respect for General Ott. However, in a statement made by Clausen on 5.12.1945, he …considers Admiral Wenneker, former German Naval Attaché, an anti-Fascist. He said Sorge placed great trust in Wenneker. 15

16

An exchange of materials on Soviet military communications with General Erich Fellgiebel was identified in the diary of the Chief of the German General Staff, General Halder, on 4.12.1940. Japanese officers were permitted to make contact with Abwehr officers behind the German frontline in Russia in 1941 and were provided with substantial information throughout the war about Soviet communications systems. There also appears to have been extensive collaboration between the Gestapo and successive Japanese Army officers in Berlin, Colonel Usui Shigeki and Colonel Yamamoto Bin, involved in issues of sabotage and subversion. It was claimed by Walther Schellenberg, the head of Gestapo intelligence, that collaboration had played a key role in promoting the purges of the Soviet armed forces in the late 1930s and it is also clear that there had been considerable Gestapo access to the decryption and intercept successes of the Forschungsamt and the Armed Forces (OKW/Chi). Ott (Tokyo) Tel.No.930 of 29.3.1942 to Ribbentrop: AA: BRAM: ‘Dr.Richard Sorge’.

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Whenever Sorge went out of town, he would leave a suitcase containing personal papers either with Clausen or Wenneker for safekeeping.17

Despite having made the effort to meet Wenneker before he left with Soviet assistance to travel to the Soviet zone of Germany, Clausen was subsequently asked by the legal team entrusted with the defence of Wenneker in the trial brought against him in 1964/65 by the West German prosecuting authorities to provide supportive testimony. However, on 1 November 1965, Clausen responded wholly negatively by saying that the Nazi regime only selected suitable individuals and their families to serve it abroad, that some of these were involved in Nazi and war crimes and worked unthinkingly for the Nazi cause and expressed regret that he was unable to provide any information on the ground that he had been arrested in Tokyo for anti-Fascist activities and spent a long time in prison.18 Clearly, this was a line of argument which simply reflected the prevailing divisions of the Cold War, but was still a blank denial of Clausen’s earlier argument about his belief in Wenneker as an ‘anti-Fascist’. The contradiction is further highlighted in the assessment of Wenneker by a senior US counter-intelligence official in the holding camp at Ludwigsburg on 14 October 1947 following his repatriation which concluded that Wenneker ‘impresses this interrogator as an anti-Nazi, sincere man, who did his duty as a soldier’.19 Unlike General Ott, who was explicitly fired for his relationship with Sorge and was not re-engaged by the West German diplomatic service, Wenneker continued to serve in the German Embassy in Japan until May 1945, but subsequently refused to accept encouraging plaudits from former professional diplomats for him to become a post-war diplomatic recruit. Very detailed written records about Wenneker’s service in Japan survive from World War II, albeit these were not absolutely complete, but his unpublished defence papers added considerably in the 1960s to knowledge about his personality and activities and, gradually, further information was subsequently released as a result of the publication of post-war interrogations and decrypted signals 17 18

19

NAW: RG 319: Clausen dossier. Letter from Max Christiansen-Clausen (East Berlin) of 1.11.1965 at: Handakten Paul (HP): Briefe und Besprechungen, Bd.II: IC 2. NAW: RG 319: Wenneker Dossier, 13.1.1948.

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unavailable at the time of his trial.These materials make it possible to re-examine Wenneker’s career in the light of his connections with Richard Sorge employing something much closer to 20-20 vision. It remains unclear, nevertheless, why there remains limited indication of evidence being derived from the Japanese side of the radio signals sent by Sorge to the USSR clearly emanating from conversations between Sorge and Wenneker after having been relayed to the German side.20 Most of the material exchanged by the Japanese side tends to highlight interaction between Sorge and the various representatives of the German Army in Japan and to underscore the parts played in the interactions with General Ott and Colonel Scholl. This directly impinged on the key relationship in Japan between the Army and the Navy which was of absolutely central significance in the development of relations between Japan and Germany in the Nazi era, but whose understanding was continually plagued by an internecine tension with ramifications even more extensive than those attributed to the situation of ‘mystery wrapped within an enigma’ by observers of the Stalinist regime. The relationship between Sorge and Wenneker involved an exchange of observations of their understanding of the so-called ‘Japanese mentality’ relayed to their separate bosses, one of whom eventually took note of their implications for national strategy, while the other flatly refused to contemplate any possible alternative to his own inflexible variant of national strategy.The analysis which unfolds below explores the pathway of this interaction and assesses the fateful outcome of the insuperable divergence that was ineluctably entailed. 20

There is a particularly interesting exchange between Captain Maeda Tadashi and Wenneker on 4 November 1941, some three weeks after the arrests of Sorge and Clausen: see POA 4: 702. In the context of Japanese Navy suspicions about the leakage of information at Shanghai in Siefken’s organisation, Maeda pointed out that he had learned that his meetings with Wenneker were being closely observed by the British Secret Service. However, all further information about the source was withheld from Wenneker at this time. It is within the realms of possibility that Navy counter-espionage agents would have been informed by the Tokkö about any messages seized at Clausen’s house that pointed to Sorge having learned from Wenneker any hints about Navy strategic intentions. What is especially intriguing is Maeda’s final statement is that ‘it is reassuring, however, that apparently the content of our discussions had not become known.’ Nothing of anything discussed by Maeda after the time of the arrests would have been passed on to the GRU to be sure, but Maeda was only appointed on 4.10. and his discussions with Wenneker on 6., 9. and 15.10. were interspersed with contacts with other Navy departments.

Abbreviations – AA – Auswärtiges Amt, the German Foreign Ministry BBC – British Broadcasting Company BRAM – Büro des Reichsaussenministers, Ribbentrop’s ministerial secretariat CIC – US Civil Intelligence Corps in Japan GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie – ‘Chief Intelligence Office’) GST – Gaikô Shiryo-kan, Tokyo, Archive of the Japanese Foreign Ministry. HP – Handakten Paul, defence files assembled during Wenneker Trial in 1964/65 IMTFE – International Military Tribunal for the Far East IRRA – Imperial Rule Assistance Association, utilised by Tôjô to reinforce his control in Japan IJA – Imperial Japanese Army IJN – Imperial Japanese Navy IWM – Imperial War Museum, London JCP – Japanese Communist Party NAA – National Archives of Australia, Canberra NAK – National Archives, Kew NAW – National Archives, Washington DC NPD – National demokratische Partei Deutschlands, far-right nationalist party in Germany. OKH – Oberkommando des Heeres, High Command of the German Army OKL – Oberkommando der Luftwaffe, Air Force High Command OKM – Oberkommando der Marine, High Command of the Navy OKW – Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, German Armed Forces Command OSS – Office of Strategic Services POA – The Price of Admiralty,Vols.1–7, Saltire House Publications, 1982–2019 RG – Record Group at NAW

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RKM – Reichskriegsministerium, German Ministry of War RSHA – Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Security Headquarters in Germany

List of Illustrations – Admiral P.W.Wenneker/ Richard Sorge Frontispiece Organisation of the People’s Commissariat for Defence of the USSR vi Organisation of the Intelligence Division of the General Staff of the Red Army (GRU) vi Max Clausen with Employees of His Company 14 Japanese & Axis Representatives Celebrate the Opening of the Pacific War, 15.12.1941 14 Reinhard Heydrich, Walther Schellenberg, Heinrich Müller, Josef Meisinger 24 Joachim Ribbentrop, Walther Hewel, Martin Luther, Heinrich Stahmer 25 Farewell Visit of Captain Wenneker to the Yasukuni Shrine, July 1937 25 Farewell Party for Commander G.C. Ross, 1936; Wartime Portrait 26 Werner Vermehren, Kurt Lüdde-Neurath, Erich Kordt, Eugen Ott 41 Japanese Naval Staff, 1942 (Chart) 56 Signing of the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact, 25.11.1936 Kojima Hideo; Sakai Naoe 73 Signing of the Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact, 13.4.1941 87 Admiral Wenneker Visit to Yasukuni Shrine in Company of Captain Gumprich, 1943 99 IJN Staff Officers in Frequent Contact with Admiral Wenneker 100 Japanese Naval Staff Reception for Allied & Friendly Countries, May 1941 100 Correspondent’s Pass for Richard Sorge 101 Agnes Smedley, G.S. Lyushkov, G.K. Zhukov, Walter Krivitsky, Rudolf von Schelia 101 Ozaki Hotsumi, Max Clausen, Molotov and Hitler in 1940, Evdokia Petrova 102 Prime Minister To-jo- Makes Gift of Quinine to Admiral Wenneker 110 Admirals Yamamoto Isoroku, Nagano Osami, Shimada Shigetaro-, Kondo- Nobutake, Ito- Seiichi, Mitsunobu To-yo-, Nomura Naokuni, 111 Field-Marshal Keitel, Admiral Canaris, Grand-Admiral Raeder, Vice-Admiral Fricke, Grand-Admiral Dönitz 111

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1

‘All is Not Well in the Camp of the Axis Powers’ Karl von Wiegand to Hearst Press, 20 November 1941

– INITIALLY, AFTER SORGE’S arrest by the Japanese Metropolitan Police on 18 October 1941, the German response in the Tokyo community tended towards a sceptical point of view. In distant Berlin, the German Foreign Ministry at first relied on information from members of the Japanese Embassy: on 4 November 1941, for example, the arrest was confirmed as having been based on written evidence by Counsellor Kase Shunichi (1897–1956) who was told by the German Foreign Ministry desk officer, Dr Karl-Otto Braun, that his superiors ‘are most urgently interested in immediate clarification of the affair and in Sorge’s release’ and Under-Secretary Ernst Woermann (1888–1979) wired Ott in Tokyo a promise on the part of Ambassador Oshima Hiroshi (1886–1975) in Berlin to support his efforts for Sorge’s release.1 Efforts by Ott to obtain more details of the accusations from the Foreign Ministry and diplomatic access were blocked by the Japanese prosecution and efforts by other German correspondents in Tokyo to do likewise were frustrated, apart from the supply of comforts. In spite of Gaimusho- secretiveness, Ott was able to learn that some 300 Japanese citizens had been arrested and this was not 1

Braun/Woermann Tel.No.2015 of 4.11.41 to Tokyo. There is a retrospective account by Braun, who put himself forward as a ‘revisionist historian’ mainly through the Institute of Historical Studies in the 1980s: see ‘Reflections on German and American Foreign Policy, 1933–1945,’ Journal of Historical Studies 22/1 (2002).This includes recollections by Braun of the events involving Sorge and was critical of Hitler’s decision to appoint Ott as German Ambassador in Tokyo. 1

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RICHARD SORGE, THE GRU AND THE PACIFIC WAR

followed up until 9 January 1942 when Ott suggested that Ozaki Hotsumi, a former adviser of ex-Premier Prince Konoe, was the main target of Japanese enquiries and that perhaps Sorge ‘got himself ensnared in the intrigues’ involved.2 Dr Braun also had a conversation with First Secretary Ushiba Nobuhiko (1909–1984) on 18 November 1941 in which Braun put forward as his ‘personal solution’ the suggestion that Sorge’s arrest should be rescinded and he be allowed ‘to leave Japan without attracting any attention’, especially as the arrest had been reported by wire to Washington by the German-American journalist, Karl H. von Wiegand (1874–1961) of the Hearst Press, as evidence that ‘all is not well in the camp of the Axis Powers’.3 Braun, however, was unaware for some time that Ushiba’s brother, Tomohiko, who had served as Prince Konoe’s private secretary since 1937, had in fact been arrested by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police under suspicion of collaboration with Ozaki, identified by Ott as having been ‘said to have been engaged in treasonable activities for a long time and to have maintained links with the Soviet authorities’.4 However, the deputy head of the Political Department, Minister Otto von Erdmannsdorff, advised Braun that he should undertake no further initiatives and leave matters to Ambassador Ott, who ‘himself was constantly making exertions in this matter’. Three weeks later, the Gaimushô responded by arranging the handing over to Ambassador Ott of a top secret memorandum compiled by the Japanese public prosecutor in which Sorge acknowledged that he joined the workers’ movement in Germany in the wake of world war and had become progressively involved with the cause of the Communist Party and the Comintern since 2 3

4

Ott Tel.No.2539 of 25.11.1941 and No. 60 of 9.1.1942. Braun minute zu P.388/41 g of 18.11.41. Just before this, the Foreign Ministry reported that the affair had been broadcast in the BBC Overseas Service and suitably embroidered. Ushiba Tomohiko had been Konoe’s private secretary and had been asked by Ambassador Grew at the request of President Roosevelt on 6.7.1941 to deny rumours of a planned Japanese armed assault on the USSR. US State Department. Peace and War: US Foreign Policy, 1931–1941. USGPO, 1943: 685. Ushiba was interviewed by Frank Tavenner as part of the IMTFE: see Tavenner Papers in University of Virginia, Law Library MS 78–3, and also the De Martino Papers which contain references to a meeting between Ushiba and Eugene Dooman, counsellor of the US embassy in Tokyo on 7.10.1941. Also linked to Ozaki was Saionji Kinkazu (1907–93) who advocated closer relations with China and moved to Beijing in 1958 and Inukai Ken, son of a former premier.

‘ALL IS NOT WELL IN THE CAMP OF THE AXIS POWERS’

3

1919 with the result that he had travelled to China in 1930 to engage in espionage activities and subsequently continued to do so in Japan. Sorge confessed that he had done so in collaboration with Branko Vukelich (1904–45), the representative of Agence France Presse in Tokyo, and that they had gathered information with the help of Japanese and others and relayed this to the USSR by radio and other means. Foreign Minister Tôgô Shigenori (1882–1950) promised Ott that he would try to obtain evidence from his colleague, the Justice Minister, and Ott urged that the German authorities search their files for information about Sorge and Clausen.5 Ott ended his wire to Berlin with a terse statement that he had also provided a briefing on the matter to Meisinger, the Police Liaison Officer in Tokyo. Meisinger, who appears to have been summoned from Shanghai after Ott had been warned by Admiral Wenneker about allegations from the Japanese Navy regarding security leaks there. These arose from supposed contacts between two European radio operators in the service of the Abwehr War Organisation with the British intelligence service. Meisinger apparently arrived in Yokohama from Shanghai on board the German merchant ship Quito on 5 November in a context of heightened Japanese security everywhere in East Asia.6 Subsequently, Ott issued specific instructions for the exchange student, Claus Lenz, to be placed on board the blockade-runner Osorno on 13 November on the ground that he had tried to build and make use of a transmitter in the German Embassy compound.7 Lenz, who had been working alongside Sorge in the publication of the Embassy’s Deutsche Dienst, subsequently was reported to have absconded from the 5

6

7

Ott Tel.No.2539 of 25.11.1941. This was quickly followed up with a letter of 29.11.41 to Dr. Braun from the editorial board of the Frankfurter Zeitung, explaining the nature of Sorge’s role as a stringer for the newspaper after Sorge had submitted a letter to them on 4 February 1936 giving as references the names of Hasso von Etzdorf (1900–89), Ambassador Herbert von Dirksen (1882–1955) and Colonel Ott as military attaché. They denied issuing any firm contractual agreement to Sorge and only sought advice from their own appointed representatives about Sorge’s suitability as a supplier of occasional articles and cables. In his post-war account composed at the Yokohama Stockade, Meisinger claimed that he had been absent in Shanghai from September to 1 November 1941. After his return, he said he checked the papers of his predecessor, Huber, and found a number of receipts signed by Sorge for information supplied to Huber. NAW: RG 319: Meisinger Dossier: 176. Chapman, ed. POA 4: 721.

4

RICHARD SORGE, THE GRU AND THE PACIFIC WAR

Osorno and was interrogated by Meisinger, to whom he admitted that he had been engaged in relations with foreigners that were forbidden, and Lenz was returned to the ship, placed under formal arrest and confined to the ship’s brig on 1 December.8 One of the avenues that could provide further illumination of Sorge’s past activities lay in what could be discovered about his stay in China from about 1930 onward.This was pursued by Dr.Braun who passed these enquiries to Vice-Consul Eugen Betz, who then sent an enquiry on to the German Consulate-General on 27 November 1941 asking what was known there about Sorge’s activity in Shanghai in the spring of 1930.9 Shanghai replied on 5 December with the observation that Sorge had appeared with a letter of introduction from the Press Department and was received by Consul-General Heinrich Rüdt von Collenberg (1875–1954) on 28 November 1929.10 Sorge was said to have been researching into agrarian conditions in China for a planned article and was given further assistance by consular officials at a further meeting on 17 January 1930, but inevitably nothing could be ascertained about his political position.11 As copies appear also to have been sent to Tokyo, the next report came on 9 January 1942 from Ott, who stated that two documents had been received (after much further pressure) from the Japanese public prosecutor. These took the form of unsigned typewritten memoranda accompanied by handwritten amendments which could have been made by Sorge himself. The first of these contained admissions that Sorge was engaged in compiling reports about conditions in the Scandinavian countries and Britain from 1925 to 1929 which had been relayed by letter to the 8

9

10 11

Ibid.: 744. In succeeding years, Meisinger kept returning to the development of any further enquiries into Lenz’s behaviour, perhaps at the instance of the Japanese police, who had been hyperactive in following individuals from the subsequent enemy states to the point of arresting people such as Vere Redman, press attaché at the UK embassy in Tokyo, who should have had diplomatic immunity, and the Anglican Bishop of Tokyo who had none. Betz cable zu Pol VIII 8006g of 27.11.41. US subsequent interest in the China phase centred round the recollections of Kawai Teikichi from 1930 to 1935 when the JCP tried in 1949 to suppress knowledge of any connection with Sorge. US concerns focussed particularly on Agnes Smedley’s role, especially as the Tokkô had recorded Ozaki’s confession that he and Smedley decided to despatch Kawai to Manchuria to gather intelligence for Sorge. NAW: RG 319: Kawai dossier. A copy of the letter of introduction may be found at: Mader 1985: 67. Zinsser (Shanghai) Tel.No.343 of 5.12.41, which was referred by Braun to von Erdmannsdorff on 29.12.41.

‘ALL IS NOT WELL IN THE CAMP OF THE AXIS POWERS’

5

Comintern. The second indicated that on his return to Moscow in September 1929, ‘a fundamental change in his relations with the Comintern’ had taken place and he embarked on his mission in China with briefings from members of the CPSU and of ‘the Information Section of the Army’. He denied, however, that he had any clear line of responsibility other than the vague notion that he was sending his reports to the Central Committee of the CPSU. Accompanying the memoranda were copies of radio messages despatched and of two written memoranda intended for the Soviet authorities. When these materials were shown to Meisinger, he pointed to contradictions in the texts, complained about the lack of precise particulars and observed that in view of the ‘memoranda being partly primitive and containing organisational and factual errors’ he doubted that ‘the compiler knows anything about the intelligence service of the Comintern’. Ott then complained to the Gaimusho- about the lack of firm factual evidence and called for more information about Sorge’s alleged involvement with Communist organisations in Europe, suggesting that Meisinger be allowed to speak directly with Sorge and to talk to the relevant public prosecutor.12 Ott’s wire was passed to the Gestapo on 17 January after the issue was reviewed in Ribbentrop’s private office, which called for a fuller review of the case.13 Sorge’s movements in Germany in the 1920s were confirmed from police records and details produced of his activities and publications. A check was made by the Gestapo with Nazi Party records, which confirmed Sorge’s membership as dating from 1 October 1934.14 The details available to the Gestapo were sent as a top secret wire to Tokyo under the signature of the head of the Press Section, Dr Schmidt, who called for confirmation of Sorge’s acceptance into the local branch of the Nazi Party.15 Ott replied on 23 February that Sorge had submitted a membership application to Major Hillmann, the Party chairman in Japan, in 12 13

14

15

Ott (Tokyo) Tel.No.60 of 9.1.1942. Sonnleithner (BRAM) minute of 13.1.42 to Woermann was relayed to the German Section and liaison established with the desk officer in the Press Section, Secretary of Legation Baßler (PVIII), who submitted a memorandum in response to Sonnleithner about the Japanese case against Sorge, but emphasising that no confirmation had yet been received from German sources. Now, however, the material had been upgraded from secret to top secret: see Baßler minute zu P28/42 gRs of 5.2.42. Chef Sipo u. SD B.Nr.3237/41g-IV of 31.1.1942 to German Section, relayed to Press Section, 10.2.42. Schmidt wire No.374 of 9.2.42.

6

RICHARD SORGE, THE GRU AND THE PACIFIC WAR

the autumn of 1933 and confirmed his acceptance on 1 October 1934, but indicated that there were no names of sponsors included in available papers.16 He confirmed that Sorge had been active as a journalist and had stimulated no political objections on the part of German officials in Japan, though it was conceded that Sorge had been injured in a motorbike accident in 1938, had suffered nervous episodes and was prone to ‘alcoholic excesses’. Ribbentrop’s response the following day was that he called for the Tokyo Embassy to be kept in the picture though it should ‘display the necessary caution’.17 Meisinger, for his part, was by no means keen to undertake any local initiatives beyond having supplied the Japanese police with a list of ‘unreliable’ members of the German community in exchanges which took place soon after the Japanese entry into the Pacific War. According to his interpreter, Karl Hamel, Meisinger showed little appetite for contacts with the Japanese police agencies prior to this time.18 It appears that most of Meisinger’s time since his arrival in East Asia in April 1941 had been preferably spent in Shanghai, where he had access to resources and living conditions substantially more desirable than those generally available in Tokyo (or Warsaw) and reportedly had been accompanied by a lady named Hertha who had previously been a personal secretary and allegedly a mistress of Heinrich Himmler and whom he was said to have married despite having an existing wife in Bavaria. 19 While in China, word circulated in Shanghai about Meisinger’s 16 17

18 19

Ott Tel.No.532 of 23.2.42. Dr.Schmidt in Tel.No.615 of 2.3.42 to Tokyo urged the ‘necessary caution’ be observed in the case and called for further information about the names of those who had sponsored Sorge’s application and for more to be revealed about the case against Clausen. Ott replied in Tel.No.771 of 12.3.42 saying that the Party files in Tokyo did not contain the names of sponsors, but that Clausen was not a Party member. Further efforts had been made by Meisinger to elicit more details of Sorge’s activities in Europe, but the public prosecutor responded by saying that enquiries were still underway. NAW: RG 319: Hamel dossier. Long and detailed statements were compiled by Meisinger while under US detention in Yokohama after the war, but these were not regarded as believable by US interrogators: ibid., Meisinger Dossier. According to post-war statements by Walther Schellenberg, nominally his superior after 1941, Meisinger had to be given some kind of appointment after service with security forces in Poland, though Meisinger himself tried to argue that his prosecutions before 1939 of leading Nazi officials accused of fraud had encouraged people in the Party to press for his employment outside Germany. Meisinger claimed that his first wife had been killed in an enemy air raid and

‘ALL IS NOT WELL IN THE CAMP OF THE AXIS POWERS’

7

behaviour in Warsaw in 1939 and 1940 and he was accorded the soubriquet ‘Butcher of Warsaw’ and this tag apparently was privately bandied around later by members of the Tokyo Embassy. In China, he was in a position to pull rank on the existing Gestapo liaison officer attached to the German consulate-general at Shanghai, Gerhard Kahner, who had been provided with covert permission since 1940 by the Japanese military authorities to engage in anti-British counter-intelligence activities. This to a great extent clashed with the simultaneous arrangements for the establishment of a War Organisation (KO China) by the German Secret Military Intelligence Organisation (Abwehr) headed by a former naval aviator, Theodor Siefken, which was set up to operate a network of radio monitoring stations seeking to listen in to British, Australian, New Zealand and United States transmissions in the Pacific region.20 Wenneker was subsequently able to observe Siefken’s dealings with the Japanese Navy in Shanghai and Tokyo and was warned by the Japanese Naval Staff about contacts observed in Shanghai by Japanese Navy security agents between two of Siefken’s radiomen, Kristek and Thyssen, and enemy intelligence in early November 1941.21 In the course of Meisinger’s earlier sojourn in Shanghai, he had come into a direct clash with Siefken

20

21

complained that Hertha had urged him to base himself in China with access to a more privileged lifestyle and that she had refused to return to Japan. But it is also clear that Meisinger secretly loathed the Japanese and often used any excuse to avoid socialising with Japanese guests invited to embassy receptions. This function also clashed with the establishment in Japan of a radio listening service, initially based on board German merchant vessels which had taken refuge in Japanese ports, operated by Admiral Wenneker, the naval attaché in Tokyo, as part of operations by German auxiliary cruisers and support vessels from 1940. When apprised of the move, Wenneker expressed some concern and after talks directly with Shanghai on a modus vivendi he somewhat reluctantly agreed that exchanges should take place in contacts in Berlin between the Navy and the Secret Service (Abwehr I Marine): see POA 1: 178 & 184; 2: 250 & 252; 4: 685 & 702. Siefken maintained close relations with the Italian Navy’s decrypt team, headed by Captain de Monte who had escaped from the British occupation of Italian East Africa in 1941 and was based in China. Its agents burgled the premises of the Japanese Naval Mission in Shanghai, having previously penetrated the office of the Governor of Hong Kong. The relationship with Siefken was complicated further by the employment of a man named Charlie Schmidt-Jochheim, who had initially been engaged by Captain Lietzmann in 1939 as someone to listen in to enemy seamen’s bar conversations as well as a Gestapo sabotage agent named Zipkow or Lansing, who was sent to Shanghai by Wenneker to acquire a Portuguese passport in order to be deployed to help isolated German vessels trapped at Mormugão in Portuguese India.

8

RICHARD SORGE, THE GRU AND THE PACIFIC WAR

over the attempted employment of the Hungarian ‘international swindler’, Fred Trebitsch-Lincoln, in May 1941 as a collaborator against the British. Siefken had intervened to apprise ConsulGeneral Fischer of the folly of such a contact and, following a report to the German Foreign Ministry, instructions were issued by Ribbentrop that Meisinger should be rapped over the knuckles for engaging in political activities when this was the responsibility of the German Foreign Ministry.22 Meisinger managed to wriggle out of this awkward situation with a plausible excuse, but was determined to exact retribution from Siefken once all police liaison officers were promoted to attaché status and given responsibility in 1942 for counter-espionage in German missions abroad under an agreement reached between the Gestapo and Ribbentrop.23 The arrangement for Abwehr officers in diplomatic posts abroad to be replaced by police liaison officers was fixed between Luther and the head of the Personnel Department, Dr Schröder, on 10 March 1942 and considerably strengthened Meisinger’s hand in future dealings with the German community in Tokyo, but also marked a further stage in wider Gestapo efforts to undermine and exert decisive control over the Abwehr organisation headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (1888–1945) which had been increasingly evident since 1933.24 Its War Organisation 22

23

24

See AA: Pol VIIIg: ‘Krieg zwischen Deutschland, und England, Frankreich und Polen:Ostasien,’ (1939–41) and Pol I M: Mil.Po.15 Nachrichten: ‘Agenten und Spionagewesen – Nachrichten,’ Bd.18 (1940–41). There is a biographical study of Trebitsch-Lincoln, although useable with care, by B. Wasserstein, The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln. London, Penguin, 1989. See Himmler letter Reichsführer-SS B. Nr. II A I- 25/42- 151 gRs of 23.5.1942 and Luther memorandum AA/UStS-D Nr.5748 of 10.3.1942 on his discussion with Schellenberg. A circular was sent to all diplomatic posts on 15.7.1942 which sought to verify that these directives from the Gestapo had been implemented. There has survived a copy of an agreement signed by Hitler himself in October 1933 at the request of Defence Minister von Blomberg in which the Gestapo would observe existing arrangements for military counterintelligence activities. For many years, instructions were issued by the German authorities to avoid discussion of any secret matters over the telephone through awareness of foreign interception techniques. In fact, other surviving archival evidence confirms that Hitler’s initial revolutionary efforts at the time of the Bürgerbräukellar Putsch in 1923 were laid bare as a result of the interception of Nazi ‘phone calls in Munich by socialist telephone engineers. See RWM Nr.394/23 pers T1/III of 8.8.1923 at: BA/MA RH 12-1/v.40. These were highly effective experiences in shaping Hitler’s resort to the use of such technologies against both domestic and foreign opponents and this was of

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9

in China represented its main manifestation in the Pacific area, but it emerged from a series of measures of co-operation with the secret service arms of the Japanese Army and Navy traceable back to the summer of 1932. After the outbreak of World War II, more frequent exchanges between the two countries accelerated and Tokyo became an influential stopping-off point for the movement of German agents being sent to the Americas or returning from there following the impending US entry into the Pacific War. German military attachés in Tokyo were important points of contact with agents passing through but, although control of the relations remained focussed in Berlin, the influence of the attachés in Tokyo was substantially enhanced as a result of the opening of hostilities with the USSR in June 1941 and with the USA in December 1941. Admiral Wenneker was the most senior German military officer in Japan and controller of most of the available remaining physical links with Europe provided by the presence of substantial numbers of blockade-running merchant vessels and of a more limited number of warships and naval auxiliary vessels. Both the military and naval attachés also controlled enciphered communications traffic with Berlin between 1935 and 1945, unlike the police representatives who remained dependent on the coding systems controlled by the Foreign Ministry, a fact that was established by Ribbentrop at the outset of war when he obtained Hitler’s approval for a monopoly of diplomatic communications. Ribbentrop made constant efforts to force all members of diplomatic missions abroad to employ diplomatic communications on the ground that all messages were deemed to be primarily of political content.This was strenuously opposed by the military hierarchies on security grounds especially after tests made by military signals specialists in 1940 claimed to have found weaknesses particularly in the system employed by consular posts abroad. Given the importance of maritime issues in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Admiral Wenneker was particularly insistent on exerting the right to engage in regular complex enciphered communication with Berlin especially at and after the outbreak of the Pacific War in order to protect the supply of intelligence to the Japanese Navy based on German decryption of Allied communications, to such an extent that he sought to operate exchanges with Berlin through the deliberate exclusion of the direct relevance to Goering’s founding of the Forschungsamt - something that Ribbentrop observed and later came to rue.

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RICHARD SORGE, THE GRU AND THE PACIFIC WAR

ambassador.25 Ribbentrop tried to restrict enciphered reports from Wenneker to the German Naval War Staff after the discovery that a report about the Japanese invasion of Timor had not been copied to the Foreign Ministry in February 1942. This led to a tense stand-off between the Armed Forces and Ribbentrop over the following nine months after an attempt was unsuccessfully made to establish a separate status for Wenneker as German liaison with Imperial Japanese Headquarters. Wenneker was eventually named as Armed Forces Attaché in Japan as senior officer and Hitler eventually rejected Ribbentrop’s demand for Foreign Ministry control of the enciphered signals of military attachés in Japan. Wenneker’s efforts to exercise supervision over the activities of Abwehr personnel in East Asia, especially in the absence of any military counter-intelligence apparatus in the area, meant that he found it difficult in relations with both his ambassador and with Meisinger, to give full effect to pressure from the Japanese Navy to exert maximum security within his command according to Japanese standards.26 The greatest pressure was already being exerted on members of the Tokyo Embassy by virtue of the uncovering of the Sorge espionage ring, as the Japanese police had succeeded in obtaining copies of radio signals and reports bound for the USSR, but although a detailed summary of investigations conducted so far was issued internally in March 1942 the full story continued to be withheld from the Tokyo Embassy because the case might have an effect on the development of Soviet-Japanese relations.27 Both 25

26

27

This was first proposed by Wenneker in a cable of 6.12.1941: see POA 4: 748 and the ruling that for fear of enemy decryption of Japanese communications despatches of intercepted enemy signals should only be sent to the Japanese Navy via Admiral Wenneker is confirmed at: POA 4: 935. Most previous signals contained the tag that Ott had been orally informed. In theory, exchanges about intelligence matters relevant to policymaking were supposed to be conducted between departments in Berlin, but on at least one occasion the Japanese Navy was deeply annoyed by the fact that Ribbentrop would make naval information available to Ôshima during their regular meetings. As the latter also communicated separately with the General Staff and Kwantung Army, word of Navy activities would be liable to be discussed at Cabinet level, chaired by an Army general. This led to a loss of face for Navy Minister Shimada and, in turn,Wenneker was faced with reluctance on the part of his sources to be as accommodating with confidential information: see Wenneker signal Nr.1/42 Chefs of 12.5.1942 at: POA 5: 237–8. A secret account, ‘Outline of the Sorge Case’, was produced in March 1942 by the Justice Ministry in preparation for the court case opening in May 1942. This was produced in a rather badly translated English version in IRR files

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Wenneker and Sorge had learned since 1936 that a strong desire existed within the Japanese General Staff for some kind of military showdown with the Red Army along the shared mutual frontier in East Asia but that there was an even greater determination within the ranks of the Japanese Navy that conflict with the Soviet Union should be avoided at all costs. Such perceptions, however, were directly in contradiction with the policy being assiduously pursued by Hitler, especially following the invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941. While the Japanese General Staff was firmly committed to an anti-communist and anti-Soviet policy, not all Army factions were of like mind or were actually in favour of more flexible methods of dealing with the potential threats involved. The civil police prosecutions of Japanese Communist adherents were based on the Peace Preservation Laws of the 1920s after the Japanese Army had been forced to abandon its occupation of the Russian Maritime Provinces and diplomatic recognition was accorded to the Soviet regime. There was no way that the civil police would concede that the Sorge espionage ring was masterminded by the Red Army General Staff as this would have led to a takeover by the military police (kempeitai). It was also clear that the small naval police force, which had been closely monitoring Wenneker’s offices prior to the outbreak of war, as well as collaborating with the civil police authorities over the surveillance of the representatives of the powers about to be attacked, would fight tooth and nail to resist pressures from the military police.28 Wenneker was well aware of Army-Navy rivalries and frictions and consciously opted to go secretly behind the backs of the Navy in order to obtain the co-operation of Army officers, many of whom had been posted to Germany in the past and were close observers of the German military system and familiar with the German language. 29 This was especially important for Wenneker as a result

28

29

held at NAW: RG 319: Clausen Dossier,Vol.I. Attached to this is a copy of the original Japanese record of the court case against Clausen, dated 6.12.1943. These documents posit a connection between the Comintern system and the GRU and also spell out the enciphered messaging system employed by Clausen for the despatch of radio signals to the USSR and may well have been the indirect basis for Lissner’s report of 23.3.1942. A much fuller account in Japanese is available in Gendai-shi Shiryo – Zoruge-Jiken. Tokyo, 1962;Vols.1–3. From 1940, separate official receptions were held by the Japanese Navy with the representatives of allied and friendly navies and with those of navies deemed to be hostile. Few Japanese Army officers were knowledgeable users of English but the bulk of Japanese Navy officers were familiar with Anglo-American technology

12

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of instructions to seek to import strategic war materials such as rubber and wolfram and the need for closer cooperation with the Army hierarchy expanded exponentially following the outbreak of the Pacific War as different regions of occupied South-East Asia were divided administratively between the two services and efforts had to be made to persuade local military and naval staffs to do deals with German business representatives to supply quantities of raw materials to be despatched in German and Italian blockaderunners to Europe.30 One consequence for Wenneker lay in a willingness on the part of Japanese military and naval factions to defend his position in view of their vested interests in deals brokered by him. The fact that Wenneker had progressively become aware of the strategic preferences of the Japanese Navy, which became particularly significant in the course of 1941, when he sought to explain and support as far as he could (before June 1941) its diametrical opposition to involvement in Hitler’s obsession with the liquidation of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, it would appear that behind the facade of diplomatic relations, a more realistic exchange between the two countries was possible through the secret service channels linking the Japanese Army with the organisations in the High Command of the German Army (OKH) and the German Armed Forces (OKW). One of these channels was located in the co-operation between the Abwehr agent, Dr. Ivar Lissner, at Harbin with the head of the Japanese Army’s tokumu kikan there, Major-General Yanagida Genzo- (1890–1952). Interestingly, Yanagida had served as Japanese military attaché in Poland in 1933–34, when there had been close collaboration between

30

and methods, whereas the minority were despatched to Germany after 1919. It was only after 1932 that increasing numbers of younger staff officers were recruited from the ranks of growing cadres posted to Germany and served with the Japanese Navy Ministry and Naval Staff. These officers became important contacts for Wenneker especially after 1935, but in his dealings with more senior officers communication took place mainly in English, which Wenneker had learned as a prisoner-of-war between 1914 and 1917 at a camp in North Wales. For Axis vessels to engage in breach of the Allied blockade, they became progressively more dependent on oil fuel seized by the Japanese armed forces, particularly in Sumatra and Borneo. The impact of enemy submarines on the small Japanese merchant fleet became so devastating that the use of German blockade-runners was offered to transport Japanese Army goods between the Asian continent and Japan in return for fuel, preferential exchange rates and the supply of defensive weapons for German vessels.

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Polish Army encryption agencies and those of the Japanese Army, and in 1940 after the fall of Poland two Polish decrypt specialists were employed within the Kwantung Army working on Soviet communications and who continued to work there even after diplomatic relations with Poland were terminated under pressure from Germany.31 Yanagida’s connections in the past had been with Poland and France and he was part of the faction in the Japanese Army that took issue with the strongly anti-Soviet cadres in the General Staff. It would appear that Yanagida was the source of information about the Sorge espionage ring which was passed on to Lissner, who communicated indirectly with the Abwehr via the German legation at Hsinking and revealed in his cable No.92 of 23 March 1942 how Sorge had been unmasked through police surveillance and seizure of Clausen’s radio transmissions and alleged that the Soviet radio code had been deciphered. These accurate details were relayed to Tokyo the following day and an evaluation of these was requested, not least because it alleged that Sorge was ‘constantly and continually briefed about the future course of Axis policies from the best-informed German sources’, having been ‘working for years for the Soviet Russians and specifically for the Red Army’.32 Ambassador Ott reacted by denouncing Lissner’s allegations as based on current rumours that were ‘completely erroneous’ and pointed to his own earlier reports derived from statements by the public prosecutor. Ott also reported that when Meisinger had talked about the issue to the public prosecutor, the latter claimed that such reports were derived from enemy sources and asked for such reports to be passed on to the public prosecutor.33

31

32

33

These relationships are much more fully documented in the author’s The Polish Labyrinth – Japan, Poland & the German Secret War. Saltire House Publications, prepared in disk form in 2019: see www.price-of-admiralty.com. Kühlborn (Hsinking) Tel.No.140 of 23.3.1942 to the Military-Political Section (Pol I M) for relay to Major Busch of the Air Intelligence Branch of the Abwehr. The cable was relayed to Tokyo on orders telephoned by Under-Secretary Woermann to Counsellor von Grote next day and sent by Braunstumm (Press Section) to chargé d’affaires Kühlborn in Hsinking to repeat to Ott. Ott Tel.No.937 of 26.3.1942.

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Max Clausen and Employees of his Company (NAW)

Japanese and Axis Representatives Celebrating the Outbreak of Pacific War, 15 December 1941 (Irma Wenneker)

2

‘In the Matter Affecting Ambassador Ott’ – IT WAS AT this point on 27 March 1942 that Ribbentrop himself intervened by firing off a cable directed personally to Ott in which he called for a full report on relations between Sorge and the Embassy and on the extent, if any, there might have been breaches of Japanese confidence. It was important, said Ribbentrop, that he had to be in a position to fend off criticisms of the Foreign Ministry arising from the circulation of the allegations to the armed forces. But he said nothing about the notification of the German police that had already added to the complexity of the issue in domestic politics, though he wanted to know how Sorge’s Communist past had been overlooked to the extent that Sorge could obtain membership of the Nazi Party without adequate checks and pointed to the use made by Sorge of support from members of the Embassy to obtain a closer connection with the Frankfurter Zeitung.34 The fact that Ribbentrop specifically asked Ott to look into the inaccuracies in Lissner’s report provided Ott with an open invitation to highlight all the contradictions which could be identified that might cast doubt on the authenticity of the allegations. He denied, firstly, that Sorge had been tried and condemned and cast doubt on claims mentioned by Lissner about the involvement of the Japanese Navy in dealings with the Russians, but made no comment about Lissner’s praise for the work of Admiral Wenneker in rescuing good relations. Ott rebutted Lissner’s claim that Sorge was ever party to continuous briefing by Embassy officials, indicating that information – mostly reliable - had been received by the military, air and former naval attachés from Sorge and was based on what had been learned from Japanese sources in the style of effective professional journalism. Ott pointed to having 34

Ribbentrop Tel.No.890 of 27.3.1942 to Ott.

15

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made reports in the summer of 1941 based on points that Sorge had claimed to have picked up from political circles round Prime Minister Konoe. Ott denied that the Embassy provided sponsorship for Sorge’s relationship with the Frankfurter Zeitung – something that had already been disproved in earlier correspondence with the editors – and Ott claimed that he had been introduced to Sorge only at the end of 1934 when Sorge was already accepted as a Nazi Party member, adding that personnel in the mission had changed so much since 1933 that there was virtually no one well informed enough about early interactions between Sorge and the Embassy. Ott drew attention to the fact that he himself had had to inform Lissner in 1940, on orders from Berlin, about his dismissal as representative of the Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, and Lissner’s transfer to Manchuria to work for Angriff and other journals. This was a result of the discovery back home that Lissner’s father had tried to falsify records indicating that the family lineage was non-Aryan.35 Ott went on to claim that he had carefully researched his high-level Japanese contacts for any indication of any lowering of mutual trust since October 1941, but could find only evidence of preferential treatment for himself and Minister Kordt. Nevertheless, he was prepared to stand aside or stand down should more objective assessments be collected that did not underpin his own observations. His trump card was the claim that he had been approached by the head of the kempeitai, General Nakamura Aketo (1889–1966) and volunteered the information that the Sorge Case had not adversely affected German-Japanese relations.36 35

36

In their potted biography of Lissner in Mader et al. (1985): 326–7, they claimed that Lissner’s real name was Robert Hirschfeld and that his Jewish origins had been concealed by his father following the family’s migration from Latvia in 1918. After Lissner himself had moved to East Asia by 1938, his father and brother had subsequently moved to Shanghai, but he appears to have been supplied with funds via Switzerland, nominally by an ‘Uncle Max’. Lissner subsequently wrote to Wenneker’s defence counsel, but died in Switzerland in 1967. The kempeitai dealt with questions of counter-espionage, whereas tokumu kikan handled the collection of covert military intelligence and issues of subversion and sabotage, areas covered by Abwehr I and II in Berlin and represented in the Japanese Embassy in Berlin by Colonel Yamamoto Bin at this period. Ott had been provided with an Enigma machine since about 1935 for the relay of secret information about the Red Army and as military attaché until 1938, was closely aligned with the General Staff and encouraged by Hitler himself to promote close co-ordination of German and Japanese military pressure on the USSR. Ott was provided in 1935 with an assistant military attaché, Major Erwin Scholl,

‘IN THE MATTER AFFECTING AMBASSADOR OTT’

17

There is no mention at all in Ott’s statement of the fact that Admiral Wenneker had served with him as naval attaché in Tokyo between December 1933 and July 1937. Evidence of the closeness of their relations comes from signed menus (seen by this author) of the years 1935 and 1936 of Anglo-German diplomatic dinners in Tokyo attended by the UK assistant naval attaché, Commander George Ross, which include the signatures of von Dirksen, Ott,Wenneker and Sorge. Further internal research within the Foreign Ministry was conducted on 27 March 1942 by Under-Secretary Luther, the head of the Inland Department, in a discussion attended by the head of the Legal Department, Under-Secretary Gaus, the head of Personnel, Dr Schröder, Minister Bergmann (Protocol), and the relevant desk officers in the Political and Press Departments.They observed that the report from Lissner was not from an agent lodged in the Legation in Hsinking but from a regular agent who had been known for some time.The cable was directed to a third party in Germany via the Foreign Ministry cipher system, as authorised by Ribbentrop with effect from 24.11.1939. It was established that the Political Department official, von Grote, handling the cable, was aware of a substantial number of messages retained in the ministry about the Sorge Case and von Grote discussed the matter with Major Busch’s deputy, Lieutenant Plötz, who gave an assurance that the issue would not be pursued by the Abwehr, though a copy would be passed on routinely to the Foreign Section (Ausland) headed by Captain Bürkner, who was contacted and informed that the information from Lissner was ‘completely erroneous’ according to the cable received from Tokyo. The cable, however, opened up the whole question of Foreign Ministry control of the communications of German military agents abroad and of the long-established policy of providing many such agents with nominal functions within missions abroad as a cover for intelligence activities.37

37

who had previously served in the Russian Section of the Intelligence Division of the German General Staff and had been a member of Sorge’s unit during World War I. See Ott Tel.No.980 of 29.3.1942 to Ribbentrop. This document was now held within a file taken over by Ribbentrop’s Secretariat incorporating all previous documents on the Sorge Case from the Political and Press Departments and no copies were distributed within the Foreign Ministry of this particular message. Many German agents, particularly if they were located within range of German listening stations, had been equipped with radio transceivers (Afu). Distant locations such as China, however, permitted communication principally through the radio links of missions and consulates with Germany, though as a result of friction between Siefken and Consul-General Fischer at Shanghai and Ambassador Stahmer, separate arrangements were made by Siefken to make use of Italian

18

RICHARD SORGE, THE GRU AND THE PACIFIC WAR

The committee then concentrated on Lissner himself. It was pointed out that he had been serving as the correspondent in East Asia of Angriff and other magazines but that at some unknown date he had also been appointed as an Abwehr agent. Initially, he had been sending his reports to Berlin by mail but following the assault on the USSR, arrangements had been made for his reports to be relayed via the Legation in Hsinking rather than via the Consulate at Harbin, where he resided and was in touch with the Japanese Army tokumu kikan there.38 There was a recognition, however, even though Ambassador Ott was evidently unaware of it, that Lissner’s reports were so numerous and valued by the Abwehr that he was rewarded with the supply on 20 August 1941 of a certificate of equivalence to Aryan status routinely issued in

38

transmitters at Beijing because he refused to make the clear text of his enciphered signals available. Ribbentrop tried to insist on all agents only to operate with his permission. It was just as a result of the scale of enemy agents operating in neutral diplomatic and consular missions being impressed on the Foreign Ministry and the revelation by Minister Selchow that an agreement had secretly been reached in 1940 by the Foreign Ministry Deciphering Section (AA/Pers.Z) for the Abwehr to supply copies of enciphered signals should they require them that forced Ribbentrop to rethink his policy. See AA: Pol I M: Abwehr Mil.Pol.: ‘Einbau von Angehörigen der Abwehr in Aussenstellen des Auswärtigen Amtes,’ Bd.1, (1940–1942). Lissner when correspondent for the Völkischer Beobachter was the only foreign journalist permitted to report on the Soviet-Japanese border fighting at Changkufeng in the autumn of 1938. It is unclear if Lissner was already reporting his observations to the Abwehr at this point, as he evidently had been in close touch with Party and Gestapo circles prior to his departure for East Asia and discovery of his non-Aryan lineage enabled him, along with other individuals with Jewish forbears, to come to satisfactory arrangements with the Abwehr hierarchy. The earliest identification of Lissner with the Abwehr can be found in Abw.I Nr.1881/5.41g IT/Lw. of 15.5.1941 sent by Dettinger to Wenneker for relay to its agent ‘Toni’ involved in the transfer of Japanese aerial torpedoes to Germany: OKM:M Att:’Japan – Mobilmachung.’ Bd.3: 428a. His nominal control lay with the Aviation Group in the intelligence-gathering section (Abwehr I Luft), but the many surviving reports submitted to Berlin after 22 June 1941 indicate quite clearly that there was an eclectic spread of military information of all sorts, including the mounting of sabotage operations on Soviet soil in which individuals of Ukrainian origin apparently figured prominently. This scattergun approach meant that German citizens who had long-established links with the military attaché in Tokyo such as Emil Fütterer, a contact of Abwehr I Heer and a leading member of the Nazi Party in Manchukuo, who appears to have sponsored Lissner in the first place, were none too pleased with such competition. Party representatives inevitably were not likely to demonstrate the degree of charitableness toward non-Aryans shown by the Abwehr hierarchy while the use of Ukrainians was unlikely to go down well with the longstanding local White Russian community encouraged and subsidized by the Kwantung Army.

‘IN THE MATTER AFFECTING AMBASSADOR OTT’

19

Hitler’s name. Nevertheless, it later emerged that membership of the Nazi Party was denied to Lissner, but this fact was not apparently revealed to most third parties, including Meisinger and also Lissner himself. But Lissner evidently appeared to continue to assert to the Japanese and others that he remained in good standing with the Nazi hierarchy. The Press Department representative, Baßler, pointed also to the fact that relations between Lissner and Ott were ‘strained’. This situation was fleshed out in greater detail by his boss, Dr. Schmidt, in a separate memorandum for Ribbentrop dated 31 March 1942. In conclusion, Luther asserted that the principal failing to be picked up lay in the acceptance of the Lissner report by Consul-General Kühlborn, acting as chargé d’affaires on behalf of the absent Minister to Manchukuo, Dr Wilhelm Wagner (1884–1946). A copy of a draft cable of censure for despatch to Kühlborn was sent on to Ribbentrop with the advice that a reiteration of the principle should be issued to all diplomatic and consular missions abroad. On 2 April, therefore, a cable to Hsinking, drafted by von Grote but signed by Ribbentrop, was issued personally to Kühlborn and a copy sent to Tokyo for information on 7 April. This last instruction followed directly from an order given by Ribbentrop to the State-Secretary, Ernst von Weizsäcker, to institute an enquiry into what facts could be assembled ‘in the matter affecting Ambassador Ott’. Weizsäcker turned initially to the director of the Political Department, Minister Otto von Erdmannsdorff (1888–1978), who had served as counsellor of embassy and occasionally as chargé in Tokyo between 1929 and 1933. He had no recall of any contact with Sorge and he was unaware of any transactions between Sorge and the mission. Weizsäcker then turned to Counsellor of Legation Kolb who had served in Tokyo until the end of 1938 and who said he knew Sorge well. Kolb recalled that Sorge was a gifted, well-connected journalist who was a ‘good mixer’ but was somewhat affected by a motorbike accident. He indicated that Sorge had contacts with members of the Embassy and often received social invitations, sometimes involving Ambassador von Dirksen in person. He recalled that Sorge also had been used by Ambassador Ott while he had been military attaché in ways that conformed with normal exchanges with useful well-informed German journalists. He believed that Ott obtained information from Sorge and evaluated this in the context of his reports home, but did not seriously consider that any secret or confidential matters were supplied by Ott to Sorge.

20

RICHARD SORGE, THE GRU AND THE PACIFIC WAR

Weizsäcker then consulted with the current serving officer on the East Asian political desk, Karl-Otto Braun, who had served in Tokyo just after Kolb and then moved on to the consulate-general in Osaka.39 Braun characterised Sorge as ‘the best-informed and most sought-after by the Embassy among all representatives of the press in Tokyo.’ Sorge was regarded as Ott’s personal friend and both attended the theatre and played chess with each other.40 Braun was then asked to come up with more specific evidence that might verify any ‘charges of excessive professional intimacy on the part of Ambassador Ott.’ Braun was under the impression while in Tokyo that Sorge appeared to have been briefed in general about the moves initiated by Ribbentrop for the creation of an alliance with Japan, which foundered in the autumn of 1939 when Hitler came to a deal with Stalin. Braun also pointed to the fact that Sorge had been invited to supply the Embassy with memoranda on political and economic issues which focussed on the Japanese domestic dynamic.41 One of Braun’s most damaging remarks was about Ott’s assistant, Major Scholl, who, he claimed, ‘conducted an intimate exchange of views with S[orge].’ Having hinted at the possibility of the mark having been overstepped by his former colleagues, he argued that most information came from a reading of the Japanese press, though he doubted if he had been in touch with Japanese official agencies to gather such data and insisted that this information had been given by Sorge to the Embassy rather than the reverse. Braun also hesitated to define more precisely the degree of actual intimacy with Major Scholl. In conclusion, however, Braun claimed that he had never obtained any firm evidence of the Embassy having supplied Sorge with any secret information and if he had been a witness to that, he too would have been culpable if he had not raised the issue at the time. He finished by 39

40

41

In August 1939, Attaché Braun wrote home from Tokyo requesting membership of the SS and this was approved on 22.11.1939 and Braun issued with the title of SS-Untersturmbannführer. A dossier on Braun can be found at: NAW: RG 319: XE003419. It later transpired that Ott’s wife had previously been married to an architect of Communist persuasion, Friedrich May, and it was also claimed that Helma Ott had actually danced with Sorge at a party in Frankfurt-am-Main: see Mader 1985: 140; The German Foreign Ministry archives contain a circular WVII 408/39.II of 24.2.1939 to principal missions abroad providing an explanation of the impact of the Sino-Japanese conflict on the Japanese economy and appears to have been based on a paper by Sorge to Ott of late 1938.

‘IN THE MATTER AFFECTING AMBASSADOR OTT’

21

saying that he ‘regrets if his statements gave rise to the impression that any serious complaints were being made about Ambassador Ott in the context of the obvious discretion used in dealings with a German journalist.’42 Braun’s personnel file attests to his status as someone who was a genuine adherent of the Nazi Party, having previously worked for the Foreign Policy Office of the Party under Alfred Rosenberg. Braun escaped from US arrest at the end of the war in Europe and migrated to Latin America like a number of other apprehensive German citizens such as Admiral Lietzmann, but it was not until a few years before the end of his life that he sought to identify himself with those who advocated varying degrees of historical revisionism be applied to past international relations. He paid particular attention to the development of US relations with Japan and Germany and identified hidden Soviet and Communist influences within the Roosevelt White House and compared these with his own experience over the Sorge Case, perhaps with a certain degree of 20-20 hindsight. According to Braun’s account, he considered Ott’s appointment as ambassador in Tokyo ‘one of Hitler’s far-reaching mistakes’ and that Ott regarded Braun with suspicion as a Nazi snitch and that he harboured ‘anti-Hitler leanings’ as an ‘old line military conservative’. Braun often encountered Sorge drunk at Lohmeyer’s restaurant and claimed that ‘his Bohemian behaviour completely disarmed our suspicions’. However, he concluded that Sorge ‘was on a very familiar basis with our Ambassador and furnished him with valuable details on Japanese domestic policy’ and enabled Sorge to become ‘a permanent guest of our three military attachés’.43 Braun claimed in the 1980s that he had been contacted by von Weizsäcker by telephone (while Braun was visiting Nuremberg) to speak about Ott-Sorge relations and saying that these were ‘intimate’ and that ‘therefore the Ambassador should be 42 43

Weizsäcker memorandum of 4.4.1942. Braun article ‘Reflections on German and American Foreign Policy, 1933–1945.’ Journal of Historical Review 6/1: 41–66, a paper presented to the 6th International Revisionist Conference’ on his career as a German diplomat during the Nazi era. Confirmation of Sorge’s intimacy with Ott and his attachés may be found in the autobiography by Klaus Mehnert: Ein Deutscher in der Welt. Stuttgart, Fischer, 1983: 180ff. Mehnert’s papers, however, do not appear to contain more precise information on the topic, even though these include lengthy correspondence between Mehnert and especially Helma Ott, and he appears to have accepted Ott’s version of events while both were alive.

22

RICHARD SORGE, THE GRU AND THE PACIFIC WAR

recalled immediately’. Braun asserted that he became ‘very disturbed’ when Weizsäcker allegedly urged that Ott should stay on. He argued that the Japanese had also been disturbed and ‘a few months later they tactfully demanded his recall.’ A comparison of memory with the surviving written record, however, points to an explicit identification of Erwin Scholl rather than Eugen Ott as engaging in intimate relations with Sorge, though Braun seems to have gleaned from his contacts with the Japanese at the time that the prosecution had taken note of Sorge’s close links with the Tokyo Embassy and concluded that Sorge ‘was rather considered to be a member of the Gestapo’.44 When Meisinger was interrogated by American CIC officers after the Pacific War about the Sorge Case, he admitted that he had found that Sorge had been on the payroll of his predecessor in office, Franz Huber. On 15 May 1942, Ambassador Ott reported the news about the impending opening of court proceedings against Sorge, having heard from Minister Kordt an account of his meeting with officials of the Ministry of Justice who assured him that the charge sheet would omit any mention of Sorge’s membership of the Nazi Party, that the brief press announcement would only refer to him as ‘an international Communist’ and that ‘the Case does not affect German-Japanese relations’.45 This was reiterated two days later at a meeting between Ribbentrop and Oshima, who explained that it had been necessary to make an announcement about the trial because of the many prominent Japanese people involved, but that the communiqué would ‘mention nothing at all about any links between the German Communists Sorge and Clausen and official (German) offices in Tokyo’.46 This was followed by a further minute composed by Under-Secretary Woermann next day about a further reassurance from Counsellor Kase in similar vein emphasising friendly relations.47 All these reassurances came on top of correspondence with the Abwehr which asked for a message to be relayed to Lissner in person which thanked him for a further eleven reports he had sent since March ‘which the evaluating offices continue to regard as very valuable’ But it ordered: ‘No more reports about Sorge as the 44 45 46

47

Conclusions in the Justice Ministry memorandum of March 1942. Ott Tel.No.1506 of 15.5.1942 at: AA: Büro d.St.S.: ‘Japan,’ Bd.7. Memorandum RAM 17b/42 gRs of 17.5.42 at: AA: BRAM: Handakten von Lösch: ‘Japan – Geheime Reichssachen’. U.St.S.Pol Nr.325g of 18.5.42.

‘IN THE MATTER AFFECTING AMBASSADOR OTT’

23

Case is being handled by other agencies’ and was signed by Major Busch.48 These messages appear to have satisfied Ribbentrop that matters had been duly disposed of. However, in June 1942, a small reminder of the reality of continuing attention was received when a copy of a message from Major Hillmann, the head of the Nazi Party in Japan, to Gauleiter Bohle was relayed asking for him to sanction Sorge’s expulsion from the Party.49 More disturbingly, however, there had come in Oshima’s next meeting with Ribbentrop on 24 June a diatribe launched by Oshima against Colonel Scholl, now German military attaché in Bangkok, who was the subject of a complaint by the Japanese government that he was obstructing cooperation with the - Japanese Army in promoting subversive activities in India. Oshima reminded Ribbentrop that he had lodged objections in 1938 to Scholl’s appointment as military attaché in Tokyo in succession to Major-General Ott. Scholl, he insisted, ‘was certainly a very clever man but he was not devoid of very considerable personal vanity.’ Ribbentrop had demurred that Scholl was not provided with the necessary -radio equipment or funds to equip agents in such activities, but Oshima claimed that Scholl had been engaging in such activities even before the outbreak of the Pacific War and reiterated his demand that Ribbentrop issue orders to the German Minister in Bangkok to support the efforts of his Japanese counterpart there.50 This points to further indications of suspicions having arisen in Japan about the relations between Sorge and German Army officers in Tokyo, confessions about which had been marked in the statements voluntarily made to Japanese prosecutors.The fact of Braun’s Party connections and personal prejudice against Ott and Scholl may well have contributed to Japanese concern. But almost more important was the antagonism coming to the surface in the attitude of senior Japanese naval officers 48

49 50

Eisenlohr Tel.No.25 of 10.5.1942 to Harbin and drafted by von Grote as zu Pol I M 1033 gRs.I. Ott Tel.No.1925 of 26.6.1942. Memorandum RAM 22/42 gRs of 24.6.42 at: AA: Von Lösch Handakten. This document is marked as having been submitted to Hitler on 26.6.42 and also contained an attack by Oshima on the Indian exile leader in Italy, Mohamed Iqbal Shedai (1888–1973), whom he accused of causing problems in relations with the Indian independence movement when in receipt of a financial subsidy from Japan. He ordered his counsellor of mission who had been appointed chargé in Rome to cut off all contact with the Punjabi Muslim Shedai and demanded that Ribbentrop intervene with Mussolini against him as a former Communist. Cf. POA 6: 47–8.

24

RICHARD SORGE, THE GRU AND THE PACIFIC WAR

about the continuing close collaboration of the Japanese General Staff with the German Army and renewed hopes for Hitler’s campaign against Stalin being completed successfully. This antipathy was increasingly stimulated by the Navy’s growing apprehensions about the reverses their forces suffered: firstly, in April 1942 when Admiral Nagumo’s force had failed to locate the British Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean despite having interrupted operations when its attempt to obtain German direction-finding assistance yielded nothing;51 then in May 1942, after the US intervention in the Coral Sea when they failed to capture Port Moresby,52 and in June 1942 when they lost four out of their eleven large aircraftcarriers at Midway.This was when Wenneker met a ‘wall of silence’ and it was only admitted confidentially, much later in February 1943, by Admiral Nomura to their German Navy allies.53

Reinhard Heydrich

51 52

53

Walther Schellenberg

Hermann Müller

POA 5: 104 & 108. Ibid.: 239 and see Kretschmer Tel.Nos.1479/80 of 14.5.1942 at: OKM: 1.Skl.: Akte X,5: ‘Meldungen und Berichte aus Tokio,’ (1941–1943): 187–8. Ott had then sent a lengthy overview of the situation in the Pacific on 15.5.42, which was distributed to German chiefs-of-staff and correctly identified the South Pacific as the fulcrum of future Japanese operations: POA 5: 243–4. US radio monitoring correctly identified Port Moresby as a prime Japanese target, as well as Midway subsequently. Persistent attempts by the attachés in Tokyo to elicit more details of the Midway operations were tightly constrained and there was a vague admission that the Combined Fleet’s approach had been ‘discovered’, but the full admission of losses was only given by Admiral Nomura in Berlin on condition that word was not passed on to other German services and especially not to Rear-Admiral Yokoi, the naval attaché in Berlin. Cf. NAW: SRH-012, App.III.

‘IN THE MATTER AFFECTING AMBASSADOR OTT’

Josef Meisinger

Joachim Ribbentrop

Martin Luther

Walther Hewel

Heinrich Stahmer

Farewell Visit of Captain Wenneker to the Yasukuni Shrine with Ambassador von Dirksen, July 1937 (Irma Wenneker)

25

26

RICHARD SORGE, THE GRU AND THE PACIFIC WAR

Farewell Party for Commander Ross with Participation of his successor as UK Assistant Naval Attaché with Japanese Friends and Favourite Geisha, 1936 (G.C.Ross)

Captain G.C. Ross, 1942 (G.C. Ross)

3

The Purge of German Journalists – FACED WITH THE need to recognise that the Sorge ring had covered its activities with the greatest care by endeavouring to conceal their covert operations through the device of obtaining respectable professional employment and, in Sorge’s case, also of pursuing an outwardly Bohemian style of social behaviour, Meisinger embarked on a course of vetting members of the German community to test the extent of their willingness to adhere to perceived National Socialist ideals and of their underlying support of the regime. With the outbreak of war, his congratulations to his hosts were accompanied by the submission of lists of German citizens deemed by him to be ‘unreliable’ – a term which covered a wide range of possibilities beyond the unacceptable norms associated with racial, political and social exclusion. The rapid expansion of Japanese control in Asia also facilitated the restoration of German activities southwards and enabled him to arrange for the appointment of his predecessor, Huber, as police liaison in Thailand. Huber was linked in with the arrangements for co-operation with the Japanese Army’s tokumu kikan, headed by Colonel Iwaguro- Takeo, which had been initiated following the appointment of Colonel Scholl as military attaché at Bangkok in July 1941. These contacts were accompanied by efforts at the expansion of the Abwehr organisation in China and were also linked to secret efforts by Admiral Wenneker to make contact with the German vessels which had taken refuge at the outbreak of war in Portuguese India. Huber called on the support of the Gestapo to vet the small numbers of German residents in Thailand and suspicion fell quite soon on the Austrian photo-journalist, Karl-Raimund Hofmeier, working for the Völkischer Beobachter, who had been given the unique opportunity as a non-Japanese to accompany invading 27

28

RICHARD SORGE, THE GRU AND THE PACIFIC WAR

Japanese forces, a role akin to that previously accorded to Ivar Lissner when working for the same newspaper in 1938. As it was discovered at this time that Lissner appeared to have obtained a close relationship with the Japanese Army covert intelligence service, there was a strong suspicion that both Lissner and Hofmeier were operating in Japanese interest and that their double life bore comparison with that now proven to be the case with Sorge and Clausen working for the USSR. It took quite a lengthy period of investigation, including efforts to resolve earlier enciphered radio signals, before the Japanese prosecutors concluded that the content of the information supplied by Sorge had been authentic and had been at least to a significant degree derived from his contacts with members of the German Embassy in Tokyo.54 Japanese Army officers had been given access to research undertaken by the Abwehr unit stationed at Bialystok, Stab Walli, which was involved in the despatch of German agents behind the Soviet lines prior to Sorge’s arrest. Active research was also ongoing in Europe itself where Abwehr counter-espionage groups were targeting Allied covert radio traffic in France and the Low Countries and had organised the necessary technical equipment for homing into enemy signals, aimed at surrounding and eliminating enemy transmitters. Following the opening of the war in the East, the task of monitoring clandestine radio transmitters in contact with the USSR, which had been conducted since the 1920s, developed further and played a significant role in the unveiling of the Rote Kapelle.55 It appears that some messages from European transmitters were deciphered by about July or August 1942, but there is no available evidence that any contribution was made before these dates from the signals or reports intercepted by the Japanese between October 1941 and March 1942. However, what is clear from Japanese reports is precisely how the signals from the Sorge ring were enciphered and it is also evident that the Japanese were astonished by the radio equipment manufactured by Clausen from parts available in East Asia as being easily transportable and capable of transmitting up to 3,000 kilometres.56 So long as 54 55 56

Section 3 of Chapter IV of Justice Ministry survey of March 1942. See V.E. Tarrant, The Red Orchestra. London, Arms & Armour Press, 1995. Justice Ministry survey of March 1942, Exh.1. Clausen blamed himself for failing to destroy unenciphered signals and reports found by the police in his quarters. Post-war statements made by Clausen to the International Red Cross and to CIC agents contain very detailed accounts of large numbers of signals transmitted by him from 1935 to 1941, but it is uncertain how much of these were revealed

THE PURGE OF GERMAN JOURNALISTS

29

the Tokyo Embassy was the recipient of rather vague information about the role of radio transmissions by Clausen, but not provided with more specific detailed evidence until after March 1942, it had been repeatedly reassured that it did not affect good relations between the two allies. Nevertheless, given the atmosphere of uncertainty about which members of the German community in East Asia could be regarded as politically reliable, pressure continued to affect individual relations. Admiral Wenneker had been directly affected by the Sorge incident and was constantly reminded about the Japanese Navy’s perpetual worries about security through his contacts with staff officers of the Navy Ministry and Naval Staff in the final quarter of 1941.57 It appears that Sorge, in fact, left a suitcase for Wenneker to look after and this was handed over to the Japanese police, who confirmed that it mainly consisted of a draft study by Sorge of social conditions. However, the news that the Japanese Navy mission in Shanghai went to the trouble of drawing Wenneker’s attention to allegations of suspicious contacts between radio operators attached to the War Organisation in China and enemy intelligence was just one of a number of worrying developments which added to the pressure generated by the Sorge arrest. Awareness that relations between Japan and the Western Powers were liable to come to a head at any moment, Wenneker sought to pursue arrangements for the despatch of the steamer Osorno, which had a greater capacity than most of the blockade-running vessels to take passengers and took not just Claus Lenz on board on the orders of Ott and Meisinger but a number of other Germans of service age to be enlisted after their arrival at Bordeaux. These recruits were assembled from different parts of the German community in East Asia and posed a problem for security because so

57

to prosecutors or just how many of his signals had been intercepted by Japanese monitoring stations and were deciphered. The range of some of the transmitters employed by Soviet agents in Europe appears in many cases not to have exceeded 600 km., though it has been estimated that the number of signals transmitted from stations in Switzerland probably was greater than 5,000 between 1941 and 1943. Wenneker had signalled Berlin, for example, in Tel.Nr.1360/41 gKdos of 20.12.1941 that he was being constantly pressed to use Foreign Ministry communications channels, ‘something that I have resisted so far as the Japanese Navy is permanently worried about security.’: POA 4: 783. Wenneker subsequently recorded on 17.1.1942 meeting with Heinrich Loy, deputy head of the Nazi Party in Japan and who subsequently claimed to be a collaborator of Meisinger, to talk about ways of tightening security surrounding the movements of blockade-runners.

30

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many individuals were aware of the assembly of the recruits in Japan and this necessitated steps to disguise ports and dates of departure.58 Similarly, the arriving blockade-runner Rio Grande was diverted by the Japanese to the dockyard at Osaka rather than to the normal reception on its arrival at noon on 6 December 1941 at Yokohama, where a number of difficulties arose. While difficulties were to emerge because crew members had broken into cases in the cargo hold, including items of wine intended for Ambassador Ott and Admiral Wenneker, the Japanese Navy and police refused to allow crew members to land for some time in the light of the outbreak of the Pacific War. When the success of the Japanese surprise attacks in Malaya and Hawaii became clear, crew members were somewhat reluctantly permitted to land some eleven days later under police surveillance, but some of them were horrified to discover that the population of Osaka, which was unfamiliar with foreign visitors, treated them in a hostile fashion as if they were citizens of enemy societies rather than as allied representatives. An ironic description of the episode was composed by a German journalist, Werner Jörg Lüddecke (1912–1986), who had been sent by the propaganda department of the German Navy to report on the Japanese war effort, but was refused access to Japanese Navy locations or ships as a war reporter. His description, entitled ‘The Glorious Landfall’, composed following his return home, spelled out the difficulties encountered with the representatives of various Japanese authorities, especially after six crewmen secretly left the ship. In January 1942, the ship moved from Osaka to Kobe, where crews could swap stories about experiences in Japan and Lüddecke eventually was posted on secondment to the Tokyo Embassy for three months before returning home. Having been sceptical about stories he had heard about excessive Japanese secrecy and that Japanese viewed Germans just as white men rather than as allies, Lüddecke recorded that he had been forced to recognise that reality when he himself ‘was actually assaulted three times even though I clearly wore a badge of rank of the Axis Powers on my coat.’59 58

59

Wenneker took steps to replace the master of the Osorno with appointment of the more reliable Captain Hellmann, who had been master of the Havelland which successfully escaped from the port of Manzanillo on the west coast of Mexico in June 1940 and avoided the blockade measures put in place by Canada and the USA. POA 6: 41–43. This account, dated 9.6.42, was submitted to Navy chiefs, who decided that it should not be circulated outside the Armed Forces nominally on the

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Lüddecke’s three months attached to Wenneker’s office in Tokyo in the spring of 1942 meant that as a journalist, who had successfully sailed to Japan and back in wartime and subsequently published novels and films about these experiences, he was later contacted in 1965 in connection with the trial of Admiral Wenneker for alleged war crimes and invited to offer any evidence on behalf of his defence. As part of his affidavit, Lüddecke wrote: The Navy was rather cut off from Party influence and free from Party interference. However, the situation was extremely precarious for everyone who knew the arrested spy, Dr. Sorge, or were even friendly with him. Ambassador Ott was one of these, and I believe Admiral Wenneker was another. The pressure exerted by Japanese agencies in this affair was extraordinarily sharp.60

Wenneker was not only concerned about German security, especially as Meisinger had indicated that he approved of men of military age being returned to Germany on blockade-runners. But Meisinger also appears to have tried to agitate with Ambassador Ott for these ships to be employed to repatriate politically ‘unreliable’ members of the German community.61 In tandem with these pressures, however, Wenneker was exposed to pressure from Ribbentrop, following his initially unsuccessful attempts to exclude Ott and the Foreign Ministry (also under pressure from the Japanese Navy) from knowledge of the planned Japanese landing on Portuguese Timor, to force him to avoid using direct enciphered cables to the German Navy and to confine the relay of information with a political content only by means of Foreign Ministry coded cables.62

60

61

62

ground of the need to maintain secrecy about the breach of the enemy blockade: see OKM/M Att II 2451/42gKdos of 7.7.42 at: OKM: M Att: ‘Blockadebrecher,’ Bd.2: 276–80. Cf. Banzhaf memo OKM/M I Pa 437/42 gKdos of 27.6.42 to OKW on the need for continuing censorship about blockade-running to prevent the enemy from learning about the major significance of the traffic for the German war economy and ‘prevented as long as possible from employing sufficient forces to attack the traffic’. Lüddecke (Rome) letter of 26.8.1965 at: HP I: 43–44. He claimed in the letter that he was partly of non-Aryan origin and that he had filled his application untruthfully and was anticipating being court-martialled following his return to Bordeaux on the blockade-runner Portland. Ott letter of 2.10.1965 stated that he had words with Meisinger opposing this and said that he had threatened to have Meisinger recalled if he persisted with this tack: ‘prior to my retirement as ambassador in January 1943, Meisinger definitely desisted from any further Gestapo manoeuvres.’ Ibid. See Ribbentrop to Keitel in AA/Pol I M 369 gRs of 23.2.1942 at: POA 5: 194–6.

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Ribbentrop claimed to have been authorised by Hitler at the outbreak of war in Europe to have a monopoly over the communications of all members of German foreign missions and backed this up with the citation of the 1935 agreement with the War Ministry that all reports and cables should be submitted to the head of mission prior to despatch.63 Without revealing to Ribbentrop the fact that the Navy refused to permit the transfer of enemy decrypts by any route other than via Wenneker, the Navy became embroiled in a dispute via Field-Marshal Keitel (Chef OKW) and Ribbentrop on this issue, which lingered on until October 1942 before being settled by Hitler in the military’s favour, but which was complicated by attempts to establish a separate role for Wenneker as either ‘German Admiral at Imperial Japanese Headquarters’ or as ‘German Admiral attached to the Japanese Naval Staff ’.64 The first of these roles was strongly opposed by Ribbentrop and his advisers and in their exchanges with Tokyo kept constantly trying to encourage Ott to back up their complaints, especially as the initial order had been authorised by Jodl without prior notification of the Foreign Ministry on 5 July 1942.65 Ribbentrop’s veto of Keitel’s order was relayed to Tokyo on 24 July and obviously this could not be ignored by Ott, who had to broach it directly with Wenneker, who then discussed matters with his Japanese Navy contacts. The force of Ott’s arguments about the inappropriate nature of any formal liaison with Imperial Japanese Headquarters could hardly have been gainsaid by Wenneker, but shortly afterward, Wenneker sent a top secret cable to the German Navy on 27 July which exists only as a summary derived from Allied decryption of Wenneker’s radio traffic and states: Concerns distrust on part of Japanese of a German Admiral who was at one time closely allied with a journalist named Sorge, and 63

64

65

Ironically, Ott as military attaché in Tokyo between 1934 and 1938 failed to make many of the copies of his earlier reports available to the Foreign Ministry and even admitted privately to Ambassador von Dirksen that he had been supplied with an Enigma cipher machine to conduct a secret exchange of military intelligence about the USSR. A whole file was created on the issue in Ribbentrop’s Secretariat at: AA: RAM:’Deutscher Wehrmachtattaché Tokio’ (1942). It is also clear from the War Diary that Wenneker initially made plans for a role as head of naval mission and for the role of naval attaché in Tokyo to be transferred to his deputy, Captain Vermehren, who had arrived in Japan in June 1942. The order was drawn up by the Navy representative at Jodl’s Armed Forces Command Staff (OKW/WFSt/Op.M): see POA 6: 60–61 & 71.

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with Ambassador Ott. Sorge was accused of espionage for the Russians.66

On 31 July, Wenneker was wired by Admiral Fricke, the Chief of Staff of the German Naval War Staff, with the advice: Subject matter is not wanted here. At present give proper facts in deferential manner to Ambassador. If the results you think necessary fail to follow, act according to your own sense of duty and report it.67

Evidently Wenneker and Ott were the only individuals in the mission who were fully apprised of their relations with Sorge since the early 1930s. Under pressure from Ribbentrop and Ott, Wenneker had no option but to accept that there was no way that there was any possibility of attachment to Imperial Japanese Headquarters and to continue to argue that the liaison role would be best established if Wenneker were attached instead to the Japanese Naval Staff.68 Such a solution, however, was made more difficult by a modified proposal by Keitel that the military attaché, MajorGeneral Alfred Kretschmer, should serve as formal liaison with the Japanese General Staff alongside Wenneker attached to the Naval Staff.69 This was not acceptable to the Japanese Naval Staff which was worried by news that Ambassador Oshima had been pressured by Ribbentrop to suggest a Japanese assault on the Soviet Maritime Provinces in conjunction with the current German offensive aimed at Stalingrad and the Caucausus. This thrust, combined 66 67

68 69

POA 6: 75. Ibid.: 79. Unfortunately, the part covering this period in Admiral Wenneker’s War Diary is missing and it is completely uncertain how these issues were handled in discussions between the two. Even if it had survived, there is no guarantee that the Diary would have included such a sensitive subject as the top secret signals sent to and from Wenneker (Chefsachen) were usually kept in a separate file in the Embassy basement and these files were later destroyed by Fräulein Krag, his private secretary, and his old school friend, Father Bitter, then serving as a teacher at nearby Sophia University. See Ott Tel.No.2214 of 22.7.42 on his discussions with Wenneker: POA 6: 69. This compromise appears to have been adopted following the despatch of a signal by Wenneker with the adoption from 1 August of the signature ‘German Admiral’ which was continued for a couple of months thereafter. However, there was no avoiding the total rejection of the initial notion in Berlin that Wenneker would act as Armed Forces’ Attaché through whom Kretschmer’s and von Gronau’s reports would be channelled.

34

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with Rommel’s offensive in North Africa, offered the tantalising prospect of the unification of the German drives eastwards with the westward progress of the Japanese naval offensive, but coincided with Wenneker’s increasing concern about the refusal of the Japanese Navy to answer German enquiries about the outcome of the Combined Fleet’s encounter with the US Pacific Fleet round Midway. Internal relations in the Tokyo Embassy were simultaneously fraught as a result of Meisinger’s pursuit of German journalists in East Asia in the wake of the Sorge debacle, especially given the perception of Sorge created through Meisinger’s alleged involvement on his first arrival in Japan as Sorge’s drinking and whoring companion. The revelation that the Gestapo had failed to lay hands on an existing file on Sorge, apparently in the hands of the Prussian provincial police, prompted his efforts to seek additional enquiries in Berlin about other German journalists. The first essay in this endeavour was provoked by Japanese enquiries in SouthEast Asia about the photo-journalist employed by the Völkischer Beobachter, Karl-Raimund Hofmeier, with Meisinger’s police colleague in Bangkok, Huber, which resulted in a response from Berlin about Hofmeier’s career as an employee of the Soviet security apparatus, the GPU. But as he was arrested by the Japanese military police and the available details passed on to Tokyo in May 1942 and he was taken to Tokyo, he was interrogated there by Meisinger and confessed.70 This initial discovery coincided closely with the receipt of the cable from Lissner to the Abwehr about Sorge, as well as with Ribbentrop’s order to Consul-General Fischer and Ambassador Stahmer to discipline Siefken at Shanghai for failing to co-operate with the diplomatic authorities in China, a problem that was additionally loaded on to Wenneker, with Ott and Meisinger breathing down his neck.71 With Meisinger now having the 70

71

Huber (Bangkok) Tel.No.185 of 20.3.42; Meisinger Tel.No.1977 of 1.7.1942 to RSHA: POA 6: 59–60. Meisinger was determined that Hofmeier would be separated from Japanese custody – unlike Sorge – and delivered into Gestapo hands, as had been suggested as a modus operandi in dealing with German Communist agents in Manchuria as far back as the 1930s. Stahmer (Nanking) Tel.No.170 of 13.5.42 revealed that Siefken had been employing no fewer than 11 sub-agents not approved by the Foreign Ministry: AA: Pol I M: Abwehr Mil.Pol.: ‘Einbau von Angehöriger der Abwehr in Aussenstellen des Auswärtigen Amtes,’ Bd.1, (1940–1942). Wenneker called for the despatch of Lieut.Col. Eisenträger, a senior employee of Abwehr I Wi, to be sent to sort the matter out. In the end, Meisinger called for Siefken’s dismissal on the ground that he had been widely consorting with homosexuals in Shanghai, this being

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35

bit between his teeth, he sent a full list of other German journalists in Japan to Berlin for security checks to be made on all and sundry. While making enquiries about Lissner with Nazi Party officers in Harbin, Meisinger authorised that Lissner be put under surveillance. In a parallel situation, his representative in Shanghai, Gerhard Kahner, was authorised to place Siefken under surveillance so that he could bypass Ambassador Ott and collaborate directly with the Japanese counter-espionage forces in Manchukuo and Shanghai. One of the journalists checked in Berlin was Werner Crome, a correspondent who had connections with the Abwehr and had been expelled from Britain on suspicion of espionage in 1937, but who had moved on to Japan in 1938. Crome had subsequently made contact with the extreme rightist politician, Nakano Seigô (1886–1943), who had visited Italy and Germany in 1937–38 and was appointed Secretary-General of the IRAA in 1940. Nakano had been interviewed by Crome on several occasions and was provided by him with an introductory letter to General Yanagida in Harbin.72 Crome figured peripherally in Wenneker’s War Diary as one of two German correspondents in touch with an alleged Japanese Navy operative named Kato- with proposals for cooperation between Japanese and German agents against the USA, but which were denounced by the Japanese Army. Katô and his friends were said subsequently to have been arrested by the kempeitai and accused of fraudulent aims.73 The Gestapo

72

73

one item of Meisinger’s items of criminal expertise previously employed by him in the 1930s when attached to Gestapo headquarters and this was evidently endorsed by Wenneker and Siefken resigned and was replaced by Eisenträger in December 1942. See POA 6: 130–1. Siefken was subsequently the prime witness for the US prosecution of his old organisation after the war for having continued to collaborate actively with the Japanese Army after the German surrender. See NAW: Shanghai Minor War Crimes Trial Record. It is claimed by Mader et al. that Nakano had been an involuntary informant of Sorge, but it is not known if Nakano had been introduced by Crome to Sorge. According to this author’s interviews and correspondence with Crome, he recalled being told by Sorge at the time of the German invasion of Russia that it was a move that the German side would come to regret. It was also unclear from Crome’s statements how Lissner came into the frame, but documentary evidence suggests that Lissner may have met Crome at some point at the Hotel New Grand in Yokohama. Whatever the truth of these contacts, Crome’s links with Lissner came to the attention of Meisinger, who subsequently had both Lissner and Crome arrested and tortured by the kempeitai in 1943. See also the dossier on Crome at NAW: RG 319. POA 5: 35. Subsequently, it appears that Crome was reprimanded by Wenneker for obtaining the help of a master of a blockade-runner in posting mail for him

36

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report on Crome indicated that he had been closely connected in Weimar times with the non-Nazi right-wing parties and this could well have contributed to Meisinger’s estimate of Crome’s reliability from a Nazi viewpoint. There appears to be no indication that Meisinger identified any link between Crome and Sorge except perhaps indirectly through Lissner, whereas a link was identified by Meisinger between Clausen and the German aero-technical specialist, Willi Förster, who was denounced by Meisinger as a possible Soviet spy on the basis of reports from Berlin that Förster had been involved in the aviation co-operation between Germany and the USSR during the Weimar era. He had then moved to Japan, where he had married a Japanese and employed Clausen’s company to supply his business with blueprints prior to October 1941. Förster and his wife appear to have acquired contacts and business interests in the area round Chigasaki, including a former Benedictine monastery where cattle were raised for the supply of fresh meat to German ships and where arrangements were made via Wenneker for the housing of German sailors, especially those badly affected by the explosion and destruction of three German vessels in Yokohama harbour on 30 November 1942: the Leuthen (ex-Nankin), Thor (auxiliary cruiser Ship 10) and Uckermark.74 Förster was arrested by the Japanese police and apparently housed briefly in Sugamo Prison near the cells occupied by Sorge and Clausen, but after a bizarre turn of events released. After the war he was compulsively occupied in efforts to obtain compensation for the losses of his business in Japan and obsessively concerned with discovering the causes of his maltreatment and pursued claims about his having been victimised along with other German citizens. It was largely as a result of his post-war agitations that the West German authorities examined the cases of the alleged Soviet spy Hofmeier and the German sailor Poweleit and brought prosecutions against Admiral Wenneker and Captain von Allwörden, master of the Rio Grande, at Hamburg in 1964/65, although Förster fervently denied wanting to cause Wenneker any serious problems. However, the prosecution used Förster’s statements as the legal basis for undertak-

74

when the ship landed at Bordeaux. Crome subsequently claimed in interviews with this author that he had been in touch with the Abwehr, but it was viewed by Wenneker as a breach of security and he may well have been reported to Meisinger. See POA 6: 169 & 176.

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37

ing their cases in the belief that they would only just remain within the 10-year limit for undertaking these, but they consciously refused to bring Förster into court as a witness.75 Throughout 1942, while trials of the members of the Sorge ring continued to progress through the courts, Meisinger zealously continued to pursue anyone and everyone against whom any suspicion of ‘unreliability’ was levied and to try to follow up the cases of any individuals who had appeared to have any connection with the Sorge Case. This included Claus Lenz about whom the Japanese police continued to prod Meisinger when it appeared that Lenz had disappeared for some time following induction in the armed forces until finally traced, but his interrogation produced no further significant progress. Thus, Meisinger was forced to gather what information he could from individuals whom Lenz had encountered prior to his enforced departure from Japan on the blockade-runner Osorno in December 1941. The final three blockaderunners which succeeded in reaching Bordeaux in 1942 left East Asian ports in August and September 1942 and only arrived in Europe in the course of November 1942. The timing of these voyages therefore makes it highly unlikely that any written report from Meisinger on the progress of the enquiries into the cases of Sorge and Hofmeier could have reached the Gestapo in time for the preparation of a top secret report sent on the two cases by Himmler to Ribbentrop on 27 October 1942. In the Sorge case, the report rested on the evidence received via the Tokyo Embassy and was relayed by the Foreign Ministry to Gestapo headquarters. Himmler’s letter spoke of a report that had recently been received from Tokyo alleging that the Japanese court had confirmed that Sorge had ‘now been sentenced to death by courtmartial as having been a long-term agent of the Soviet Russian Intelligence Service’. It named Ott when military attaché in Tokyo 75

The Förster saga is examined in greater depth in the author’s Ultranationalism in German-Japanese Relations. Folkestone, Global Oriental, 2011, chapter 1. Förster had tried to pursue his compensation efforts on several occasions after 1947 and had sought to bring in Ott, Wenneker, von Gronau and Seelheim as witnesses in court actions. He approached Eugen and Helma Ott again during the Wenneker trial and Ott’s rather arms-length response to defence counsel’s appeal for assistance may be seen at: HP- I 01–07. This includes a handwritten note from Helma Ott to Frau Matzky, wife of Ott’s successor as military attaché, asking ‘Who is this Förster ? He has written to my husband and said that he wanted to save Wenneker...’

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as Sorge’s sponsor for his dealings with the Frankfurter Zeitung and also named Ott as the person responsible for employing Sorge to edit the Embassy newssheet and his subsequent temporary appointment in charge of the German News Agency in Japan. In conclusion, it was stated that ‘as a result of the fact that Sorge was constantly briefed from the best German source about Axis policy and its future course, the Sorge espionage case has created major political dangers.’76 This final conclusion appears to have been essentially copied from the report from Lissner to the Abwehr in March 1942 which singled out Ott as culpable and specifically accepted the Lissner claim that Sorge was linked to Soviet military intelligence rather than just to the Comintern. In the case of Hofmeier, the Himmler report again based its conclusions on the cables from Huber in Bangkok and Meisinger in Tokyo, acknowledging the role that he had played in extracting a confession from Hofmeier and in obtaining the support of the Japanese police in placing him under arrest.77 It accepted the gloss placed on Hofmeier’s confession by Meisinger that when he moved from Austria to Turkey in 1933 Hofmeier allegedly was recruited by the GPU to reveal the names of any Germans supposed to be working for the overthrow of the Soviet Communist Party on the basis of information obtained by him78 from the then representative of the Nazi Party at Istanbul: ‘these agents’, it was alleged, ‘who were won over were later sent with a fictitious task to the Soviet Union in order that they be disposed of.’ Ribbentrop was urged to take responsibility for adequate security checks on individuals outside diplomatic missions in order to exclude them from any influence over the Party. Himmler’s report to Ribbentrop followed on from a statement reported to have been made by Hitler to Keitel that ‘it is absolutely his will that diplomacy is not concerned with questions of an operational or tactical kind’. This confirmed that 76 77

78

POA 6: 131–3. Huber (Bangkok) Tel.No.185 of 20.3.1942 and Meisinger (Tokyo) Tel.No.1977 of 1.7.1942. AA: Inland II:Akte 90–83–60b: ‘Ostasien – SD Leute in Thailand,’ (1942). In a letter of 12.1.1965, Dr. Lissner stated:

I think it out of the question that Hofmeier was a spy. I knew Hofmeier well. He was a shy, reticent young man, who provided adequate service as a reporter for the Völkischer Beobachter. He did not have the slightest reason for being a spy. Clearly, Meisinger uncovered a major criminal record against Hofmeier and this is also the reason why it was important for him to get Hofmeier out of the grasp of the Japanese as quickly as possible. HP I L 79.

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39

Admiral Wenneker ‘has the right to report directly to the Naval War Staff without the involvement of the Ambassador.’79 This was to be passed on to the Japanese Naval Staff, which had pressed consistently for Ribbentrop to be bypassed as he made life for the Japanese Navy awkward through his close relationship with Ambassador Ôshima, who retained direct communications with the Japanese General Staff and the Kwantung Army in line with his support for the Japanese Army to be permitted to join in Hitler’s crusade against the USSR. The specific regulation of this matter was to be passed on to Ribbentrop in a couple of days’ time, which coincided with the Himmler report to Ribbentrop, and the Japanese were not to be informed of the fact that Wenneker as Armed Forces Attaché was to be provided with briefings from his colleagues, Major-Generals Kretschmer and von Gronau. Ribbentrop had reiterated to Ott in a cable of 21 October that he wanted Ott’s views on how best to maintain that any changes in Wenneker’s reporting to Berlin could ‘take place only in such a way that it left undisturbed the fundamental relationship of the Naval Attaché with the Embassy’. Ott was urged not to discuss the issue with Wenneker directly, but having been familiar with the need for maximum secrecy in past dealings with the Japanese Army, Ott may have had an inkling about the underlying reason for bypassing Ribbentrop that the Naval War Staff sought to influence the Japanese Navy by means of the passing of decrypted enemy signals uniquely via Wenneker. On 25 October, Ott informed the Foreign Ministry about Wenneker’s opposition to the security problems brought about by approval of the repatriation of German recruits by blockade-runner, a viewpoint which Ott regarded as ‘justified’ and a step that Meisinger could hardly fail to endorse. Ott reported Wenneker as insisting that this procedure ‘now has to stop and in future only Germans repatriated for exceptional reasons are to be transported’.80 On 2 November 1942, Ribbentrop had written a memo to his representative at Hitler’s Field Headquarters, Ambassador Walther Hewel (1904–45), asking him to inform Hitler of his decision to replace Ambassador Ott with Ambassador Stahmer in Tokyo. This did not take place until 19 November, when Hewel also, together with Jodl, presented their alternative proposals for setting out future relations with the military attachés in Japan. 79 80

POA 6: 129. Ibid.: 130.

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After reading both proposals, Hitler said he was not prepared to re-open the question and signed the draft prepared by Jodl and Keitel. Ribbentrop’s liaison with the High Command, Ambassador Ritter, had tried to insist that Tokyo was likely to be of crucial importance in bringing the war to an end and insisted that the post must be occupied by an ambassador in Tokyo who ‘enjoys in all political circles in Japan, civil and military, trust, respect and influence in the highest degree’.81 Ambassador Ott was informed about his replacement on 23 November and told that the Sorge Case ‘had an unfavourable effect on your personal position vis-à-vis these authorities’ with an added expression of regret that he would be unable to return home in view of the dispute with the UK over the shackling of commandos.82 Following the conclusion of hostilities, Ott was interviewed by an American official from the OSS at his retirement residence in Beijing, when he had an opportunity to provide background information about the circumstances leading to his visit to Japan in 1933. Later, in Japan, he filled in a standard questionnaire for the US authorities when he conspicuously said nothing about the reasons for his replacement on 31 January 1943, when little was known publicly about the Sorge Case and he claimed that he had been fired by Ribbentrop because he had opposed Hitler’s order for the manacling of British commandos.83 Consistent with this explanation were the statements by junior officials of the former German Embassy, such as former Secretary of Legation Franz Krapf (1911–2004), who subsequently served as German Ambassador in Japan from 1966 to 1971, and, on whose death in 2004, was criticised by Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer for the fact that the Ministry had glossed over his early career, when he had been involved with the Nazi Party and the SS.

81 82 83

Ibid.: 133–4. Ibid.: 148. On his return home in 1947, Ott attended enquiries examining the reasons behind the Nazi takeover, when he had served as a liaison between General von Schleicher and Hitler. Ott claimed that he had been able to defend his actions successfully in correspondence with other observers. Nothing, however, appears to have reached public knowledge about any explanations he may have given about his relations with Sorge between 1934 and 1941. Cf. Mehnert Nachlass.

THE PURGE OF GERMAN JOURNALISTS

Werner Vermehren

Kurt Lüdde-Neurath

Erich Kordt

41

Eugen Ott

(Maria Freitag-Vermehren/Bundesarchiv/Ingeborg Krag/Wikipedia)

General Matzky & Colleagues (Eleanore Matzky)

Captain Johannes Lietzmann (Inge Holland-Lietzmann)

4

‘Expressions which are Psychologically Dangerous’ General Jodl to Admiral Wenneker 24.12.1942

– I N THE COURSE of 1942, Admiral Wenneker had observed the developments in the Pacific War with mounting pessimism. In April, he had been invited on an extensive tour of the areas in East and South-East Asia occupied by victorious Japanese forces and already observed that they appeared to be resting on their laurels and to be unaware of the stiffness of combat arising in Europe by comparison with the cheap victories in which the Japanese populace was currently basking. Although reports back home about what was really happening in relations with Japanese officials were occasionally being filtered through by individuals such as the war reporter Lüddecke and the captains of blockade-running vessels, which emphasised the Japanese obsession with secrecy, their aggressive responses to criticism and a general lack of commitment to joint endeavour as allies.84 Until September 1942, over half the blockade-runners equipped and despatched to Europe successfully reached there with cargoes of valuable raw materials such as rubber, wolfram and tin, all of which were of outstanding importance for the German war economy. At first, these voyages were somewhat less hazardous because the Japanese occupation of South-East Asia made it possible for blockade-runners to take materials on board directly from producing areas and utilise gradually improving facilities in such ports 84

See, for example, the responses of German ships’ captains to questions posed by the Chief-of-Staff of the Naval War Staff, Vice-Admiral Kurt Fricke, on 18.11.1942 at: POA 6: 138–142.

42

‘EXPRESSIONS WHICH ARE PSYCHOLOGICALLY DANGEROUS’ 43

as Saigon, Djakarta and Singapore. For some time, however, these vessels operated with limited fuel resources and over time found it difficult to obtain access to refined fuel seized on Sumatra. But because Sumatra was controlled by the Japanese Army, Wenneker offered in return for fuel supplies the use of some of his supply vessels to ship Japanese cargoes from South-East Asia in view of the Japanese Navy’s dominant control of civilian ships, which began to decline through serious losses to the growing threat from the US submarine fleet. In the course of the following months, however, the Germans were faced with steadily increasing Allied attacks in the Atlantic, primarily from the air but also from surface warships equipped with radar and aided by greater knowledge of German naval ciphers. The wider strategic picture, too, began to deteriorate seriously both from the increasing resistance to German offensives in Russia and North Africa and in a growing awareness that the chances of an allied meeting in southern Asia from German and Japanese forces breaking through together in the Indian Ocean were fast diminishing. Promises were made by the Japanese Navy to launch fresh seaborne offensives against Ceylon and Madagascar, which were initially suspended because of the onset of the monsoon season but were not backed by the ability or determination of the Japanese Army to engage in major offensives in India. Faith was placed in the possibility of the successful subversion of the Indian independence movement, but the US intervention at Guadalcanal following the successful defences of Port Moresby and Midway effectively forced both Japanese Army and Navy to concentrate on defence of the South Pacific perimeter. For over six months, the German armed forces were prevented from registering the severe losses of the Combined Fleet and Wenneker kept complaining that the Japanese Naval Staff was rarely inclined to provide a balanced view of the fighting. As a result of the successful operations of the armed merchant cruiser, Thor (Ship10) in the Indian Ocean, mail was captured from the liner Nankin which included the Allied monitoring of Japanese fleet movements in the Pacific set out in the Combined Intelligence Centre of the New Zealand Navy’s reports to the British C-in-C at Colombo.85 An intercepted signal from 85

The New Zealand monitoring reports were of Issues 12–14 of the Intelligence Summary compiled between 21.3. and 6.4.1942. Cf. NAW: RG 457: SRH-012, Vol.1, which covers US traffic analysis and decryption in first half of 1942.

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Wenneker to the Head of Naval Signals in Berlin, dated 2 September 1942, reported that he had been invited by the Japanese Navy to participate in a conference on communications between the two allies from which he gathered that ‘documents captured on the Nankin showing disposition of Jap Fleet apparently created the impression that their own communications service is inadequately secure’.86 That reality remained fatefully decisive for the outcome of the Pacific conflict and Wenneker was forced to observe both a declining impact on the outcome of the efforts to strengthen the links between the allies and on the ability of the Japanese to defend the huge territorial gains that had been made in the first months of the Pacific War. Summing up developments at the end of 1942, Wenneker signalled the following observations to the High Commands: Disenchantment has set in compared to the triumphalism at the beginning of the year. Indeed the activists, who were still believing in the possibility of a successful landing in America, realise that a decisive battle is not possible and that before a compromise is attainable it will involve a full-scale tension over some years, as America for internal political reasons will never stop cranking up its armaments and will reject any let-up. The causes of disenchantment are the severe reverses at Midway and in the Solomons, which also have serious consequences for us, as they completely strangle the planned and the major deployment of naval forces against the sea routes to Basra and Suez ever more frequently demanded by us. The causes of the reverses again were, apart from the childlike need to savour the victory over the White Race and astonishment over the richness of the pickings in the quarrel between Army and Navy and between them and the civilian agencies over their division and exploitation. All of this paralyses the will to attack and 86

NAW: RG 457: SRGL Series. This signal was reproduced in summary form on 2.8.1945. The original materials were received with the arrival of the prize vessel at Yokohama on 18.7.1942 but the contents were not examined thoroughly by Wenneker until the end of July 1942 and copies made available to the Japanese Naval Staff thereafter. Scrutiny of the original reports from the spring of 1942 indicate that Allied monitoring of Japanese radio signals rather than evidence of any successful decryption had been achieved. Japanese suspicions combined with subsequent discovery of codebook losses in the Solomon Islands brought about significant changes to the cipher system which hindered successful Allied progress that had been made and had contributed to US pre-emption of the Japanese assault on Midway.

‘EXPRESSIONS WHICH ARE PSYCHOLOGICALLY DANGEROUS’ 45

the drive for further advances and indeed gives rise to neglecting to occupy the necessary points of security. At any rate, the occupation of Tulagi by the Americans was a total surprise. According to the unanimous conviction of leading naval officers a breach or pushing back of Japan by America from the occupied Southern Regions can only have any prospect of success from Australia. In this regard there are already indications at present of preparations by the Americans for this. The occupation of New Guinea and particularly control of the Torres Straits would exclude this danger. On the other hand, the occupation of the Solomon Islands for the defence of New Guinea is indispensable. In other words the fate of the whole of South-East Asia stands or falls with the Solomon Islands where the situation at present is very serious. If the islands are lost now, it will hardly be possible to stop the stepby-step advance of the Americans and in view of the increasing strength of the Americans, making any later re-occupation impossible. In the light of the Japanese frame of mind it is understandable if, on the basis of the analysis of the situation there by the Operations Section of the Armed Forces Command Staff (OKW/WFSt/ Op) of 12.12. to push the Japanese to make fresh efforts to give preference to the Indian Ocean over the Solomons promotes little reciprocity. One points here to the limited Japanese potential not to allow wastage. The fallback in production is worrisome in the highest degree, as with the fall in iron production from 4.7 to 3.8 million tons. Similarly, overall aircraft production corresponds to this with under 1,000 a month not anticipated. The shipping situation is catastrophic. There is unhappiness even with the productivity of workers and the morale of the people, which in no way reflects the seriousness of the situation. From the foregoing it is clear that further major operations, e.g. against India, Ceylon, Australia or Hawaii, are no longer discussed any more. Rather, all forces are directed toward the internal build-up of the region.87

When Wenneker’s report was analysed by Jodl, its contents were censured for submitting what was regarded as a ‘defeatist’ appraisal of the Japanese military situation: An estimate of the situation at the end of the year like the one of 16.12. must, because of its importance, be submitted to the Führer. 87

POA 6: 176–7. This was relayed by cable to Berlin on 16.12.1942.

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But in addition, it must be kept free of exaggerations, especially of a negative kind. Expressions such as ‘situation very serious’, ‘fate of South-East Asia stands or falls with the Solomon Islands’, ‘the shipping situation is catastrophic’, ‘extremely worrisome drop in production’ are expressions which are psychologically dangerous and of an unimaginative military way of thinking, which must always be based on a healthy optimism, do not stand out. It creates the impression that Japan no longer has any value for us as an ally and is to be written off, while it really is one of the important factors for a successful continuation of the war for us. I request you to pay attention to this in future reporting.88

Wenneker’s response to this rap on the knuckles was to note in his War Diary that he intended to obtain further confirmation of his estimations in impending conversations with Japanese officers, but for the time being he indicated that the impressions contained in his report ‘are derived entirely from Japanese officers, including the Chief of Naval Staff himself ’. He was at a loss to understand why his superiors were unprepared to call a spade a spade and he insisted on his view that Japanese potential was limited and that it was better to spell this out now rather than later.89 At this point, having been appointed Armed Forces Attaché, Wenneker was promoted to vice-admiral and as such the highestranking attaché in Tokyo, though he protested that it made his task less easy to perform in view of the fact that his principal liaisons were with junior officers up to the rank of captain and his meetings with senior admirals tended to be fleeting at events such as formal receptions.90 88

89

90

Ibid.: 205. Jodl had already insisted to the Naval War Staff on 17.3.1942 that all estimates of the strategic situation ‘must coincide with the view of the Führer’: OKM: 1.Skl.: KTB, Teil C, Ca: ‘Grundlegende Fragen der Kriegführung,’ 140–1. At the same time, discussions between the Naval War Staff and the members of the Japanese Naval Mission in Berlin also indicated that there was a serious difference of opinion between Admiral Nomura Naokuni (1885–1973), the head of mission, and the Naval Attaché, Rear-Admiral Yokoi Tadao, who was subsequently interrogated on 25.3.1946 and a transcript prepared for the IMTFE: see University of Virginia, Law Library, Tavenner Papers. Yokoi intimated to his German hosts that he believed that Nomura was telling an overoptimistic story about Japanese policy. Subsequently it was acknowledged by Nomura in February 1943 that the Japanese Navy had lost 5 out of its 11 best large aircraft-carriers, but asked that this information not be passed on to other German agencies and not to be mentioned to Yokoi: see POA 6: 348. From the surviving Japanese evidence, such as the war diary of the Navy Minister, Admiral Shimada Shigetaro- (1883–1976), it is apparent that there were twice as

‘EXPRESSIONS WHICH ARE PSYCHOLOGICALLY DANGEROUS’ 47

On top of all the bad news from the various fronts,Wenneker was especially depressed with the events of 30 November 1942 when the German supply vessel Uckermark blew up when moored in the inner harbour at Yokohama and caused fires and explosions which virtually destroyed the armed merchant cruiser Thor and the prize vessel Leuthen (ex-Nankin) with the loss of over 50 lives and numerous other casualties.To these there was an almost hysterical reaction on the part of Meisinger who resorted to the long-distance telephone to the Gestapo91 with claims that the disaster had been the result of sabotage rather than that it had been primarily the result of an accident involving Chinese workers in cleaning out fuel tanks when a spark had led to combustion and spread through the detonation of torpedoes in the hold. Most of the Chinese workers were killed and a number of Japanese personnel on land suffered badly. In the subsequent enquiry, the Japanese side was determined to put the blame on the German side, which paid out compensation to the families of the Japanese affected and had to pursue lengthy negotiations for satisfactorily dealing with the wreckage. Because of the fact that ammunition was being kept on board German ships, these were subsequently permitted only to anchor off Japanese ports and this often added to difficulties in turning blockade-runners’ cargoes round and to add to existing problems of obtaining use of drydocks and repair facilities.92 These losses,

91

92

many meetings with the Italian Naval Attaché, Admiral Carlo Balsamo, as with Wenneker. Meisinger filed a report on events at Yokohama on 3.12.1942, which was sent on direct to Himmler by Schellenberg, in which he referred to something having happened in Tokyo that he could not talk about more fully, but that ‘one could see from miles away that the three guns had been completely obliterated.’ As it was impossible to fathom the meaning of the wire, the Gestapo contacted the Foreign Ministry for further information and was told that the Leuthen had exploded in Tokyo harbour [sic] and been blown apart and that two other armed merchant cruisers Uckermark and another name unknown had been set on fire. The quays and port installations had been badly hit and that 40 Germans had been killed or wounded. The Japanese were responding to events well and their enquiries into causes were underway with Meisinger involved. Schellenberg note of 3.12.42 RSHA Kr.VI V.B.Nr.3078/42 gRs at: NAW: T-175, File EAP 161–6-12/250. Even with the promise of Japanese Navy support, German vessels were repaired only by small Japanese firms and Wenneker experienced great difficulty in obtaining anti-aircraft guns for defence of blockade-running vessels with the result that he had to make deals with the Japanese Army usually to obtain weapons captured from enemy vessels. In dealings with the Japanese Navy, Wenneker found it difficult to lay hands on suitable replacement torpedoes and there was a noticeable aversion on the Japanese side to the possibility of encounters between

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particularly of the armed merchant cruiser Thor, greatly diminished Wenneker’s role in terms of any direct German involvement of surface warships in the Indo-Pacific area, which was eliminated altogether with the loss of the Michel (including his former assistant, Commander Trendtel) on 17 October 1943.93 Although Ambassador Ott temporarily succeeded in reining in Meisinger’s impulse to despatch all of those he regarded as ‘unreliable’ home for the direct care of the Gestapo, his replacement by Stahmer on 1 February 1943 whetted Meisinger’s appetite for further dealings with the German community. This coincided with the worsening chances of success in achieving landfall in France as a result largely of Allied measures to tighten up the security of their communications and to fend off the risk that the German side might retain insights from decrypts they continued to maintain until November 1942. Although Ribbentrop and his colleagues might regard Stahmer as a rather more docile and responsive envoy than Ott, this was largely the result of Gestapo surveillance and infiltration of the Foreign Ministry between 1936 and 1941. In response to complaints by Rosenberg in 1935 about Foreign Ministry obstructionism in East Asian policy, steps had been taken to threaten officials with arrest and incarceration in concentration camps if they failed to toe the Party line. Other employees of organisations such as Ribbentrop’s private office were also subject to investigation and this revealed among other things that Stahmer, employed initially to make contacts with foreign ex-servicemen’s organisations, was married to a Jewish lady and had himself been a freemason – elements liable to result at best in dismissal. Meisinger had in fact been involved in such investigations, principally in the naming of Dr Friedrich Hack as a homosexual.94 Stahmer,

93

94

German and Soviet vessels in the Pacific which impinged on the hostility of the Japanese Navy to involvement in conflict with the USSR. The surface warships were replaced by the despatch of U-boats to bases prepared in South-East Asia for operations mainly in the Indian Ocean, something envisaged by Dönitz as head of the submarine arm in 1942 but actively pursued in 1943 after he was appointed C-in-C of the German Navy. Wenneker’s role in these operations may be examined in more detail in POA 6 & 7, especially in the surviving parts of the War Diary kept by him and Captain Werner Vermehren, his deputy. Hack was a broker in the aviation industry who served as an intermediary with Japanese military and naval attachés in the 1920s and 1930s and was a director of the German-Japanese Society but also a liaison between the Japanese embassy and the Abwehr counter-intelligence office. When he left to visit Japan with a filming company, he moved to Switzerland and played a role as an intermediary between

‘EXPRESSIONS WHICH ARE PSYCHOLOGICALLY DANGEROUS’ 49

consequently, was highly vulnerable to pressure from Meisinger throughout his tenure of the Tokyo mission and Meisinger steadily gained major influence within the mission and the wider German community.95 With the worsening strategic situation, too, Wenneker found that he was forced to call upon the backing of Meisinger in efforts to improve security for departing blockade-runners, especially as the impact of US submarines in the Pacific conflict became ever greater and German vessels, not just the Japanese maritime fleet, were engaged in the import of raw materials from South-East Asia to be processed by the industrial centres on the home islands. Not only was there growing concern about the possibility of ship departures being observed by representatives of the neutral Soviet mission (and information relayed to the Western allies), but Wenneker also encountered further problems within the supply organisation in East Asia which compelled him to hand over power to investigate fraudulent long-term handling of relations with the principal German shipping and trading firms. The problem was first uncovered following the loss of the chartered German vessel, R.C. Rickmers, when it was discovered around 10 January 1943 that the managing agent, C. Holstein, was taking commissions illegally from the Japanese charter firm and the matter had been passed on to Meisinger two days later to pursue enquiries into the misuse of state funds and Meisinger recommended that he be sacked.96 Doubts subsequently were raised on 13 February about the commissions charged by the shipping department of Illies & Co., the main German trading firm in East Asia, several of whose employees had been retained by Wenneker’s Supply Organisation. These doubts appear to have been initiated

95

96

the Japanese mission in Berne and the OSS representatives in the closing stages of World War II. The suggestion that he was a suspected homosexual was passed on to the author by General Arisue Seizô, former Japanese military attaché in Italy and subsequent head of military intelligence in the Japanese General Staff. Meisinger apparently set up an extensive biographical card system covering the names of the bulk of the community in Japan and extended his control over Huber as police representative at Shanghai and arranged for the transfer of Gerhard Kahner to Kobe in January 1943 to keep crews of German ships under surveillance. In his post-war interrogations, Meisinger said that he was aware that future prospects for Germany were increasingly dim following publication of news of German reverses round Stalingrad and was so scared of the possibility of being handed over to the Russians that he sought to commit suicide in the Yokohama stockade where he was held. NAW: RG 319, Meisinger dossier. POA 6: 255–6 & 270–1

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by further investigations on the part of Meisinger, who before the war had held the Gestapo desk investigating corruption within the Nazi Party, and who cabled Berlin via the Embassy on 21 January announcing the resignation of Major Heinrich Hillmann, the head of Illies & Co. and the leader of the Nazi Party in Japan.97 All the companies involved were subsequently forced to repay all the monies extracted from Japanese companies for commissions and Meisinger agitated for the guilty parties to be sent home for trial and sentencing. In the interim, however, doubts began to arise about the despatch of the next three blockade-running vessels because of the increasing difficulties encountered by returning vessels through the Bay of Biscay from aircraft of RAF Coastal Command. At Meisinger’s insistence, the prisoner Hofmeier was the subject of an urgent demand for transfer from Japanese custody to the supply vessel Brake, which set sail from Kobe on 3.2.1943 and orders were issued that he should be transferred to the blockade-runner Burgenland at Manila.This ship then set sail for Singapore on 18 February with the intention of sailing from there to Bordeaux - only for all four vessels departing from East Asia at this time to be recalled on 27 February. But because repatriation had been conceded as an exceptional arrangement by Ambassador Ott98, Meisinger appears to have been able to insist on the repatriation of Hofmeier as a matter of necessity, and at a time when orders were issued in a context where at least half of all returning blockade-runners successfully arrived at Bordeaux. Meisinger subsequently tried to insist that the individuals deemed to be guilty of fraud should also be repatriated as an exceptional case and had opportunities 97

98

Ibid.: 335–6. Following questioning by Captain Vermehren on 24.2.43, employee Vinnen was sacked over irregularity and frauds from Ahrens & Co. POA 7: 30, 44–5, 52, 55 & 57. Meisinger reported the result of his investigations on 18.3.43: ibid.: 144–5. See proposal for a suspected German Communist in Manchukuo to be arrested by the Japanese and placed on board a German merchant ship under arrest: Best letter Gestapa 1130/36 II A 1 of 2.12.1937 to Foreign Ministry, but this had been abandoned when the suspect escaped. AA: Pol V: Po.19D: Inhaftierung von Kommunisten und Bolschewisten,’ Bd.1,(1936–38). At this time, too, Best was involved in warning off Dr Otto von Raumer not to get involved with an extension of the Anti-Comintern Pact to third countries because this was the province of Rosenberg and not of Ribbentrop, then in London as ambassador, which followed an order from Foreign Minister von Neurath of 23.4.1937 claiming to have been made by Hitler not to negotiate with other governments. AA: Ref.D: g.Rs: ‘Deutsch-Japanisches Abkommen,’ (1936–39).

‘EXPRESSIONS WHICH ARE PSYCHOLOGICALLY DANGEROUS’ 51

to make unsuccessful representations to a committee of enquiry which involved him, Stahmer, Wohlthat and Wenneker.99 Wenneker’s problems, however, were intensified at this period by the major efforts required of his Supply Organisation to obtain the necessary stores and equipment involved in the establishment of branch offices and necessary logistical support for the initiation of U-boat operations in South-East Asia. Alongside this effort were plans by Berlin to shift from the use of surface transports to that of U-boats converted to carrying cargoes of rubber and wolfram since Hitler had impressed on Dönitz that the need to import as much natural rubber as in the past had to a great extent been solved by the development of artificial materials which were longer-lasting than all-rubber tyres. These plans were severely disrupted by the grounding on rocks of the supply vessel Quito and the need to try to replace cargo that had been partially destroyed by the ingress of water. These events coincided with efforts to prepare the repair and equipment of the last remaining German armed merchant cruiser, Michel, for operations in the Pacific, but also coincided with a severe test of German maritime authority in the form of two captured Norwegian sailors attempting to damage the prize ship Rossbach in order to escape from German control. Because the Norwegians had thrown hand grenades, which could have caused deaths or injuries had they exploded,Wenneker decided to hand the arrestees over to Japanese justice but was cautioned by Berlin on the need to have sound evidence available to cover him in the event of a guilty verdict calling for the death penalty to be applied.100 99

100

Ibid.: 76–7: their discussion on 2.4.43 referred to the risks of enemy interrogation if blockade-runners were intercepted and the point was made that court prosecutions in Japan could not be carried out. Hofmeier appears to have returned to Yokohama on Burgenland at this date and to have been under the supervision of Commander Trendtel during the voyage. According to a signal of 22.4.43, the Naval War Staff approved repatriation in principle provided the requisite proof was available, but repatriation depended entirely on the opportunity arising. Meisinger was duly informed of this point but it is unclear if Wenneker put him into the picture about the loss of three German vessels sailing from Japan in March and April 1943. The two accused were subsequently imprisoned and a third man committed suicide, while a Swedish sailor named Bivall, who had witnessed the German tactics at sea. was handed over to the Japanese military authorities at Singapore to prevent him from making his experiences public and the Swedish diplomatic authorities were prevented from obtaining access to him until events had moved on and his stories were no longer of value if revealed to the enemy. In the cases of the German journalists, Lissner and Crome, Meisinger had secretly made arrangements with the kempei for them to arrest the journalists on his

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The need for caution in these cases also stimulated concern about the growing possibilities for interception of further blockade-runners and about what any individuals accused of treasonable offences on board intercepted vessels might be induced to reveal to the enemy.101 All available evidence points to continued pressure from Meisinger about how best to counteract the possibility of such prisoners as Hofmeier being captured in the course of repatriation and there is little doubt that the Gestapo had many fewer scruples about the treatment of individuals guilty of treason than the officers of the Naval War Staff. With the decisions taken by Hitler to order the phasing out of the increasingly dangerous surface blockade-running and the commitment by Dönitz to the switch to submarine transport, the decision to delay the despatch of the final three blockade-runners, Rio Grande, Burgenland and Osorno to Bordeaux was intended to coincide in time with the most favourable weather conditions in the Atlantic in the winter months of 1943/44. The first two vessels had been selected to make the voyage in the spring of 1943 but this move was suspended because the timing coincided with the most favourable summer-time conditions for enemy aircraft and ships in the Atlantic, but clearly Wenneker had conceded to Meisinger the despatch of Hofmeier as an exception to the general rule. However, no evidence appears to have survived of the terms and conditions of such an order to the masters of Brake and Burgenland but it is possible that verbal instructions may have been given by Wenneker to Commander Trendtel, his former deputy, who sailed on Burgenland to Singapore and back to Yokohama after its recall. Trendtel had initially been proposed as someone suitable to head one of the three naval bases to be established in South-East Asia, having been put in charge of supply and repair arrangements

101

say-so and, despite efforts by Admiral Canaris and Minister Wagner at Hsinking to refute his charges, there was nothing that they or Admiral Wenneker could do to gainsay the fact that, when the alleged claims were actually reported in person to Hitler, the latter stated that such people should immediately be shot. POA 7: 166–7 & 169. As a result of German discoveries of what had happened to POWs in North Africa while being handled by their British captors, Wenneker had included information about what could be expected by captured crews in the sailing orders for all blockade-runners departing from Japan from 1941 onward. Wenneker himself had been captured in 1914 after the battle of Dogger Bank and had spent lengthy confinement in North Wales as part of a life experience coincidentally shared with Captain Joachim Lietzmann, German Naval Attaché in Japan from 1937 to 1940, and Admiral Dönitz himself.

‘EXPRESSIONS WHICH ARE PSYCHOLOGICALLY DANGEROUS’ 53

at Yokohama following the arrival of Captain Vermehren on the Dresden in June 1942 and Trendtel’s place as assistant naval attaché transferred to him. From 1 April 1943,Vermehren was put in charge of the implementation of the plan to organise the logistics of the U-boat operations in South-East Asia, but was not necessarily privy to the arrangements arrived at between Wenneker and Meisinger for Hofmeier. It is clear, however, from statements made by Vermehren to CIC investigators in 1945 that Vermehren had stated that he believed that the handling of Hofmeier was based on demands from Meisinger, who had been nominated by Stahmer as the acting head of the Nazi Party in Japan on 27 February 1943.102 The order issued under Wenneker’s signature in October 1943 for the handling of Hofmeier and two sailors facing serious criminal charges was, nevertheless, drafted by Vermehren and typed up by his secretary, Fräulein Habenicht, before being submitted to Wenneker for signature.103 Before the last blockade-runners left port, it appears that it was Meisinger who made arrangements for consular secretary, Gerhard Ender (1910–1956), who had briefly been chief cipher clerk in the Tokyo Embassy until sacked by Ambassador Stahmer on 10 March 1943 for incompetence,104 to be shipped home on board Burgenland and provided with an acting military rank and a pistol. Ender had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1923 and appears to have been given confidential instructions by Meisinger as Party leader in Japan to ensure that he execute Hofmeier in the event of the ship’s interception by the enemy on the high seas. There is no evidence that either Wenneker or Vermehren were aware of such an instruction and the principal evidence for this act of murder only came subsequently from witness statements made by former crew members of the ship to West German prosecutors involved in the cases against Admiral Wenneker and Captain von Allwörden, the master of the Rio Grande, as responsible for the deaths of Hofmeier and Poweleit. The key piece of evidence 102 103 104

Stahmer Tel.No.684 of 25.2.43: see POA 7: 130–1. Ibid.: 196. Ibid.: 139. Meisinger kept on making claims that there were inadequate security measures in the Tokyo embassy and, in reply to an enquiry from the Personnel Department of 15.7.1942, Ott had stated in Tel.No.2432 of 8.8.1942 that tighter security arrangements had been instituted for surveillance of personnel on site with the help of Meisinger. Included in a description of the steps undertaken was the naming of Consular Secretary Gerhard Ender as supervisor of the embassy cash and cipher offices.

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concerned was derived from the order signed by Wenneker on 2 October 1943, a single copy of which was located in the ship’s papers of the blockade-runner Osorno, which was the only one of the three vessels that successfully reached Europe on 25 December 1943 but was grounded and reached the Gironde estuary eventually on 13 January 1944. Four prisoners on criminal charges were divided among three blockade-runners and the order stated that they were all to be kept in solitary confinement in the brig and because they were expected to have the most severe penalties inflicted on them, they were not to be released in the event of enemy interception on the ground that they were likely to ‘make treasonable statements’.The order was to be kept secret from other crew members until the ships were stopped by the enemy but was unusually to be included in the sailing orders of all three ships. It added that a signal about it had been passed on to the Naval War Staff. In his interrogation by CIC officers on 1 October 1945, Captain Vermehren, head of the Naval Special Service since 1 April 1943, admitted that he had been issued instructions by Wenneker to ‘arrange transportation for Hoffmeyer [sic] ...on a blockade-runner to Germany’ but insisted that the order ‘could only have been given by Meisinger’.105 Although the text of enquiry into the matter sent by Berlin to Wenneker survived, there appears to be intercepted evidence specifying that an order had been sent to Wenneker for the order to be rescinded and for the masters of the three blockade-runners to be contacted to tell them that they were to be made personally responsible for the handling of their prisoners. Wenneker appears to have responded to a reminder about this by informing Berlin on 21 October 1944 that he had been unable to rescind the order before departure and had agreed to keep Hofmeier on board Burgenland in response to urgent representations by Meisinger.106 105

106

NAW: RG 319: Meisinger Dossier: 257. Interrogation of Captain Dietrich Niebuhr (b.1888) who had been German naval attaché in Argentina until expelled in 1943 and was appointed to co-ordinate blockade-running in Berlin (OKW/ Ausland III) elicited a claim that there had been no compulsory repatriations in blockade-runners. While this may have been the case when Niebuhr was located at Buenos Aires, this most certainly was not true of East Asia, where consideration had been given of enforced repatriation from Manchuria as early as the 1930s. US interrogators, however, appear to have accepted this observation and did nothing to question the practice. See NAW: RG 59: De Witt C. Poole Mission; NAK: KV2/3301. This is based on intercepts of signals deciphered after the war which appear in summary form and were partially mutilated and would very likely have been

‘EXPRESSIONS WHICH ARE PSYCHOLOGICALLY DANGEROUS’ 55

Shortly before departure the news was announced that Sorge and Ozaki had been sentenced to death and this may well have been relevant to the treatment of Hofmeier.107 Burgenland was intercepted off the coast of Brazil on 4 January 1944 by the USS Omaha and Hofmeier was shot on the deck of the ship prior to the setting of the scuttling charges and the launching of the lifeboats.The crewmen reached the coast of Brazil and were interned there prior to being moved on to camps in the United States and it took many months before more precise information was obtained in Berlin as a result of the release of a sailor whose health made it highly unlikely that he would be fit enough for war service. When first reports of the sinking reached Tokyo and five crew members were reported missing, Meisinger stated that Hofmeier must be one of these. This clearly suggests that Meisinger had prior knowledge of the arrangements made with Ender for ensuring that Hofmeier would stand no chance of imparting any information of value to the enemy – even if he had any.108

107 108

discounted as legal texts had they been available to the West German prosecutors. See NAW: RG 257: SRGL 1501 & 1699–1700. Meisinger seems to have sought to avoid handing Hofmeier over to the Japanese police on the return of Burgenland after recall from Singapore and seems to have insisted that Hofmeier be kept under guard on the ship until it sailed for home in October 1943. The Japanese authorities insisted that the German authorities handle their own criminal trials in Japan and accept total responsibility for the arrangements for death penalties being carried out. See POA 7: 254 & 259. Transocean News Agency Report of 29.9.1943:: ibid.: 193–4. When interviewed by CIC officers in Tokyo on 10.10.1945, Ambassador Stahmer stated that Meisinger’s activities were carried out ‘in great secrecy’ but that he never questioned Meisinger about these. He said, however, that he had asked Meisinger about his activities in Poland, but that Meisinger argued that he had to combat riots and uprisings by civilians. ‘Meisinger,’ he claimed, ‘frequently resorted to “court-martials” and it was necessary to shoot a great many people.’ NAW: RG 319, Meisinger Dossier: 214–6. Stahmer claimed that Meisinger had been involved in the repatriation of Hofmeier ‘in December 1943, before Stahmer took office’ [!] and he believed that could have been done only with the approval of the RSHA. Meisinger, too, often called Hermann Müller, his boss, by radio-telephone but Stahmer claimed that these were ‘usually put through late at night and were not censored by any Embassy official’. Meisinger himself said, when compiling his account, that he often contacted Berlin when Stahmer was away and did not submit these reports to the Embassy.

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5

The Bifurcation of Intelligence in Retrospect, 1929–1937 – A FTER SORGE SET out for his mission in China in 1929, Soviet foreign and defence policy had witnessed a leap forward in the form of the so-called Manchuli Incident when Soviet forces had been deployed across the border with Manchuria in order to seize back control of the Chinese Eastern Railway from the local warlord, Zhang Xue-liang. Although the dispute, in which Germany had been asked to act as mediator, demonstrated the effective results of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan on the organisation of his military forces, perhaps much of the organisational success is attributable more to the lengthy period of military collaboration between Germany and the USSR in the Weimar era. This armed demonstration, however, promoted regional instability that was viewed with concern by the Japanese Kwantung Army and the Army General Staff in Tokyo; they had eyed Soviet moves in East Asia with growing hostility and impatience but had been constrained by the politicians and the Navy, following the withdrawal of Japanese forces from Siberia in 1923. Substantially, as a result of the onset of the Great Depression on trade between Japan and the USA, businessmen and politicians had joined in the Army’s alarm and evidence began to indicate a growing desire to stage moves to combat any threats to Japanese interests, particularly in China. This was partially illustrated by the passage of legislation in the Diet of the Peace Preservation Law in 1925 and its steadily increasing application against socialists and communists from then until February 1941, when it was completely rewritten. This was paralleled in Germany, which began to suffer from the impact of the steady withdrawal of US investment in the industrial economy as well as the decline of international trade, which 57

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was already constrained by the lack of convertibility in currencies. Military leaders who had promoted the covert cooperation with the USSR in the 1920s began questioning the wisdom of encouraging the huge scale of Soviet military developments when it became evident that, for example, the production of Soviet military aircraft had already reached in peacetime twice the levels of German production in World War I.109 German strategic perceptions had mainly been shaped by apprehensions about Franco Polish threats, but the air threat from the USSR, combined with existing domestic political worries about the opposition of the Social Democratic and Communist Parties, were linked with ideas of political revolution bandied around by the Comintern, for which Sorge had laboured in this period.110 It was at this period that overtures were opened up by the Japanese Army for the revival of secondments of officers to units of the German Army in 1930.111 The most prominent of these had 109

110

111

See Felmy note In 1 Nr.1098/31 III gKdos enclosing a copy of a lengthy study of development of aviation in the USSR from 1917, which forbade its circulation outside the military service and ends with a quotation from a Russian engineer, who said: ‘You read and hear about it, but don’t feel it! There is a glass curtain between us.’ RWM: Luftamt: In 1.281.A 5 Ref.III: Akte Lu 1,III geh.: ‘Luftfahrtindustrie, Luftverkehr, Forschung, Baufaufsichten 1931,’ Bd/3 (1931–32): fol.196–211. BA/MA: RH 12–1/v.105. German police forces made raids on suspected Communist premises in order to discover links with the Soviet Union and these efforts were stepped up in the late 1920s through the monitoring and decryption of radio traffic between KPD cells and the Soviet network, steadily being technologically strengthened by acquisitions of German and foreign radio techniques. German Army radio monitoring stations began to track a group of coded transmissions in the so-called ‘Comintern codes’ (given the general label JKG) from about July 1928 which, it was thought, were based on an unknown book. They had been unable as yet to make any breaks in the system, but at least three channels involving despatches from the German Communist Party were identified, though no clear evidence was found of messages sent to it and it was assumed that ‘these are consigned by illegal routes, cutting out the postal services, or perhaps via short-wave stations which can be picked up by secret Communist receivers.’ See Decipherment Report No.2 in Chiffrierstelle Nr.82/30 gKdos of 24.10.1930 to the Chief of the Secret Military Intelligence Service (Chef Abw.Abtlg.) at: RWM: Abw.II Chi:’Entzifferungsberichte,’ (1925–1934). The matter was handled within the Defence Ministry by the Wehrmachtsabteilung whose deputy head and subsequent head was Lieutenant-Colonel Eugen Ott. Initially, the Japanese request was put by Colonel Kawabe Torashirô, military attaché in Berlin from 1929 to 1932, to General Heye but was not initially accepted until the Japanese Army agreed on the principle of reciprocity in such secondments. See Adam letter Der Reichswehrminister TA Nr.1963/30 T3 III/Ia of 8.12.1930 to Foreign Ministry at: AA: Büro RM: ‘Militärwesen,’ Bd.1, (1920–29). The very earliest Japanese request had been advanced in April 1927 by Kawabe’s

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been Captain Okamoto Kiyotomi (1894–1945), whose father had served with the kempeitai in Siberia during the brief, but bloody, occupation of the Russian Maritime Provinces and had witnessed the massacre at Nikolaevsk (Niko Jiken) in 1920. Okamoto was initially seconded to Army Group VI at Münster, where an Army radio monitoring post was located, but there is no record of him in contact with this. However, he subsequently served as Assistant Japanese Military Attaché in Berlin from 1932 to 1934, at a time when the first exchanges of military intelligence about Russia were initiated and Okamoto acquired the reputation of having been the first Japanese Army officer to make contact with the Nazi Party.112 When questioned, Okamoto said that he had been in touch with ex-servicemen’s organisations and right-wing parties, but denied that any official discussions were being conducted with the Nazi Party.113 Such links were attacked by Soviet diplomats in Berlin and Moscow, but this had little effect on the German press and parties which publicly supported the Chinese resistance to Japanese military expansion in Manchuria and their naval assault on Shanghai, as prominent Nazi retired officers had been recruited to train the new Chinese Army and assisted its many campaigns against the forces of the Chinese Communist Party. But this essentially provided a cover for close links with the German armed forces and business representatives involved in the sale of arms and the import of vital Chinese raw materials such as molybdenum and wolfram, indispensable for the production of hardened steel for armour, artillery and tanks in competition with imports from the USSR. In the period before the appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancellor, an important role in China policy was played by

112

113

predecessor, General Watanabe Jotaro-, who asked unsuccessfully for special visits to military training establishments which he described as a preliminary to ‘the greatly desired rapprochement between the two armies’. In fact, the Japanese interest lay particularly in the rumours about German military training of the Chinese Army, initially headed by Colonel Max Bauer (1869–1929), a protégé of Ludendorff who had direct links with Hitler. When Bauer died at Shanghai, his papers had been acquired by Japanese secret agents who approached a German agent there for help with translations. Hitler was quoted as having made a speech in favour of the Japanese Army’s support for the so-called Manchurian Incident in December 1931. Talks appear to have taken place between Schickedanz of the Nazi Party’s Foreign Affairs Committee and Japanese Ambassador Obata in spring 1932, but this appears to have done nothing to dampen down agitation against Obata from within the bureau of the military attaché, Banzai Ichiro-, which accelerated Obata’s withdrawal from Berlin.

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Colonel Eugen Ott as effective head of the Defence Minister’s Secretariat, where he also had access to policymaking over the reappointment of German military attachés abroad in 1932 and supervised agencies such as the Abwehr, headed by Major-General von Bredow. In particular, he served as liaison with Hitler acting as a go-between for General von Schleicher and President von Hindenburg. Ott gave evidence after World War II about this latter role and was allegedly able to convince this enquiry that he had not helped facilitate Hitler’s takeover of power in January 1933.114 After Hitler had done this, Ott later claimed that he had made contact with General von Hammerstein, the head of the German Army, requesting that he be permitted to be reassigned to a post in the Army Group Area furthest away from Berlin. He claimed that the suggestion had been made by his wife, Helma, that he should seek to follow up friendly suggestions from Japanese Army officers to pursue closer contacts with Japan which would take them as far away as possible from Berlin but might initiate possible arrangements that would parallel the appointment of Commander Wenneker as German naval attaché in Tokyo from December 1933.115 As Ott’s reports to the Defence Ministry in connection with his assignment to the Japanese Army in 1933 appear to have been destroyed in the wartime bombing of the Heeresarchiv at Potsdam, the relevant documentation about Ott’s assignment is missing. 114

115

See Mehnert Nachlass, Stuttgart and the interview Ott gave to Theo Sommer in Deutschland und Japan zwischen den Mächten. Düsseldorf, 1962: 20; and see Bernd Martin, Deutschland und Japan im Zweiten Weltkrieg, 1940–1945. Göttingen, 1969. This was the explanation provided by Ott to the OSS officer, Andrew B. Puskas, at his retirement location in Beijing on 15.11.1945 and was repeated in Tokyo to Commander J.D. Shea on 18.2.1946: see NAW: RG 319: IRR: Ott Dossier. While still in office, there is evidence that he continued to be involved in some of the briefings for newly appointed German military attachés between December 1932 and March 1933 involving the Defence and Foreign Ministries until his replacement by Friedrich Fromm (1888–1945). Helma Ott, the daughter of the lawyer Dr. Robert Bodewig, married Ott in 1921 following her divorce from Friedrich May, a Communist councillor in Frankfurt-am-Main, who subsequently moved to Moscow. These points were raised in separate interviews with Ivar Lissner and Werner Crome, according to a memorandum by 1st Lieut. G.R. Splane, Jr. of 13.4.1946, which noted that they had intrigued against Ott while ambassador in Japan and retained a grudge against him for his treatment of them prior to their arrest and torture by the kempeitai in 1943. Crome explained to the author that the US authorities appear to have accepted the view that they had been double agents and Crome claimed that he had been denied access to US official contacts when he served in Japan after the war as a journalist. See also NAW: RG 319: Crome dossier.

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Given that permission had been given in 1930 for the secondment of three junior Japanese officers to the German Army, diplomatic protocol required a reciprocal benefit to be demanded on the German side, but it is clear that Ambassador Voretzsch in Tokyo had already pointed to the lack of office space in the embassy in the case of the agreed appointment of Wenneker in 1932/3. Ott was replaced by Fromm as head of the Wehrmachtsabteilung in March 1933 but Ott had already directly approached General Banzai on 17 March asking him to relay to Tokyo a request for his secondment to Japan from June to December 1933 and for him to be attached to an artillery regiment before moving to Manchuria ‘to join a Japanese army unit in Manchuria to learn about conditions there’.116 Ott sailed for Japan in the liner Leverkusen and disembarked at Shanghai on 29 May for a few days before leaving for Japan.117 At first, he spent some time in Nagoya, then was sent on a trip to make contact with the Kwantung Army for a period of some three months from August to October 1933. He then stayed on in Tokyo until the end of the year at the Sanno Hotel and from an account of a meeting in Moscow with Colonel Hartmann, the German military attaché there, the retiring ambassador in Tokyo indicated that Ott had stayed on there until his successor, Dr Herbert von Dirksen (1882–1955), arrived and was in a position to inform Ott of his meeting with Hitler and Defence Minister von Blomberg at which Hitler had indicated that he wanted him ‘to bring about a deepening and expansion of German-Japanese relations’.118 Von Dirksen expressed a wish to visit Manchukuo, as Ott had done, but this was vetoed by Foreign Minister von Neurath. East German sources claimed that Sorge had met Ott when he was at Nagoya, but this is patently incorrect as Sorge did not arrive in 116

117

118

See AA: Pol.IV: Akte Po.13: ‘Militärische Angelegenheiten Japans,’ Bd.3, 1932– 1935. The Wehrmachtsabteilung had two separate sections: W.A. (Inland) dealt with domestic politics, W.A.(Ausland) with external politics and liaised with the Foreign Ministry and the Abwehr under Captain Konrad Patzig (1888–1975) which enjoyed close contacts with the Austrian, Hungarian and Italian secret services. Patzig was informed in detail about Italian policy as a result of the decryption of the most important codes used by the Italian Foreign Ministry and collaboration was established with the Italian Navy’s decrypt agency. Initially Ott expressed a wish to travel to Nanking to establish contact with members of the German military mission, but was prevailed on to make a more discreet rendezvous at Shanghai. See AA: G.A.: Abt.IV OA: ‘Mandschurei – Anerkennungsfrage,’ (1933–36). Von Dirksen arrived in Tokyo on 16 December 1933.

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Japan from Canada until September 1933 when Ott had already been in Manchuria for several weeks.119 Ott himself later stated that he had not met Sorge until September 1934, after he had taken up his appointment as military attaché in Tokyo. On one of Wenneker’s early reports received in January 1934, the C-in-C of the German Navy, Admiral Raeder, had made a note that ‘the Führer wishes good relations with Japan’. Consequently, it was hardly a matter of surprise that when Ott sailed for his trip to Japan to take up the appointment as military attaché in Tokyo, he sought to make contact at Nanking with the principal German military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek as part of a manoeuvre to promote a Sino-Japanese reconciliation.Von Dirksen again intervened to warn Ott at Shanghai that it would be best if he refrained from such a rendezvous because that would, in his view, damage the good relationship that Ott had derived from his previous secondment in 1933. Stalin had sought at the end of 1932 to try to persuade Japan that it should fall into line with his policy of promoting non-aggression pacts with his neighbours, but this was a move that was firmly rejected by the Japanese Army, which was zealously trying to build on its successful occupation of Manchuria by seeking to gain wider political and economic support within Japanese society. The active policy being pursued at the same time by Hitler was one of seeking to crush the activities of the German Communist Party and to capitalise on the major blow undertaken by the German Army in 1931 to force the ruling Social Democratic Party from office in Prussia, the most powerful of the states in the German federation.The German Army, however, had no wider interest in promoting Hitler’s quest for improved ties with Japan because of the extensive expansion of German trade in arms with China and the import of large quantities of tungsten from China as part of the programme of secret military rearmament and to replace from Chinese sources as much as possible of the past dependence on such trade with the USSR, now officially forbidden by Hitler at the end of 1933. The German military mission in China, however, was rather divided in its priorities. Most of the more senior personnel, especially after General Wetzell was replaced by General von Seeckt 119

Sorge stayed initially at the Sanno Hotel but moved out to a cheaper hotel, while Ott stayed there from October and initially sent a request to Berlin to return home early.

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and latterly by General Alexander von Falkenhausen, tended to pay more attention to the wishes of the Defence Ministry and its appointed liaison officers, while others identified with the Nazi ideology were concerned most with the efforts of the Kuomintang to obliterate the guerrilla forces of the Chinese Communist Party. For example, one of the latter individuals was a German pilot named Fritz Möllenhoff, who was employed as an artillery spotter and was subsequently claimed to have been an involuntary informant of Sorge.120 More detailed information about the progress of Sorge’s China mission and the contacts with Ozaki and Miyagi cover the role played by Sorge in assisting Comintern operations, such as the rescue of Emil Noulens (Paul Rügg) and the combatting of Chinese and international efforts aimed at curtailing or eliminating Soviet or native Chinese Communist influences.121 It was also claimed from the East German side that Sorge managed to gain access to the Enigma cipher machine available to the military mission.122 It is also clear from von Dirksen’s correspondence with Berlin that Ott confided to him that he had been provided with an Enigma machine to facilitate secure exchanges of military intelligence about Soviet military developments, which appears to have been an expansion of the exchanges first recorded in May 1932. However, copies of these texts appear not to have been notified under the existing agreement between the Foreign and Defence Ministries for attachés to submit reports and cables in advance to their heads of mission. The Foreign Ministry also discovered that Ott had not been submitting his regular written reports to von Dirksen and that when complaints were made about this, a number of copies of Ott’s reports were retrospectively submitted for the Foreign Ministry’s archives. 120 121

122

See Kreiner, ed. (1986): 167n. German, British and US archival sources contain numerous references to searches for information about various suspected foreign Communists or fellow-travellers in the 1930s. Interest in the USA was perhaps greatest about the activities of such Americans as Agnes Smedley, with whom there were numerous interactions by members of the Sorge Ring. The issue had already been raised by Harold Woodhead, a British journalist in Shanghai who questioned Smedley’s connection with the Frankfurter Zeitung. See Mader et al. (1984): 64ff. and Deakin & Storry (1964): 70ff. The author was told by Fräulein Ingeborg Krag, Admiral Wenneker’s private secretary, that when she was first sent out to the Far East she delivered a new Enigma machine to the Falkenhausen mission. With British help, she escaped from the war zone.

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The deduction is inescapable that Ott was intent on pursuing a policy of rapport with the Japanese Army that chimed in to a much greater extent with Hitler’s preferences than with those of either Foreign Minister von Neurath or of Defence Minister von Blomberg. This was reinforced in the summer of 1936 when Ott met Hitler in the course of annual Army manoeuvres and urged him to see that links with the Japanese Army were unlikely to pay off in the near future in terms of bilateral pressure on the USSR because of the need for the Japanese to catch up with advanced Soviet military technology. At the same time, Ott was conscious of the German Army’s unwillingness to make any formal commitment to military collaboration with the Japanese Army and skilfully provided satisfaction to both his political and his military masters. Similar pressure was exerted on Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr from 1935, who engaged in support for secret antiCommunist and anti-Soviet activities with the secret services of Austria, Italy, Poland, Finland and Hungary in competition with Heydrich and Himmler. Its extension to include the Japanese Army in this array came principally from the energetic activities of officers in the bureau of Japanese military attachés in Berlin and, - above all, from the conspicuous efforts of Major-General Oshima Hiroshi, who proposed a formal secret service agreement in the autumn of 1935 along the lines of an existing staff agreement between the Japanese and Polish armies.123 Oshima was also in contact with Ribbentrop, who exploited the situation politically to promote the establishment of the Anti-Comintern Pact and thereby ensured that he would develop closer contacts and favour with Hitler. However, following on from Hitler’s determination to commit the German economy to autarchic principles in the spring of 1936, Hitler explored with considerable care all the options arising from maximisation of German rearmament and the benefits to be derived from co-operation with Britain, Italy and Japan. In early May 1936, orders were issued for studies to be made and advice given about future co-operation with Japan and answers were supplied to Hitler by Ott, Ambassadors von Dirksen and Trautmann, War Minister von Blomberg and others by early June 1936. Hitler was warned by von Blomberg that closer collaboration with Japan ran the long-term risk of direct conflict with Britain and the USA. Hitler, apparently with advice from 123

See the author’s The Polish Labyrinth: Japan, Poland & the German Secret War, 1919–1945.Saltire House Press, 2017: 52–4: www.price-of-admiralty.com.

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Ribbentrop, who had unsuccessfully tried to initiate talks with Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku in Berlin in January 1935, gave him the opportunity for opening talks – independently of the Foreign Ministry – with Japanese Ambassador Mushakoji and limited the extent of cooperation with the Japanese military to the existing secret exchange of intelligence about the USSR and curtailing the extent of anti-Soviet collaboration sought by Ôshima solely to an unwritten agreement, reached in July 1937 following the outbreak of Sino-Japanese armed conflict.124 Soon after the combined conclusions of the German armed services were submitted on 25 May 1936, a report was received from Commander Wenneker which laid out a detailed analysis of the causes of the incident on 26 February 1936, when Japanese Army units had seized control of an area of central Tokyo close to the building of the National Diet and carried out a number of assassinations of ministers in the government of Admiral Okada Keisuke (1868–1952). This was directed against the traditional framework round the Imperial Court. Unlike earlier reports from Ambassador von Dirksen and Colonel Ott, the Wenneker report followed up with an account of the steps taken to end the coup and carry out reforms under the succeeding Hirota cabinet, which had not figured in the earlier reports, as their authors had embarked on their return trips to Germany to submit their advice. Von Dirksen himself had been out of town recuperating from a severe bout of asthma and on returning hotfoot to Tokyo found that the area under Army control included the German embassy itself125 and issued instructions that his wife should seek refuge at 124

125

In December 1935, Oshima had sought to persuade Canaris and Keitel, as paralleled in a secret past agreement between the Japanese and Polish General Staffs: see RKM: Ausland: Akte Stein. The defecting Soviet agent Krivitsky subsequently revealed that Oshima’s dealings with the Abwehr had been reported to Moscow and evidence was also provided that Moscow knew the text of the secret protocol of the Anti-Comintern Pact published in December 1936. This suggested that the Soviet Union had intercepted and/or decrypted exchanges between the two sides and much later it was revealed that Japanese diplomatic or consular establishments had been burgled and codebooks photographed: statement by Mrs. Evdokia Petrova, who worked in the Japanese sub-section of the Spets-Otdel from 1934 to 1942, at NAA, Canberra: CRS A6283/NR1/14: 1–5. She claimed that Soviet agents in the field were instructed to lay hands on all available coding information. The German Embassy was located close to the National Diet and opposite the War Ministry and the General Staff; since its destruction in World War II it was chosen as the site for the contemporary National Diet Library.

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the home of Wenneker in the suburbs. When Hilda von Dirksen arrived there, she found - to some mutual embarrassment - that Wenneker was entertaining a young Japanese woman with the result that the story got back to his superiors, together with reports of other episodes, such as Wenneker having driven into the sea when allegedly drunk.This was also compounded by a subsequent episode when Wenneker was reported to have offered cash to a Tokyo bar proprietor to get him to annul a contract entered into with the peasant parents of a young bar-girl.The local press apparently got hold of the story, which would have been something of an embarrassment to the Embassy if this had been published, but when Wenneker contacted the British assistant naval attaché, Commander George Ross RN, he was advised to approach their mutual friend, Commander Kojima Hideo, the 2nd Adjutant to Navy Minister Nagano, and successfully obtained Japanese Navy cooperation in censoring the press story.126 These rumours about Wenneker’s ‘Bohemian’ life-style during his first tour in Japan were revisited by his superiors early in 1940 when Wenneker’s effectiveness in dealing with the Japanese Navy was cited by Ambassador Ott as justification for Wenneker’s second appointment as naval attaché in Japan but he was urged to marry again before he left. He. in fact, married Irma, who was employed at the accommodation block at Wilhelmshaven where he lived. A witness to the marriage was Admiral Karl Dönitz, then in charge of German submarine forces.127 How far Wenneker’s lifestyle in 1930s Japan can be described as ‘Bohemian’ is a moot point, but it is interesting that this was also the description given of Sorge’s lifestyle by members of the Embassy that date from the period immediately after Wenneker’s departure for home in July 1937. Other observers subsequently maintained that a somewhat similar pattern of ‘Bohemian’ behaviour was allegedly pursued by Meisinger in his personal relations with Sorge approximately in the period from 126

127

Author’s interview of the late Rear-Admiral G.C. Ross (1900–1993), whose papers are accessible at the IWM in London. A single postcard sent by Dönitz to Wenneker on 3.7.1940 may be found at: POA 2–3: 489–90. The postcard was found inside a book sent by Wenneker from Japan to New Zealand after the war and found by his daughter from his first marriage, which ended in 1934. This was relayed to Frau Irma Wenneker, who enabled this author to make a copy during a visit to her house at Bergstedt in Hamburg in 1982; she also recounted the condolence visit of Dönitz, accompanied by minders from the NPD, to her house in 1979 after Wenneker’s death. Wenneker was subsequently buried at sea.

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April to September 1941, before Meisinger was mainly located at Shanghai.128 Much is made of Sorge’s sybaritic life-style in 1930s Tokyo as well as of Sorge’s encouragement of members of the Embassy to participate in his Bohemian exploits in the most recent journalistic account of ‘the impeccable spy, Richard Sorge’.129 On the other hand, instead of the dismissive conclusion reached by former Ambassador Voretzsch that ‘in view of the complete secrecy maintained by the Japanese about all matters of any interest, the material accumulated by the naval attaché during his stay is likely to be practically nil’ proved completely misguided as a result of Wenneker’s ability to utilise effectively the information obtained from junior officers in the Navy Ministry, the Naval Staff and even the Combined Fleet. By the time of the attempted coup on 26 February 1936 he had achieved a high degree of knowledge and competence.130 By the time of his report on the nature of the coup and its implications on 6 May, he was the longest serving senior officer in the Tokyo mission and came to a number of highly perceptive conclusions.131 128

129

130 131

Meisinger’s first wife was supposedly killed during an enemy air raid and he was prevailed on to marry the personal secretary and discarded mistress of Himmler and take her with him to Japan. She apparently decided to remain in Shanghai and supposedly refused to return to Japan in 1941. According to a statement by the journalist Werner Crome to the author in Tokyo in December 1965, Franz Huber had reported the Japanese police as advising that Hertha Meisinger would not be allowed to leave Shanghai. Meisinger subsequently turned to relations with one of his secretaries who had been evacuated from internment in the Dutch East Indies and was described by the US Occupation as his mistress. Fräulein Abt later apparently became a GI bride and emigrated to the USA, where she was contacted by Wenneker’s defence counsel in the 1960s, but declined to become involved in any discussion of her past relationship with Meisinger. Unfortunately, many of the detailed names and situations described in Owen Matthews, The Impeccable Spy. London, Bloomsbury, 2019 are rather less than impeccable. For instance, Wenneker is described as a ‘bachelor’ on his first tour of duty in Japan, but from the author’s conversations with members of the Wenneker family it is clear that he was divorced from his first wife in 1934. Matthews recalls that his father had contacts in Oxford with Bill Deakin, but manages throughout the book to misspell the name of Deakin’s co-author on their book about Sorge, Dick Storry, who researched the then Japanese literature and had interviews with Sorge’s prosecutor, Yoshikawa Mitsusada. See POA 1 (2nd ed.): xx, citing Voretzsch’s report of 20.3.1933. Wenneker B.Nr.230/36g of 6.5.1936 at: RKM: Marineleitung: M Att: ‘Attachéberichte Tokio 1936,’ Bd.1. This was read by the chargé d’affaires Willy Noebel, who had composed the initial cable to Berlin during Ambassador von Dirksen’s absence and subsequently contributed a blow-by-blow account of early events to von Dirksen’s Political Report J.Nr.867 of 3.3.1936 at: AA:UStS:

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While the Navy Ministry accepted the Army’s advances on the mainland to block Soviet interference in China, it criticised the Army for conducting its own separate foreign policy and called for the establishment of weekly meetings of the Navy, Army and Foreign Ministries. But while placing emphasis on the idea of a ‘unified foreign policy’ it made a strong call for the main weight of foreign policy to be directed toward a southward advance to solve the problems of the shortage of raw materials and overpopulation. The Navy’s intention to discipline the younger radical officers and tighten control from above aimed at reducing the Army’s influence over national policy, highlighted by Wenneker as part of ‘the strong inner strife’ between the two services which was linked to clear evidence of Navy units being assembled with the firm intention of intervening with armed force against the Army militants. Despite Wenneker’s judgment that the notion of a united front between them was ‘superficial’, the main conclusion drawn in the War Ministry was that the coup’s main result was the practical elimination of a parliamentary form of government and argued that ‘it will undoubtedly develop into an authoritarian military state’.

Ribbentrop and Mushakoji Signing the Anti-Comintern Pact with Oshima looking on (IWM)132

132

‘Militärputsch in Tokyo,’ (Februar 1936). This was followed by a further report from von Dirksen on 9.3.1936 on Comintern activity in Japan and the German News Agency (DNB) reported on 12.3.36 the arrest of number of Japanese translators by the police on a charge of selling secret information about the coup and about Japanese troop movements to the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo: AA: Abt.IV Rußland: Akte Po.19: ‘Bolschewismus, Kommunismus usw. in Japan,’ (1927–1936). A large number of recorded intercepted telephone calls in the local area made on wax discs by the Metropolitan Police in the nearby Interior Ministry were discovered about forty years ago, but it is uncertain if these provided information leading to any of the arrests at the time of the coup. Ullstein Bild has a copy of the full complement of officials present and these include von Raumer, Commander Kojima, Minister von Erdmannsdorff, Counsellor Inoue Yujiro, and secretaries Yanai and Furuuchi.

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The difference in geographical focus of the two services was consequently not taken on board in the advice subsequently delivered to Hitler, but it is clear that Ribbentrop and Ott continued to emphasise the greater importance of the role of the Army in Japanese policy and strategy and that this was assiduously reinforced by the robust confrontational advocacy of General Ôshima. The War and Foreign Ministries sought to circumvent Hitler’s commitment to Japan because of the close links already forged since the late 1920s with Chiang Kai-shek and opted to emphasise the superficial rather than the contradictory nature of Japanese foreign policy preferences. It was these latter differences on which the Soviet Union had concentrated since 1931 and had previously been underscored in Moscow in reports derived by Commander von Baumbach from conversations with his Japanese colleague, Maeda Minoru, in October 1933.133 In his confessions to the Japanese police in 1942, Sorge supplied a considerable amount of information on the reporting of the coup and particularly supplied the GRU with his own analysis illustrated by information filtered through his Japanese colleagues, Ozaki and Miyagi, together with summaries of the reports compiled by von Dirksen (regarded as ‘superficial’ by Sorge) and by Ott (regarded as ‘more profound’) and relayed information obtained by Wenneker confirming that the ‘tension between navy and army was extremely acute thanks to the Incident’.134 The latter information was not included in the article Sorge published in the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik in May 1936 but it certainly did not reveal that Sorge preferred the interpretation provided by Miyagi that it portended a future Japanese advance against China rather than against the USSR, as predicted by Ozaki. Although the Sorge article is dubbed as ‘perhaps the best published European account of the February Mutiny’,Wenneker’s subsequent account 133

134

Maeda Minoru (1893–1990) was subsequently director of the Japanese Naval Staff’s Intelligence Division in 1940–42, while his younger brother, Maeda Tadashi, was one of Wenneker’s most important staff officer contacts in Tokyo. The latter was despatched to Europe in 1937 to take part in the Coronation Naval Review at Portsmouth and a meeting with him was recalled to the author by the German correspondent, Werner Crome, who was expelled from Britain under suspicion of espionage. Deakin & Storry: 172–7. Sorge obtained access to materials available to Major Erwin Scholl, who had been despatched to Tokyo as Ott’s assistant following a period of service in the Russian Section of the German General Staff and both found that they had a bond in common by having served in the same regiment on the Western Front during World War I.

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is fuller and more explicit about the Japanese Navy’s southern advance as outwardly peaceful, but really likely to be aggressive, especially if Britain became involved in any European conflict. Sorge later stated that he microfilmed his report for relay to Moscow via Shanghai and that he had also photocopied the reports by von Dirksen and Ott. He did not, however, say that he had also seen Wenneker’s later report but was able to incorporate the nub of Wenneker’s views on Army-Navy relations.135 It is interesting, to say the least, that the German Navy Archive contains a German-language copy of a top secret report by Captain Vivian, the UK naval attaché in Tokyo, which Wenneker allegedly had secretly photographed with his Leica camera and which was placed among briefing papers for a meeting between Raeder and Admiral Nagano at Staaken in December 1935 attended by Ribbentrop.136 This report had concluded that Vivian regarded the value of the Japanese Navy as ‘second-class’ and this view was evidently relayed to the Japanese side either in discussions with Japanese staff officers and/or at a high level in Berlin. It is not certainly known that such views were also shared with Sorge, as Sorge appears to have avoided naming Wenneker in his confessions and concentrated particularly on his relations with Ott. However, it is clear that the views of the German Navy about strategic issues were never taken very seriously as the least powerful of the three German armed services, and were consistently dismissed by senior Army leaders as ‘continental dreaming’ and largely ignored by Hitler. Nevertheless, from this early date at least there is a clear bifurcation of significance in the sharing of intelligence about Japanese society and government between Sorge and Wenneker and on the several impacts this analysis had in Moscow and Berlin. Wenneker’s subsequent reports until July 1937 continued to develop the issue of the preference of the Japanese Navy to press ahead with the build-up of its fleet and to support agitation in Japanese political life in favour of claims that Japan had more right than The Netherlands to exert a dominant influence 135 136

See POA 1 (2nd ed.): xxvi ff. See OKM: M-IV-1: ‘Attaché- und Auslandsangelegenheiten,’ (1934–36): 211–234. The original report of February 1935 is at NAK: ADM 116. Secret photography was a specialty of Sorge rather than of Wenneker and Admiral Ross did not recall such an opportunity involving Wenneker, but recalled that Captain Vivian stated to him that he did not trust the Germans.

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over the economy of the Dutch East Indies. The value of that economic unit to the Japanese Navy lay particularly in the supply of crude US-owned oil for its ships and aircraft137, which assumed ever greater importance after the outbreak of the war with China and substantial numbers of naval air units participated in the attacks in central and southern China following the invasion of Shanghai, where the bulk of British investment capital was located. This subject area also became of significant importance to Ribbentrop following his appointment as German ambassador in London in the autumn of 1936. In the summer, attempts were made by Japanese Ambassador Yoshida to try to interest Foreign Secretary Eden in the idea of a tripartite German-Japanese-British united front against the Soviet Union, but these were emphatically and very scornfully rejected by Vansittart, who described Yoshida as ‘a very feeble person’ and ‘really not much good at his job,’ and Foreign Secretary Eden, who stated that Britain would have no part Foreign ‘in a crusade against any ideology’.138 There was awareness in the UK Tokyo Embassy that Japanese policy aimed at ‘securing the North for an advance in the South’ and in the Foreign Office this was encapsulated in the phrase Drang nach SüdOsten and highlighted by the issue of the Keelung Incident, which marked an end to the traditional British policy of fleet exercises between Hong Kong and Japan. Wenneker’s view was that the Japanese Navy would hold off active involvement in confrontation with Britain until the attention of London was distracted away from the Far East by the development of a serious threat to European security. In the summer of 1936, Wenneker was able to make an unusually large number of visits to Japanese fleet units, naval yards and arsenals and to come into contact with a much wider range of opinion within the Japanese Navy than he had experienced in the past. In his report, read by War Minister von Blomberg, Wenneker pointed to the indication that Britain was fast becoming Enemy 137

138

Wenneker compared estimates of the Japanese Navy’s fuel reserves from figures obtained through discussions with the US Naval Attaché and Commander Ross in his B.Nr.245/36g of 4.8.1936 at: RKM: Marineleitung: M Att: ‘Attachéberichte Tokio, 1936,’ Bd.1. NAK: FO371/F7043/303/23: Eden minute of 16.11.1936 & F7504/303/23: Cadogan/Vansittart minutes of 7.12.1936. A draft had been prepared by the Gaimushô in the event of British adhesion to an anti-Comintern agreement and subsequently the text of the Secret Additional Protocol produced by the decryption of the Japanese text was submitted to the Foreign Office on 4.12.36.

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No.1 and replacing the USA as primary potential enemy since 1907 and reiterated their strong expressions of opposition to the calls by Army officers for a showdown with the Soviet Union.139 This last view was even more emphatically embodied in his report of 1 December 1936 to Admiral Raeder describing the lukewarm reaction of the Japanese Navy to the announcement of the Anti-Comintern Pact, when contacts had stated that a war with the USSR would be ruinous for Japan even if such a war were won: the agreement was noted as the brainchild of the Japanese Army, whereas the Navy was identified as the progenitor of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 and supporter of the successful campaign against Russia in 1904–5.140 According to Max Clausen in post-war statements, the Sorge Ring had been geared particularly to watching out for Japanese policy and war plans involving the Soviet Union, strengthening of the Japanese armed forces and moves between Germany and Japan following the cementing of the Anti-Comintern Pact.141 It was confirmed by Dr Karl-Otto Braun on 4 April 1942 that at this period Sorge was the ‘best-informed’ German journalist in Japan and it is clear from evidence from social gatherings among foreign diplomats in Tokyo that Sorge regularly accompanied Ambassador von Dirksen and his military and naval attachés and that he was privy to discussions where the significance of the political role of the Japanese Navy was evident. It is clear, however, that this significance was not properly understood in Berlin by Ribbentrop and Hitler and this emerged as a prime source of complaints later articulated by the head of the Japanese Naval Mission, Admiral Nomura Naokuni, and even more by the long-term aide to successive Japanese naval attachés in Berlin since 1921, Dr Sakai Naoe (1900–1993).142

139

140 141 142

Wenneker B.Nr.237/36g of 26.6.1936 and B.Nr.249/36g of 1.9.1936 at: RKM: ML: M Att: ‘Attachéberichte Tokio 1936’. Wenneker had contact at this time with Rear-Admiral Nomura Naokuni, who had been Chief-of-Staff of the Combined Fleet and was Director of Naval Intelligence from 1936 to 1938, and had been Japanese Naval Attaché in Berlin from 1929 to 1931. Wenneker B.Nr.265/36g of 1.12.1936 at: ibid. NAW: RG 319: Clausen Dossier, released to the public on 22.2.1985. A biography was composed in French by his son, Hideko Bertrand-Sakai, who lived in Switzerland with his English mother, Edith Parsons, and a paperback edition was available in 2015. See also POA 6: 157–9.

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Kojima Hideo (Irma Wenneker)

Sakai Naoe (Wikipedia)

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6

The Bifurcation of Intelligence in Retrospect, 1937–1941 – IN DECEMBER 1936, Wenneker requested permission to pay a visit to Shanghai. But it is uncertain if this was allowed, though he paid a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine with Ambassador von Dirksen at the time of his farewell in July 1937.143 He returned home to be appointed captain of the so-called ‘pocket battleship’ Deutschland which saw service in the Mediterranean and provided support for Axis forces intervening in the Spanish Civil War. At this time, he made contact once more with Commander Ross serving with the British Mediterranean Fleet. But no record survives of any contact with Japanese Navy officers in Europe nor is there any evidence of contact between Wenneker and Sorge after departing from Japan at the end of his first tour of duty there. There is evidence, however, of the early establishment by Wenneker of the secret Supply Area in Japan and China (Etappe Japan) organised by a section of the Abwehr, which worked closely with the Foreign Ministry to establish arrangements for the logistical supply of and assistance to German merchant ships in the event of the development of international crises or the outbreak of war.144 In his first tour, however, Wenneker primarily sought to develop contacts with members of the German business community in East Asia involving the shipping industry and providing support from time to time for German cruisers despatched on voyages round the world mainly for training purposes. Although such contacts had 143 144

See the photograph on p.25 above. Details of the development of the German Navy’s Supply Service (Etappendienst) may be found in: Marineleitung: AIII-1–11:’Etappenwesen,’ (1927–1941) and see POA 1 (2nd ed.).

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been pursued by the German Navy since about 1926, questions of naval intelligence had remained mainly matters of concern about international developments in Europe, but only began to have any relevance for East Asia from the time of the Ethiopian Crisis in the winter of 1935, when younger Japanese Navy officers began to urge their leaders that such European distractions provided encouragement for the expansion of Japanese influence in South-East Asia. As Hitler’s commitment to rearmament and to seeking to exploit anti-Communist and anti-Soviet sentiment in neighbouring states became increasingly evident, it was followed by a growing manifestation of friction and hostility towards those who were unprepared to make common cause against the USSR.145 When the Japanese response to anti-Communist clarion calls began to stimulate increasing hostility in relations between Japan and the Soviet Union in line with the long-term aspirations of the Japanese General Staff, the Sorge Ring focussed on evidence of any transition from theoretical to practical applications of hostility in terms of conflict along the lengthy borders between Japanese-controlled territory on the Asian continent and Soviet and Outer Mongolian territory.This was accompanied by concern about the evolution of a more strategic collaboration between Hitler and the Japanese Army. Given the fact that German diplomats and military attachés were in regular contact with other foreign missions, it was readily possible for Sorge to utilise his contacts in the German Embassy to learn also about the thinking of other foreign diplomatic staff. Undoubtedly, there was rather greater sympathy for much of the 1930s among British officers for an anti-Communist outlook and the British military attaché, MajorGeneral Piggott, argued that a Japanese-Soviet clash was more likely to occupy the centre ground of Japanese policymaking.146 145

146

In Britain, a great deal of effort was made by Rosenberg and Ribbentrop to promote closer Anglo-German relations and a friendship society, the Anglo-German Fellowship, was co-founded by Ernest Tennant, a London banker, who according to his sister had ‘an absolute horror of Communism and saw the rise of Hitler as the salvation of Germany’. She visited Germany in 1933 and was introduced to Hitler, who, she said, had ‘extraordinary pansy-like eyes and an hypnotic presence’. Nancy Tennant’s Memoirs: 31, kindly made available to the author by Mr & Mrs Toby Tennant of Newcastleton in 2016. Much of the information gained also forms part of a forthcoming book by the author, Stormy Petrel – Thomas Brown,Harbinger of Worldwide Conflict. See www.price-of-admiralty.com. Following the alliance with Japan, both the British and British-Indian armies continued to operate secondments of language officers attached to Japanese Army units until 1941 and these were a source of information that could theoretically be utilised by the War Office: see GST: Files 5.1.4.23–1 & 2. However, the

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As Miyagi had argued, Japanese aggression in East Asia centred on moves by the Japanese Army in North China, beginning with the so-called Marco Polo Bridge Incident. This, however, was more than matched by the successful landing by the Japanese 3rd Fleet at Shanghai cancelling out the humiliation of the failed fleet operations there in 1932 which had, in fact, been strongly opposed by the Anglo-American Powers.147 Wenneker left Japan soon after the outbreak of conflict between Japan and

147

tendency was to argue, like the German leadership, that the Japanese Army controlled greater political influence than the Navy and many of the soldiers who underwent secondments in Japan, such as Captain Wards, were not seen as entirely credible when they warned of the dangers of involvement in conflict with the Japanese Army. The Royal Navy also had been advised that the Japanese Navy was ‘second-rate’, while the perceptions of the RAF were even more blinkered because they believed by 1941 that the Japanese were more likely to locate their best units in the North and for their less effective aircraft to be located in the South. Details of UK perceptions of the Japanese threat may be found at NAK in the collections of Cabinet papers, especially CAB 81, and the author benefitted from correspondence and interviews with Captain Wards, some of whose papers may be examined in the IWM Library. These diplomatic moves had been extensively followed as a result of the decryption of much of the British radio traffic to China by the German Defence Ministry, but by 1936 other German decryption agencies such as the German Navy’s B-Dienst and the Forschungsamt established by Goering had been developed substantially and complemented the work of RKM/Chi and of the Foreign Ministry’s Pers Z operations. The earliest indication of the set-up in Nazi Germany may be found in an interdepartmental discussion on the ‘Surveillance of Communications’ in RWM Nr.43/34 gKdos.TA/T2 III/In 7 IV/Abw.II. at: RWM: ML: AIIIa-1: ‘Verschiedenes,’ Bd.1 (1933–34). The role of the Forschungsamt in particular was important because it exercised tight monitoring control over all telephone conversations, which extended to successfully listening in on telephone conversations conducted by German and Czech political figures functioning in exile in Switzerland. The relevant German technology manufactured by the Visophon Co., which was reported as having sold listening devices to the Abwehr, Berlin magistrates and the German state railway internally, but also to Hungary, Poland and Russia. The Götting note of 10.4.1930 to Colonel Ott, the deputy head of the Wehrmachtsabteilung, relayed a warning from the Abwehr about the dangers of making incautious long-distance telephone conversations and asked for this to be repeated to the Army Intelligence Section (T3). During the 1930s, successful decryptions of foreign communications were channelled most secretly to Hitler and people like Ribbentrop complained that much of such communications was not also relayed to him, so that it can only be deduced that among the reasons for Hitler’s foreign policy decisions was the fact that Hitler was privy to such knowledge. Japanese communications were also being intercepted by Minister Selchow (AA/Pers.Z) as early as 1936 and the Gestapo also set up equipment to monitor conversations inside the Japanese embassy in Berlin, thereafter, in conjunction with the Forschungsamt.

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China and unable to provide any advice about the determination of the Japanese Navy to leave no stone unturned to ensure that it would play an equally active role in China as an interim strategic move southward. As Ott and Scholl remained in post, their interpretations of events in China for the period from August to November 1937 were repeated to the German Navy until Wenneker had been replaced in Tokyo by Captain Joachim Lietzmann, who inevitably took some time to pick up on Wenneker’s contacts within the Japanese Navy but who, according to Ott’s subsequent comment, was singled out as a close contact of Sorge during his tour of duty from 1937 to 1940.148 According to East German claims, Lietzmann was said to have permitted Sorge to look at parts of his war diary and to have had access to Lietzmann’s codebook.149 Lietzmann’s arrival coincided with an approach made by Captain Kojima for Raeder’s agreement for the initiation of exchanges of technical, tactical and strategic data together with an annual exchange of naval intelligence about the USSR along the same lines as the military agreement recently reached by Generals Ôshima and Keitel.150 Lietzmann supplied information from the Japanese Naval Staff about Soviet fleet units in the Pacific, but more importantly passed on a report of a speech by Captain Sekine, a former Navy press chief, in which he had made it clear that after the defeat of China Japan intended to drive Britain and the Soviet Union out of Asia and that if Russia failed to recognise Japanese claims, Japan would not hesitate to instigate military actions without declaring war. Sekine also added that Japan had 148

149

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Copies of Ott/Scholl reports for 1937 may be found at: RKM: ML: M Att: ‘Attaché-Berichte Tokyo,’ Bd.1, 1937. Lietzmann report B.Nr.348/37g of 26.12.1937 enclosed a copy of a discussion about the Soviet Union held by Ott with General Araki and a number of staff officers from the Russian Section of the Intelligence Division of the Japanese Army General Staff. Mader et al. (1985): 326: the reference does not provide any specific information about which entries or parts of the war diary were examined. A Navy hand cipher was operated up to the end of 1939 and a DJ Enigma began to be employed from early January 1940. Lietzmann was informed about the oral agreement for the exchange of intelligence about the Soviet Union in M Att 132/37 gKdos of 18.9.1937 at: RKM: OKM: M-IV: Heft 2, ‘Attaché- und Auslandsangelegenheiten,’ 1936–37. Subsequent to the oral agreement with Oshima in July 1937, the pre-1914 naval attaché in Tokyo, Captain von Knorr, informed the German Navy that Oshima had represented to him that the Japanese attack on China had been prepared well in advance prior to what he suggested was the ‘impending’ Japanese attack on the Soviet Union.

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to remain on friendly terms with the United States in order to prevent American support for Britain or Russia and this radical proposal was echoed in a magazine article by Admiral Suetsugu though these feelings were particularly directed at Britain over its support for China. However, it was already being observed in Berlin that the Japanese were scrutinising existing military and economic ties between Germany and Chiang Kai-shek closely and assurances were given to Kojima that military equipment such as U-boats promised to China in the past would not be supplied while Sino-Japanese conflict persisted, but the Japanese were not to be told about the naval and military training supplied to China through the Falkenhausen military mission. This position was relayed to Lietzmann, who had already reported the agitation in the Japanese press about the supply of arms and munitions to China by the Western Powers, the USA and Germany, and was told that he should bear it in mind that political relations with Japan took precedence over economic relations with China.151 Ôshima singled out the progress of cooperation with Germany in promoting internal tensions within the USSR which had resulted in the series of political assassinations by Stalin within the Red Army and a consequent weakening of Soviet military preparedness.152 The situation had been tested by the Kwantung Army in the border conflict over the island of Kanchatsu in the Amur River in May 1937153 and justification for the Japanese onslaught in China was cited in detail about Sino-Soviet collaboration and on Communist activity in China by RearAdmiral Nomura Naokuni, the director of naval intelligence, 151

152

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Mootz signal M Att Nr.196/37 gKdos of 26.11.1937 at: OKM: 1.Skl.Ic: Akte 5/1: ‘Verschiedenes,’ 1933–1940; 210–1. There is no unequivocal documentation available about subversive collaboration, but it was claimed by Walter Schellenberg at the end of World War II to have rested on arrangements worked out between the Gestapo and Colonel Usui Shigeki (1898–1941) to plant information indicating military involvement in a plot against Stalin. It is of interest in this connection that agents of the Polish Communist Party bugged the German embassy in Warsaw at this time and apparently heard statements by General Uborevich that he wanted to make contact again with German generals who had collaborated with the USSR during the Weimar Period. See the author’s The Polish Labyrinth. Saltire House Publications, 2017: xxxi & 61–64 and it should also be noted that a member of the German mission in Warsaw was Rudolf Schelia, subsequently arrested by the Gestapo and executed in 1942 for involvement in the Red Orchestra. See von Dirksen Political Report J.No.1163/37 of 8.7.1937 at: AA: Pol VIII: ‘Mandschukuo-Rußland,’ (1937–1939).

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in a discussion with Lietzmann on 1 November 1937.154 This was only one of a number of exchanges with the Japanese Navy about developments in the USSR linked to the earlier accord for an exchange of intelligence about the Soviet Navy and signs of differences between the Japanese armed services about the desirability of reaching an agreement with China in order to cope with the Soviet issue.155 The Chinese were not prepared to make any significant concessions to Japan and it became increasingly clear that the Japanese forces in China were finding it increasingly difficult to manage their strategy in China despite the massive advance against Hankow.156 The pressure from the Japanese Army in favour of an escalation in its proposals for a showdown with the Soviet Union intensified in the spring of 1938 with the defection of Major-General Lyushkov over the Korean border and his subsequent lengthy interrogation with the assistance of German and Polish specialists. Lietzmann submitted a lengthy report on this development, which highlighted the seriousness of the internal divisions within the Soviet defence and political establishment.157 These events were clearly of direct interest to the Sorge Ring and the fact that Ott subsequently singled out Lietzmann’s contacts with Sorge as significant clearly indicates that Lietzmann, as well as Ott, now promoted ambassador,158 and Scholl, were 154

155

156

157

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Lietzmann B.Nr.9/37 gKdos of 1.11.1937 at: OKM: M-IV: Heft 3, ‘Attaché- und Auslandsangelegenheiten,’ 1937–38: 62–69. Ôshima pressed ahead with efforts to convert the verbal agreement on the exchange of military intelligence about the USSR into a written instrument, but the emphasis of the Japanese Navy at this period was much more on its interest in extending this exchange to countries other than the USSR. This was turned down by Grand-Admiral Raeder as premature and Lietzmann so instructed after the despatch of reports derived from the Gaimushô about Soviet views on the defence of Czechoslovakia following the German occupation of Austria. Ibid., but Heft 4: 136–7, 181, 212–3. This was highlighted in a special consultation between Prime Minister Konoe and members of the German Embassy in July 1938 which effectively admitted that Japanese forces in China had overreached themselves: see ibid.: 87–104. Lietzmann report B.Nr.30/38 gKdos on the subject, which was relayed to Captain von Baumbach, the naval attaché in Moscow, on 30.9.1938 is unfortunately missing from the above file: ibid.: 143–4. This was clearly bound up with the current crisis over Czechoslovakia and with German proposals for the initiation of military/technical discussions with Italy and Japan in preparation for the possible outbreak of war in Europe. A card from Ribbentrop to Sorge on his 43rd birthday (4.10.1938) was found recently, along with Sorge’s official correspondent’s card (see p.103) among papers

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equipped with relevant information on developments and this was extended in the context of the outbreak of fighting between Soviet and Japanese forces at Lake Khasan (Changkufeng) between 12 July and 11 August 1938. Clear indications were provided in Abwehr reports about Soviet reinforcement of their Far Eastern armies and in the conclusion by Captain von Baumbach in Moscow that the most significant element lay in the Soviet determination to throw in all the forces at their disposal to ensure that the border line between Russia and Manchuria would be maintained at all costs.159 The crisis in Soviet-Japanese relations continued over the following year with the support being given by the Kwantung Army for operations conducted along the border between Manchukuo and Outer Mongolia in the area of Nomonhan. The crisis expanded through German pressure on Japan to provide support for their hostility toward both the USSR and Britain in the form of the tripartite alliance negotiations backed by Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. Over several months, resistance on the part of the Japanese Navy intensified and was found to focus on the Navy Vice-Minister, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, who argued that Japan was unprepared to conduct war simultaneously with both the Soviet Union and the Western Powers. Navy resistance to Army operations against both China and the Soviet Union complicated Hitler’s decision-making for many months and the German moves against Poland were also complicated further by the division among officers in the Japanese Army who essentially were primarily in favour of continued support for friendly relations either with Poland or Germany or both. The crisis was resolved on the German side by Hitler’s decision to opt for the unthinkable rapprochement with Stalin in August 1939 which enabled Germany to opt for conflict with the Western Powers and for the Soviet Union to benefit simultaneously from the deal with Hitler and to focus on the conduct of the successful operations led by General Zhukov in Outer Mongolia. The issue of Soviet-Japanese conflict was inevitably of prime importance to the Sorge Ring and this was subsequently

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in a Tokyo bookstore: see Torror (2015). This had presumably been organised by Ott following his appointment as ambassador. See von Baumbach report B.Nr.191/38 of 15.8.1938 at: OKM: ‘Rußland – Ferner Osten,’ (1937–38) which includes numerous press and secret service materials available to German naval intelligence at this juncture.

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confirmed in the post-war recollection of intelligence targets by Clausen.160 The significance of Sorge’s reports for Stalin’s handling of the European crisis may well have been high for Soviet and East German biographers, but undoubtedly the situation over Poland and the Baltic States arose from Hitler’s own choices and clearly Stalin’s welcome for partition arrangements in Europe as of substantial advantage for the USSR could be linked directly with the opportunity it presented to bring about the destruction of the Japanese 6th Army, especially in the context of continuing and well-known opposition from the Japanese Navy to minimise the Army operations on the Asian mainland. Consequently, the negative impact of the Nomonhan events on the domestic reputation and prospects of the Japanese Army’s future influence on economy and society was devastating and Japanese faith in Hitler’s reliance as an ally was deeply affected.161 On the other hand, the Japanese debacle was not something that caused Hitler much loss of sleep, especially as the onslaught on the Western Powers that followed was increasingly demonstrated as positively welcome to the perceptions of the bulk of the Japanese naval officer corps, but was also overshadowed by the outbreak of the Finnish-Soviet Winter War and Hitler’s continued perception of an enfeebled Soviet military establishment. The Japanese Navy’s welcome for Germany’s strategic moves steadily encouraged the relatively weak German Navy to seek Japanese support for the build-up of the supply network developed by Captain Lietzmann for the protection of German shipping, trade and operations in the Indo-Pacific region.162 160

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NAW: RG 319: Clausen dossier. The German journalist Werner Crome informed the author at an interview in Tokyo on 19.12.1965 that he had followed the course of these operations at the time and was in regular touch with his fellow correspondents, including Sorge, in Tokyo. The Soviet account of military operations may be found in Istoriya Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voina Sovetskogo Soyuz, Vol.I: 236–245. This can be demonstrated in terms of the shift that occurred in persuading ultranationalist political groups, such as those headed by Kodama Yoshio and Sasagawa Ryo-chi, to move from support of the Army to the Navy and Navy Air Force: see the author’s Ultranationalism and German-Japanese Relations, 1930– 1945. Folkestone, Global Oriental, 2011: ch.7. The Etappendienst was expanded exponentially between 1934 and 1939 but its operation in countries like Italy, which were sympathetic to German ambitions, was already evident in 1934, but later marked by co-operative moves such as Italian willingness to exchange information derived from espionage and decryption at

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This was strengthened by the moves to obtain Japanese support for the acquisition of naval intelligence about Western resources and extended it to the USA following the American steps to control trade and access to strategic raw materials. Wenneker was extensively briefed on objectives to be developed and implemented prior to his departure for his second tour of duty in Japan in February 1940, but there is no evidence of any explicit briefing of Sorge about these, although as events unfolded in Europe, the scope of German opportunities for deriving benefit from the Japanese connection became steadily clearer. Both Italian and German agencies initially expected a British collapse and Wenneker undoubtedly sought to facilitate the interest of the Japanese Navy in utilising the German-Soviet understanding to draw a line under Soviet-Japanese conflict. This was undoubtedly an enterprise in which Sorge had a strong interest and he may well have encouraged Wenneker to continue to pursue such a policy in cooperation with the Japanese Navy. Other Japanese more familiar with the values and goals of Hitler and the Nazi Party, however, remained unconvinced that such an understanding could not be sustained on a more permanent basis. The views of such individuals as Shiratori Toshio, the former Japanese ambassador in Italy, explicitly cast doubt on such possibilities and at an interview with Wenneker (arranged by Ambassador Ott) on 15 August 1940, Shiratori expressed the view that ‘sooner or later, there was no doubt that Germany and Japan would make common cause in the destruction of Russia.’163 Signs of Hitler’s disquiet and determination to revert to his deeprooted antagonism were already evident in the concern evoked by the Soviet pressure in annexing the province of Bessarabia while mopping-up operations in France were still continuing and touched on the raw nerve of German reliance on its most important foreign source of its crude oil in Rumania.164 It is unclear

163 164

this and decryption at this early stage. The Japanese Navy, however, showed a much greater reluctance to enter into such relations before April 1939 and continued to be highly selective in terms of more intimate exchanges until the summer of 1941 by comparison with the support shown to the Japanese Army in terms of intelligence, subversion and sabotage incorporated in the organisational structures of the Abwehr and Gestapo. See POA 1 (2nd ed.): 169–171. The intensity of German operations in Europe underlined the speed of the use of oil reserves by land and air forces which led to demands, primarily from Goering, for the German Navy to be required to hand over substantial

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at what point information was filtered through to Sorge about the preparations for Operation Barbarossa, whether following the replacement of General Matzky by General Kretschmer at the end of 1940 or the return of Colonel Scholl before taking up his appointment as military attaché in Thailand or this prospect was adumbrated by Ott through regular contacts with German military couriers, such as Colonel von Niedermayer, with instructions since 1936 to report on their observations along the TransSiberian Railway. The Japanese intelligence network in Europe was more than adequately informed of the build-up of German forces along the mutual frontier with the USSR both through consular observations and through secret service links.165 However, there was considerable scepticism in Tokyo about the seriousness of Hitler’s intentions - and it was not until Hitler actually met with Ambassador Oshima at the beginning of June 1941 that the German plans were spelled out, but even then people in Tokyo were not convinced that it was any more than a trick to persuade Stalin to supply greater economic benefits.166

165

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amounts of its accumulated stocks of fuel, mainly imported from the USA and Mexico. See Raeder memorandum ObdM: Op I 576/40 g.Kdos.Chefs of 29.3.1940 and subsequent note of 6.5.1940 at: OKM: ObdM: ‘Handmaterial,’ (1932–1944). The German side indicated its unhappiness with the activities of the Japanese consul Sugihara at Königsberg and the links of the Japanese military with the Polish General Staff and the Home Army: see the author’s The Polish Labyrinth: 112 ff. It is claimed in Krug et al. Reluctant Allies. Annapolis, 2001: 176 that the Japanese Navy ‘received notice of “Barbarossa”...a month and a half’ before the German attack. It cites a signal of 29.6.1941 from Captain Yokoi, the Japanese naval attaché in Berlin, as evidence for this, but there is no such evidence demonstrated in this retrospective appeal for a formal statement of Navy policy on the matter. The statements of the Japanese naval attaché in Rome, Captain Mitsunobu To-yo-, to his German counterpart, however, demonstrate very much more clearly the Navy’s wholly negative view of the attack, comparing it to the misguided strategy of the Japanese Army in the endless depths of the Chinese land mass. Krug et al. point to the co-ordination of German and Japanese naval policies as facilitated more by contacts between the Abwehr and Japanese attachés than with the German Naval War Staff. Nevertheless, it was pointed out by the Abwehr that the paucity and quality of intelligence reports supplied by the Japanese side ‘especially since the outbreak of the war with Russia’ was a matter of complaint and it was believed on the German side that it was attributable to the unwillingness of the authorities in Tokyo to provide attachés with fuller briefings. See Pieckenbrock letter Abw.I H Ost/N 1472/42 gKdos of 29.4.1942 at: OKW: Abteilung Ausland VId: ‘Dreimächtepakt’. The Abwehr itself had direct orders from

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As a result of subsequent protests by Wenneker that he found it awkward for him to be promoted to vice-admiral and admiral because that made it more difficult for him to work particularly with the younger, more radical staff officers in the Japanese Navy, in fact he frequently had valuable discussions with a few more senior officers, especially with the Vice-Chief of the Japanese Naval Staff, Admiral Kondo- Nobutake (1880–1953).167 It was Kondo- in particular who provided key clues to Wenneker up to the eve of the Pacific War about Japanese naval strategy. On 3 April 1940, it was Kondo- who invited Wenneker to a one-to-one discussion at a tea-house at which German help was solicited to broker a settlement between Japan and the USSR.168 On 18 April, Kondo- ‘repeatedly expressed his amazement at the outstanding achievements demonstrated in the landing in Norway’ and remarked that ‘these were surprising in view of the tenfold superiority’ of the enemy. This was followed on 2 May at a discussion with Vice-Admiral Yamagata Seigo-, the head of the Japanese Naval Air Force Bureau, who said that ‘the achievements of the German Air Force in Norway, which have attracted the greatest attention, have indicated a turning point in naval warfare.’169 At an interview with Wenneker on 3 July 1940, Kondo- remarked that ‘the campaign in Norway has demonstrated that they need have no fear even of a vastly superior fleet’ and that ‘it is manifest that the one opponent worthy of attention, America, can do practically nothing to get the better of Japan militarily.’170 He pointed out, however, that ‘the petroleum situation is serious’ and estimated that fuel supplies might be adequate only for nine months, especially if there were a full American embargo. The only way to overcome the problem lay in the seizure of the oilwells of the Dutch East Indies, but to do so the Japanese Navy would need to maximise its naval air arm on land and at sea and to do so would entail coming

167

168 169 170

Hitler to circulate rumours in neutral countries that the German build-up was geared towards an attack on the British Isles (‘Operation Albion’), which the Japanese eagerly awaited: see OKW/WFSt/Abt.L (I Op)44142/41 gKdos.Chefs. of 15.2.1941 at: OKM: Akte V,5, Bd.1: ‘ “Barbarossa” Weisungen des OKW und Zeittafel.’(1940–41): 309–13. See, for example, the comment by Wenneker in response to a critical statement by Jodl on 24.12.1942 that his informants were entirely Japanese naval officers, ‘including the Chief of Naval Staff himself’’: POA 6: 205. POA 1 (2nd ed.): 101. Ibid.: 116. Ibid.: 151.

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to an accord with the Army to be provided with the necessary budgetary facilities. This had to be prepared through the establishment of the second Konoe administration and part of the Army’s price lay in the acceptance of the Tripartite Alliance with Germany and Italy in September 1940. Japan’s military preparations for war included the acquisition of knowledge about advanced military technology from Italy and Germany which was substantially accomplished through the despatch of military and naval missions in the first half of 1941. The Japanese armed forces were in a position to offer to supply their allies with such strategic materials as rubber, tin and wolfram, largely obtained via the Japanese Army’s occupied territories in China and Indochina, while the Japanese Navy was in a position to supply perhaps the best aerial torpedoes then available.171 These weapons, however, were never fully developed in Germany, partly because plans for the construction of German aircraft-carriers were never completed, but also partly because greater operational success was obtained in January 1941 through the acquisition of British code materials, which enabled German and Italian aircraft to carry out surprise air attacks in the western Mediterranean which nearly brought about disastrous consequences for Force H based at Gibraltar.172 Although there had been the closest cooperation between Italian and German decrypt agencies, there is no evidence to suggest that knowledge of German decryption of British codes and ciphers was imparted to the Japanese Navy before the summer of 171

172

Wenneker worked out arrangements for obtaining strategic raw materials via the Chief of the Military Affairs Bureau in the Japanese War Ministry, General Muto Akira (1892–1948): see Wenneker B.Nr.349/40 gKdos of 28.8.1940 at: POA 2–3: 500–1. The driving force in securing the despatch of 100 Japanese aerial torpedoes to Germany and Italy in 1941 was Captain Mitsunobu To-yo-, who made approaches initially via the Japanese Navy Mission in Berlin, but Wenneker arranged for transport of the torpedoes in conjunction with representatives of the Abwehr. One cruiser, HMS Southampton, was sunk and the aircraft-carrier HMS Illustrious was so badly damaged that it had to be moved to the USA for repair, which put it out of action for many months. The code materials were captured by the German auxiliary cruiser Atlantis in the Indian Ocean in November 1940 from the liner Automedon: ibid.: 513. It took a considerable time for knowledge of the losses to be recognised in London, but eventually the problem was headed off by the switch to one-time pads for War Office and Admiralty ciphers: NAK: CAB 81. There are some surviving traces of the capture of intelligence material supplied to MI6 and SOE representatives in the Far East, but only from unweeded documents in US custody.

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1941, even if then. Although the Japanese Naval Mission was told in principle that it was of prime importance to pay close attention to communications signals for operational purposes, it was mainly illustrated from the successes achieved in the Norway campaign, but the Japanese Navy was not aware that much of these derived from the reading of British signals traffic.173 German decrypt organisations continued to enjoy a considerable, if diminishing, capacity to intercept and read British communications for most of 1941 and right up until November 1942 in certain respects, but in the course of 1941 the safeguards of onetime signals were introduced and agreement was reached with the USA for access to decryption of the Japanese ‘Purple’ machine code in return for collaboration with Anglo-Dutch-Australian advances in reading the Japanese Navy’s JN-25 cipher. Access to the diplomatic ‘Purple’ system, however, was only of very limited value over issues of peace and war, especially as Ôshima in Berlin and Nomura Kichisaburo- in Washington employed alongside the ‘Purple’ system of the Gaimusho- Japanese Army and Navy systems to communicate with Tokyo, from which the Anglo-American states were excluded. Although the Spets-Otdel in Moscow had access to a number of Japanese systems, Stalin had much less certainty about German signalling systems and was fed with assumptions about the irrationality of an attack by Hitler, as German deception traffic appeared to verify the assertion that German preparations were geared to the launching of an invasion of the British Isles. The collapse of Britain had been widely canvassed in Rome and Tokyo since the fall of France and the Japanese Navy and Japanese military attachés in Europe favoured this as the most likely future scenario, especially as it offered easy pickings on their doorstep. In the exchanges between Wenneker and Kondo-, it was made very clear that any Japanese expansion in Central Asia could not deliver the vital raw materials that expansion southwards proffered and that to grasp these the need to include the occupation of the Philippines was both essential and do-able.174 173

174

A special report was compiled to evaluate the UK radio signals obtained from the stranded submarine HMS Seal in May 1940, but there is no evidence to confirm that the decipherment elements referred to in this were brought to Japanese attention. See OKM B.Nr.3.Skl.B 530/41 gKdos of 21.2.1941 at: OKM: 3.Skl.B:‘B-Berichte 1940,’ Bd.4. See POA 2–3: 538–9.

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The vulnerability to Soviet air attacks on Japanese centres of production impelled the Japanese Navy to continue arguing for a defensive stance in the North and preferably for the achievement of an accommodation with the Soviet Union which would permit a southern advance unmolested. The despatch of Foreign Minister Matsuoka to Europe via Moscow failed to deliver any Japanese initiative, but elicited a close, but unresponsive observation on Hitler’s part since he was unsure of Japanese reticence, but utterly dismissive of a silent Italian response.The widely circulated German appraisal of the alliance with Japan noted: Matsuoka clearly had a special interest in ascertaining what view was held in Germany about Soviet Russia. The following alternatives were commended to him in making such a judgment: a) If the Soviet Union behaved itself, then everything would actually be fine; but, on the other hand, b) it behaved badly, it must be ‘neutralised’. From outward appearances, Matsuoka is supposed to have given no sign of having taken in the full meaning of b). But people who know him, especially the German ambassador in Tokyo, Ott, estimate that Matsuoka is too sly a character for that to be doubted.’175

Matsuoka signs Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact, April 1941in the presence of Molotov, Stalin and Vishinsky (Wikipedia) 175

Bürkner memorandum OKW/Ausl III.Org.Nr.127/41 gKdos.Chefs. of 10.4.1941 at: OKL: Genst.d.Lw./8.Abt.:’Matsuoka-Besuch,’ (1941).

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Matsuoka was not apprised about the attempts by Ribbentrop to draw up arrangements for Soviet support of the Axis in advance of Molotov’s visit to Berlin in November 1940.176 Molotov’s demeanour simply reinforced Hitler’s determination to seek to obtain the greatest concessions from the USSR and to crush Bolshevism once and for all. As late as February 1941, the Soviet military attaché in Belgrade continued to reassure the German side that the Soviet Union would put up with a German advance from the Balkans into Turkey and to seize Iraq, but Molotov declared in a speech on 29 March 1941 that he was tired of Japanese temporising and rejection of a repeated Soviet offer of a non-aggression pact with Japan, which was accompanied by his own demand for the retrocession of South Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands.177 The German response to Matsuoka’s enquiries was that the Japanese should simply avoid responding to these suggestions when it was noted that Matsuoka planned to stop over in Moscow on his way home, as the Japanese delegation included Commander Fujii Shigeru, who had been charged by the Japanese Navy with urging on Matsuoka the need to reach some kind of détente with the Soviet Union by means of a non-aggression pact or some other suitable accord.178 As a result of a direct intervention by Stalin himself, a neutrality pact with Japan was offered in combination with a proposal that the Japanese concession on North Sakhalin would be abandoned in due course. Following Japanese acceptance and Matsuoka’s return home, Wenneker was met by Kondo- on 17 April 1941 and told that the Japanese Navy has always supported it, as a clarification of the position of the Soviet Union has long been the primary and most significant precondition for any operation against the South. People are struck particularly by the fact that the Russians have not named their 176

177

178

Protocols had been drawn up for secret Soviet-Japanese cooperation, but Molotov had demanded that Japan denounce claims to continue to obtain oil from North Sakhalin. AA: Etzdorf Handakten: ‘Aufzeichnungen.’ 3.12.1940. The background to the Soviet stance is more fully set out in Bidder memorandum e.o.Pol VIII 2287/41g of 9.5.1941 at: AA: Pol.Abt.: Akte Po.23A g OA ‘Krieg zwischen Deutschland, England, Frankreich und Polen,’ Bd.1,(1940–1). Matsuoka had served in the Japanese consulate at Shanghai and provided intelligence of value to the Combined Fleet in the days leading to the destruction of the Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1905. See Matsuoka Tel.No.136 of 25.4.1905, one of many to Foreign Minister Komura: GST, File 5.2.2.20–3: Nichi-Ro seneki kankei Rokoku Barateki kantai tôkô kankei ikken: 1556.

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price to Japan so far. People have mainly pointed to the major German successes in the Balkans and the German troops assembled along the Russian frontiers as the explanation for the unwonted Russian willingness to be accommodating. At some later date they must anticipate Russian counter-demands.179

On the very same day, an accord was reached between the Japanese Army and Navy on acceptance of an earlier Navy submission that a southward advance was a matter of life-and-death for Japan and emphasised the need for preparedness to resort to force if no other means could be found, but conditional on reaching an accord with the USSR and even at the risk of the outbreak of war with the USA and its friends – tai Nanpo- shisaku yo-ko-.180 The Japanese Army, however, continued to indicate to Colonel Kretschmer that it would respond to the situation of a possible German-Soviet war by suggesting that it would make arrangements, if needed, to conduct a simultaneous set of moves against Singapore, Manila and Vladivostock/Blagoveshchensk, while the Japanese Navy indicated to Wenneker that it was ready for action, but that the Japanese Army was not and stated that the Navy would be unhappy if U-boat attacks on US convoys led to war but approved the Army not taking part in any German-Soviet conflict.181 This would clearly have been something that Sorge would have welcomed, but he would nevertheless have had to take note of the impending outbreak of German operations in the - East from his conversations with Ott and others even though Oshima’s account of his meeting with Hitler on 3 June 1941 was not on balance believed by highly-placed officers such as General Okamoto, who had been moved from Berlin to serve as head of military intelligence on the Japanese General Staff. One of the questions arising from the decision to mount Operation Barbarossa initially in May 1941 was that of finding an answer to the replacement of the transport of rubber and other strategic 179 180

181

Wenneker report B.Nr.279/41 gKdos of 17.4.1941 at: POA 2–3: 545–6. Daihonei Kaigunbu: Dai Tô-A Senso- Kaisen Keii. Senshi So-sho, Vol.101. Tokyo, Asagumo Shinbun-sha, 1979: 169–209. Kretschmer Tel.Nr.47/41 gKdos of 23.5.1941 at: OKH: Genst.d.H.: O Qu IV: Attachéabteilung: ‘Chefsachen, Bd.1941; Wenneker Tel.Nr.474/41 gKdos of 10.6.1941: POA 2–3: 462–4. Wenneker’s conversation with Captain Takada promoted a feeling of disappointment that the Japanese Navy would not automatically support Germany against the USA in the Atlantic and adumbrated continuing concern about the prospect of a protracted conflict.

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materials from East Asia on the Trans-Siberian Railway by the shipment of these by blockade-runner to ports on the Atlantic coast of Europe. Discussions were held in March 1941 about how best to organise this traffic through the vessels in Pacific ports, co-ordinated by Wenneker and supported by Helmut Wohlthat, who had been delegated from the Four-Year Plan Office to take charge of trade negotiations in Tokyo.182 Wenneker despatched some eleven blockade-running transports from Japanese ports in 1941, most of which successfully reached Bordeaux but it was only the last of these which was subjected to any security surveillance by Sturmbannführer Meisinger after his return on Ott’s orders from Shanghai.Whatever Sorge managed to glean from Wenneker, Ott and others was effectively countered by the steps taken by Canaris to convince observers of German strategy that the troop concentration on the Soviet border was merely a feint to disguise steps intended to bring about a British collapse in the Channel, the Mediterranean and the Balkans. The key step in Soviet strategy was unmistakeably the intervention by Stalin in April 1941 to provide assurance in the rear of the long-planned Japanese drive into South-East Asia in the direction of Australasia. Sorge’s longstanding recognition of the ambitions of the Japanese Navy since 1936 owed not a little to Wenneker’s contribution to the deriving of insights into the vagaries of the so-called ‘Japanese mentality’. But undoubtedly 182

The initial discussions had been initiated in September 1940 and the initial administrative organisation had been proposed by the Naval War Staff in February 1941, but by mid-March this had had to be put into effect and accelerated on orders issued by Keitel. The issue of blockade-running was initially proposed to the Japanese Navy via Admiral Nomura, the head of the naval mission in Berlin, but given the perception that Japanese decision-making would be too timeconsuming, it was decided to press ahead with German vessels, but to be prepared to take the security risk of alerting the civilian agencies involved. Admiral Canaris and Captain Bürkner were warned of the move and counter-intelligence (Abwehr III) informed. In order to combat Soviet suspicions, it was decided to despatch one amount of rubber by train in the full knowledge that this would have to be sacrificed once military operations had begun. See OKW: Ausl.VId: Akte Sonderstab HWK:’Blockadebruch als Wirtschafts-Kriegsmassnahme’ (1940–41). The appointment of Meisinger as police liaison officer in Japan appears to have been timed to coincide with the need for security at the Japanese end and this appears to have stemmed from Schellenberg of the Gestapo, having obtained many of the pieces of security information from Counsellor Kramarz of the Foreign Ministry in 1941, but later made arrangements for the posting of police attachés to replace existing security personnel under Abwehr control in overseas posts via Martin Luther.

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as time passed during 1941 he was also greatly aided by his Japanese collaborators, above all by Ozaki and his links with the Asahi Shinbun and the insights into the policies of the Konoe Cabinet provided by such individuals as Saionji Kinkazu and Ushiba Tomohiko- as US-Japanese tensions mounted. Once Operation Barbarossa was launched, General Okamoto was among those who tended to believe Hitler’s boast that victory was weeks rather than years away, while others who had had direct links with the German scene were rather more sceptical.183 The Japanese Navy was, however, deeply disillusioned by the German offensive and these views were channelled among others by Captain Mitsunobu To-yo-, the Japanese naval attaché in Rome, who argued that the Red Army had prepared defence in depth and that not even the capture of Moscow ‘would deliver a fatal blow’.184 He went on to compare the attack on Russia with the Japanese experience in China which faced ‘in a vast and barely accessible hinterland an enemy which will resort to the means of guerrilla warfare which tie down vast numbers of one’s own troops without being able to bring about a decisive military victory’. The initial intelligence estimate by the German Army, which produced a study of possible Japanese operations in the Far East and Siberia, was that the Kwantung Army faced some 455,000 Soviet forces, whereas Japanese intelligence calculated these at some 600,000 men. Captured Soviet troops subsequently interrogated by the Germans confirmed that, in response to Japanese military mobilisation in Manchuria (Kanto-kuen) in July 1941, the Red Army had reinforced its forces and withdrawn civilians behind lines of fortification previously constructed. This amply supported the assertion by Mitsunobu that ‘while the Russians had organised substantial troop transfers from Siberia to the western front prior to the outbreak of the German-Russian war, such troop movements were no longer being observed after the outbreak of war’ and that ‘Russian forces in Siberia would be held in the Far East against Japan.’ 183

184

In particular, General Yamashita Ho-bun submitted a report on 7.7.1941 following his return home in which he recommended that Japanese technological backwardness indicated that war should be avoided for as long as possible: Bo-eicho-: Senshi-shitsu: ‘Yamashita Shisatsudan Ho-koku,’ (Gunji Gyo-sei Sonota 87). Löwisch (Rome) B.Nr.Gkds 1158/41 of 10.7.1941 at: OKM: M Att: ‘Italien – Land,’ Bd.2,(1941–42):

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The outbreak of the war against the USSR was noted by Wenneker as an indication that the use of blockade-running vessels now represented the only physical link with the homeland and its significance confined not merely to the supply of rubber to the homeland. Following conversations with Japanese naval officers, Wenneker reported that it was not expected that Japan would attack Russia, as they regarded it as impossible for Japan to sustain operations in both North and South simultaneously and reiterated that such an attack would certainly not solve the urgent problem of raw material supply. The expectation was that a Soviet collapse would be possible at best by the winter, but that the Navy ‘hopes to inhibit the strong desire within the Army for an offensive toward the North’. Wenneker indicated that he thought that the Americans were hoping for a Soviet-Japanese clash, but learned from Navy officers that planning was underway for a simultaneous attack on Manila and the Dutch oil-wells. Ambassador Ott was briefed orally about these points but not supplied with a copy of the report.185 The cable of 30 August also contained references to the lack of progress in Japanese-American relations and this was reinforced in Wenneker’s conversation with Captain Maeda on 6 October 1941, which specified US demands as completely unacceptable, but also pointed to the impact of the embargo on Japanese supplies of fuel.186 These tense diplomatic negotiations were certainly also reinforced for Sorge through the leakage of sentiments from the Konoe circle suggesting that the refusal of President Roosevelt to respond to Konoe was the last throw of the dice in trying to prevent war and would also have been picked up from Ott, who subsequently acknowledged that he had received briefings from Sorge and relayed these to Berlin. Clausen recalled that Saionji had reported the outcome of the Imperial Conference in early July 1941 and had subsequently supplied drafts of material employed in - Japanese-American negotiations, while Ozaki learned from Oda Shintaro-, from the Shipping Section of Mitsui Bussan, in July 1941 that only 250,000 Japanese troops were being despatched to 185

186

Wenneker B.Nr.645/41 gKdos of 22.8.1941 at: POA: 2–3: 487–8. These views were reiterated in his B.Nr.678/41 gKdos of 30.8.1941, which stated that the Japanese Army aimed to postpone any move northwards until after the winter, but reaffirmed the view in the Navy that war with the USA was increasingly widely regarded as virtually inevitable. Ott was also briefed orally about this report: ibid.: 419–92. This was relayed extensively by Ott to the Foreign Ministry: POA 4: 663.

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the Kwantung Army while 350,000 troops were being directed southwards and a reserve of 400,000 troops was to be held in the homeland.187 Wenneker had meetings with Captain Maeda Tadashi, who had succeeded Captain Kojima as head of the German sub-section of the Intelligence Division of the Japanese Naval Staff, on 6, 9 and 15 October 1941. On 9 October, Maeda enquired if Germany would automatically support Japan if it made war on the USA and Wenneker replied that, as hostilities were as good as being conducted with US warships in the Atlantic already, it would effectively signify that Germany was already in combat operations with the US fleet. Asked if Germany would continue to support Japan in the event of a lengthy Pacific war, Wenneker said that he could not speak for his government, but doubted that the United States would tolerate abandoning its commitment to overthrow the Nazi regime and thought that it was unlikely to make peace in the Atlantic but continue fighting at the same time with Japan. On 15 October 1941, Wenneker again met Maeda, who revealed that the Japanese Navy had been able to decipher messages from the US Embassy in Moscow to the State Department which indicated that the Soviet Union was opposed to any openly hostile policy toward Japan.188 Sorge was arrested on 18 October, the date on which the announcement of the To-jo- Cabinet was revealed to the public and in fact confirmed the same kind of tightening of Japanese security that had previously occurred on To-jo-’s appointment as War Minister in July 1940.189 Wenneker was increasingly made aware of the redoubled Japanese concern with security over the following months, though nothing was recorded of any discussion with Japanese Navy officers about the arrests of Sorge and Clausen in his War Diary. What perhaps was of greatest interest and significance 187

188

189

NAW: RG 319: Clausen dossier. Ozaki also verified in August 1941 the suspension of operations against the USSR, but it remains unclear whether Sorge’s reporting also relied on information from Wenneker or Wenneker’s report on the matter relied on an exchange of information with Sorge, as well as on the conversations Wenneker had with Japanese Navy officers, or both. POA 4: 663, 669 and 675–6. Again, Wenneker briefed Ott on his meetings and was asked by Maeda not to reveal Japanese decryption capabilities, though in fact there was an on-going collaboration among German, Italian and Japanese agencies directed at US communications at this time and there is evidence that some success had been met with Japanese decryption efforts since 1937. POA 1: 170 referred to the arrests of British nationals in Japan as spies.

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was the enquiry made by Maeda on 24 October 1941 when Maeda asked if Germany would welcome Japanese mediation to bring about a peace between Germany and the Soviet Union ‘in the near future’. Wenneker responded that Germany was set on the overthrow of Stalin and was unlikely to accept any Japanese mediation before this step had been accomplished. Maeda then reiterated his earlier enquiry about German support for a Japanese southward advance, already mentioned to Wenneker as well-nigh inevitable. Such a strategy was always welcome to Germany as this ‘would be most advantageous for both countries’ and Wenneker mentioned it as his personal belief that it would be good if Anglo-American forces were tied down in the Pacific and the reduction of US supplies to Britain would be welcome to Germany ‘as the war would be decided not in Russia but in the Atlantic’.190 Wenneker made a written report of this encounter for Ott, who promised to use it as part of his own communications with Ribbentrop, but no evidence for this appears in the surviving correspondence between Tokyo and Berlin and it is out of the question that Ribbentrop would ever have broached such an issue with Hitler then, especially as subsequent Japanese enquiries in such a vein in each succeeding year were met with a withering response.The leading figures in the German Naval War Staff at no time had any interest in any closer contacts with the USSR and evidence of their unhappiness with Hitler’s obsession was preserved in its archives.191 Having been a British prisoner-of-war from almost the beginning of World War I, Wenneker and other officers such as Admirals Lietzmann and Dönitz who had been POWs of the British demonstrated their enthusiasm for a showdown with the Royal Navy.192 Following his release from Akita Prison, Max Clausen informed officers of the US Civil Intelligence Corps that he had had a meeting with Admiral Wenneker at Karuizawa on 11 December 1945 and received confirmation from him that before Sorge’s arrest he had been asked to take care of Sorge’s suitcase and this had been substantiated in a subsequent ‘cross-examination’. It was then noted that ‘Wenneker declared, however, that he had never read the manuscripts contained in the suitcase before its surrender to the Japanese authorities. He said he believed that the manuscripts 190 191 192

POA 4: 688–9. See OKM: 1.Skl.: KTB, Teil Ca: ‘Grundlegende Fragen der Kriegführung’ (1942–43) See Dönitz letter of 3.7.1940 to Wenneker at: POA 2–3: 498–9.

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contained studies of the labour conditions in Japan, made by Sorge over a number of years.’ Clausen had already stated in the course of an earlier interrogation on 5.12.1945 that ‘he considers Admiral Wenneker, former German Naval Attaché, an anti-Fascist. He said Sorge placed great trust in Wenneker. Whenever Sorge went out of town, he would leave a suitcase containing personal papers with either Clausen or Wenneker for safekeeping. Subject believed the bag contained principally the manuscript of a political work Sorge was writing. Clausen believes the bag was last left with Wenneker when Sorge was imprisoned, and Clausen intends to see if Wenneker still has it.’193 This indicates a considerable degree of intimacy between Sorge and Wenneker, but it is interesting that Ott admitted friendly relations between Sorge and Lietzmann and said nothing about relations between Wenneker and Sorge in the much lengthier periods of time that Ott had known Sorge. It is clear, too, that the Japanese authorities succeeded in reading many of the radio signals transmitted by Clausen, particularly those sent in 1941, through the known use of the German Statistical Yearbook as the main key and also through the seizure of Clausen’s transmitter and copies of plain and enciphered texts. Wenneker’s personal opinion that the war would not be won in Russia but on the Atlantic coincided entirely with the views of the Japanese Navy and the Japanese Navy in turn was adamantly opposed to the ambitions of the Japanese Army and especially to those of the anti-Soviet faction within the Army, which was well-represented by Ôshima Hiroshi and other strong admirers of the German military tradition in Berlin and sustained in the General Staff in Tokyo and by many of the staff officers serving with the Kwantung, China and Southern Armies. Generals Ott, Matzky and Kretschmer in Tokyo were symbols in Tokyo of the historic link with the German Army but as such were deeply mistrusted by the Japanese Navy and its political allies, as was confirmed by the secret monitoring of the Japanese Embassy buildings in Berlin by the Gestapo and the Forschungsamt.194 Given the initial claims by the Japanese police that Sorge was an agent of the Comintern, this was modified as a result of 193 194

NAW: RG 319 Clausen dossier. Attention was drawn in Der Chef des Sipo und des SD/VI C B.Nr.51443/42 Wau/R1g of 20.4.1942 to Under-Secretary Luther to the difference in opinions between Ambassador Oshima and the staff of the Japanese military attaché with the civilian members of the embassy: AA: Inland II: ‘SD-Berichte betr. Irland und Japan,’ (1940–43).

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subsequent interrogations to one which identified Sorge as an agent of the 4th Section of the Soviet Army General Staff in Japanese texts but was, nevertheless still spoken of as a Comintern agent in the prosecution of the case in the courts in the course of 1942.195 The interpretation relayed by Ivar Lissner to the Abwehr in March 1942 specified that Sorge was an agent of the GRU, but this was ignored by Ott when called to account and it is very likely that the representation of Sorge as a Comintern agent by the civilian police was connected with an implicit denial of him as a military agent to fend off any claims for the case to be transferred to the military police (kempeitai). The apparent source of Lissner’s information seems to have been the Army secret service (tokumu kikan), headed by an officer with close connections with the Army faction which had traditionally worked with the Polish rather than the German General Staff and which became extremely critical of the German handling of Soviet national minorities after the successful German advances in the second half of 1941. During 1942, the Japanese Navy intervened in the dispute between the German military and the Foreign Ministry about the reporting from members of the German Embassy in Tokyo to Berlin by siding with Wenneker against Ott because they objected to information about the Japanese Navy’s strategy being passed on by Ott to Ribbentrop and then on to Oshima and relayed to the War Ministry and General Staff, which then caused embarrassment for the Japanese Navy Minister within Japanese politics at a time when they faced the most difficult strategic decision-making.196 The complaints from the Japanese Navy about the role of Ribbentrop and his intimacy with Oshima were ongoing and after 195

196

It was especially ironic that while Sorge and Clausen were being pursued as agents of the Comintern the Japanese government decided that it desired the lapse of the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern agreement on 25.11.1941. Wenneker had complained about information about future Japanese naval strategy being passed on to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin that had not been passed on by him to Ott in his signal Tel.Nr.510/42 gKdos of 10.3.1942, but he had then had to go off on a lengthy trip round the Japanese-occupied areas. When he returned to Tokyo, he found a very stiff attitude among his contacts, who then explained about the difficulties that had arisen for Navy Minister Shimada at Cabinet meetings and he requested in his Tel.Nr.1/42 Chefs of 15.5.1942 to Admiral Fricke that such high-level information cables not be relayed to Ribbentrop in future. See POA 5: 74 & 237–8. This had led to demands by Keitel that Wenneker be assigned a separate role as head of naval mission and not subordinate to Ott as under pre-war regulations and opened a lengthy tussle with Ribbentrop to obtain Hitler’s agreement in November 1942 for Wenneker to be appointed Armed Forces’ Attaché with completely separate ciphering arrangements.

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the debacle at Midway it had to be reiterated that Japan would be in no position to mount offensives on more than a single front as they were so committed to fighting in the Solomon Islands that they would not even be able to repeat fleet operations in the Indian Ocean, allegedly because of monsoon conditions, and that therefore any possibility of effecting a junction in the Middle East to meet up with German land forces at Suez and in the Caucausus was absolutely out of the question.197 The absolute opposition of the Japanese Navy to an Army attack on the Soviet Far East was clear to both Wenneker and Sorge from 1936 and without doubt Wenneker was viewed by the Japanese Navy as its best German advocate, who was unprepared to compromise with Hitler’s vision in the way that Ott had done and continued to be seen as the proponent of the German Army’s strategy in Tokyo and committed to the line of argument put forward by Ribbentrop and the view put forward by Jodl which called on the German armed services not to question Hitler’s strategic ideas.198 The southward strategy proposed by the Japanese Navy predominated in the course of 1941 and was strongly endorsed by Wenneker and the German Navy’s leaders, but although all attempts to alter Hitler’s obsession with the crusade against Bolshevism were in vain, it is clear that the Japanese Navy kept on pressing with the notion of mediation by Japan between Germany and the USSR and also backed Wenneker against Ott. Ott tried to cite evidence in favour of his claim that the Sorge affair did not have deleterious effects on German-Japanese relations, but this was undermined by Sorge himself in his lengthy confessions. Although Ott and Ribbentrop denied the negative claims presented by Ivar Lissner in March 1942 and ignored Lissner’s contention that Sorge was an agent of the GRU rather than of the Comintern, Ott’s representations were repudiated in Himmler’s submission of 197

198

The difficulties facing the Japanese Navy were spelled out with increasing clarity by no less a figure than Vice-Admiral Kondo-, Wenneker’s most influential high-ranking contact since 1940, who returned to Japan after service at sea as officer commanding the Japanese 2nd Fleet and complained about the German commitment to the Russian front as ‘a secondary war theatre’. See Wenneker Tel.Nr.2/42 Chefs of 14.5.1942 at: OKM: 1.Skl.: KTB, CXV: ‘Zusammenarbeit mit Japan,’ (1941–42): 147–8 and German Admiral (Tokyo) Tel.Nr.1/42 Chefs of 1.8.1942 at: OKM: 1.Skl.: Akte X,5:’Meldungen und Berichte aus Tokio,’ (1941– 43): 251. See Jodl directive OKW 00956/42 gKdos of 17.3.1942 which ordered that any estimates of the enemy situation ‘must coincide with the view of the Führer’: OKM: 1.Skl.: KTB, Teil C Ca:’Fragen der Kriegführung,’: 140–1.

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October 1942 of his summary of the Sorge and Hofmeier cases for Ribbentrop and Hitler. Nothing was said by Ott about the positive contribution made by Wenneker to German-Japanese relations in Lissner’s report, but there is every indication that the memoranda submitted to the German Embassy sought to gloss over Sorge’s contribution to Soviet military intelligence. It is also evident that the undoubted evidence of Wenneker’s close association with Sorge that emerged from the decrypted signals seized by the Japanese police from Clausen were not disclosed to Ott or Meisinger, though they may have figured in exchanges between Wenneker and Japanese Navy officers in July 1942 and appear to have prompted Wenneker to make his top secret signal to Admiral Fricke about his relations with Sorge and voicing his concern that this might emerge in future exchanges. The German Navy leaders, however, reacted in a similar fashion to Wenneker’s concerns as Admiral Canaris and the Abwehr reacted to the Lissner submission. Ott most obviously responded to the demands by Ribbentrop for Wenneker to submit all of his signals which he deemed to have a ‘political’ content or significance, even though Ott had failed in the 1930s as military attaché to submit all his reports to the German Army to his head of mission and had had the fact of his use of an Enigma cipher machine prised from him by Ambassador von Dirksen. Ott had also assiduously submitted to Ribbentrop the various reasons for rejecting the alternative arrangements for Wenneker’s appointment, first as liaison with Imperial Japanese Headquarters, then as liaison with the Japanese Naval Staff. The issue was finally settled by Hitler himself in October 1942 when he authorised Wenneker to communicate matters of military significance without informing his ambassador and was evidently swayed by the fact that Wenneker was the principal conduit of naval signals derived from the decryption of enemy communications, as well as by the arguments deployed by Himmler against Ott which were followed by Ott’s dismissal as ambassador in Japan. The extent of Ott’s vanity or perhaps duplicity can be judged by the fact that in his formal statements to US interrogators in Japan after the end of the war, Ott simply ignored the fact that his dismissal had been down to the Sorge affair and tried to claim that he had been dismissed because he had opposed Hitler’s order that British commandos be manacled when captured. Although Ott was certainly aware of the contacts between Sorge and other attachés in Tokyo over many years, no mention appears

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ever to have been made public by Ott to Wenneker’s contacts with Sorge. Wenneker certainly acknowledged that Ott’s role as ambassador to chair daily meetings in wartime to share their experiences of their contacts with the Japanese was far in advance of any consultations between Ott’s successor in office, Heinrich Stahmer, and the attachés, though from the end of 1942 Wenneker operated as armed forces attaché and was expected to co-ordinate his reporting with that of his Army and Air Force colleagues in the Embassy. There was at least one point at which Wenneker and Ott were involved in a measure of shared pathos: this was the time when Wenneker heard of the sinking of the blockade-runner Rhakotis on which Ott’s only son, Podewig, was returning home and was very concerned about his possible loss when it was intercepted in the Atlantic by a British destroyer, but Wenneker also recorded his delight subsequently that he had been rescued, especially as it coincided in time with Ott’s dismissal from office.199

Admiral Wenneker Visit to Yasukuni Shrine in company with Captain Gumprich, 1943 (Irma Wenneker) 199

See POA: 6: 235 & 244–5 indicated that Podewig Ott was rescued with all on board. But at first Wenneker stated in his War Diary that it had been particularly painful for Ott to learn of his son being missing so soon after being relieved of his post. Podewig was called up to serve in the German Army, but was killed during the battle of Stalingrad later that year. The evidence in Wenneker’s War Diary that Podewig Ott was rescued at sea at the beginning of January 1943 underlines the inaccuracy in the account by Matthews (2019): 344 that Ott learned of his death in late 1942 when in Peking. Ott, of course, retired to Peking after leaving his post in Tokyo on 31.1.1943.

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Maeda Minoru

Yokoi Tadao

Maeda Tadashi

Hiraide Hideo

Takada Toshitane

Yokoyama Ichiro-

Ishikawa Shingo-

Kojima Hideo

Japanese Naval Staff Reception for Allied & Friendly States, May 1941 (Irma Wenneker)200 200

Included in this group are the Soviet Naval Attaché and his Assistant and such occasions ended after 22.6.1941.

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Sorge’s Press Correspondent’s Pass (Tharror 2015)

Agnes Smedley

G.S.Lyushkov

G.K. Zhukov

Walter Krivitsky

R. von Schelia

Ozaki Hotsumi

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Max Clausen

Molotov Meeting Hitler on 18.11.1940 (Pravda)

Evdokia Petrova

7

Conclusions – ONE OF THE principal features of the various historical accounts of the Sorge Affair that needs to be more accurately characterised is that of Sorge’s relationship with Meisinger. It is clear that Meisinger was located in Tokyo for only a small part of his service as Police Liaison Officer prior to his recall by Ott from Shanghai following Sorge’s arrest, as Meisinger and his new wife found Shanghai a much more attractive location within East Asia than Tokyo. Meisinger clearly was encouraged by Sorge to indulge in whatever fleshpots were available in Tokyo when he first arrived there in April 1941.201 Meisinger was clearly despatched to Tokyo before the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union and soon after the despatch of Wohlthat from the FourYear Plan Ministry to negotiate a trade agreement with Japan at a time when it was recognised that steps would have to be taken to replace the land route through Russia for vital supplies of rubber for the German war economy. At first, it was hoped that the Japanese could be persuaded to despatch rubber on board Japanese vessels to Europe after the Japanese Naval Mission was delivered by the auxiliary cruiser, Asama Maru, and hopes were entertained of a Japanese assault on Singapore and the Dutch East Indies without the United States being drawn into the conflict. If one examines Schellenberg’s activities at this time, he was busily worming his way into the confidence of Counsellor Kramarz of the Military-Political Department of the German Foreign 201

Meisinger arrived by train in Tokyo after having travelled via the Trans-Siberian Railway, when he made friends with the businessman, Heinrich Loy, who became deputy head of the Nazi Party in Japan. Matthews (2019): claims falsely that Meisinger came to Japan by submarine. There is only Schellenberg’s retrospective claim that he had discussions with Himmler about despatching Meisinger to Japan to keep tabs on Sorge.

103

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Ministry and subsequently suggesting that the liaison officer of the Abwehr, von Bülow, be replaced by someone with closer Party and Gestapo connections. The replacement was a close friend of Ribbentrop, Under-Secretary (Inland) Luther, who broached the suggestion put forward by Schellenberg that Abwehr officers in diplomatic missions abroad responsible for counter-espionage be replaced by police liaison officers. At the end of 1940, Meisinger was transferred from Warsaw for training within Schellenberg’s department, but when he reached East Asia his telegrams and telephone contacts were always with Heinrich Müller, never Schellenberg. As an old colleague in Bavaria of Himmler and Heydrich, Meisinger was invited to escort and marry Himmler’s personal secretary and alleged mistress, Hertha, whom he accompanied to Shanghai, but left her there when recalled to Tokyo in November 1941.202 Meisinger initially tended to be influenced by Ott in taking a sceptical view of the Japanese arrests, but took an uncompromising line with the exchange student Lenz, who was accused of constructing an illegal radio receiver and subsequently of consorting with a number of politically dubious Germans and of meeting with the wife of the assistant Polish military attaché in Tokyo, Stella Kaszprzyk.203 Lenz was arrested and put in the brig of the blockade-runner Osorno with the cooperation of Ott, Consul-General Seelheim and Wenneker’s assistant, Trendtel.204 When interrogated by US CIC agents after the war, 202

203

204

The Gestapo had already despatched the trainee Japanese-language official, Kurt Hamel, at the end of 1940 and in 1939 had arranged with the Finance Ministry the despatch of the Jewish man, Karl Kindermann, and his wife with scarce foreign exchange. Kindermann had been arrested and imprisoned in Moscow in the late 1920s and was deemed a suitable person to spread the anti-Soviet word in Japanese education and cultural circles. In post-war enquiries, Hamel indicated that he often acted as translator for Meisinger in some of his contacts with Japanese officials, but that Meisinger preferred to employ people like Loy on some occasions as Loy was more of a friend than a subordinate. Kindermann had contacts with some rather dubious Japanese middle-men such as Yokoyama Yui and in the 1970s published an account of his meetings with Sorge which came out in summary form in Shôkan (December 1976), the Japan Times 20.-24.11.1976 and Japan Times Weekly, 4.-25.12.1976. Meisinger tried to suggest that Lenz had an affair with Mrs Kasprzyk and this was a point of complaint for her in post-war London, when she objected to this allegation of being Lenz’s ‘mistress’ in the study by Deakin & Storry (1966): 300 POA 4: 721–2. Lenz coincidentally had been employed along with Sorge in the production of an embassy newssheet, Deutsche Dienst, but suspicions against him were allegedly being pursued by the Japanese police. He was eventually interrogated in December 1943 but this proved a dead end.

CONCLUSIONS

105

Meisinger had relatively little to say on the Sorge Affair apart from noting that Sorge had been on the payroll of his predecessor, Franz Huber, as police liaison officer in Japan and this is partially confirmed by Sorge’s Japanese interrogators who reported that Sorge was believed to be connected with the Gestapo. While in China, Meisinger had been given a reprimand on the orders of Ribbentrop for interference in ‘political’ matters over his dealings with the mountebank pseudo-Buddhist Trebitsch-Lincoln and was told to stick to his job as police liaison officer.205 With the outbreak of the Pacific War, Meisinger had made contact with both the civil and the military police in Japan and drew attention to the names of German subjects he regarded as ‘unreliable’, perhaps as a way of obtaining greater cooperation with them and probably offsetting any criticism of his failure to unmask Sorge and Clausen. Meisinger was involved with Wenneker in an attempt to make use of a Gestapo saboteur named Lansing or Grudley to obtain a Portuguese passport in Shanghai so that he could make contact with two German merchant vessels which had taken refuge in Portuguese India at the outbreak of war. This effort, which also involved Colonel Scholl in Bangkok, failed but Huber had been sent as assistant to Scholl after the outbreak of war and it was thanks to Huber that enquiries were made of the Gestapo in Berlin which revealed the involvement of the GPU agent, KarlRaimund Hofmeier, as a photo-correspondent of the Nazi paper, Völkischer Beobachter, the only foreign journalist permitted by the Japanese Army to accompany the forces invading Malaya. Meisinger insisted on having Hofmeier arrested and brought by sea to Japan for interrogation and for his release into German custody so that he could point to his active engagement in hunting down Communist spies. 205

Meisinger’s activities were revealed by Siefken, the head of the Abwehr intelligence post in China, who was wary of the parallel activities of Gerhard Kahner, who had been sent to China on Heydrich’s orders to liaise with the Japanese counter-intelligence agencies in the summer of 1940. There was bad blood between Siefken and Meisinger thereafter and Siefken was expelled on the basis of Meisinger’s allegations about Siefken’s homosexual associates at the end of 1942. This had the concurrence of Wenneker, who mistrusted Siefken’s radio monitoring operations and was warned about alleged contacts with the enemy secret services in Shanghai by the Japanese Navy, especially when Siefken was observed in contact with Commander Otani Inaho visiting Tokyo. Partly at Japanese prompting, Wenneker was always concerned about protecting the security of the blockade-running operations, not least after the US interception of the Odenwald which tried to masquerade as a neutral US vessel in the Atlantic.

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To affirm this zeal, however, he needed the cooperation of Wenneker and Ott to have him transported home for trial and likely execution, something they were only willing to concede ‘in exceptional circumstances’. As Meisinger had been promoted to police attaché and specifically given responsibility for embassy security and for counter-espionage, it was difficult for Wenneker not to go along with Meisinger’s security arrangements, especially given the increasing enemy measures against German and Italian blockade-running from the autumn of 1942. Hofmeier was initially assigned to the blockade-runner Brake, but this had to be recalled from Singapore and he was transferred to the Burgenland at Manila, returned to Yokohama and eventually sent homeward from Yokohama in October 1943 – apparently against the advice and orders of the German Naval War Staff. But having departed for home, it was intercepted off the coast of Brazil in January 1944 and Hofmeier shot through prior arrangements by Meisinger with the Nazi consular officer, Gerhard Ender, on the deck of the sinking vessel. This was the most extreme measure pushed through by Meisinger, but almost certainly mediated through Meisinger’s cooperation with the kempeitai, the Japanese military police organisation reckoned to be much more brutal than the equivalent civilian police organisation, the Tokko-, which had handled the cases against the Sorge Ring, - or even the Gestapo itself. Meisinger’s methods became increasingly geared to close collaboration with the Japanese military police and this was particularly well illustrated in the cases of German journalists, Ivar Lissner and Werner Crome, who were arrested and tortured in 1943 into making confessions that they had collected intelligence about Japan for the Abwehr, but had also acted as double agents by trading information with Russian officials and secret agents. Faced with statements that they had admitted to spying against Japan, however, it was just as impossible for Wenneker or Kretschmer to intervene on their behalf as it had been in the cases of Sorge and Clausen and the supporting statements submitted by the German Minister in Manchukuo, Wilhelm Wagner, and by Admiral Canaris himself were ineffective in fending off the allegations submitted by Meisinger, which reached the ears of Hitler himself and Hitler had retorted that such people ‘should immediately be shot’.206 These methods 206

See AA: Pol IM: ‘Abwehr – Rußland/Lissner,’ 2 Bde., (1940–1944).

CONCLUSIONS

107

became prevalent following the German defeat and Meisinger himself confessed that ever since Stalingrad he anticipated the worst and feared being handed over to Soviet justice – to the point of trying to commit suicide.207 When junior members of the Tokyo Embassy urged Wenneker to appeal to Grand-Admiral Dönitz as Hitler’s successor to confront Meisinger and conspired to expel Ambassador Stahmer from internment in 1945, Wenneker urged caution in the light of the pact of collaboration by Meisinger and Kahner with the kempeitai and the likelihood of a desperate response. Both Meisinger and Wenneker continued to dispose of substantial funds in Tokyo and at the Deutsche-Asiatische Bank in Shanghai to sustain their positions for some time and Wenneker saw little merit in demonstrating even more antagonism toward Nazis than had been apparent at least since 1935. In conversation with Commander Ross during the visit of a German training cruiser to Japanese ports, Wenneker had belittled the fashion among German residents to engage in the ‘German greeting’, the new Nazi salute, and reiterated this again in 1942 to visiting Lieutenant Lüddecke during his brief attachment to the staff of the naval attaché. Both Ott and Wenneker tried to maintain the traditional apolitical stance of the German armed forces and were regarded with some distaste by the radically stimulated younger generation of diplomats such as Karl-Otto Braun.208 In 1942, cases of fraudulent appropriation of state funds in connection with the maintenance of the merchant shipping in Japan were laid at the door of such businessmen as Heinrich Hillmann, the head of Illies & Co., the largest German trading firm in East Asia, and Meisinger was brought in by Wenneker to conduct the investigation of these. These resulted in Meisinger finding Hillmann guilty and forcing his resignation as Nazi Party Leader in Japan. Meisinger persuaded Ambassador Stahmer to accept him as interim Nazi Party head and tried to force Wenneker to ship Hillmann home for trial. With central support from the Navy in Berlin, such requests were opposed by Wenneker, but Illies and other firms involved were forced to repay commissions they had illegally obtained from Japanese firms for the maintenance and repair of 207 208

NAW: RG 319: Meisinger Dossier. Braun, a convinced Nazi who served in Japan in the late 1930s, regarded Ott’s appointment as ambassador as one of Hitler’s more unwise appointments and recalled in the 1980s how he was regarded as a Gestapo plant by Ott.

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German shipping. At the end of 1942, three German ships were destroyed in Yokohama harbour and Wenneker experienced considerable difficulty in fending off claims by Meisinger that this had been the work of unknown saboteurs rather than caused by the Chinese crewmen employed to clean out holds containing gasoline residues ignited by sparks from metal scrapers.209 In the course of 1943, a new head of the Nazi Party in Japan was appointed to take over from Meisinger. This was Franz-Josef Spahn who was transported to East Asia in U-511 and turned out to be even more fanatical ideologically than even Meisinger contemplated and Meisinger claimed that he had given advice to Spahn that such attitudes would not be understood in a Japanese context.210 Nevertheless, in 1944 Spahn began to make the argument that Wenneker should show his commitment to the Fatherland by openly espousing the Nazi ethic. This was rejected by Wenneker at length and complaints were made to the Navy in Berlin about such outrageous demands. Although General Kretschmer sought to mediate between the two men, neither side was prepared to compromise and matters were patched up by means of an agreement to postpone a Party hearing until the end of the war.Wenneker was well aware from his dealings with Meisinger that since returning to Japan Meisinger had compiled a very detailed card index of the names of German residents in Japan and these contained notes about their political reliability, both positive and negative, and clearly recognised the potential problems which Meisinger could generate within the large numbers of crewmen under his control, especially as Ambassador Stahmer was in no position to restrain him directly. If Meisinger had to wait until the battle of Stalingrad to realise the inevitable, Wenneker had already made clear in his annual report on developments in the Pacific in 1942 that Japan faced an uphill battle to survive. His comments provoked an outburst of indignation from General Jodl, who stated that he could not submit such a pessimistic report to Hitler and urged a more 209

210

46 out of 51 Chinese workers were killed and there was apparently a mix-up in translating the meaning of gas-oil and gasoline which had been applied to the fuel supplied to one of the vessels, the Leuthen (ex-Nankin) prize, in port at Java. The fire had spread to the warship Thor and caused torpedoes on board to explode and blow the ship apart. See POA 6: 260. There is a lengthy interview of Spahn by CIC officers at Karuizawa on 16.9.1945 available on You Tube obtained from a video collection acquired by Getty Images, but it has – unsurprisingly- attracted fewer than 4,000 hits.

CONCLUSIONS

109

upbeat analysis. ‘It creates the impression that Japan no longer has any value for us as an ally and is to be written off, while it really is one of the important factors for a successful continuance of the war for us.’ Wenneker noted in the War Diary that he intended to respond to this but wanted first to have further talks with his confidants, including the chief of naval staff, and concluded: It is not entirely understandable why straight talk is not desired. In fact the Japanese potential is limited and it is better to see this in its entirety than to be deceived later.211

It is clear that the strategy of the Japanese Navy remained in direct contradiction with Hitler’s war of annihilation in the East and expectations of any preparedness for acceptance of Japanese mediation remained in vain. The likelihood of a continuing strategic impasse made further remonstrations futile and could only end in the ruin of any future career. Meisinger’s presence and methods ensured that Wenneker was as powerless as his service remained peripheral to the German conduct of global war. The dismissal of Ott effectively spelled the end of any hope there might remain for Hitler’s initial scenario of any unity of strategic purpose with the Japanese Army and this was borne out in Hitler’s personal discussion with General Okamoto on 31 May 1943. The fact that representatives of the Japanese Navy in Berlin complained that Hitler failed to understand that Japan was an island empire, could not share in the implementation of a continental strategy and that he was unable to comprehend the Navy’s vital, central role in the Japanese conduct of war cut no ice. Wenneker and Sorge between them identified the central strategic stresses within Japanese policy making by pooling perspectives derived from the course of the February Incident in 1936 and witnessed its fruition in April 1941. Hitler learned nothing from Wenneker’s reporting and although Stalin is credited with having been influenced by Sorge’s reporting, the truth is that Stalin relied principally on the wider opportunities thrown up by developments in the international situation in 1939 and 1941 and disposed of Soviet forces between Europe and the Far East largely 211

POA 6: 206. There is no evidence of any further remonstration with Jodl and it was many months later before this entry was read by the Naval War Staff or relayed to Jodl.

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on the basis of the climatic circumstances arising in the course of these years. It was on Wenneker’s insights into Japanese Navy strategy on which Sorge relied most on the German side, but Wenneker did not dare to draw attention to his intimate interaction with Sorge either during World War II nor in the Cold War situation after 1945 as he would have been hung out to dry in the same way as Eugen Ott. As for Sorge himself, claims about his information being directly responsible for the shift of Soviet armed forces to the western front are not so easy to verify. Some forces were moved from Central Asia in the winter of 1941 which were of value in the mounting of the winter offensive by Marshal Timoshenko. Numerous units shattered in the summer of 1942 were regrouped in the Far East, but it was not until the winter of 1942 that substantial numbers of troops, aircraft and tanks began to be safely transferred westwards and were deployed in the critical Stalingrad campaign. To a great extent, however, Sorge was able with Wenneker’s insights to provide credible evidence of the Japanese need to channel the bulk of their forces into the onslaught on South-East Asia, which was seen by both Roosevelt and Churchill as an irrational choice in the context of Hitler’s commitment to the conflict in the East.

Prime Minister To-jo-, accompanied by Rear-Admiral Oka, making gift of quinine to Admiral Wenneker, accompanied by Major-General Kretschmer and Assistant Air Attaché Nehmiz (Irma Wenneker)

CONCLUSIONS

Admirals Yamamoto Isoroku

Nagano Osami

Ito- Seiichi

Shimada Shigetaro-

Mitsunobu To-yo-

111

Kondo- Nobutake

Nomura Naokuni

(Wikipedia)

(Wikipedia)

Field-Marshal Keitel

Admiral Canaris

(Wikipedia)

Grand-Admiral Raeder

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Vice-Admiral Fricke

Grand-Admiral Dönitz

(Bundesarchiv/Wikipedia)

Select Bibliography – Braun, Karl-Otto: ‘Reflections on German and American Foreign Policy, 1933–1945’ Journal of Historical Studies 6/1: 41–66. Chapman, J.W.M. (1982–2019) The Price of Admiralty – The War Diary of the German Naval Attaché in Japan, 1939–43, Vols.1–7. Saltire House Publications Chapman, J.W.M. (1991) ‘Rikhard Sorge i Voina na Tikhom Okeane,’ Problemi Dalnego Vostoka 6: 122–135 Chapman, J.W.M. (1986): ‘Japan in German Aviation Policies of the Weimar Period,’ in: Kreiner, ed. (1986): 155–173 Chapman, J.W.M. (2011) Ultranationalism in German-Japanese Relations, 1930–45 – From Wenneker to Sasakawa. Folkestone, Global Oriental Daihonei Kaigunbu (1979): Dai-Tô-A SensôKaisen Keii. Sensô Sôsho, Vol.101. Tokyo, Asagumo Shinbun-sha. Deakin, W.F. & Storry, G.R. (1966): The Case of Richard Sorge. London, Chatto & Windus Gorodetsky, G. (2005) The Maisky Diaries. New Haven,Yale UP. Hsia, A.T. (1962) Enigma of the Five Martyrs. Berkeley, UCal Center for Chinese Studies Istoria Velikoi Otchestvennoi Voini Sovetskogo Soyuz (1960): Moscow, Voennoe Izdatelstvo Jochem, Clemens (2017): Der Fall Försters. Berlin, Hentrich & Hentrich Johnson, Chalmers (1990) Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring. Stanford UP Kolesnikov, M. (1965) Takim Byl Richard Sorge. Moscow, Voennoe Izdatelstvo Ministerstva Oborony SSSR. Josef Kreiner, ed.: Japan und die Mittelmächte. Bonn, Bouvier Verlag. J. Kreiner & R.Mathias-Pauer eds. (1990): Deutschland-Japan in der Zwischenkriegszeit. Bonn, Bouvier Verlag Krug, Hans-Joachim, Hirama Yoichi, Sander-Nagashima, B.J. & Niestlé, Axel (2001): Reluctant Allies. Annapolis, Naval Institute Press Mader, Julius (1985): Dr.Sorge-Report. Berlin (East), Militärverlag der DDR. Martin, Bernd (1969): Deutschland und Japan im 2.Weltkrieg. Göttingen, Musterschmidt Verlag Matthews, Owen (2019): An Impeccable Spy – Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent. London, Bloomsbury Mehnert, Klaus (1983): Ein Deutscher in der Welt. Stuttgart, Fischer. Miyauchi Kanji (1975): Niitakayama no bore 1208. Tokyo, Rokkoshi Shuppan.

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Samejima Tsunao (1981). Motogunreibun tsûshin kachô no kaiso – Nihon kaigun tsûshin, dempa kankei non seki. Tokyo, Shinkôsha Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, D. (1998) ‘Tsarist Codebreaking – Some Background and Examples,’ Cryptologia 22/4 (October 1998): 342–353 Sommer, Theo (1962) Deutschland und Japan zwischen den Mächten. Tübingen, J.C. Mohr Verlag Tharror, Ishaan (2015): ‘The Fascinating Story of the Alcoholic, Womanizing German Double Agent Who Turned the Tide of World War II,’ Washington Post, 20 May US Congress/H.R. (1951): Un-American Activities Committee, Hearings on the Richard Sorge Spy Case. Washington DC, USGPO US State Department (1943): Peace and War- US Foreign Policy, 1931– 1941. Washington DC, USGPO Wasserstein, B. (1989): The Secret Lives of Trebitsch-Lincoln. Penguin. Willoughby, Charles A. (1952) Sorge – Soviet Master Spy. London, Kimber

Source Materials – GERMANY Auswärtiges Amt (AA) Büro RM: ‘Militärwesen,’ Bd.1, (1920–29) BRAM: ‘Dr.Richard Sorge,’ (1941–42) --------: Loesch Handakten: ‘Japan-Geheime Reichssachen ’ --------: ‘Deutscher Waffen-Attaché Tokio,’ (1942) St.S.: ‘Akten betreffend Japan’ (1938–1943), Bde.1–13 ----- ‘Akten betreffend Rußland,’ (1939–1943), Bde.3, 6–7, 10 U.St.S.: Po.5 Japan: ‘Militärputsch in Japan,’ (Februar 1936) Botschafter Ritter: ‘Japan,’ 3 Bde. (1941–43) Inland II: Akte 109/3: ‘SD-Berichte betr. Irland und Japan,’ (1940–43) -----------: D II gRs: ‘SD-Leute in Shanghai,’ (1940–43) ----------: Akte 101/4: ‘Dr.Ivar Lissner,’ (1942–44) ----------: Akte 499: Akten betreffend Namen ----------: Akte 413: ‘Verschidene Meldungen betr. Ostasien,’ (1941–44) ----------: Akte 89–83–68: Ostasien – Deutsche Agenten,’ (1941–42) ----------: -----------------: ‘Ostasien – Auskünfte, Agenten und Spionage – Einzelfälle,’ (1943–45) ----------: Akte 90–83–60E: ‘Ostasien – SD Leute in Thailand,’ (1942) Ref.D: g.Rs: ‘Deutsch-Japanisches Abkommen/Ital.-Japanisches Abkommen,’ (1936–39) II-FM: ‘Militär-Attaché Moskau,’ (1933–1936), 5 Bde. IV OA: Po.3: ‘Politische Beziehungen Japans zu Rußland,’ (1920–1936), 12 Bde. -------: ‘Mandschurei – Anerkennungsfrage,’ (1933–36) --------: Po.13: ‘Militärische Angelegenheiten Japans,’ Bd.3, (1932–35) IV Rußland: Akte Po.19: ‘Bolschewismus, Kommunismus in Japan.’ (1927– 1936) Pol I g: ‘Krieg zwischen Deutschland usw.- Ostasien,’ (1940–41) -------: ‘Politische Angelegenheiten Ostasiens,’ (1936–38) Pol I M: Akte Mil.Po.15 Nachrichten: ‘Agenten und Spionagewesen,’ Bd.18 (1940–1) -------- ‘Abwehr – Japan,’ (1941–43) ______ ‘Abwehr/Mil.Pol.: ‘Einbau von Angehörigen der Abwehr in Aussenstellen des Auswärtigen Amtes,’Bd.1, (1940–42)

115

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Pol I M: ‘Abwehr – Ostasien,’ (1941–1944) -------- ‘Abwehr – Einbau des Kptlt. Siefken als KO-Leiter China,’ (1940–44) -------- ‘Abwehr Rußland – Lissner,’ 2 Bde.,(1942–44) -------- ‘Japan – Ostasien,’ (1940–44) -------- ‘Denkschrift d. Brit.Kabinett über Lage im Fernost,’ (1941) Pol.V/VIII: Po.19: ‘Sozialismus, Bolschewismus, Kommunismus, usw.in China,’ (1936–39) -------: Po.19D: ‘Inhaftierung von Kommunisten und Bolschewisten,’ Bd.1, (1936–1938) Pol VIIIg: ‘Krieg zwischen Deutschland, England, Frankreich und Polen – Ostasien,’ (1939–41) ----------: ‘Mandschukuo-Rußland,’ (1937–1939) G.A.: Po.19: ‘Bolschewismus in Japan,’ (1927–1936) D.R.: ‘SS-Angelegenheiten,’ (1939) Handakten Köpke, 1925–1935 Reichswehrministerium (RWM) Abwehrabteilung: Abw.II Chi: ‘Entzifferungsberichte,’ (1925–33) Luftamt: Akte Lu 1.III geh.: ‘Luftfahrtindustrie, Luftverkehr, Forschung, Bauaufsichten, 1931,’ Bd.3. (1931–32) Reichkriegsministerium (RKM) ML: M-IV: Heft 3–4: ‘Attaché- und Auslandsangelegenheiten,’ (1937–38) ML: M Att: ‘Attaché-Berichte Tokio, 1936’ Abw.Abt.II: ‘Chi-Berichte,’ (1926–1934) Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH) Genst.d.H.: Attaché-Abteilung: KTB, Chefsachen, Bde. 1–4, (1943–44) ------------: FHW: ‘Chefsachen,’ (1939–45) ------------: FHW: Akte 28: ‘Militärattaché Tokio,’ (1943–45) ------------: FHW: Akte 17a: ‘Zusammenarbeit Deutschland-Japan im Rahmen- des Dreimächtepakts,’ (1941–43) -------------: FHO: ‘Lage Fernost,’ (1942–44) -------------: FHO: ‘Die Rote Armee,’ (1943) Oberkommando der Luftwaffe (OKL) Genst.d.Lw./8.Abt.:’ ‘Matsuoka-Besuch,’ (1941) Oberkommando der Marine (OKM) Marineleitung: AIII-1–11: ‘Etappenwesen,’ (1927–1941), 11 Bde. ------------------: AIIIa-l: ‘Verschiedenes,’ Bd.1, (1933–34) M-IV: ‘Attaché- und Auslandsangelegenheiten’ Bde.1–4 Ob.d.M.: Persönlich: Großadmiral Raeder: 1939–1943 1.Skl.: KTB, Ca: ‘Grundlegende Fragen der Kriegführung,’ (1939–1943)

SOURCE MATERIALS

117

------: KTB, C, XV: ‘Zusammenarbeit mit Japan,’ (1941–44) ____: Akte X, 5: ‘Meldungen und Berichte aus Tokio,’ (1941–43) ------: Akte X, I: ‘Zusammenarbeit Deutschland-Japan,’ (1941–43) ------: Teil B VI: ‘Nachrichtendienst B-Dienst,’ (1942–43) 3.Abt.Skl.: ‘Rußland – Spannung,’ (1938) 3.Skl.B: ‘X-B-Meldungen und X-B-Lageberichte,’ (1941) 4.Skl.: ‘Op.-Geheimhaltung,’ (1941–1944) Abt.Funkaufklärung: ‘X-B-Lageberichte,’ (1942) M Att: ‘Japan – Mobilmachung,’ 5 Bde., (1939–42) ____: ‘Attaché-Berichte Tokio, 1936’ _____: ‘Attaché-Berichte Tokio, 1937’ ------: ‘Rußland – Ferner Osten,’ (1937–1939) ------: ‘Kurierpost,’ (1943–1945) ------: ‘KTB des M Att und Militärischen Leiters der Grossetappe Japan-China,’ (1939–1943) ____: ‘Italien – Land,’ Bd.2, (1941–42) Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) WFSt: VO Ausland/Ic: ‘Fernost: Indien, Japan, China,’ (1943–44) -------: VO Ausland/Ic: ‘Rußland,’ (1943–44) _____: Akte tV, 5: ‘”Barbarossa” Weisungen des OKW und Zeittafel,’ Bd.1, (1940–41) Abt.Ausland: Akte Stein: ‘Geheime Kommandosachen, Japan und Sonstiges,’ (1935–1938) Ausl.VId: ‘Akte Sonderstab HWK,’ (1940–42) -----------: ‘Dreimächtepakt,’ (1942) Wi-Rü-Amt: Wi Ausl.: Akte 3 i 39:‘ Sakai/Jap.Marine,’ (1942–3) US National Archives & Records Service RG 331: Records of the US Army Staff: IRR Files: Clausen, Kodama, Meisinger, Ott, Sasagawa RG 457: Records of the NSA RG 59: Records of the State Department JAPAN Bôei-chô: Senshi-shitsu: ‘Yamashita Shisatsudan Hôkoku,’ Gunji Gyôsei Sonota 87 ------------------------------: ‘Kaigun Daijin Kambô Nisshi,’ (1941–45) Gaikô Shiryôkan, Tokyo: Files 5.1.4.23–1 & 2 & 5.2.2.20–3 UK National Archives, Kew ADM 116, FO 371, CAB 81, KV2

Index of Persons – ALLWÖRDEN, Heinrich von: master of blockade-runner Rio Grande, sunk off the coast of Brazil, January 1944; prosecuted for alleged war crimes at Hamburg, 1964/65. 33, 44 ARAKI Sadao (1877–1966), General, Minister of War, 1931–34: 59, 77 ARISUE, Seizô (1895–1992) Lieut.General IJA; military attaché in Rome, 1938–1940; chief of intelligence, Japanese General Staff, 1943–1945. 42 BALSAMO, Carlo: Italian admiral, naval attaché in Japan, 1941–42. 40 BANZAI Ichiro (1892–1946): IJA Lieut.General; military attaché in Berlin, 1932–34 & 1940–42. 49, 59 BANZHAF: Officer in German Navy Propaganda Department. 30 BASSLER, Hilmar: Secretary of Legation, Press Department, German Foreign Ministry. 8, 14, 22 BAUER, Max (1869–1929): Colonel, head of German military advisers in China, 1927–29. 49 BAUMBACH, Norbert von: Captain, German naval attaché in Moscow, 1933–1941. 60, 61, 79–80 BERGMANN: deputy head of Protocol Department in the German Foreign Ministry. 21 BEST, Werner (1903–89): head of counter-intelligence in Gestapo, 1934–40. 25, 42–3 BETZ, Eugen: German Vice-Consul in charge of legal matters at Shanghai, 1941. 13 BITTER, Bruno: Jesuit priest, Jôchi Daigaku, Tokyo; boyhood friend of Admiral Wenneker, helped destroy archive in the basement of the German embassy in Tokyo, May 1945. 31 BIVALL: Swedish sailor captured on Norwegian ship and imprisoned by IJA at Singapore by request of Wenneker, 1942. 43 BLOMBERG, Werner von (1878–1943), Field-Marshal; German minister of defence/war, 1932–38; resigned following denunciation of his wife by Meisinger. 50, 51, 52, 56 BOLTZE, Erich: Minister in the German embassy in Japan, 1943–45. BOHLE, Ernst W. (1903–60): Gauleiter and State-Secretary in the German Foreign Ministry dealing with Nazi Party matters, 1937–45. 24 BOSE, Subhas Chandra (1897–1945): Indian nationalist leader, escaped to Germany in 1940; transported by U-boat to East Asia, 1943

119

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BRAUN, Karl-Otto (1910–88): employee of the Nazi Party Foreign Policy under Alfred Rosenberg; student of Japanese, attaché and SS-Untersturmbannführer in Tokyo and Osaka; head of the East Asian department in the German Foreign Ministry, 1941–1945 – 5, 8, 12, 13, 22, 23, 56, 72, 76, 107 BRAUNSTUMM: member of Press Department, German Foreign Ministry. 18 BREDOW, Ferdinand von (1884–1934): General, head of Abwehr, 1929– 32; head of ministerial secretariat, Ministry of Defence, 1932–33; assassinated, 1934. 48 BÜLOW, Adolf von: liaison between Foreign Ministry and Abwehr, 1932–41. 104 BURKNER, Leopold von (1894–1975), Vice-Admiral; head of the Foreign Section in OKW, 1939–1945. 21, 65, 67, 87, 90 BUSCH, Major: head of aviation group in the German military intelligence service (Abwehr I Luft), 1940–1944. 18, 21, 24 CADOGAN, Alexander (1884–1968): UK Ambassador in China, 1933– 35; permanent under-secretary, Foreign Office, 1938–1946. 56 CANARIS, Wilhelm (1888–1945), Admiral: visited Japan in 1924/25; head of German secret service, 1935–1944. 16, 43, 52, 67, 76, 80, 90, 98, 106, 111 CHIANG KAI-SHEK (1887–1975): Chinese generalissimo, 1927–1975. 50, 54, 78 CHURCHILL,Winston S. (1874–1965): UK prime minister, 1940–45. 110 CLAUSEN, Max (1899–1979): radio operator for GRU espionage groups in China and Japan, 1935–1941; proprietor of a business producing technical blueprints; jailed by Japanese courts, 1941–1945. 8, 9 10, 13, 17, 24, 28, 29, 33, 56, 61, 68, 69, 72, 74, 75, 81, 92, 94–6, 102, 106 COX, Melville: Reuters correspondent in Japan, tortured by kempeitai and driven to suicide, June 1940. 8 CROME, Werner: German journalist expelled from the UK in 1937; and in Japan, 1939–43; arrested and tortured by kempeitai following denunciation by Meisinger. 32–3, 43, 49–50, 54, 61, 75, 81, 106 DIRKSEN, Herbert von (1882–1955): German ambassador in Moscow, Tokyo and London, 1932–1939. 13, 21, 22, 26, 30, 50, 51, 52, 53–4, 55, 56, 57, 60, 72, 74, 78, 98 DIRKSEN, Hilda von: wife of above, 52 DÖNITZ, Karl (1891–1980), head of German submarine service and Grand-Admiral; nominated by Hitler as his successor, 1945. 41, 43, 69, 76, 80, 94, 107, 111 DOOMAN, Eugene (1890–1969): counsellor of US embassy in Tokyo, 1941. 12 EDEN, Anthony (1897–1977): UK Foreign Secretary, 1935–37 & 1941– 45; Prime Minister, 1953–1956. 55

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EISENTRÄGER, Lothar (1896–1963), Lieut.Colonel: sent to China by Abwehr I Wi in 1941, was appointed head of War Organisation in China, 1942–45; prosecuted by the US Army for continuing to co-operate with the Japanese after German surrender in May 1945. 32–33 ENDER, Gerhard (1910–1956): Nazi Party member since 1923, later employed as a consular official in the Balkans and in Japan; fired as head of the cipher office in the German embassy in Tokyo, then given responsibility by Meisinger for executing Soviet spy Hofmeier on board blockade-runner Burgenland in January 1944. 44, 75, 106 ERDMANNSDORFF, Otto von (1888–1978): counsellor of embassy in Tokyo, 1929–33; Minister and deputy director of the Political Department in the German Foreign Ministry, 1941–42. 12, 13, 22, 36 ETZDORF, Hasso von (1900–1989): member of German embassy in Japan, 1931–34; acted as sponsor for Sorge to the Frankfurter Zeitung; Foreign Ministry liaison with OKH, 1940–43. 13, 88 FALKENHAUSEN, Alexander von (1878–1966): General, chief military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek; military governor of Belgium, 1940–44. 51, 60, 78 FELMY, Hellmuth (1885–1965): Air Force General; specialist aviation officer in German Defence Ministry, subsequently head of special force sent to Iraq (Sonderstab F). 48 FISCHER, Joschka: German Foreign Minister (b.1948) and ViceChancellor, 1998–2005. 36 FISCHER, Martin: German Consul-General in Shanghai, 1941–45. 15, 21, 32 FÖRSTER, Willi (1905–66): German aeronautical technician in the Soviet Union and Japan; client of Max Clausen and arrested on suspicion of being a Soviet sympathiser by the Japanese police in 1943 following denunciation by Meisinger; with his Japanese wife, owner of properties in the Chigaseki area used by Admiral Wenneker to obtain beef for ships’ crews and provide accommodation for crewmen of three ships blown up at Yokohama on 30.11.1942. Freed but lost all his enterprises and denied compensation by Japan and USA after 1945. 33 FRICKE, Kurt (1889–1945),Vice-Admiral: chief of staff, German Naval War Staff, 1941–1943. 31, 38, 70, 80, 96, 111 FRITSCH,Werner von (1880–1939), Colonel-General: head of German Army Command, 1935–1938; wrongly accused by Meisinger of homosexuality, but forced to resign. FROMM, Friedrich (1888–1945): Colonel, replacement for Ott in Wehrmachtsabteilung, 1933. 49, 50 FUJII, Shigeru, Commander: Japanese Navy officer attached to Matsuoka mission to Germany and the USSR in 1941. Member of Dai-Ichi Iinkai. 66, 88

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FÜTTERER, Emil Oskar: German businessman initially employed by a subsidiary of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank in Manchuria; Nazi Party official, informant of military attachés and contact of Abwehr I Heer. 21 GAUS, Friedrich Wilhelm: Under-Secretary, German Foreign Ministry, head of Legal Department. 21 GOERING, Hermann (1983–1946): Reichsmarschall, C-in-C, German Air Force and head of Four-Year Plan. 62, 76, 82–3 GREW, Joseph (1880–1965): US ambassador in Tokyo, 1932–41. 12 GRONAU, Wolfgang von (1893–1977): Air Force Major-General: Air Attaché in Japan, 1939–45. 31, 33, 35 GROTE, Otto H.M. (b.1909): agriculture specialist in Ribbentrop secretariat; deputy head, Section on Military-Political Affairs in German Foreign Ministry, 1941–44. 18, 21, 22 GUMPRICH, Günther (1900–43): German Navy captain, commanding officer of auxiliary cruisers Thor and Michel, 1942–3. 99 HABENICHT, Fräulein: secretary of Captain Vermehren. 44 HACK, Friedrich: German arms broker; officer of German-Japanese Society, contact of Abwehr IIIf; accused of being homosexual, moved to Switzerland and middleman for IJN. 41–2 HALDER, Franz (1884–1972), colonel-general, chief of Army General Staff, 1938–42. 9, HAMEL, Karl: Japanese interpreter employed by Gestapo, 1940–45 and used by Meisinger at meetings with Japanese police officers. 14, 104 HAMMERSTEIN, Kurt von (1878–1943): General, C-in-C, German Army, 1930–34. 49 HARTMANN: Colonel, German military attaché in Moscow, 1932– 34. 50 HELLMANN: Master of blockade-runners Havelland and Osorno, 1941– 44. 29 HEWEL,Walther (1904–45): Ribbentrop liaison at Hitler’s headquarters. 25, 35 HEYDRICH, Reinhard (1904–42): director of the Gestapo, 1934–39. 25, 52, 105 HILLMANN, Heinrich: managing director, Illies & Co.; head of Nazi Party in Japan, 1933–1943. 14, 24, 42, 76, 107 HIMMLER, Heinrich (1900–45): Chief of German Police and Reichsführer-SS, 1933–45. 9, 15, 34, 41, 52, 71, 97–8, 104 HINDENBURG, Paul von (1847–1934): Field-Marshal, President of Germany, 1928–34. 48 HIRAIDE Hideo (Captain IJN): naval attaché in Italy, 1939–40; Navy press spokesman, 1941–42: 56, 100 HIROTA Koki (1878–1948): Japanese ambassador in Moscow, 1930–33; Foreign Minister, 1933–36; prime minister, 1936–37. 52

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HITLER, Adolf (1889–1945) 12, 16, 20, 22, 24, 30, 34, 35, 39, 43, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 64, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 80, 81, 82, 83–4, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98, 102, 106, 108–10 HOFMEIER, Karl-Raimund (d.1944): Austrian photo-journalist for Völkischer Beobachter in China and Malaya, 1940–42; revealed as former GPU agent, 1942; arrested and held in Japan and repatriation by blockade-runner on orders of Meisinger, 1942–44; executed on board Burgenland by Gerhard Ender. 28, 32–34, 42–45, 98, 105–6 HOLSTEIN, C.: German shipping management agent in Japan, 1941– 42. 42 HUBER, Franz: SS-Sturmbannführer; police liaison officer in Japan, 1938– 41; seconded to Bangkok, 1942; police attaché at Shanghai, 1943–45. 23, 28, 32, 34, 42, 105 INUKAI Takeru (1896–1960): son of assassinated premier Inukai, arrested by Japanese police in connection with the prosecutions of Ozaki and Sorge. 2 ISHIKAWA Shingô: IJN Rear-Admiral. Head of 2nd Section in the Naval Affairs Bureau, dealing with mobilisation matters before 1940, then liaison with IJA, Home and Foreign ministries. 73, 100 ITÔ Seiichi: IJN Admiral.Vice-Chief of Naval Staff, 1941–44. 80, 111 IWAGURÔ Takeo: IJA Colonel: ADC to Japanese Mission to USA, 1941; officer commanding 5th Guards Regiment in Malaya, 1942; head of tokumu kikan in Bangkok, 1942–43. 28 JOCHHEIM, Charlie SCHMIDT-: holder of German and US passports, imprisoned for theft in Hong Kong; employed as contact of German naval attachés in Japan, 1939–41; discharged but taken over by Meisinger and allegedly murdered Zipkow in China. 15 JODL, Alfred (1890–1946): Colonel-General, head of OKW/WFSt. 31, 35, 39, 63, 77, 84, 97, 108–9 KAHNER, Gerhard: Gestapo liaison officer in Shanghai, 1940–43; transferred to Kobe, 1943–45. 15, 32, 42, 75, 105, 107 KASE Shunichi (1892–1956): Counsellor of Japanese Embassy in Berlin, 1940–42; in Rome, 1942–43; Minister in Switzerland, 1943–45. 24 KASPRZYK, Stella: wife of the Polish assistant military attaché in Tokyo. 1941. 104 KATÔ: alleged IJN agent arrested by kempetai, 1942. 33 KAWABE Torashirô (1890–1960): IJA Colonel, military attaché in Berlin, 1929–32. 48 KAWAI Teikichi (b.1901): agent of Sorge rings in China and Japan, 1930–41. 7, 13 KEITEL, Wilhelm (1882–1946): Field-Marshal, head of OKW, 1938–45. 30, 31, 34, 35, 52, 58, 66, 70, 77, 80, 90, 96, 111 KINDERMANN, Karl: German Jew imprisoned in Soviet Union in the 1920s, paid foreign exchange by Gestapo to move to Japan in 1939. 104

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KNORR, Wolfram von: German naval attaché in Japan, 1914; member of Sonderstab Wilberg, an Air Force unit employed to analyse the results of the use of the Condor Legion in Spain, 1937–38. 77 KODAMA Yoshio (1911–84): Japanese ultranationalist, switched from support of IJA to IJN in 1939. 61, 81 KOJIMA Hideo (1896–1982): IJN Rear-Admiral, naval attaché in Berlin, 1936–39 & 1943–45. 53, 56, 58, 60, 68, 73, 77–8, 100 KOLB, Erich: head of East Asian Section in Foreign Ministry. 22 KONDÔ Nobutake (1880–1953): IJN Admiral; vice-chief of naval staff, 1940–41; officer commanding 2nd Fleet. 63, 66, 70, 80, 84, 86, 88, 97, 111 KONOE Fumimarô (1891–1945): Japanese prime minister, 1937–39 & 1940–1. 8, 20, 60, 63, 67, 68, 79, 84, 91, 92 KORDT, Erich (1903–1969): counsellor of legation, German embassy in London, 1936–38; head of Ribbentrop’s ministerial secretariat, 1938–41; minister in Tokyo, 1941–43; minister in Nanking, 1943–45. 9, 20, 24, 25, 36 KRAG, Ingeborg: personal secretary to Lietzmann and Wenneker in Japan. 31, 51 KRAMARZ, Hans: Counsellor, head of Political-Military Group in the German Foreign Ministry, 1941. 74, 90, 103 KRAPF, Franz (1911–2004): secretary of legation in Tokyo Embassy; ambassador in Tokyo, 1966–71: 36 KRETSCHMER, Alfred (1894–1967): Lieut.General; Intelligence Division of German General Staff, 1927–29; instructor and quartermaster, 1935–40; Military Attaché in Japan, 1941–45. 25, 31, 75–6, 80, 83, 88, 95, 106, 108, 110 KRISTEK: Czech radio operator employed by Siefken, but suspected of espionage, 1941. 15 KRIVITSKY, Walter (1899–1941): agent of the GRU in Amsterdam, defected to France, UK and USA. 52, 74, 102 KÜHLBORN: Consul-General and chargé in Hsinking, 1942. 18, 22 LENZ, Klaus: German exchange student working alongside Sorge on embassy newsletter, but accused of consorting with the enemy and forcibly shipped home by blockade-runner, December 1941. 13, 29, 33, 74, 104 LIETZMANN, Joachim (1894–1959), vice-admiral; head of section M I in Naval Command Office, 1929–32; naval attaché in France and Spain, 1933–37 and in Japan, 1937–40; service in the Adriatic and moved to South America after 1945 for fear of war crimes prosecution. 9, 15, 36, 43, 58, 60, 61–2, 69, 77, 79, 93 LISSNER, Ivar (1908–66): East Asian correspondent of the Völkischer Beobachter, 1938–40; discharged when family accused of covering up Jewish ancestry; moved to Manchukuo as correspondent of Angriff and other magazines, but employed as an agent of Abwehr I Luft until

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arrested and tortured by the kempeitai at the instigation of Meisinger, 1943. 9, 18, 20, 21, 24, 28, 32–4, 43, 49, 71, 75, 96, 97, 98, 106 LÖWISCH, Werner (1894–1971): Navy Captain, German naval attaché in Rome, 1939–43. 67, 91 LOY, Heinrich Loy: deputy head of Nazi Party in Japan. 29, 103–4 LÜDDECKE, Werner Jörg (1912–1986): German journalist and writer, served as Navy propaganda officer in Japan, 1942. 29–30, 37, 76, 107 LÜDDE-NEURATH, Kurt (1911–1984): junior official in the German Embassy in Tokyo. 36 LUTHER, Martin: Under-Secretary for Internal Affairs in the German Foreign Ministry, responsible for liaison with Gestapo. 15, 21, 25, 67, 70, 90, 95, 104 LYUSHKOV, Genrikh Samoilovich (1900–45): GPU Commissar in Ukraine and Far East, defected to Japan, June 1938. 60, 79, 101 MAEDA Minoru (1893–1990): IJN Rear-Admiral. Naval attaché in Moscow, 1931–34 & 1938; chief of Naval Intelligence Division, 1940–42. 54, 72, 100 MAEDA Tadashi (1898–1977): IJN Rear-Admiral; head of German section in Intelligence Division of the Naval Staff, 1935–37; served on cruiser Ashigara at Coronation Naval Review in Portsmouth; senior ADC in Combined Fleet, 1937–38; naval attaché at The Hague, 1940; head of German Section/Intelligence Division, 1941–42; IJN representative at Djakarta, 1942–45. 54, 68–9, 72, 93, 100 MATSUOKA Yosuke (1880–1945): Japanese Foreign Minister, 1940–41. 64–6, 87, 88 MATZKY, Gerhard (1894–1983): Lieut.General: German military attaché in Japan, 1938–40; chief of intelligence division of General Staff, 1940–42. 36, 83, 95 MAY, Friedrich: German Communist councillor, first husband of Helma Ott. 22, 49 MEHNERT, Klaus (1906–1984): German journalist in Moscow until 1935; professor of the University of Hawaii until 1941; moved to China and edited journal The Nineteenth Century, 1941–47; editor, Christ und Welt.. 23 MEISINGER, Josef Albert (1897–1947): SS-Standartenführer; criminal law clerk in Bavaria, appointed desk officer dealing with homosexuality and abortion at Gestapo headquarters, 1933; involved in cases against Rôhm, Fritsch, von Blomberg and many others, 1933–38; desk officer dealing with fraud within the Nazi Party; Chief of Police in Warsaw, 1939–40 and described by others as ‘the Butcher of Warsaw’; transferred to counter-intelligence and despatched as police liaison officer to Tokyo embassy, 1941; initially located in China, but recalled to Tokyo by Ott in November 1941 regarding Sorge Case; police attaché, 1942–45. 13–6, 18, 23, 25, 28–30, 32–35, 41–2, 44–45, 53–54, 67, 71, 74–77, 90, 103–4, 106–9

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MEISINGER, Hertha: secretary and alleged mistress of Himmler, married Josef Meisinger and sent with him to Japan. 13–14, 53, 104 MEISINGER, Martha (neé Zirngibl): Married Josef Meisinger in 1934, alleged to have been killed in an air raid. 53 MITSUNOBU Tôyô (1897–1944): IJN Rear-Admiral; naval attaché in Paris, 1933; member of delegation to London Naval Conference, 1934–35; naval attaché in Rome, 1940–44; killed by Italian partisans. 62–3, 67, 80, 83, 85, 91, 111 MIYAGI Yotoku (1903–45): major contact of the Sorge espionage ring. 51, 54, 55, 58, 76 MÖLLENHOFF, Fritz E.: Nazi Party member employed as a military aviation spotter in the conflict between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party, 1930–1; worked with Ataman Semeonov in Manchuria as a propagandist, 1932–33. 51 MOLOTOV, V.M (1890–1986): Soviet Foreign Minister, 1939–41. 65, 74, 87, 88, 102 MONTE, de: Italian Navy captain: collaboration with German Navy’s B-Dienst, 1934–35; involved in radio interception service on board sloop Eritrea in East Africa to 1941 and in China to 1943. 15 MÜLLER, Hermann (1900–45): head of Gestapo, 1939–45. 25, 45, 104 MUSHAKOJI Kintomo (1882–1967): Japanese ambassador in Berlin, 1935–37. 52, 54 MUSSOLINI, Benito (1883–1944): 24 MUTÔ Akira (1892–1948): IJA General, Chief of Military Affairs Bureau, 1939–42. 63, 85 NAGANO Osami (1880–1947): IJN Admiral, Chief of Naval Staff, 1941–44. 40, 53, 55, 80, 84, 111 NAGUMO Chûichi (1886–1944): IJN Admiral, task force commander in Indian Ocean, April 1942. 25 NAKAMURA Aketo (1889–1966): IJA Lieut.General: head of kempetai, 1941–42. 20 NAKANO Seigô (1886–1943): leader of the Tôhôkai; secretarygeneral of the IRAA, 1940–43; quarrelled with Tôjô, committed seppuku. 32 NEHMIZ: German Assistant Air Attaché in Tokyo, 1939–45. 80, 110 NEURATH, Konstantin von ((1873–1956): German Foreign Minister, 1932–38. 43, 50, 51 NIEBUHR, Dietrich (1888–1964): Navy captain; naval attaché in Buenos Aires, 1936–43; head of central Navy Supply (Ausland III). 45 NOEBEL, Willi: Counsellor of German Embassy in Tokyo, 1936. 53 NOMURA Kichisaburô (1877–1964) IJN Admiral, head of mission to USA, 1941. 64, 86 NOMURA Naokuni (1885–1973) IJN Admiral. Naval Attaché in Berlin, 1929–31; officer commanding Kure submarine base, 1932–34;

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127

Chief of Staff, Combined Fleet, 1935–36; Chief of Naval Intelligence, 1936–38; head of naval mission at Shanghai, 1938–40; head of naval mission in Berlin, 1941–43; very briefly Navy Minister, 17.7.1944; C-in-C Yokosuka naval base in charge of naval convoys, 1944–45. 25, 40, 56, 60, 66, 72, 78, 90, 111 NOULENS, Hilaire: pseudonym of Paul Ruegg, arrested in 1931 in the International Concession at Shanghai working for the Comintern; allegedly rescued through Sorge providing a bribe. 51 OBATA Yûkichi (1873–1947): Japanese ambassador in Berlin, 1931–32. 49 ODA Shintarô: member, Shipping Section of Mitsui Bussan, 1941. 92 OKA Takazumi (1890–1973): IJN Admiral. Naval Attaché in London, 1934–36; Chief of Naval Intelligence Division, 1939–40; Chief of Naval Affairs Bureau, 1940–44; chairman of Dai-Ichi Iinkai. 80 OKADA Keisuke (1868–1952): IJN Admiral, Japanese prime minister, 1934–36. 52 OKAMOTO Kiyotomi (1894–1945): IJA Lieut.General; seconded to German Army, 1930–31; assistant military attaché in Berlin, 1932– 34; military attaché in Berlin, 1940–41; chief of military intelligence, General Staff, 1941–42; vice-chief of staff, Southern Army, 1942–43; military attaché in Switzerland, 1943–45 after meetings with Ribbentrop, Zeitzler and Hitler; committed seppuku. 48, 66, 67, 77, 88, 91, 109 ÔSHIMA Hiroshi (1886–1975): IJA Lieut.General; assistant military attaché in Berlin, 1921–23; military attaché in Vienna, 1923–25; chief of III.Section, Army General Staff, 1931–34; military attaché in Berlin, 1934–38; ambassador in Berlin, 1938–39 & 1941–45; interned at Bedford Springs in USA, July-November 1945. 12, 16, 24, 31, 34, 52, 54, 58, 60, 64, 66, 70, 77, 78, 83, 86, 88, 96 ÔTANI, Inaho (b.1901), IJN Captain, naval attaché in Shanghai, 1941– 42; close collaboration with Abwehr representatives in China, 105 OTT, Eugen (1889–1977), major-general; head of Wehrmachtsabteilung in the German Defence Ministry, 1929–33; on secondment to IJA in Tokyo and Manchukuo, 1933; military attaché in Tokyo, 1934–38; ambassador in Japan, 1938–1943; retired to Beijing, but called as witness to IMTFE, 1945–47. 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 41, 42, 44, 48–9, 50, 51, 54, 55, 58, 60, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 79, 82, 83, 87, 88, 92, 93, 96–9, 107, 110 OTT, Helma (née Bodewig): wife of above. 22, 23, 33, 49 OTT, Podewig: only son of Eugen and Helma Ott. 99 OZAKI Hotsumi (1901–44): correspondent of the Asahi Shinbun; research adviser to South Manchuria Railway Co.; member of the ‘Breakfast Club’ together with individuals close to prime minister Konoe. 9, 12, 51, 54, 55, 67, 68, 74, 91, 92, 93, 102

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PATZIG, Konrad (1888–1975): Admiral, officer then head of Abwehr, 1929–35, later Chief of Personnel, German Navy. 50 PETROVA, Evdokia (1915–2002): wife of the 3rd Secretary in the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, defected 1954; former Japanese specialist in the Spets-Otdel, 1934–1942. 52, 74, 102 PIECKENBROCK, Hans (1893–1959): head of Abwehr I: 83 PIGGOTT, F.S.G. (1888–1966) UK Major-General, military attaché in Japan, 1922–26 & 1936–39. 57, 75 PLÖTZ, Lieutenant: deputy head of section Abwehr I Luft, 1942. 21 POWELEIT: German sailor accused of crimes repatriated on blockaderunner Burgenland and kept locked in brig when vessel intercepted and sunk. Led to prosecution of Wenneker and von Allwörden at Hamburg, 1964/65. 33, 44 RAEDER, Erich (1876–1960): Grand-Admiral, C-in-C, German Navy, 1928–43. 50, 55, 56, 60, 62, 74, 77, 79, 83, 111 RAUMER, Otto von: headed the Far Eastern Section of Ribbentrop’s Bureau, 1935–38; in Ribbentrop’s Secretariat until resignation following policy differences. 42–43 REDMAN, H. Vere: (1901–75): press attaché in UK embassy in Tokyo, 1940–41. 13 RIBBENTROP, Joachim (1893–1946): German Commissioner for Disarmament, 1934–36; Ambassador in London, 1936–38; Foreign Minister, 1938–45. 9, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 30–32, 34–5, 41, 52, 54–57, 61, 69–72, 75, 79, 80, 94, 96–9, 104, 105 RITTER, Karl (1883–1968): head of Economic Policy Department in German Foreign Ministry threatened by Gestapo with incarceration in a concentration camp, 1935; ambassador in Brazil and liaison with OKW, 1936–45. 35 ROMMEL, Erwin (1891–1944): officer commanding Panzerarmee Afrika, 1940–43. 31 ROOSEVELT, Franklin D. (1882–1945): US President, 1932–45. 12, 78, 92, 110 ROSENBERG, Alfred (1893–1946): Head of the Nazi Party’s Foreign Policy Office. 43, 75 ROSS, George C. (1900–1993): UK Rear-Admiral, assistant naval attaché in Japan, 1934–36. 26, 52, 57, 74, 76, 107 RÜDT VON COLLENBERG, Heinrich (1875–1954): German Consul-General in Shanghai, 1929. 13 SAIONJI Kinkazu (1907–1993), son of the last Genrô Prince Saionji, contact with Konoe circles. 12, 67, 91, 92 SAKAI Naoe (1900–1993): assistant to successive Japanese naval attachés in Berlin, 1921–45. 56, 72, 73 SASAGAWA Ryôichi (1899–1995): Japanese ultranationalist, switched from support of IJA to IJN in 1939. 61, 81

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SCHELIA, Rudolf von (1897–1942): German diplomat, 1st Secretary in Warsaw, 1937–39, informant of NKVD, executed as part of Rote Kapelle arrests. 60, 78, 102 SCHELLENBERG, Walther (1910–52), head of Department VI (counter-intelligence) in the Gestapo. 9, 15, 25, 41, 67, 74, 78, 90, 104 SCHICKEDANZ, Gustav A. (1895–1977): Nazi businessman in contact with Japanese embassy in Berlin.. 49 SCHLEICHER, Kurt von (1882–1934): General, head of ministerial office in Defence Ministry, Defence Minister and Reich Chancellor, 1928–33; murdered on Hitler’s orders, 1934. 35 SCHMIDT, Paul K. (1899–1970): German Foreign Ministry interpreter from 1924; head of Press Department. 14, 22 SCHOLL, Erwin: Colonel; member of the Russian Section, German General Staff to 1935; assistant military attaché in Tokyo, 1935–40; military attaché in Thailand, 1941–45. 10, 20, 23, 24, 55, 58, 77, 79, 83, 105 SCHRÖDER, Hans: Head of Personnel Department, German Foreign Ministry, 1941–45. 15, 21 SEECKT, Hans von (1866–1936): Colonel-General, head of military advisory mission in China, 1933–36. 51 SEELHEIM, Heinrich (1884–1964): German Consul-General at Yokohama, 1940–45. 33, 104 SEKINE Gunpei (1886–1964): IJN Captain; chief of Press Section in Navy Ministry, 1932–35. 59, 77 SELCHOW, Kurt von (b.1886): former German Army cryptologist appointed to Foreign Ministry in 1919 and later promoted Minister and head of Department Pers/Z. 21, 58, 76 SHEDAI, Mohammed Iqbal (1888–1973): leading figure in Indian National Movement in Italy. 24 SHIMADA Shigetarô (1883–1976): IJN Admiral, Navy Minister, 1941– 44. 40, 70–1, 80, 96, 111 SHIRATORI Toshio (1887–1949): Japanese minister in Sweden and ambassador in Italy: 82 SIEFKEN, Theodor (1893–1964): naval pilot, served as a Supply contact in East Africa in the 1930 and involved with Italians; head of Abwehr War Organisation in China, 1940–42; dismissed at instance of Meisinger, but remained in China and was chief prosecution witness in US Army’s Shanghai Minor War Crimes Trial. 15, 21, 32, 75, 105 SMEDLEY, Agnes (1892–1950): China correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung. 51, 74, 101 SONNLEITHNER, Franz von: minister in Ribbentrop’s Secretariat. 14 SORGE, Richard (1895–1944): member of the German Communist Party who became a journalist and operated covertly as an agent of the Comintern, then headed the GRU spy rings in China and Japan, 1929–1941.9–10, 12–14, 17–18, 20, 22–24, 28–9, 30–32, 34, 47, 50–51, 53, 55–6, 58, 61, 67, 69, 71–2, 74–5, 77–9, 81, 83, 88, 90, 92–3, 99, 101, 103, 105, 109–10

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SPAHN, Franz-Joseph (1902–81): Nazi Party head in Japan, 1943–45 sent by U-boat at Meisinger’s request. 108 STAHMER, Heinrich (1892–1978); desk officer in the Ribbentrop Bureau dealing with foreign ex-servicemen, 1935–38; liaison with Japanese embassy in Berlin, 1938–40; Consul-General attached to Coburg mission to Japan and USA and principal negotiator of the Tripartite Pact in Tokyo, 1940; ambassador in Nanking, 1941–43; ambassador in Tokyo, 1943–45. Repatriated in 1947, then moved to Liechtenstein. 9, 21, 25, 32, 35, 41, 43, 44, 45, 76, 99, 107–8 STALIN, Josef V. (1878–1953): 22, 24, 47, 50, 61, 65, 77, 80, 81, 83, 86, 87, 90, 109 SUETSUGU Nobumasa (1880–1944): IJN Admiral;Vice-Chief of Naval Staff, 1930–33; C-in-C, Combined Fleet, 1933–34; Home Minister, 1937–39. 60, 78 SUGIHARA Chiune (1900–86): Japanese consul in Kovno, Prague and Königsberg, 1940–41: 83 TAKADA Toshitane (1895–1987): IJN Admiral: head of 1st Section, Naval Affairs Bureau in Navy Ministry, 1940–42. 66, 73, 88, 100 TENNANT, Ernest (1887–1962): British banker, co-founder of the AngloGerman Fellowship, and advocate of co-operation with Hitler. 75 TENNANT, Nancy (1897–2001), sister of the above, met Hitler, Ribbentrop, Goering and Hanfstängl in Berlin in 1933. 75 THYSSEN, Theodoore: defecting Dutch radio operator employed by Siefken and suspected of espionage by Japanese in Shanghai, 1941. 15 TÔGÔ Shigenori (1882–1950): met Lenin while a diplomat in Switzerland during World War I; Japanese Foreign Minister, 1941–42. 12, TÔJÔ, Hideki (1884–1948): IJA General;Vice-Minister and War Minister, 1938 & 1940–44; prime minister, 1941–44. 8, 80, 93, 110 TRAUTMANN, Oskar (1877–1950): German head of mission in China, 1935–38. 52 TREBITSCH-LINCOLN, Ignaz (Fred): (1879–1943): Hungarian Jew, Liberal MP, involved in Kapp Putsch; fraudster and self-claimed Buddhist ‘abbot’. 15, 75, 105 TRENDTEL, Werner (1916–1943): naval commander, assistant naval attaché in Japan, 1941–42. 43, 104 UBOREVICH, Ieronim P. (1896–1937): Soviet General, officer commanding Belorussian Military District, 1931–37. Arrested and executed in May 1937. 78 USHIBA Nobuhiko (1909–1984): 1st Secretary, Japanese Embassy in Berlin, 1941–45; head of economic section in Gaimushô, 1957–64; Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1964–67; ambassador in Washington, 1970–73. 12, USHIBA Tomohiko: secretary of prime minister Konoe, 1937–41. 12, 67, 91

INDEX OF PERSONS

131

USUI Shigeki (1898–1941), Colonel IJAAF; specialist in sabotage and subversion in office of Japanese military attaché in Berlin, 1936–37; involved in the defection of Wang Ching-wei, 1938–39; member of 8th Section, Japanese General Staff, 1939–41; commanding officer, 98th Heavy Bomber Squadron; killed in action over Burma. 9, 60, 78 VANSITTART, Robert (1881–1957): Permanent Under-Secretary, Foreign Office. 55 VERMEHREN, Werner: Navy Captain; Zeppelin pilot in World War I; section head in Supply Service (Abwehr/Ausland IV), 1934–42; assistant naval attaché in Japan, 1942–45. 31, 36, 41, 42, 44, 45 VINNEN, Ulrich: employee of Ahrens & Co. in Japan; supply contact until 1942, when dismissed for fraud. 42 VISHINSKY, Andrei (1883–1954): Deputy Soviet Foreign Minister, 1940–1: 87 VIVIAN, Guy (1887–1963): UK Vice-Admiral; naval attaché in Japan, 1934–36; C-in-C, Western Approaches, 1942–43. 55 VORETZSCH, Ernst A. (1868–1945): German ambassador in Tokyo, 1928–33. 50, 53 VUKELIC, Branko (1904–45):Yugoslav correspondent for Agence France Presse in Japan. 12, WAGNER, Wilhelm (1884–1946): German Minister in Hsinking, 1940–45; captured by Soviet forces and died in prison. 22, 106 WARDS, G.T. (Colonel): seconded from Indian Army to IJA, 1923–28; assistant UK military attaché in Tokyo, 1940–41. 75–6 WATANABE Jotarô (1874–1936): IJA General, military attaché in Berlin, 1927–29; inspector-general of military training, 1935–36, assassinated in February Incident. 48 WEIZSÄCKER, Ernst von: State-Secretary in the German Foreign Ministry, 1938–43. 22, 23, WENDLER: German Minister in Thailand. 24 WENNEKER, Irma: wife of below. 53 WENNEKER, Paul W. (1898–1979), Admiral; captured after the Battle of the Dogger Bank and POW in North Wales, 1914–7; naval attaché in Tokyo, 1933–37; officer commanding Deutschland, 1937–1940; naval attaché in Tokyo, 1940–47; company director in brother’s firm; prosecuted at Hamburg, 1964–65 for responsibility for deaths of spy Hofmeier and sailor Poweleit. 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34–5, 38 ff., 43, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54–5, 56, 58, 61–3, 66–9, 70–1, 72, 74, 76, 77–8, 80, 82, 84, 85, 86, 88, 90, 92, 93–4, 96–9, 106–10 WETZELL, Georg (1869–1947): General, chief military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, 1930–34. 51 WIEGAND, Karl H. von (1874–1961): German and US journalist working as correspondent for the Hearst Press from 1917; interned in Manila, 1941–45. 12

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WOERMANN, Ernst (1888–1979): Under-Secretary (Political) in German Foreign Ministry, 1938–43; ambassador in Nanking, 1943– 45. 12, 14, 18, 24, WOHLTHAT, Helmut C.H. (1893–1982), employee of German Economics Ministry and Four-Year Plan Office, involved in financial and trade negotiations in UK, USA and Japan. 43, 66, 90 WOODHEAD, Harold G.W. (1883–1959): UK journalist employed by the North China Daily News in the 1930s. 51 YAMAGATA Seigô (1891–1945), V-Adm., head of naval aviation bureau, 1939–42: 84 YAMAMOTO Bin, IJA Colonel: assistant military attaché in Berlin, 1940–42 responsible for issues of subversion and sabotage; head of Hikari-kikan, 1942–45; head of Nakano School, 1945. 9, 20, YAMAMOTO Isoroku (1884–1943): IJN Admiral; head of delegation to London Naval Conference, 1934–35; reception by Ribbentrop in Berlin, 1935; Navy Minister, 1937–39; C-in-C, Combined Fleet, 1939–43. 52, 61, 80, 111 YAMASHITA Hôbun (1885–1946), IJA General; head of military mission to Germany, 1941; commanding officer of 25th Army in Malaya, 1941–42; and in the Philippines, 1943–1945. 67, 91 YANAGIDA Genzô (1890–1952): IJA major-general; military attaché in Poland, 1933–34; head of Kwantung Army tokumu kikan at Harbin, 1942–43; captured by Red Army in 1945 and tried for war crimes. 9, 18, 32 YOKOI Tadao: IJN Rear-Admiral, 1942: Assistant Naval Attaché in Berlin, 1935–36; staff officer ‘A’ in Navy Ministry, 1937, European Section, Naval Intelligence Division, 1937–39; Naval Attaché in Berlin, 1940–43. Involved in defence of Ambassador Ôshima at IMTFE. 25, 40, 62, 73, 83, 100 YOKOYAMA Ichirô: Adjutant of Japanese Navy Ministers in the 1930s. 73, 100 YOKOYAMA Yui: Japanese political middleman: 104 YOSHIDA Shigeru (1878–1967): Japanese ambassador in London, 1936–38; prime minister, 1947–54. 55–6 YOSHIKAWA Mitsusada (1907–1988): Japanese prosecutor of Sorge. 53 ZHANG XUE-LIANG (1901–2001):Warlord of Manchuria. 1928–31. 47 ZHUKOV, Georgi K.(1896–1977): Marshal of the Soviet Union: commander of 1st Soviet Mongolian Army Group, 1938–39 which inflicted a heavy defeat on the Japanese 6th Army at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol (Nomonhan) in August 1939. 61, 74, 80, 101 ZINSSER: official in German Consulate-General in Shanghai, 1941. 13 ZIPKOW (aka LANSING or GRUDLEY): Gestapo saboteur suggested as operative at Marmugão, 1941. 15, 75, 105

Index –

Afu: 17 Agence France Presse: 3 Ahrens & Co.: 50 Akita Prison: 94 Angriff. 16, 18 Argentina: 54 Asahi Shinbun: 91 Asama Maru: 103 Australia: 45, 90 Austria: 37, 64 Axis: xiv, 2, 13, 20, 88 Balkans: 88–90 Baltic States: 81 Bangkok: 23, 27, 34, 38, 105 Basra: 44 Belgrade: 88 Berne: 49 Bessarabia: 82 Bialystok: 28 Biscay: 50 Blagoveshchensk: 89 Blockade: 12, 30, 31, 84 Blockade-Running Vessels: 12, 29, 31, 42, 47, 49, 90, 92, 105; Brake, 50, 52, 106; Burgenland, 50, 52–5, 106; Dresden, 53; Havelland, 30; Odenwald, 105; Osorno, xiii, 3–4, 29, 30, 37, 52, 54, 104; Portland: 31; Quito, 3, 51; R.C.Rickmers, 49; Rhakotis, 99; Rio Grande: 30, 36, 52–3; Rossbach: 51 Bordeaux: 29, 36, 37, 50, 52, 90 Borneo: 12 Brazil: 55, 106

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Canada: 30, 62 Central Asia: 86, 110 Ceylon: 43 Changkufeng: 18, 80 Chigasaki 36 China: xii, 2, 3, 4, 9, 34, 59, 62, 76, 77, 79, 85, 105 Chinese Eastern Railway: 57 Ciphers: 8, 10, 17, 31, 43, 63, 85–6, 95, 96 Cold War: xvi, 110 Colombo: 43 Coral Sea: 24 Djakarta: 42 Dogger Bank: 52 English Channel: 90, Enigma: 16, 63, 98 Ethiopian Crisis: 75 Europe: 29, 54, 71, 81 Finland: 64, 81 France: 13, 58, Fraud: xii, 6, 49–50 Frankfurt-am-Main: 20, 60 Frankfurter Zeitung, 3, 15, 16, 37, 63 Freemason: 48 Gibraltar: 85 Germany: Abwehr, xv, xvi, 3, 7, 8, 10, 12, 16, 17, 18, 22–3, 27, 28, 34, 36, 37, 60, 61, 64, 74, 76, 82, 90, 98, 104, 106; Air Force (OKL), 84, 85: Alliance: 80, 85;

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INDEX

Anti-Comintern Pact, 50, 64, 65, 67, 71, 83–4, 96; Armed Forces (OKW) xiv, 10, 12, 15, 44–5, 60, 97, 107; Army(OKH: 12, 61, 62, 96; Heeresarchiv, 60; Navy (OKM): 31, 33, 97–8; Naval War Staff, 39, 42, 45, 52, 83, 94; Warships: aircraft-carriers, 85; Atlantis, 85; Deutschland, 74; Leuthen 36, 47; Michel, 48, 50; Thor, 36, 43, 47– 8; Uckermark, 36, 47; U-boats: 48, 50, 89, 89; ßurgerbräukellar Putsch, 8; German Communist Party (KPD), 34, 58, 62; Community in Japan, xiii, 8, 29, 49; decryption, xv, 9, 39, 57, 61, 76, 85- 6; direction-finding: 24, 58; Foreign Ministry, xiv, 8, 15, 17, 18, 20, 29, 31, 40, 69, 96; Tokyo embassy, xii, xiii, xvi, 3, 6, 16, 21, 28, 29, 30, 65, 75, 96; Gestapo, xii, xv, 5, 8, 18, 21, 31, 34, 35–6, 47, 49–50, 52, 76, 82, 90, 95, 104, 105; radio monitoring, 7, 28, 59, 76, 93, 106; Nazi Party, xii, 5, 15, 18, 19, 21, 23, 31, 40, 49, 53, 59, 82, 107–8; non- Aryan: 16, 18, 31, 48; North Africa, 34, 43, 52; SS: 20, 40; Operation Albion, 84; Operation Barbarossa, 83–4, 91; Prussia, 34, 62; Social Democratic Party, 58, 62; Transozean News Agency, xiii; Gironde: 54 Guadalcanal: 43 Hamburg: 67 Hearst Press: 2 Homosexuality: xii, 48, 105 Hong Kong: 71 Harbin: 18, 23, 35 Hawaii: 30 Hsinking: 17, 19, 52 Hungarian Secret Services: 61, 64, 76

Illies & Co.: 49–50–9, 107 India: 23, 43 Indian Ocean: 9, 24, 43, 85, 97 Indochina: 85 International Red Cross, xiv, 28 Iraq: 88 Istanbul: 37 Italy: 23, 81–2; Foreign Ministry, 61; Italian East Africa, 7; Secret Services, 61, 64, 87 Japan: Communist Party, xiii, 2, 4; February Incident, 65–9, 108; Great Depression, 57; Imperial Court, 65; Imperial Conference, 92; IJA: xvi, 43, 47, 58, 62, 80, 89, 92; factions: 10, 12, 95; General Staff: 11, 24, 33, 39, 49, 57, 67, 69, 75, 76, 79, 89; Kantôkuen: 91; Kwantung Army: 13, 18, 39, 57, 61, 64, 89, 92–3; kempeitai, xiii, 11, 16, 35, 60, 96, 106; IJHQ: 10, 33, 98; Military Affairs Bureau, 85; tokumu kikan, xv, 12, 16, 18, 27, 28, 96; IJN: xvi, 3, 11, 12, 29, 39, 43, 47, 67, 70–2, 77, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 109–10; Combined Fleet: 24, 34, 43, 44, 72, 80, 88; Navy Ministry, 68, 80; Naval Air Force, 84, 85; Naval Mission: 46, 72, 85–6, 103; Naval Staff, 33, 43, 56, 72, 84; IRAA: 35; code- breaking, xiv, xv, 13, 29, 98; Gaimushô, 1, 2, 5, 71, 86, Justice Ministry: 3, 10, 22; mediation: 94, 97; Metropolitan Police, 1, 2, 67; Niko Jiken, 59; Peace Preservation laws: 11, 57; public prosecution, 2, 5, 13; Clausen Case: 11; Sorge Case: 10, 16, 17, 40; radio transmissions, xiv, 13; Sugamo Prison, xiii, 36; technological backwardness, 91; telephone

INDEX

interception, 68; Tokkô: xvi, 4, 106; UK, Enemy No.1, 71–2; war production: 45, 87; Yasukuni Shrine, 25, 74, 99 Kanchatsu Island: 78 Keelung Incident: 71 Kobe: 30, 49, 50 Königsberg: 83 Kurile Islands: 88 Languages: 11, 12, 104 Latin America: 21 Lohmeyer’s Restaurant: 21 Ludwigsburg: xvi Madagascar: 43 Malaya: 30, 105 Manchuli Incident: 57 Manchuria/Manchukuo: 4, 34, 50, 57, 59, 61, 62, 80, 91 Manchurian Incident: 59 Manila: 50, 89, 92, 106 Manzanillo: 30 Mediterranean: 90 Midway: 24, 34, 43, 44, 97 Mitsui Bussan: 92 Molybdenum: 59 Monsoon: 43 Mormugão: 7 Münster: 59 Nagoya: 61 Nanking: 61, 62 Netherlands East Indies: 67, 70–1, 84, 92, 103 New Guinea: 45 New Zealand: 43, 66 Nomonhan: 80 Norway: 84 North Sakhalin: 88 Nuremberg: 21 Oil: 12, 71, 82–3, 92 Osaka: 20, 30 Outer Mongolia: 80

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Pacific War: xiii, 6, 8, 22, 30, 42, 44; Philippine Islands: 86 Poland: 6, 12, 55, 58, 64, 76, 80–1, 83, 104 Port Moresby: 24, 43 Portugal: Portuguese India, 7, 105; Timor, 10; Quinine: 110 Radar 43 Rome: 83, 91 Rote Kapelle: 28, 78 Rubber: 12, 42, 51, 103 Rumania: 82 Saigon: 42 Sanno Hotel: 61, 62 Shanghai: 4, 6, 7, 29, 34, 35, 49, 59, 61, 62, 67, 70, 71, 74, 76, 90, 105 Siberia: 57, 91 Singapore: 42, 50, 51, 55, 103, 106 Sino-Japanese War: 20, 65, 76, 77 Solomon Islands: 44–6, 97 South Sakhalin: 88 Spanish Civil War: 74 Stuttgart: 60 Subversion: xv, 23, 82 Suez: 44, 97 Sumatra: 12, 43 Sweden: 51 Switzerland: 29, 72, 76 Thailand: 27, 83 Tin: 42 Torres Straits: 45 Tsushima: 88 Tulagi: 45 Turkey: 37, 88 UK: 4, 86, 90; Army, 75; BBC, 2; Coronation Naval Review, 69; Germany: 17, 40, 52, 64, 70, 75; Foreign Office, 71; Investments, 71; Royal Navy: 76, 94; Eastern Fleet: 24; Force H, 85; RAF:

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INDEX

76; Reuters, xiii; Secret Service (MI6), xvi, 3, 85; Security Service (MI5), 3, 69; Ships: Automedon, 85; Nankin, 43- 4; HMS Illustrious, 85; HMSSouthampton, 85; SOE, 85 Ukraine: 18 USA: 30, 35, 64, 72, 78, 82, 92, 103; CIC: 22, 28; 53–5, 94, 104; Congress, xii; Overseas Investment, 58; OSS: 40, 60; Pacific Fleet, 34; Pearl Harbor, xii, xiii; POW camps, 55; radio monitoring, 24; State Department, 2, 92; USS Omaha, 55; White House: 21; Yokohama Stockade, 3, 6, 49; USSR: 39, 9, 94; Aircraft Production, 58; assassinations, 78; Caucasus, 33, 97; code-breaking, xi; Comintern: xiii, xiv, 2, 5, 37, 58, 67, 95–7; CPSU, 5; Five- Year Plan, 57; GPU, 34, 37, 105; GRU vi, xi, xii, xiv, xvi, 5, 11, 69, 96, 97; Maritime Provinces, 33; neutrality pact,

87; non-aggression pacts, 62, 88; NKO vi; radio transmissions, 3, 5, 95; Soviet zone of Germany, xvi; Spets-Otdel, 65, 86; Stalingrad, 33, 99, 107, 108, 110; Trans-Siberian Railway, 90, 103 Visophon Co.: 76 Vladivostock: 89 Völkischer Beobachter: 16, 18, 27, 34, 37, 105 War Crimes: xvi, 35 Warsaw: 6, 7, 78 White Race: 44 White Russians: 18 Wolfram: 11, 59 World War I: 17, 69 World War II: ix, x, xvi, 9, 49, 60, 65, 78, 110 Yokohama: 30, 35, 44, 47, 53, 106, 108 Zeitschrift für Geopolitik: 69

The author is a graduate of the Universities of St Andrews and Oxford. He researched and taught as a Junior Research Fellow at St Antony’s College, then as Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex. He was appointed Professor of International Relations at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto in 1991 and was elected as Hon. Senior Research Fellow in the Scottish Centre for the Study of War in the University of Glasgow in 1999. He conducted research and interviews in the UK, USA, Australia, Japan, Germany, Switzerland and The Netherlands and was founder and General Editor of the international journal Japan Forum, published by Oxford U.P. from 1988 to 1995. His research has focussed mainly on the role of intelligence in the international history of the first half of the twentieth century. His most recent monograph is on Ultranationalism in German-Japanese Relations, 1930–1945. Folkestone, Global Oriental, 2011 and he has also published a preliminary study of a little-known German secret agent of Scottish descent in Scottish Review (Summer edition 2016): ‘The Notorious Mr. Brown - A Scottish Jihadist’, which will appear under the title, Stormy Petrel, in 2021.

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