The Labyrinth: Memories of Walter Schellenberg, Hitler's Chief of Counterintelligence

Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, April-June, 2004 by James L. Mader

The Labyrinth: Memories of Walter Schellenberg, Hitler's Chief of Counterintelligence by Walter Schellenberg (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000) Paperback 456 pages, $18.00, ISBN 0306809273

Walter Schellenberg, the Counterintelligence Chief for Adolf Hitler during World War II, wrote his memoirs titled "The Labyrinth" recounting the counterintelligence (CI) operations of Germany during the height of the war. [He received one of the lightest sentences of any WWII war criminal, six years in prison. The mitigating factor in this light sentence was his attempts to help concentration camp prisoners in the latter part of the war.]

In his memoirs, Mr. Schellenberg recounts some of the most interesting aspects of the German CI paradigm and the constant battles he waged with his superiors. While many of his tasks were odd by any standard, he also was in charge of one of the most advanced CI and counterespionage (CE) agencies of the time. In fact, in many ways, Schellenberg managed to blend many disparate intelligence disciplines and entities into a workable format. He recounts in his memoirs many of the failures of the Third Reich to recognize the importance of CI and CE and to integrate CI and CE into the operational planning process. One can deductively link the failures of the internal policies in regards to CI to the inability of Germany to effect real stability operations in the Eastern Theater, and consequently win the war.

Mr. Schellenberg believed that the resistance to a "Secret Service" in Germany was at the very least plausibly related to the lack of a Secret Service tradition in Germany like England had. (1) He thought that there was no understanding of effectively implementing intelligence into the planning and operational processes. Furthermore, he lamented the fact that the intelligence services of Germany were--

   "Overlapping bureaus and agencies, which
   resulted in duplication, waste, inefficacy, and
   the inevitable personal and professional jealousies.
   Finally, there was a drastic shortage
   of specially trained personnel." (2)

Mr. Schellenberg noticed these problems when first installed as the department head and he spent most of his career attempting to fix the system that no one wanted fixed. He makes the point that it appeared that Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Internal Security Branch (SD) and Schellenberg's immediate supervisor, constantly attempted to play "divide and conquer" among the different departments in order to maintain political control of them. (3) Thus, according to Schellenberg, the mission got lost in the politics of bureaucracy.

Mr. Schellenberg sought to obtain liaison offices with various departments with which he had to do business. He had not always had the ability to go to other ministerial heads without prior permission and the ability to liaise with other departments improved efficacy. (4) What the reviewer finds most interesting is that the conventional wisdom about Nazi Germany is that the government was a Leviathan and had coordinated information among the various intelligence and investigative divisions. According to Schellenberg, however, this was not the case. It was not due to the phenomena of being averse to investigations and intelligence work per se, it was in fact extreme parochialism. This parochialism would haunt Schellenberg's CI capabilities throughout the war.

He goes on to complain about the lack of security among the upper echelon social circles. "The amount of highly secret and vitally important information that was so bandied about in these circles was really incredible ..." (5) He specifically blames the scientists, engineers, and senior officers. According to Mr. Schellenberg, these people were the most "loose lipped" among all of German society. He points to the harm that all the gossip and careless talk among them did to the German war effort. Again, it would seem conventional wisdom, about Germany would lead one to believe that each person would be paranoid about being accused of being loose lipped. However, it seems that security among the upper ranks of the Reich was not of interest and, according to the author, did great damage to the war effort.

Perhaps the greatest fault Mr. Schellenberg lays on the German Government was the lack of meaningful support to CI:

   "I told him ... It was not enough for the personnel
   officers to say that they had assigned to me
   so many hundred men. Numbers in themselves
   meant little in the face of training masses of foreign
   nationals, finguists, and specialists, and
   the deficiencies in technical equipment were
   just as serious." (6)

It seems Mr. Schellenberg faced an age-old intelligence problem, the disconnect between the "Real Army" and the "Real Intelligence World." Schellenberg spends much time throughout his memoirs speaking of the inability of the Regular Army staff officers to understand the operations of a CI organization. Throughout the history of Nazi counterintelligence, the German Regular Army staff officers tried to apply Regular Army principals to CI and political intelligence.