180-568: The Federal Intelligence Service ( German : Bundesnachrichtendienst , pronounced [ˌbʊndəsˈnaːχʁɪçtnˌdiːnst] ; BND ) is the foreign intelligence agency of Germany , directly subordinate to the Chancellor's Office . The BND headquarters is located in central Berlin . The BND has 300 locations in Germany and foreign countries. In 2016, it employed around 6,500 people; 10% of them are military personnel who are formally employed by
360-460: A de facto official language of Namibia after the end of German colonial rule alongside English and Afrikaans , and had de jure co-official status from 1984 until its independence from South Africa in 1990. However, the Namibian government perceived Afrikaans and German as symbols of apartheid and colonialism, and decided English would be the sole official language upon independence, stating that it
540-402: A second language , and 75–100 million as a foreign language . This would imply the existence of approximately 175–220 million German speakers worldwide. German sociolinguist Ulrich Ammon estimated a number of 289 million German foreign language speakers without clarifying the criteria by which he classified a speaker. As of 2012 , about 90 million people, or 16% of
720-587: A "commonly used" language and the Pan South African Language Board is obligated to promote and ensure respect for it. Cameroon was also a colony of the German Empire from the same period (1884 to 1916). However, German was replaced by French and English, the languages of the two successor colonial powers, after its loss in World War I . Nevertheless, since the 21st century, German has become
900-555: A German parliamentary inquiry into the surveillance activities of the BND and its cooperation with the US National Security Agency . The BND has been reported to store 220 million sets of metadata every day. That is, they record with whom, when, where and for how long someone communicates. This data is supposedly collected across the world, but the exact locations remains unclear to this date. The Bundestag committee investigating
1080-574: A West German intelligence organization affiliated with the CIA whose existence had not been officially acknowledged. The most central figure in the BND's history was general Reinhard Gehlen , the leader of the Gehlen Organization and later the founding president of the BND, who was regarded as "one of the most legendary Cold War spymasters." From the early days of the Cold War the Gehlen Organization and later
1260-653: A bargaining tool with the intelligence services of the Western Allies. Meanwhile, as of 1946, when Joseph Stalin consolidated his absolute power and control over Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe as agreed at the Potsdam Conference of 1945 and demarcated with what became known as the Iron Curtain , the Western Allies of World War II , the U.S, Britain, and France had no sources of covert information within
1440-507: A consequence, the Chancellery issued an executive order banning BND operational measures against journalists with the aim to protect the service. The committee published a final report in 2009, which mostly confirmed the allegations, identifying the intent to protect the BND from disclosure of classified information and finding a lack of oversight within the senior leadership of the service but did not identify any responsible members from within
1620-539: A general staff officer ... Great operational ability and a great deal of foresight in his thinking." He was also noted to be very hardworking. His role in Barbarossa was mainly planning for the difficulties of bringing reserves up to the front, separating the areas of the army groups and armies in the invasion, and arranging transportation. For this work Gehlen was awarded the War Merit Cross , first and second classes, in
1800-501: A good record in the collection of military and economic intelligence on East Germany and the Soviet forces there. But this information, for the most part, came from observation and not from clandestine penetration". Upon Gehlen's retirement in 1968, a CIA note on Gehlen describes him as "essentially a military officer in habits and attitudes". He was also characterized as "essentially a conservative", who refrained from entertaining and drinking,
1980-556: A greater need for regularity in written conventions. While the major changes of the MHG period were socio-cultural, High German was still undergoing significant linguistic changes in syntax, phonetics, and morphology as well (e.g. diphthongization of certain vowel sounds: hus (OHG & MHG "house") → haus (regionally in later MHG)→ Haus (NHG), and weakening of unstressed short vowels to schwa [ə]: taga (OHG "days")→ tage (MHG)). A great wealth of texts survives from
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#17328486534752160-557: A high-placed mole in Stavka . When the cables continued, the British suspected a Soviet operation but later dismissed that idea upon investigation. The cables are available to be read upon purchase from the British archives at cost. The fact remains that aside from several instances of possible Soviet disinformation, most of the Max cables contained extremely accurate intelligence. Max was a big reason for
2340-453: A native tongue today, mostly descendants of German colonial settlers . The period of German colonialism in Namibia also led to the evolution of a Standard German-based pidgin language called " Namibian Black German ", which became a second language for parts of the indigenous population. Although it is nearly extinct today, some older Namibians still have some knowledge of it. German remained
2520-679: A popular foreign language among pupils and students, with 300,000 people learning or speaking German in Cameroon in 2010 and over 230,000 in 2020. Today Cameroon is one of the African countries outside Namibia with the highest number of people learning German. In the United States, German is the fifth most spoken language in terms of native and second language speakers after English, Spanish , French , and Chinese (with figures for Cantonese and Mandarin combined), with over 1 million total speakers. In
2700-475: A result, the surviving texts are written in highly disparate regional dialects and exhibit significant Latin influence, particularly in vocabulary. At this point monasteries, where most written works were produced, were dominated by Latin, and German saw only occasional use in official and ecclesiastical writing. While there is no complete agreement over the dates of the Middle High German (MHG) period, it
2880-434: A serial number, which tracked its number within the series of messages; and a secondary catalogue number that indicated the region and location that the message referred to. The messages were also filed by date, which was of no less importance. It was an incredibly efficient and well-organized system. If asked what exactly was reported about a specific city or region, or what was reported on a specific date, Kauder could retrieve
3060-762: A thing. Further operations by the Gehlen Org produced detailed reports about Soviet construction and testing of the MiG-15 jet-propelled aircraft, which United States airmen flying F-86 fighters would soon to face in aerial combat during the Korean War . Between 1947 and 1955, the Gehlen Organization also debriefed every German PoW who returned to West Germany from captivity in the Soviet GULAG . The network employed hundreds of former Wehrmacht military intelligence and some SS officers, and also recruited many other agents from within
3240-702: A year into the German war against the Soviet Union, Gehlen understood that the FHO required fundamental re-organization, and secured a staff of army linguists and geographers, anthropologists, lawyers, and junior military officers who would improve the FHO as a military-intelligence organization despite the Nazi ideology of Slavic inferiority. Gehlen made great use of cables received from the Max Network . Originally an Abwehr creation, Max
3420-432: Is "chock full of errors". The CIA review is kinder when speaking of Gehlen's memoirs but makes this comment: "Gehlen's descriptions of most of his so-called successes in the political intelligence field are, in my opinion, either wishful thinking or self-delusion.... Gehlen was never a good clandestine operator, nor was he a particularly good administrator. And therein lay his failures. The Gehlen Organization/BND always had
3600-688: Is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family , mainly spoken in Western and Central Europe . It is the most spoken native language within the European Union . It is the most widely spoken and official (or co-official) language in Germany , Austria , Switzerland , Liechtenstein , and the Italian autonomous province of South Tyrol . It is also an official language of Luxembourg , Belgium and
3780-580: Is a recognized minority language in the following countries: In France, the High German varieties of Alsatian and Moselle Franconian are identified as " regional languages ", but the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of 1998 has not yet been ratified by the government. Namibia also was a colony of the German Empire, from 1884 to 1915. About 30,000 people still speak German as
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#17328486534753960-454: Is absolutely reliable." Helms' information came from the BND. A further laudable success involved the BND's activity during the Czech crisis in 1968; by then, the agency was led by the second president, Gerhard Wessel. With Pullach cryptography fully functioning, the BND predicted an invasion of Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia. CIA analysts on the other hand did not support
4140-515: Is all far from the fact," as quoted in the Washington Post . Critchfield added that Gehlen hired the former Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS) men "reluctantly, under pressure from German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to deal with 'the avalanche of subversion hitting them from East Germany'". Gehlen's memoirs were published in 1977 by World Publishers, New York. In
4320-596: Is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects , with many varieties existing in Europe and other parts of the world. Some of these non-standard varieties have become recognized and protected by regional or national governments. Since 2004, heads of state of the German-speaking countries have met every year, and the Council for German Orthography has been the main international body regulating German orthography . German
4500-546: Is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages . The Germanic languages are traditionally subdivided into three branches: North Germanic , East Germanic , and West Germanic . The first of these branches survives in modern Danish , Swedish , Norwegian , Faroese , and Icelandic , all of which are descended from Old Norse . The East Germanic languages are now extinct, and Gothic
4680-519: Is archived for 10 years "for long-term analysis". Apparently though, this long-term storage doesn't hold any Internet communications, data from social networks, or emails. In December 2022, a high-ranking employee of the BND was arrested on alleged treason. Carsten L. is said to have disclosed information from his professional activity to the Russian domestic secret service FSB . The Public Prosecutor General accuses him of treason ("Landesverrat") because it
4860-472: Is called the "German Sprachraum ". German is the official language of the following countries: German is a co-official language of the following countries: Although expulsions and (forced) assimilation after the two World wars greatly diminished them, minority communities of mostly bilingual German native speakers exist in areas both adjacent to and detached from the Sprachraum. Within Europe, German
5040-430: Is complicated by the existence of several varieties whose status as separate "languages" or "dialects" is disputed for political and linguistic reasons, including quantitatively strong varieties like certain forms of Alemannic and Low German . With the inclusion or exclusion of certain varieties, it is estimated that approximately 90–95 million people speak German as a first language , 10–25 million speak it as
5220-520: Is generally seen as ending when the 1346–53 Black Death decimated Europe's population. Modern High German begins with the Early New High German (ENHG) period, which Wilhelm Scherer dates 1350–1650, terminating with the end of the Thirty Years' War . This period saw the further displacement of Latin by German as the primary language of courtly proceedings and, increasingly, of literature in
5400-595: Is generally seen as lasting from 1050 to 1350. This was a period of significant expansion of the geographical territory occupied by Germanic tribes, and consequently of the number of German speakers. Whereas during the Old High German period the Germanic tribes extended only as far east as the Elbe and Saale rivers, the MHG period saw a number of these tribes expanding beyond this eastern boundary into Slavic territory (known as
5580-559: Is less closely related to languages based on Low Franconian dialects (e.g., Dutch and Afrikaans), Low German or Low Saxon dialects (spoken in northern Germany and southern Denmark ), neither of which underwent the High German consonant shift. As has been noted, the former of these dialect types is Istvaeonic and the latter Ingvaeonic, whereas the High German dialects are all Irminonic; the differences between these languages and standard German are therefore considerable. Also related to German are
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5760-435: Is one of the major languages of the world . German is the second-most widely spoken Germanic language , after English, both as a first and as a second language . German is also widely taught as a foreign language , especially in continental Europe (where it is the third most taught foreign language after English and French), and in the United States. Overall, German is the fourth most commonly learned second language, and
5940-587: Is one of the three biggest newspapers in Namibia and the only German-language daily in Africa. An estimated 12,000 people speak German or a German variety as a first language in South Africa, mostly originating from different waves of immigration during the 19th and 20th centuries. One of the largest communities consists of the speakers of "Nataler Deutsch", a variety of Low German concentrated in and around Wartburg . The South African constitution identifies German as
6120-455: Is one of the unsolved mysteries of the war, with Kauder's loyalties and sources of information still unclear. Max was probably the most sophisticated radio operation in World War Two: "Kauder now had skilled German radio operators at his disposal. He also formed his own team [of Jews] that worked with the radio operators and managed detailed records of all messages. Each message was assigned
6300-401: Is partly derived from Latin and Greek , along with fewer words borrowed from French and Modern English . English, however, is the main source of more recent loanwords . German is a pluricentric language ; the three standardized variants are German , Austrian , and Swiss Standard German . Standard German is sometimes called High German , which refers to its regional origin. German
6480-479: Is quite out of the question. Our ambassador in Tel Aviv assured me only yesterday that everything was normal." Helms replied: "I am sorry, but I adhere to my opinion. The Israelis will strike and their object will be to end the war in their favor with extreme rapidity." President Lyndon Johnson then asked Helms for the source of his information. Helms said: "Mr. President, I have it from an allied secret service. The report
6660-610: Is said to have been state secrets. The new BND headquarters in Berlin, near the former Berlin Wall , was completed in 2017. At the official opening in February 2019, Angela Merkel , then Chancellor of Germany , made this statement: "In an often very confusing world, now, more urgently than ever, Germany needs a strong and efficient foreign intelligence service". At the time, some 4,000 employees were expected to work from this location, moving here from
6840-510: Is the Sachsenspiegel , the first book of laws written in Middle Low German ( c. 1220 ). The abundance and especially the secular character of the literature of the MHG period demonstrate the beginnings of a standardized written form of German, as well as the desire of poets and authors to be understood by individuals on supra-dialectal terms. The Middle High German period
7020-663: Is the most significant unit within BND and has the highest number of employees. The department is located at the former BND HQ in Pullach , Bavaria. One of the major SIGINT stations after WW2 was Bad Aibling Station , which was operated for decades in cooperation with the National Security Agency (NSA). Furthermore, Station Gablingen, Station Rheinhausen , Station Schöningen , Station Starnberg-Söcking and Station Stockdorf . German language German (German: Deutsch , pronounced [dɔʏtʃ] )
7200-566: Is the only language in this branch which survives in written texts. The West Germanic languages, however, have undergone extensive dialectal subdivision and are now represented in modern languages such as English, German, Dutch , Yiddish , Afrikaans , and others. Within the West Germanic language dialect continuum, the Benrath and Uerdingen lines (running through Düsseldorf - Benrath and Krefeld - Uerdingen , respectively) serve to distinguish
7380-481: Is understood in all areas where German is spoken. Approximate distribution of native German speakers (assuming a rounded total of 95 million) worldwide: As a result of the German diaspora , as well as the popularity of German taught as a foreign language , the geographical distribution of German speakers (or "Germanophones") spans all inhabited continents. However, an exact, global number of native German speakers
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7560-673: The Ostsiedlung ). With the increasing wealth and geographic spread of the Germanic groups came greater use of German in the courts of nobles as the standard language of official proceedings and literature. A clear example of this is the mittelhochdeutsche Dichtersprache employed in the Hohenstaufen court in Swabia as a standardized supra-dialectal written language. While these efforts were still regionally bound, German began to be used in place of Latin for certain official purposes, leading to
7740-526: The Los Angeles Times , reported that he "is credited with modernizing the BND by hiring academic analysts and electronics specialists". Reinhard Gehlen's memoirs, The Service, The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen (English title), were published in 1977, (World Publishers, New York). A Review of the book published by the CIA makes this comment about Gehlen's achievements and management style: "Gehlen's descriptions of most of his so-called successes in
7920-529: The Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), in response to an alleged avalanche of covert ideological subversion hitting West Germany from the intelligence services behind the Iron Curtain . Gehlen was instrumental in negotiations to establish an official West German intelligence service based on the Gehlen Organization of the early 1950s. In 1956, the Gehlen Organization was transferred to
8100-682: The 213th Infantry Division . It was mobilized for the Polish campaign but did not see any action, being held in reserve. He was still awarded the Iron Cross , second class. In late 1939 he was transferred to the staff of General Franz Halder , the Chief of the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), the Army High Command. In his early work, Gehlen was once again planning the construction of fortifications, both along
8280-627: The Alamanni , Bavarian, and Thuringian groups, all belonging to the Elbe Germanic group ( Irminones ), which had settled in what is now southern-central Germany and Austria between the second and sixth centuries, during the great migration. In general, the surviving texts of Old High German (OHG) show a wide range of dialectal diversity with very little written uniformity. The early written tradition of OHG survived mostly through monasteries and scriptoria as local translations of Latin originals; as
8460-618: The Bundesnachrichtendienst was created from the Gehlen Organization, and was transferred to the West German government, with all staff. Reinhard Gehlen became President of the BND and remained its head until 1968. Several publications have criticized Gehlen and his organizations for hiring ex-Nazis. An article in The Independent on 29 June 2018 made this statement about some of the BND employees: "Operating until 1956, when it
8640-522: The Early Middle Ages . German is an inflected language , with four cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative); three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and two numbers (singular, plural). It has strong and weak verbs . The majority of its vocabulary derives from the ancient Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, while a smaller share
8820-417: The European Union 's population, spoke German as their mother tongue, making it the second most widely spoken language on the continent after Russian and the second biggest language in terms of overall speakers (after English), as well as the most spoken native language. The area in central Europe where the majority of the population speaks German as a first language and has German as a (co-)official language
9000-758: The German General Staff in 1936. During his early years on the General Staff, in October 1936 he was assigned to the Operations Section, and in the following year he was reassigned to the Fortifications Section. In November 1938 Gehlen was again posted to an artillery regiment. At the time of the Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, Gehlen was a major and an operations staff officer in
9180-514: The German states . While these states were still part of the Holy Roman Empire , and far from any form of unification, the desire for a cohesive written language that would be understandable across the many German-speaking principalities and kingdoms was stronger than ever. As a spoken language German remained highly fractured throughout this period, with a vast number of often mutually incomprehensible regional dialects being spoken throughout
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#17328486534759360-554: The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I , and the other being Meißner Deutsch , used in the Electorate of Saxony in the Duchy of Saxe-Wittenberg . Alongside these courtly written standards, the invention of the printing press led to the development of a number of printers' languages ( Druckersprachen ) aimed at making printed material readable and understandable across as many diverse dialects of German as possible. The greater ease of production and increased availability of written texts brought about increased standardisation in
9540-439: The Old High German language in several Elder Futhark inscriptions from as early as the sixth century AD (such as the Pforzen buckle ), the Old High German period is generally seen as beginning with the Abrogans (written c. 765–775 ), a Latin-German glossary supplying over 3,000 Old High German words with their Latin equivalents. After the Abrogans , the first coherent works written in Old High German appear in
9720-417: The Reichswehr , the truncated army of the Weimar Republic , and was an operations staff officer in an infantry division during the invasion of Poland in 1939. After that he was appointed to the staff of General Franz Halder , the Chief of the Army High Command (OKH), and quickly became one of his main assistants. Gehlen had a significant role in planning the German operations in Greece , Yugoslavia , and
9900-418: The Soviet Union . When the Red Army continued to fight after the initial German success during Operation Barbarossa, in the spring of 1942 Gehlen was appointed by Halder as director of Foreign Armies East (FHO), the military intelligence service of the OKH tasked with analyzing the Soviet armed forces. He achieved the rank of major general before he was dismissed by Adolf Hitler in April 1945 because of
10080-427: The Sprachraum in Europe. German is used in a wide variety of spheres throughout the country, especially in business, tourism, and public signage, as well as in education, churches (most notably the German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (GELK) ), other cultural spheres such as music, and media (such as German language radio programs by the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation ). The Allgemeine Zeitung
10260-422: The Standard German language in its written form, and the Duden Handbook was declared its standard definition. Punctuation and compound spelling (joined or isolated compounds) were not standardized in the process. The Deutsche Bühnensprache ( lit. ' German stage language ' ) by Theodor Siebs had established conventions for German pronunciation in theatres , three years earlier; however, this
10440-400: The Upper German dialects spoken in the southern German-speaking countries , such as Swiss German ( Alemannic dialects ) and the various Germanic dialects spoken in the French region of Grand Est , such as Alsatian (mainly Alemannic, but also Central–and Upper Franconian dialects) and Lorraine Franconian (Central Franconian). After these High German dialects, standard German
10620-408: The pagan Germanic tradition. Of particular interest to scholars, however, has been the Hildebrandslied , a secular epic poem telling the tale of an estranged father and son unknowingly meeting each other in battle. Linguistically, this text is highly interesting due to the mixed use of Old Saxon and Old High German dialects in its composition. The written works of this period stem mainly from
10800-425: The "war against terror". The Bundestag constituted an investigative committee ("Parlamentarischer Untersuchungsausschuss") to investigate the allegations. The committee tasked the former Federal Appellate Court (Bundesgerichtshof) judge Dr. Gerhard Schäfer [ de ] as special investigator, who published a report confirming illegal BND operations involving and targeting journalists between 1993 and 2005. As
10980-435: The 2003 incident which ultimately led to the invasion of Iraq . The payments of 3,000 Euros monthly were made by a cover firm called Thiele und Friedrichs (Munich). As a result of the premature cancellation, al-Janabi filed a lawsuit at the Munich labour court and won the case. Several former senior BND officials publicly stated that the agency had repeatedly warned the CIA not to take Curveball's information as fact. Hanning,
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#173284865347511160-504: The BND also found out from its sources, the Cuban exiles living in Miami, that Cuba was also trying to get hold of weapons through German dealers. According to a BND report, Cuba was also able to recruit four former Waffen-SS officers as instructors for the Cuban armed forces. However, the identity of the men was blacked out in the report. "This negative view of BND was certainly not justified during ... [1967 and] 1968." The BND's military work "had been outstanding", and in certain sectors of
11340-430: The BND engaged in espionage in Austria between 1999 and 2006, spying on targets including the International Atomic Energy Agency , the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries , the Austria Press Agency , embassies, and Austrian banks and government ministries. The government of Austria has called on Germany to clarify the allegations. In 2014, an employee of BND was arrested for handing over secret documents to
11520-468: The BND gathers both military and civil intelligence . While the Strategic Reconnaissance Command [ de ] (KSA) of the Bundeswehr also fulfills this mission, it is not an intelligence service. There is close cooperation between the BND and the KSA. The domestic secret service counterparts of the BND are the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution ( Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz , or BfV) and 16 counterparts at
11700-410: The BND had an intimate cooperation with the CIA, and often was the western intelligence community's only eyes and ears on the ground in the Eastern Bloc . The BND is also regarded as one of the best informed intelligence services in regards to the Middle East from the 1960s. The BND was quickly established as the western world's second largest intelligence agency, second only to the CIA. Both Russia and
11880-421: The BND has been lost. An exasperated Chancellor Helmut Kohl called the service "idiots". A few weeks later BND president Konrad Porzner and minister of defence Gerhard Stoltenberg rated the transfers as not to be problematic, since the equipment was only handed over for trials and was supposed to be returned afterwards. On 5 February 2003, Colin Powell made the case for a military attack on Iraq in front of
12060-408: The BND president at the time, even formulated his concerns about that in a letter to then CIA Director George Tenet . The CIA however ignored those warnings and presented the information as facts. Following the 2006 Lebanon War , the BND mediated secret negotiations between Israel and Hezbollah , eventually leading up to the 2008 Israel–Hezbollah prisoner exchange . In the beginning of 2008, it
12240-407: The BND that was headed by Gehlen. All three were eventually discovered and convicted in 1963. There were also Communists and their sympathizers within the CIA and the SIS ( MI6 ), especially Kim Philby and the Cambridge Spies . As such information appeared, Gehlen, personally, and the Gehlen Organization, officially, were attacked by the governments of the Western powers. The British government
12420-450: The BND's many successes under Wessel but noted that there had been "a number of incidents of East Germans infiltrating the West German government, particularly intelligence agencies, on Gen. Wessel's watch". The kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich was a watershed event for the BND, following early warnings from other countries, because it led the agency to build counter-terrorism capabilities. In 1970
12600-429: The CIA and the BND bought the Swiss informations and communication security firm Crypto AG , for $ 5.75 million. Already in 1967 the BND tried, together with the French intelligence service, to buy the company from its founder Robert Hagelin. This deal though fell through due to Hagelin, who was already cooperating with the CIA, refusing. The CIA at the time did not cooperate with the French. In 1969, after negotiations with
12780-444: The East German security service, later known as Stasi . Several informants in East Berlin reported in June and July 1961 of street closures, clearing of fields, accumulation of building materials and police and army deployments in specific parts of the eastern sector, as well as other measures that BND determined could lead to a division of the city. However, the agency was reluctant to report communist initiatives and had no knowledge of
12960-714: The Empire. Its use indicated that the speaker was a merchant or someone from an urban area, regardless of nationality. Prague (German: Prag ) and Budapest ( Buda , German: Ofen ), to name two examples, were gradually Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain; others, like Pressburg ( Pozsony , now Bratislava), were originally settled during the Habsburg period and were primarily German at that time. Prague, Budapest, Bratislava, and cities like Zagreb (German: Agram ) or Ljubljana (German: Laibach ), contained significant German minorities. In
13140-560: The FHO's alleged "defeatism" and accurate but pessimistic intelligence reports about Red Army military superiority. Following the end of World War II , Gehlen surrendered to the United States Army . While in a POW camp, Gehlen offered FHO's microfilmed and secretly buried archives about the USSR and his own services to the U.S. intelligence community . Following the start of the Cold War ,
13320-650: The Foreign Armies East (FHO) after the dismissal of Colonel Kinzel. Prior to that he had little intelligence experience, though he did have interactions with military intelligence, the Abwehr , during his earlier work at the Army High Command, to the point where he received a warning for meddling too much in the affairs of that agency. Before the Wehrmacht disasters in the Battle of Stalingrad (23 August 1942 – 2 February 1943),
13500-718: The Frisian languages— North Frisian (spoken in Nordfriesland ), Saterland Frisian (spoken in Saterland ), and West Frisian (spoken in Friesland )—as well as the Anglic languages of English and Scots. These Anglo-Frisian dialects did not take part in the High German consonant shift, and the Anglic languages also adopted much vocabulary from both Old Norse and the Norman language . The history of
13680-571: The GDR regime. They knew the carrying capacity of every bridge, the bed count of every hospital, the length of every airfield, the width and level of maintenance of the roads that Soviet armor and infantry divisions would have to traverse in a potential attack on the West. Almost every sphere of eastern life was known to the BND. Unsung analysts at Pullach, with their contacts in the East, figuratively functioned as flies on
13860-596: The Gehlen Organisation to the BND. ... Instead of expelling them, the BND even seems to have been willing to recruit more of them – at least for a few years". The authors of the book A Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe state that Reinhard Gehlen simply did not want to know the backgrounds of the men that the BND hired in the 1950s. The American National Security Archive states that "he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals". On
14040-673: The Gehlen Organization or "the Org", a secret intelligence service composed of former intelligence officers of the Wehrmacht and members of the SS and the SD , which was headquartered first at Oberursel , near Frankfurt, then at Pullach , near Munich. The organization's cover-name was the South German Industrial Development Organization. Gehlen initially selected 350 ex-Wehrmacht military intelligence officers as his staff; eventually,
14220-445: The Gehlen Organization to the BND.... Instead of expelling them, the BND even seems to have been willing to recruit more of them – at least for a few years". On the other hand, Gehlen himself was cleared by the CIA's James H. Critchfield , who worked with the Gehlen Organization from 1949 to 1956. In 2001, he said that "almost everything negative that has been written about Gehlen, [as an] ardent ex-Nazi, one of Hitler's war criminals ...
14400-813: The General Staff, led by Wehrmacht Major General Reinhard Gehlen . Its main purpose was to collect information on the Red Army. After the war Gehlen worked with the U.S. occupation forces in West Germany. In 1946 he set up an intelligence agency informally known as the Gehlen Organization or simply "The Org" He recruited some of his former co-workers at Gestapo Trier: Dietmar Lermen, Heinrich Hädderich, August Hill, Friedrich Walz, Albert Schmidt, and Friedrich Heinrich Busch. Many had been operatives of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris ' wartime Abwehr (counter-intelligence) organization, but Gehlen also recruited people from
14580-475: The German language begins with the High German consonant shift during the Migration Period , which separated Old High German dialects from Old Saxon . This sound shift involved a drastic change in the pronunciation of both voiced and voiceless stop consonants ( b , d , g , and p , t , k , respectively). The primary effects of the shift were the following below. While there is written evidence of
14760-447: The German states; the invention of the printing press c. 1440 and the publication of Luther's vernacular translation of the Bible in 1534, however, had an immense effect on standardizing German as a supra-dialectal written language. The ENHG period saw the rise of several important cross-regional forms of chancery German, one being gemeine tiutsch , used in the court of
14940-675: The Germanic dialects that were affected by the High German consonant shift (south of Benrath) from those that were not (north of Uerdingen). The various regional dialects spoken south of these lines are grouped as High German dialects, while those spoken to the north comprise the Low German and Low Franconian dialects. As members of the West Germanic language family, High German, Low German, and Low Franconian have been proposed to be further distinguished historically as Irminonic , Ingvaeonic , and Istvaeonic , respectively. This classification indicates their historical descent from dialects spoken by
15120-646: The Irminones (also known as the Elbe group), Ingvaeones (or North Sea Germanic group), and Istvaeones (or Weser–Rhine group). Standard German is based on a combination of Thuringian - Upper Saxon and Upper Franconian dialects, which are Central German and Upper German dialects belonging to the High German dialect group. German is therefore closely related to the other languages based on High German dialects, such as Luxembourgish (based on Central Franconian dialects ) and Yiddish . Also closely related to Standard German are
15300-845: The Italian autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia , as well as a recognized national language in Namibia . There are also notable German-speaking communities in France ( Alsace ), the Czech Republic ( North Bohemia ), Poland ( Upper Silesia ), Slovakia ( Košice Region , Spiš , and Hauerland ), Denmark ( North Schleswig ), Romania and Hungary ( Sopron ). Overseas, sizeable communities of German-speakers are found in Brazil ( Blumenau and Pomerode ), South Africa ( Kroondal ), Namibia , among others, some communities have decidedly Austrian German or Swiss German characters (e.g. Pozuzo , Peru). German
15480-794: The Jew. This information was the bait that may have carried costs for the Soviets but was worth the payoff when it was later used as part of the Soviet Maskirovka Strategy to trap the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad, Kursk, and the Summer Offensive of 1944 ( Operation Bagration ). Many of the Jews who stayed alive working for Kauder later moved to Israel. Ageing Israelis have made the claim "a handful of Jews won World War Two " — slightly legitimate if Max caused
15660-507: The MHG period. Significantly, these texts include a number of impressive secular works, such as the Nibelungenlied , an epic poem telling the story of the dragon -slayer Siegfried ( c. thirteenth century ), and the Iwein , an Arthurian verse poem by Hartmann von Aue ( c. 1203 ), lyric poems , and courtly romances such as Parzival and Tristan . Also noteworthy
15840-470: The Max information was accurate, and both the NKVD and Smersh later investigated the Max network. It is possible that Stalin kept Max away from the regular organizational structures, which he never fully trusted. It is argued that the accuracy of the Max reports were the bait that caused the FHO overreliance on Max – to the extent that Nazi officials defied Hitler's explicit directive to stop working with Kauder
16020-734: The Middle East remain important focuses of the BND's activities, in addition to violent non-state actors . The BND today acts as an early warning system to alert the German government to threats to German interests from abroad. It depends heavily on wiretapping and electronic surveillance of international communications . It collects and evaluates information on a variety of areas such as international non-state terrorism, weapons of mass destruction proliferation and illegal transfer of technology, organized crime , weapons and drug trafficking, money laundering, illegal migration and information warfare . As Germany's only overseas intelligence service,
16200-640: The NATO military alliance . The organization employed hundreds of former members of the Nazi Party and former Wehrmacht military intelligence officers. After West Germany regained its sovereignty, Gehlen became the founding president of the Federal Intelligence Service ( Bundesnachrichtendienst , BND) of West Germany (1956–68). Gehlen obeyed a direct order from West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer , and also hired former counterintelligence officers of
16380-446: The NSA spying scandal has uncovered that the German intelligence agency intercepts communications traveling via both satellites and Internet cables. It seems certain that the metadata only come from "foreign dialed traffic", that is, from telephone conversations and text messages that are held and sent via mobile phones and satellites. Of these 220 million data amassed every day, one percent
16560-572: The Office for Military Sciences. The BND is the largest agency of the German Intelligence Community . The BND was founded during the Cold War in 1956 as the official foreign intelligence agency of West Germany , which had recently joined NATO , and in close cooperation with the CIA . It was the successor to the earlier Gehlen Organization , often known simply as "The Organization" or "The Org",
16740-553: The Red Army, and much strategic political intelligence about the Soviet Union. Understanding that the Soviet Union would defeat and occupy the Third Reich , Gehlen ordered the FHO intelligence files copied to microfilm ; the FHO files proper were stored in watertight drums and buried in various locations in the Austrian Alps. They amounted to fifty cases of German intelligence about the Soviet Union, which were at Gehlen's disposal as
16920-414: The Reichsführer-SS) men "reluctantly, under pressure from German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to deal with 'the avalanche of subversion hitting them from East Germany.'" From 2011 to 2018, an independent commission of historians studied the history of the BND in the era of Reinhard Gehlen. The results are published in comprehensive studies. So far (as of April 2020) eleven volumes have been published. During
17100-557: The Reichswehr, including more opportunities for officers to receive promotions. That same year in October, Gehlen began attending the "Commander Assistants Training," the equivalent of the German staff college during the Weimar Republic, and in June 1935 he graduated as second in his class. The following month he was promoted to captain and assigned to the "Troop Office," or what was renamed
17280-470: The Soviet Union, on the recommendation of Colonel Heusinger. Halder was dissatisfied with Kinzel's performance and was looking for a replacement, though he thought that the 40-year old Gehlen was too young for such an important role and had no previous intelligence background. Heusinger believed that Gehlen was a good manager, and on his advice, Gehlen was appointed the head of FHO on 1 April 1942. In spring of 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Gehlen assumed command of
17460-755: The Soviet Union. In exchange for his own liberty and the release of his former subordinates (also prisoners of the US Army), Gehlen offered the Counter Intelligence Corps access to the FHO's intelligence archives and to his intelligence gathering abilities aimed at the Soviet Union, known later as the Gehlen Organization . Boker removed his name and those of his Wehrmacht command from the official lists of German prisoners of war, and transferred seven former FHO senior officers to join Gehlen. The FHO archives were unearthed and secretly taken to Camp King, ostensibly without
17640-650: The Soviet border and in the west. Halder increasingly relied on Gehlen during the spring of 1940 and he became one of Halder's main assistants. Gehlen was sent as his liaison officer to several German units that were involved in the Battle of France in May 1940 (the 16th Army and the Panzer Group ), and in October of that year he was assigned to the Eastern Group of the Operations Section, led by Colonel Adolf Heusinger . Heusinger—who incidentally would later work with Gehlen after
17820-460: The Third World also laid the groundwork for friendly relations that Gehlen attempted to use to steer local governments into taking an anti-Soviet and Pro- NATO stance during the ongoing Cold War and further assisted the West German economic miracle by both encouraging and favoring West German trade and corporate investment. Gehlen's refusal to correct reports with questionable content strained
18000-458: The U.S. military (G-2 Intelligence) accepted Gehlen's offer and assigned him to establish the Gehlen Organization , an espionage service focusing on the Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc . Beginning with his time as head of the Gehlen Organization, Gehlen favored both Atlanticism and close cooperation between what would become West Germany, the U.S. intelligence community , and the other members of
18180-533: The UN Security Council. Powell supported his case with information received from the BND, instead of Mr. Hans Blix and the IAEA . The BND had collected intelligence from an informant known as Rafid al-Janabi alias CURVEBALL, who claimed Iraq would be in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction , apart from torturing and killing over 1,000 dissidents each year, for over 20 years. Rafid was employed before and after
18360-630: The US government should not be underestimated, because the BND was able to regularly provide the CIA with detailed information about Soviet arms deliveries through its very good sources in Cuba. There are indications that the secret service was also informed about military actions against Cuba. Ten days before the Bay of Pigs invasion , Gehlen reported to Bonn : "Within a relatively short period of time, large-scale military operations to defeat Fidel Castro will begin." In 1962,
18540-514: The US, the BND approached Hagelin anew and bought the company together with the US intelligence service. Crypto AG produced and sold radio, Ethernet, STM, GSM, phone and fax encryption systems worldwide. Its clients included Iran, Libya, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican. The BND and the CIA rigged the company's devices so they could easily decipher
18720-631: The United States. He was suspected of handing over documents about the committee investigating the NSA spying in Germany. The German government responded to this espionage by expelling the top CIA official in Berlin. In December 2016, WikiLeaks published 2,420 documents from the BND and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV). The published materials had been submitted in 2015 as part of
18900-646: The West German government and formed the core of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), the Federal Republic of Germany's official foreign intelligence service, with Gehlen serving as its first president until his retirement in 1968. While this was a civilian office, he was also a lieutenant-general in the Reserve forces of the Bundeswehr , the highest-ranking reserve-officer in the military of West Germany. Gehlen
19080-493: The accuracy of the intelligence, Hitler dismissed Gehlen, soon after his promotion to major general . The FHO collection of both military and political intelligence from captured Red Army soldiers assured Gehlen's post–WWII survival as a Western anticommunist spymaster, with networks of spies and secret agents in the countries of Soviet-occupied Europe. During the German war against the Soviet Union in 1941 to 1945, Gehlen's FHO collected much tactical military intelligence about
19260-569: The anti–Communist Gehlen Organization became the nucleus of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, Federal Intelligence Service). Gehlen was the president of the BND as an espionage service until his retirement in 1968. The end of Gehlen's career as a spymaster resulted from a confluence of events in West Germany: the exposure of a KGB mole , Heinz Felfe , (a former SS lieutenant) working at BND headquarters; political estrangement from Adenauer, in 1963, which aggravated his professional problems; and
19440-650: The bomb attack. Laboratory tests had shown no evidence of the BND agents' involvement. However, the Germans were released only 10 days after they were arrested. It was suspected that the arrest was a revenge by Kosovo authorities for the BND report about organized crime in Kosovo which accuses Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaçi , as well as the former Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj of far-reaching involvement in organized crime. According to reporting in Der Standard and profil ,
19620-487: The caper would stay under wraps, the real spy was told to be ready for recall; he made his move to the West at the appropriate time. The East German regime, however, fought back. With still unhindered flight to the west a possibility, infiltration started on a grand scale and a reversal of sorts took hold. During the early 1960s as many as 90% of the BND's lower-level informants in East Germany worked as double agents for
19800-513: The cavalry school in Hanover in 1926, where spent two years before requesting a transfer, and in 1928 he was sent to back to his original unit in Schweidnitz. There he met a secretary working for the military, Herta von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, and they got married in 1931. She was a member of an aristocratic Prussian military family . After Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933 there was an expansion of
19980-540: The codes that countries used to send encrypted messages. In 1986, the BND deciphered the report of the Libyan Embassy in East Berlin regarding the "successful" implementation of the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing . According to an interview with Stasi defector Col. Rainer Wiegand, BND agents were assigned to use the anti-Stasi protests in East Germany in order to covertly obtain files from Building No. 2, which houses
20160-543: The counterespionage directorate. Wiegand assisted by providing the blueprints of the building and indicated which offices the agents should prioritize. Operation Summer Rain was a highly classified joint mission involving the Federal Intelligence Service and special units of the German Armed Forces during the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s. The primary objective of the operation was to gather intelligence on
20340-586: The countries in which the occupying Red Army had vanquished the Wehrmacht. On 22 May 1945, Gehlen surrendered to the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) of the U.S. Army in Bavaria and was taken to Camp King , near Oberursel , and interrogated by Captain John R. Boker. The American Army recognised his potential value as a spymaster with great knowledge of Soviet forces and anticommunist intelligence contacts in
20520-638: The deal, saying it would result in several hundred millions of dollars in back tax payments, the sale remains controversial, as a government agency has paid for possibly stolen data . In November 2008, three German BND agents were arrested in Kosovo for allegedly throwing a bomb at the European Union International Civilian Office , which oversees Kosovo's governance. Later the "Army of the Republic of Kosovo" had accepted responsibility for
20700-430: The development of non-local forms of language and exposed all speakers to forms of German from outside their own area. With Luther's rendering of the Bible in the vernacular, German asserted itself against the dominance of Latin as a legitimate language for courtly, literary, and now ecclesiastical subject-matter. His Bible was ubiquitous in the German states: nearly every household possessed a copy. Nevertheless, even with
20880-452: The dialect so as to make the work as natural and accessible to German speakers as possible. Copies of Luther's Bible featured a long list of glosses for each region, translating words which were unknown in the region into the regional dialect. Luther said the following concerning his translation method: One who would talk German does not ask the Latin how he shall do it; he must ask the mother in
21060-434: The downfall of the German effort in the east, where most of the German army were destroyed. On the other hand, Max cables clearly warned FHO regarding Operation Mars , a terrible defeat for the Red Army. This caused the British to conclude that it was impossible for Max to be a Soviet operation. However, the British may have been blinded by western ideals regarding acceptable costs of national sacrifice. The Max Network
21240-585: The early years of the Cold War of 1945–91, Gehlen's agents were providing the United States Federal Government with more than 70% of its intelligence on the Soviet armed forces . Early in 1948, Gehlen Org Spymasters began receiving detailed reports from their sources throughout the Soviet Zone of covert East German remilitarization long before any West German politicians had even thought of such
21420-418: The early years of the Cold War . He was in charge of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front of World War II and was later the first director of West Germany's intelligence agency, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND). Gehlen is also considered to be one of the founders of the West German armed forces, the Bundeswehr . The son of an army officer and World War I veteran, in 1920 Gehlen joined
21600-435: The eastern provinces of Banat , Bukovina , and Transylvania (German: Banat, Buchenland, Siebenbürgen ), German was the predominant language not only in the larger towns—like Temeschburg ( Timișoara ), Hermannstadt ( Sibiu ), and Kronstadt ( Brașov )—but also in many smaller localities in the surrounding areas. In 1901, the Second Orthographic Conference ended with a (nearly) complete standardization of
21780-517: The fact that Gehlen allowed former Nazis to work for the agencies. The authors of the book A Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe (2015) stated that Reinhard Gehlen simply did not want to know the backgrounds of the men whom the BND hired in the 1950s. The American National Security Archive states that "he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals". An article in The Independent on 29 June 2018 made this statement about BND employees: "Operating until 1956, when it
21960-399: The first years of oversight by the State Secretary in the federal chancellery of Konrad Adenauer of the operation in Pullach , Munich District , Bavaria , the BND continued the ways of its forebear, the Gehlen Organization. The BND racked up its initial east–west cold war successes by concentrating on East Germany . The BND's reach encompassed the highest political and military levels of
22140-414: The former Sicherheitsdienst (SD), SS and Gestapo , after their release by the Allies . The latter recruits were controversial because the SS and its associated groups were notoriously the perpetrators of many Nazi atrocities during the war. The organization worked at first almost exclusively for the CIA, which contributed funding, equipment, cars, gasoline and other materials. On 1 April 1956
22320-474: The former headquarters in Pullach , a suburb of Munich . The agency's total number of employees, in Germany and other countries, was approximately 6,500. The Bundesnachrichtendienst is divided into the following departments: BND is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for foreign and domestic intelligence and counterintelligence purposes with content of German interest. The department Technische Aufklärung ( TA )
22500-443: The government. In 1990, BND gave the Finnish Security Intelligence Service the so-called Tiitinen list —which supposedly contains names of Finns who were believed to have links to Stasi . The list was classified and locked in a safe after the Director of the Finnish Security Intelligence Service, Seppo Tiitinen, and the President of Finland, Mauno Koivisto , determined that it was based on vague hints instead of hard evidence. In
22680-435: The home, the children on the streets, the common man in the market-place and note carefully how they talk, then translate accordingly. They will then understand what is said to them because it is German. When Christ says ' ex abundantia cordis os loquitur ,' I would translate, if I followed the papists, aus dem Überflusz des Herzens redet der Mund . But tell me is this talking German? What German understands such stuff? No,
22860-409: The hour – of the outbreak of the Six-Day War in the Middle East on 5 June 1967. According to declassified transcripts of a United States National Security Council meeting on 2 June 1967, CIA Director Richard Helms interrupted Secretary of State Dean Rusk with "reliable information" – contrary to Rusk's presentation – that the Israelis would attack on a certain day and time. Rusk shot back: "That
23040-421: The inefficiency of the BND consequent to Gehlen's poor leadership and continual inattention to the business of counter-espionage as national defence. According to Der Spiegel journalists Heinz Höhne and Hermann Zolling , the premature end of the German colonial empire in 1918 placed West Germany's new foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst at a considerable advantage in dealing with
23220-417: The influence of Luther's Bible as an unofficial written standard, a widely accepted standard for written German did not appear until the middle of the eighteenth century. German was the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire , which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe . Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of
23400-401: The information was so potent that FHO refused to allow any tainting of their golden source. After the war, the Allies interrogated Kauder and his associates and promptly concluded that the Soviets ran the entire Max operation, and that Kauder was not a professional spy but merely allowed himself to be the figurehead relaying information he received from his NKVD contacts and sources. However,
23580-535: The intelligence field the BND still showed brilliance: in Latin America and in the Middle East it was regarded as the best-informed secret service. The BND offered a fair and reliable amount of intelligence on Soviet and Soviet-bloc forces in Eastern Europe, regarding the elaboration of a NATO warning system against any Soviet operations against NATO territory, in close cooperation with the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces). One high point of BND intelligence work culminated in its early June 1967 forecast – almost to
23760-425: The keys to breaking Czechoslovakian intelligence's codes. The results were nothing less than devastating for Czechoslovakian espionage and led to multiple arrests and convictions. The security and efficacy of the Gehlen Organization were compromised by East German and Soviet moles within it, such as Johannes Clemens , Erwin Tiebel and Heinz Felfe who were feeding information while in the Org and later, while in
23940-514: The knowledge of the camp commander. By the end of summer 1945, Captain Boker had the support of Brigadier General Edwin Sibert , the senior G2 (intelligence) officer of the U.S. Twelfth Army Group, who arranged the secret transport of Gehlen, his officers and the FHO intelligence archives, authorized by his superiors in the chain of command, General Walter Bedell Smith (chief of staff for General Eisenhower ), who worked with William Donovan (former OSS chief) and Allen Dulles (OSS chief), who also
24120-415: The largest concentrations of German speakers are in the states of Rio Grande do Sul (where Riograndenser Hunsrückisch developed), Santa Catarina , and Espírito Santo . Reinhard Gehlen Reinhard Gehlen (3 April 1902 – 8 June 1979) was a German military and intelligence officer who served the Weimar Republic , Nazi Germany , and West Germany , and also worked for the United States during
24300-452: The massive anti-Communist ethnic German, Soviet, and East European refugee communities throughout Western Europe. They were accordingly able to develop detailed maps of the railroad systems, airfields, and ports of the USSR, and the Org's field agents even infiltrated the Baltic Soviet Republics and the Ukrainian SSR . Among the Org's earliest counterespionage successes was Operation Bohemia, which began in March 1948 after Božena Hájková,
24480-445: The message instantly, using his simple, intelligent and efficient filing method. Gehlen's cadre of FHO intelligence-officers produced accurate field-intelligence about the Red Army that frequently contradicted Nazi Party ideological perceptions of the eastern battle front. Hitler dismissed the gathered information as defeatism and philosophically harmful to the war effort against " Judeo-Bolshevism " in Russia. In April 1945, despite
24660-443: The most part, came from observation and not from clandestine penetration". The agency's second president, Gerhard Wessel, retired in 1978. According to his obituary in the Los Angeles Times in August 2002, the "former intelligence officer in Adolf Hitler's anti-Soviet spy operations" ... "is credited with modernizing the BND by hiring academic analysts and electronics specialists". The New York Times News Service obituary lauded
24840-402: The mother in the home and the plain man would say, Wesz das Herz voll ist, des gehet der Mund über . Luther's translation of the Bible into High German was also decisive for the German language and its evolution from Early New High German to modern Standard German. The publication of Luther's Bible was a decisive moment in the spread of literacy in early modern Germany , and promoted
25020-439: The newly independent governments of post-colonial Africa, Asia, and the Middle East . This is why many Third World military and foreign intelligence services were largely trained by BND military advisors . This made it possible for the BND to easily receive accurate intelligence in these regions which the CIA and former colonialist intelligence services could not acquire without recruiting local spy rings. BND covert activities in
25200-404: The night of 8-9 November 1948, after being warned by "Ondřej" of an imminent Stalinist witch hunt for " rootless cosmopolitans " within the Czechoslovak officer corps, Captain Jeřábek and two other senior military intelligence officers crossed the border into the American Zone and defected to the West. In addition to several lists of Czechoslovakian spies in West Germany, Captain Jeřábek also carried
25380-423: The ninth century, chief among them being the Muspilli , Merseburg charms , and Hildebrandslied , and other religious texts (the Georgslied , Ludwigslied , Evangelienbuch , and translated hymns and prayers). The Muspilli is a Christian poem written in a Bavarian dialect offering an account of the soul after the Last Judgment , and the Merseburg charms are transcriptions of spells and charms from
25560-467: The notion of "fraternal assistance" by the satellite states of Moscow; and US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Llewellyn Thompson , quite irritated, called the secret BND report he was given "a German fabrication". At 23:11 on 20 August 1968, BND radar operators first observed abnormal activity over Czech airspace. An agent on the ground in Prague called a BND out-station in Bavaria: "The Russians are coming." Warsaw Pact forces had moved as forecast. However,
25740-413: The organization recruited some 4,000 anticommunist secret agents. After he started working for the U.S. Government, Gehlen was subordinate to US Army G-2 (Intelligence). He resented this arrangement and in 1947, the year after his Organization was established, Gehlen arranged for a transfer to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The agency kept close control of the Gehlen Organization, because during
25920-428: The organization's credibility, and dazzling achievements became an infrequent commodity. A veteran agent remarked at the time that the BND pond then contained some sardines, though a few years earlier the pond had been alive with sharks. The fact that the BND could score certain successes despite East German Stasi interference, internal malpractice, inefficiencies and infighting, was primarily due to select members of
26100-434: The organization's credibility, and dazzling achievements became an infrequent commodity. A veteran agent remarked at the time that the BND pond then contained some sardines, though a few years earlier the pond had been alive with sharks. The fact that the BND could score certain successes despite East German communist Stasi interference, internal malpractice, inefficiencies and infighting, was primarily due to select members of
26280-457: The other hand, Gehlen himself was cleared by James H. Critchfield of the Central Intelligence Agency who worked with the Gehlen Organization from 1949 to 1956. In 2001, he said that "almost everything negative that has been written about Gehlen, [as an] ardent ex-Nazi, one of Hitler's war criminals ... is all far from the fact," as quoted in The Washington Post . Critchfield added that Gehlen hired former Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service of
26460-400: The political intelligence field are, in my opinion, either wishful thinking or self-delusion. ... Gehlen was never a good clandestine operator, nor was he a particularly good administrator. And therein lay his failures. The Gehlen Organization/BND always had a good record in the collection of military and economic intelligence on East Germany and the Soviet forces there. But this information, for
26640-462: The pronunciation of the ending -ig as [ɪk] instead of [ɪç]. In Northern Germany, High German was a foreign language to most inhabitants, whose native dialects were subsets of Low German. It was usually encountered only in writing or formal speech; in fact, most of High German was a written language, not identical to any spoken dialect, throughout the German-speaking area until well into the 19th century. However, wider standardization of pronunciation
26820-464: The recent defeat of Germany in World War I and the reduction in the size of the army. In 1920, at the age of eighteen, Gehlen completed his Abitur and joined the Reichswehr . In 1921 he was posted to the 6th Light Artillery Regiment (later the 3rd Prussian Artillery Regiment) in Schweidnitz , a town in Silesia near the Polish border, and 1923 he became a lieutenant. He graduated from the infantry and artillery schools. Gehlen received an assignment at
27000-479: The requested GDR weapon systems (an SA-6 system, a ZSU-23/4 and other equipment) to Israel. The transfers were shipped using the ports and airports of Hamburg, Wilhelmshaven , Manching and Alhorn . In late 1991, a shipment labeled "agricultural machinery" was unexpectedly inspected by the Wasserschutzpolizei and weapons were discovered. A state’s attorney started an investigation and parliamentary designated BND-overseer Willy Wimmer concluded, that control over
27180-424: The rise of Gehlen's career, and he leveraged the "success of Max" into a spymaster's reputation and a postwar career. Possible Soviet penetration of Max would parallel and be a strong contributor for the thorough Soviet penetration of NTS and the Gehlen Organization . During the war some German officers attempted to trace the mechanics of Kauder's networks, and never found a satisfactory explanation. Nevertheless,
27360-464: The same year another book was published about him, The General Was a Spy, by Heinz Hoehne and Herman Zolling, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York. A review of the latter, published by the CIA in 1996, calls it a "poor book" and goes on to allege that "so much of it is sheer garbage" because of many errors. The CIA review also discusses another book, Gehlen, Spy of the Century , by E. H. Cookridge, Hodder and Stoughton, London , 1971, and claims that it
27540-428: The scope and timing because of conflicting inputs. The erection of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961 thus came as a surprise, and the BND's performance in the political field was thereafter often wrong and remained spotty and unimpressive. There was a great success for the Federal Intelligence Service during the Cuban Missile Crisis . In 1962, the BND was the first Western intelligence service to have information about
27720-433: The sister in law of Czechoslovak military intelligence officer Captain Vojtěch Jeřábek, defected to the American Zone and applied for political asylum in the United States. After learning from Hájková that Captain Jeřábek was secretly expressing anti-communist opinions to his family, the Org dispatched a Czech refugee and veteran field agent codenamed "Ondřej" to make contact with the Captain and his family in Prague . During
27900-407: The slowly sinking efficiency of BND in the last years of Reinhard Gehlen became evident. By 1961, it was clear that the BND employed some men who were Soviet "moles"; they had come from the earlier Gehlen Organization. One mole, Heinz Felfe, was convicted of treason in 1963. Others were not uncovered during Gehlen's term in office. Gehlen's refusal to correct reports with questionable content strained
28080-426: The spring of 1941. As Operation Barbarossa began and the Red Army continued to fight despite its losses, Halder became upset at his intelligence department for not informing him of the true extent of Soviet military capabilities. In late 1941 Gehlen was being considered to replace Colonel Eberhard Kinzel as the head of Foreign Armies East ( Fremde Heere Ost , FHO), the Army Staff section responsible for analyzing
28260-467: The staff who took it upon themselves to step up and overcome then existing maladies. Abdication of responsibility by Reinhard Gehlen was the malignancy; cronyism remained pervasive, even nepotism (at one time Gehlen had 16 members of his extended family on the BND payroll). Only slowly did the younger generation then advance to substitute new ideas for some of the bad habits caused mainly by Gehlen's semi-retired attitude and frequent holiday absences. Gehlen
28440-490: The staff who took it upon themselves to step up and overcome then existing maladies. Abdication of responsibility by Reinhard Gehlen was the malignancy; bureaucracy and cronyism remained pervasive, even nepotism (at one time Gehlen had 16 members of his extended family on the BND payroll). Only slowly did the younger generation then advance to substitute new ideas for some of the bad habits caused mainly by Gehlen's semi-retired attitude and frequent holiday absences. Gehlen
28620-425: The state level Landesämter für Verfassungsschutz (State Offices for the Protection of the Constitution); there is also a separate military intelligence organisation, the Military Counterintelligence Service ( Militärischer Abschirmdienst , or MAD). The predecessor of the BND was the German eastern military intelligence agency during World War II , the Abteilung Fremde Heere Ost or FHO Section in
28800-492: The states of North Dakota and South Dakota , German is the most common language spoken at home after English. As a legacy of significant German immigration to the country , German geographical names can be found throughout the Midwest region , such as New Ulm and Bismarck (North Dakota's state capital), plus many other regions. A number of German varieties have developed in the country and are still spoken today, such as Pennsylvania Dutch and Texas German . In Brazil,
28980-433: The stationing of Soviet medium-range missiles on the caribbean island and passed it on to the United States . Between 1959 and 1961, Reinhard Gehlen called on Washington several times in vain to "insert the dangerous communist bastion, which at the same time represents an excellent starting point for the communist infiltration of Latin America , into the [USA] sphere of power by rapid access." Gehlen's influence on
29160-449: The third most commonly learned second language in the United States in K-12 education. The language has been influential in the fields of philosophy, theology, science, and technology. It is the second most commonly used language in science and the third most widely used language on websites . The German-speaking countries are ranked fifth in terms of annual publication of new books, with one-tenth of all books (including e-books) in
29340-418: The wake of the German reunification in 1991, Israel requested access to GDR weapon systems. In March 1991 a parliamentary commission decided to not give the requested weapons to Israel. Six month later, under the supervision of BND-director Volker Foertsch, the service, in conjunction with elements within the Federal Ministry of Defence , still without political clearance to do so, arranged several transfers of
29520-415: The wall in ministries and military conferences. When the Soviet KGB suspected an East German army intelligence officer, a lieutenant colonel and BND agent, of spying, the Soviets investigated and shadowed him. The BND was positioned and able to inject forged reports implying that the loose spy was actually the KGB investigator, who was then arrested by the Soviets and shipped off to Moscow. Not knowing how long
29700-409: The war, as the first head of the West German Bundeswehr —also recognized Gehlen's talent as a staff officer. From late 1940 Gehlen worked on operational planning for Germany's movement east. That included the invasion and occupation of Greece and Yugoslavia, as well as the preparations for Operation Barbarossa . In February 1941 Gehlen was described in a report by his superiors as "a fine example of
29880-402: The weapons systems utilized by Soviet forces. In 2005, a public scandal erupted (dubbed the Journalistenskandal , journalists scandal) over revelations that the BND had placed a number of German journalists under surveillance since the-mid 1990s, in an attempt to discover the source of information leaks from the BND regarding the activities of the service in connection with the war in Iraq and
30060-438: The world being published in German. German is most closely related to other West Germanic languages, namely Afrikaans , Dutch , English , the Frisian languages , and Scots . It also contains close similarities in vocabulary to some languages in the North Germanic group , such as Danish , Norwegian , and Swedish . Modern German gradually developed from Old High German , which in turn developed from Proto-Germanic during
30240-415: The written form of German. One of the central events in the development of ENHG was the publication of Luther's translation of the Bible into High German (the New Testament was published in 1522; the Old Testament was published in parts and completed in 1534). Luther based his translation primarily on the Meißner Deutsch of Saxony , spending much time among the population of Saxony researching
30420-429: Was a "neutral" language as there were virtually no English native speakers in Namibia at that time. German, Afrikaans, and several indigenous languages thus became "national languages" by law, identifying them as elements of the cultural heritage of the nation and ensuring that the state acknowledged and supported their presence in the country. Today, Namibia is considered to be the only German-speaking country outside of
30600-407: Was an artificial standard that did not correspond to any traditional spoken dialect. Rather, it was based on the pronunciation of German in Northern Germany, although it was subsequently regarded often as a general prescriptive norm, despite differing pronunciation traditions especially in the Upper-German-speaking regions that still characterise the dialect of the area today – especially
30780-588: Was born 1902 into a Protestant family in Erfurt and had two brothers and a sister. His father was Walther Gehlen, an officer in the Imperial German Army during World War I , and his mother, Katharina Margaret Gehlen ( née van Vaernewycks ), was a Flemish noblewoman. He grew up in Breslau , where his father, a former army officer, was a publisher for the Ferdinand-Hirt-Verlag, a publishing house specializing in school books. In his youth, Gehlen's main interests were mathematics and horses. He wanted to follow his father's path and become an army officer, despite
30960-504: Was especially hostile towards Gehlen, and the politically Left wing British press ensured full publicisation of the existence of the Gehlen Organization, which further compromised the operation. On 1 April 1956, 11 years after World War II had ended, the U.S. Government and the CIA formally transferred the Gehlen Organization to the authority of what was by then the Federal Republic of Germany , under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1949–63). By way of that transfer of geopolitical sponsorship,
31140-427: Was established on the basis of public speaking in theatres and the media during the 20th century and documented in pronouncing dictionaries. Official revisions of some of the rules from 1901 were not issued until the controversial German orthography reform of 1996 was made the official standard by governments of all German-speaking countries. Media and written works are now almost all produced in Standard German which
31320-405: Was forced out in April 1968 due to "political scandal within the ranks", according to one source. His successor, Bundeswehr Brigadier General Gerhard Wessel, immediately called for a program of modernization and streamlining. With political changes in the West German government and a reflection that BND was at a low level of efficiency, the service began to rebuild. Years later, Wessel's obituary in
31500-402: Was forced out of the BND due to "political scandal within the ranks", according to one source, He retired in 1968 as a civil servant of West Germany, classified as a Ministerialdirektor , a senior grade with a generous pension. His successor, Bundeswehr Brigadier General Gerhard Wessel , immediately called for a program of modernization and streamlining. Several publications have criticized
31680-401: Was one of the primary sources of FHO intelligence on the Soviet Military. Based in Sofia, Max - the Klatt Bureau (Dienststelle Klatt) was led by a Viennese Jew, Richard Kauder and included many other Jews as radio operators. Max cables were highly accurate, and amounted to 10,700 cables from 1942–44, causing a British warning – Ultra intercepted the Max cables – to Stalin regarding
31860-414: Was revealed that the BND had managed to recruit excellent sources within Liechtenstein banks and had been conducting espionage operations in the principality since the beginning of the 2000s. The BND mediated the German Finance Ministry's $ 7.3 million acquisition of a CD from a former employee of the LGT Group – a Liechtenstein bank owned by the country's ruling family. While the Finance Ministry defends
32040-427: Was superseded by the BND, the Gehlen Organisation was allowed to employ at least 100 former Gestapo or SS officers. ... Among them were Adolf Eichmann 's deputy Alois Brunner , who would go on to die of old age despite having sent more than 100,000 Jews to ghettos or internment camps, and ex-SS major Emil Augsburg . ... Many ex-Nazi functionaries including Silberbauer , the captor of Anne Frank , transferred over from
32220-425: Was superseded by the BND, the Gehlen Organization was allowed to employ at least 100 former Gestapo or SS officers.... Among them were Adolf Eichmann ’s deputy Alois Brunner , who would go on to die of old age despite having sent more than 100,000 Jews to ghettos or internment camps, and ex-SS major Emil Augsburg .... Many ex-Nazi functionaries including Silberbauer , the captor of Anne Frank , transferred over from
32400-424: Was the OSS station-chief in Bern . On 20 September 1945, Gehlen and three associates were flown from the American Zone of Occupation in Germany to the US, to become spymasters for the Western Allies . In July 1946, the US officially released Gehlen and returned him to occupied Germany. On 6 December 1946, he began espionage operations against the Soviet Union, by establishing what was known to US intelligence as
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