Nikolaus Ritter

Nikolaus Ritter
German military photo of Ritter in 1940
Birth name	Nikolaus Adolph Fritz Ritter
Nickname(s)	Dr. Rantzau (code name)
Born	(1899-01-08)8 January 1899 Rheydt, German Empire
Died	9 April 1974(1974-04-09) (aged 75) Germany
Allegiance	German Empire Weimar Germany Nazi Germany
Service/branch	Abwehr (German Military Intelligence Service)
Years of service	1914–1919 1936–1944
Rank	Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant colonel)
Commands held	Chief of Air Intelligence in the Abwehr
Battles/wars	World War I World War II
Relations	Mary Aurora Evans Ritter (spouse) Irmgard Klitzing(spouse) Katharine Francis Ritter (daughter) Nikolaus Haviland Ritter (son) Karin Ritter (daughter)

Nikolaus Ritter (8 January 1899 – 1975) is best known as the Chief of Air Intelligence in the Abwehr (German military intelligence) who led spyrings in the United States and Great Britain from 1936 to 1941.

Early life

Ritter was born in Rheydt, Germany, the son of Nikolaus Josef Ritter and Käthe Hellhoff. He attended Volksschule (primary school) in Bad Bederkesa from 1905 to 1910, Klostergymnasium (high school) in Flensburg from 1911 to 1914, and he finished his high school diploma (Abitur) at Domgynasium in Verden an der Aller, near Bremen. He then enlisted in the German Imperial Army in World War I and was assigned to the 162nd Infantry Regiment. He served on the Western Front in France where he was twice wounded. Ritter was promoted to Lieutenant in June 1918.^[1]

After World War I, Ritter moved to Lauban, Germany (now Poland) and he became an apprentice with a textiles company from 1920 to 1921. In 1921, he attended the Prussian Technical School for Textiles in Sorau, Germany (now Poland) and became a textile engineer. He returned to Lauban as a superintendent of a textile company, but then emigrated to the United States in January 1924 and found employment as a clerk at the Mallinson Silk Company in New York and he also worked odd jobs as a floor layer, housepainter, metalworker and dishwasher. He married Mary Aurora Evans (1898 - 1997),^[2] an Irish-American teacher from Alabama in 1926, and together they had two children: Nikolaus Haviland Ritter (21 December 1933 - 2009) and Katharine Francis Ritter (13 December 1934 - ?).^[1]

In 1936, Ritter returned to Germany and joined the Abwehr, German Military Intelligence Service. He moved to Hamburg, Germany and brought his family to Germany in 1937. However, Aurora filed for divorce soon after learning of his employment with the Abwehr. In 1939 he married Irmgard Klitzing and with her had a daughter, Karin Ritter (2 January 1940 - ?). Unable to flee Nazi Germany, Aurora and the children lived in Hamburg and survived the devastation of the Allied bombing. In 1946, Aurora and the children returned to the United States, and in 2006 Katharine published a memoir on the life of her mother - Aurora: An Alabama school teacher in Germany struggles to keep her children during WWII after she discovers her husband is a German spy.^[1][2]

Spymaster

Enola Gay bombardier Thomas Ferebee with the Norden Bombsight on Tinian after the dropping of the atomic bomb Little Boy.

In the late 1930s, Ritter became Chief of Air Intelligence in the Abwehr and he operated under the code name: DR. RANTZAU. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwher, instructed Ritter to contact a former spymaster he knew from the first World War who was living in New York, Fritz Joubert Duquesne. Back in 1931, Ritter had met Duquesne in New York, and the two spies reconnected in New York on 3 December 1937. Ritter also met with Herman W. Lang, a spy who operated under the code name: PAUL.^[3]

Herman Lang worked as a machinist, draftsman, and assembly inspector for the Carl L. Norden Company where he had been contracted to manufacture an advanced, topsecret military bomber part, the Norden bombsight. He provided Ritter a large drawing of the Norden bombsight which Ritter stored inside of a hollow cane umbrella and that he took back to Germany by ship. The Germans proceeded to build a model from the drawings, and later brought Lang to Germany to work on and finish an improved version of the bombsight. While in Germany, Lang met with Ritter and was also received by Hermann Goering. In 1945, General George Patton's Third U.S. Army Division came upon a hidden factory in the Tyrolean Alps and captured the factory used to produce the German version of the Norden bombsight.^[3][4][5]

Everett "Ed" Minster Roeder, another German agent in the U.S., worked for the Sperry Gyroscope Company of Brooklyn as an engineer and designer of confidential materials for the U.S. Army and Navy.^[6] From Roeder the Abwehr obtained the plans for an advanced automatic pilot device that was later used in Luftwaffe fighters and bombers.^[7] Roeder also disclosed blueprints of the complete radio instrumentation of the new Glenn Martin bomber, classified drawings of range finders, blind-flying instruments, a bank-and-turn indicator, a navigator compass, a wiring diagram of the Lockheed Hudson bomber, and diagrams of the Hudson gun mountings.^[6]

Ritter employed several other successful agents across the U.S., but he also made the mistake of recruiting a man who would later become a double agent, William Sebold. On 8 February 1940, Ritter sent Sebold to New York under the alias of Harry Sawyer and instructed him to set up a shortwave radio-transmitting station to establish contact with the German shortwave station abroad. Sebold was also instructed to use the code name TRAMP and to contact a fellow agent code named DUNN, Fritz Duquesne.^[8][6]

Duquesne Spy Ring

FBI surveillance photographs of Duquesne in the office of William Sebold, 25 June 1941

Once the FBI discovered through Selbold that Duquesne was again in New York operating as a German spy, director J. Edgar Hoover provided a background briefing to President Franklin Roosevelt.^[9] FBI agent Newkirk, using the name Ray McManus, was now assigned to DUNN and he rented a room immediately above Duquesne's apartment near Central Park and used a hidden microphone to record Duquesne's conversations.^[10]

The FBI leased three adjacent rooms in Times Square.^[11] One room would serve as double-agent Sebold's office from which he would receive intelligence reports from Abwehr spies that would later be censored by the FBI and partially transmitted by Sebold via coded short-wave radio to Germany.^[11] The other two rooms were used by German-speaking FBI agents who would listen in with headphones and record the meetings using a motion picture camera behind a two-way wall mirror.^[8][11] The first time Duquesne arrived at Sebold's office, he surprised the FBI agents by conducting an examination of the office, opening chests, looking in corners and around mirrors, and pointedly asking Sebold, "where are the mics?"^[12] Once Duquesne believed he was safe, he raised his pants leg and removed documents from his sock, such as: a sketch and photo of the M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle, a drawing of a new light tank design, a photo of a U.S. Navy Mosquito boat, a photo of a grenade launcher, and reports on U.S. tanks he had observed at bases at West Point and in Tennessee.^[13] Duquesne also described sabotage techniques he had used in earlier wars such as small bombs with slow fuses he could drop through a hole in his pants pocket, and he commented on where he might use these devices again.^[13]

The 33 convicted members of the Duquesne spy ring. Duquesne is pictured in the top, right. (FBI print)

On 28 June 1941, following a two-year investigation, the FBI arrested Duquesne and 32 Nazi spies on charges of relaying secret information on U.S. weaponry and shipping movements to Germany.^[8] On 2 January 1942, less than a month after the U.S. was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on the United States, the 33 members of the Duquesne Spy Ring were sentenced to serve a total of more than 300 years in prison.^[8] They were found guilty in what historian Peter Duffy said in 2014 is "still to this day the largest espionage case in the history of the United States."^[14] One German spymaster later commented that the ring's roundup delivered 'the death blow' to their espionage efforts in the United States. J. Edgar Hoover called his FBI swoop on Duquesne's ring the greatest spy roundup in U.S. history.^[15] In a 1942 memo to his superiors, Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr reported on the importance of several of his captured spies by noting their valued contributions, and he writes that Duquesne "delivered valuable reports and important technical material in the original, including U.S. gas masks, radio-controlled apparatus, leak proof fuel tanks, television instruments, small bombs for airplanes versus airplanes, air separator, and propeller-driving mechanisms. Items delivered were labeled 'valuable', and several 'good' and 'very good'."^[16]

Great Britain

Arthur Owens, a Welsh nationalist, was the owner of a company in Britain that made batteries to both the Royal Navy and the German Kriegsmarine. He was briefly employed by MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, to spy on German shipyards in 1936. But in 1938 he was so enticed by the attractive woman the German Abwehr provided him that he switched his allegiance. Owens operated as an Abwehr agent under Ritter and went by the code name: JOHNNY O'BRIEN.^[17]

Owens had second thoughts about his work with the Abwehr, and in September 1938 he informed British authorities of his connections to German intelligence and about a radio transceiver he would soon receive. The radio arrived in London in early 1939 at the Victoria Station the luggage office and Owens turned it over to British authorities. Although Owens met with Ritter in Hamburg on 11 August 1939, on 4 September he also volunteered his services MI5. On 12 September, MI5 agreed to make Owens a double agent, returned his transmitter so he could contact the Abwehr, and gave him the code name: SNOW.^[17]

Owens became a key agent in Britain's "Twenty [XX] Committee", a complex double-agent program whose name comes from an inter-agency board chaired by MI5 with representatives from all British intelligence services and interested departments.^[7] MI5 provided Owens with the false names of agents to give to Ritter and, beginning in the spring of 1940, Ritter sent some of his British-based agents and contacts to Owens.^[17] Once captured, MI5 would give these Abwehr agents a choice of becoming double-agents with MI5, or face death by firing squad.^[17] Several former Abwehr chose to work for Britain and delivered vital information to the Allies, including details about troop movements and the keys to cracking German codes.^[17]

But Owens regularly exaggerated his importance and MI5 continued to be suspicious of him.^[17] On once occasion, MI5 sent a second double-agent, Sam McCarthy (code name: BISCUIT), to test Owens.^[17] McCarthy reported back that Owens admitted he was double-crossing MI5, and this led MI5 to believe that Owens was primarily interested in making money from both sides and that neither side trusted him entirely.^[17] Following a mission by Owens to Lisbon in 1941 in which he met with Ritter, MI5 sent Owens to Dartmoor Prison for the duration of the war.^[17][7] MI5 had intended to capture Ritter during the mission to Lisbon, but failed to do so.^[17] After the war Owens moved to Ireland, disappeared into obscurity, and died in 1957.^[17]

Over the course of the war, the Twenty Committee grew to about 120 double-agents.^[7] The Twenty Committee almost abandoned its double-agents after the betrayal of Owens, but when the Abwehr failed to take any demonstrable countermeasures, the Twenty Committee chose instead to provide its double-agents with disinformation to pass on to Germany.^[7] After the war it was discovered that Ritter had known that the cover for this agents in Britain had been blow, but due to fear of repercussions Ritter did not inform his Abwehr superiors.^[7]

North Africa

Before the Second World War, Hauptmann Graf (Captain Count) László Almásy of the Royal Hungarian Air Force had lived in North Africa where he had been a desert explorer, mobility expert, and the celebrated aerial discoverer of the Lost Oasis of Zerzura (the subject of the later novel and film, The English Patient).^[18] In 1939, Almásy published in Germany a book based on his years in North Africa - Unbekannte Sahara; mit Flugzeug und Auto in der Libyschen Wüste (English: Unknown Sahara: With Airplane and Automobile in the Libyan Desert)^[19] With an interest in forming a spy ring in North Africa, the Abwahr sent Ritter to meet with Almásy in Budapest.^[18]

Ritter conceived of a plan, known as Plan El Masri, Almásy's acquaintance with Egyptian General Aziz el Masri, an Arab nationalist whom the British had ousted as Army chief of staff, to organize an Arab revolt against the British.^[18] Abwehr chief, Admiral Canaris, agreed to the plan, and sent Ritter to Taormina in Sicily to form the Aufklärungskommando Nordost Afrika (Reconnaissance Command, Northeast Africa) with Almásy as his second in command.^[18] Ritter's Sonderkommando (special forces unit) was tasked to provide military intelligence on desert warfare to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, extract el Masri from Cairo, and to form a spy ring in Egypt.^[20] Immediately assigned to Ritter were two pilots, a Fieseler Fi-156 Storch liaison plane, and two Heinkel He-111 medium bombers for long-distance missions.^[18] In addition, four multi-lingual Abwehr radio operators were assigned in Sicily, Greece, Libya, and Cairo.^[18]

On May 16, 1941, Almásy flew to Egypt to meet with el Masri, but the plane carrying el Masri was unable to reach the rendezvous point; it had developed engine trouble and crash landed 10 miles outside Cairo.^[18] On June 17, they tried again, only this time Ritter would meet el Masri in Egypt.^[18] However, Ritter's pilot refused to land at the designated meeting place due to difficult terrain and near darkness, and fighting over Libya forced Ritter's plane to ditch in the Mediterranean, wounding Ritter and forcing the survivors to spend the next 9 hours in a life raft before washing up on the beach.^[18]

Later Military Service

When Ritter returned to Germany he became a commander of several anti-aircraft installations, including an installation in Hannover in late 1944.^[1][7]

Later life

In 1972, Ritter published his memoir - Deckname Dr. Rantzau; die Aufzeichnungen des Nikolaus Ritter, Offizier im Geheimen Nachrichtendienst.^[21] (English: Code Name Dr. Rantzau - The Notes of Nikolaus Ritter, Officer in the Secret Intelligence Service). He died in 1974 in Germany.^[1][2]

Notes

Source notes

References