The German Naval Intelligence Service (German: Marinenachrichtendienst [MND]) was the naval intelligence department of the Germany Navy and had a long history, going back to the naval aspirations of German emperor Wilhelm II in 1899.
The department had various names throughout its existence. Between 1901 and 1919, the service was called the Nachrichten-Abteilung also known as N (English: Military intelligence department) and was the naval intelligence service of the Imperial German Navy. It focused its efforts on France, the United States and above all the United Kingdom, whose Royal Navy was Germany's principal rival for naval supremacy. Its activities had little practical impact on the course of the First World War and it was dissolved in 1919 after Germany's defeat in the war. After the war, saw the establishment of the observation service (B-Dienst) in 1918–1919. In spring 1925, the Naval Intelligence Division was disbanded and did not reform until October 1934 under Theodor Arps when it was named Marinenachrichtendienst (English: Naval Intelligence Service). During the Second World War, the service underwent various re-organisations, starting as part of 2/SKL, later 4/SKL of the Oberkommando der Marine (OKM) and finally dissolved on 22 July 1945, two months after the end of hostilities.
Establishment After the Admiralstab was established in 1899, its chief, Vice-Admiral Otto von Diederichs, sought to establish a naval intelligence department. He petitioned Kaiser Wilhelm II in January 1900 to approve the project. Although the Kaiser approved, Diederichs' plans were blocked by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz of the German Imperial Naval Office, with whom he had previously clashed over plans to expand the authority of the Admiralstab. Tirpitz simply declined to answer Diederichs' request for funds, prompting the latter to approach the Kaiser again in January 1901.
Diederichs presented a memorandum arguing that without an intelligence staff, it would be impossible for the navy to develop contingency plans for war. It needed to focus on Germany's most likely naval enemies – France, the United Kingdom and the United States – but currently had only limited means for gathering intelligence, including reviewing newspaper reports and utilising naval attachés as a source of information. The navy needed to have its own dedicated intelligence staff, modelled on the German Army's Abteilung IIIb. Diederichs asked for four staff to man the new department; one staff officer to serve as its head, with one lieutenant commander as assistant; one more officer off active duty to carry out confidential work such as couriering correspondence and paying agents; and a cartographer who could double as a photographer. It would need an annual budget of ℳ150,000 marks a year.
The Kaiser again approved the proposal and directed the Naval Office to implement it, but Tirpitz continued to obstruct Diederichs – this time by reducing his budget from the requested ℳ150,000 marks to only ℳ10,000. Nonetheless this was enough to establish the new department at the Admiralstabs headquarters at 70 Königgrätzer Straße (today's Stresemannstraße) in Berlin. Originally called the Nachrichtenbüro ("Intelligence Bureau"), it was soon renamed the Nachrichten-Abteilung or "Intelligence Department", known simply as N for short.
1901 to 1918 The Navy news service () was an educational and news analysis service of the Imperial German Navy (German: Kaiserliche Marine) or Admiralstab between 1901 and 1919. From 1901 it was known as the news bureau () and Intelligence Bureau (N) and was considered separate in function and form from the news service of the German Imperial Naval Office, whose function was considered a press or propaganda office of the Navy.
German signals intelligence began in 1912 with experiments using antennae attached to kites to discover and establish the frequencies of British naval radio stations.
Organisation Before the First World War, the organisation of the Naval Intelligence Service was as follows: In the Naval Staff, there was a single naval officer: Kapitänleutnant Braune, who was responsible for all questions and problems of the intelligence service, and establishment of the naval signals intelligence network. The department soon grew in size to four members, despite Tirpitz's continued obstructions. It had three heads during its 18 years in existence. The executive head of the unit was Fritz von Prieger. The administrative heads of the news department of the Naval Staff of the Navy were
Captain : 1901 to March 1914. Later Commander. Commander : March 1914 to February 1918. Frigate Captain. Captain : February 1918 – 1919
The director of N customarily signed documents with a capital 'N' and the first letter of his own name.
Within N, duties were divided between several subdivisions. The most important was the overseas intelligence gathering division, NI, which was managed from 1913 to 1919 by Commander (later Naval Captain) . Secretarial responsibilities were managed by naval Lieutenant Georg Stammer, who handled correspondence for N and NI and also worked for naval counter-espionage. More branches were added during the First World War, when N grew hugely in size. Although its numbers are not recorded in the surviving German archives of the period, it certainly employed hundreds of staff at the very least; its army counterpart employed over 1,100 people at its peak in 1918. One of those employed by N in a minor position was Wilhelm Canaris, who rose to become head of the Abwehr, Nazi Germany's military intelligence service. A naval counter-espionage agency called G (for Gegenspionage or counter-espionage) was spun off from N, under the authority of Paul Ebert, who was to become the news service director in 1918. A sabotage branch called NIV was established within N in the spring of 1916, operating under the cover of a commercial agency.
The news service operated in a significantly different fashion from its great rival, the British Secret Service Bureau (which later divided to become MI5 and MI6). It was directly integrated into the Admiralstab and recruited exclusively from the Imperial Navy, in contrast to its more independent and less military-oriented British counterpart. Rather than pursuing careers in the organisation, its staff would serve stints of a few years in N before rotating back out into mainstream naval careers. After Tapken left N in 1914, for instance, he continued working for the Admiralstab in various capacities and was promoted to rear-admiral during the war.
Operations Recruitment The primary target of the News Service was the British Royal Navy, the largest and most powerful navy of the time. From its establishment in 1901, it sought to recruit a network of agents around the world to observe the movement of foreign warships, which in practice meant principally British ships. Political considerations led the service to also focus attention on the French Navy. The organisation recruited two types of agents: fleet observers, rapporteur () or (BEs) and confidential men () or (VMs). BEs were originally intended to gather intelligence on foreign naval movements while VMs were to help supply German warships in wartime. The commanders of individual German battleships were responsible for recruiting agents in each of their ports of call. To protect agent networks, all communications with BEs were routed exclusively through "main correspondents" () or HBEs who were responsible for providing them with codes, wireless telegraphs and other secret communications equipment during periods of international tension or war.
Recruiting agents was not straightforward for N. It sought to recruit reserve German army officers working abroad, but this resulted in complaints from the army and only produced a few recruits (though this exercise did make it possible for N to recruit more agents during the war). Its army intelligence counterpart, Abteilung IIIb, was of little help; the two agencies viewed each other as rivals and were reluctant to share information or assets. The various German steamship companies, especially the Hamburg America Line (HAL), provided a valuable source of recruits. Shipping employees were regarded as ideal candidates for recruitment; they were widely traveled, often expert in naval matters and were stationed across the world. Their companies were happy to cooperate as they looked forward to receiving valuable naval contracts, while the employees themselves would enjoy exemption from conscription so that they could continue to work as naval intelligence agents. The German agent Carl Hans Lody, who spied in the UK in the early months of the First World War, was one such example of a shipping employee who had been recruited as an operative.
The German diplomatic service was also an important source of recruits, with the Admiralstab approaching German diplomats to recruit them directly or to enlist their help in recruiting others. The German foreign ministry had reservations about this activity, as it feared the consequences for its reputation if it became known that its diplomats were working for the navy, but by 1911 it had thrown its support behind the navy's efforts to recruit agents.
It was then alleged that during the early 20th century, the unit placed a troupe of fleet observers along the Russian Baltic coast. The unit used its own agent networks, especially against the Russian Empire. To that end, the service had set up a number of bases in the Scandinavian countries. From 1912 it cooperated with the Swedish naval service to enable military reconnaissance. During 1914–1915 of the First World War, the service participated decisively in the use of the East Asia Squadron,For activities of intelligence department in Latin America, see BAMA-stock RM 5/2181. "Stages Atlantic and Pacific, Havana, Rio, Santos, Valparaiso". The settlement of the stages will last until about 1920–21. later on the revolutionizing of Russia and Finland. When the war ended, the news department of the Naval Staff unfortunately destroyed large parts of their records inventory,Federal Archives-Military Archive (BArch-MA) Department RM 5. a fact which today makes very difficult verification of allegations contained in this paragraph.
Day-to-day operations On the eve of the First World War, N had established a global "war intelligence system" (Kriegsnachrichtenwesen or KNW) which was intended to provide a flow of intelligence on foreign naval movements in the event of war or heightened tension. In practice, the system proved a failure. Britain cut Germany's overseas cables in August 1914, cutting off contact between N and many of its operatives abroad. In 1915 the Admiralstab instructed most of its overseas agents to discontinue their activities. In addition, the German navy's operational plans changed so frequently that it made it almost impossible to undertake long-term intelligence-gathering.
In 1914 there was no organised radio reconnaissance in the German Imperial Navy, but only a radio monitoring service – B service (B-Dienst), which was carried out from aboard the fleet ships When they began around 1907/08, to listen to the radio communications of the British Navy, the service was seeking insight on how technical communication were achieved. The News service wasn't specifically looking to achieve tactical or operational superiority, but rather to get to know the state of radio engineering development in the Royal Navy and to track it. The monitoring was carried out by Radio Station Heligoland, the vessel SMS Zieten, a fishery protection ship and a trawler for communication tests. The fact that Britain used plain language in the text and call address was not evaluated.