Fritz or Richard Klatt was an alias name of Richard Kauder, a converted Jew, born in Vienna, who volunteered for the Abwehr to protect his Jewish mother. His ‘Klatt Bureau’ reported to Vienna’s Abwehr post on two main situations: Soviet troop dispositions on the Eastern Front (‘Max’ messages) and British dispositions in the Middle East (‘Moritz’ messages from Turkey). The number of messages received in Vienna from ‘Max and Moritz’ was enormous: 3,000 in 1942, 3,700 in 1943, and 4,000 in 1944.2 However, the true source of Klatt’s information remains one of the main spy mysteries of World War II.
‘Max’ and ‘Moritz’ Cables
The Abwehr’s Viennese post Ast XVII (the number means the German military district) that received Klatt’s cables was organized after the Anschluss with Austria in 1938, and in 1940 it became Ast Vienna. Therre were two departments in it, I (espionage) and III (counterintelligence), and the Ast was responsible for collecting intelligence in the countries to the South East from the Reich and, after June 1941, in the Soviet Union.3 Colonel Rudolf Count von Margona-Redwitz, a close friend of Admiral Canaris, headed Ast Vienna until April 1944, when he was transferred to the Army High Command (OKH) in Berlin, and another of Canaris’s friends, Colonel Otto Amster, succeeded him in Vienna.
In July 1944, after the unsuccessful assassination attempt on Hitler, the Gestapo arrested both colonels as the Abwehr anti-Hitler plotters. On October 12, 1944 Count Margona-Redwitz was sentenced to death and executed, while Amster escaped from prison in April 1945 and in May SMERSH arrested him. In Vienna, in August 1944 Colonel Otto Wiese succeeded Amster.
In October 1940, Kauder and Ira Longin (or Iliya Lang), a White Russian and a close associate of the White Russian general Anton Turkul, established Dienststelle I or ‘Klatt Bureau’ in a villa in the central part of Sofia, Bulgaria. Sofia was important for the German intelligence and counterintelligence because Bulgaria was the only German ally country that continued to have diplomatic relationships with the Soviet Union, and the huge staff of the Soviet Embassy in Sofia included NKVD/NKGB and military spies. General Turkul was the leader of a fascist group of White Russian military emigrants in Europe, and in 1938 he moved from France to Berlin. After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed, Turkul left Berlin for Rome, where he organized his own intelligence network. Later, in 1944, he joined the Russian Liberation Army under General Andrei Vlasov’s command. In 1940, Turkul agreed to supply Sofia’s outpost with information gathered by his agents.
David Kahn described Kauder in his book Hitler’s Spies: ‘[Kauder] was of middle height, with a round face, well fed and well dressed… He spent his days in his office and on the move, apparently also doing some private business and paying off the Bulgarian police so he would not be bothered. He spent his nights in restaurants and cafes dining well and dating women.’4 The radio call sign of the ‘Klatt Bureau’ was ‘Schwert’, meaning ‘Sword’.
Presumably, Kauder’s agents, including ‘Max’, were stationed inside the Soviet Union, even in high positions in Moscow.5 Kurt Geisler, a former Abwehr officer who worked in the Stab Walli from 1941 to 1943 and was later captured by the Soviets, testified in 1947: ‘“Max” is a former Czar’s Army officer and a colonel in the Red Army signal troops. During the war he was the head or a deputy head of signals at the staff of one of the southern Red Army’s fronts located subsequently in Rostov-on-Don, near Baku and in Tbilisi.’6 Colonel Friedrich Schildknecht, head of the FHO group from October 1941 till September 1942, and captured in 1943 in Stalingrad, was of a similar opinion: ‘[“Max”] was an officer of the Red Army’s General Staff or a senior staff officer working at the front or army headquarters of the Soviet Armed Forces.’
Geisler also mentioned that ‘BAUN, who was in the town of Nikolaiken (East Prussia) with his Walli I, was making a monthly map, on which he marked information from “Max” reports every day. Each week he reported the data on the map to Colonel [Eberhard] Kintzel [Gehlen’s predecessor as FHO head]… I also know that Admiral CANARIS sent a number of the “Max” reports to HITLER’.7 The Fremde Luftwaffe Ost (German Air Force intelligence) also considered Max’s reports the best intelligence the Luftwaffe ever had. But, in fact, it is not known if the information was real.
In December 1941, British intelligence began to intercept and decipher Kauder’s messages between his bureau in Sofia and the Ast Vienna, and soon MI6 started to suspect the Soviets of being behind Kauder’s activity.8 At the same time, Moscow received some of the British-intercepted materials through John Cairncross and Kim Philby, the Soviet agents in MI6. Additionally, the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) received deciphered ‘Moritz’ messages through the agent ‘Dolly’ (presumably, James MacGibbon) and his handler Ivan Sklyarov (alias ‘Brion’), Soviet Military Attaché in London.9 In July 1942, the NKVD also began to intercept and decipher Kauder’s messages. However, Kauder’s modus operandi remained unknown.
The ‘Klatt Bureau’ operated independently of the main Abwehr office in Sofia attached to the German Legation and headed by Colonel Otto Wagner (alias ‘Dr. Delius’). Colonel Wagner was skeptical regarding Kauder’s activity. In 1946, he told the American investigator Arnold Silver: ‘One wall of Klatt’s office was covered with a map of the USSR west of the Urals, with a small light near each city. Whenever [an] Abwehr officer visited Klatt, one or more lights flashed repeatedly, whereupon Klatt would exclaim, for example, “Ah! A report from Kiev has just come in.”’10
At the end of 1942, Wagner complained to Admiral Canaris and Hans Piekenbrock, suggesting that Kauder might be a Soviet spy, and ordered an investigation of Kauder’s activity.11 It was found that there was no radio station handling Kauder’s traffic in Bulgaria. When confronted with this fact, Kauder responded that he received information from Turkey by phone. This coincides with Ira Longin’s statement to Arnold Silver, the American investigator, in 1946 that he called from Istanbul to Kauder in Sofia. Also, Geisler told his Soviet interrogators that because of the problem with receiving radio messages from ‘Max’ in Berlin, in 1942 he met with Longin in Sofia twice and discussed this problem with him. But in 1943 Wagner’s investigators also discovered that Kauder and Longin had contacts with the Soviet Legation in Sofia and, possibly, were given information there.
Despite the suspicion, in September 1943 Kauder was allowed to move to Budapest, where he headed his own Abwehr outpost, Luftmeldekopf Südost (Air Intelligence Outpost, Southeast).12 By this time, Kauder’s group consisted of 25–30 members, of whom 6–7 were ciphering operators, and 4–5 were radio operators. All Kauder’s staff members were Jews or half-Jews, and being employed by the Bureau was crucial for their survival. Until August 1944, cables were sent to Vienna, and after that, to both Vienna and Berlin. For cover, the Bureau’s signboard said Bureau of the Preserve Plant ‘Fruits and Vegetables’.
After August 1944, when Abwehr I was included in Schellenberg’s SD as part of the Amt Mil (Military Department), Lieutenant Colonel Werner Ohletz, head of the Branch C (operations in the east), became responsible for Kauder’s network.13 In November 1944, the SD moved the ‘Klatt Bureau’ to the small town of Csorna in Hungary, while the Ast Vienna was relocated to the village of Obing in Bavaria.14