The Reichsmarine intelligence staff merged with the Abwehr in 1928. By the 1920s, the slowly growing Abwehr was organised into three sections: Many members of the Reichswehr (a significant portion of them Prussian) declined when asked to consider intelligence work, since for them, it was outside the realm of actual military service and the act of spying clashed with their Prussian military sensibilities of always showing themselves direct, loyal, and sincere. When Gempp became a general, he was promoted out of the job as chief, to be followed by Major Günther Schwantes, whose term as the organization's leader was also brief.
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At that time it was composed of only three officers and seven former officers, plus a clerical staff. The first head of the Abwehr was Major Friedrich Gempp, a former deputy to Colonel Walter Nicolai, the head of German intelligence during World War I, who proved mostly ineffectual. The Abwehr was created in 1920 as part of the German Ministry of Defence when the German government was allowed to form the Reichswehr, the military organization of the Weimar Republic. The Abwehr had its headquarters at 76/78 Tirpitzufer (the present-day Reichpietschufer) in Berlin, adjacent to the offices of the OKW. The OKW formed part of the Führer's personal "working staff" from June 1938 and the Abwehr became its intelligence agency under Vice-Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. On 4 February 1938, the Ministry of Defence-renamed the Ministry of War in 1935-was dissolved and became the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) with Hitler in direct command. Under General Kurt von Schleicher (prominent in running the Reichswehr from 1926 onwards) the individual military services' intelligence units were combined and, in 1929, centralized under Schleicher's Ministeramt within the Ministry of Defence, forming the foundation for the more commonly understood manifestation of the Abwehr.Įach Abwehr station throughout Germany was based on the local army district ( Wehrkreis) more offices opened in amenable neutral countries and (as the greater Reich expanded) in the occupied territories. The initial purpose of the Abwehr was defence against foreign espionage: an organizational role which later evolved considerably.
Although the 1919 Treaty of Versailles prohibited the Weimar Republic from establishing an intelligence organization of their own, they formed an espionage group in 1920 within the Ministry of Defence, calling it the Abwehr. The Abwehr ( German for resistance or defence, though the word usually means counterintelligence in a military context pronounced ) was the German military-intelligence service for the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht from 1920 to 1945.
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