Speaking of the German intelligence service, it is estimated that many people will think that it is the best intelligence department in World War II, after all, the German intelligence chief Heydrich Reinhardt did not blow it out, and could turn the SS security service, which was originally only a dozen people, into one of the best intelligence agencies in the world.
However, Heydrich and his intelligence services could not represent all German intelligence services, for example, the German Foreign Service on the Eastern Front was a typical pit cargo, for no reason, but because none of the intelligence services it provided were accurate.
Founded in 1917, the "Foreign Service" is one of the oldest intelligence services in Germany and an important source of intelligence for the German General Staff, which was created to assess the military strength of other countries, especially those that may be hostile to Germany, and to analyze and predict the activities of enemy forces on all fronts in the war. After the First World War, the German General Staff was dissolved, but the Foreign Forces Department was transformed into the Army Statistics Department under the "t3 Department" of the Wehrmacht Office, and was not renamed the Foreign Forces Department until 1931.
For some time afterwards, the Foreign Forces Service remained an important source of intelligence for the German General Staff until 1938, when it was split into the "3rd Department" Western Division and the "11th Division" Eastern Division. Originally, the split of the Foreign Military Division was intended to allow it to better take charge of different strategic directions, but this split made a joke. Because the Foreign Military Service on the Eastern Front must not only search for intelligence from Eastern European countries, including the Soviet Union, but also pay attention to the countries to the east of the Soviet Union, including but not limited to: Japan, the United States, Canada, etc.
The scope of intelligence gathering in the Foreign Armies of the Eastern Front is to go all the way to the east, and it is estimated that it will be able to turn back to France in the end, after all, if you go all the way to the east, you will definitely be able to return to Western Europe.
When Hitler drew up the battle plan for the attack on the Soviet Union, the intelligence of the Foreign Forces Office on the Eastern Front was an important source of reference for intelligence, but Hitler probably did not expect that the Foreign Military Service on the Eastern Front was so unreliable, and nothing else to say, just the head of the Foreign Military Service on the Eastern Front, Albert Günzel, was enough to say, because this was not worthy of being an intelligence chief at all.
As the person in charge of collecting Soviet intelligence, he himself knew nothing about intelligence work, had never been to the Soviet Union, could not speak a word of Russian, and did not know half anything about the Soviet Union. It is unreliable to let this guy be responsible for collecting Soviet intelligence.
Originally, soviet intelligence was not easy to collect, and the Soviet People's Commissariat of internal affairs was also a good hand in intelligence warfare, and now that Kinzerl was asked to take the foreign armies of the Eastern Front to collect intelligence, it must not be the same as the husky who smoked the wind? As a result, the intelligence gathered by the Foreign Military Department on the Eastern Front led by Kintzel became this style.
In January 1941, they compiled a manual of reports on the soviet forces, which contained no description of the composition of the Soviet army, except that the general Soviet army group might consist of a command, several infantry corps, heavy artillery, aviation and logistical support units, and speculated that the army group might be equipped with cavalry or motorized troops.
In fact, it is not difficult to see that the manual given by Günzel does not have a single sentence, and the whole article is running the train with a mouth full of mouths. The only thing he acknowledged was that the Foreign Armies on the Eastern Front did not know much about the actual situation of the Soviet army, and the German generals asked themselves to make up for it when they were fighting.
This was probably the only place that "comforted" Hitler and the German generals, because Günzel and the foreign armies on the Eastern Front were even more unreliable in other ways. For example, with regard to the number of Soviet troops in the western territory, at first Kintzel said at the end of 1940 that the Soviet Union had 70 divisions in the western territory, by the beginning of 1941 the number became 90 divisions, in March it became 120 divisions, and by the end of May the number became 180 divisions.
Hitler almost lost his nose when he saw the report on the strength of the Soviet army, so why did the numbers reported by the Foreign Armies office on the Eastern Front become more and more than one day? Hitler's own heart was cold, and he felt as if he had stepped into a pit. In order to cover up the intelligence error and to strengthen Hitler's determination to attack the Soviet Union, the Chief of the General Staff of the German Army, Franz Halder, comforted Hitler tightly, saying that although the Soviet army had numerical superiority, Germany's weapons were well-equipped, and the German army was well-trained and would be able to defeat the Soviets on the battlefield.
Halder said so, and Hitler could only choose to believe it, but unfortunately neither of them knew how unreliable the Foreign Military Service on the Eastern Front was. Leaving aside the fact that the Foreign Military Service on the Eastern Front knew nothing about the Population Figures and Industrial Capabilities of the Soviet Union, the German General Staff could not estimate the Soviet Military Capabilities very well. Even the maps they provide are unreliable.
The map given by the Foreign Military Department of the Eastern Front was compiled on the map of the old Tsarist Russia with the official tourist map published by the Soviet Union, and the highway marked on it may be a rural dirt road in reality, or it may be a dirt road in the real sense, and the place originally marked as a village is actually a town. Fighting with such a map, I believe that the German officers were very tempted to drag out the people in the foreign military departments on the Eastern Front and kill them.
As for the deployment of Soviet forces in the border military regions, it is even more true and do not think about it, and the Soviet military manual published by the Foreign Military Department of the Eastern Front is not written at all. The Foreign Military Service on the Eastern Front had no understanding of the Soviet military deployment in the border areas, and the information given was entirely based on speculation and speculation, and the specific names of the Soviet troops were unknown.
Germany's Army Group North was a typical victim of this, after more than half a month of fighting the Soviets, before they knew in mid-July that their opponents were the Soviet 9th Army and the 26th Army, and they had been fighting each other for a long time.
In fact, the intelligence gathering work of the Foreign Military Departments on the Eastern Front was a complete failure, and the accuracy and reliability of its intelligence work could not be regarded as even amateur. In this regard, although the anti-espionage capabilities of the Soviet People's Commissariat of internal affairs were outstanding, so that the Foreign Military Service on the Eastern Front could only rely on the Russian exiles of the Tsarist era and defectors after the founding of the Soviet Union to obtain intelligence, it was more that the Foreign Armies on the Eastern Front were in their own low ability to work.
The vast majority of the intelligence collected by the foreign armies on the Eastern Front before the outbreak of the Soviet-German war was mainly speculation, and did not make any effective countermeasures at all, and even deliberately concealed their mistakes in intelligence work and came up with a batch of unreliable intelligence. Looking at it this way, we are not surprised that the German army faced a series of problems after the outbreak of the Soviet-German war, and the information obtained before the war was not accurate, so is it not normal to encounter difficulties and problems?