Büro Ha In April 1939, Roessler's friend Schnieper met the photo dealer
Hans Hausamann while on vacation in
Lugano. Hausamann ran a press service and specialised in military intelligence from 1935 onwards. Schnieper shared his political views, so Hausamann asked him to find him an employee. Schnieper suggested his university friend Franz Wallner, who was able to fulfill the intelligence service tasks assigned to him. Hausamann therefore asked Schnieper to find another employee who was familiar with conditions in Germany and would be a reliable informant. Schnieper suggested his friend Roessler. Roessler anticipated that the Nazis would soon launch a military attack on Switzerland and therefore agreed to work with Hausamann. but only on the condition that the offer was official. At that time, Schnieper was working as a junior officer in the Swiss military intelligence agency
Büro Ha, at the time located near
Teufen, and he introduced Roessler to Major Hausamann. However, he avoided meeting with him personally, so Hausamann used Franz Wallner, who lived in Lucerne, as an intermediary. From the summer of 1939 to May 1944, he sent him 80-130 individual reports per month but Hausamann did not pass on any information to Roessler. Roessler became one of the most important sources of intelligence for
Büro Ha.
Rote Drei Another recipient of Roessler's messages and analyses was
Soviet military
intelligence-agent
Alexander Radó, who ran a Soviet espionage network in Switzerland that was section of the so-called
Red Orchestra. In Germany it was known as the
Rote Drei. Roessler was recruited into the espionage network by Soviet agents and
Rachel Dübendorfer via . Schneider, an economist, became an editor at the Gladbecker Zeitung newspaper after completing his studies. In 1926, he was selected from 230 applicants as a translator at the
International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva. He remained there until the end of his employment in 1939, when the ILO laid off staff because its importance had declined, resulting in Schneider becoming unemployed. At the same time, Roessler placed an advertisement in the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung looking for a publisher who could also work in French-speaking Switzerland and on 17 July 1939 Schneider was hired. Schneider began to set up a branch of the publishing house in Geneva. Roessler and Schneider had similar political views and got on well, which resulted in Roessler telling Schneider of the reports he was receiving. Schneider was friends with Dübendorfer (who also worked at the ILO), and her partner Paul Böttcher. Böttcher was a communist and former finance minister of Saxony and lived in Switzerland under the name Dübendorfer. Like Roessler, whom he did not know personally, Böttcher provided Radó with intelligence. At a dinner together around June 1941, Schneider showed Böttcher one of Roessler's reports. About a year later, Böttcher told Schneider that a report by Roessler would be of great strategic interest to Soviet intelligence and asked Schneider if Roessler would be prepared to pass the intelligence to him on a regular basis. Roessler agreed and from the summer of 1942 to 1944 gave Schneider the typed sheets, who
couriered them to Dübendorfer. Schneider received no payment from either of the recipients for his transmission services, only reimbursement for the costs of the railroad.
The role of Karel Sedláček In June 1937, Karel Sedláček, a German speaking Czech intelligence officer, worked undercover as Karl Seltzinger in Zurich as correspondent for the Prague-based newspaper
Národní listy. By the autumn of 1938, Sedlacek was friends with
Hans Hausamann and receiving intelligence reports from him. In the spring of 1939, Sedláček moved to Lucerne where he met Roessler and through their common journalistic background, cultivated him. In September 1939, Sedláček began transmitting intelligence to
František Moravec of the
Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London and continued over a period of three years.
Battle of Kursk and Operation Citadel In early March 1943, Hitler planned a massive offensive against the Kursk salient known as
Operation Citadel in the hope of regaining the initiative in the east. On 15 April 1943, Hitler signed Order Number 6 to begin the offensive. Within 24 hours Alexander Foote had informed Soviet intelligence. On the 3 April 1943, a message stated: The Wehrmacht's attack on Kursk is to be postponed until the beginning of May 1943 because increasingly stronger Soviet forces are being massed on the northern sector of the front, especially in
Velikiye Luki. This report was true because Order No. 6 of the OKH ordered May 3 as the earliest date of attack. On 20 April 1943 a message stated the attack on Kursk is postponed to 12 June 1943. This order was not signed until 29 April 1943. The attack was later postponed again and began on 5 July 1943. In at least almost 70 cases, Sándor Radó forwarded significant messages from Roessler to Soviet intelligence. Roessler's intelligence wasn't only strategic in nature; he also supplied the Soviets with detailed information on the new German
Panther tank.
Remuneration Roessler was particularly mercenary in his approach. At the beginning of 1942, Roessler complained to Bernhard Mayr von Baldegg, who was an officer in the Swiss general staff at the time, staff officer to
Max Waibel, in command of Noehrichtenstelle I of the 5th Signals in Lucerne, that he found the work for Hausamann boring. Waibel decided to keep him interested by paying him 250
Swiss francs per month, which later increased to 400 francs as the war progressed. Büro Ha also paid him 1000 francs per month which was raised to 2000 francs per month as the war progressed. Roessler was also paid by Soviet intelligence, initially receiving 700
Swiss francs per month, increasing to 3000 francs per month as the war progressed. The following are some examples of captured radio messages that detail Roessler's mercenary nature: ::* 12.3.1943 . . . Agree to buy Plan Ostwall for 5000 francs. Does Lucy know whether these documents are genuine and reliable? ::* 10. and 11.11.1943 . . . Sissy states that Lucy group no longer works when the salary stops. ::* 14.11.1943 . . . Please tell Lucy in our name that ... his group will surely be paid according to his demands. We are ready to reward him richly for his information. ::* 9.12.1943 ... Inform Lucy not to worry about the money situation.
Roessler's Sources in World War II The record of messages transmitted show that Roessler had four important sources. It was never discovered who they were. The four sources whose codenames were
Werther,
Teddy,
Olga, and
Anna were responsible for 42.5 percent of the intelligence sent from Switzerland to the Soviet Union. The search for the identity of those sources has created a very large body of work of varying quality and offering various conclusions. Several theories can be dismissed immediately, including by Foote and several other writers, that the code names reflected the sources' access type rather than their identity- for example, that Werther stood for Wehrmacht, Olga for Oberkommando der Luftwaffe, Anna for Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office)- as the evidence does not support it. Alexander Radó made this claim in his memoirs, that were examined in a
Der Spiegel article that comprehensively debunked the claim as false. Three and a half years before his death, Roessler described the identity of the four sources to a confidant. They were a German major who was in charge of the Abwehr before
Wilhelm Canaris, Hans Bernd Gisevius, Carl Goerdeler and a General Boelitz, who was then deceased. The most reliable study by the CIA Historical Review Program concluded that of the four sources, the most important source was
Werther. The study stated he was likely
Wehrmacht General
Hans Oster, other Abwehr officers working with Swiss intelligence, or Swiss intelligence on its own. There was no evidence to link the other three codenames to known individuals. The CIA believed that the German sources gave their reports to Swiss General Staff, who in turn supplied Roessler with information that the Swiss wanted to pass to the Soviets.
Transmission channels There are least two theories on how Roessler received his reports in Switzerland. In the first earlier theory, Roessler received his reports via radio transmission that were encrypted with the
Enigma rotor cipher machine. This theory is supported by Jörgensen, Accoce, Quet, along with Tarrant In Berlin, Roessler was a member of the
Herren Klub, a prestigious
gentleman's club, where he met senior officers from the German military, many who would later become his contacts within Germany and assist with the disclosure of classified information. On 30 May 1938 in Lucerne, Roessler was visited by two of his contacts, the German generals
Fritz Thiele and
Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, who would eventually become the officer in charge of the intelligence department of
Army Group Centre in the
Eastern Front. Roessler was provided with an
Enigma machine and the latest
shortwave transmitter and told to start listening for messages from Thiele who was stationed in the
Bendlerblock. The messages were sent using the call-sign
RAHS. A typical day for Roessler was to receive transmissions via the Broadcasting Center during his work day, and rebroadcast that information to the Russian military after leaving work for the evening. In this theory, Roessler was trained by Schneider on how to use the Enigma and the radio transmitter. This thesis was comprehensively contradicted by
Der Spiegel magazine on 15 January 1967 article "Verräter im Führerhauptquartier". The second newer and simpler theory is described by Kamber who believes that the messages from Roessler's sources from the German Reich were sent via telephone and
telex lines to the Milan reporting center. From there, they were forwarded to Switzerland by a courier. These were documents that arrived at Lucerne railroad station via the
Chiasso border station by
Swiss Post mail train at 11:30 in the evening. Roessler collected them there almost daily. Stöckli who was friends with Roessler from when he first moved to Lucerne, had told two authors, Lutz Mahlerwein and Adalbert Wiemer of a historical TV programme "Dora an Direktor: der Angriff steht bevor" on 18 July 1989, that the reports had come by postal train to Milan. The TV programme details had been recorded by the
Stasi and archived.
End of operations On 12 December 1941, the
Abwehr discovered
Leopold Trepper's espionage network in Belgium and gave it the moniker
"Rote Kapelle". On 9 November 1942,
Anatoly Gurevich was arrested and during interogration he exposed the existence of the Swiss network to the
Abwehr. Hans Peter, the lover of
Margrit Bolli was actually a German agent, and according to one source stole an unencrypted message that had been left in Bolli's apartment when she moved apartment, as early as 16 March 1943 and passed it to German intelligence, who used it to decrypt Rote Drei radio communications. In the summer of 1943,
Heinz Pannwitz of the
Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle despatched the German Jew Ewald Zweig with the cover name Yves Rameau to Switzerland with the intention of penetrating Radó's network. Zweig passed on details of what he learned about the network to the Swiss Federal Police. Swiss defensive neutrality was important to the Swiss people, particularly in foreign policy that had passed from a political doctrine to tradition and had existed for centuries. There were also genuine fears that Switzerland would have been encircled after the
Italian armistice. When the Swiss were informed of the existence of the network, they immediately began searching for it on 9 September 1943. On 11 September 1943, a Swiss Army radio
counterintelligence company notified the Federal Police that radio signals from the Geneva area could be detected, which resulted in the arrest of radio operator Margrit Bolli along with Edmond and Olga Hamel on the night 13 October 1943.
Wartime arrest After Hamel and Bolli were arrested, Roessler feared that he would also be investigated and that his informants in the German Reich would be endangered. He asked Mayr von Baldegg, the deputy head of Noehrichtenstelle I, to intervene on behalf of Hamel and Christian Schneider. Mayr von Baldegg presented the request to the head of the intelligence office, but left it at that. Until the arrest of Dübendorfer and Böttcher, the federal police were not aware of Roessler's reports. Radó suspected that Christian Schneider told the federal police that the reports came from Roessler. On 19 May 1944, the federal police arrested Roessler, the cutout Schneider, the courier Tamara Vigier and Mayr von Baldegg. This ended Roessler's intelligence activities not only for Soviet intelligence, but also for the Büro Ha and the Swiss General Staff.
Roger Masson, head of the intelligence section of the Swiss army staff, was not interested in the intelligence activities of their informant Roessler becoming known to a wider group of people. He could have tried to have the investigation closed. However, he decided not do this. Instead he sent Roessler to prison for his own safety, as Masson feared that the German
Sicherheitsdienst would attempt to kidnap Roessler. On 6 September 1944, Roessler was released from prison. The main hearing against him and Schneider in the criminal case took place after the end of the war, in 22–23 October 1945, before a military court. Noehrichtenstelle I placed one of its officers as a defense attorney. The division court considered it criminal that Roessler and Schneider also passed on information in reports to Soviet intelligence that the Swiss authorities had determined through interrogations of deserters. The divisional court found Roessler and Schneider guilty, but nevertheless refrained from imposing a penalty because both had rendered great service to Switzerland. Roessler did not reveal the names of his German and Swiss informants either in the preliminary investigation or in the main proceedings On 22–23 October 1945, the Swiss military court sentenced each to two years.
Summary During his spy career, Roessler provided intelligence to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, at the minimum. He was often able to deliver accurate intelligence within one day of the orders being issued. For instance, a German army commander found a copy of his own orders in the Red Army headquarters building in the Polish town of
Łomża when his unit occupied it after wresting it from the Russians. This was reported to the German high command, yet they were unable to find the leak. ==After World War II==