Ebook: Breach of Security - The German Secret Intelligence File on Events leading to the Second World War

ISBN 7183-0101-3
The document now printed is one of the very few surviving examples of the work of the most secret of all the German intelligence agencies active in the Nazi era, the Forschungsamt (Research Office). Very little apart from the fact of its existence appears to have been known by Allied Intelligence agencies during the war.
The record here printed shows that the experts of the Forschungsamt were able, in part at least, to read the codes and listen in to telephone conversations between the embassies and legations in Berlin and the foreign offices of Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Turkey, Belgium, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Latvia. In addition they benefited from the position of Berlin and Vienna as centres of the European cable system (all cables to Moscow and the Far East ran through Berlin, as those from London to South-East Europe ran through Vienna) to intercept communications between the Japanese embassies in Western Europe and Tokyo, between the Turkish embassy in Moscow and Ankara, and between the Bulgarian and Yugoslav legations in London and Paris and Sofia and Belgrade.
This document sets out a picture of British policy towards Germany from the signature of the Munich Agreement to the British declaration of war on Germany at n a.m. on 3 September 1939.