Il Daily Telegraph pubblica oggi un articolo che prende spunto dall’analisi di alcuni documenti dell’MI5 recentemente declassificati. Quello di cui tratta questo materiale sono (tentate) operazioni condotte da agenti dei servizi segreti tedeschi nei confronti degli occupanti alleati tra il 1944 ed il 1945. Operazioni in perfetto stile James Bond, a tratti cosi’ apparentemente assurde da sembrare essere uscite dalla fantasia di un bambino. Eppure pensate realmente. Amesso e non concesso che gli agenti tedeschi catturati e le cui dichiarazioni sono contenute nei documenti dell’MI5 corrispondano al vero.
Female agents were also to be sent to kill senior Allied commanders using microbes hidden in handbag mirrors, according to interrogation reports.
One assassination device, captured by advancing Allied troops, involved a gun hidden inside a belt bulk with a Swastika emblem on it.
Documents from the interrogations of captured German agents disclose the Nazi security service, the RSHA, had a unit that was planning subversion operations in Allied countries using targeted assassinations and poisons.
The information came from a four-strong unit of German agents, including one woman, who were parachuted into Ayon, near St Quentin in France in March 1945, two months before the end of the war.
They had been flown from Stuttgart in a captured B17 Flying Fortress, which dropped them behind enemy lines before getting shot down.
The agents insisted that some of their colleagues had been equipped with various poisons, “not the usual ampoules of hydrocyanic acid, with which agents have been equipped in recent months to commit suicide after arrest,” a de-briefing report added.
Instead they were carrying a glass tube of Bayer’s aspirin tablets that included one or two that contained poison.
“Death was stated to take place ten minutes or so after one of these had been swallowed,” the report, released for the first time to the National Archives, said.
Targets were to be persuaded to take the asprin after smoking specially prepared cigarettes that would give them a headache.
“The agent was also to smoke one of the cigarettes and would take one of the real asprins from the tube,” the document said.
The method was designed for targets travelling on trains, although one of the captured agents, Anna Marguerite Prelogar, admitted that the idea was “fanciful.”
There was also a powder which was to be placed on door handles, books and desks, made of powdered glass coated with poison.
Another powder could be used “for example by waiters” to dust a room, causing death if swallowed but not inhaled.
A brown spherical pellet about 1mm in diameter was to be placed in ashtrays and the heat of the cigarette or cigar ash would cause the pellet to vapourise and “kill anybody nearby.”
A special cigarette lighter had a flat surface near the wick where a similar pellet could be placed.
Nescafe, sugar, cigarettes and the German chocolate called “Sarotti” had also been prepared with poison in them, the report said. One of the agents was “particularly emphatic” about the chocolate, according to the report.
“The above story seems somewhat fantastic,” it added. “and it may be that the agents prepared it together to make themselves interesting. On the other hand, both described these poisons quite spontaneously.”
The agents said they had been shown the powdered glass by an SS “technical expert” Hauptsturmfuhrer Winter in Neustrelitz in Northern Germany, but they were “not sure whether the samples were models or the real thing.”
Two of the experts apparently discussed supplying bacteria to agents and one of the captured men had asked for details but was told the subject was “not for little girls.”
The “microbes” said to be for use by female rather than male agents, were hidden in the middle of back to back mirrors carried in handbags.
The agent, Henri Morael, said he had seen test tubes containing poisons or microbes in different coloured liquids or powders which were also in a “sabotage text book.”
The microbes were to be used “by female agents against highly-placed persons in Allied occupied territory.”
MI5 was so concerned that a subsequent report said that “captured agents and hidden equipment dumps should be searched for cigarette lighters, medicine, foods and cigarettes which are obviously not part of a food dump prepared for the use of the agents themselves.”
The report marked “secret” for the counter-intelligence war room in London of the Supreme Headquarter Allied Expeditionary Force outlined “German terrorist methods.”
It said the German secret service, the Abwehr, had come up with an abortive scheme in June 1943 for undermining the morale of American troops in North Africa through the “widespread distribution of narcotics.”
An intercepted German document from October 1944, marked “secret state paper” discussed the adding of poisons to “one whisky, the schnapps, one liqueur and one bottle of wine” and the request from a member of the SS that “a simple method be prescribed whereby he can poison these drinks.”
The document also mentioned the “accumulation of strong poisons that can be injected into foodstuffs by means of a hypodermic syringes” such as sausages.
The poisons should take several hours or days to take effect, it said, adding: “It is important that the bandits should not drop dead in the house to which they have been invited, but only afterwards.”
Among other assassination devices, the US 20th Corps reported that they had found a pistol made to resemble a belt buckle, described as black with a silver-coloured swastika, “spread eagled on the front.”
“The cover drops down and by pushing a button, a two barrelled .32 pistol flips out, pointing directly to the front,” they said.
“By means of pressing two more buttons, the weapon can fire two shots.”
Lord Rothschild, then head of MI5′s counter-espionage section, had a bar of chocolate and a tin of Nescafe seized from German forces sent away for tests for poisons and asked his experts whether arsenic could be used to poison bread and cakes.
As a result MI5 recommended: “The eating of German food or the smoking of German cigarettes should be completely prohibited under pain of severe penalties.”
But an intercepted German document dated February 1944 suggested that the German had also been on the wrong end of poison attempts, this time from the Polish resistance using tins of Nivea cream containing a paste impregnated with mustard gas.
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