Oberstleutnant Walter Nicolai.

nicholai

Abteilung IIIb was the department within the General Staff with responsibilty for Intelligence, Press, Propaganda and defence against enemy espionage activities. Its head throughout the war was Oberstleutnant Walter Nicolai. He spoke fluent Russian. Nicolai was considered ultra-conservative and monarchist.

Walter Nicolai, papers which also came to Moscow in 1945 as war booty. Accessible since the early 1990s, these papers have not been seriously examined since they first became available. They consist essentially of a multi-volume-compilation of excerpts from Nicolai’s war diaries, and his war letters to his wife, interspersed with later, interpretative remarks. Despite the methodological problems of such a compilation, the papers provide an interesting insight into the work of IIIb and the Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL, the Supreme Army Command)

Most pre-war efforts of Abteilung IIIb were directed towards France, while intelligence about Russia remained primarily in the hands of Germany’s military attaché in Moscow. Intelligence on Great Britain was the responsibility of German naval intelligence, thus it seems that Latin America and other areas overseas would have fallen under naval purview as well.81 However, Berlin’s July 1914 instructions to its ambassador to the United States, Johann von Bernstorff, placed the Western Hemisphere under Abteilung IIIb responsibility. When the war broke out, Major Nicolai oversaw “about 90 officers and military civil servants” in the “rear branch of IIIb” in Berlin that had both intelligence and counterintelligence duties. They obviously had some early successes because Nicolai was decorated with the Iron Cross Second Class in November 1914. He became a confidante of the new chief of staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn and backed von Falkenhayn’s desire to concentrate all possible forces on the Western Front after failure of the Schlieffen Plan in autumn 1914.

Sometime during 1915, the German military intelligence office in Berlin underwent a reorganization that changed Abteilung IIIb from a sub-division to an independent division. Major Nicolai wrote that this change was a mere formality to mirror the independent status his organization had achieved since the war started, and that he was already receiving the pay of a regimental commander, as was appropriate in such cases.

Sir Roger Casement

An article by Pöhlmann German Intelligence at War, 1914–1918. from The Journal of Intelligence History Winter 2005 gives a very good overview about Abteilung IIIb. It says that secret military police (Geheime Feldpolizei) was acting as an executive arm for counterintelligence work in the occupied territories for IIIb. This would mean that Nicolai's unit was not a police (or secret police) force in any institutional or legal sense. On the other hand censorship was in the hands of Nicolai's men with legal authority to do so. I think that here the line gets blurry...