Visit of Magdeburg Town

Getting organized in the morning...

... to see The New Order 'Art'

MP S. Byczyński on Magdeburg's square

Taking a walk

The city hall of Magdeburg

An old man at the entrance of an restaurant: "HITLER IS A CURSE OF THE GERMANY. HE SPOILS OUR YOUTH. THEY ONLY KNOW HOW TO MARCH IN UNIFORMS AND SING, RECITING SLOGANS ABOUT WORK AND FATHERLAND. THEY ARE BUILDING ROADS, SO HE CAN SHIFT HIS PANZERS AROUND. THE TRENCH WAR IS OVER; THE NEXT ONE WILL BE MOTORIZED WITH THOUSANDS OF PLANES IN THE SKY AND COLUMNS OF FROZEN VEHICLES IN THE NIGHT. MANY OF OUR YOUNG MEN WILL DIE... I HAVE SEEN IT IN A DREAM. I WAS IN IT.

June 30 1934. "Night of the Long Knives", Himmler eliminates the opposition within the Nazi Party.

December 1, 1934. Jagoda passes into the action, Sergey Kirov, a founder of the Bolshevik Revolution, is assassinated by a former Chekist.

Stalin appoints personally Jagoda to lead the investigation. A purge of the old TCHEKA guard follows, but Jagoda's hold on NKVD weakens and he knows it. Nikolay Yezhov, Laventi Pavlovich Beria and Ivan Serov, all Russians, are challenging him.

Stalin has his own plans. Hitler will open the Europe for him; he will be an icebreaker… so the soviet revolution may reach the Mediterranean Sea. Hitler's Condor Legion is in Iberian Peninsula will start the war; Stalin must be ready to step in and take over the Europe. The Motherland must build an army no one could resist it… a force of millions with a power of steel (in Russian; Stalin = Steel man).

Christmas 1934. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris is appointed the head of "Abwehr" since Captain Patzig was in conflict with SS intelligence chief; Walther Schellenberg and SD head.
Hans Berno Gisevious, a counsellor in the ministry of the interior, who's duty was with criminal police, met with Canaris and provided information about criminal activity of Colonel Rudolf Bamler. In this reorganization, Canaris took care to surround himself with a hand-picked staff, notably his second-in-command, Hans Oster and Erwin von Lahousen, Section II Chief. All, but one, were not members of the Nazi party. The exception was Rudolf Bamler, who was appointed as chief of Section III to cement Himmler's trust in him, but Canaris made sure to keep a tight leash on him and gave him limited access to operational information.

January 1, 1935. Before he took over the Abwehr, the soon-to-be Admiral Canaris was warned by its previous head; Patzig of attempts by Himmler, Walther Schellenberg and Reinhard Heydrich to take over all German intelligence organs. Canaris, a master of backroom dealings which were so much a part of his life, thought he knew how to deal with them. But even while he tried to maintain an at-least cordial relationship with them, the antagonism between the Abwehr and the SS did not stop with Canaris at the helm. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, a man of Italian descent, had extensive connections among European aristocracy.

1935 General L. Rivet is the head of Deuxieme Bureau.

1935. Capt. Jurek Sosnowski, the agent of Polish intelligence, arrives in Berlin. He presents himself as a wealthy man and by means of seduction, promises of marriage or blackmail with pornographic photos he had taken. He is able to obtain from his mistresses certain Wehrmacht secret documents. After discovery, he is exchanged for few German agents whom the poles arrested. Two women are executed by axe. One is given a long prison sentence.

Winter 1936. Major Pokorny, Coronel J. Albrecht, Marshal's Ridz-Smigly representative and Senator S. Byczyński meet. Major Pokorny announced - "Polish Veterans received an invitation to Magdeburg. We are to meet with Germans there, the same Germans that were helping Soviets during 1920 war. We are coming as friends mind you. I feel we will be tested as to a possibility of alliance against Soviets. This is the opportunity we were waiting for."

In 1936, during Berlin Olympics, Nazis invited Polish veterans of Polish-bolshevik war, the Marshal's men, to Magdeburg for a get-together. MP Stefan Byczyński, Colonel J. Albrecht and Captain Antońy Landowski were there along with others.

During a grand tour of Magdeburg, Nazi hosts offered a veiled invitation to join the Germany in a future invasion of Soviet Russia. In reality Polish objected to the idea, but the Polish Intelligence service used Magdeburg meeting to FINALLY set a sting operation.

Accordingly, special burglary experts teams, broke into the secret files of the General Staff and the Abwehr and removed documents related to German-Soviet collaboration. To conceal the thefts, fires were started at the break-ins, which included Abwehr headquarters. Admiral Canaris was convinced that it was the work of SS.

August 1936. Berlin. Olympic games. Severyn Kulesza has to ride on a spare horse. He only gets second. At the games he passes, against a heavy payment, the "documents" to a Czech agent.

Through a double agent, Colonel Frantisek Moravec, the head of Czechoslovak Intelligence, was informed about a secret memorandum "signed" between Poles and Germans. The fabricated memorandum, in which Poland and Germany pledges a mutual support to attack Soviet Russia, was delivered to Czechs. The "memorandum" mentioned a secret support that will be given to invaders by a mutinous fraction of Red Army officers who will stage a military coup against Stalin at the time of German-Polish invasion. Fabricated documents (memos of live and telephone conversations with Michail Tukhachevski), supposedly stolen from German Military Intelligence files, are planted in France through an NKVD agent Sobolev, who gravitates in white Russian circles. In Czechoslovakia "a secret memorandum of Polish-German Alliance" is passed to Stalin through President Benes himself.

Stalin was Georgian, and very suspicious of jews controlling the early soviet movement in Russia, and communist movement around the world in general. He needed a pretext to clean up his political future. The Polish Intelligence sting operation, presented to Czechs, as a security leak from Himmler's GESTAPO, provided Stalin with a pretext he was looking for. The Czech president Benes personally informed Stalin's ambassador about Polish-Nazi alliance and a planned secret coup within the Red Army high command. Delivered by Benes, the sting message was looking very real to Stalin. Benes was scared to be isolated in the centre of Europe at the time when Hitler was demanding Sudetenland from Czechs. Maybe the "Magdeburg's memorandum" was more than a pretext to Stalin, since he paid (in gold), few months later, for a list of all future Red Army mutineers. It was delivered by a soviet NKVD agent in Paris; ex-white general Sobolev who later, with his Russian ex-ballerina wife, was executed by former employers. The list was prepared based on the information available from monitoring the golden era of Soviet-German military cooperation. The General Tuhachevsky was at the top of the list. Stalin swallowed, or used for his ends, the decoy. The BIG CLEANUP of 1936-38 started.

Prolog   Cavalry   Players   Trip   Meeting   Airport   Boat ride   Castle   Visiting   Bad Harzburg   Epilog   Executions   Photos   The End