SECRET ARMIES
10
ever,
in
its
shows
how
the Gestapo, the Nazi secret service, operates
ruthless drive.
For years Hitler had laid plans to fight, if he had to, for
Czechoslovakia, whose natural mountain barriers and man-made
defensive line of steel and concrete stood in the way of his an
to the Ukrainian wheat fields. In preparation for
the day when he might have to fight for its control, he sent into
the Republic a host of spies, provocateurs, propagandists and
nounced drive
saboteurs to establish themselves, make contacts, carry on propa
ganda and build a machine which would be invaluable in time
of war.
In a few instances I learned the details of the Nazis inex
orable determination and their inhuman indifference to the
lives of
even their
own
agents.
Arno Oertel, alias Harald Half, was a thin, white-faced spy
trained in two Gestapo schools for Fifth Column work. Oertel
was given a German passport by Richter, the Gestapo district
chief at Bischofswerda on what was then the Czechoslovak-Ger
man
frontier.
"You
will proceed to
Prague,"
Richter instructed him,
"and
As soon as it is safe, go to Langenau
near Boehmisch-Leipa and report to Frau Anna Suchy.* She will
lose yourself in the city.
give you further instructions."
Oertel nodded. It was his
first
important espionage job
as
signed to him after the twenty-five-year-old secret agent had fin
ished his intensive course in the special Gestapo training school
in Zossen
(Brandenburg), one of the
many
schools established
by the Nazi secret service to train agents for various activities.
After his graduation Oertel had been given minor practical
* Frau
Suchy was one of the most active members of Konrad Henlein s
Deutscher Volksbund, a propaganda and espionage organization masquerading
as a "cultural" body in the Sudeten area. She is today a leading official in
the new German Sudetenland.