DALLAS – Lawyers and family members of Botham Jean, the man who was shot and killed by a Dallas police officer, are demanding that she be fired.
More court documents were also released as public record on Friday in the shooting investigation.
RELATED: Protests continue demanding justice for Botham Jean

The new information from the search warrants reveals investigators are setting a timeline of who was coming and going from South Side Flats on the night of the shooting. Investigators removed the door lock from Officer Amber Guyger’s apartment and downloaded the electronic code information. They did the same for Botham’s apartment door lock exactly one floor above. In addition, they downloaded surveillance video from the apartment management office and gained access to building entry logs.

The new documents just made public on Friday give a glimpse into the investigation, but do not say whether a search warrant was served on Guyger’s apartment or personal vehicle. It comes the same day as Botham’s family and attorneys call for an internal investigation into DPD and the immediate termination of Guyger.
“We are calling, we are demanding that Officer Amber Guyger be fired and terminated immediately. She should not still be on the payroll for the city of Dallas,” said Lee Merritt, an attorney for the Jean family.
Guyger is charged with manslaughter for the death of 26-year-old Botham Jean. Dallas police said she had just gotten off her shift last Thursday night when she mistook Jean’s apartment for her own at the South Side Flats near Downtown Dallas.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit, Guyger said she was able to get into the wrong apartment with her key since it was left slightly open. She walked in, saw a shadow and fired her weapon.
“Understand where the charge is manslaughter where it currently stands or whether it eventually goes to where it ought to be which is murder, regardless this is a woman who in under four years on the force has been involved in two suspicious shootings. One was certainly criminal,” Merritt said. “There’s no place for her. The city of Dallas needs to send out a message that there’s no place for a woman like that on the police force.”
Botham’s family and their attorneys have serious concerns about the Dallas Police Department and Texas Rangers’ investigation. They claim Guyger has given a false account of what happened and said there are witnesses with critical information who have yet to be interviewed.
“I’m calling on Amber Guyger to come forward with the truth,” Merritt said.
The attorneys also criticized the department for leaking documents to the media to make Botham seem like a criminal. Merritt said there was a search warrant issued the night he died. It was specifically designed to allow police to go into his apartment and look for evidence of drug paraphernalia.
“On the night that he was killed, the Dallas Police Department investigators were interested specifically in finding information that could help assassinate his character,” Merritt said. “He lived 26 years on this Earth without ever being accused of a crime. And it took him being murdered by a Dallas police officer in order for him to become a criminal.”
“No. 1: Botham Jean did not kill anyone. No. 2: Police Officer Amber Guyger killed Botham Jean. She committed the crime. And No. 3: the issue is why Botham Jean being investigated as if he is the criminal,” added Attorney Ben Crump.
Botham’s mother, Allison Jean, said learning about the search warrant was worse than the call she got on the morning after her son’s death.
“To have my son smeared in such a way, I think shows that there are persons who are really nasty, who are really dirty and are going to cover up for the devil Amber Guyger,” Allison said.
Botham’s mother wants to see the toxicology reports on the officer released. She also wants to know if Guyger’s apartment and personal vehicle were ever searched. That’s unclear. There are multiple other warrants that were issued, but they have not been made public.
“I don’t know my son to be involved in such,” Allison said. “And I want to find out if whether the toxicology reports on Amber has been released because she was the murderer.”
Botham’s family has been calling for a fair hearing for her son and peaceful protests.
“But if information like that will come out to tarnish my son’s reputation in his death, I will not sit back and see that justice does not prevail,” Allison said. “It is time that we recognize that lives matter. My son’s life matters.”
The attorneys said the Jean family has only asked for equal justice and fairness. They strongly believe Officer Guyger is getting preferential treatment and said they have lost confidence in the Dallas Police Department and the Texas Rangers. They are hoping the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office will do the right thing.
FOX 4 reached out to Dallas PD and some city officials to ask whether Guyger’s paid administrative leave status would change. No one has responded.

Botham Shem Jean, a black man, was in his own apartment in Dallas last Thursday when Amber Guyger, his downstairs neighbor and an off-duty police officer, shot him inside his own apartment. One week after the shooting, those are the only details that are certain.
Everything else remains a mystery.
Jean was not accused or suspected of any crime. Guyger, a four-year veteran of the Dallas Police Department, says the shooting was an accident — the tragic culmination of a series of missed warning signs that revolve around a mistaken belief that she was in her own apartment.
According to Guyger’s account, when she arrived home to the South Side Flats apartments on September 6, she didn’t realize she had gotten out on the wrong floor of her building and that the apartment she was in was not, in fact, hers. Seeing a “large silhouette” in the dark apartment, she said she thought she was being burglarized. So she shot, hitting Jean in the chest. When she turned on the lights in the apartment, she realized her mistake, CNN reported.
The family of the 26-year-old Jean disputes this, arguing that Guyger’s story doesn’t add up. And for the past week, new details in the case have only added to the confusion, raising more and more questions about what happened that night and why Jean, a St. Lucia native who moved to Dallas after graduating from school, was killed in his own home.
The details of the shooting are almost hard to believe. And the handling of the case so far has left community members and Jean’s family frustrated and concerned that his death will become the latest instance of a police officer being allowed to fatally shoot an unarmed black man and facing no repercussion.

There are plenty of questions and few answers about the shooting

The immediate hours after the shooting raised plenty of questions about what exactly happened inside Jean’s apartment and why the shooting took place. More than one week later, much of that confusion still remains, as Dallas police and Jean’s family offer very different accounts of what happened on the night of September 6.
Efforts to understand what happened have been complicated by variations in official police documents on the case. According to the September 7 search warrant, Dallas officers said that Guyger, unaware that she was on the building’s fourth floor instead of its third, attempted to enter the apartment with her key when Jean opened his front door. “A neighbor stated he heard an exchange of words, immediately followed by at least two gunshots,” the warrant noted. This account suggests Jean was shot at his front door.
But the details of a September 9 arrest affidavit filed after Guyger turned herself in to police are quite different. That affidavit says Jean was actually shot farther into his apartment. In that account, which was written after an interview with Guyger, the officer returned home after her shift, unaware of the floor she was on, and attempted to use an electronic key to open the apartment front door. However, the door was slightly ajar, and the force of using her key pushed the door open, despite the fact that her key did not open the lock.
Guyger then entered the apartment and after seeing a “large silhouette” issued verbal commands and then fired twice, striking Jean in the chest. She did not realize the mistake until she turned on the lights, called 911, and checked the apartment number outside the door.
Jean’s family has disputed this account of the shooting. Attorney Lee Merritt, who is representing Jean’s family, said that he spoke to witnesses who heard Guyger knocking on the door and yelling, “Let me in,” prior to the shooting. But these accounts are not included in the police search warrant or arrest affidavit because, officers said, the witnesses did not share these details with police.
“Much of the affidavit doesn’t comport with common sense,” Merritt told CNN on Tuesday. “Certain statements are demonstratively false.”
The lack of clear answers has fueled rampant speculation, and some of it, like the possibility of a relationship between Jean and Guyger, has been swiftly dismissed by the family. A neighbor of Jean’s has also called attention to details, like a red doormat outside Jean’s door, that Merritt says should have alerted Guyger to the fact that she was at the wrong apartment. And for outside observers, one question looming over everything is why a trained officer like Guyger would be so quick to use deadly force in the first place.
Beyond the questions of what led up to the shooting and why it happened, Jean’s family and community members have raised a number of concerns about the pace of the investigation and how it is being handled. They argue that Guyger is receiving deferential treatment that a civilian suspect would not receive, noting that she was charged with manslaughter rather than murder, and that the charge did not come until three days after the shooting.
The family has also become increasingly concerned with what police are sharing about the case, particularly in the wake of recent reports highlighting that a small amount of marijuana was found in Jean’s apartment. Those reports, which came out on the day of Jean’s funeral, cited a police search warrant that had been issued in the hours after the shooting, leading Merritt to argue that police “immediately began looking to smear [Jean],” saying it is part of a pattern that has seen police departments and media position black victims as being culpable for their own deaths.
“They went in with the intent to look for some sort of criminal justification for the victim,” Merritt said Thursday, according to USA Today. “It’s a pattern that we’ve seen before … we have a cop who clearly did something wrong. And instead of investigating the homicide — instead of going into her apartment and seeing what they can find, instead of collecting evidence relevant for the homicide investigation — they went out specifically looking for ways to tarnish the image of this young man.”
On Friday, the family called for Guyger’s immediate termination from the police force. “She should not be on the payroll for the city of Dallas” Merritt noted, pointing to a 2017 shooting that Guyger was also involved in as additional proof that she should be removed.
The shooting puts renewed attention on the Dallas Police Department two years after a gunman shot multiple police officers during a protest in the city and made national headlines. In the days after that shooting, national outlets made much of the police department’s efforts at reform, with the Washington Post calling it a model department and praising its community policing programs.
The Botham Jean shooting has shown that these reforms, which have been accompanied by prosecutions and convictions of some officers involved in misconduct and excessive force, have not entirely erased black and brown residents’ concerns about policing in the city.
In recent days, protesters have renewed their calls for additional reforms, including changes to the local Citizen Police Review Board. They argue that the apartment shooting cannot be disconnected from other acts of police violence in the area, adding that while Jean’s death is not a scenario that immediately comes to mind when police shootings are discussed, it should still raise concerns about police accountability, racial profiling, and racial disparities in police use of force.
“We’re still dealing in an America where black people are being killed in some of the most arbitrary ways: Driving while black, walking while black — and now, we have to add living while black,” Merritt told reporters on Sunday.

Black people are much more likely to be killed by police than their white peers

Based on nationwide data collected by the Guardian, black Americans are more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to be killed by police when accounting for population. In 2016, police killed black Americans at a rate of 6.66 per 1 million people, compared to 2.9 per 1 million for white Americans.
There have also been several high-profile police killings since 2014 involving black suspects. In Baltimore, Freddie Gray died while in police custody — leading to protests and riots. In North Charleston, South Carolina, Michael Slager shot Walter Scott, who was fleeing and unarmed at the time. In Ferguson, Darren Wilson killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown. In New York City, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner by putting the unarmed 43-year-old black man in a chokehold.
While the circumstances of Jean’s shooting are different from these other high-profile cases, there is one possible explanation for the racial disparities: Police tend to patrol high-crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black. That means they’re going to be generally more likely to initiate a policing action, from traffic stops to more serious arrests, against a black person who lives in these areas. And all of these policing actions carry a chance, however small, to escalate into a violent confrontation.
That’s not to say that higher crime rates in black communities explain the entire racial disparity in police shootings. A 2015 study by researcher Cody Ross found, “There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.” That suggests something else — such as, potentially, racial bias — is going on.
One reason to believe racial bias is a factor: Studies show that officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in video game simulations. Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology professor who conducted the research, said it’s possible the bias could lead to even more skewed outcomes in the field. “In the very situation in which [officers] most need their training,” he previously told me, “we have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail them.”
Part of the solution to potential bias is better training that helps cops acknowledge and deal with their potential prejudices. But critics also argue that more accountability could help deter future brutality or excessive use of force, since it would make it clear that there are consequences to the misuse and abuse of police powers. Yet right now, lax legal standards make it difficult to legally punish individual police officers for use of force, even when it might be excessive.

Police only have to reasonably perceive a threat to justify shooting

Legally, what most matters in police shootings is whether police officers reasonably believed that their lives were in immediate danger, not whether the shooting victim actually posed a threat. It’s still unclear what this will mean in Guyger’s situation. During a press conference shortly after the shooting, the Dallas Police Department noted that the incident would be handled differently than other officer-involved shootings.
We also don’t yet know what legal strategy Guyger, who has been charged with manslaughter and may be indicted on more charges by a grand jury, will take. But it’s not difficult to take the use of force legal standard and think of how a lawyer would try to apply it to this case. Yes, Guyger entered the wrong home, but once she was there, she, as a police officer, genuinely feared she was being burglarized. A defense attorney might claim that it is reasonable to fear for her life in that kind of situation — an argument that would seem to justify the use of force.
David Klinger, a criminologist at the University of Missouri St. Louis, told Vox that a major issue in a criminal trial may be “whether she was acting in a law enforcement capacity or as a private citizen.” If she was acting as a police officer, the law gives her more latitude to use force. If she was acting as a citizen, perhaps not.
Pete Schulte, a Texas attorney and former police officer, has said that another legal question will be whether Guyger’s mistake of entering the wrong apartment could be “reasonable under the circumstances.” “If the … criminal jury finds that to be a reasonable mistake, she could be acquitted,” he explained.
In the 1980s, a pair of Supreme Court decisions — Tennessee v. Garner and Graham v. Connor — set up a framework for determining when deadly force by cops is reasonable.
Constitutionally, “police officers are allowed to shoot under two circumstances,” Klingner previously told Dara Lind for Vox. The first circumstance is “to protect their life or the life of another innocent party” — what departments call the “defense of life” standard. The second circumstance is to prevent a suspect from escaping, but only if the officer has probable cause to think the suspect poses a dangerous threat to others.
The logic behind the second circumstance, Klinger said, comes from a Supreme Court decision called Tennessee v. Garner. That case involved a pair of police officers who shot a 15-year-old boy as he fled from a burglary. (He’d stolen $10 and a purse from a house.) The court ruled that cops couldn’t shoot every felon who tried to escape. But, as Klinger said, “they basically say that the job of a cop is to protect people from violence, and if you’ve got a violent person who’s fleeing, you can shoot them to stop their flight.”
The key to both of the legal standards — defense of life and fleeing a violent felony — is that it doesn’t matter whether there is an actual threat when force is used. Instead, what matters is the officer’s “objectively reasonable” belief that there is a threat.
Jewel Samad/AFP via Getty Images
That standard comes from the other Supreme Court case that guides use-of-force decisions: Graham v. Connor. This was a civil lawsuit brought by a man who’d survived his encounter with police officers but who’d been treated roughly, had his face shoved into the hood of a car, and broken his foot — all while he was suffering a diabetic attack.
The court didn’t rule on whether the officers’ treatment of him had been justified, but it did say that the officers couldn’t justify their conduct just based on whether their intentions were good. They had to demonstrate that their actions were “objectively reasonable,” given the circumstances and compared to what other police officers might do.
What’s “objectively reasonable” changes as the circumstances change. “One can’t just say, ‘Because I could use deadly force 10 seconds ago, that means I can use deadly force again now,’” Walter Katz, an attorney who specializes in oversight of law enforcement agencies, previously said.
That is the constitutional standard. There are also different criminal standards at the state level, which may have different interpretations for what is reasonable use of force and what isn’t. But, broadly, police officers are allowed to use force if they reasonably perceive a threat even if a threat is not actually present.
In general, officers are given a lot of legal latitude to use force without fear of punishment. The intention behind these legal standards is to give police officers leeway to make split-second decisions to protect themselves and bystanders. And although critics argue that these legal standards give law enforcement a license to kill innocent or unarmed people, police officers say they are essential to their safety.
For some critics, the question isn’t what’s legally justified but rather what’s preventable. “We have to get beyond what is legal and start focusing on what is preventable. Most are preventable,” Ronald Davis, a former police chief who previously headed the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, told the Washington Post. Police “need to stop chasing down suspects, hopping fences, and landing on top of someone with a gun,” he added. “When they do that, they have no choice but to shoot.”

Police are rarely prosecuted for shootings

Much has been made of the fact that it took three days for Guyger to be charged in the shooting, because the Texas Rangers postponed issuing an arrest warrant to gather more information after the case was passed to their agency. Meanwhile, Dallas County District Attorney Faith Johnson has said that the case will be handled fairly and has left the door open to adding more serious charges. “The grand jury is going to have a full picture of what happened in this situation,” she told reporters on Monday.
Police officers like Guyger are very rarely prosecuted for shootings — and not just because the law allows them wide latitude to use force on the job. Sometimes the investigations fall onto the same police department the officer is from, which creates major conflicts of interest. Other times the only available evidence comes from eyewitnesses, who may not be as trustworthy in the public eye as a police officer.
“There is a tendency to believe an officer over a civilian, in terms of credibility,” David Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer who co-wrote Prosecuting Misconduct: Law and Litigation, previously told Amanda Taub for Vox. “And when an officer is on trial, reasonable doubt has a lot of bite. A prosecutor needs a very strong case before a jury will say that somebody who we generally trust to protect us has so seriously crossed the line as to be subject to a conviction.”
If police are charged, they’re very rarely convicted. The National Police Misconduct Reporting Projectanalyzed 3,238 criminal cases against police officers from April 2009 through December 2010. They found that only 33 percent were convicted, and only 36 percent of officers who were convicted ended up serving prison sentences. Both of those are about half the rate at which members of the public are convicted or incarcerated.
It is still unclear what will happen next in the case, and it could be months before Guyger appears before a grand jury. But one week after Botham Jean’s death in his own apartment, there is considerable concern that a conviction will not happen. “We will not stand by quietly as what we believe to be false narratives that diminish any culpability for the offending officer are advanced,” Minister Sammie Berry of Dallas West Church of Christ said after Jean’s funeral on Thursday. “The undeniable reality is that he was slain in his home, where he had the right to be and was abiding by the law.”

A prominent U.S. law firm had a deeper role than previously known in helping a Ukrainian leader suppress his main political opponent, court filings revealed Friday.
The firm — not identified in the filings but previously described as Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom — produced a 2012 report that was used to justify the jailing of an opponent of Ukraine’s then pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych.
What hasn’t been revealed is that Skadden expressed reservations just a month before the report’s release. Skadden wrote a private message in November 2012 to political consultant Paul Manafort that the evidence of criminal intent by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko “is virtually non-existent.”

Skadden had another potential conflict in the matter. While it purported to be an arbiter of the Tymoshenko matter, the firm had also been hired by Ukraine in connection with the former prime minister’s case. That included providing “training to the trial team prosecuting Tymoshenko,” according to the filings.

The details were released as part of a guilty plea Friday by Manafort, a former campaign chairman of President Donald Trump, who admitted to laundering more than $30 million earned over a decade while working as a political consultant for Ukrainian clients, including Yanukovych.
Skadden hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing. A firm spokeswoman wasn’t immediately available for comment. Previously Skadden has said it produced an independent report, that it hadn’t engaged in activities on behalf of Ukraine in the U.S. and wasn’t required to register with the Justice Department for working on behalf of a foreign government.

The Ukraine work has roiled one of the world’s most prestigious law firms. Skadden’s lead lawyer on the Ukraine report, Gregory Craig, who had served as President Barack Obama’s White House counsel, left the firm in April. He couldn’t be reached for comment.
Alex van der Zwaan, a Russian-speaking Dutch lawyer for the firm in London who also worked on the case, pleaded guilty in February to lying about his work with Manafort for the Ukrainian government and agreed to cooperate with the Mueller probe. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail.

Ethical Duties

Skadden lawyers may have violated their ethical duties by failing to provide competent, independent legal advice in issuing their report or by helping further an injustice in the courts of Ukraine, said Rebecca Roiphe, who teaches legal ethics at New York Law School.
“Skadden could face some problems with disciplinary authorities in D.C., assuming this is as bad and as baseless as described,” she said.
Tymoshenko was convicted of embezzlement and abuse of power in Ukraine in October 2011.
Amid criticism from the U.S. and the European Union that Tymoshenko’s prosecution was politically motivated, Manafort, 69, solicited Skadden to write a report on behalf of Yanukovych’s government.
The report, released publicly, criticized some aspects of the case but concluded that the evidence supported her conviction and that her due process rights hadn’t been violated.
Manafort used one of his offshore accounts to funnel $4 million to Skadden to avoid public disclosure of how much the firm earned for the report, the filings say. Skadden earned more than $4.6 million in total for its work while the Ukrainian government reported it paid the firm only $12,000. The firm has said it returned some funds it held in escrow.
“Manafort and others knew that the actual cost of the report and the scope of the law firm’s work would undermine the report’s being perceived as an independent assessment and thus being an effective lobbying tool,” prosecutors wrote.

Manafort worked closely with an unnamed lobbying firm to “sell” the Skadden report in the U.S., including having the law firm hand out hard copies to U.S. government officials and members of Congress, the filings said.
— With assistance by Bob Van Voris, and Greg Farrell

HITLER’S SECRET WAR IN SOUTH AMERICA 1939-1945 German Military Espionage and Allied Counterespionage in Brazil. By Stanley E. Hilton. Illustrated. 353 pp. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press. $20.
THE fascination with espionage, counterespionage and secret intelligence operations of every kind during the Second World War is endless. Year after year, we learn something new about the triumphs and defeats, the imagination, sophistication, dedication and courage – as well as the stupidity, greed and sloth – of the rival intelligence services who were then engaged in lethal combat around the globe. Since wartime intelligence literature keeps growing, we are now familiar with most of the activities of Britain’s supersecret Security Coordination apparatus and Special Operations Executive and of the United States’ Office of Strategic Services, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Naval Intelligence. We know how the theft of the German ”Enigma” enciphering machine and sheer mathematical genius enabled the British to penetrate Nazi military communications, and how the United States Navy broke the Japanese codes. Captured Axis documents tell us the Nazi, Italian and Japanese sides of the story. We can now make a powerful case for the notion that superior intelligence operations were at the root of the ultimate Allied victory.
Fresh material continues to turn up, throwing light on often important intelligence operations that have been generally ignored or overlooked. The latest case in point is Stanley E. Hilton’s superbly researched and extremely readable ”Hitler’s Secret War in South America 1939-1945,” which for the first time outlines the German effort to establish espionage networks in Brazil to monitor Allied shipping in the South Atlantic and beyond. The Germans wanted to track movements both of troopships destined for the Middle East and the Pacific and of merchantmen convoys bearing vital foodstuffs and strategic materials for Britain so that they could better direct their U-boats for the kill. A parallel mission was to spy on the American military buildup in strategic northeastern Brazil and to transmit to Germany reports from Nazi agents in the United States.
In the public mind, as is true even today, Brazil was at best a secondary security concern for the Allies. In reality, it was so important that both Washington and London went to extraordinary lengths to eradicate the German espionage networks there – not a simple proposition given the fact that for a long time key Brazilian officials (including the Federal police chief) were frankly pro-Axis. In March 1942, German agents in Rio de Janeiro and in the northeastern city of Recife informed their headquarters through clandestine radio transmissions that the British liner Queen Mary, carrying 9,000 American troops, was sailing along the Brazilian coast. As it happened, United States Signal Intelligence Service radio monitors intercepted the messages and provided the British with a timely warning; otherwise, Nazi submarine packs prowling the South Atlantic might well have sunk the ship.
In 1940, after the German conquest of Western Europe, reports reached the White House that Hitler planned to dispatch military forces to Brazil to support local German communities in setting up a Nazi regime; President Roosevelt became so worried that he ordered preparations to airlift 10,000 troops there and to ship another 100,000 troops by sea if the rumors proved true. (Actually, Hitler had never contemplated such an action.) And throughout the war, the State Department and the American Embassy in Rio de Janeiro were under unrelenting pressure from the United States military to destroy Nazi intelligence operations in Brazil.
This whole story is now told, in immense detail, by Mr. Hilton, a professor of history at Louisiana State University. He first published his findings in Brazil in his 1977 book ”Suastica sobre o Brasil” (”Swastika over Brazil”). Because Mr. Hilton named a number of members of the pro-Nazi Integralista Party, dissolved in 1938 after an abortive coup d’etat, as active German espionage agents, his book triggered something of a storm in Brazil. Former Integralistas accused him of being a Central Intelligence Agency operative, and attempts were made to close Brazilian archives to American researchers. The American edition, Mr. Hilton writes, differs from the original Portuguese version because it incorporates new material from declassified O.S.S., F.B.I. and Federal Communications Commission files, as well as confidential reports from the Brazilian police detective who played a key role in smashing the Nazi networks.
Continue reading the main story

█ ADRIENNE WILMOTH LERNER

The Abwehr was the German military intelligence organization from 1866 to 1944. The organization predates the emergence of Germany itself, and was founded to gather intelligence information for the Prussian government during a war with neighboring Austria. After initial successes, the organization was expanded during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Under the direction of Wilhelm Stieber, Abwehr located, infiltrated, and reported on French defensive positions and operations. The Prussians claimed victory, largely because of the success of Abwehr agents. In 1871, Prussia united with other independent German states to form the nation of Germany. The new country adopted much of the former Prussian government and military structure, including the Abwehr.
The intelligence agency was again tested at the out-break of World War I in 1914. German agents worked to pinpoint the location and strength of the Allied forces, helping the German forces to invade and progress through northern France before stalemated trench warfare began. New military technology changed the nature of espionage. Agency director Walther Nicolai recognized the need for a modernizedintelligence force and reorganized the department to include experts in wire tapping, munitions manufacturing, shipping, and encryption. The agency tapped enemy communications wires, intercepting and deciphering Allied dispatches with measured accomplishment. The Abwehr sent several agents to spy on the manufacture of poison gas in France, and tracked munitions production and shipping in Britain. The organization sent saboteurs to disrupt the shipment of arms from America to Allied forces in Europe. Several ships were sunk in transit after being identified by agents as smugglingarms. German agents, often acting on information collected by Abwehr, set fire to several American weapons factories and storage facilities. While the Abwehr was generally successful, the loss of the German codebook to British intelligence somewhat undermined the agency’s ultimate efficacy during the war.
After World War I, the Abwehr ceased operation under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. The intelligence service was re-established in 1921. When the Nazis gained control of Germany in the 1930s, some members of the intelligence agency began to spy on their own government. The Nazis created a separate intelligence organization, the Sicherheitsdienst , or Security Service, headed by Reinhard Heydrich. In 1935, the new Abwehr director, Wilhelm Canaris, and Heydrich reached an agreement about the roles of each agency, but both trained and maintained their own espionage forces. Canaris reorganized the Abwehr into three branches: espionage, counter-espionage, and saboteurs. He appointed three distinguished Abwehr agents to lead the branches, but only on condition that they were not members of the Nazi party. This aroused the suspicion of rival Security Service. The two agencies came into conflict on several occasions, and as Heydrich gained power, he persuaded the government to investigate members of the Abwehr for espionage and treason. Several members of the Abwehr were arrested in 1939. Though a handful of the agency’s highest ranking officials were active as double-agents or as members of the Resistance, the organization as a whole continued its espionage operations on behalf of the German government.
At the outbreak of World War II, Abwehr resumed operations similar to those carried out during World War I. The agency was in charge of tracking troops and munitions transports, tapping wires and intercepting radio messages, and infiltrating foreign intelligence and military units. Abwehr placed two operatives inside the British intelligence agency for two years, and developed a highly successful encryption device called the Enigma machine. Agents tracked and monitored various resistance movements in occupied Europe, and even sabotaged military and government strongholds behind Allied lines.
Canaris made the United States one of Abwehr’s primary targets even before America’s entry into the conflict. By 1942, German agents were operating from within all of America’s top armaments manufacturers. Abwehr scored perhaps its greatest victories in the area of industrial espionage, as agents managed to steal the blueprint for every major American airplane produced for the war effort.
One of the Abwehr’s responsibilities during World War II was the extraction of information from prisoners of war. While Abwehr agents remained largely in control of seeking strategic information from British, French, and American prisoners, the Nazi government issued a special directive to various branches of the military regarding Russian prisoners of war. The Commissar Order, as it became known, instructed the Army to handle Russian prisoners as harshly as they deemed necessary for the retrieval of military information. At one time, German concentration camps held more that 1.5 million Russian prisoners. Canaris himself raised several objections to this policy, largely on the grounds that it undermined the authority and efficacy of his agency and could cripple the German war effort.
In 1944, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, assumed control of Abwehr after an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler and several other high ranking Nazi officials. Himmler suspected that the plot was the work of agents inside the government, most especially the Abwehr. The July Plot also exposed the work of those Abwehr agents who had intentionally leaked sensitive information to the Allies. Several agents, including Canaris, were charged with treason and executed. The Abwehr was then dissolved.