Talk:Research Office of the Reich Air Ministry

Militarisation of civilian ranks

The World War II German civil service (just like many other countries) had a scheme for working out the equivalent rank of civil servants and military. This is talked about on "European axis signal intelligence in World War II as revealed by "TICOM" investigations and by other prisoner of war interrogations and captured material, principally German, Volume 7, Goering's "Research" Bureau" (PDF). p. 29.. A current British scheme is shown here.

However German civil servants were not military officers, just as British and American civil servants are not military officers.

Page 29 explicitly says that ORR was a civil service rank. It is not appropriate for the article to describe an OOR as a Lt Colonel.-- Toddy1 (talk) 13:45, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Toddy1, I'll take a look at it. I notice one mistake when you first posted it. scope_creep (talk) 18:44, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Primary sources

This article is mainly based on an editor's interpretation of primary sources.-- Toddy1 (talk) 03:56, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

Tukhachevski affair: not the linked Tukhachevski?

Drive-by comment: the header "Tukhachevski affair" links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Tukhachevsky, who died in 1831. Is that really correct?

(One minute with Google doesn't explain what should have been there, either...) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:980:2F71:1:916B:8049:1835:F23A (talk) 18:20, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

The article is wrong, perhaps because the source is wrong. I don' have access to the book cited here. It must be referring to Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the commander-in-chief of the Red Army, who was shot in June 1937, not the Colonel Alexander Tukhachevsky who died in 1831. What the article is referring to here, but not describing very well, is a German intelligence operation in early 1937 under which false information was planted that alleged Marshal Tukhachevsky was planning a coup to depose Stalin in mid-1937, which led to his execution together with a number of other Red Army generals. On 12 June 1937, three out of the five marshals of the Soviet Union were shot; Tukhachevsky was the best known of the three victims. For those interested, yes, the Soviet Marshal Tukhachevsky was a direct descendent of the Tukhachevsky who died in 1831. The Tukhachevsky family were an old boyar (noble) family and Mikhail Tukhachevsky was an officer in the Imperial Russian Army with a distinguished record who during his time in a POW camp in Germany in World War One was a friend of Charles de Gaulle who had taken been prisoner by the Germans at the Battle of Verdun. It yet be proved definitely, but many historians think there is a connection between the theories of military modernization championed by Tukhachevsky and de Gaulle, which are so similar in so many ways. Tukhachevsky subsequently joined the Red Army upon his return to Russia and played a major role as one of the more successful generals on the Red side during the Russian Civil War. One may object that it was unlikely that a nobleman would be taken in by the Bolsheviks as one of their leading generals, but there was actually quite a lot of that sort of thing that happened during the Russian Civil War-the pressing need for qualified and experienced military officers to lead the Red Army overrode ideology. The claim that the Red Army during the civil war was led by workers and peasants, not by former officers of the Imperial Russian Army, is mostly Soviet propaganda.

I'm writing this from memory, but it was always my understanding that this was a SS operation, not a Forschungsamt operation. The documents proving the plans for the alleged coup were forged in Berlin and then were passed on to the Czechoslovak intelligence service, which in good faith then passed them on to the Soviets. It is not entirely clear how important these forgeries really were. A number of sources claim that this was a cunning ploy by SS-SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich to trick Stalin into executing his best general together with a number of other senior Red Army officers, but it remains unclear if this was really the case. Stalin certainly did not need forged documents from Germany to be murderous as anybody who is familiar with his story can readily arrest. At Tukhachevsky's trial, which lasted all of a hour, the prosecution made no references to the forgeries. German language sources tend to credit the forgeries as crucial for the purge of the Red Army's leadership in 1937-1938 while Russian language sources tend not to. Regardless of the precise importance of these forgeries lies the nature of the power structure of the Third Reich. Anybody who knows anything about Nazi Germany will know that the Nazis spent a disproportionate amount of their time feuding with one another as there were always a number of different agencies, both of the German state and the Nazi Party, who were doing precisely the same thing and spent most of their time locked into turf battles with one another. This applied to the intelligence-gathering field just as much as everything else. There was the Abwehr, which was the Wehrmacht intelligence service, the SS, and the Forschungsamt. One of the major reasons for the failures of the German intelligence during the Second World War was it was all divided up into various feuding groups, who did not like to work together at all. It is possible that Forschungsamt worked together with the SS in this operation, but this claim seems a bit dubious. Göring and Himmler were rivals, not as an allies, through the two did work together from time to time if there was a common interest. The Forschungsamt was primarily a Sigint (signals intelligence) group while the SS was more of a humint (human intelligence) group, but the Nazis being the sort of people that they were were never content to leave well enough alone. The SS also engaged in signint while the Forschungsamt also engaged in humint. Everything that I always read on the subject states this operation was the brainchild of Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's deputy, who was one of the SS leaders least likely to co-operate with people who were not part of the SS. Heydrich did not like or trust anybody who was not with the SS. This claim requires further research. --A.S. Brown (talk) 01:08, 28 March 2022 (UTC)