En spion tæt på regeringen: Horst von Pflugk-Harttungs arbejde for Abwehr og Gestapo i 1930’ernes Danmark

Abstract

In November 1938, the German naval officer Horst von Pflugk-Harttung was arrested for espionage in Copenhagen and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment with subsequent expulsion. Pflugk-Harttung’s comprehensive military espionage of foreign ships from Danish soil had been compromised by British and Danish intelligence services during summer 1938. 5e revelation came as a shock for the Danish government who thought that they had cooperated with a journalist with close ties to the German Embassy and the Reich Chancellery and not with a spy misusing Danish friendship and confidentiality. It was publicly known that Pflugk-Harttung had been convicted in Sweden for weapon smuggling and also that the young Pflugk-Harttung in 1919 headed a right wing militia and personally had murdered the German communist leader Karl Liebknecht. Nevertheless, Danish ministers welcomed Pflugk-Harttung in 1932 as counsellor in Danish-German diplomacy. If a new war broke out, Pflugk-Harttung – so was the Danish calculation – could help the government to repeat the German friendly diplomacy during the First World War which had spared Denmark for invasion. The exact identity of Pflugk-Harttung’s employer in Berlin, is unknown. Archives on German intelligence operations abroad during the 1930’es are scarce and so is the research literature. As an intelligence officer in Sweden, he had most probably worked for the “Lohmann network”, an alliance of German industrials, offcers and politicians who wanted to restore a Great Germany after the empire’s defeat in 1918. In 1932, when Pflugk-Harttung entered Denmark, he seemed to have acquired a formal position under the new Abwehr Ausland which by the end of the 1920s had been upgraded and empowered abroad by navy intelligence officers like Pflugk-Harttung. As the Scandinavian governments in Berlin’s analysis would probably stay neutral in a coming war, German diplomats and intelligence officers were instructed to manage that these countries served German strategic interests. In Denmark Pflugk-Harttung undertook the role as influencer infiltrating Denmark’s political and military elite. Besides, he tied up with Gestapo in Hamburg and a few anticommunist Danish police officers to monitor and persecute German communist refugees. When Pflugk-Harttung’s old friend, naval officer Wilhelm Canaris became head of Abwehr in 1935, Pflugk-Harttung also set up a naval military espionage apparatus based on pro-German recruits and positioned along Danish coasts. In hindsight, the Danish government was naive and opened the possibilities of being exploited from Berlin. It is difficult however, to measure the exact impact of Pflugk-Harttung on Danish foreign policy makers as Danish security policy during the 1930s basically consisted in a constant diplomatic effort to demonstrate Denmark’s authentic neutrality towards Berlin. The Danish government therefore was to a large extent responsible itself for the concessions it gave to please Berlin as well as for the subsequent vulnerabilities the German-friendly policy this might have entailed. One of them was to leave still more military room of maneuver in Danish straits to Kriegsmarine. Another was to reduce intelligence operations to a minimum and to bet almost everything on the neutrality diplomacy. Ceteris paribus, this reduced Denmark’s insight into Germanys plans, military strength and multifaceted subversive capacities and operations. In contrast, Berlin, thanks to Pflugk-Harttung being in Denmark, must have had substantial insight into the world visions of the Danish elite and subsequently could use this data to tailor propaganda and secret approaches in Denmark during the last half of the 1930s. Berlin must have become confident that Danes would prefer to close their eyes for German subversion when it did not hurt Danish society itself (only refugees). Danes would also go far in letting Germany dispose of Danish soil and waters in order not to be involved in war and Danish public would accept the narrative of Germany being protector of neutral countries against so-called aggressive powers. The fatal consequence were revealed when Germany invaded and occupied Denmark 9th April. In this move, Pflugk-Harttung played a part. Not as a military planner, neither as political strategist. But his espionage apparatus and political infiltration into the elite during several years had made Denmark an easy prey.