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| Draußen Stendal und Friedenthal - 'Seeing Without Being seen' |
| 2025-11-18 |
| [WarfareHistoryNetwork] The Brandenburgers, employing stealth and disguise, were Germany’s clandestine force during World Wat II. It was in the early hours of the German invasion of Holland, May 10, 1940, and a Wehrmacht doctor was tending to a soldier wounded during the capture of the key Gennep border bridge. “There’s not much of your company left,” he remarked to his patient, assuming so because he did not see others about. “Company? There were nine of us.” “Impossible!” Not to the soldier. “We are the Brandenburgers!” he declared. He was not referring to being residents of the city 40 miles northeast of Berlin, but to members of Germany’s most secret special force of World War II. For other such units as the British Commandos and Special Air Service and the American OSS, stealth meant sneaking up usually in the dark. For the Brandenburgers it was usually walking up, in broad daylight, straight out in the open—but still being just as secret, and deadly. The Brandenburgers were the brainchild of Theodor von Hippel, a captain in the Abwehr (military intelligence) concerned with covert combat operations and sabotage. From his own experience with guerrilla fighting in East Africa against the British in World War I and his study of the tactics of Lawrence of Arabia, Hippel conceived the idea of donning the uniforms of enemies and the clothing of civilians to approach positions and infiltrate them to seize and hold vital positions, commit sabotage, gather intelligence, and spread mayhem and confusion. Then he took the idea to his superior, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Canaris rejected the idea as too wild, even for the weird world he operated in, so Hippel received permission from the General Staff to create his special unit in October 1939. After gaining approval, the first disguise was the unit’s actual name, that of a mundane construction unit. Its members soon nicknamed themselves for the city they were secretly based near, Brandenburg. Brandenburgers were recruited on a strictly volunteer basis from the Volksdeutsch, ethnic Germans from outside the Reich. “There was not an area of Europe with which some group of Brandenburgers was not familiar, nor a language they could not speak,” author James Lucas wrote. Recruiting did not stop there but spanned the world from expatriates returning from abroad to those who spoke Arabic dialects, even Afghani and Tibetan. Although part of the Abwehr, the Brandenburgers were not professional spies and saboteurs, but still soldier specialists of the Wehrmacht, which decided their missions and ultimately their fate. “Seeing without being seen” was the credo of the training, combining standard sabotage with “how to spit like a Russian,” member Helmut Shwinkler recalled. “The course had a very leveling effect on everyone in it. “Independence and intelligence counted more than rank. It was typical of the place that the officers and soldiers shook hands rather than saluting each other. Unlike the rest of the army who were told to ‘leave the thinking to the horses because their heads are bigger,’ we were encouraged to think for ourselves and to develop intuition and resourcefulness. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |