Wilhelm Franz Canaris was a German admiral and the chief of the Abwehr from 1935 to 1944. Initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, Canaris turned against Hitler and committed acts of both passive and active resistance during World War II following the German invasion of Poland in 1939.
Hugo Bleicher was a sergeant in Nazi Germany's Abwehr assigned to the Geheime Feldpolizei in German-occupied France during World War II. Described as a "super spy-catcher," Bleicher infiltrated resistance networks in France and was responsible for the arrest of more than one hundred French resistors and British Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents. Most of the SOE agents he captured were later executed.
Vera May Atkins was a Romanian-born British intelligence officer who worked in the France Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) from 1941 to 1945 during the Second World War.
Christa Winsloe, formerly Baroness Christa von Hatvany-Deutsch, was a German-Hungarian novelist, playwright and sculptor, best known for her play Gestern und heute, filmed in 1931 as Mädchen in Uniform and the 1958 remake. Winsloe was the first to write a play on female homosexuality in the Weimar Republic, yet without a "radical critique of the social discrimination of lesbian women."
The Austrian resistance was launched in response to the rise of the fascists across Europe and, more specifically, to the Anschluss in 1938 and resulting occupation of Austria by Germany.
Virginia Hall Goillot DSC, Croix de Guerre,, code named Marie and Diane, was an American who worked with the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in France during World War II. The objective of SOE and OSS was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany. SOE and OSS agents in France allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England. After World War II, Hall worked for the Special Activities Division of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Erich Vermehren, also known as Erich Vermeeren de Saventhem or Eric Maria de Saventhem, was an ardent anti-Nazi, an agent of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organization, and later a leading Catholic Traditionalist.
Sidney Robey Leibbrandt was a South African Olympian, who during World War II acted as an Abwehr agent for the Third Reich against the British Empire in South Africa. In 1943, he was convicted of high treason by a South African court and imprisoned for 5 years.
Friesack Camp or Camp Friesack was a special World War II prisoner of war camp where a group of Irishmen serving in the British Army volunteered for recruitment and selection by Abwehr II and the German Army. The camp was designated Stalag XX-A (301) and located in the Friesack area, Brandenburg region. The training and selection by Abwehr II and the German Army occurred during the period 1940–1943.
The Irish Republican Army (IRA), a paramilitary group seeking to remove Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom and unify Ireland, shared intelligence with the Abwehr, the military intelligence service of Nazi Germany, during the Second World War.
The Abwehr was the German military-intelligence service for the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht from 1920 to 1944. Although the 1919 Treaty of Versailles prohibited the Weimar Republic from establishing an intelligence organization of their own, they formed an espionage group in 1920 within the Ministry of Defence, calling it the Abwehr. The initial purpose of the Abwehr was defense against foreign espionage: an organizational role that later evolved considerably. Under General Kurt von Schleicher the individual military services' intelligence units were combined and, in 1929, centralized under Schleicher's Ministeramt within the Ministry of Defence, forming the foundation for the more commonly understood manifestation of the Abwehr.
Princess Helena Adelaide of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg was the third eldest daughter of Friedrich Ferdinand, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein and his wife Princess Karoline Mathilde of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. She was a princess of Denmark through her marriage within the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg to Prince Harald of Denmark. Princess Helena was a Nazi sympathiser during World War II and was after the war exiled from Denmark, but eventually allowed to return, where she died.
Nic Waal, born Caroline Schweigaard Nicolaysen in Kristiania, Norway was a Norwegian psychiatrist, noted for her work among children and adolescents in Norway where she is known as "the mother of Norwegian pediatric and adolescent psychiatry." She was also active in the Norwegian resistance during World War II, and was named as one of the Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
Jørgen Haagen Schmith, also spelled Jørgen Haagen Schmidt, known during the war by the codename Citronen, was a renowned fighter in the Danish resistance movement during the German Occupation of Denmark (1940–1945). He was a saboteur, including his involvement in the bombing of the Forum Copenhagen. He was also a rescuer and liquidator. He died after a multi-hour firefight with German soldiers on 15 October 1944.
Friedrich Franz von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst was an Austrian prince who served as a military attache in Saint Petersburg. Later he was chief of German propaganda and director of German espionage in Switzerland. He also served with his regiment on the Russian front.
Valerie Niehaus is a German actress.
Vera Schalburg was a Soviet, German and British agent and sister of Christian Frederik von Schalburg.
Jessie Jordan was a Scottish hairdresser who was found guilty of spying for the German Abwehr on the eve of World War II. She had married again after her German husband died fighting for Germany, before she became a spy in Scotland. She was imprisoned and deported to Germany after the war ended.
Nikolaus Ritter is best known as the Chief of Air Intelligence in the Abwehr who led spyrings in the United Kingdom and the United States from 1936 to 1941.
Maria Kruse (1908–?), better known by her stage name Lea Niako, was a German exotic dancer and actress. Niako was renowned across Europe for her dance performances in the late interwar period, from 1926 to 1933. She often performed with little to no clothes; nude dancing, or Nackttanz, was at the time popular and was seen as an artistic expression of modernity and emancipation. For her unusual and exotic performances, she garnered great attention in the international press. She also broke through into the film industry, appearing in the Portuguese film Fátima Milagrosa (1928) and the Spanish film La Carta (1931).
