Walter Nicolai was the first senior IC (Intelligence) Officer in the Imperial German Army. A supporter of the Great War, he ran the military secret service, Abteilung IIIb. According to Höhne and Zolling, he was one of the founders of the German Fatherland Party.
Nicolai was born in Braunschweig on August 1, 1873, the son of a Prussian Army captain and a farmer’s daughter. At the age of twenty, he decided to pursue a military career.
From 1901 to 1904, Nicolai studied at the War Academy in Berlin. Shortly before his appointment as Chief of the Intelligence Service of the German High Command, he was known to have taken trips to Russia and spoke the language fluently. With regard to politics, Nicolai was considered to be an ultraconservative monarchist.
In 1906, Nicolai began his career in Abteilung IIIb. He also took over the news station in Königsberg. Under his leadership, it became a major center for espionage against the Russian Empire. In early 1913, Nicolai was named the head of Abteilung IIIb, which helped to inform others of the Austrian espionage case against Captain Alfred Redl.
Between 1913 and 1919, Nicolai headed the German secret service and directed Abteilung IIIb intensively during the First World War. He wrote, “Before each new acquisition, delivery pp. to ask the I.O., what benefits it brings for the war”.
Nicolai was best remembered for employing the Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod, better known under her stage name Mata Hari (born August 7, 1876; died October 15, 1917). Information on Hari was revealed nearly sixty years after the war in the so-called Gempp Report. Also known as “Agent H 21″, Mata Hari was hired by the German secret service in the late autumn of 1915, but it was not until May of the following year that Nicolai decided to train her as an agent. He assigned Major Roepell to be her commanding officer.
Roepell taught Hari “on long walks on the outskirts of the city the basics of the agent’s job”. An expert in cipher writing also practiced “chemical writing” with her. After a week of “training “, Mata Hari’s mission was (1) to reconnoiter the enemy’s upcoming offensive plans from Paris, (2) travel through areas of military interest in France, and (3) maintain contact with both Roepell (director at the Kriegsnachrichtenstelle West in Düsseldorf) and Major Arnold Kalle (director of agent HQ in the German embassy in Madrid, Spain). Hari was then subordinated to Captain Hoffmann, who gave her the codename “H 21”.
In January 1917, Major Kalle transmitted radio messages to Berlin that described the helpful activities of Agent H-21. But the Deuxième Bureau intercepted these wires… and from their content, identified H-21 as Mata Hari. The messages were in a code that German intelligence knew to have been broken by the French, which suggests that the communiques were contrived to have Mata Hari arrested by the French!
Around this time, Walter Nicolai had grown very annoyed that Mata Hari had provided him with no worthy intelligence… that she sold the Germans mere Paris gossip about the sex lives of French politicians and generals. He decided to terminate her employment by exposing Mata Hari as a German spy to the French.
Another famous female spy was Elsbeth Schragmüller. For many years, she was invariably known as Mademoiselle Docteur or Fräulein Doktor. Her actual name was eventually revealed in 1945 from German intelligence documents captured by the Allies after the Second World War. In 1915, Nicolai assigned Schragmüller as chief of the Kriegsnachrichtenstelle Antwerpen.
Nicolai saw himself aa a military educator, a supervisor, and an initiator of patriotic self-discipline with a relentless will to win. When Erich Ludendorff became the first quartermaster general in late August 1916, there was an expansion of military intelligence for the secret police. Nicolai’s officers took part in the promotional work for war bonds, and he helped to found the ultranationalist German Fatherland Party.
After Germany’s defeat in the First World War, Walter Nicolai retired with the rank of colonel. His deputy and successor in 1920 was Major Friedrich Gempp. Nicolai later published two books about his activities.
During the short-lived Third Reich, Nicolai belonged to the expert advisory board of the Imperial Institute for the History of the New Germany. After the Second World War, he was arrested by SMERSH under the personal order of Stalin, deported from Germany, and interrogated in Moscow.
Walter Nicolai died in custody on May 4, 1947 in the hospital of Moscow’s Butyrka Prison at the age of seventy-three. His body was cremated and buried at the necropolis of the Donskoy Monastery in a mass grave.
In 1999, Russian military prosecutors formally exonerated Nicolai of all charges.