Quislings and Ordinary Persians

Abstract

Of political intelligence pertaining to Persia, little may be learned from this chapter. This is largely because the Abwehr and the SD ill-advisedly concentrated their operational efforts not on the Persian polity itself, but instead on an unruly handful of Persian emigrés within the Reich. These exiles, mostly young students, spent the war squabbling over their unrealistic dreams of governing Persia, encouraged by Berlin spymasters whose aims seem to have been equally unrealistic. In this chapter we will therefore seek to discover how and why the German intelligence services came to waste scarce and valuable resources, for years, on hypothesizing a regime change involving a small number of ambitious but powerless men, out of touch with their occupied homeland, instead of establishing productive active-intelligence networks or liaising effectively with their two agents in place, Franz Mayr (SD) and Berthold Schulze-Holthus (Abwehr).

Not only had German agents organized a fifth column from within, but the Abwehr and the Foreign Office in the Reich itself had recruited a number of prominent and dangerous Persian quislings in preparation for the crossing of the Caucasus by the Wehrmacht. (History of Combined Intelligence Centre Iraq and Persia)¹