The Rehabilitation of Germany’s Secret Service

Germany’s federal intelligence service, the bnd, is getting a big overhaul. “Germany’s responsibility in the world is growing, and with it our demands on our intelligence services,” Federal Chancellery Minister Thorsten Frei told Bild on June 27. “The further development and strengthening of the federal intelligence services is … a priority for the federal government.”

Details are sparse, but we shouldn’t underestimate the government’s new focus.

In 2019, the bnd opened a new headquarters in Berlin—an imposing $1.3 billion building with a footprint roughly the size of 36 soccer fields. The Guardian called it the “world’s biggest intelligence headquarters.”

Now the bnd is getting a new president—German ambassador to Ukraine Martin Jäger—as well as significantly more money and more flexibility in espionage abroad and technical reconnaissance, Spiegel reported on June 11. Current bnd President Bruno Kahl will become the German ambassador to the Vatican, which apparently occurred upon request.

Recent criticism of the bnd is that it did not warn strongly enough about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and that some agents cooperated with Russian intelligence agencies. But what some see as weakness may be by design: The Trumpet has long warned of secret German-Russian cooperation. (Read “Germany’s Secret Deal With Russia—Exposed.”)

Yet public perception is that the bnd is not up to the task, overly regulated or even incompetent. Peter R. Neumann, professor of security studies at King’s College London, wrote for Spiegel Online on June 12:

On the one hand, people make fun of the “slouch hats,” considering them incompetent and doubting that they play in the same league as the American cia or the British MI6. On the other hand, there are fears that they could create an all-powerful surveillance state in the blink of an eye if their operations are not closely monitored and legally restricted.

Such contradictions show how difficult Germany still finds it to deal with the bnd: a secret service that is not even allowed to call itself that, but only “intelligence service”—as if it were a kind of state-funded press agency.

A powerful foreign intelligence service is just as important for the security of the country as a “war-ready” military. The world is in turmoil, one crisis follows another, and it is clear to everyone that Germany must once again stand more firmly on its own two feet, including when it comes to its intelligence services.

Neumann concluded: “A powerful foreign intelligence service is as essential to Germany’s security as a powerful military. Politicians must finally understand this.”

Talking to Bild, Neumann said: “A fundamental problem is that German chancellors have never really challenged and utilized the bnd.” This has resulted in a “dysfunctional agency,” he claimed.

Previous German governments were hesitant to establish Germany as global power and didn’t utilize the bnd as much. But this is changing.

“The goal must be for the bnd to be able to generate more information and intelligence independently in the future,” Carlo Masala, professor of international politics at the Bundeswehr University in Munich told Bild.

Masala and others are demanding that the bnd have more freedom in storing IP addresses, using facial recognition, and investigating financial flows. Neumann added that the bnd must focus on covert operations abroad. Recent secret service operations for Ukraine in Russia and Israel in Iran reveal their value.

However, the idea that Germany’s intelligence service is weak and strictly controlled is “distorted” according to intelligence expert Thorsten Wetzling. In an interview with Welt published June 27, he claimed the opposite—that a lack of oversight poses considerable risk for democracy.

If you consider Germany and the bnd’s history, you would have to agree.

Founded by Nazis

Even though the bnd isn’t as famous as America’s cia, Britain’s MI6, Russia’s fsb or Israel’s Mossad, it does build on one of the most feared surveillance agencies in history, that of Nazi Germany.

“Historians conducting an internal study of ties between employees of the German foreign intelligence agency and the Third Reich have made a shocking discovery,” Spiegel Online wrote in 2011. “In 2007, the bnd destroyed personnel files of employees who had once been members of the SS and the Gestapo.”

The article noted: “It has long been known that around 10 percent of the employees at the bnd and its predecessor organization once served under SS chief Heinrich Himmler in Nazi Germany.” However, the full extent of the seamless transition is a mystery, as the files of around 250 bnd officials were destroyed.

An independent commission of historians noted that the individuals were “in significant intelligence positions in the SS, the SD (the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party) or the Gestapo.” Some were even accused of World War ii war crimes.

If you add the fact that new staff recruited by the bnd often were relatives of existing bnd employees, you see mounting evidence of a deliberate attempt to keep the connection to the mass murder regime alive. As the bnd admitted in 2018, it even employed the daughter of SS chief Heinrich Himmler in the early 1960s, Gudrun Burwitz, who “spent her life mingling with right-wing extremist circles and always defending her father” (Deutsche Welle, June 29, 2018).

This isn’t too surprising if you consider former Nazi Gen. Reinhard Gehlen created Germany’s postwar spy network. (Read “Germany’s Secret Service Scandal” for more information.) The Allies thought it could be controlled and prove useful against Soviet Russia.

Troubling Future

It is important to consider this history and the future implications. Consider this warning from Herbert W. Armstrong on May 9, 1945:

We don’t understand German thoroughness. From the very start of World War ii, they have considered the possibility of losing this second round, as they did the first—and they have carefully, methodically planned, in such eventuality, the third round—World War iii! Hitler has lost. This round of war, in Europe, is over. And the Nazis have now gone underground. In France and Norway they learned how effectively an organized underground can hamper occupation and control of a country. Paris was liberated by the French underground—and Allied armies. Now a Nazi underground is methodically planned. They plan to come back and to win on the third try.

Mr. Armstrong’s warning was validated in 1996 when the United States declassified a 1944 document detailing a meeting attended by Nazi officials and leaders of Germany’s top industries. (Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry discusses this document in Germany’s Conquest of the Balkans.)

But it wasn’t just the armed industries that went underground. Germany’s postwar military, police force and secret service were infested with Nazis who went underground to prepare for a sudden reemergence.

What we are seeing aligns with Bible prophecy, the source of Mr. Armstrong’s warning. Revelation 17:8 warns, “The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder … when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.”

“The word translated ‘bottomless pit,’ or abyss, in verse 8 actually means underground. That’s where the Nazis have been since before the end of World War ii. The so-called Holy Roman Empire is going to rise to power one final time,” Mr. Flurry explains in Germany and the Holy Roman Empire.

The world is asleep to this development. Despite the bnd’s atrocious history, virtually no one will warn about it. The Bible’s warning is unique. We can only understand our world by looking to God for understanding as Mr. Armstrong did.

Request a free copy of our booklet He Was Right to learn more about Mr. Armstrong’s Bible-based forecast and what it teaches us.