It’s Germany’s “biggest espionage scandal of the century,” according to Deutsche Welle chief political editor Michaela Küfner—and Germany is no stranger to espionage scandals.

August Hanning, former head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service (bnd), was arrested October 6 and taken into pretrial detention the next day. He is accused of illegally gathering state secrets. Investigations are ongoing about whom he shared them with. According to investigators, he received the material from his former office manager, who is also in pretrial detention.

According to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, Hanning gained access to approximately 2,000 documents by 2022, “including information that was frequently classified.” Hanning at the time worked as a private consultant, traveling frequently to Russia and China. He is said to have visited Russia at least seven times between 2015 and 2019.

Investigators are also trying to determine if he shared state secrets with foreign powers.

Colluding With Enemies of the West

Der Spiegel reports that Hanning allegedly prepared an analysis for the Azerbaijani intelligence service and that investigators suspect he also shared sensitive information with a man from the Chinese intelligence community.

The Azerbaijan connection is intriguing. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Azerbaijan has become a meeting place for former German and Russian officials. It has a reputation for bribing European politicians.

Hanning was head of the bnd from 1998 to 2005, during Gerhard Schröder’s term as chancellor. Schröder is known for his pro-Russia stance. Hanning later served as state secretary of the Interior (2005–2009), so he is viewed as one of Germany’s best-informed and most connected people.

Hanning himself maintained extensive contacts in Moscow, which include Nikolai Patrushev, the former head of the Russian intelligence service fsb. After leaving politics, Hanning formed his own consulting firm and also worked for the British consulting firm G3, where he served as head of the Russia division.

The bnd has frequent access to classified information from other Western secret services, including those of the United States, Britain and France. British intelligence agencies are currently investigating whether classified information or their own agents may have been compromised. This means American and British agents and informants could be in danger.

America and Britain should know better. In December 2022, a bnd employee was caught selling secrets to Moscow during the ongoing war in Ukraine. In fact, the bnd has a long history of sharing secrets with Western enemies. As Edward Lucas wrote for the Center for European Policy Analysis:

Penetrated by the opposition, paralyzed by legal obstacles, and subject to political interference, Germany’s intelligence services were for decades seen as, at best, useless and, at worst, outright harmful. I remember a British spook in Cold War Berlin in the 1980s joking: “If you want Gorbachev to know something quickly, tell the Germans in strict secrecy: It will be on his desk in the Kremlin the next morning.”

In this recent case, the bnd again claims to have been oblivious to what was happening.

“What is troubling is that the leak of highly sensitive and, in some cases, classified information went unnoticed by the German foreign intelligence service,” Germany’s Nordkurier wrote. “It was only a chance discovery during the investigation into the case of the Block family of Hamburg entrepreneurs that revealed the data leak.”

Potentially more troubling is if the bnd knew what was going on and simply allowed the sharing of classified information with Western enemies.

Rising From the Nazi Underground

The recent revelations come as German parliamentarians debate the expansion of the bnd’s power. Although the bnd has the largest secret service headquarters on Earth, its capabilities have been curtailed due to Germany’s history. But given the failing relations with the U.S. and Russia’s threats to Europe, the bnd is requesting more power—and Chancellor Friedrich Merz wants to grant it.

Spiegel wrote regarding the recent scandal:

Can we, in good conscience, give such an agency more power? Or shouldn’t the oversight mechanisms at least be expanded just as significantly?

Some German media outlets seem more concerned about empowering the bnd than America and Britain do. Former British MI6 intelligence officer Matthew Dunn said he would be “very surprised” if the recent scandal changed Britain’s relations with the bnd.

“These are grown-up organizations, and they would realize this is personality-specific to Hanning and his bureau chief,” he said. “There will be no finger-pointing; they would not view this as some damning indictment of the organization as a whole.”

America and Britain fail to recognize that this scandal is far bigger than a “personality-specific” case. As Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry warned in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine:

Many elite Germans feel that their nation has now extracted all the benefit it can from the United States, and they are now ready for a new phase in German strategy. Some want modern Germany to use its impressive industrial and economic power to multiply its political and military power. They want to establish Europe as a new superpower, a modern Holy Roman Empire!

That is why the bnd has a history of passing on secrets to Russia and other Western enemies. That’s also why the bnd is seeking independence from Western secret services.

The rise of a modern Holy Roman Empire is prophesied. This empire’s last reincarnation was in the days of Adolf Hitler, who colluded with the Vatican, brought the empire’s crown jewels to Nuremberg, and attempted to overthrow the world order by allying with Russia and Japan.

Although Hitler ultimately failed, there is extensive evidence that his Nazi apparatus went underground—and the bnd is part of it.

As theTrumpet.com managing editor Richard Palmer wrote, the bnd:

• was filled with Nazi war criminals
• was run largely by ex-Nazis for the first decade or two of its operation
• helped Nazis on the run, including the infamous Adolf Eichmann, hide from justice
• recruited Nazi war criminals like Klaus Barbie, known as the “Butcher of Lyon”—as late as 1960
• broke German and international law by transferring large numbers of weapons—including tanks, helicopters and fighter jets—to Croat and Bosnian fighters during the 1990s
• spied on German journalists between 1992 and 2005
• destroyed files, in 2007, detailing the Nazi past of the organization’s founders
• was accused in 2011 of covering for or working with neo-Nazis
• has been spying on foreign journalists since 1999
• was caught helping the U.S.’s National Security Agency spy on other European countries, organizations and businesses

Should such an organization be trusted? The answer is obviously no. Why then are other Western intelligence agencies treating it like a trusted partner?

Answering that question is at the heart of America’s and Britain’s fatal postwar weakness. And that question cannot be answered without a thorough understanding of Bible prophecy, as explained in “Germany Will Betray America.”