Nazi Spymaster Captured in Austria (21 MAY 1945)
Born in Austria in 1915, Wilhelm Hoettl joined the Nazi party in the late 1930s while studying at the University of Vienna, where he received his doctorate in history. By 1945, he had achieved the rank of Sturmbannführer (equivalent to a major) in the Waffen-SS and was serving in Department VI (Foreign Secret Service) of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) as an intelligence specialist in southeastern Europe.
Recognizing the deterioration of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945, RSHA chief Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner was determined to establish an independent Austrian state, free from communist interference. He instructed several RSHA officers, including Hoettl, to begin liaising with anti-Nazi, anti-communist organizations in Austria in the hopes of forging an alliance with them. Through this alliance, Hoettl established contact with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Switzerland for support, but the rapid end of the war in Europe instead forced Kaltenbrunner and his staff to flee before any progress was made.
While searching for Kaltenbrunner in Austria in May 1945 [https://www.dvidshub.net/news/470966/cic-captures-reich-security-chief-13-may-1945], the 80th CIC Detachment captured a number of Nazi officers, including Hoettl on May 21. He was briefly interrogated by the detachment before he was transferred to the Third U.S. Army Interrogation Center in Freising, Germany. There, Hoettl provided information about “an extensive W/T [Wireless Telegraphy] network throughout southeastern Europe” consisting of “5 major stations and about 30 agents, not including minor feeders.” This network purportedly had contact with agents behind Soviet lines.
Although American intelligence was suspicious of Hoettl’s motives, the information was deemed too valuable to pass up and was passed to the OSS counterespionage branch. Under Project MOUNT, the OSS began using this network to communicate with Hoettl’s cryptographers in Hungary and Romania, hoping to secure intelligence from the agents behind Soviet lines. In mid-June, OSS Director Maj. Gen. William Donovan authorized Project MOUNT to maintain radio contact with these agents, but the operation quickly fell apart when the Russians, still considered American allies, began asking questions. In August, the Joint Chiefs of Staff instructed the OSS to dissolve Hoettl’s network to maintain the western Allies’ relationship with the Soviet Union.
Hoettl was then sent to Nuremberg as a key witness in the war crimes trials against high-ranking Nazi officials. Mistrusted by the U.S. Army and denounced as a traitor by the Nazis, Hoettl continued to supply information about the numerous intelligence operations he’d overseen during his time with the RSHA to interrogators while in American custody until late 1947.
Returning to occupied Austria, Hoettl soon ingratiated himself with the 430th CIC Detachment and, using his former intelligence connections, formed a series of informant networks under the direction of the CIC Gmunden Field Office. Project MONTGOMERY began in July 1948, wherein “Austrian nationals, refugee Hungarians and bona fide resident Hungarians” began providing intelligence on Soviet forces in Hungary. In October 1948, Project MOUNT VERNON began a similar operation to collect intelligence from the Soviet occupation zone in Austria. These operations continued into 1949.
Hoettl returned to civilian life in Austria as a well-respected citizen. Over the next few decades, he established himself as a leading authority on Nazi wartime intelligence and espionage activities, publishing multiple books on the subject. He was briefly arrested again by the U.S. Army in 1953 under suspicion of aiding a communist espionage ring in Vienna but was never tried. Having “successfully evaded any serious taint from his past,” according to historian Kevin C. Ruffner, Hoettl died in 1999.
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Article by Erin E. Thompson, USAICoE Staff Historian. New issues of This Week in MI History are published each week. To report story errors, ask questions, request previous articles, or be added to our distribution list, please contact: TR-ICoE-Command-Historian@army.mil.
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