The enigmatic Nazi spy Walther Giese, the “Führer of Ecuador” who disappeared without a trace

Walther Giese’s biographical journey was similar to that of other leaders of Nazi Germany. Born in Silesia in 1893 in a proletarian home, he tries to improve his lot from the end of primary school. He went to the United States, where he worked as a salesman, until the start of the First World War, he had to enlist in the German navy and ended up a prisoner in Great Britain.

He was released in 1919 and He emigrated to Argentina: he lived in rural areas and later he was also a police officer. However, given the difficult situation, he decided to go to Holland and there he found a job in an advertising company.

With Hitler already in government, andIn 1934, Giese was contacted by a Nazi agent in the German secret service, who offered him a part-time job. At that point, he decided to decline the offer. Once again unemployed, it was he who contacted the secret service, but at that point, and to his surprise, he would end up being rejected.

No job offer in Europe, in 1935, he decided to return to America. He settled in Ecuador for three years and, a year before the outbreak of World War II, he returned to Germany and volunteered for the Naval Secret Service.

Thus, Giese entered the Defense (“Defensa”) An intelligence organization created in the middle of the Weimar Republic in 1921 and which, with the arrival of Nazism to power and under the command of Marine Captain Wilhelm Canaris, reported directly to the high command and to Hitler himself.

Taking advantage of your previous experience, He is posted to Ecuador with the mission of monitoring the merchant navy of neutral countries, as well as the movements of ships along the northwest coast of South America and the Panama Canal. Before returning to Ecuador, received a three-month special training on espionage. In addition, and at that time, he was already fluent in English, Dutch and Spanish, in addition to German, his mother tongue.

In Quito, Giese, Under the pseudonym “Greif”, he watched the ships, established a network of volunteers and even developed a system for sending messages to Germany, via Rio de Janeiro, from photographs of secret documents he hid under book covers., in many cases, unbeknownst to those who transported them. While, his spy work remained hidden under the facade of the secretary of the German embassy in Quito.

After a while and under the protection of leader Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, in charge of organizing Nazi affiliates around the world, Giese was appointed head of the small existing Nazi structure in Ecuador. At the same time, he was elected president of the German colony installed in the country. He even led the Ecuadorian version of the Gestapo.

Despite the secrecy that was to surround his mission, Giese became more and more important in local politics, to the point that on July 25, 1939 he was decorated with the “National order of merit in the rank of knight” by the government of Aurelio Mosquera Narváez. The distinction was awarded “for special services rendered to the country”, according to the official terms of the Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and given to the agent by the same Minister of Foreign Affairs Julio Tobar Donoso.

Publicly, who was now called “Walter Giese” has been recognized as the “Führer of the National Socialist Party of Ecuador”, according to accusations by leaders and the opposition press. His stay in the country was getting more and more difficult, so the Ecuadorian government had to expel him in January 1942.

The German spy left for Buenos Aires, a city he already knew and had a much larger and stronger pro-Nazi nucleus than the one he had helped develop in Ecuador. During a stopover in Santiago, he personally met the military aviation attaché of the German Embassy, ​​Commander Ludwig Von Bohlen, who had set up a spy network in Chile. He thus obtained a safe-conduct which allowed him to embark in Buenos Aires and arrive in Hamburg at the end of May 1942.

In July 1942, while in Berlin, Walther Giese learned that Its next field of operations would be in Spain. To do this, he joined the counter-espionage network of the KriegsOrganitation Spanien (KOSp), headquartered in Madrid, which has spread throughout Spain a large network of soldiers and activists infiltrated into many other networks and organizations. The initial mission assigned to the spy was to send secret agents and radio transmitters to South America.

In September 1942, Giese moved to the Spanish capital under the new identity of sales representative of a bogus company. In addition, and to operate in the spy network, he had two identities: that of “Alfredo Thomas” and another like “Nordmann “, although the latter was to be used only in official business.

Knowing better the ground on which he had to act, he went in November to the port of Bilbao and accepted the possibility that Nazi agents could embark as stowaways to reach America. At the beginning of 1943, he created a network to recruit pro-German volunteers and thanks to his effective counter-espionage missions, Giese warned his superiors that the English were preparing clandestine airstrips near Bilbao, Vitoria and Pamplona.

The success of Walther Giese’s work has enabled it to be important in Galicia, one of the most strategic regions in all of Europe for Nazi and Allied intelligence services. At the center of the international dispute was the mining and appropriation of tungsten (wolfram), used to strengthen the structure of bullets, missiles, ships and airplanes.

Giese thus became one of the most relevant KOSp agents in all of Spain by launching the German news agency in Galicia, in turn made up of five autonomous, but still coordinated, sections that were to compete with similar intelligence offices set up by the British, Americans and Spaniards. In addition, He remained active in ideological surveillance and detection of Jews and others persecuted by Nazism through the bogus travel agency American Line, located in Vigo.

Installed from July 1943 in La Coruña, Giese was able to obtain a list of the British and Americans passing through Galicia from the registers of local hotels. In this way, the agency to which he belonged could follow the movements of Allied spies throughout Spain.

Despite the protection of the government of Francisco Franco, andn October 1944 Walther Giese and fifty other Nazi agents had to leave Spain due to pressure from the Allies and when German weakness was already evident. Back in Berlin, he joined the naval espionage division with the aim of revealing who were traitors in relations with the Embassy and with the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

While the end of the war was already imminent, and in order not to fall into the hands of the Russians, On April 29, 1945, Walther Giese decided to surrender to the Americans. Immediately he was taken to the Berlin interrogation center and after almost a month and a half of questions and answers, he deciphered the functioning of KOSp, also providing the identities of all the German agents who had acted in Spain since their arrival in Madrid in 1942.

The person responsible for the interrogation, Major Frederick Sternberg noted that the inmate “had been absolutely cooperative” and “had the attitude of someone who committed no crime” during the war.

Perhaps their broad spirit of collaboration was the main reason why Walther Giese may have taken on a new identity, for from October 11, 1945, all trace of the one until then known as the “Führer of Ecuador” was lost. and who was considered one of the main Nazi spies in Spain.

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