Landscapes of intelligence in the Third Reich: visualising Abwehr operations during the Second World War

ABSTRACT The German military-intelligence service (the Abwehr) was a macrospatial organisation whose clandestine operational activities were significantly affected by such factors as place and space. As the Second World War progressed, the Abwehr’s covert spaces expanded and contracted dynamically, producing some challenging operational environments. The service responded in various ways to a changing landscape engendered by military occupation, overseas deployment, geographical distance, enemy activity, and imminent defeat. In response to the recent spatial turn in the theory and methodology of other disciplines, intelligence historians should now consider incorporating geospatial viewpoints more often into their textual accounts and perhaps even publishing dynamic online visualisations with the aid of historical geographic information systems (HGIS).