NAZI ESPIONAGE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 February 1942, Page 4

NAZI ESPIONAGE

MAINTENANCE OF CONTACT WITH JAPAN. DISCLOSED BY RECENT ARRESTS ON INDIAN FRONTIER. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, February 12. The recent arrest by the British on the frontier of Afghanistan and India of the famous German entomologist, Colonel Brandt, and a German botanist named Orderderfer, has revealed the extent of a system which Germany had built up for the purpose of maintaining communications with Japan. Admiral Canaris, chief of the German Secret Set’vice, spent years working out a plan by which the Germans have been able to exchange information with the Japanese war organisations. The starting point was at Athens, and the ending point at the advanced Japanese positions in Burma and north Indo-China.

“Die Zeitung,” the German language newspaper published in London, revealed that the organisation’s channels became necessary after the collapse of diplomatic relations with Brazil, which entailed the suspension of the Italian-South American air service, severing the last communication between the Germans and the nations cutside Europe except by radio, which could be intercepted.

Admiral Canaris’s strategy consisted of the use of relays of numerous cara[vans equipped with receiving and I transmitting sets moving about the (Syrian and Arabic deserts, and eastward, in Iran, Afghanistan, and the TiIbetan mountains. The caravans’ trans<missions were too weak to enable their I interception. The arrest of Brandt and Orderderfer has shown how far the plan has 1 already been carried out.