Background
Alfred Naujocks was born on 20 September 1911 in Kiel.
Alfred Naujocks was born on 20 September 1911 in Kiel.
An engineering student at Kiel, Naujocks was the type of young ruffian who proved to be so useful in the street-fighting phase of Nazism. A well-known amateur boxer, he was frequently involved in brawls with communists. He joined the SS in 1931 and three years later enrolled in the SD. becoming one of Heydrich's most trusted agents.
In 1939 he was made head of the sub-section of Section III of SD Ausland and put in charge of such special duties as fabricating false papers, passports, identity cards and forged notes for SD agents operating abroad. He was responsible for devising the scheme to bombard England with forged banknotes (Operation Bernhard) in the early phase of W'orld War II. On Heydrich’s instructions. Naujocks had earlier supervised and led the feigned ‘Polish’ attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz, near the Polish frontier, which was presented by Nazi propaganda as an act of aggression which justified the German invasion of Poland. Naujocks led a small force of SS commandos, dressed in Polish uniforms, who seized the Gleiwitz transmit¬ter on the evening of 31 August 1939 and announced that ‘the time had come for war between Poland and Germany’. After completing the operation, Naujocks and his men left behind the body of a condemned criminal from one of the concentration camps, as if he had been killed in the attack. The following day, after this fabricated ‘provocation’, the German army crossed into Poland.
On 8 November 1939 Naujocks was involved in another escapade, the kidnapping of two British intelligence agents in the little town of Venlo on the German-Dutch border. Naujocks again did the knuckleduster work in this operation, which was designed to give the Germans a pretext for invading Holland on the grounds that the Dutch had violated their neutrality. Naujocks was dismissed from the SD in 1941 for disputing one of Heydrich’s orders and transferred to the Waffen-SS. In 1943 he was sent to the eastern tront and the following year served as an economic administrator with the occupation troops in Belgium. While in this nominal post, he carried out a number of murders of members in the Danish Resistance movement. Naujocks deserted to the Americans in November 1944, but found himself placed in a war criminals’ camp at the end of the war. He escaped from custody before he was due to be tried by an Allied tribunal. It has been alleged that Naujocks was involved after the war in running ODESSA (Organization der SS Angehörigen - ‘Organization of SS Members'), the Nazi escape organization, together with Otto Skorzeny who handled contracts with the Spanish government, supplying passports and arranging for funds. Naujocks and his associates handled the tourists (i.e. Nazi criminals) going to Latin America, being responsible for their reception and protection there. He was later reported to have settled in Hamburg, w here he pursued his business activities until his death on 4 April I960 without being brought to account for his wartime ‘exploits’.