Borvendég Zsuzsanna: Fabulous Spy Games. How international trade networks with the West developed after 1945 - A Magyarságkutató Intézet Kiadványai 24. (Budapest, 2021)

EMIL HOFFMAN AND HIS CIRCLES - Nazis reloaded

FABULOUS SPY GAMES

plans for the future secured. Their cooperation proved partially successful, as will be revealed later.

Bickenbach received

funding again from the Hungarian state in 1957, but the idea that they should get rid of him and replace him with Triska was already being raised at the time, although the latter was still a war criminal in Hungary, so he could not enter the country.91

In spite of all that, the business with Bickenbach

came

to an end, and there is barely any mention of his name in the various documents drafted in the second half of the 1950s.92

So who replaced him? No one was able to secure a monopoly in certain businesses in the way Bickenbach

had

done. Emil Hoffman and his business partner, Gustav Meissner, however, were frequent visitors to the Kádár-era

Hungary,

and, up until the mid-1960s it was through them that the Hungarian foreign trade elite was trying to find its way to the management of the key industrial companies.

91 ÁBTL

3.1.5.

0-12344/13 p. 148 Report, 17 October 1963

92 It is interesting that a report from 1984 says that the West German authorities arrested Richard Müller

and

Harald Bickenbach

for

violating the foreign trade act. Richard Müller

was the Eastern Bloc’s biggest importer of embargoed goods from the 1970s onwards, he was able to obtain most sensitive and modern technologies for the Soviets, all of which were delivered to Moscow via Hungary, through Hungarian companies. (Cf. Borvendég

2017, p. 95-98) The report mentioned says that the two suspects transported equipment to the Soviet Union on behalf of Technoimpex and were caught in the process. ÁBTL

2.7.1.

Daily Operational Information Report (NOIJ) 1984-III/II-68 6 April 1984 Although having identical names is not evidence, per se, but it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Karl Bickenbachs company

was taken over by his son, who worked in close cooperation with the Hungarian secret services even in the 1980s.

93 CIA, FOIA, Special collection of Gustav Meissner, 12 April 1944

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/MEISSNER%2C%20GUSTAV_0004.pdf (Downloaded on: 8 August 2019)

Meissner, too, started his career as a zealous Nazi. Having graduated as a journalist, he was a propagandist in Hitlers Germany, following the occupation of Denmark he served as a press attaché

at

the German Embassy in Copenhagen, but he also served on the eastern front. In 1944, he was mentioned as Denmarks most dangerous man, who was the eyes and ears’ of German intelligence in the small flatland country.93

The German security service, the SiPo (reorganised as a unit under RSHA after the outbreak of the war), and German intelligence and

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