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 - Atlas GmbH
EMIL HOFFMAN AND HIS CIRCLES relating to Hoffmann. Knowing how extensive Gehlens network was, and knowing Hoffmanns affinity to secret services, it is not beyond the realms of fantasy that Hoffmann was indeed in contact with the US intelligence service through Gehlen. It is still not clear whether Atlas worked for Gehlen or not, but the company definitely had a Nazi employee who participated in an operation lead by Gehlen as a CIA agent. A former high-ranking Nazi officer, Helmut Triska was indicated as the company’s general partner. Triska was born in 1910 in Austria and attended university in Vienna, where he was a committed supporter of Nazi Germany as a student and worked, according to Czechoslovak intelligence information, for the German secret service. His cover was blown in 1926 and he had to flee the country, to be redirected later to Czech and Hungarian territories.57 According to his official curriculum vitae, he continued his studies at the university of Munich from 1936 and played a major role in Hungary during the war, but he was a key figure in shaping the ideas of German imperial politics in relation to Hungary even before that period. In 1939, he was moved to the Reich’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he was in charge of Central European matters and elaborated the plan of swallowing Hungarian territories with a German minority.58 Following the Anschluss, Hungary became a direct neighbour of the Third Reich, which greatly restricted the country’s room for manoeuvre. Although Hungary proposed the territorial revision of Őrvidék (Burgenland), it soon became clear that this dream would never be realised: In August 1939, Hitler confirmed to Regent Miklos Horthy that the two states had reached their final historical borders.59 At this stage, however, Helmut Triska’s plan to redraw the borders had been hatched to annex Western Hungary to the Reich on the false and presumptive grounds that the area from Bratislava to Szentgotthárd was full of towns and villages inhabited by Germans. Triska’s plan would have ripped an area of 1,250 km2 and a population of 120,000 from the country, an integral 57 ÁBTL 3.1.5. 0-12344/13 p. 63 Report on the recruitment of West-German citizen Helmut Triska, 15 October 1963 58 Tóth 2006, p. 195-199 More on the topic cf. Botlik 2013 59 Horthy 1990, p. 215 27
