Walter Nicolai 
(01.08.1873 - 04.05.1947)
place of birth:  Braunschweig  (Brunswick)
Königreich Preußen:  Abteilung IIIb,  Oberstleutnant


Prussian general staff officer Walter Nicolai headed up Germany's military intelligence department during the First World War. He was born to the family of a former infantry company commander who died when Walter was only four years of age. His mother came from a simple peasant family but was able to get her son into the cadet corps, where he spent his early formative years. Beginning military service in 1893 as a lieutenant with the infantry regiment in Göttingen, Nicolai boosted his service career by marrying his commander's daughter.

As a student at Berlin's Military Academy, Nicolai specialized in foreign languages, learning Russian, French, and English. As an officer assigned to do intelligence work at the Great General Staff, he likewise became proficient in Japanese. Following the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, he was sent to the military intelligence section of I. Armee-Korps in Königsberg where he studied Russian military doctrine. He also served as a company commander in an infantry regiment before finally landing in 1912 back with the Prussian Great General Staff to temporarily head up its Sektion IIIb intelligence section, a post he would keep and greatly expand until War's end.

Major Nicolai spent his pre-War years in Berlin working with Ludendorff to build up Germany's intelligence capabilities while improving relations with sister security services in Austria and Italy. At War's outbreak, Nicolai became the permanent chief of Supreme Command's intelligence and counter-intelligence office, Sektion IIIb. Here he oversaw 90 military officers and civil servants while also heading up the war propaganda effort. His chief task during the Great War, however, was managing of the flow of reconnaissance information. There were some field commanders, most notably Crown Prince Wilhelm, who greatly resented Nicolai's "meddling" when he placed his intelligence officers, or "OHL spies", within the staffs of numbered armies. Major Nicolai also cultivated a heated rivalry with Oberst Max Bauer as Section IIIb delved deeper into Germany's domestic policies.

As the War ground to a halt, now Oberstleutnant Nicolai took the cessation of hostilities in stride, but his efforts to find employment within post-war Germany's Reichswehr proved fruitless. Upon retiring from military service in early 1920, he received a ceremonial promotion to Oberst (charakter) and kept the right to wear a uniform. Reichswehr commander Hans von Seeckt indicated to Nicolai that he should keep himself ready should the Fatherland ever need his extensive intelligence experience, but neither the Weimar Republic nor the Third Reich ever thought to recall him. Despite this fact, in 1945 the Russian NKVD apprehended the former security chief at his home in Nordhausen, believing that he had been a key figure in Hitler's intelligence service. Nicolai died in 1947 while still under arrest at the Butyrka Hospital in Moscow. 

	Oberstleutnant	27.01.1918