With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

MI5 files: Nazis plotted to kill Allied troops with coffee

The Nazis planned to kill Allied troops with poisoned coffee, chocolate and cigarettes, as part of a terrorist campaign in liberated Europe, newly disclosed MI5 documents show.

Female agents were also to be sent to kill senior Allied commanders using microbes hidden in handbag mirrors, according to interrogation reports.

One assassination device, captured by advancing Allied troops, involved a gun hidden inside a belt bulk with a Swastika emblem on it.

Documents from the interrogations of captured German agents disclose the Nazi security service, the RSHA, had a unit that was planning subversion operations in Allied countries using targeted assassinations and poisons.

The information came from a four-strong unit of German agents, including one woman, who were parachuted into Ayon, near St Quentin in France in March 1945, two months before the end of the war.

They had been flown from Stuttgart in a captured B17 Flying Fortress, which dropped them behind enemy lines before getting shot down....
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)