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Johan Matz

Associate Professor | Senior Lecturer

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Intelligence and disinformation in World War II and the early Cold War 1943–48: Stachowiak alias Drauschke alias Donoa, his intelligence activities in Sweden and Denmark, and the Raoul Wallenberg case

Author

  • Johan Matz

Summary, in Swedish

In September 1943, a Polish citizen Mieczyslaw Stachowiak, assigned with the German Wehrmacht’s Organisation Todt to Norway, left his detachment and escaped to Sweden. In the following two years he maintained contacts with no less than five diplomatic missions in Sweden – Britain, Germany, Japan, Spain and the United States – and provided them with false intelligence in return for money. In May 1945, after having tried to trick the Japanese mission in Stockholm to believe that he was a defected Soviet agent operating in Sweden under the false cover of a US citizen, Henri Brunsso Donoa, while simultaneously trying to have the Americans and British to believe that he had been assigned by the Japanese for an intelligence mission in the US, he was arrested by the Swedish police on charges of illegal intelligence activities and was deported later. After two years – in October 1947 – he turned up at the Swedish diplomatic mission in Warsaw claiming that the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who had been arrested by the Soviets in January 1945 in Budapest, had managed to escape his Soviet guards and was staying with Polish partisans in southeast Poland. This article describes Stachowiak’s intelligence activities, the diplomatic missions and the Swedish police efforts to investigate his disinformation and discusses whether he acted on orders from Moscow when approaching the Swedes regarding Wallenberg.

Publishing year

2015

Language

Swedish

Pages

16-37

Publication/Series

Journal of Intelligence History

Volume

14

Issue

1

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Topic

  • Political Science

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1616-1262