Walter Schellenberg

Walter Schellenberg was a German SS and security-service officer who rose through the Sicherheitsdienst and the Reich Security Main Office. In 1939 he took a leading role in an intelligence deception aimed at British officers in the Netherlands, presenting supposed contacts with anti-Hitler German officers while the operation was controlled by the Nazi security apparatus.

The deception culminated in the Venlo Incident on 9 November 1939, when British intelligence officers Sigismund Payne Best and Richard Henry Stevens were seized near the Dutch-German border and taken into Germany. Schellenberg later became a senior foreign-intelligence official. After the war he was convicted in the Ministries Trial and served a prison sentence before his early release on health grounds.