Hilde Purwin (born Hildegard Burkhardt: 16 September 1919 – 29 March 2010) was a German journalist. She was exceptionally talented as a linguist and had an unusually powerful memory.
She was recruited by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in October 1939. She worked initially as a security services "mail clerk" but in July 1940 was transferred to Berlin where she became an Italian interpreter. In July 1942 she was sent to Rome where at various stages she worked, ostensibly, as a secretary and/or an interpreter. Between September 1943 and July 1944 she played a pivotal role in the so-called "Ciano operation". After the defeat of Nazi Germany the American intelligence services benefited from her wartime intelligence gathering. They also acquired valuable additional intelligence because she took extra carbon copies - unbeknownst to German intelligence - of more than 700 sheets that she had translated from Italian source documents into German during the final months of the war. She sorted and sequenced these, and buried them in a large carefully sealed tin under the strawberry patch beside the apple tree in the garden at the family home where her widowed mother still lived.
In 1946 the United States military administration in Germany employed her as a simultaneous translator and recruited her for intelligence work. They gave her a new identity, knocking a year off her age. She became "Hilde Blum" born in 1920 and was mandated, under the code name "Gambit", to identify and unmask Soviet agents operating in Berlin. However, after a few years she decided that she did not wish to spend the rest of her life in espionage activities. She joined the Berlin Telegraf (newspaper), initially as a volunteer reporter, and quickly rose to become a distinguished political correspondent. She formed a particularly good working relationship with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. He regularly picked her out for impromptu "interviews" in the lobby or restaurant at the Bundestag even though he liked to open their discussions with the insight, "I do know that you vote for the wrong side, Mrs. Purwin" ("Ich weiß ja, dat Se falsch wählen, Frau Purwin") - Hilde Purwin was a Social Democrat supporter and made no secret of the fact.
Two marriages and time spent in the espionage community left Hilde Purwin with an unusually wide range of names by which she may be identified in sources.
Life Provenance and early years Hildegard Gertrud Burkhardt was born in Obernissa, a small village few kilometers to the east of Erfurt in what would then have been seen as southern central Germany. Her early childhood was spent in Obernissa. The family later moved to a house alongside the elegant Belvederer Allee in Weimar, twenty or so minutes (by train) to the east of Erfurt. According to at least one source this was so that the family's talented daughter could be enrolled at the (normally boys-only) "Realgymnasium" (secondary school) there and benefit from the excellent languages teaching which the school provided. Her father, Eduard Burkhardt, was a teacher (and former World War I flying officer). Hildegard, born in 1919, was the elder of her parents' two recorded children. Her brother Rolf was born two years later. 1933, the year the Nazis took power, was the year of her fourteenth birthday. It was also the year in which her father died. She completed her schooling in 1937 and went to Dresden to take a "Pflichtjahr" (a form of mandatory gap year) working as a childcare helper for the Madaus family who were the owners of a major pharmaceuticals company. A year later she went to Leipzig to undertake an intensive languages course which was sufficient to qualify her for work as a simultaneous translator in Italian soon afterwards. She had intended to follow her year in Leipzig with a further year undertaking a similar course in francophone Lausanne in order to attain equivalent fluency in French but that plan was closed off by the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939.
German intelligence She was recruited by the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS's security and intelligence agency, through her local government employment office ("Arbeitsamt") in September/October 1939. Commentators accept Burkhardt's contention that her first promotion within the German intelligence services took place only after she had raised the issue with her boss. It would not be the last time that she would demonstrate a combination of self belief and professional ambition which at that time might well have been considered unladylike. She informed "SS Sturmbannführer Hermann" that "she was good with languages and wished to use them". She was transferred in July 1940 from the provincial mail room in Weimar to "Amt VI" (literally "Office 6"), the department in Berlin that dealt with political foreign intelligence. Her work involved translating reports from Italian agents. She also reviewed Italian and Vatican newspapers and provided translations of those "showing certain anti-German tendencies". In this respect she was therefore already being required to apply certain analytical skills and judgements alongside the basic clerical and organisational tasks commonly associated with a secretarial role.
In July 1941 she was posted to the wartime German embassy in Rome, employed as the secretary to Guido Zimmer. Zimmer was the senior member of "Amt VI" at the diplomatic mission, mandated to "sort out" the "intelligence situation" in Rome. He seems to have failed, and was recalled to Berlin in November 1941. His secretary, Hilde Burkhardt, was recalled with him and resumed her work in Berlin as an Italian language interpreter. However, in July 1942 she returned to the Rome embassy, now as secretary to Zimmer's successor, Helmut Looss. Looss was also recalled to Berlin, from where he was sent to work on the Russian front, after a relatively short time in Rome. After the war ended Hildegard Beetz (as she had by that time become) was invited to compile a detailed description of her work for the German intelligence services. Somewhere along the way she had picked up eerily good English. There were doubtless matters that she failed to mention, but what she included was judged by the US intelligence officers reading her "Lebenslauf" ("résumé") to be broadly accurate. She wrote that her boss, Helmut Looss, "was simply not interested in the work and, therefore, let me do everything". Looss was not replaced in Rome, and this time Burkhardt was not sent back to Berlin. She remained in Rome, undertaking the "Amt VI" work, and employed, formally, as secretary to the police attache, Herbert Kappler. In the words of her report to the Americans, "I worked alone until August 1943".
In June 1943 she married General Staff Officer Gerhard Beetz. In August 1943, however, with Allied troops approaching Rome and Mussolini under arrest, all female German government workers were evacuated from Rome. Hilde "Felizitas" Beetz returned to Berlin to work for Wilhelm Höttl, the newly appointed head of the "Amt VI Italien-Referat".
Ciano Between September 1943 and July 1944 "Felizitas" Beetz played a pivotal role in the so-called "Ciano operation". Galeazzo Ciano was Benito Mussolini's son-in-law. He served between June 1936 and his sacking by Mussolini on 5 February 1943 as Foreign Minister. Following the Grand Council vote of 24 July 1943 in which Ciano joined with the majority and opposed his father-in-law, voting to invite King Victor Emmanuel III to "resume his full constitutional powers", and the ensuing political take-over by General Pietro Badoglio, Ciano was on the receiving end of a vicious press campaign, deprived of a passport, and kept under virtual house arrest at his home in Italy. He began to fear for his personal safety and that of his family. On 27 August 1943 German intelligence arranged for Ciano and his family to be transported to Ciampino airfield, while avoiding the Italian police. Ciano was picked up by one car while his wife Edda and their three children were taken while walking in the park, by a different route, by another car, to a pre-assigned meeting point in the city where they were placed in a German army truck for the airport transfer. From Ciampino they were flown to Munich on board a Luftwaffe Ju 52 transport. What Ciano regarded as his escape was organised personally by Beetz's new boss Wilhelm Höttl. For Höttl and German Intelligence, the over-riding objective of the "Ciano operation" was to obtain Ciano's diaries and extensive supporting papers concerning his years at the heart of Italy's political establishment, which the German government feared might include incriminating or embarrassing information about relations between the two governments or, indeed, about the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop (whom Ciano was known to hate).
Ciano had assumed that once he reached Munich it would be a simple matter to arrange for him and his family to move to Madrid, and when this did not happen as anticipated he expressly offered Höttl his diaries (which were still safely hidden in Italy) in return for expediting the Ciano family's move to neutral Spain. Höttl believed that the Ciano diaries would be of huge political importance and he persuaded Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Reich Security Main Office, that Ciano's information could be used to discredit the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. At the political level, the security services reported to Heinrich Himmler, whose mandate covered a wide range of domestic responsibilities. Something that Himmler shared with his security chief, and indeed with virtually the entire German intelligence establishment, was a loathing of von Ribbentrop.
While Ciano was held, at this stage with his wife and children, under elegant house arrest in a lakeside villa in the hamlet of Allmannshausen, south of Munich, the security services assigned "Felizitas" Beetz to act as his "translator-hostess". Through her work at the embassy in Rome she already knew Ciano reasonably well, but she now had the opportunity to become better acquainted with Edda Ciano and the couple's three children.Erich Kuby: Verrat auf Deutsch. Wie das Dritte Reich Italien ruinierte. Hamburg, Hoffmann und Campe 1982, , pp. 280ff, 379ff Ciano would have been under no doubt that Beetz was there to spy on him, but she was self-evidently not a "typical career spook", and he was charmed by her. The charm was clearly mutual and the two became close, though Beetz always insisted that they never became lovers. Edda Ciano was probably more aware of the acute danger in which her husband found himself than he was. In the months that followed she treated Beetz not as a rival for Ciano's affection, but as a well-positioned ally in a shared struggle to save his life.Edda Ciano: My Truth. As told to Albert Zarca. Translated into English from the French language text by Eileen Finletter. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1977, , p. 225ff.