A Better intelligence service for Nazi Germany

What would happen if Nazi Germany had better decryption, espionage and counter-espionage services. Lets suppose Hitler had at his service men at the level of the NKVD of Beria

Would that make any difference to the war? With the Luftwaffe knowing the locations of the British air bases, or deciphering the Manhattan project?
 
Well deciphering the manhattan project wouldn't be much worth. They didn't have the materials and Hitler didn't really care for the "jewish" technology.

It could work really well for their submarine warfare though, being able to keep the enigma code and keep sinking allied shipping without much losses. Also their agents in the UK could provide valuable reports on planned invasions, would be really bad for the ivasion of Italy and France. Plus Wilhelm Canaris and many other conspirators would be unmasked and shot earlier and their effect on the war would be less.
 

Deleted member 1487

What would happen if Nazi Germany had better decryption, espionage and counter-espionage services. Lets suppose Hitler had at his service men at the level of the NKVD of Beria

Would that make any difference to the war? With the Luftwaffe knowing the locations of the British air bases, or deciphering the Manhattan project?
For one thing you'd need to stop the proliferation of sub-empires within Germany to combine all their code breaking work and intelligence overlap. Germany did actually have a lot of very good code breakers with good early success, but then suffered from the proliferation of offices competing for resources and the Allies tightening up their codes and changing them frequently (something the Germans never really got right, but then the Allied success with ULTRA is overblown). Really for code breaking the best they could do over OTL was just combine the offices into one strategic office like Bletchly Park and having the military services have better contact to pass successes and problems back and forth with that national agency.
As to a German Beria....they did have that, Schellenberg and before him Heydrich. The NKVD was more of a counter-intel service and means of regime security, similar to the SD/RHSA, but much more brutal (in terms of the purges). In fact Beria hurt international intel gathering by executing many of the GRU (Russian military intelligence) intelligence agents during the Purges and having to rebuild their networks again from scratch. What NKVD international espionage successes were had were mainly the result of useful idiots in the international communist parties. Ignorant far left intellectuals were willing to work for the USSR because of their ideology, so there was a much more fertile field for them to mine with their agents.
The Germans did have actually some pretty good success with intel activities pre-war, even the Abwehr, but had their screw ups when the war went on; the biggest problem was recruiting the wrong agent to operate in America and turned himself in to the FBI and worked as a double agent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_G._Sebold
He helped roll up most of the German assets in the US.

The other problem is that the Germans never really tried to develop networks in Britain pre-war because Hitler didn't want to antagonize them. The Soviet counter-intel service was brutal and pervasive, so intel gathering was very tough in the East. The biggest thing they could have done was put a lot more work into Britain pre-war than they did IOTL, not have an anti-Nazi network running the Abwehr, not screw up with Sebold, and generally have a bit more luck and tact in their intel work.
 
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