March 21st, 1941
Baghdad - Fifteen men of the Brandenburg Regiment - twelve soldiers and three NCOs, under the command of Oberleutnant Friedrich Kalwer - quietly arrive in the Iraqi capital. Dressed in civilian clothes, they are accompanied by Leutnant Dieter Baron von Stroltz zu Groltz, of the Fallschirmjägers of General Student. All of them speak English and several Arabic.
With authentic Swiss passports, which a frontier official* in Basel issued for the Abwehr, they reach Istanbul via Constantza. For them, M. Régnier, eager to be forgiven for the case of their four sacrificed comrades, was able to knock on the right doors. They reach the border of Iraq in groups of three or four, with the help of MAH, one of the countless intelligence services of Ankara. As soon as they cross the border, some supporters of the Golden Square** welcome them and drive them to the capital.
Oberleutnant Kalwer and his men have the task of preparing for the landing at Rachid (Rasheed) Air Base***, 11 kilometers southeast of Baghdad, of the planes made available to the Abwehr by the Luftwaffe to transport to Iraq instructors and specialists, weapons, ammunition and transmission equipment to Iraq. With the help of officers, they have to make sure that the hangars would be big enough to hide the aircraft during the day, since the flights would only take place at night, and to arrange for the supply of fuel, oil and spare parts, to install a radio-gonio beacon (two beacons will arrive from Berlin via Istanbul in the middle of boxes of surgical instruments) and to find barracks for the ground personnel.
Leutnant von Stroltz, an old Prussian by his father but American by his mother and a Harvard graduate, has to locate landing zones for paratroopers near the capital or in the north of the country. He will be carrying the identity papers of an oil engineer, in the name of one of his cousins... first cousins from across the Atlantic.
All the members of what must be called a military mission have, as soon as they enter Iraqi soil, ceased to be part of the Wehrmacht and adopted the same status as the Kondor Legion, a few years earlier in Spain.
* Historians give the generic name of frontism to the various fascist or pro-Nazi organizations that were created in Switzerland during the 1930s. There were about a dozen groups, ultranationalist, anti-capitalist, anti-communist, anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic, financed more or less by Berlin and Rome. The leaders of one of them, the Swiss National Movement, were received during the summer of 1940 by Marcel Pilet-Golaz, president of the Confederation, to express their views on the place of Switzerland in the "new European order". The frontist Georges Oltramare, head of the Union nationale de Genève, editor of the newspaper Au Pilori, is known in France for having become one of the editorialists of the collaborator Radio-Paris in 1940. His posters proclaimed, before the war: "Help Georges Oltramare to deliver Geneva from the Freemasons who betray it, the Jews who rob it and the politicians who dishonor it". The Abwehr and SD of course recruited agents from among the frontists, and it was among these factions, which nevertheless boasted of their attachment to neutrality, that the few hundred Swiss volunteers of the Waffen SS were recruited.
** The Golden Square was a conspiracy of Arab nationalists - Muslims and Christians together - who set themselves the goal of driving the British out of Iraq, first, and then out of the Middle East. They grouped themselves around four colonels (hence the name of the organization).
*** Formerly RAF Hinaida, this airbase was used to establish the Iraqi Air Force until 1935.
