Georg Hansen Spied for Moscow Before Joining the German Resistance
By Vera Kessler ·
Georg Hansen was arrested and deported to the Soviet Union in 1927 for espionage, a detail held in the personal files of the British Security Service.
Georg Hansen was hauled into custody in London and deported to the Soviet Union. Along with Wilfred Macartney, he paid for his betrayal with the loss of his home and the sudden, forced relocation to the state he had served in secret.
According to the file's catalogue entry under reference KV 2/649, Hansen was a German national arrested in January 1927. The British Security Service records that he was charged, alongside Macartney, with an "offence relating to espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union." The record is brief, stripped of the courtroom drama or the specific secrets traded, noting only the result: deportation.
January 1927
In the late 1920s, London was a crossroads for revolutionaries and intelligence officers, a place where the boundaries between political activism and state-sponsored espionage were often blurred. For the Security Service, Hansen was simply another name in the PF Series—the personal files dedicated to Soviet intelligence agents and suspected agents.
This series serves as a ledger of penetration. In related entries, the scope of the Soviet effort becomes clear. The catalogue records figures like Harry Frederick Houghton, a clerk in the Admiralty Underwater Detection Establishment who passed classified material to Moscow until his 1961 conviction (KV 2/4381). It records Arthur Alexandrovitch Adams, who entered the United States under business cover in 1938 to target military secrets and later attempted to penetrate the American atomic bomb project (KV 2/3788).
Against this backdrop of systemic infiltration, Hansen and Macartney were early casualties of the British counterintelligence dragnet. The catalogue entry for KV 2/649 does not detail what Hansen was spying on or how he was caught, only that the British state decided he was too dangerous to keep on its soil.
Successor to Canaris
Public records offer a jarring contrast to the 1927 arrest. The man who was once a deported Soviet agent later rose to the rank of Oberst (Colonel) in the German Generalstab. He did not merely return to the fold of the German military; he ascended to its most sensitive heights.
By the 1940s, Hansen had entered the orbit of Wilhelm Canaris, the enigmatic head of the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence. The public record establishes that Canaris appointed Colonel Hansen as his successor to lead military counterintelligence before Canaris was removed from office in February 1944.
This trajectory—from a Soviet asset in London to the head of the Wehrmacht's counterintelligence—suggests a life lived in the gaps between official narratives. The transition from an agent of the Comintern to a high-ranking officer of the Third Reich is a pivot that would usually trigger immediate suspicion in any security screening. Yet, Hansen not only survived the purges of the era but became a key figure in the German Resistance against the Nazis.
A Roll Call of Agents
There is a certain irony in the fact that Hansen, a man once arrested for spying on the West, ended his military career attempting to dismantle the regime of Adolf Hitler from within. His role in the Resistance represents a final shift in allegiance, though it is unclear if his 1927 activities in London informed his later convictions or if they were the remnants of a youthful ideological fervor that the Soviet Union eventually discarded.
The British archives, however, remember him not as a resistance fighter or a Colonel, but as a criminal. In the KV 2 series, he is grouped with the like-minded and the compromised. The Security Service’s PF Series does not concern itself with the later redemption or the professional ascent of its subjects; it records the moment of breach.
For the historian, the gap between the deportation of 1927 and the appointment of 1944 is a void. The catalogue entry for KV 2/649 tells us where Hansen began his recorded journey with the British state—as a prisoner and a deportee—but it says nothing of how he navigated his way back into the heart of the German military establishment.
Whether the Soviet Union viewed his later service in the Abwehr as a betrayal or a long-term plant remains a question the catalogue entry does not answer.