Operation Mincemeat - How a Corpse Fooled Hitler

In early 1943 as Hitler was in control of the majority of Europe, Churchill decided to attack Europe's "underbelly", Italy and Greece, so that they could get the allied troops in northern Africa up through the Mediterranean quickly to surprise the Nazis and the Italians occupying the areas while keeping the rest of their troops in England in order to continue preparing an invasion of France. The problem with this plan was that it was too obvious and the enemy was well aware of what the allies intended to do. Hitler had been fearing this oncoming attack of southern Europe for a while and was eagerly waiting to overhear from allied communications where exactly they were going to attack so he could send out his waiting troops to stop them.

There were only three places that the allies could enter the "underbelly" of Europe through: Greece, Sicily and Sardinia. In order to decided where they would invade, the allies held the Casablanca conference in January, 1943 in French Morocco where they formulated their plan to invade through Sicily in July and called it Operation Husky. In order to pull of Operation Husky, the allies needed to do everything in their power to keep Germany from learning of the location of the invasion which lead to the creation of Operation Mincemeat.

There were 51 different operations and suggestions for deceiving the Germans about the location of the allied invasion. Operation Mincemeat was originally a suggestion on that list and entailed a corpse dressed as an airman with fraudulent military dispatches in his pockets leaking the invasion of Greece instead of Sicily being dropped on a coast tangled in a failed parachute to give false information to the Nazis. Churchill was in favor of this idea because Hitler already believed that the allies were going to invade Greece, and this would support his thinking and would look enough like an accident to fool the Nazis.

Intelligence officers Charles Cholmondeley and Ewen Montagu at MI5 were put in charge of this operation and were given three months to plant the corpse so that the Nazis would have enough time to find and digest the information and move their troops to the wrong place before the actual invasion in July. They decided to plant the body in Spain because though it was supposed to be neutral, there were a lot of Axis sympathies so the information would be passed on to Hitler through his many spies there. The intelligence officers were specifically targeting Nazi agent Adolf Claus who was known to be ruthless but quite gullible, and they knew he would not consider the possibility that the information was part of an elaborate hoax and would pass it on to Hitler without question.

Now that they had a place to drop the body, Cholmondeley and Montagu went about creating a plausible backstory for the airman who they named Major William Martin. They decided that in order to make the persona of the airman believable, there must not only be important documents in his pockets, but also what they called "pocket litter" - ticket stubs, pictures of family and receipts. They decided to give him a wife, and all the women working at MI5 submitted photographs to be placed in his pocket. A woman named Gene Leslie was selected, and Hester Leggart, the head secretary, was chosen to write the love letters that would go along with it while Cholmondeley wore what would be the uniform of Major Martin everyday to give it that worn in look.

Once they received final approval to carry out this operation from Admiral Godfrey, the intelligence agency started looking for a body. They needed someone who did not have any signs of visible trauma or disease, who was of military age, and who did not have relatives who would care about burial. They preferred to have someone who died of pneumonia because if there was an autopsy done by the Spanish, the fluid in his lungs from the illness would convince them that he drowned due to a faulty parachute.

After a lot of struggle to find a body, they eventually received the corpse of Glyndwr Michael who met all of the requirements except he died from rat poison, not pneumonia. Another problem with the body was that they had no photos of him to use for an ID card, and in every picture they took, he looked like a dead body. Since they were running out of time, the officers decided to use Michael anyways, and luckily there was a fellow intelligence offer who looked similar enough to the body for an ID photo. In order to keep the Spanish coroners from performing an autopsy and realizing that the body wasn't freshly dead from drowning, there was a St. Christopher medal placed in his pocket. The medal showed the Catholic Spanish that the airman was Catholic, and as it was against Catholic tradition to dissect a body, the Spanish would leave his body alone.

Once the backstory was complete in spring of 1943, the M15 was ready to launch Operation Mincemeat. The intelligence officers dressed the body of Michael, now Major Martin, in his airman's uniform now well worn and full of pocket litter, put a life vest on him, and chained a briefcase to his wrist containing a letter from a one general to another with the false information about the invasion in it to make it seem inconspicuous. Then the body went into a metal cylinder and was given to a submarine commander to release into the current that took him right to Huelva where the German agent Adolf Claus was staying. Once the body was released, the British sent out frantic missing person messages that they knew would get intercepted so that the Nazis would know that they had something important on their hands.

Nine days after the body washed up on the shore, Hitler's most trusted man in Spain, Karl Kuhlenthal, obtained the briefcase from Claus and carried the message on up the line to Hitler. Since the false information in the letter about the invasion of Greece instead of Sicily confirmed Hitler's suspicions, he believed what he read without question and moved his troops to defend Greece's coast instead of defending Italy. The allies were able to invade Sicily easily and gain easy access to Italy where they were able to advance with little opposition and loss of life until the Nazis were able to relocate their troops and Operation Mincemeat was a success.

Sources:
Stuff you should know podcast - Operation Mincemeat
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-11887115
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/topics/operation_mincemeat