Rudolf Roessler

Rudolf Roessler was born on November 22, 1897 in Kaufbeuren, Bavaria.[3] He was the son of a Bavarian Forestry Official. At the age of 17 and following the start of World War I, he enlisted in the German army and served as a soldier.[4] While enlisted, he befriended ten other people from the military who would later become his contacts in World War II and assist with the disclosure of classified information. After being released from service in the German army, he studied theology in Augsburg.

Roessler, growing in opposition of the rise of Nazism, started working as a newspaper man at the Augsburg Post Zeitung to warn fellow Germans to the rise of Nazism when Adolf Hitler became prominent in German politics.

Rudolf Roessler was visited by German generals and two of his contacts, Rudolf von Gersdof and Fritz Thiele. He was provided with a radio and given the nickname Lucy, short for Lucerne, where he lived. The one condition for his services was that he would never name his sources.

Roessler's information came straight from the German High command. He would get radio contact from the Official Broadcasting Center of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, and the information was given to a transmitter who only knew Roessler by his call number "RAHS." A typical day for Rudolf Roessler was to receive transmissions via the Broadcasting Center during his work day, and rebroadcast this information to the Russian military after leaving work for the evening.

The order of how the Russians received Roessler's information was this: the contacts would send information to Roessler. From Roessler, he would transmit the information to Christian Schneider, his boss. From Schneider to Rado, then Foote, and finally to Moscow.

During Operation Barbarossa, Roessler was able to get information for the complete order of battle including codenames, individual battalions down to the soldier, precise times and directions of attack, senior officers down the corps commanders, and the intention of each individual attack.

When Roessler received this information, he tried to give it to the Swiss to relay to the Russians, but the Swiss refused to share the information. Through other contacts, he was able to alert the Russians. However, the Russian "center" believed Roessler to be an agent provocateur or double agent, and disregarded his information. On 22 June 1941, Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union.

During the Battle of Kursk (German code name "Operation Zitadelle"), Roessler was able to get information for the sectors to be attacked, the number of men and materials, the locations of the supply and command posts, where possible reinforcements could come from, and the day and hour of attack.

This time, Russia was prepared. 977,000 men, 3,300 tanks and assault guns, 20,000 other guns, and 3,000 aircraft were deployed in a defensive line 70 miles (110 km) deep. The German plan was a pincer movement.

Roessler was arrested twice on counts of spying for a foreign nation. His first arrest occurred on May 19, 1944; he was incarcerated at the prison of Lausanne until his release on September 8, 1944. His second arrest was in March 1953. His trial was held on November 2, 1953, where he was charged with spying on West Germany for Czechoslovakia. He was imprisoned for nine months and released in early 1954.

Roessler is a major character in Colin Forbes' thriller The Leader and the Damned. The book largely follows known historical facts in depicting Roessler getting messages from a highly placed agent in Hitler's headquarters, giving exact and detailed information on the German army's dispositions on the Eastern Front and passing them on to Moscow, where they get the attention of Stalin in person. As depicted in the book, Roessler himself does not know the identity of this highly placed agent, known only by the code-name "Woodpecker".

• Accoce, Pierre; Quet, Pierre (1968). A man called Lucy, 1939-1945. New York: Coward-McCann. OCLC 44768514.
• C.P.S. "Le Jugement Contre Roessler Et Schnieper." Tribune De Lausanne 6 November 1953: n. pag. Print.
• Sandor Rado: The Jovial and Worldly Spy. Vol. 30. 1986. Print.
• "Soviet Agents' Work Revealed." Prescott Evening Courier [Prescott, Arizona] 9 July 1953: 8. Print.
• "Top Soviet Spy Goes on Trial." Sarasota Herald-Tribune [Sarasota, Florida] 2 November 1953: 1. Print.
• "Alexander Rado." Central Intelligence Agency. Central Intelligence Agency, 15 November 2013. Web. 27 December 2015.
• Ambrose, Stephen E. Ike's Spies. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company Inc, 1981. Print.
• Bauer, Eddy, Peter Young, James Lawton Collins, and Correlli Barnett. Illustrated World War II Encyclopedia: An Unbiased Account of the Most Devastating War Known to Mankind ... Contains the Original Text Previously Published in the United Kingdom plus Background Articles by a Group of Distinguished Historians ... Enlivened with Color Photographs Recently Uncovered. Place of Publication Not Identified: H.S. Stuttman, 1978. Print.
• Hastings, Max (2015). The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939 -1945 (Paperback)|format= requires |url= (help). London: William Collins. ISBN 978-0-00-750374-2.
• Rossé, Christian. "Le Service De Renseignements Suisse Face à La Menace Allemande, 1939-1945." Ivresdeguerre.net. 8 May 2007. Web. 27 Dec. 2015.
• "'Rote Drei' Agent Files." The National Archives. N.p., May 2004. Web. 27 December 2015.
• "Rudolf Roessler." SpyMuseumcom the 1 Resource for Espionage on the Web. 19 March 2015. Web. 27 December 2015.
• Time-Life Books, ed. WW II: Time-Life Books History of the Second World War. 1st ed. New York: Prentice Hall, 1989. Print.
• Volkman, Ernest. "Rudolf Roessler: The Enigma of Lucy." Spies: The Secret Agents Who Changed the Course of History. New York: J. Wiley, 1994. 237-46. Print.
• Ziemke, Earl Frederick. The Soviet Juggernaut. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life, 1980. Print.