Brigadier Leslie Hollis reported to Prime Minister Churchill: “Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker by the right people and from the best information they look like acting on it.”
The phrase was Hollis’s, and it has become one of the most quoted lines from the entire operation. It captured exactly what the planners had hoped for: not just that the documents had been read, but that the right people, the senior German intelligence and military officials, had accepted them as genuine.
On May 14, 1943, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz reported directly to Hitler. The report noted that the Führer had rejected Mussolini’s assessment that Sicily was the actual invasion target and instead believed the Allied attacks would be directed primarily against Sardinia and the Peloponnese region of Greece.
This was the signal that the deception had penetrated to the highest level of German command.
J. GERMAN INTERPRETATION AND MILITARY CONSEQUENCES
Hitler’s response to the intelligence from Martin’s documents was rapid and directive.
On May 12, 1943, before the Mincemeat documents had even reached Berlin, but when German intelligence had already absorbed reports of the body’s discovery and the preliminary contents of the briefcase, Hitler issued orders declaring that Sardinia and the Peloponnese were to be defended “at all costs.” The instructions reflected not just the Mincemeat documents but also the broader intelligence picture the Germans were assembling, of which the documents were the most striking single piece.
The German military response developed over the following weeks.
The 1st Panzer Division was transferred from France to Salonika, Greece. This was a significant armored formation, not a garrison unit but a mobile strike force capable of responding to an amphibious invasion. Its deployment to Greece made sense only if Greece was expected to be an invasion target.