A key figure in the German assessment was Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, the senior Abwehr officer in Madrid. Kühlenthal had the documents, or photographs of them, brought to his attention and was sufficiently impressed with their apparent authenticity that he traveled personally to Berlin to present the intelligence to the OKW — the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces. This was an unusual step. An Abwehr station chief traveling personally to Berlin to brief the OKW indicated a high degree of personal conviction about the material’s importance.
Kühlenthal’s mission to Berlin is documented in various accounts of the operation, drawing on postwar testimony and captured German records. Whether he was genuinely convinced of the documents’ authenticity, or whether he was exploiting the material to enhance his own standing with his superiors, is a question that gets into the internal politics of the Abwehr, which was a complicated and often corrupt organization. What is clear is that he transmitted the material in a way that ensured it reached the highest levels of German command.
The Abwehr itself was, by 1943, a severely compromised organization. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, its head, had his own complicated relationship with the Nazi regime and would eventually be executed in 1945 for his involvement in resistance activities. Several senior Abwehr officers were in contact with British intelligence. The organization’s internal dysfunction, its penetration by Allied intelligence, and Canaris’s own complicated loyalties meant that the information passing through it was subject to all kinds of distortions and mishandlings. Kühlenthal himself, ironically, was later assessed by British intelligence as having been an effective source of information precisely because he passed material, including distorted or false material, to Berlin in ways that British intelligence could track.