The British intelligence assessment of the deception’s success, as the invasion drew near, concluded that the operation had worked in its primary purpose. The documents had reached German intelligence. German assessments of Allied intentions had shifted, at least in part, toward Greece and Sardinia. German defensive dispositions reflected this shift.
What could not be known, before the invasion, was whether this would be enough. Military operations are not experiments with control groups. There was no version of the Sicily invasion that proceeded without Mincemeat, against which the actual outcome could be compared. The value of the deception would be assessed after the fact, and after the fact, the assessment was that it had contributed meaningfully to the operation’s success.
J. GERMAN INTERPRETATION AND THE LIMITS OF THE DECEPTION’S EFFECTS
The German interpretation of the Mincemeat material was not a simple case of a deception being swallowed whole by a naive enemy. It was a more complicated process of intelligence assessment, institutional politics, and strategic preconception, and understanding what actually happened helps avoid both the mythology of Mincemeat as a perfect deception and the revisionist dismissal of it as irrelevant.
German military intelligence in 1943 was a contested space. The Abwehr, under Canaris, was the traditional military intelligence service, but it had been increasingly challenged by the SD Ausland — the foreign intelligence service of the SS, under Walter Schellenberg. The competition between these two organizations meant that intelligence assessments were sometimes colored by institutional rivalries. A piece of intelligence that arrived through Abwehr channels was not automatically accepted by SD analysts, and vice versa.