The Gestapo agent from Sweden. Dagmar Imgart.

It is often believed that the Gestapo was an organisation which employed hundreds of thousands of people and which controlled every aspect of life within National Socialist Germany and later in the occupied territories. That is the myth, in fact, the Gestapo was a comparatively small organisation which relied very heavily on denuniciations. The reasons why people worked with the Gestapo varied. Such denunciations came from people who believed in the National Socialist system as well as those who were being blackmailed by the Gestapo into giving information. Some freelance agents who chose to work for the Gestapo for the cash or rewards it brought to those in a position to exploit their contacts. In the latter group falls one Dagmar Imgart, a Gestapo agent from Sweden whose case became quite well known in the immediate post war period, due to death sentences handed down to people in the German resistance because of her. In this video I shall briefly tell her story.
Dagmar Imgart was born Dagmar Atterling on 8 June 1896 in Ramsberg , in the municipality of Lindesberg in the central Swedish province of Örebro. Her parents were farmers.
In 1922, she went to Germany to learn the language. In Stettin, now Szczecin in Poland she met Dr. Otto Imgart. They married on 28 October 1922. They had one child, Birgitta.
Otto Imgart was a member of the Wingolf Association which is an umbrella organisation of Christian student fraternities. Through this membership, in 1925 he took on the honorary role of federal statistician for the “Association of Old Wingolfits” and finally became federal archivist in 1927. Through her husband's work, Dagmar Imgart also gained increased contact with pastors and academics amongst others.
Hitler came to power in 1933. All student and Christian associations came under increasing pressure from the Nazi student association . The Wingolf associations were dissolved in the next two years. The Imgarts moved to Giessen in 1936, however they maintained the contacts they had made.
As a foreign national, Dagmar Imgart could travel to Sweden but for that she did need a permit. Her journeys brought her to the attention of the Gestapo. Whether they recruited her or she volunteered is not known but by 1941 she was a Gestapo agent. This meant that she was able to travel to Sweden during the war and receive gifts and money for people in war torn Germany. As agent V140, her code name was “Babs,” a name she chose as it had been a name of affection given to her when she was a child. She was assigned to the Gestapo “Church Enlightenment” department, her job was thus to spy on the church organisations which were opposed to the National Socialist system.
Her Gestapo handlers requested she became a member of the Una Sancta movement in 1941 and, from 1942, forced herself into the circle around the pastor and orientalist Alfred Kaufmann. Kaufmann had been a member of the Wingolf in Giessen.
Kaufmann had belonged to the right in German politics and had been a supporter of the DNVP - the party that had allied itself with Hitler allowing him to get a majority after the fraudulent elections of March 1933. Many years earlier, Kaufmann had been the pastor to the parents of Rudolf Hess in Alexandria and had baptised the future deputy Fuehrer. Later, he told people of how he had done his bit for the National Socialists in the seizure of power in Geissen. However, by the end of the 1930s, Kaufmann had changed his mind and clearly did not think much of the National Socialists. He brought attention to himself not only because of his refusal to give the Hitler salute but also by his lectures which meant that he had to travel. He had formed a circle of friends who would meet and talk. This was a literary circle, a social club, they did not plan resistance activities but they did chat about what they had heard on foreign radio broadcasts, made fun of the Nazis and generally said what their minds. To make it worse, the association between Kaufmann and Rudolf Hess was known. After the Hess flight to the UK in May 1941, this association was one of suspicion and the Gestapo may have thought that somehow he was still in contact with Hess.
Imgart regularly passed information about this circle of friends to the Gestapo. On 6 February 1942 she was detained by the Gestapo but this was only not to blow her cover. That evening and the following morning, the Gestapo arrested everyone in the group.
After a show trial on 20 - 21. July 1942 , Alfred Kaufmann and Heinrich Will were sentenced to death by the People's Court. This was the first trial where the death sentence was given for the crime of listening to foreign radio broadcasts. Elisabeth Will, the wife of Heinrich Willi was given a prison sentence - from prison she was sent to Auschwitz where she was murdered. Another member of the group was beaten to death by the Darmstadt Gestapo.