The History of Terrorism
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Grain
Grain trade
1929-1939 Known as the "King of Wheat," the Dreyfus Group dominated the grain trade through the Great Depression and up to the outbreak of World War II.
1939-1945 World War 2 WWII
Cultural history of World War II
United States home front during World War II
American propaganda during World War II
1944-1945 Operation Cornflakes
Attachments
Operation Cornflakes
Parents
1942-1945 Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
American propaganda during World War II
Intelligence of World War II
Morale Operation (MO)
Office of Strategic Services operations
Philatelic fakes and forgeries
Propaganda AKA Public Relations
Propaganda techniques using information
Psychological warfare (PSYWAR)
The OSS was created as a PSYOP against the German public during WW2.
The overarching goal of the operation was to disrupt the morale of the German people by using a method of large scale psychological operation (PSYOP) that the British MI6 had been pushing into service with the help of the Royal Air Force (RAF).
United States intelligence operations
Children
1944 Operation CORNFLAKES began with OSS officials collecting any and all German POWs that had experience with the German postal service or Reichspost.
1945 OSS Stamps of Hitler showing his face as a half eaten skull.
1945 The first mission of Operation Cornflakes took place on 5 January 1945, when a mail train to Linz was bombed.
A unit of the OSS out of Rome claimed to have forged over 15000 envelopes a week.
In hopes of shaking the morale further in the German people, the OSS called upon master forgers similar in nature as MI6 once had, but rather than having an image of Himmler replacing Hitler, the OSS used a stamp of Hitler, but with some minor modification
Operation Cornflakes involved tricking the German postal service, Deutsche Reichspost, into inadvertently delivering anti-Nazi propaganda to German citizens through mail.
The envelopes were to be addressed and sealed in Siena, then down to Rome where they would be placed into the counterfeit bags where the mail would be finally sent to Bari to be routed and canceled.
The letters coming out of Rome to be mailed were completed in different cities around Rome.
The OSS was formed from the division of the Foreign Information Service (FIS) and the Coordinator of Information (COI), a division that President Roosevelt enacted by Executive order 9128.
With this information the OSS and German exiles scoured the telephone directories and pulled over two million, randomly selected names registered within the Reich to send forged letters to.