On the eve of the Allied landings in Normandy, German agent Paul Fitrmutz – code name “Ostro” – knew what was about to happen. A few days before the landing, Ostro, who was in Lisbon, had in his hands the smallest detail of Operation Overlord, as the planned Normandy landing was codenamed.
The Allies would not land at Calais, as the German command and Hitler believed, but on the coast of Normandy, having gathered 200,000 troops, in two levels of attack. Ostro wanted to inform his superiors in Berlin. "The plan envisages an attack from the air and from the sea in the area of Carendan, east of Herburg", he wrote in his message.
Ostro was Austrian. From an early age he became involved in the dark world of espionage. He spoke six languages fluently and had a particularly high IQ. For a time he had also collaborated with the British secret services. Because of their collaboration, he was arrested, in 1935, by the Gestapo. Nevertheless, he continued to work for the British, who he informed about Hitler's plans to annex Austria and Czechoslovakia.
In 1939 he became a member of the Nazi party and in 1940 he was sent to Lisbon. There he developed an espionage network in favor of Germany, but also passing on misleading information supplied to him, in a way, by the British. The fact that some of the information he transmitted was not accurate made the Germans suspect that he was not properly evaluating the information he was sending them.
This was also the fate of his report on the impending Allied landing in Normandy. Hitler refused to accept its authenticity with known results. "The fact that Ostro tells us the exact location, time and day of the landing leads me to the conclusion that the information is false," Hitler had said at the time.
Fitrmutz survived the war. He died in 1958 in Spain, working there as a correspondent for Der Spiegel. If his account of the landing had been believed, perhaps the course of World War II would have been different.