Mine of information

1. A corruption of “Meinhoff information”.

During the Second World War a double agent known to British intelligence as Fritz Meinhoff became an increasingly useful source. He was thought to have been a young German civil servant who, alarmed when Hitler came to power, determined to undermine the Third Reich from the inside.

Ostensibly an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party, he rose through the ranks of its central command to the equivalent role to a British political party’s junior whip. He had access to policy decisions, military planning and the ear of the Führer. He also spoke impeccable English, and may even have been briefly educated in Engalnd, so decided early in the war that he would be valuable as a spy. With the blessing of the Party, he managed to secure a post at the British consulate in Alexandria as an interpreter. Once inside the building he quickly confided his mission and started to feed disinformation back to Berlin and reliable information to the allies via regular coded broadcasts. General Mountbatten admitted after the war that much of his strategic planning during the African campaign came from information gleaned from this source.

During one broadcast the name Fritz Meinhoff was used as a sign-off. “Meinhoff information” quickly spread throughout the intelligence services as an expression to denote trustworthy tip-offs. Sometime around VE day (May 7, 1945), Meinhoff broadcast a message which revealed his origins as a Nazi turncoat, but neither his real identity nor his location. Subsequent researchers into the story believed his real name was Max Müller, the son of a German dairy magnate, a party member listed as having been posted from Berlin but never returned. Former employees of the British consulate in Alexandria identified Fritz Meinhoff from descriptions of Müller. They said that the man they knew as Meinhoff had left the Consulate on the evening of May 15th, 1945 “to celebrate” and was never seen again.

2. What landfill will eventually become.