WW2.1: Gestaponomicon

For a period after America's entry into the war, the Office of Strategic Services struggled to even comprehend that the stories of monsters and other occult phenomena fielded against the Allies by Axis forces might be real rather than exagerations or outright imaginings. Their culture simply didn't allow for belief in such.

As a result, once it began to sink in that the threat was very real, the OSS was far behind the SS and the Gestapo in occult knowledge and experience and began to recruit and study at a fevered pace. This rush resulted in initial failures, as the organization was unable to properly vet references and authorities. Their early understanding of the occult mysteries was contaminated by charlatans and bad fiction.

One such failed operation was a disinformation campaign aimed at creating false intelligence for Axis spies to intercept. The aim was to create the impression that the OSS had discovered that the Gestapo had acquired a valuable tome and was keeping it from the other German factions, thus sewing distrust in the German ranks. Unfortunately, the team based most of its misinformation on an uninitiated interpretion of HP Lovecraft's description of the Necronomicon.

The material developed for the project hopelessly transparent to any experienced occult scholar. To make matters worse, the project members had taken to refering to the fictional tome as the Gestaponomicon, and a newly recruited and poorly briefed transcriptionist had dutifully included the derisive title in several the false documents to be intercepted.

If the Germans had been inclined to be taken in by the ruse, unlikely given Hitler's well known obsession with occult references and blind rage on discovery that any had been denied him, and the intercepted material had been given to intelligence analysts of insufficient experience to spot the obvious falsification, the ludicrous title of the fictional book was enough to alert even the dullest of German analysts.

Unknowingly, the organization's bumbling resulted in an unguessed victory. A group of conspirators within the Gestapo had actually been concealing several occult references from Hitler and the other German factions, and this false intelligence spooked them into destroying the books rather than using them to increase their personal power and influence.