Codeword: Direktor

by Heinz Höhne

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: History, Espionage

448 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published November 1, 1970

Reviews

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Using freshly uncovered archival material, Hohne pries open the longstanding mystery surrounding Rote Kapelle (trans. Red Orchestra), the octopus-like Russian spy network operated by German Communists in the Third Reich for several years before and during the war, an intrigue which is still a source of boiling political controversy in Germany, i.e., the forthcoming memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen, former head of the West German intelligence service, allege that Martin Bormann was actually a Soviet spy with ties to Rote Kapelle. For a time the Abwehr (German counterintelligence) was stumped -- Hitler himself supposedly said in 1942, ""The Bolsheviks are ahead of us only in one thing -- espionage"" -- but eventually the Nazis broke Rote Kapelle and, in the great tradition of double agentry, they turned the operation into an elaborate counterespionage coup, persuading many uncloaked informers to feed Moscow false information; the smug Germans liked to say, ""Rote Kapelle is dead, long live Rote Kapelle."" The question however which most intrigues Hohne is were the Germans who spied against Hitler guilty of treason (as claimed by the right, then and now) or were they heroic resistance fighters striving to overturn the Fascist war machine (the leftist position). Hohne rejects both arguments as extreme and baseless (a spy is a spy is a -- spy) and surprisingly concludes that Rote Kapelle actually had little effect on the outcome of the war one way or other. Just as in The Ordeal of the Death's Head (1970), his study of Hitler's SS, Hohne refuses to sensationalize or glamorize aspects of World War II which lend themselves to this kind of treatment. Like his earlier work, this study is verbose and sometimes tiresomely repetitious (e.g., he discusses Gestapo treatment of captured agents in several different places) but in spite of these few quibbles, Codeword: Direktor establishes Hohne as a serious, competent German historian of the Nazi period.

[Devin Welsh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but felt like it was written by a student rushing to finish a term paper and just shoved in as much data as possible without any comprehension.