Avenue of Spies: A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Family's Heroic Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Paris

by Alex Kershaw

Hitler’s modern weapons were designed to rip humans to small pieces of flying flesh, to turn them to hamburger.

Paris had been declared an open city, abandoned to the Boche without a fight.

As a general in the SS and chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), Heydrich already pulled the key levers of terror, being in charge of the Gestapo, the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD), and the Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo). Tens of thousands had been murdered on his orders. Millions more would eventually die as a result of his carefully planned answer to the Jewish “problem” in Europe—the Final Solution, the greatest crime in human history.

“It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”