Hitler's Spies – David Kahn, 1978 ★★

Keeping Hitler in the Dark

Titles are funny things. Sometimes they are disarmingly bland, suggesting nothing of the page-turning dynamite within.

Others are short and sweet and promise killer content, only to offer a damp squib. Such was the case with this, historian David Kahn’s promisingly-titled follow-up to his landmark examination of cryptography, The Codebreakers.

Hitler’s Spies is a dull read in the fortunate sense that it turns out there’s not that much of a story here, even if Kahn takes 543 pages telling it. The Third Reich had a mighty army to impose itself across Europe and parts beyond, but their ruthless efficiency didn’t extend to espionage. In a sort of merciful adjunct of the social Darwinism so many Nazi leaders espoused, spycraft was not a strong point of theirs, thanks to the same systemic traits that fueled their drive for war, with a strong assist coming in the blinkered leadership of Adolf Hitler.

Kahn writes: At every one of the strategic turning points of World War II, her intelligence failed. It underestimated Russia, blacked out before the North African invasion, awaited the Sicily landing in the Balkans, and fell for thinking the Normandy landings a feint.

A key problem with Kahn’s book, at least for me, is his numbing interest in laying out the groundwork of Nazi espionage. Long chapters detail the organizational charts of various entities that were charged with the collection and analysis of information. Kahn details German intelligence activities in World War I and the interwar period, how it was managed and maintained.

World War I had something World War II didn’t have: A legendary spy working for the Germans. Alas, Mata Hari was not much of an example of stealthy competence; she was found out within weeks of working her womanly wiles on Allied officers. The only known death Mata racked up for her German overlords turned out to be her own.

In World War II, such fumbling was more common, and as Kahn tells it, came at a higher price for the Germans. Take for example the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Rippentrop, whose embassies served as conduits of vital pre-war information:

He believed that his chief duty, aside from executing the Fuhrer’s wishes, was to shield him from doubts and from considerations that might instill doubts. He urged his officials to share his faith and forbade them to submit reports that might shake it. Consequently, though his subordinates often reported unpalatable truths, the reality that reached Hitler through him was less objective than subjective.

In popular fiction, Nazi spies often serve a vital role, working with ruthless efficiency to undermine Allied plans. Think of Eric Ambler’s Journey Into Fear, published in the war’s second year, or later potboilers like Ken Follett’s Eye Of The Needle. Can anyone who has seen the classic The Man Who Never Was, a cinematic recounting of one of the war’s great misdirection ploys, forget the performance of Stephen Boyd as a cool and courageous Nazi spy who nearly blows the works on British secret agent man Clifton Webb?

Boyd’s Irish spy was that movie’s one outsized fictional element, inserted for some needed tension. Such a character had to be invented since the Germans had nothing like him working on their end in real life.

If to underscore this disparity, Hitler’s Spies opens on the coast of Maine in the last full year of the war, where a U-boat drops off a pair of agents. The two men are soon spotted but escape a hasty dragnet. They wind up in New York City, where one of them, an American-born gadfly, contents himself with picking up women at fancy Manhattan restaurants before deciding to abscond with his diamond cache of spy funds. Eventually he gives up the other spy to authorities, and that’s that.

The chapter, entitled “The Climax of German Spying in America,” concludes thusly: It had cost the Nazis $60,000 in cash, the value of 99 diamonds, the time of a U-boat, the effort of spymasters in Berlin, Dresden, and The Hague, and the hopes of high officials of the Thousand Year Reich. And it had produced absolutely nothing.

It was emblematic of Germany’s entire secret war. There was but one coup scored by German agents in the United States, the acquisition of plans for the Norden bombsight. The German spies, known as the Duquesne Spy Ring, were rounded up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation before the U. S. entry to the war, but not before the plans were in the hands of Abwehr officer Nikolaus Ritter in Hamburg.

Fritz Joubert Duquesne, head of a German spy ring, has a date with the G-men in this FBI surveillance photo of a meeting with double agent William Sebold (seen from behind), captured through a one-way mirror. Image from http://all-that-is-interesting.com/duquesne-spy-ring-william-sebold

The Abwehr was the main organ of German intelligence, a hotbed of anti-Hitler sentiment as it turned out led by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Before the war’s end, Canaris would pay a heavy price for his lack of faith in Hitler, led out naked to an execution ground a month prior to the war’s end.

As Kahn depicts him, Canaris was less a lion of resistance than a tired old man who did his best work for democracy before he turned on his leader. The Abwehr usually gave Hitler bad information about enemy intentions, overestimating Allied forces and missing clues regarding their intentions. Unfortunately, Canaris proved as inept when he became active in an anti-Hitler conspiracy, hemming and hawing from the sidelines while others, more energetic, unsuccessfully attempted to kill Hitler with a bomb in 1944.

“He was the Hamlet of conservative Germany,” Kahn notes of Canaris, quoting British intelligence officer and later historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. It’s a sad, apt epitaph.

By the time of his execution, Canaris’s incompetence was proving his best revenge. Take what happened in Great Britain, where the Abwehr was charged with one of its most vital tasks: Uncovering Allied plans to open up a second front in France.

The English operations are detailed in a middle section of Hitler’s Spies, following long and ponderously detailed accounts of such things as radio surveillance activities, aerial photography runs, which chemical reagents were favored in the use of invisible ink, and even infantry reconnaissance. Ineptitude is the common denominator. In Great Britain, the German spies were found out quickly and employed by British intelligence as part of an epic misinformation campaign:

It was the greatest deception in the history of warfare, since the Trojans dragged into their jubilant city a huge wooden horse left by the departing Greeks.

The British kept the Germans thinking about alternate places where the Allies might land, everywhere except Normandy where the landings came. The plot was aided by Hitler himself, who was fixated on another stretch of French coastline closer to the British Isles, the Pas de Calais.

“For it is there that the enemy must and will attack, and it is there – unless everything is misleading – that the decisive battle against the landing forces will be fought,” Kahn reports Hitler saying at one of his staff meetings. Even after D-Day, with fake British reports buttressing his delusions, Hitler kept needed panzer troops waiting in another part of France for an attack that never came.

If everything in Hitler’s Spies was as interesting as this, it would be a much harder book to put down, bulky as it is. But I sense Kahn would counter that he wasn’t interested in writing that kind of history. His is more academic than popular in nature, meant to present a soup-to-nuts rundown of German intelligence in all its forms.

Kahn’s book has been superseded in several respects over the past 40 years; it misses a good deal of the more active subterfuge against Hitler practiced by Nazi intelligence leaders in the tail end of the war, like that of Canaris’s chief rival, SD commander Walter Schellenberg, and the fact that some intelligence officers like Ritter knew their British assets had been turned but did nothing about it in fear of what it would mean for them if Hitler discovered their being duped.

But I suspect, for all its omissions and its general dullness, Hitler’s Spies’ main thesis remains incontrovertible, that the intelligence failures were a byproduct of their government’s ruinous character. “In the end, German espionage, like so much of that vile regime, ran on blood and stank of burnt flesh,” Kahn notes. As he shows in his laborious way, this is not a good system for getting and keeping secrets, for which we can be thankful.