In Hitler's Secret Service
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
In Hitler's Secret Service The Labyrinth. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet By Walter Schellenberg. Veteran CBS foreign correspondent Harper. 423 pp. $4.95. The Labyrinth is an apt title for this...
...But this chapter, like most of the others, is less a study than a narrative...
...His story of the struggle between the spies and counterspies, saboteurs and police of Hitler's Reich and its enemies is always absorbing, often thrilling...
...Goering, by then no more than "King of the Black Market" (in Himmler's description), dressed in toga and sandals and fingering a glass full of precious stones, symbolizes the rot that crumbled the monolithic state...
...In part, the material is not unfamiliar...
...The impressions of Schellenberg himself, which seep out from between the lines of his narrative, are by no means the least interesting element of this book...
...Yet the sad tale of the gullible British, who expected easily to find a German opposition with which they could negotiate, has its moral for our time, too...
...The story of the Venlo episode has probably never been told in such colorful detail—down to the corny episode of the British spy challenging the German agent in the bathroom with the question, "Tell me, do you always wear a monocle...
...One would have liked to hear much more about this tendency in men like Martin Bormann and Gustav Mueller...
...Walter Schellenberg, young man on the make in a time of trouble, secret operative who rose to be the confidant of Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler and finally head of the German Intelligence Service, has written an account of the secret war...
...But by then the rush of events was beyond the power of any man to divert, let alone stem...
...As a spy story alone, The Labyrinth will make its mark, touching, as it does, the high points of a dozen operations and going into the more dramatic aspects of modern espionage technique...
...And, in the end, says Schellenberg, "very little" of the incriminating evidence had to be forged...
...He has set down, in this book, a colorful sketch of an intelligence service which he would probably have been capable of fashioning into a superb machine...
...But neither drugs nor hypnosis could get him to confess more than his part in the attempt, if indeed there was much more...
...The superstitious Himmler, with his moods and horoscopes, has been particularly well dissected...
...No less true is this of the vain and empty Ribbentrop, who could think of nothing better when the end was in sight than theatrically to volunteer to assassinate Stalin...
...One of these was that the Duke of Windsor, allegedly disgruntled at his subordinate part in the British war effort, was considering voluntary exile in a neutral European country...
...The man who planted the time bomb in the beer cellar on the eve of the Nazi anniversary—a carpenter named Elser— was caught...
...The Labyrinth is an apt title for this fascinating story of a talented careerist in the maze of a Byzantine system which gave him ample scope for devious maneuvering, but hope for neither escape nor fulfilment...
...He was one of that rootless generation which came to manhood in the late Twenties and early Thirties, bewildered and insecure, ready to accept a doctrine (in his case a career) which offered stability...
...Schellenberg was actually sent to Portugal to kidnap the Duke and went to considerable trouble before he could convince his chiefs that the enterprise was a pipe dream...
...was surely one of the seeds of Nazism's destruction...
...Much of their activity, as they revolved in the flickering light of Hitler's favor, was plain and fancy throat cutting...
...But Schellenberg is the manipulator and cold observer rather than the student of character...
...A political reader might wish for greater detail about so historic a piece of skulduggery as the collaboration of Heydrich, Eduard Benes and Stalin which led to the liquidation of Marshal Tukhachevsky and the leading marshals of the Red Army in 1937...
...This man of immense and sinister power, who relied largely on his chiropractor for his judgments of men...
...The Gestapo had to burglarize the secret archives of the German General Staff to obtain some of the material...
...Schellenberg goes over Operation Cicero and recalls the affair of Richard Sorge, who may have been one of history's most curious double agents...
...The Nazis, notably their Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, entertained even more fatuous illusions...
...He outlines the struggle between the Nazi and Soviet secret services, and their respective triumphs in the "Rote Kapelle" and "Operation Zeppelin...
...Schellenberg reviews the bomb plot against Hitler in 1939—a mystery that was never solved...
...Nevertheless, Schellenberg succeeds, without moralizing or self-justification, in giving the reader a good look at the intimate workings of the Nazi Fiihrerhorps—especially of its secondary and lesser members, Himmler, Heydrich, Ribbentrop, Ernst Kaltenbrunner and others...
...The excellent foreword by Alan Bullock, distinguished author of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, examines Schellenberg's bona fides and stakes out the area of the police system in which he operated...
...Only toward the end did he move from skilful gathering and screening to intellectual conclusion...
...It is not surprising that, in the Gotterdammerung of the "Thousand-Year Reich," the thoughts of some of its cruelest servants should have revealed a growing affinity for the Soviet system...
Vol. 40 • September 1957 • No. 36
