Norman Ridley

Eleven years after Reinhard Gehlen, the head of Adolf Hitler’s Eastern Front military intelligence unit, emerged from hiding to hand himself over to US forces, he had, with the help of the American CIA, created a legend for himself as founder and first president of the West German Secret Service. In this role he employed many of the same Wehrmacht and SS officers he had served with during the Second World War. All through the steady progression of his career before and during the Second World War, Gehlen had been far too industrious and committed to court the limelight. Then after the defeat of Germany, when he transferred his allegiance to the CIA and later became head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, he became a man whom Hugh Trevor Roper’s described as someone who ‘always moved in the shadows’. For some, the German intelligence network that Gehlen had controlled since 1942, was part of an unbroken tradition going back to the days of Bismarck. For a great many in Gehlen’s organisation the Cold War was merely an extension of an anti-Soviet campaign that had begun on 22 June 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. After the war, Gehlen had emerged unscathed from Hitler’s bunker and no war crimes charges were ever brought against him. His name, and those of 350 of his Wehrmacht command, were redacted from the official lists of German prisoners of war. Gehlen protected and employed men like Heinrich Schmitz who had been part of Einsatzgruppe A, the murder squad that massacred so many, including communist functionaries and Jewish women, men and children, in the Baltic States. Though Gehlen had remained loyal to Hitler right to the end, once state authority collapsed he wasted little time in making contact with the Americans and offered to place his vast intelligence resources at their disposal in the new fight against Soviet communism. While German generals Heinz Guderian and Franz Halder placed great store by Gehlen’s reports on the tactical level, Hitler called them ‘defeatist’ and gave them barely a glance when making his disastrous strategic decisions. Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, did not repeat Hitler’s mistake, but Gehlen deeply resented the way that his reports to Dulles were mishandled. It became Gehlen’s ambition initially to head up a completely independent West German foreign intelligence service. However, it was not until 1951 that talks to establish a West German intelligence service at federal level began. In the immediate post-war years, Gehlen tirelessly made his case to defend the harbouring of former Wehrmacht and SS personnel in his organisation and battled to prove his worth to the Americans. This book looks at Gehlen’s life from his early career in the chaos of Weimar, through his elevation to General Staff intelligence officer on the Russian Front. It describes how he survived the defeat of the Third Reich and offered himself to the Americans as a foil against the Soviet Union in the Cold War. In doing so it closely examines Gehlen’s record to separate fact from his self-serving fictions.

Formed a mere two months after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Cheka, the Soviet Security and Intelligence Agency, was formed to gather intelligence and promote revolution abroad. This organisation underwent a series of transformations over the following decades and achieved some remarkable successes against Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the USA, and the United Kingdom. Throughout the 1930s, the Soviets pursued their ambition of gaining influence in Eastern Europe. It was a plan that inevitably brought them into conflict with Nazi Germany, against which they began setting up clandestine organisations that were meant to become operational in the event of war. The USA had been of peripheral interest to the Soviets up until the prospect of war loomed ever closer. Then, when it became known that Britain and the USA were exploring the potential of atomic weapons, espionage in the western hemisphere became of paramount importance. Despite their being allies against the Nazis, the Soviets significantly increased spying activity against both nations in an effort to develop their own atomic bomb programme. After the end of the Second World War, a new and ominous threat hung over the world in the guise of the Cold War when the Soviets brought into play their British spy network which became known as the Cambridge Five. These were agents who had been radicalised and recruited during the 1930s and then embedded within the British security services. In Stalin’s Top Spies the author explores five of the Soviet Union’s greatest spies: Leopold Trepper (and the Red Orchestra), Ursula Kuczynski (the Atomic Spy), Richard Sorge (a Soviet agent in Tokyo), Kim Philby (the Cambridge Spy), and Rudolf Abel (a Soviet intelligence officer who was arrested in the USA on charges of espionage in 1957). The book not only reveals their successes and failures, but assessing the extent to which they influenced world events from the Second World War through to the early years of the Cold War. In so doing, it also highlights the failures of the target nations to recognise the threat posed to them and exposes their lack of success in dealing with it.

When the American War of Independence broke out, the American, British and French intelligence agencies were particularly well structured, but it soon became apparent to all involved that victory hinged on sound political and military intelligence. While Britain and France had a tradition of conducting espionage, the Americans struggled with an intelligence service that was almost always markedly inferior. Even so, despite this disadvantage, it was they who prevailed. Right from the start, General George Washington had been keenly aware of the importance of the espionage and counterintelligence roles. Under his supervision, several networks of spies operated in both close-knit circles and far-reaching societies. The undercover agents were merchants, tailors, farmers, and other extraordinary patriots with ordinary day jobs. Benjamin Franklin took responsibility for covert action, while John Jay oversaw the counterintelligence work. All three men were all honoured by the CIA in 1997 as the Founding Fathers of the American intelligence services. The British, in particular, required information about geography and terrain unfamiliar to their forces. The British, for example, conducted a campaign of trying to win over the American public and especially the enslaved people of African descent. They also relied in part on spies such as Benedict Arnold, whose name later became synonymous with treason and betrayal. Discounting technology, there are few differences between modern espionage and the techniques and methods of 250 years ago. Double agents, secret writing, dead drops, clandestine meetings, code-making and breakings, sabotage, bribery deception, signals, propaganda, and partisan warfare were all very much in evidence during the revolution. Both sides also mounted disinformation campaigns to confuse and mislead. In no small part, the outcome of a number of Civil War battles, such as Lexington, Concord and Yorktown, owed much to the use of intelligence and the work of America’s spymaster, Agent 711 – General George Washington.

Resistance in Nazi Germany was a brave but extreme reaction to the totalitarian regime, requiring individuals to confront evil, face torture, and risk death. In a country with no tolerance for dissent, opposition meant confronting the brutal consequences of one's actions, often with little hope of changing the course of events. Most stories of German opposition focus on the failed assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944 by Oberst Claus von Stauffenberg. However, this was just one of many plots against the Führer, involving military and political leaders who sought peace by eliminating Hitler. Many of these individuals, if they had survived, might have faced war crime charges at Nuremberg. This book explores both the military and diplomatic figures who resisted Hitler, as well as other forms of internal opposition that predated Nazi control of the Reichstag in 1933. It highlights the tens of thousands who were imprisoned, tortured, or executed for standing against the dictatorship. The elites who welcomed the end of Weimar democracy were often more willing to accommodate Hitler, but many others—motivated by religious, political, or humane beliefs—refused to compromise, showing immense courage and sacrifice. The book also examines the Gestapo’s efforts to track down and eliminate these resistance groups.

The post-war world was dominated by the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., but the events of 1956 exposed their limitations. On 22 October 1956, following Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden secretly met with French and Israeli leaders in Sevres, France. They agreed that Israel would invade Egypt, with Britain and France intervening under the guise of peacemaking to secure control of the canal and topple Nasser. On 23 October, far from the Middle East, hundreds of thousands of protesters in Budapest opposed Soviet occupation, tearing down Stalin statues. The uprising escalated as the Soviet Red Army intervened, leading to twelve days of violence, thousands killed or injured, and 250,000 Hungarians fleeing their country. Britain and France withdrew from the Suez after nine days of fighting, their ambitions thwarted by international pressure and canal closure. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. struggled to influence these events. The U.S., preoccupied with domestic elections and the threat of Soviet nuclear retaliation, could not support Eastern European movements. Soviet actions during the Hungarian uprising weakened their global image. Norman Ridley’s analysis reveals how these crises highlighted the limitations of superpower influence. Despite their nuclear strength, the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. faced challenges they could not overcome, showing their mutual struggles in shaping the post-war world order.

The intelligence war between Germany and the Soviet Union, ignited by Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, was fiercely contested over four years. Neither side was prepared for the scale of the conflict, and both quickly developed methods to assess and counter each other’s military intentions. This book explores the intelligence strategies of Stalin’s SMERSH and Hitler’s Abwehr. SMERSH coordinated three independent counter-intelligence agencies within the Red Army, while the Abwehr was Germany’s military-intelligence service. Focusing on key battles like Stalingrad and Kursk, the book examines how both sides competed for intelligence advantage. The Soviets excelled in strategic deception, manipulating German decision-making. Early in the war, they used counterintelligence to deceive the Germans, notably during their surprise counteroffensive at Moscow in December 1941 and their hidden tank formations in 1942. German intelligence chief Gehlen underestimated Soviet deception and overestimated German superiority, which hindered effective analysis. Meanwhile, the Soviets deployed agents behind German lines and employed terror tactics to destroy German operations. The pivotal battle of Stalingrad revealed the Germans' intelligence failures, and their subsequent losses marked a turning point. By the war's end, Soviet counterintelligence had become a critical weapon, reshaping the intelligence landscape and significantly impacting the outcome of the war.

When Hitler was striving for recognition and relevance in the political turmoil of the early Weimar years in Germany he gave little thought to the world on the other side of the Atlantic other than to nurture a constant nagging resentment over President Wilson’s role in the post-war evisceration of Germany at Versailles in 1919. It was the United States, however, that had bankrolled the German economy to substantially boost industrial production and employment in the 1920s and the evidence of American wealth and economic power was hard to ignore. Even when the Nazis took over in Germany after the elections of March 1933, Hitler’s narrow vision was still concentrated on consolidating his power base in Germany itself and quickly thereafter expanded to take in the countries of Eastern Europe. What impressions he had of American culture and society were encapsulated in the trivialities and stereotypes of Hollywood movies depicting the ‘wild west’ or the deprivations of the Great Depression. Despite its economic power, nothing in Hitler’s world view envisaged the United States as a potential player in European politics, but the Germans intelligence services that he inherited were not so easily convinced. They had been aware of American power and influence since before the First World War and for them, spying on the United States was nothing more than a continuation of their efforts to prevent that country thwarting German ambitions. There had been spectacular successes in the past, such as the espionage attack that had wreaked massive destruction in the Black Tom Island explosion on 30 July 1916. But overall, the German agencies had gone to great lengths and considerable expense without achieving their ambitions and failed to prevent American participation in the war. With another war in prospect, the Germans once again made plans to influence American policy and do what they could to keep their forces out of European affairs. Spying for Hitler traces the history of German espionage in the United States and describes, in detail, the personnel involved and operations they conducted all through the 1930s and early 1940s. It examines the training of German agents and the espionage techniques they employed. The way in which the FBI reacted to the threat, in particular, from the Griebl-Lonkowski spy ring, shows how Hoover’s ‘Feds’ were initially slow to appreciate the danger, but soon learned the lessons. This was later to put them on a sounder footing to counter further attempts to infiltrate agents into the United States. This was most spectacularly displayed in Operation Pastorius, when saboteurs were landed on the American East Coast from U-boats. This book also examines the way in which the Germans used ‘sleeper’ agents and also describes how the FBI successfully ‘turned’ German agents to feed disinformation to Abwehr headquarters in Berlin. It describes how espionage missions played out and the fate of those involves.

During the Second World War, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were occupied on three separate occasions – twice by the Soviet Union and once by Nazi Germany. The signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939 allowed the Soviets to dominate the Baltic states without fear of German reprisals, causing many in the German-Baltic populations to flee to Poland. Soviet rule of the Baltics was brutal with the purging of political elites and deportation of many tens of thousands in a bid to turn them into vassal states. Consequently, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, many Balts saw it as a liberation from Soviet cruelties. The reality was, however, that it turned out to be the beginning of something much worse. During their occupation of Poland prior to Barbarossa the Nazis had decimated the Polish political elites, and the Jews there had been herded into ghettos in preparation for deportation to the east where they would serve as slave labour in the Nazi economy after the conquest of the Soviet Union. Similar policies were to be adopted in the Baltics when Reinhard Heydrich’s murder squads, the Einsatzgruppen, were allowed to move into the newly-occupied territories. Operating behind the advancing German forces Einsatzgruppen A, B, C, and D – four special mobile killing units, each made up of about a thousand men from the security police and the German intelligence service – proved to be more than willing to carry out Heydrich’s orders. He had called for the removal of every vestige of opposition to Nazi rule which primarily meant complete elimination of the ‘inferior’ races who were unfit for work and the ghettoization of others in preparation for their economic exploitation. On foreign soil, away from scrutiny and free of all constraint, the Einsatzgruppen discovered that through the mass shootings of communists, Jews and gypsies it was possible to accelerate the pace of the Holocaust, slaughtering men, women and children in their tens of thousands. The Einsatzgruppen were assisted by local ‘volunteers’ who helped to identify victims as well as kill them; in places whole Jewish communities were swiftly eliminated. Many of the killers and victims had known one another as neighbours and colleagues. This massive slaughter of civilians convinced Heydrich and Himmler that complete extermination of Jews was within their grasp and before very long, in the death camps, new industrial methods of killing would be devised.

In many countries around the world, the end of the First World War, far from leading to a new world order of stability, ushered in an area of uncertainty and economic decline. To solve the problems of unemployment, high inflation, low wages and poor working conditions, many turned to the political right for a solution – to leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler. But it was not only in countries such as Italy and Germany that people saw fascism as an alternative to democracy. It is sometimes said fascism in America first manifested itself as a reaction by a native-born population to the surge in the numbers of European immigrants in 1830\. It went on to find a voice at least another four times up to the outbreak of the Second World War, most obviously in the formation of the German American Bund. American politicians and commentators have traditionally avoided applying the label of ‘fascist’ to any movement, preferring instead to describe extreme right-wing groups as ‘nativist’, money-making rackets exploiting gullible followers, or simply the ‘lunatic fringe’. For many years this denied them the opportunity to examine the possibility that American fascist ideologies or social structures were rooted in patterns of the American past, as opposed to being a foreign import. The Ku Klux Klan has been described as the world’s first fascist organisation and this book looks at the arguments for and against that assertion. It also examines how the philosophy behind that movement remained as a potent undercurrent in American politics up to the start of the Second World War. There is also an examination of how American racial policies were used by the Nazis when drawing up their own. Whilst argument persists over whether movements such as the Silver Shirts and the Friends of New Germany were truly fascist, it is undoubtedly the case that personalities behind them, individuals such as William Dudley Pelley and Father Charles Coughlin, exhibited all the classic characteristics of fascism. And they were by no means unpopular. A proponent of many of Hitler’s policies, during the 1930s, when the US population was about 120 million, an estimated 30 million listeners, for example, tuned in to Coughlin’s weekly radio programme. This book compares the ways that both the United States and fascist regimes, especially that in Germany, tackled the immense social and economic problems resulting from the Great Depression. It also explores the way that European fascist regimes, especially that in Nazi Germany, tried to influence the American political process both legally and illegally and analyses the level of success they achieved in both.

When the Nazis came to power in January 1933, they began a programme of transforming Germany from a democracy into a totalitarian state, but it was not a matter of simply enforcing compliance. The people had to be coaxed into believing in the new regime. Hearts and minds had to be won over and one of the ways the Nazis did that was to create an ideal of German nationhood in which everyone could feel proud. This was especially the case with art, which came to be used as a powerful tool of propaganda both to disseminate the myth amongst the population and indicate to the Nazi administrators the sort of cultural environment they should create. It was not an easy thing to do. While the nation was being re-created as a dynamic, modern, and powerful industrial giant, all the signals coming from Hitler indicated that his own idyllic view of the German nation was of a traditional, rural people deep-rooted in a romantic-mystical aesthetic. Hitler’s own experience as an artist in Vienna before the First World War had shown that, whilst technically proficient, his work was detached and impersonal. Despite being rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts he continued to see himself as artistically gifted, especially in the field of architecture. This book looks at how the artistic side of Hitler’s personality dominated Nazi aesthetics and the ways in which the Third Reich manipulated public opinion and advanced its political agenda using the power of art. Despite his early setbacks, Hitler always thought of himself first and foremost an artist. He would frequently break off discussions with diplomats and soldiers to veer off on a lecture about his ideas on art and architecture which had been formed during his time in Vienna. _Nazi Propaganda Through Art and Architecture_ explores how Hitler’s artistic and architectural vision for Germany led to the monumental structures which we now associate with the Third Reich, alongside the rural idyl he sought to espouse, and how they came to symbolise the re-emergent power of a German nation which would dominate Europe.

Following the end of the First World War, many countries experienced economic decline. Unemployment, high inflation, low wages and poor working conditions led to widespread unrest. This manifested itself in the rise of powerful militaristic leaders, first in Italy where fascism was born, and then in Germany and elsewhere. The policies of the likes of Mussolini and Hitler were hugely popular, and fascism was seen by many as a viable political alternative to democracy. To some degree, these ideals also gained traction in the UK where some individuals in and among the elite of British society believed fascism was the way forward for the country. This is fully explored in Hitler’s British Nazis which traces the evolution of extreme right-wing opinion from the turn of the century right through to the end of the Second World War. In particular it looks at the way British fascism developed its own character due to Britain having been on the winning side during the First World War. Early fascist movements of the 1920s are analysed including the fascist tendencies of the Suffragette Movement. The book then traces the way in which domestic politics and the dire economic situation of the early 1930s created a political vacuum that was filled by Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirt Movement. Throughout the 1930s right-wing sympathisers looked to Hitler’s Germany rather than to Mussolini’s Italy for inspiration. Some members of aristocratic and political elites, many with virulent anti-Semitic views, saw in German fascism a template for Britain to build on but remained wilfully blind to the excesses of the Nazi regime that were getting worse by the day. The book looks at the way in which Nazi Germany was depicted in the press and how powerful press barons, many of whom were pro-German and supported Chamberlain’s appeasement policies, were able to influence public opinion. The role of the Mitford sisters, Unity in particular, is explored in detail as is the influence of the Cliveden Set under the leadership of the Astors and perhaps most interesting of all is the role played by King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson as they flirted unashamedly with fascism and threatened to take Britain down a very different path to that which it took after the abdication.

Following the end of the First World War, the newly reformed state of Poland was wedged uncomfortably between the two dominant nations of Germany and the Soviet Union. With their diametrically opposed political philosophies, both of Poland’s neighbours plotted continuously to reclaim its lands that had up until recently been part of the once great but now defunct German and Russian empires. In order to protect itself, Poland was obliged to plot and negotiate with both of its neighbours to try and prevent them from realising their ambitions to eviscerate the country. The United States had been instrumental in the creation of the Polish state after the First World War, Wilson in particular stoking the Poles’ growing powerful nationalistic fervour. As Norman Ridley reveals, this was the beginning of a turbulent period for Poland. There was, for example, the dramatic and improbable ‘Miracle on the Vistula’ when Polish forces defeated the communist Red Army in 1920 – and in so doing halted the spread of communism across eastern Europe. As well as bitter ethnic battles between Germany and Poland for the political control of Upper Silesia, there were also the burning ambitions of Weimar Germany, and later Nazi Germany, to reclaim lands stripped from them and incorporated into the new state of Poland at Versailles. Despite America’s initial support after the war, the US thereafter showed little interest in Poland’s predicament. While France was a traditional friend to the Polish peoples, and a significant supplier of military aid, its political influence over eastern European affairs weakened as its own political institutions fell prey to extremes of both left and right and its immediate post-war dominance waned. Britain was interested only in commerce and that made Germany and Russia significantly more important as trading partners than the predominantly agricultural and technically backward state of Poland. Despite the dominance of right-wing politics in Poland, the emergence of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany did little to bring the countries together. This even drove them further apart as the Führer ramped up his rhetorical assault on the perceived injustices of Versailles, which were soon to translate into territorial expansion over Austria and Czechoslovakia. Poland was to be the next in line. Britain and France belatedly roused themselves to challenge the threat posed by Hitler and the Nazis. After the capitulation of the Anschluss and the humiliation of Munich, London and Paris found themselves in the disagreeable position of seeing no option but to throw their whole weight behind the integrity of the Polish state if they were ever going to make any sort of stand against Nazi aggression.

War is a costly business and in 1939, Germany was almost broke with its economy overheating and heading for runaway inflation. Hitler needed hard foreign currency to pay for his war machine and the only way he could get this was by selling gold that he looted from the national banks of Austria, Czechoslovakia and all the countries that were occupied after September 1939. Another source of gold was the theft of personal gold especially from the Jews, most grotesquely, the haul of dental gold which came out of the concentration camps. No neutral country would accept Reichsmarks so the gold had to be laundered through Swiss banks. The story of Swiss complicity in German war crimes is still a subject of controversy, and lawsuits. There are also questions about the parts played by other countries, particularly Portugal, in laundering stolen gold for the Nazis. The Vatican's dealings with Hitler have often been seen as ambiguous and this book investigates the Holy See's role in helping ship Nazi gold to South America, and how that gold might have been used to re-create the German Reich. After the war a commission was set up to recover as much gold as possible and restore it to those from whom it was stolen. This, of course, was beset by huge problems especially with regards to gold that was looted from Holocaust victims. Enormous quantities of gold and other treasures were hidden in a mine at Merkers in Thuringia which was found by the US 3rd Army in 1945, but much gold remains unaccounted for, and attempts are still ongoing to uncover supposed hidden caches, the most recent in Poland where four tons are believed to have been found by the Silesian Bridge Foundation in May of 2022. The whereabouts and disposal of the remaining stolen gold has led to numerous investigations and countless conspiracy theories. In Hitler's Gold the author analyses these and uncovers many of the mysteries surrounding this continuing search for the missing millions.

On 19 December 1938, Otto Hahn, working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, conducted an experiment the results of which baffled him. It took his migr collaborator Lise Meitner to explain that he had split an atom of uranium, which at the time seemed to defy all known laws of physics. When Neils Bohr took this news to the United States it became clear to scientists there that these results opened a completely new and, for some, horrifying possibility of energy production that could be used for both peaceful and military purposes. Scientists in Germany, France, Britain and the US began to delve deeper into the implications. But it was the British government that was the first to explicitly describe how the splitting of the atom might be utilised to create a practical weapon of fearsome power. France, by then, had been occupied by the Germans and most of their nuclear scientists had fled to Britain. For their part, the Germans, who for a time were at the very forefront of nuclear research, had weakened their own scientific ranks by hounding many of their best scientists who had fled persecution under the draconian Nazi racial laws. They still retained, however, possibly the ablest nuclear scientist of them all in Werner Heisenberg who set about developing his own programme for nuclear power. British scientists made extensive progress before realising that translating their laboratory results into the vast industrial enterprise required to build a bomb was way beyond the nation's stretched resources. The government agreed to hand over all the UK's research findings to America in return for a share of the spoils. The United States, for its part, was impressed with British results and invested enormous sums of money and resources into what became known as the Manhattan Project in a concerted effort to build a bomb before the end of the war. For much of the war the Soviets showed little enthusiasm for the sort of investment required to build their own bomb. However, with an eye to the future they established an extensive espionage network both in Britain and America. Following the German surrender there was still the problem of Japan, and the race continued to develop a working bomb to accelerate the end of the war, both to save Allied lives and to prevent Soviet expansion into northern China and the Japanese mainland. It was a race that the Unites States won. It was also a race that ushered in a new Cold War.

From the chaos of the First World War, during which Germany and Russia had fought each other to a standstill, there emerged two societies whose diametrically opposed ideologies of communism and fascism represented the opposite extremes of the political spectrum. Despite this, in time the governments and military establishments in both countries were able to create an environment where political expediency led to both cooperation and an eventual alliance. Western democracies found both systems repellent but the two countries, Germany and the Soviet Union, embodied vast resources of, in the case of the Soviets, raw materials and, in the case of Germany, huge intellectual, scientific and industrial expertise. Both offered massive opportunities for trade, but neither made comfortable partners. Britain, whose sympathies lay more with the Germans, and France, whose history tied them more to Eastern Europe, tended to treat both Germany and the Soviet Union as outcast states. This created a great deal of animosity in return and ultimately drove the outcasts into each other's arms. Whilst animosity was rampant on a political level, both countries, now having equal pariah status in the eyes of the Western allies, began to see huge benefits in military and economic cooperation. Collaborative ventures for covert armament production and training facilities were initiated in 1921. These schemes would continue, with varying degrees of success, for more than a decade until the rise of Nazism in Germany put an end to it. The Spanish Civil War saw not only thee two rival political philosophies but opposing military doctrines also being tested against each other on the field of battle. It is remarkable, therefore, that these two nations emerged from this maelstrom to re-discover the spirit of Rapallo'. It was a spirit which culminated in the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939. Within weeks, both sides would display their unity as they fell together with ruthless efficiency upon the hapless Poland. This book looks at how these two strange bedfellows' dealt with western hostility and found ways to accommodate each other in a bid to recover from the economic devastation and dismantling of their historic territorial boundaries. The extent to which cooperation was achieved is unusual given the circumstances, especially as they had to contend with the machinations of the Western Powers. The era of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact proved to be a brief liaison, one that collapsed into savagery again when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa just a few months later.

The First World War had seen the mechanisation of warfare. Battle fronts had become immobilised in the grip of machine-guns and heavy artillery, leading to slaughter on an unprecedented scale. The end of the war saw exhausted governments extricating themselves from the carnage, but some leaders were concerned that, sooner or later, another major war would follow. As France's Marshal Foch put it, the Treaty of Versailles was only a twenty-year truce'. The overriding concern was to find ways in future of avoiding the kind of static battle fronts that had consumed so many in such futile efforts. Military aviation was seen as the one great innovation that had the potential to do this by revolutionising warfare. It would not only augment the effectiveness of ground forces in a tactical role, but it also had the means of reaching out strategically beyond the battlefronts to strike at the enemy's trade, supplies, communications and industrial production. All through the war, military aviation had been firmly under the control of army commanders but there was soon a fierce debate over the way it should develop. The development of an air doctrine' within each of the major European powers was fraught with difficulty as the nascent air arms struggled, with varying degrees of success, to free themselves from army control to find a new, independent identity. This book examines the way in which these air arms competed for prominence within the military structures of six major European nations - Germany, Britain, France, Soviet Union, Poland and Italy - with different resources, ambitions and philosophies, in the years from the beginning of aviation right up to the start of the Second World War.

On 9 November 1939, two unsuspecting British agents of the Special Intelligence Services walked into a trap set by German Spymaster Reinhard Heydrich. Believing that they were meeting a dissident German general for talks about helping German military opposition to bring down Hitler and end the war, they were instead taken captive in the Dutch village of Venlo and whisked away to Germany for interrogation by the Gestapo. The incident was a huge embarrassment for the Dutch government and provided the Germans with significant intelligence about SIS operations throughout Europe. The incident itself was an intelligence catastrophe but it also acts as a prism through which a number of other important narrative strands pass. Fundamental to the subterfuge perpetrated at Venlo were unsubstantiated but insistent rumours of high-ranking Germany generals plotting to overthrow the Nazi regime from within. After the humiliation suffered when Hitler tore up the Munich Agreement, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was anxious to see just how much truth there was in these stories; keen to rehabilitate his reputation through one last effort to find a peaceful rapprochement with Germany. When Franz Fischer, a small-time petty crook and agent provocateur, persuaded British SIS operatives in the Netherlands that he could act as a go-between for the British government with disaffected German generals, the German Security chief Reinhard Heydrich stepped in and quietly took control of the operation. Heydrich’s boss, head of the Gestapo Heinrich Himmler, was anxious to explore the possibility of peace negotiations with Britain and saw an opportunity to exploit the situation for his personal benefit.On the day before a crucial meeting of conspirators and British agents on the Dutch-German border, a bomb exploded in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich in the exact spot where Hitler had stood to deliver a speech only minutes earlier. The perpetrator was quickly arrested, and Hitler demanded that Himmler find evidence to show that the two events were intimately connected—the British agents were snatched hours later. While the world was coming to terms with the fearsome power of German military might the British intelligence capability in northern Europe was consigned to the dustbin in the sleepy Dutch town of Venlo. This first full account of the Venlo incident explores the wider context of this German intelligence coup, and its consequences.

Most strongly associated with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, it is often stated that Britain's policy of appeasement was instituted in the 1930s in the hope of avoiding war with Hitler's Nazi Germany. At the time, appeasement was viewed by many as a popular and seemingly pragmatic policy. In this book the author sets out to show how appeasement was not a na ve attempt to secure a lasting peace by resolving German grievances, but a means of buying time for rearmament. By the middle of the 1930s, British policy was based on the presumption that the balance of power had already dramatically shifted in Germany's favour. It was felt that Britain, chiefly for economic reasons, was unable to restore the balance, and that extensive concessions to Germany would not satisfy Hitler, whose aggressive policies intensified the already high risk of war.. The only realistic option, and one that was clearly adopted by Neville Chamberlain, was to try to influence the timing of the inevitable military confrontation and, in the meantime, pursue a steady and economically sustainable programme of rearmament. Appeasement would buy' that time for the British government. Crucially this strategy required continuously updated and accurate information about the strength, current and future, of the German armed forces, especially the Luftwaffe, and an understanding of their military strategy. Piercing the Nazis' veil of secrecy was vital if the intelligence services were to build up a true picture of the extent of German rearmament and the purposes to which it might be put. The many agents, codebreakers, and counter-espionage personnel played a vital role in maximising the benefits that appeasement provided - even as war clouds continued to gather. These individuals were increasingly handed greater responsibility in a bid to inform British statesmen now scrambling to prepare for a catastrophic confrontation with Germany. In Reading Hitler's Mind, Norman Ridley reveals the remarkable efforts made by the tiny, underfunded and often side-lined British intelligence services as they sought to inform those whose role it was to make decisions upon which the wheels of history turned.

Almost since the advent of warfare, civilians have suffered collateral damage', but the concept of Total War - a war without limits - only surfaced in the early part of the twentieth century. The idea of huge numbers of aircraft raining death upon defenceless cities was seen by many as not only barbaric but, in practical terms, quite unrealistic given the logistical challenges that would have to be overcome in order to put them into practice. Any complacency over the threat, however, was rudely shattered on 26 February 1935, when Adolf Hitler officially signed a decree authorizing the formation of the Luftwaffe. The third branch of Germany's armed forces erupted on to the European military landscape. Its blustering claims of irrepressible air power sent waves of panic rippling through ministries of war throughout the world. Framing a realistic response to Hitler's propaganda offensive proved to be problematic given the lack of detailed knowledge of not only the numbers, but also the true performance capabilities of his new generation of aircraft and the ways in which they had expanded the boundaries of war. It was, therefore, of huge interest to all modern military establishments when these machines were deployed during the Spanish Civil War which broke out in July 1936. Notwithstanding the limited scope of this conflict, it offered, for the participating nations, a testing ground for new machines and, for the interested observers, a window into the future of aerial warfare. When the Spanish Civil War was less than a year old it had already seen air power employed in most of the ways that it would be used in the Second World War. This not only included airlifting troops, reconnaissance, interdiction, close support and strategic bombing, but also the deliberate targeting of civilians as a means of achieving military objectives. This book looks at all the significant aerial engagements of the war and examines them against the background of the wider global context. In this way, the Spanish Civil War's part in the evolution of air power is confirmed, as is the way in which its lessons were learned, or ignored, in the context of the much greater conflagration that was to come.

The Battle of Britain was fought between two airborne military elites and was a classic example of pure attack against pure defence. Though it was essentially a 'war of attrition', it was an engagement in which the gathering, assessment and reaction to intelligence played a significant role on both sides. In some respects, both the RAF and the Luftwaffe were hamstrung in their endeavours during the Battle of Britain by poor intelligence. The most egregious Luftwaffe blunder was its failure to appreciate the true nature of Fighter Command's operational systems and consequently it made fundamental strategic errors when evaluating its plans to degrade them. This was compounded by the Luftwaffe's Intelligence chief, Major Josef 'Beppo' Schmid, whose consistent underestimation of Fighter Command's capabilities had a huge negative impact upon Reichsmarschall Goering's decision-making at all stages of the conflict. Both the Luftwaffe and the RAF lacked detailed information about each other's war production capacity. While the Luftwaffe did have the benefit of pre-war aerial surveillance data it had been unable to update it significantly since the declaration of war in September 1939. Fighter Command did have an distinct advantage through its radar surveillance systems, but this was, in the early stages of the conflict at least, less than totally reliable and it was often difficult to interpret the data coming through due to the inexperience of many of its operators. Another promising source of intelligence was the interception of Luftwaffe communications. It is clear that the Luftwaffe was unable to use intelligence as a 'force multiplier', by concentrating resources effectively, and actually fell into a negative spiral where poor intelligence acted as a 'force diluter', thus wasting resources in strategically questionable areas. The British, despite being essentially unable to predict enemy intentions, did have the means, however imperfect, to respond quickly and effectively to each new strategic initiative rolled out by the Luftwaffe. The result of three years intensive research, in this book the author analyses the way in which both the British and German Intelligence services played a part in the Battle of Britain, thereby attempting to throw light on an aspect of the battle that has been hitherto underexposed to scrutiny.