A remarkable tale of espionage and intrigue—the true story of Hitler’s intelligence chief and his role in the conspiracy to assassinate the Führer. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was appointed by Adolf Hitler to head the Abwehr (the German secret service) eighteen months after the Nazis came to power. But Canaris turned against the Fu¨hrer and the Nazi regime, believing that Hitler would start a war Germany could not win. In 1938 he was involved in an attempted coup, undermined by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In 1940 he sabotaged the German plan to invade England, and fed General Franco vital information that helped him keep Spain out of the war. For years he played a dangerous double game, desperately trying to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo. The SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, became suspicious of Canaris and by 1944, when Abwehr personnel were involved in the attempted assassination of Hitler, he had the evidence to arrest Canaris himself. Canaris was executed a few weeks before the end of the war. In a riveting true story of intrigue and espionage, Richard Bassett reveals how Admiral Canaris’s secret work against the German leadership changed the course of World War II.

Startling new revelations about collaboration between the Allies and the German Secret Service. Based on extensive primary source research, John Bryden’s Fighting to Lose presents compelling evidence that the German intelligence service — the Abwehr — undertook to rescue Britain from certain defeat in 1941. Recently opened secret intelligence files indicate that the famed British double-cross or double-agent system was in fact a German triple-cross system. These files also reveal that British intelligence secretly appealed to the Abwehr for help during the war, and that the Abwehr’s chief, Admiral Canaris, responded by providing Churchill with the ammunition needed in order to persuade Roosevelt to lure the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor. These findings and others like them make John Bryden’s Fighting to Lose one of the most fascinating books about World War II to be published for many years.

This biography of the Nazi intelligence chief who spied both for and against Hitler examines the life of one of WWII’s most intriguing figures. An early supporter of Adolph Hitler, Wilhelm Canaris became chief of German military intelligence before secretly turning against the Nazi regime at the start of World War II. Throughout his career, few who knew him ever understood his plans. Even today, historians find Wilhelm Canaris a man of mystery among Hitler’s top lieutenants. The great protector of German opposition to Hitler, Canaris was also the one who prepared the Third Reich’s major expansion plans. While he motivated those who were eager to bring down Hitler, he also hunted them as conspirators—one of the many contradictions he was forced to live with in order to stay in control of the Nazi spy network. This superbly researched biography follows Canaris's career from his first dabbling in the intelligence business during World War I through his time as head of the Abwehr to his execution in 1945 for his role in the July Plot. A highly readable account, it tells the story of an apparently old-fashioned naval officer, drawn into the web of the Nazi regime.

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was the head of the Abwehr?Hitler's intelligence service?from 1935 to 1944. Initially a supporter of Hitler, Canaris came to vigorously oppose his policies and practices and worked secretly throughout the war to overthrow the regime. Near the end of the war, secret documents were discovered that implicated Canaris and hinted at the extent of the activities conducted by Canaris's Abwehr against the Hitler regime, and in 1945 Canaris was executed as a national traitor. But Canaris left little in the way of personal documents, and to this day he remains a figure shrouded in mystery. Drawing on newly available archival materials, Mueller investigates the double life of this legendary and enigmatic figure in the first major biography of Canaris to be published in German.

This is a riveting account of the life and work of Sir Stewart Menzies, who served as the head of British intelligence during World War II. The book draws on previously unpublished sources to provide a detailed portrait of Menzies as a strategist, diplomat, and master spy. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This publication joins two cryptologic history monographs that were published separately in 1989. In part I, the author identifies and presents a thorough account of German intelligence organizations engaged in clandestine work in South America as well as a detailed report of the U.S. response to the perceived threat. Part II deals with the cryptographic systems used by the varioius German intelligence organizations engaged in clandestine activities.

“When on July 20, 1944, a bomb—boldly placed inside the Wolf’s Lair (Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia) by the German Anti-Nazi Resistance—exploded without killing the Führer, the subsequent coup d’état against the Third Reich collapsed. Most of the conspirators were summarily shot or condemned in show trials and sadistically hanged. The conspiracy involved a wide circle of former politicians, diplomats, and government officials as well as senior military men. The Resistance had started as early as 1933 and involved several planned putsches and assassination attempts. Hans B. Gisevius knew or met the major figures—including Beck, Canaris, Oster, Goerdeler, and von Stauffenberg—and barely escaped after the coup’s failure. One of the few survivors of the German Anti-Nazi Resistance, Gisevius traces its history, from the 1933 Reichstag fire to Germany’s defeat in 1945, in a book as riveting as it is exceptional.”-Print ed.

Ernest R. May's Strange Victory presents a dramatic narrative-and reinterpretation-of Germany's six-week campaign that swept the Wehrmacht to Paris in spring 1940. Before the Nazis killed him for his work in the French Resistance, the great historian Marc Bloch wrote a famous short book, Strange Defeat, about the treatment of his nation at the hands of an enemy the French had believed they could easily dispose of. In Strange Victory, the distinguished American historian Ernest R. May asks the opposite question: How was it that Hitler and his generals managed this swift conquest, considering that France and its allies were superior in every measurable dimension and considering the Germans' own skepticism about their chances? Strange Victory is a riveting narrative of those six crucial weeks in the spring of 1940, weaving together the decisions made by the high commands with the welter of confused responses from exhausted and ill-informed, or ill-advised, officers in the field. Why did Hitler want to turn against France at just this moment, and why were his poor judgment and inadequate intelligence about the Allies nonetheless correct? Why didn't France take the offensive when it might have led to victory? What explains France's failure to detect and respond to Germany's attack plan? It is May's contention that in the future, nations might suffer strange defeats of their own if they do not learn from their predecessors' mistakes in judgment.

A spy navigates the labyrinthine horrors of Nazi Germany, on a mission to save the woman he loves “Charyn’s blunt, brilliantly crafted prose bubbles with the pleasure of nailing life to the page in just the right words. . . . [Cesare is] provocative, stimulating and deeply satisfying.” —Washington Post On a windy night in 1937, a seventeen-year-old German naval sub-cadet is wandering along the seawall when he stumbles upon a gang of ruffians beating up a tramp, whose life he saves. The man is none other than spymaster Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris adopts the young man and dubs him “Cesare” after the character in the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for his ability to break through any barrier as he eliminates the Abwehr’s enemies. Canaris is a man of contradictions who, while serving the regime, seeks to undermine the Nazis and helps Cesare hide Berlin’s Jews from the Gestapo. But the Nazis will lure many to Theresienstadt, a phony paradise in Czechoslovakia with sham restaurants, novelty shops, and bakeries, a cruel ghetto and way station to Auschwitz. When the woman Cesare loves, a member of the Jewish underground, is captured and sent there, Cesare must find a way to rescue her. Cesare is a literary thriller and a love story born of the horrors of a country whose culture has died, whose history has been warped, and whose soul has disappeared. Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among other honors, he has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his novels have been selected as finalists for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn lives in New York.