For three years during World War II, future Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles commanded the OSS mission in Bern, Switzerland. From Hitler's Doorstep provides an annotated selection of his reports to Washington from 1942 to 1945. Dulles was a leading source of Allied intelligence on Nazi Germany and the occupied nations. The messages presented in this volume were based on information received through agents and networks operating in France, Italy, Austria, Eastern Europe, and Germany itself. They deal with subjects ranging from enemy troop strength and military plans to political developments, support of resistance movements, secret weapons, psychological warfare, and peace feelers. The Dulles reports reveal his own vision of grand strategy and presage the postwar turmoil in Europe. One of the largest collections of OSS records ever published, these telegrams and radiotelephone transmissions from the National Archives provide an exciting account of the course of the European war, offer insight on the development of American intelligence, and illuminate the origins of the Cold War. They will interest diplomatic and military historians as well as specialists on modern Europe. This volume is almost unique as document-based intelligence history and serves as a badly needed bridge between diplomatic history and intelligence studies.

All Britain was convinced that the Germans would come. They had nothing left with which to oppose the German panzers. In only five weeks the Germans had crushed France and expelled the BEF from Belgium. Now those panzers stood on the Channel coast, waiting for the order to send them to England.

Berlin had been safe for Anita Powitzer for as long as she could remember. But when Hitler came to power, everything changed. Now policemen harmed instead of helped, and Anita couldn't even talk to her best friend. Flung from her secure childhood into a fearful world, she and her family had to find a way to flee Berlin before it was too late. It was risky, and Anita had to be separated from her loved ones, but this was the only way out. Alone in a country with a language she didn't understand, staying with people she had never met, Anita had to wait and hope her parents could join her. Would she and her family be safe? A journey fraught with danger from Germany to Great Britain, and finally to America, this is the true story of one Jewish family's escape from Nazi Berlin.

When the curtains fell on the 'Thousand-Year Reich', in May 1945, SS-Brigadefuhrer Walter Schellenberg left for neutral Stockholm, only to be takn shortly thereafter to Frankfurt and London for interogating. The 'Final Report' on the Case of Walter Schellenberg is the revealing product of those Allied interogations. Reinhard R Doerries has written the first scholarly appraisal of Schellenberg as a Nazi leader and Hitler's final head of foreign intelligence.

New York Times Bestseller "A poignant, fascinating story, bringing to life the soldier-scholars who saved Italy's treasures."—Evan Thomas, best-selling author of Ike’s Bluff and Sea of Thunder When Hitler’s armies occupied Italy in 1943, they also seized control of mankind’s greatest cultural treasures. As they had done throughout Europe, the Nazis could now plunder the masterpieces of the Renaissance, the treasures of the Vatican, and the antiquities of the Roman Empire. On the eve of the Allied invasion, General Dwight Eisenhower empowered a new kind of soldier to protect these historic riches. In May 1944 two unlikely American heroes—artist Deane Keller and scholar Fred Hartt—embarked from Naples on the treasure hunt of a lifetime, tracking billions of dollars of missing art, including works by Michelangelo, Donatello, Titian, Caravaggio, and Botticelli. With the German army retreating up the Italian peninsula, orders came from the highest levels of the Nazi government to transport truckloads of art north across the border into the Reich. Standing in the way was General Karl Wolff, a top-level Nazi officer. As German forces blew up the magnificent bridges of Florence, General Wolff commandeered the great collections of the Uffizi Gallery and Pitti Palace, later risking his life to negotiate a secret Nazi surrender with American spymaster Allen Dulles. Brilliantly researched and vividly written, Saving Italy brings readers from Milan and the near destruction of The Last Supper to the inner sanctum of the Vatican and behind closed doors with the preeminent Allied and Axis leaders: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Churchill; Hitler, Göring, and Himmler. An unforgettable story of epic thievery and political intrigue, Saving Italy is a testament to heroism on behalf of art, culture, and history.

The award-winning author of Target Switzerland uses “a wide breadth of research to attempt to answer why Switzerland escaped the Nazi onslaught” (Daly History Blog). While surrounded by the Axis powers in World War II, Switzerland remained democratic and, unlike most of Europe, never succumbed to the siren songs and threats of the Nazi goliath. This book tells the story with emphasis on two voices rarely heard. One voice is that of scores of Swiss who lived in those dark years, told through oral history. They mobilized to defend the country, labored on the farms, and helped refugees. The other voice is that of Nazi Intelligence, those who spied on the Swiss and planned subversion and invasion. Exhaustive documents from the German military archives reveals a chilling rendition of attack plans which would be dissuaded in part by Switzerland’s armed populace and Alpine defenses. Laced with unique maps and photos, the book reveals how the Swiss mobilized an active “spiritual defense” of their country—including the use of the press and cabaret as weapons against totalitarianism—and explores the role of women in the military and economy, the role of Jewish officers in the highest levels of the Swiss army, and the role of Switzerland itself as America’s window on the Reich. “Halbrook succeeds not only in achieving a thorough analysis of Switzerland’s armed neutrality, but also in revealing through their own voices the willingness of ordinary citizens to accept total war in order to preserve their freedom.”—Swiss American Historical Society Review

Hitler was one of the few politicians who understood that persuasion was everything, deployed to anchor an entire regime in the confections of imagery, rhetoric and dramaturgy. The Nazis pursued propaganda not just as a tool, an instrument of government, but also as the totality, the raison d'être, the medium through which power itself was exercised. Moreover, Nicholas O'Shaughnessy argues, Hitler, not Goebbels, was the prime mover in the propaganda regime of the Third Reich - its editor and first author. Under the Reich everything was a propaganda medium, a building-block of public consciousness, from typography to communiqués, to architecture, to weapons design. There were groups to initiate rumours and groups to spread graffiti. Everything could be interrogated for its propaganda potential, every surface inscribed with polemical meaning, whether an enemy city's name, an historical epic or the poster on a neighbourhood wall. But Hitler was in no sense an innovator - his ideas were always second-hand. Rather his expertise was as a packager, fashioning from the accumulated mass of icons and ideas, the historic debris, the labyrinths and byways of the German mind, a modern and brilliant political show articulated through deftly managed symbols and rituals. The Reich would have been unthinkable without propaganda - it would not have been the Reich.

"Presents an account of how OSS spymaster Allen Dulles led a network of disenchanted Germans in a plot to assassinate Hitler and end World War II before the invasion of opportunistic Russian forces,"--NoveList.

For three years during World War II, future Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles commanded the OSS mission in Bern, Switzerland. From Hitler's Doorstep provides an annotated selection of his reports to Washington from 1942 to 1945. Dulles was a leading source of Allied intelligence on Nazi Germany and the occupied nations. The messages presented in this volume were based on information received through agents and networks operating in France, Italy, Austria, Eastern Europe, and Germany itself. They deal with subjects ranging from enemy troop strength and military plans to political developments, support of resistance movements, secret weapons, psychological warfare, and peace feelers. The Dulles reports reveal his own vision of grand strategy and presage the postwar turmoil in Europe. One of the largest collections of OSS records ever published, these telegrams and radiotelephone transmissions from the National Archives provide an exciting account of the course of the European war, offer insight on the development of American intelligence, and illuminate the origins of the Cold War. They will interest diplomatic and military historians as well as specialists on modern Europe. This volume is almost unique as document-based intelligence history and serves as a badly needed bridge between diplomatic history and intelligence studies.

On October 16, 1943, the Jews of Rome were targeted for arrest and deportation. The Nazis, the Vatican, and the Jews of Rome examines why—and more importantly how—it could have been avoided, featuring new evidence and insight into the Vatican’s involvement. At the time, Rome was within reach of the Allies, but the overwhelming force of the Wehrmacht, Gestapo, and SS in Rome precluded direct confrontation. Moral condemnations would not have worked, nor would direct confrontation by the Italians, Jewish leadership, or even the Vatican. Gallo underscores the necessity of determining what courses of actions most likely would have spared Italian Jews from the gas chambers. Examining the historical context and avoiding normative or counterfactual assertions, this book draws upon archival sources ranging from diaries to intelligence intercepts in English, Italian, and German. With antisemitism on the rise today and the last remaining witnesses passing away, it is essential to understand what happened in 1943. The Nazis, the Vatican, and the Jews of Rome grapples with this particular, awful episode within the larger, horrifying story of the Holocaust. Despite the inadequacy of memory, we must continue to attempt to make sense of the inexplicable.