Spying on the Reich: The Cold War Against Hitler

Historian Howard (Power and Glory) offers a well-researched and revealing account of the “international effort to monitor and understand Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s.” Focusing on British and French spy agencies, with forays into their Polish and Czech counterparts, Howard explains that Allied intelligence officials—underfunded by their governments and distracted by the alleged threat of Bolshevik subversion—were slow to recognize signs of Germany’s post-WWI rearmament. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, much of their information came from foreign businessmen and journalists who visited Germany and disreputable agents like Polish spy Jerzy Sosnowski, who “demanded ludicrously high payments for documents whose value was unclear.” With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Allied spying efforts gradually began to grow more serious and cooperative: Polish, British, and French agents collaborated on breaking the Nazi’s Enigma cypher-coding machine; the Czechs became adept at recruiting high-level Nazi sources; and British military attaché Noel Mason-MacFarlane rushed from Berlin to Vienna to gather firsthand information about Germany’s armed forces during the annexation of Austria. Still, Allied agents largely shared a belief that Hitler would back down from invading Poland, a conviction that was “catastrophically mistaken.” Packed with a colorful cast of characters and offering pinpoint analysis of where the Allies went wrong, this will delight espionage buffs. (Apr.)