Project Eagle: The Top-Secret OSS Operation That Sent Polish Spies Behind Enemy Lines in World II

Polish spies live through and document the final days of the Third Reich in this harrowing debut account. Drawing on declassified OSS reports and decades of archival research, historian Micgiel pieces together the story of Project Eagle, a little-known Polish contribution to the Allied victory. Beginning in March 1945, the Allies recruited, trained, and parachuted into the collapsing Reich dozens of Polish agents—all of them soldiers who had surrendered at Normandy after being forcibly conscripted into the Wehrmacht, and thus had some familiarity with living among Germans. Supplied with radios and false documents, they moved stealthily from town to town, blending in with Germany’s large population of Polish forced laborers and feeding information back to London. Enduring Allied bombing and shrinking food rations, they witnessed a wave of terror unleashed by the SS on the German citizenry, summary executions of Wehrmacht soldiers for their military failures, and death marches of concentration camp inmates. As the tides turned, they saw Gestapo agents lynched and army discipline dissolve. When Allied troops arrived in Germany, the Polish agents helped conduct house-to-house searches for high-ranking Nazis. The spies’ post-mission briefings, published here in full, read like dispatches from hell. It’s an invaluable glimpse of the Third Reich’s demise. (June)