The Shadow War Against Hitler: The Covert Operations of America's Wartime Secret Intelligence Service (review)

Research on the activities of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which was established in 1942 as successor to the COI (Coordinator of Information), founded in the previous year, and which became the forerunner of the CIA, only made sense after related documents had been declassified little by little from the 1980s on. The monograph under consideration is clearer on several points than the German original published in 1999, but is essentially an unrevised translation. Therefore, the tremendous volume of World War II related records declassified since that date has not been made use of. Nevertheless, Mauch's results remain impressive.

The fear of a German "fifth column," an anxiety that the author considers to be neurotic, played a central role in establishing this intelligence service under its director William J. (Wild Bill) Donovan. His intention was to provoke an early collapse of Hitler's Reich by finding out the moral, economic, and military weak points of the enemy and by activating German resistance groups. One division of the OSS, dealing with "Research and Analysis" (R&A), evaluated information, while a second was concerned with the infiltration of agents into the German Reich and a third with cultivating contacts within the German resistance against National Socialism. Significantly, Mauch is able to show that President Roosevelt had only a limited interest in and understanding of both signal intelligence and OSS activities. Instead, he kept a private intelligence service run by the journalist John Franklin Carter. Among the persons he employed were some with strange histories like ex-Nazi Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl.

One theme given special consideration is the OSS outpost in the Swiss capital of Bern, which Allen Dulles had taken over in late 1942 as "the big window onto the fascist world." Another is the "turning point of 1943." In that year, following the German defeat at Stalingrad, a committee was founded consisting of exiled German Communists and captive German officers to find ways of hastening the German surrender and preparing a new postwar order. While the liberal R&A analysts saw in the committee an effective force that could help topple the Nazi regime and tended to downplay any danger of chaos or a Bolshevik revolution, conservative circles, including Dulles, who were able to prevail inside the OSS, were already anticipating the rise of a Communist, pro-Moscow government in postwar Germany.

Dulles succeeded in becoming acquainted with anti-Hitler resistance circles and in procuring information and top secret documents even from German ministries and the army. He demanded with increasing urgency that encouragement be offered to any groups that could eliminate the Nazi leaders and at the same time block a Communist takeover. Accordingly, he gradually came to recommend a careful revision of the Casablanca formula of "unconditional surrender." However, his proposals were rejected by the U.S. government.

Mauch is able to prove that Dulles was not only informed about the plan to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944, but also about the production of German missiles in Peenemünde, etc. On the other hand, the author also deals with the failures and shortcomings of OSS activities. Still, he is convinced that the war was shortened by at least several weeks thanks to OSS activities.

Mauch's study is also a valuable contribution to an understanding of the postwar world, since the secret intelligence analysts developed ideological creeds that ultimately led to the political controversies and constellations of the cold war. It comes as no surprise that Allen Dulles became the director of the reorganized intelligence service, the CIA. A basically anticommunist stand and a continuation of his efforts to use intelligence channels as a way of promoting the political candidates he favored for a stable and pro-Western postwar Germany, became common ingredients in American policy all over the world from that time on.