Hitler's Last Chief of Foreign Intelligence: Allied Interrogations of Walter Schellenberg (review)

Reinhard Doerries has done the fields of the history of intelligence and of Nazi Germany a great service in explaining, annotating, and publishing the report of the British interrogation of SS-Brigadefuehrer Walter Schellenberg, the last head of the German World War II intelligence service. Doerries's fine and informative introduction to the report is particularly helpful in establishing the context of the interrogation and the personal history of this ambitious and skilled young functionary who rose quickly through the SS ranks to a position of power in the intelligence bureaucracy of Nazi Germany.

Schellenberg's reasons for joining the SS—its "dashing and elegant" uniform, an "elite" organization attracting "'the better type of people'," with attendant "prestige and social advantages"—illustrate the appeal of the Nazis to talented young men such as Schellenberg and Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and armaments minister. His career, as Speer's, demonstrates the opportunities for advancement, as well as the precarious existence of party functionaries, in the cutthroat atmosphere of the Third Reich.

While the study of Schellenberg sheds particular light on the multitudinous and generally abortive efforts of German intelligence abroad, perhaps its most interesting material concerns the byzantine inner workings of the Nazi regime. Schellenberg enjoyed the patronage and protection of first Reinhard Heydrich and then Heinrich Himmler. The vacillating nature of Himmler enabled Schellenberg through his foreign contacts to negotiate the release of first Scandinavians and later thousands of Jews to neutral countries. Furthermore, his realization earlier than most Nazis of the possibility of German defeat prompted his efforts to seek a negotiated end to the war, an effort doomed to fail in the face of Nazi and Allied intractability on the subject.

This reader found of particular note the work's insights into the dubious health of both Schellenberg, who was seriously ill during much of the war and would die in 1952, and Himmler, whose nervous and stomach problems incapacitated him and rendered him dependent on his masseur, even occasionally for political advice.

The details of the final report of British interrogation of Schellenberg make for interesting reading, as do the lengthy appendices on subjects ranging from the penetration of German industry to the Werewolf. Doerries's work would obviously appeal to readers particularly interested in intelligence, but the general reader interested in the workings of the the Nazi government and in functionaries whose attachments to Hitler's inner circle of confidants shed light on their patrons, would also find this book illuminating.