The best books to learn more about the inner workings of Nazi Germany

One of the strangest characters of the Nazi regime was Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German born in Estonia and educated in Latvia.

He was one of Hitler’s closest friends from the 1920s. He is often viewed as the chief ideologue of the Nazi Party. After the War, his personal diary was discovered. It commenced in 1935. His activities before that are insufficiently documented, but important details of what he was doing in 1929 were revealed by Heinrich Pfeifer, who was recruited by Rosenberg to be his personal aide in that year, when Pfeifer was only 24 years old.

Wittman and Kinney have written this important book reporting on what was found in Rosenberg’s revealing diary, and it is a riveting read. To find the private diaries of senior people is most revealing, and very rare. Rosenberg was a weird fellow, but then which Nazi leader wasn’t? 

This crucial book was originally published by Putnam’s, New York, in 1941. 

Riess admitted in his autobiography (which exists only in German) that the book was largely a compilation of material from various sources, much of it handed to him personally by Robert Vansittart, the head of British Intelligence at the time. Large portions of the book were in fact written by Heinrich Pfeifer, and supplied to British Intelligence, part of it on Pfeifer’s two trips to London, and part passed across via Vansittart’s agent Walker in Lucerne.

Riess was a Jewish refugee from Germany who was trusted by Vansittart to aid him in helping to persuade the American public to enter the War against Germany. The book is one of the most astonishing books of its kind ever written, full of breathtaking revelations. It deserves to be widely known and to be a classic text for historical studies.

Its basic theme is the Nazi invention of what they called total espionage, which meant the infiltration of any and every institution and organisation in a targeted country. There were so many spies and fifth columnists for Hitler in the United States at the outbreak of the War that they numbered in the thousands or probably even tens of thousands.

Never in the history of the world until that time had such a massive effort been made to take over a country from the inside.

This book was originally published by Doubleday, New York, in 1944. This book also contains material obtained from Heinrich Pfeifer, not only from Pfeifer’s own experience but from Pfeifer’s secret network of sympathisers and informants deep within the Nazi Establishment.

It is alarming in the extreme, detailing as it does how the Nazis of the SS and SD had since 1943 started planning to metastasize their doctrines all round the world, and found a Nazi International organisation, with the eventual hope of creating a Fourth Reich which was not dependent upon the territory of Germany, but was spread across the world invisibly, so that no armies could ever conquer it.

They planned the ratlines and escape routes to all the friendly countries such as Argentina and Chile. Their ratline HQ was in Madrid, with the full cooperation of the Franco Government. One of the two chief organisers was SS Lieutenant General Ernst (‘Fritz’) Kaltenbrunner, head of the SD’s main office. He himself was too well known and recognisable to escape, and was captured and executed at Nuremberg. But most of the others got clean away.

Much of what is described in this book did successfully take place, and the infrastructure and funding with huge shipments of gold did indeed establish a widespread network which we can call the Nazi International. This book is absolutely hair-raising, and it is not fiction. To say that it is still relevant today hardly needs saying. 

This is a gigantic book of 665 pages, and a reading task not for the faint-hearted. It has no index, but then, preparing one might have taken months and easily have added another 100 pages to the book.

It is a reference book which can aid anyone seriously interested in the SS security services, the SD. Much of it is based on the basic SS files seized after the War, and it summarises and reproduces those with meticulous and overwhelming thoroughness. But it must be pointed out that the higher-level secret files of the SS and SD have never been found.

The Heinrich Pfeifer book supplies a great deal of information which was unavailable to Tyas. The personnel files of the department heads of the SD have not been found, and the most detailed account of that level of the operations of the SD is to be found in Pfeifer’s book. The Pfeifer and Tyas books therefore need to be consulted jointly.

The RHSA is the name (in initials) of the head office of the SD. From Tyas’s book we now know the names of all the supporting staff, in voluminous detail, though the endless lists of names of employees are rarely supplemented by biographical details, as most of them are utterly unknown persons. Tyas’s huge labour is one of those things that had to be done, but until recently no one had the energy to tackle it. So congratulations to Tyas! What a horrible task! But all historians can only be eternally grateful.

For the general reader, the book is one to be consulted and dipped into. I can’t imagine anyone sitting down and reading it straight through. But then it was not meant to be. When Plato gave a public reading in the Athens theatre of his new book The Republic, it lasted for so many hours that everyone got up and progressively left until, at the end of the reading, only Aristotle remained of the audience. I don’t think Plato ever forgave his pupil for this.

How humiliating it must have been to have one student who was prepared to endure the whole thing while the rest of Athens left! Well, no one is going to read the Tyas book in a sitting, but you don’t have to be an Aristotle to see its value as a work of reference.  

This is a lively and shocking book, exposing countless Nazi wartime spies and sympathisers in Britain, with their stories and photos of them. One of them was Major General John F. C. Fuller.

When I was very young, I knew several people who knew him and spoke of him warmly. He was greatly admired for his book on Alexander the Great. These friends often said they were hoping to introduce me to him, but it never happened. They thought I would find him interesting because of his knowledge of ancient Greece.

None of them appeared to be aware that Fuller was a fanatical anti-Semite and fascist who had supported Hitler. So easily did he survive the War and retain some admirers into the 1960s. Fuller was famous as a genius of modern armored warfare and had countless admirers in the Army. He had written 45 books. He died in 1966. I mention him because he was the only one I nearly met of the huge number of pro-Nazis who had been active in wartime Britain.

The pro-Nazis included the Duke of Bedford, Lord Semphill, Sir Vernon Kell who was the first Director of MI5, and of course the notorious Sir Oswald Moseley. And in recent years the story has finally come out that the Duke of Windsor, who had abdicated as King Edward VIII, was not only a friend of Hitler but was prepared to be restored to the throne as a Quisling king in the event of Hitler’s conquest of Britain.

In addition to these were the head of the Bank of England and countless other traitors spread throughout the British Establishment. Anyone interested in spies and espionage, and especially in traitors, will find much that is horrifying in this book.