Schellenberg: He Was Hitler’s Secret Service Chief

Walter Schellenberg’s memoirs would be worth reading, if for nothing else, as a first-rate collection of spy stories. For the text does not belie the promise of the chapter-headings: the plot to kidnap the Duke of Windsor, the affair of the Vietinghoff brothers, the Polish agent K— and the spy-ring in the Man-chukuoan Embassy, the capture of the British secret service agents at Venlo, and the hunting down of the Communist Rote Kapelle organization. All these are episodes not from fiction but from the history of the last twenty years and they are described by the man who became the head of Hitler’s Foreign Intelligence Service.