The Third Reich's Intelligence Services: The Career of Walter Schellenberg

This is the first-ever analytical study of Nazi Germany's political foreign intelligence service, Office VI of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and its head, Walter Schellenberg. Katrin Paehler tells the story of Schellenberg's career in policing and intelligence, charts the development and activities of the service he eventually headed, and discusses his attempts to place it at the center of Nazi foreign intelligence and foreign policy. The book locates the service in its proper pedigree of the SS as well as in relation to its two main rivals - the Abwehr and the Ausw rtige Amt. It also considers the role Nazi ideology played in the conceptualization and execution of foreign intelligence, revealing how this ideological prism fractured and distorted Office VI's view of the world. The book is based on contemporary and postwar documents - many recently declassified - from archives in the United States, Germany, and Russia.


About the Author
Paehler, Katrin: - Katrin Paehler is Associate Professor at Illinois State University. She was a member of the Independent Historians Commission on the German Foreign Office and Nazism and its Aftermath, and is co-editor of A Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe (2015).