Reinhard R. Doerries

Pretty decent coverage of General Schellenberg's time as the head of Amt. VI (Foreign Intelligence) in the RSHA. A good portion of the book comes from the subjects memoirs, but a fair amount of information comes from other primary source material. The author covers the subject in depth, focusing on Schellenberg's war years and his running of Amt. VI. What I found most fascinating about the subject, was how little foreign intelligence work Schellenberg (and hence Amt. VI) really partook of. It seems as soon as Schellenberg took control of Amt. VI (in 1942), he was focused on finding a way to get Germany out of the war. He (Schellenberg) met constantly with people from Neutral countries who could possibly put out peace feelers to the Allies. Then, during the final two years of the war, he was focused on helping get as many people out of the concentration camps as possible (another very noble pursuit). He did all this, and yet he seems to have done very little actual foreign intelligence work. I my opinion, Schellenberg was a decent person, but was a complete failure as an intelligence chief. I should also add, that something I also found of interest in the book, was the location of the Amt. VI HQ. There are very few books out there that list any of the SS HQ's besides the Prinz Albrecht Strasse HQ, but very little of the SS Apparatus was with the PAS HQ, therefore I was always curious where all of these other Amt.'s had their HQ's. Well, Amt. IV was located in a formerly Jewish owned apartment buildings in Berlin.… (más)