At the end of the war, a captured German officer offered to testify against the Nazi leadership then on trial at Nuremberg. He was General Erwin von Lahousen who had been deputy chief of the Abwehr under the leadership of Admiral Canaris. Canaris had been murdered by the Gestapo for being part of the plot to kill Hitler. Lahousen had also been part of the plot but had been away on the Russian front and escaped the reprisals.

Because he had been in a leadership role for all of the war and had access to Hitler, Lahousen had knowledge about many of the Nazi crimes. According to his testimony, he and Canaris tried to fight the war by the rules but on some occasions, were forced to organize projects that pushed the boundaries.

The Abwehr was the German Armed Forces Secret Service with the role of placing spies around the world and organizing sabotage in enemy countries. This book is about many of those plans and how some were successful and some were failures. Some of the projects were doomed to fail because the German leadership would not let the Abwehr do proper planning. Some of the ideas were thwarted by the Abwehr because if successful would damage other projects or situations that worked for Germany as well as the Allies. An example of this is the British courier planes that flew between England and Stockholm. Hitler wished the plane to be sabotaged because English newspapers and other propaganda was being brought into Germany via that route. He failed to understand that those same newspapers and other materials brought to Stockholm provided German intelligence people information about the situation in England.

Some of the stories contain humour for the spies sent to England and America were often bumbling fools and their errors led to their capture very quickly.

According to information in this volume, Canaris and Lahousen foiled a plot hatched by the Gestapo to kidnap the Pope. ( )