Hitler's Secret Army: A Hidden History of Spies, Saboteurs, and Traitors

by Tim Tate

Overview

This dramatic exposé of Allied subterfuge and betrayal uncovers the treachery of undercover fascists and American Nazi spy rings during the height of World War II.

Between 1939 and 1945, more than seventy Allied men and women were convicted—mostly in secret trials—of working to help Nazi Germany win the war. In the same period, hundreds of British Fascists were also interned without trial on specific and detailed evidence that they were spying for, or working on behalf of, Germany. Collectively, these men and women were part of a little-known Fifth Column: traitors who committed crimes including espionage, sabotage, communicating with enemy intelligence agents and attempting to cause disaffection amongst Allied troops. Hundreds of official files, released piecemeal and in remarkably haphazard fashion in the years between 2002 and 2017, reveal the truth about the Allied men and women who formed these spy rings. Several were part of international espionage rings based in the United States.

If these men and women were, for the most part, lone wolves or members of small networks, others were much more dangerous. In 1940, during some of the darkest days of the war, two well-connected British Nazi sympathizers planned overlapping conspiracies to bring about a “fascist revolution.” These plots were foiled by Allied spymasters through radical—and often contentious—methods of investigation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643130774
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	07/02/2019
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	660,614
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Tim Tate is a multi-award winning documentary filmmaker, investigative journalist, and prolific author. Over a career spanning almost forty years he has made more than eighty documentaries for all British networks and international broadcasters, and written for most national newspapers. His films have been honored by Amnesty International, the Royal Television Society, UNESCO, the International Documentary Association, the Association for International Broadcasting, the [US] National Academy of Cable Broadcasting, and the New York Festivals. He is the author of fifteen history books, including Hitler's Forgotten Children and the bestselling Slave Girl which has sold over 700,000 copies.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Prelude xvii

Introduction xix

1 A Wake-up Call 1

2 Target Britain 15

3 A Nation Unprepared 29

4 'The Shadow of the German Sword' 43

5 The Last Spies of Peace 59

6 Phoney War 75

7 Perish Judah!' 89

8 Lords Traitorous 107

9 Two Weeks in May 125

10 Assisting the Enemy 143

11 The Kensington Conspiracy 165

12 'A Revolutionary Dictatorship Should be Imposed' 185

13 Password 'Peter Leigh' 209

14 Witch-finding 227

15 Humble Tools and Real Criminals 251

16 Treachery and Death 269

17 'Most Frank and Attractive' 299

18 'Rosebud' and the Road to Entrapment 327

19 Dorothy, Dormouse and Jack 341

20 The Marita Network 355

21 After the War 379

Afterword 391

Acknowledgements 395

Selected Bibliography 397

Notes 399

Index 449

Editorial Reviews

05/27/2019

Spies and traitors in the United Kingdom before and during WWII were a reality, not a myth as researchers have often posited, as documentarian Tate reveals in this meticulous analysis of previously secret government files on Britain’s domestic Nazi sympathizers. Beyond piecing together the stories of these saboteurs, whose ranks included lower- and middle-class British citizens as well as aristocrats and parliamentarians, the author discusses the government’s uneven, conflicted handling of their cases and the dangers they posed, especially in the war’s early years. Upper-class conspirators including Lord Tavistock, who called Hitler’s demands for territory in Poland “exceedingly reasonable” and illegally met with German officials in 1940 to negotiate terms to end the war, avoided internment and other punishments meted out to lower-class culprits, allowing them in many cases to continue their subversive activities. Tate draws parallels to the way Western nations handle thorny decisions involving terrorists and immigrants today, asking, “Does the long-term goal—safety and security for the greatest number of people—ever excuse the wholesale trampling of an individual’s human rights?” This will interest history buffs, espionage aficionados, and anyone with an interest in how the mistakes and choices of the past can shed light on the present. Agent: Andrew Lownie, Andrew Lownie Literary Agency. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"Hitler’s Forgotten Children is emotional read, engagingly written. It's much easier to empathize with the tragic situation of hundreds of children during Hitler's reign."

All About History [Praise for Tim Tate]

"Witty, well-written, and deeply-sympathetic. A fitting monument for all the intrepid women who turned out to play the beautiful game in the teeth of male scorn."

The Daily Mail [Praise for Tim Tate]

"Tate’s approach is rigorously unsensational. Only once or twice does controlled anger seep through prose that is clear and level-headed and cumulatively merciless in condemnation of a trade most people do not wish to know about."

The Sunday Times (London) [Praise for Tim Tate]

2019-04-28
A prolific British documentary filmmaker and author pursues the documentation released between 2000 and 2017 by MI5 and other entities that reveals the mostly secret convictions of a considerable number of British spies during World War II.

Despite what England has publicly presented—that the so-called Fifth Column was a myth and the threat of "enemies within" just hysteria—Tate (Pride: The Unlikely Story of the True Heroes of the Miner's Strike, 2018, etc.) returns to the record to tell a different story. He underscores three elements: that the majority of spies for Nazi Germany were not German immigrants but British citizens; that those punished were of lower class than the aristocratic ringleaders at the top; and that much of the evidence of convictions was buried or covered up for decades. Tate looks at several espionage networks, many developed in small towns around regular kinds of people who became radicalized by infiltrations of resourceful German intelligence agents in Britain in its plan to invade the country in the late 1930s. Britain did not have a functioning anti-espionage law until August 1939, when Parliament enacted an Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, allowing a classification system (regarding the level of threat) for non-naturalized Germans living in the country. By May 1940, the House of Commons passed the Treachery Act, dispensing the death penalty for treason. The pool of big fish, "the key pillars of British society," contained plenty of rabid anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi figures, such as Oswald Mosely and his British Union and Archibald Ramsay and his Right Club, which was plotting a coup to replace the government with Nazi sympathizers. While the latter retained his seat in the House of Commons, many little fish were severely punished, even hanged. From the internment of suspects, the British eventually turned to a more covert form of entrapment: the sting operation. In true documentarian fashion, the author relentlessly brings forth evidence that has long been buried.

An engaging work of World War II history.

Kirkus Reviews