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19 Works 712 Members 7 Reviews

About the Author

Works by Heinz Höhne

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Common Knowledge

Canonical name
Höhne, Heinz
Birthdate
1926
Date of death
2010-03-27
Gender
male
Nationality
Germany
Birthplace
Berlin, Germany
Place of death
Großhansdorf, Germany

Members

Reviews

Riveting subject matter (5-star) but the book is either very poorly written (2-star) in a disjointed journalistic style or poorly translated or both.

See what happens when an entire civilized country goes berserk and the wildest conspiracy theory you could ever come up with turns out to be true.

What could be more interesting than Nazi death squads, storm troopers, death camps, medical experiments, entire Death's Head army divisions not even under the control of the military? How could they avoid creeping themselves out?

So next time you say it can't happen here, host a tea party.
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Flagged
Gumbywan | 2 other reviews | Jun 24, 2022 |
Soviet spy ring in Germany in WWII
 
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kaki1 | Oct 20, 2021 |
Workman like but not especially interesting.
 
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carterchristian1 | 2 other reviews | Apr 6, 2011 |
A detailed, well-written biography of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who was killed on Hitler's orders due to his implication in plots to bring down the Nazi government. Unfortunately, the book is marred by the author's conventional leftist bent. Höhne not only fails to credit Canaris as a man of conscience--his antipathy drives the author to underrate Canaris' effectiveness as intelligence chief. Canaris comes off as a slack-witted fool, and clearly no "master spy". One must ask how a fool could have survived so long in the Nazi hierarchy--without ever cozying up to Hitler.

Briefly put, Höhne cannot understand that a man can be both an arch-conservative and anti-Nazi. This is a common failing of the intellectual elite of today: they must believe that a man of the right is necessarily an enemy. Yet, as historian John Lukacs has noted, the strongest opposition Hitler faced came not from the left, but the right. Consider Churchill: hardly a liberal, he was the Nazis' most implacable enemy. Just so with Canaris: the German spy chief might best be described as "arch-conservative", even "imperialist" (in the sense of desiring a return to the old Imperial government), but he nurtured the core of military resistance against Hitler; a resistance that twice would try to kill Hitler during the war, and that would have killed him before the war started--had they not been paralyzed by Chamberlain's astounding trip to Munich.

Still, this book shows abundant scholarship, and should be read (critically) on that account.
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Flagged
Hologrim | 2 other reviews | Dec 29, 2008 |

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Statistics

Works
19
Members
712
Popularity
#35,611
Rating
½ 3.6
Reviews
7
ISBNs
47
Languages
6

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