xxvGerman achievements abound. Whether in World Cup soccer competi-
tion or the production of luxury automobiles and precision cameras,
Germany has maintained an enviable record of accomplishment. Given
the preeminent role that the country has also played in the field of intel-
ligence, a number of questions come to mind. Was it Germany’s lack
of natural boundaries as das Land der Mitte that made it so vulnerable
to foreign powers and their covert operatives? At the same time, was it
the absence of stable political institutions that helped foster a recurring
atmosphere of domestic subterfuge and conspiracy? And perhaps most
importantly, what marks do its many spies and intelligence organiza-
tions ultimately deserve?
Certainly a host of popular images come to mind regarding German
espionage. In The Invasion of 1910, the prolific Edwardian novelist
William Le Queux wrote alarmingly of 100 advance German agents
in London, passing unnoticed but working in unison, each little group
of two or three with its allotted task. Upon the outbreak of World War
I, the Times of London, reflecting a widely held opinion, asserted that
“in their eager absorption of the baser side of militarism, the Germans
seem to have almost converted themselves into a race of spies.”^1 Emo-
tions ran no less high in World War II. In 1939, Hollywood’s first
explicitly antifascist feature film—Confessions of a Nazi Spy—played
to an enthusiastic international audience and actually included footage
from the trial of an agent recently captured by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. Even though the Soviet Union replaced Nazi Germany as
the dominant threat after 1945, it was Berlin that emerged center stage
in the East–West conflict and became hauntingly evoked by John le
Carré’s acclaimed novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Fortunately, the scrupulous scholarship of the past several decades
on both sides of the Atlantic now allows for a far more dispassionate