Description: With a combination of collected documents, correspondences, personal notes, communications with peers, and from memory, this captivating account by an espionage agent reveals an insider's glimpse of the German intelligence service and of a handler's expansive and diverse agent network.
Brief description: Nikolaus Adolf Fritz Ritter (1899-1974) was Chief of Air Intelligence in the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service. Ritter lived in the United States for 10 years until 1935 when he returned to the German military where he recruited and sustained an agent network under the Chief of Intelligence Service, Admiral Canaris.
Review Quotes:
This is a rare story of a German spy handler in World War II. No racy cars, long-legged women, royal casinos, and jet-set hideaways à la James Bond or George Smiley. Just 'sober and nerve-wracking mosaic work' tinged with 'greed, foolishness, and treason' by an Abwehr spymaster named Niklaus Ritter (Dr. Rantzau). First published in German in 1972, Ritter's memoirs detail his recruiting of agents in Belgium, Britain, Egypt, Hungary, the Netherlands, and the United States. It is a story of triumphs (stealing the Norden bombsight and the Sperry gyroscope) and defeats (betrayal by an FBI double agent and incarceration by British counterintelligence). It is gripping reading. It is dramatic. It is realistic.
--Holger H. Herwig, author of The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918