THE SECRET FRONT (327 pp.)—Wilhelm Hoettl—Praeger ($3.95)
Any big or little wheel of Nazi Germany who rolls long and far enough can apparently come to rest on the lists of a U.S. publisher. Unregenerate Nazis get there with the rest. Austrian-born Wilhelm Hoettl, 38, qualifies with the very first sentence of his book, The Secret Front: "I do not propose to start by moralizing on my reasons for entering the German Secret Service."
Hoettl, a graduate student in Vienna University when he entered the secret service, rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and claims to have been a big espionage wheel, but his book and his personal history betray him as more of a pinwheel. In The Secret Front, he twirls about in windy draughts of gossip, secondhand information, hero worship, pure invention and long-fermented spite.
The Fallen Angel. High up on Hoettl's spite list is his chief, Heinrich Himmler, whom he never actually met. Himmler, says Hoettl, was an "extreme mediocrity" who "in all earnestness believed himself to be a reincarnation of the German King Heinrich I." "A disciple of fortune tellers," he never made a move without consulting a team of astrologers and magicians. According to Hoettl, Himmler even hired a batch of professing alchemists and put them to work in the cellar at Gestapo headquarters to make gold. How did this man, "who in normal times would have been put into a nursing home," become the "foremost man after Hitler in the German Reich?" For one thing, says Hoettl, Hitler was "an indifferent judge of men." For another, Himmler was propped up by an evil genius behind the scenes, his henchman Reinhard Heydrich, "the Hangman."
Heydrich fascinates Hoettl, and he compares him to Cesare Borgia. "Both men were imbued with the same complete disregard for all ethical values . . . the same passion for power, the same cold intelligence, the same frigidity of heart, the same systematically calculated ambition, and even the same physical beauty of a fallen angel." Hoettl saddles Fallen Angel Heydrich with a satanic list of deeds. It was Heydrich, according to Hoettl, who worked out the plans for the mass extermination of the Jews and for the stringent Nazi subjugation of Czechoslovakia.* It was Heydrich who planted the idea in Hitler's mind that his old party comrade, Ernst Roehm, was plotting a storm-trooper revolt, and Heydrich himself, says Hoettl, made up the lists of the hundreds who were done away with on June 30, 1934, the "night of the long knives." If Hoettl can be believed, Heydrich achieved his masterpiece when he painstakingly forged a correspondence suggesting that the brilliant chief military strategist of the Russian army, Marshal Tukhachevsky, and high German officers were plotting to overthrow Stalin.