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3,000,000 Rubles. Late in 1936, according to Hoettl, German intelligence heard that Tukhachevsky was planning an army revolt against the Soviet dictator and his regime. Heydrich persuaded Himmler and Hitler that they should tip off Stalin, and thus touch off a purge that would gut the Soviet high command. Stalin bit, even paid 3,000,000 rubles for the forged bait, and in the trials of 1937, purged Tukhachevsky and all his confederates. The rubles, says Hoettl in an ironic footnote, were counterfeit; the first German agent who spent them in Russia was promptly arrested.
The Midnight Tango. In between large slices of history on German policy in Italy and the Balkans during World War II, Hoettl sandwiches in personality tidbits on other Nazi bigwigs. Ribbentrop was called Ribbentropf in South Germany, Tropf meaning lout. According to Hoettl, Ribbentrop, when enraged, would shut himself up in his darkened bedroom. This was called his "midnight tango act," and while it was on, foreign office underlings would secure the Deputy Foreign Minister's signature on papers they knew Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop would not have signed. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military intelligence, was passionately fond of his dachshunds, says Hoettl and when abroad would telephone daily to inquire of their health. Requesting a transcript of one of the admiral's tapped phone calls from Tangier to Berlin, the chief of the Spanish secret police was once highly chagrined to find that all the top secret information he had gained was a detailed report on the natural functions of an ailing dachshund.
Sifting fact from fiction in The Secret Front is made more difficult because Hoettl has not told his personal story, that of a middle-level bureaucrat aching to be a master spy. Though he speaks of "my agents," he never actually commanded any, but merely processed the reports of actual spies and served as a specialist on Central European peoples.
Ex-SS to CIC. After the war, Hoettl promoted a villa for himself in Alt-Aussee, near Salzburg, by lining up ex-SS informants for the U.S. Army's CIC or Counter-intelligence Corps. The Army dropped him in 1949. He claims to have intelligence contacts behind the Iron Cur tain, and was arrested in 1953 because of his connections with suspected Soviet spies. But later Hoettl was released with out charges. He now supports the neo-Nazi VDU Party because, he says, it is the nearest thing to a sensible rightist party in Austria.
With his wife, Hoettl founded a publishing house just to publish The Secret Front. The book flopped in Germany and the publishing business with it. It has been published in the U.S. on the apparent assumption that even if Nazi Hoettl's countrymen would not read his story, his ex-enemies will.
*It was there that Heydrich the Hangman met his death, after an assassin bombed his car on the outskirts of Prague on May 27, 1942.