Books: Great Improbabilities

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TOTAL ESPIONAGE—Curt Riess—Putnam ($2.75).

Adolf Hitler once remarked of his hopes and methods: "The greatest improbability is the most certain." If this book had no other value, it would make that statement dangerously clear. For the Nazis, relying as always upon the moderate rationality of the world at large, have made such use of "improbabilities" as amounts to cold genius. Nowhere have they used them more brilliantly and systematically than in the art of espionage.

Witty, vain, gregarious Curt Riess is a former German journalist who went to Paris when Hitler came in, became U.S. correspondent for Paris-soir in 1934. His U.S. stuff (particularly on Hollywood) was syndicated all over Europe. Now a resident of Manhattan, he is married to an editor of Collier's, writes for the Saturday Evening Post. His friends: Raoul de Roussy de Sales, Thomas Mann, Dorothy Thompson.

Total Espionage is 1) an analysis of Nazi methods, organization, successes; 2) a sketch of the piteous failure of the Allies in the same field; 3) a heartening if somewhat thin prognosis based on the awakening of the Western Hemisphere to danger and to action. By its very nature such a book can be neither complete nor wholly reliable. But it is the fullest treatment of an absorbing and important subject so far in World War II.

The Organization. The Allies, in espionage as in war, floundered along in traditional forms: spying was essentially military, to be practised by professionals. Unfortunately they had to cope with an enemy which, having revolutionized warfare, revolutionized espionage too. While France's time-honored Deuxième Bureau hopefully trained its second-string Mata Haris, and while Prime Ministers Chamberlain and Baldwin blandly ignored as "exaggerated" (substitute Hitler's "improbable") the catastrophic findings of Britain's brilliant 64, the Germans set in motion "the greatest espionage organization that had ever existed." Typically, Goebbels compiled a blacklist of all the worn-out tricks which the secret agents of the rest of the world still used.

The founding brains of this tremendous machine, according to Riess, were Walther Nicolai, Ludendorff, Goebbels, Himmler, and above all Rudolf Hess, "the only really great adventurer of the Nazi Party." It grew out of Nicolai's conversations with Ludendorff on the nature of total action; out of Goebbels' and Himmler's intelligent respect for the methods of Lenin (the Gestapo was "a complete plagiarism of the OGPU"); and out of Hess's studies under Geopolitician Professor Karl Haushofer. Haushofer assigned his star pupil the study of Japan—a study which Hess promptly narrowed to "Japan and Espionage," and on which he wrote a 40,000-word thesis which may be regarded as the Magna Charta for the hidden eyes of the New Order.

In 1933-34, Hess developed his Liaison Staff, an organization whose three basic principles, in utter departure from previous Occidental practice, were: "Everyone can spy. Everyone must spy. Everything can be found out."

By the end of 1934, Total Espionage was ready to function. Its setup:

> The Intelligence Service of the War Ministry (under Nicolai).

> The Organization of Germans Living Abroad (the AO; under Ernst Wilhelm Bohle).