Master Spy; The Incredible Story of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who, while Hitler's Chief of Intelligence, was a Secret Ally of the British

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc, 1951. Presumed First U.S. Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good/Good. viii, [2], 286 pages. Frontis illustration. Footnotes. Bibliography. Index. Front board weak, restrengthened with glue. Originally published in Great Britain as Chief of Intelligence. Wilhelm Franz Canaris (1 January 1887 - 9 April 1945) was a German admiral and chief of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, from 1935 to 1944. Initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler, by 1939 he had turned against the Nazis as he felt Germany would lose another major war. He was among the military officers involved in the clandestine opposition to Nazi Germany leadership. He was executed in Flossenbürg concentration camp for high treason as the Nazi regime was collapsing. No direct evidence of his involvement in the July 20 plot was discovered, but his close association with many of the plotters and certain documents written by him that were considered subversive led to the assumption of his guilt. Derived from a Kirkus review: The knowns, and some of the conjectural unknowns, in the life of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, an enigmatic to elusive figure in espionage who served as Hitler's Chief of Intelligence for nine years, but who may have been a British agent as well. Charming, exacting, mistrustful, softspoken, Canaris became an Admiral during the first World War, but officially entered the Abwehr (Security Service) in 1935 of which he was later to become head. Here are the delicate to dubious military and diplomatic interchanges in which he figured; the occasions on which he sabotaged and betrayed German plans and proceedings, from the Munich pact to the proposed invasion of England and throughout the conduct of the war, until his deposition by Hitler in 1944, and his execution in 1945. An investigation which relies on fact-which has been difficult to isolate- rather than sensational speculation, this is a deliberate, detailed account by a former correspondent of the London News Chronicle.