For three years during World War II, future Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles commanded the OSS mission in Bern, Switzerland. From Hitler's Doorstep provides an annotated selection of his reports to Washington from 1942 to 1945. Dulles was a leading source of Allied intelligence on Nazi Germany and the occupied nations. The messages presented in this volume were based on information received through agents and networks operating in France, Italy, Austria, Eastern Europe, and Germany itself. They deal with subjects ranging from enemy troop strength and military plans to political developments, support of resistance movements, secret weapons, psychological warfare, and peace feelers. The Dulles reports reveal his own vision of grand strategy and presage the postwar turmoil in Europe. One of the largest collections of OSS records ever published, these telegrams and radiotelephone transmissions from the National Archives provide an exciting account of the course of the European war, offer insight on the development of American intelligence, and illuminate the origins of the Cold War. They will interest diplomatic and military historians as well as specialists on modern Europe. This volume is almost unique as document-based intelligence history and serves as a badly needed bridge between diplomatic history and intelligence studies.

All Britain was convinced that the Germans would come. They had nothing left with which to oppose the German panzers. In only five weeks the Germans had crushed France and expelled the BEF from Belgium. Now those panzers stood on the Channel coast, waiting for the order to send them to England.

Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia were all German allies in the Second World War, unlike the other countries of Europe which had either been forcibly occupied by the Nazis or remained neutral. SOE Missions mounted within their borders were thus doubly hazardous for they were conducted in enemy-populated territory, heavily policed by military forces and gendarmerie. Furthermore all these states had well developed and experienced security services, usually supplemented by Gestapo and Abwehr units. A further complication to the activities of SOE in these countries was that they had all been effectively conceded by Western Allies to Russia; not surprisingly therefore, operations in the Soviet sphere of influence were to prove diabolically difficult.This is a story about the courage of individuals in the face of overwhelming odds. Hunger, ill-health, exhaustion, cold and treachery all combined to make life for those members of SOE who parachuted into these Fascist outposts of Fortress Europe as insufferable as it was dangerous. For weeks on end, the SOE missions moved continually at night, chased by enemy troops, betrayed by local villagers, awaiting air drops that never came and listening out for orders that were rarely specific. Thus the picture that emerges of SOE activities in these countries is one of heroic proportions, with courage, dedication and daring displayed by every mission.Although nearly all SOE personnel were either killed or captured, the impact of their clandestine operations served as a persistent irritant, continuously undermining Germanys strategic and political assumptions about the loyalty of her allies.

Berlin had been safe for Anita Powitzer for as long as she could remember. But when Hitler came to power, everything changed. Now policemen harmed instead of helped, and Anita couldn't even talk to her best friend. Flung from her secure childhood into a fearful world, she and her family had to find a way to flee Berlin before it was too late. It was risky, and Anita had to be separated from her loved ones, but this was the only way out. Alone in a country with a language she didn't understand, staying with people she had never met, Anita had to wait and hope her parents could join her. Would she and her family be safe? A journey fraught with danger from Germany to Great Britain, and finally to America, this is the true story of one Jewish family's escape from Nazi Berlin.

A revelatory secret history of how America became home to thousands of Nazi war criminals after World War II, many of whom were brought here by the OSS and CIA--by the New York Times reporter who broke the story and who has interviewed dozens of agents for the first time.

How American labor leaders came to the rescue of political and Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. Rescue, Relief, and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee's Anti-Nazi Operations, 1934–1945 is the English translation of Catherine Collomp’s award-winning book on the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC). Formed in New York City in 1934 by the leaders of the Jewish Labor Movement, the JLC came to the forefront of American labor’s reaction to Nazism and antisemitism. Situated at the crossroads of several fields of inquiry—Jewish history, immigration and exile studies, American and international labor history, World War II in France and in Poland—the history of the JLC is by nature transnational. It brings to the fore the strength of ties between the Yiddish-speaking Jewish worlds across the globe. Rescue, Relief, and Resistance contains six chapters. Chapter 1 describes the political origin of the JLC, whose founders had been Bundist militants in the Russian empire before their emigration to the United States, and asserts its roots in the American Jewish Labor movement of the 1930s. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss how the JLC established formal links with the European non-communist labor movement, especially through the Labor and Socialist International and the International Federation of Trade Unions. Chapter 4 focuses on the approximately 1,500 European labor and socialist leaders and left-wing intellectuals, including their families, rescued from certain arrest and deportation by the Gestapo. Chapter 5 deals with the special relationship the JLC established with currents in the Resistance in France, partly financing its underground labor and socialist networks and operations. Chapter 6 is devoted to the JLC’s support of Jews in Poland during the war: humanitarian relief for those in the occupied territory under Soviet domination and political and financial support of the combatants of the Warsaw ghetto in their last stand against annihilation by the Wermacht. The JLC has never commemorated its rescue operations and other political activities on behalf of opponents of fascism and Nazism, nor its contributions to the reconstruction of Jewish life after the Holocaust. Historians to this day have not traced its history in a substantial way. Students and scholars of Holocaust and American studies will find this text vital to their continued studies.

Filled with revelations and replete with telling detail, this riveting book lifts the curtain on the United States' secret intelligence operations in the war against Nazi Germany.