Inside the Gestapo

The fascinating first-hand account by a top defector of the ruthlessness, spy intrigues and curious personalities of the Third Reich. A unique and intimate record, full of surprises, sardonic wit and tragic endings. “Gestapo tactics”: Espionage, intrigue, and subversion. Cunning, cynical, and ruthless in exploiting every human weakness – and murdering anyone who got in the way. Koehler was a special agent working for the top Nazi cop Heydrich, head of the Gestapo, the Secret State Police. He earns his spurs as spying in France, disguised as a Trotskyist refugee, laying the groundwork for Germany to annex these provinces, and matching wits with French and Communist intelligence services. A keen observer and skilful narrator, Koehler reveals how the Gestapo secretly financed and supported the Rumanian Iron Guard and the Spanish Fascists. Then he is sent undercover to a concentration camp to finger a fugitive. What he sees there, and the flogging that puts him in hospital, sows the seeds of his plan to escape.
His next mission is to recover “The Fatal File” — documents showing that Hitler’s grandmother became pregnant while working as a maid in the Rothschild mansion in Vienna — the Austrian chancellor’s secret blackmail weapon to hold Nazi Germany at bay. Heydrich advises Koehler to employ a beautiful Countess to inveigle the file — Austria is disarmed — and the Wehrmacht marches into Austria. Koehler is then promoted to the detail guarding Hitler’s residence in the Alps, and gets his chance to escape to Switzerland, where he writes “Inside the Gestapo”. In 1943 the OSS commissioned a psychological profile of Hitler by Walter Langer, who drew on the revelations in this book. In 1972 Langer followed up with The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report, which became a mass-market bestseller.