The Arms Maker of Berlin

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

HALF THE FUN of writing this book was the month I spent poring over declassified OSS records in the beautiful reading room of the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The staff were helpful and knowledgeable, the material was endlessly fascinating, and the setting was a treat for the eyes. Heck, even the cafeteria food was good, especially the ribs.As I followed the paper trail of Allen Dulles through, figuratively speaking, the streets and alleys of wartime Switzerland, I most often sought guidance from the incomparable Lawrence McDonald, a veteran archivist who knows every nook and cranny. Without him, I’d probably still be floundering through the first of those sixty boxes of documents.Among those documents, I am particularly indebted to two richly detailed field reports from OSS operatives: the April 1, 1945, report of Philip Keller, describing his arrest and interrogation during his infiltration of Bavaria, and the dramatic report of Gertrude LeGendre describing her capture by the Germans in occupied France in September 1944.I also owe a deep debt of gratitude to Neal H. Petersen’s seminal work, From Hitler’s Doorstep, an admirably indexed and annotated collection of Dulles’s wartime intelligence reports. It functioned as my road atlas in navigating the era’s baffling array of operatives and code names. Another helpful tool was American Intelligence and the German Resistance to Hitler, edited by Jürgen Heideking and Christof Mauch.In researching Dulles himself, I relied greatly on the fine biography Gentleman Spy, by Peter Grose, and also Autobiography of a Spy, the colourful memoirs of Mary Bancroft, who was a confidante and mistress of Dulles.On the subject of Nazi Germany and what it means to spend your life researching that era, I owe much to Professor Gerhard Weinberg, of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Not only did he allow me into his living room to pick his brain for hours on end, but he also steered me toward other helpful historians and archivists.On the topic of the student resistance group known as the White Rose, three books were particularly helpful: Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, by Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn; A Noble Treason, by Richard Hanser; and The White Rose: Munich, 1942-1943, by Inge Scholl. The Fall of Berlin, by Anthony Read and David Fisher, was invaluable for its details of daily life in wartime Berlin, and The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting was a vital reference for all matters pertaining to the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 1942. Thanks also to the caretakers of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer House in Berlin for allowing me to roam its rooms for a short but significant period one spring afternoon.On the subject of downed American airmen who spent much of the war in Switzerland, thanks to Captain Martin Andrews, who not only shared his own vivid memories but also his papers. For additional help on this topic I am indebted to Refuge from the Reich, by Stephen Tanner, and Masters of the Air, by Donald L. Miller.In Switzerland, thanks to Dr. Pierre Th. Braunschweig for his observations, and also for his informative book, Secret Channel to Berlin: The Masson-Schellenberg Connection and Swiss Intelligence in World War II.