Word: hoettl
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gehlen's astonishing thesis. A 1947 book called Who Killed Hitler? states: "Russian intelligence reported Bormann under arrest, a prisoner of the Red Army in the Berlin area in early July 1945-two months after Berlin's capture!" An International News Service story in 1950 quotes Wilhelm Hoettl, a Nazi secret service expert, as saying that Bormann and other former German officials were running a bureau in the U.S.S.R. to "reorganize Germany, East and West, along the lines of a people's democracy...
...Midnight Tango. In between large slices of history on German policy in Italy and the Balkans during World War II, Hoettl sandwiches in personality tidbits on other Nazi bigwigs. Ribbentrop was called Ribbentropf in South Germany, Tropf meaning lout. According to Hoettl, Ribbentrop, when enraged, would shut himself up in his darkened bedroom. This was called his "midnight tango act," and while it was on, foreign office underlings would secure the Deputy Foreign Minister's signature on papers they knew Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop would not have signed. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military intelligence, was passionately fond...
Sifting fact from fiction in The Secret Front is made more difficult because Hoettl has not told his personal story, that of a middle-level bureaucrat aching to be a master spy. Though he speaks of "my agents," he never actually commanded any, but merely processed the reports of actual spies and served as a specialist on Central European peoples...
...After the war, Hoettl promoted a villa for himself in Alt-Aussee, near Salzburg, by lining up ex-SS informants for the U.S. Army's CIC or Counter-intelligence Corps. The Army dropped him in 1949. He claims to have intelligence contacts behind the Iron Cur tain, and was arrested in 1953 because of his connections with suspected Soviet spies. But later Hoettl was released with out charges. He now supports the neo-Nazi VDU Party because, he says, it is the nearest thing to a sensible rightist party in Austria...
With his wife, Hoettl founded a publishing house just to publish The Secret Front. The book flopped in Germany and the publishing business with it. It has been published in the U.S. on the apparent assumption that even if Nazi Hoettl's countrymen would not read his story, his ex-enemies will...