Word: hoettl
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...little wheel of Nazi Germany who rolls long and far enough can apparently come to rest on the lists of a U.S. publisher. Unregenerate Nazis get there with the rest. Austrian-born Wilhelm Hoettl, 38, qualifies with the very first sentence of his book, The Secret Front: "I do not propose to start by moralizing on my reasons for entering the German Secret Service...
...Hoettl, a graduate student in Vienna University when he entered the secret service, rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and claims to have been a big espionage wheel, but his book and his personal history betray him as more of a pinwheel. In The Secret Front, he twirls about in windy draughts of gossip, secondhand information, hero worship, pure invention and long-fermented spite...
...Fallen Angel. High up on Hoettl's spite list is his chief, Heinrich Himmler, whom he never actually met. Himmler, says Hoettl, was an "extreme mediocrity" who "in all earnestness believed himself to be a reincarnation of the German King Heinrich I." "A disciple of fortune tellers," he never made a move without consulting a team of astrologers and magicians. According to Hoettl, Himmler even hired a batch of professing alchemists and put them to work in the cellar at Gestapo headquarters to make gold. How did this man, "who in normal times would have been put into...
Heydrich fascinates Hoettl, and he compares him to Cesare Borgia. "Both men were imbued with the same complete disregard for all ethical values . . . the same passion for power, the same cold intelligence, the same frigidity of heart, the same systematically calculated ambition, and even the same physical beauty of a fallen angel." Hoettl saddles Fallen Angel Heydrich with a satanic list of deeds. It was Heydrich, according to Hoettl, who worked out the plans for the mass extermination of the Jews and for the stringent Nazi subjugation of Czechoslovakia.* It was Heydrich who planted the idea in Hitler...
...Rubles. Late in 1936, according to Hoettl, German intelligence heard that Tukhachevsky was planning an army revolt against the Soviet dictator and his regime. Heydrich persuaded Himmler and Hitler that they should tip off Stalin, and thus touch off a purge that would gut the Soviet high command. Stalin bit, even paid 3,000,000 rubles for the forged bait, and in the trials of 1937, purged Tukhachevsky and all his confederates. The rubles, says Hoettl in an ironic footnote, were counterfeit; the first German agent who spent them in Russia was promptly arrested...