Behind the Scenes of Third Reich Diplomacy

A study of German diplomacy in the last months of the Third Reich, and in particular of the attempts made in the spring of 1945 to convert the anti-Hitler coalition into an anti-Soviet one: the contacts at Ascona, the approaches through Sweden and Switzerland, and the manoeuvres of Himmler, Schellenberg and the men around them.

The historical material is solid and the narrative detailed. What gives the book its edge is that Rozanov twice interrupts the 1945 story to attach a footnote to his own present. Lyman Lemnitzer, one of the two Allied officers sent in civilian clothes to negotiate with the SS at Ascona in March 1945, is identified as the later commander of NATO and a leader of the Committee on the Present Danger. Paul Nitze, present at the meeting with Speer that May, is identified the same way.

That is the book's real proposition, and it is not about 1945. When this was written Nitze had just been named the American negotiator on intermediate-range missiles at Geneva, and the conclusion says in plain words that much of the deceit employed in Nazi diplomacy had passed to reactionaries in the West.

The date on the spine is 1984; the date of the book is 1981, and the copyright page says so without being asked. Brezhnev is quoted twice and alive, and detente appears as live policy rather than obituary.

Companion volume to Sipols on the diplomacy before the war.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.