Walter Schellenberg was one of the youngest and most successful SS leaders at the top of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA). From the summer of 1941 to the end of the war, he led “Office VI” of the RSHA, which grew out of the Siccherheitsdienst (SD) and sought to function as the SS and NSDAP's main foreign intelligence agency. Schellenberg and Office VI have long been only partly understood enigmas. Schellenberg himself is largely to blame for this: both during and after the war, he was at great pains to portray Office VI as simply a conventional foreign intelligence agency, and himself as a pragmatic analyst and even humanitarian. He cast himself as the man who sought to negotiate an early end to the war with the Western Allies, and who, at the end of the war, selflessly helped save thousands of Jews by trading them for nonmilitary aid. Nearly all of this is a myth, but one that has entered the postwar historiography and continues to influence it to this day. Katrin Paehler corrects the myth, providing a nuanced, balanced, and solid new look at the man (and agency) who tried to be the Third Reich's main source of foreign intelligence—but failed utterly.

Paehler has written an innovative book that combines a political biography of Schellenberg with an institutional history of Office VI. What might have been problematic in a different context works very well here, given the specific nature of the National Socialist system built on the so-called Führerprinzip, in which individuals and their personalities mattered a great deal. Paehler is able to clear up and correct many of the myths that surround both Schellenberg and Office VI. She describes how Schellenberg, who was originally a Catholic and came out of a conservative, German-nationalist milieu, studied to be a lawyer and did not join the Nazi Party and SS until 1933. He was nonetheless able to rise quickly within the SD to head first Office IV E of the RSHA (the Gestapo's counterintelligence section) and then, by the summer of 1941, all of Office VI. Paehler shows that Schellenberg was a fiercely ambitious climber, whose main skills were self-aggrandizement, picking the right backers (Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler), and an ability to appear both deeply loyal and efficient. Paehler further makes the point that Schellenberg was an “effortless” National Socialist of sorts, so deeply embedded in a Nazi worldview that he was both capable of appearing to the outside world as a pragmatist, and fundamentally incapable of seeing the world outside a Nazi ideological framework, despite his later obfuscations.

This book gives us the clearest and most complete view of Office VI to date. It was decidedly not a normal intelligence organization, but rather an amateurish and poorly staffed institution that began and remained located in the context of the SD and SS. The entire justification for Office VI (and the SD as a whole) was that its unwavering commitment to a National Socialist worldview would somehow make it better than the hopelessly conservative police and Abwehr (Office VI's chief rival, the German military intelligence, which it absorbed in 1944). Paehler also demonstrates that Schellenberg and the men he served sought to use Office VI to build and practice an alternative National Socialist foreign policy, with a goal of someday fully supplanting—or fully Nazifying, which amounted to the same thing—the Foreign Office. Paehler locates the spectacular failure of Office VI as an intelligence service largely in its ideological strictness, which made it incapable of understanding anyone or anything that did not correspond to Nazi ideology. Paehler also sets Office VI in the larger German institutional context of excessive decentralization and empire-building, together with a disregard, even contempt, for intelligence gathering: “Office VI was more than a traditional intelligence service and less: it never provided reliable foreign intelligence nor was it particularly successful at forging an independent foreign policy. However, under Schellenberg, Office VI provided the powerful illusion of being both” (357).

The book has many strengths. It is based on detailed research in a wide and geographically diverse body of sources that are massive in quantity and maddeningly incomplete because of deliberate and accidental destruction during the war. At the same time, Paehler is able to make a nuanced evaluation of the language used in her sources—for example, in her useful explanation of the difference in German between Spionageabwehr and Gegenspionage, which can both be translated as “counterintelligence” (83). The book is largely for specialists, including members of the intelligence community, for whom the story of Office VI will serve as a cautionary tale about how not to do intelligence. There is also a very welcome, if short, chapter on Schellenberg after the end of the war, which discusses his surprisingly successful efforts to write the postwar history of Office VI and his own role in it.

The weaknesses of the study are few and not entirely Paehler's fault. There is no bibliography, which is especially regrettable in a book so rich in sources. There might have been more careful editing, and even specialists would have appreciated placing an organogram of Office VI at the beginning of the study, and pairing it with one of the RSHA as a whole. None of this seriously detracts from the book's considerable merits, however.

Its great appeal to specialists notwithstanding, this book deserves to be read widely. It has important things to say about who was able to succeed in the Third Reich—and why. It corrects the persistent myths that surround both Schellenberg and Office VI, and makes a major contribution to our understanding of how the SD and RSHA functioned as central agents of Nazi crimes. Paehler makes two other major contributions in this study. She convincingly demonstrates that both Office VI and Schellenberg were intensely ideological, to the point of being blinkered. She also shows how neither Schellenberg, nor Office VI, nor the RSHA can be fully understood without grasping the fact that Schellenberg and Himmler both hoped to use Office VI not simply for collecting intelligence, but also for creating an active and fundamentally National Socialist foreign policy that would make the Foreign Service irrelevant.

Far from being a humanist at heart, Schellenberg was a murderous careerist who was deeply implicated in Nazi crimes, most directly in the Anschluß of Austria and the occupation of Poland, but also in his negotiations with the Allies, callously offering Jews as currency. Schellenberg was not a sober realist and technocrat, but rather a central architect and executor of the deadly SS empire, as well as a man who helped shape both the SD and the RSHA. The SD, out of which Schellenberg and Office VI both came, was central to the nature and structure of the RSHA, which, in turn, was instrumental in creating the Nazi agenda and implementatng its policies. Paehler provides us with a useful study of how ambition and clever office politics, combined with a businesslike yet prevalent antisemitism, could propel an amoral careerist like Schellenberg to the highest levels of the Nazi state—and of how National Socialist ideology, so fundamental to the SD and Office VI, could make both such spectacular failures.