Nazi Pinwheel

THE SECRET FRONT (327 pp.)--Wilhelm Hoettl--Praeger ($3.95)

Any big or 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.

The 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 a nursing home," become the "foremost man after Hitler in the German Reich?" For one thing, says Hoettl, Hitler was "an indifferent judge of men." For another, Himmler was propped up by an evil genius behind the scenes, his henchman Reinhard Heydrich, "the Hangman."

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's mind that his old party comrade, Ernst Roehm, was plotting a storm-trooper revolt, and Heydrich himself, says Hoettl, made up the lists of the hundreds who were done away with on June 30, 1934, the "night of the long knives." If Hoettl can be believed, Heydrich achieved his masterpiece when he painstakingly forged a correspondence suggesting that the brilliant chief military strategist of the Russian army, Marshal Tukhachevsky, and high German officers were plotting to overthrow Stalin.

3,000,000 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.

The 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 of his dachshunds, says Hoettl and when abroad would telephone daily to inquire of their health. Requesting a transcript of one of the admiral's tapped phone calls from Tangier to Berlin, the chief of the Spanish secret police was once highly chagrined to find that all the top secret information he had gained was a detailed report on the natural functions of an ailing dachshund.

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.

Ex-SS to CIC. 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.

*It was there that Heydrich the Hangman met his death, after an assassin bombed his car on the outskirts of Prague on May 27, 1942.

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