What Hitler Knew: The Battle for Information in Nazi Foreign Policy

I magine yourself a high-level strategist in a government where your phone is tapped, your every action monitored, and your life at constant risk should you fall from favor. After years of turmoil and mounting tension, you bear witness to a wave of state-sponsored terror in which your colleagues are murdered and thousands of your fellow citizens are rounded up and arrested. Within such an unstable, tumultuous environment, what would it be like to go to work each day? On a personal level, how would the constant surveillance affect your behavior and your performance? What Hitler Knew is an incisive study of how the climate of fear in Nazi Germany influenced Hitler's advisers and shaped the decision-making process. Zachary Shore argues persuasively that the inherent instability of the Third Reich led its diplomats to manage and control their "information arsenal" with obsessive intensity, in a desperate battle to defend their positions and safeguard their lives. The result, Shore concludes, was a chaotic flow of information between Hitler and his advisers that may have accelerated the march toward war. In the process of tracing how information traveled in the corridors of Nazi power, Shore discovers surprising new facts relating to Hitler's major foreign policy decisions, from his seizure of power right up to the hours before the outbreak of war. Drawing on multinational primary research, including records from the KGB archives, Shore provides fresh insights into Hitler's daring recapture of the Rhineland, Germany's dramatic decision to align with Poland, the intrigues over arms deals with Ethiopia, and the fall of Hitler's first foreign minister. He also offers new and provocative interpretations of Stalin's decision to sign the Nazi-Soviet pact, and Chamberlain's intentions for a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Zachary Shore takes the reader into the tortured, uncertain world of the Nazi hierarchy, telling for the first time the compelling story of What Hitler