BOOK REVIEWS 377

persecuted. German courts of law during the Hitler dictatorship, of course,

showed little interest in such intent on the part of the regime’s enemies.
This carefully researched, remarkably empathetic, and insightful book has
some unfortunate errors, a few of which should be noted. It was President
Hindenburg’s appointment of the National Socialist leader as Reich
Chancellor on January 30, 1933, not the March 5, 1933, “elections that
brought Hitler to power” (p. 87). Helmuth James von Moltke led his own resis-
tance group, later called the Kreisau Circle; he was not “a member of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer’s resistance circles” (p. 125). Contrary to Nelson’s view that the
Americans “were still trying to steer clear of war” in summer and fall 1941
(p. 228), President Roosevelt told Churchill during their meeting in Placentia
Bay in August 1941 (as Martin Gilbert in Churchill VI, p. 1,168, quotes
Churchill) that “he would wage war, but not declare it, and that he would
become more and more provocative,” and that “he would look for an ‘incident’
which would justify him in opening hostilities.”
Nelson’s book was “born of a human rights perspective”; she modestly calls it
a “good-faith effort in making sense of this complicated tale” with the material
she could find (p. 339). But in some respects her work is exemplary, as a
balanced addition to existing literature for English- and German-language
readers (a German translation, Die Rote Kapelle. Die Geschichte der legendären
Widerstandsgruppe, Munich: C. Bertelsmann, was published in 2010). This
moving account of the convictions, motivations, lives, and deaths of the
Berlin group of intellectuals and working-class resisters supersedes the biased
and distorting cold-war accounts, the eastern version of which presented the
Rote Kapelle as a purely communist-directed organization, while in the west
the view of the group as contemptible traitors prevailed. Nelson presents a
balanced account of the Berlin group’s heterodox antifascism, its priorities
and actions, and its involuntarily limited involvement in the transmission of
intelligence to Moscow.
PETER HOFFMANN
MCGILL UNIVERSITY
doi:10.1017/S0008938911000239

Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat. By Denis

Smyth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2010. Pp. xiii + 367. Cloth
$29.95. ISBN 978-0-19-923398-4.

Operation Mincemeat was an attempt by British intelligence to deceive the

Germans in spring 1943 about the site of the next great Allied amphibious
378 BOOK REVIEWS

landing. With Operation Husky aiming for the Italian island of Sicily in July,
Mincemeat sought to deliver fake documents to the German high command
indicating that southern France and Greece were the real targets. Such operations
were common in World War II, and indeed we might even call them business as
usual for both sides before any major undertaking.
What sets Mincemeat apart from any other similar operation in World War II
was the intended means of delivering that fake information: a corpse. The mas-
termind of the plot, Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu, and his small
band of planners procured a dead body—not as easy as it sounds, oddly
enough, even in the midst of the bloodiest war in human history—dressed it in
a Royal Marine uniform, lashed a valise to it filled with fake documents, including
letters to Generals Sir Harold Alexander and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and
dumped it off the coast of Franco’s Spain near the port of Huelva. The Spanish
authorities retrieved it, and did just about what you would expect an Axis-
leaning neutral to do. They informed the British of the tragedy and handed
the apparently important documents over to the German military intelligence
service, the Abwehr. Sure it sounds like a movie, and in fact it is a movie, The
Man Who Never Was (director Ronald Neame, 1956), starring Clifton Webb as
Montagu.
In other words, Smyth is working with some great material here, and by and
large the book delivers. What comes through most clearly is the incredible
complexity of the undertaking. The planners had to find a suitable corpse,
and he had to look like a “staff officer type.” They actually had a lot of discus-
sion over this point. He had to have a convincing backstory. What was he doing
on this flight? Why was he carrying these important papers? He had to have a
convincing life back in Britain, and it is here that we enter the theater of the
absurd. The planners gave “Major Martin” letters from his “father,” warning
notes from his bank manager complaining about his tendency to overdraft,
expired leave passes, all suitably weathered. They even gave him a sex life, an
attractive young fiancée named “Pam,” replete with photograph and love
letters. They began talking about him as if he were real. Indeed, it is no exag-
geration to say that they began to believe he was real. It is fascinating stuff, much
like a police procedural on television, and more than a little ghoulish. Ever try
to put heavy military boots on a frozen corpse? Our operatives had to do just
that. They solved the problem by holding the ankles over a flame to thaw them.
Deathly Deception is not without problems. Foremost among them is the relent-
less cheerleading tone, the “isn’t-this-just-amazing?” cast to the rhetoric. All the
planners are magnificent. One is an “accomplished pilot, pianist, and painter”
(p. 169), and another a “born adventurer” (p. 161). Montagu himself is the
real deal, filled with “gusto for the game of the double-cross” and “imaginative
flair,” and also “adept at fathoming his antagonist’s mindset and manipulating it
to his advantage” (p. 26). In fact, much of the text here is of the “Montagu did
 BOOK REVIEWS 379
this and then Montagu did that” variety, detailing one bold act of genius after
another.
That is perhaps unavoidable in a book of this nature, but the problems run
deeper. There is no real thesis to the book, outside of “Mincemeat was terrific.”
The author is prone to exaggerate its impact, referring to the “lives of the tens of
thousands of Allied soldiers” depending on it, as well as “the fate of millions of
people whom the invasion might help liberate from Nazi tyranny” (p. 46,
repeated almost verbatim on p. 279). This is all highly debatable. Hitler had
long been concerned about his Balkan flank. Indeed, he had fought a campaign
there, prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union, in spring 1941. Victorious in
Tunisia in May 1943, the Allies were clearly going to land somewhere in the
Mediterranean, either on one of the islands or somewhere on the northern
shore. The German deployment, therefore, was a prudent one under the circum-
stances, covering southern France, Sicily, and Greece. The exact same scenario
would have played out with or without Mincemeat. Even the author has to
recognize this, admitting at one point that Hitler’s own inclination to defend
the Balkans “makes it impossible to quantify the effect of Operation
Mincemeat” (p. 275).
As to the campaign itself, Operation Husky cannot really be categorized as a
kind of “near run thing” won by a clever intelligence stratagem. The Allies
came ashore on Sicily against relatively light opposition, and after overcoming a
skillfully led German rear guard, overran the island by August. It wasn’t all that
close. The Italians, who comprised the vast majority of Axis strength on the
island and without whom the island would surely be lost in any event, did not
fight at all, but Smyth does not discuss the impact of Mincemeat, if any, on them.
In the end, Deathly Deception calls to mind an unusual moment in time. A great
war is raging, and some very smart people on the Allied side are sitting around a
corpse, contemplating the possibilities.

ROBERT M. CITINO
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS
doi:10.1017/S0008938911000240

Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and its

Transformations. Edited by Jürgen Matthäus. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 2009. Pp. x + 211. Cloth $74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-
538915-9. Paper $24.95. ISBN 978-0199772537.

In their efforts to reconstruct the history of the Nazi extermination of European

Jews, historians have long been reluctant to use survivor testimony. English- and
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