Robert Hutchinson, German Foreign Intelligence from Hitler’s War to the Cold War: Flawed Assumptions and Faulty Analysis (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2019)
Exploring the root of German intelligence failure, Robert Hutchinson’s German Foreign Intelligence from Hitler’s War to the Cold War: Flawed Assumptions and Faulty Analysis presents a succinct overview of the difficulties, assumptions, and eventual failures of German intelligence from World War II into the Cold War. Hutchinson is a fellow in the Strategy and Policy Department at the Naval War College and earned a Ph.D. in Modern European History from the University of Maryland in 2018. This book stems from a desire to understand how the German intelligence services functioned during World War II, and how that translated to Cold War relations with the United States. He explores three primary sources of foreign intelligence: the German Foreign Office; German military intelligence from the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH) and Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), which represent the German Army High Command and its superior, German Armed Forces High Command; and the state “Security Service”—the political arm of the Nazi Party. By exploring the available records of these services, Hutchinson presents analysis of German foreign intelligence services based on the products they produced rather than the processes they followed. The American military’s infatuation with the Nazi war machine is nothing new. Studying the root of that admiration through the lens of the Nazi intelligence apparatus, however, is a fascinating new interpretation on the problems inherent in using Nazi Germany’s experiences on the Eastern Front to shape American Cold War intelligence policy and war plans.
The author’s primary thesis is that the most significant flaw of German intelligence was its inability to see the world as it was and that this deficiency persisted after the war as German intelligence veterans rose to positions of prominence during the early Cold War due to their alleged expertise on the Soviet Union. In actuality, they were far from experts. Instead, these organizations were colored by a sense of racial superiority that clouded intelligence analysis and reporting. To Hutchinson, these services provided faulty politicized intelligence that consistently underestimated their adversaries while confirming the Nazi worldview. From Nazi Germany to West Germany, of course, institutional frameworks combined with policy makers’ desires and influence to create a highly politicized and extremely subjective version of intelligence. In the end, German intelligence failed because the German High Command, especially Hitler, only paid attention to reports that confirmed his beliefs.
Nazi intelligence, according to Hutchinson, portrayed Great Britain as politically and morally bankrupt, ready to collapse at a moment’s notice. Racist worldviews painted the Soviet Union as racially inferior and militarily inept. Nazi intelligence services also maintained that the United States’ potential as the arsenal of democracy was undermined by its political, cultural, and racial unrest. In short, Nazi intelligence, rather than providing objective analysis of its adversaries, instead portrayed them as “puppets in the hands of the international Jewry” and wholly inferior to the German war machine (p. 2). After the war, former Nazi operatives negotiated a future in the Cold War by portraying themselves as apolitical instruments of the regime that possessed invaluable knowledge on fighting the Soviet Union, and that only through their help could the United States and its allies be fully prepared to defend against future Soviet aggression. In reality, as Hutchinson argues, these operatives were, in fact, ideologues, criminally culpable in war crimes, yet through careful crafting of post-war studies for the US Army known as the “Foreign Military Studies” program, created a vital role in the future defense of West Germany and NATO.
Organized into six thematic chapters, the first three detail the inability of Nazi strategic intelligence services to accurately portray its adversaries during the early war period from 1939–1941. As the author argues, German intelligence was primarily focused on Jewish influence over each nation-state and their respective weakness, rather than reporting on potential strengths and problems the Wehrmacht might face in fighting each country. Chapter One argues that the Germans were convinced that bombing, blockade, and covert operations would so demoralize the population that peace might be possible without invasion. Chapter Two then argues that flawed reporting on the Red Army between 1939 and 1941 was the result of deep-seated cultural and racial biases that the author argues that led to German inability to accurately assess Red Army strength which had long-lasting implications into the Cold War. In Chapter Three, Hutchinson asserts that Abwehr intelligence reports on the United States consistently emphasized the influence of American Jewry, fueling Hitler’s conception of America, and undermining otherwise accurate reporting on the economic and military potential of the United States. Chapter Four focuses on tactical intelligence on the Eastern Front, and the role played by Nazi intelligence in the Final Solution between 1941 and 1943. This chapter portrays the Nazi intelligence services as key players in the racial war against European Jewry and corroborates other analyses that German’s often blurred the lines between intelligence work and genocide.
Chapter Five and Six outline postwar efforts by German intelligence and military personnel to portray themselves as experts on Soviet tactics and apolitical professionals like their American counterparts. Hutchinson argues that this was accomplished primarily through the fledgling West German Federal Intelligence Service and the American Foreign Military Studies Program. Because the OKW, OKH and others closely collaborated with the US Army Historical Division after the war, their voice indirectly undergirded US Army doctrine after 1947. Racist, social-Darwinist, and anti-Soviet beliefs permeated German operational reports and, the author argues, became key components of American plans for future war with the Soviet Union. This was the least convincing part of the book. German influence on the United States military and intelligence communities in the Cold War is clear, but Chapter Five relies primarily on the story of one officer, Reinhard Gehlen. While Gehlen is certainly influential, and his racial biases toward Russian people and the Red Army is clear, pinning later Cold War biases on one person is unconvincing and reductionist at best.
The author draws on official reports and other documents from the Nazi era and Cold War-era Germany and archival research in declassified reports in the United States to paint a robust yet incomplete picture. Hutchinson points out the importance of the German intelligence services daily, weekly, and monthly intelligence reports as an allusion to their potential importance as source material. However, the officially filed reports assuredly reflect what these services wanted their commanders to see, rather than useful intelligence. Because of the inherent difficulties of studying intelligence history, one wonders if access to information still classified might change his conclusion. Nevertheless, the conclusions he draws follow logical interpretations of those sources he accesses. The author presents one major “what if” scenario—arguing that the survival of “foreign national stereotypes” in German intelligence “had detrimental consequences for both American military planning and West German national security” (p. 244). While this might be true, without a shooting war or massive intelligence failures to cite, this claim reads as mere conjecture.
Much like Haslam’s work on Soviet intelligence, or Kotani’s work on Japanese intelligence, Hutchinson’s book emphasizes the dangers inherent in politicized intelligence. Intelligence gathered and presented through a political lens rather than objective, apolitical analysis can contribute to faulty assumptions and national failure. Unlike previous interpretations of German intelligence operations, Hutchinson is more concerned with how intelligence was gathered and presented, and the effect it had on significant policy decisions than with internal obstacles in German intelligence services. It is an especially important work for scholars of German and Nazi history, as well as how former Nazi officers influenced the US Army in the early cold war. I would recommend this book to serious scholars in the field of intelligence, but due to its specific nature, this book is not recommended for undergraduates or lay persons.