Nein! The Plot Against Hitler 1935-1944

During his last days in the Berlin bunker, Adolf Hitler could not cope with the fact that he had been betrayed by his own people. For the most part, he was right. In 1945, the Nazi army was crushed on all fronts, Hitler's regime was collapsing, and many of his henchmen, including the Führer himself, escaped just punishment. But before the war even began, a group of high-ranking figures in Germany had come together with the determination to stop Hitler at any cost.

In his book, Paddy Ashdown tells for the first time the stories of those who stood at the very top of Hitler's Germany, first trying to prevent World War II and then working tirelessly to sabotage the Führer's victory after it broke out. Newly released documents reveal repeated attempts by these conspirators to warn the Allies of Hitler's megalomaniacal plans. The main focus of the book is the activities of the Abwehr commander Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, through which he sabotaged Hitler's policies, plotted his liquidation, and also facilitated the systematic passage of key military secrets of the Third Reich to London, Washington, and Moscow through the spy networks of MI6, the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA), and Russian intelligence based in Switzerland. Since 1943, members of these groups have made a concerted effort to bring Germany to peace with the various Western powers. An immediate end to the war would ensure that Eastern Europe would not fall into Soviet subjugation.

The author offers a glimpse behind the curtain of a seemingly unified Third Reich, revealing that the much-hyped Hitler bombings were in fact only a small part of a much larger story – of the story, in which the leaders of the German state used all available means, including the conspiracy, of murder and espionage, to ensure that Hitler would be defeated. Their motivation was the reputation of their native country and the maintenance of liberal and democratic values. For these courageous conspirators, the current form of the European Union, with Germany at its centre, was a dream worth laying down one's life for.