'Whenever I was on missions abroad I was under standing orders to have an artificial tooth inserted which contained enough poison to kill me within thirty seconds if I were captured. To make doubly sure, I wore a signet-ring in which, under a large blue stone, a gold capsule was hidden containing cyanide.' - Walter Schellenberg.
In compliance with the Fuhrer's directive on the imminent invasion of Britain in 1940, the Gestapo prepared a secret handbook for the occupation forces. The first part, edited by senior Nazi Walter Schellenberg who had been educated in England, is a detailed analysis of how the Germans thought the country worked. The second, equally intriguing section is a list of the men and women the Gestapo had earmarked for immediate arrest. Written in August 1940, the handbook sheds extraordinary light on the British political system, the establishment, the church, industry, the police, trade unions and even the Boy Scouts. The chapter on the British Secret Service was considered so embarrassingly accurate that the few copies captured at the end of the war were retained by the authorities, and it is only now, more than half a century later, that a translation has been made to reveal the full remarkable truth.
This unique account of Hitler's corrupt regime illuminates more vividly than any other the deepening atmosphere of terror and unreality in which the Nazi leadership lived as the war progressed. Schellenberg recounts with firsthand knowledge the motivations and machinations surrounding the Nazi Army's every move in Poland, Austria, and Russia. But this remarkable inside account is perhaps most memorable for its riveting portraits of Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, Heinrich Mueller, Ernst Kaltenbrunner—men whom Schellenberg calls, with stunning lack of irony, ”Hitler's willing executioners.”