Richard Overy
The Man Who Plotted for Peace
Hitler’s Spy Chief: The Wilhelm Canaris Mystery
By Richard Bassett
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 329pp £20 order from our bookshop
Counterfactual history is now a well-established means of trying to explore what might or might not have happened in the Second World War, had different decisions been taken. If only ‘x’ had been the option chosen, ‘y’ could have been the consequence, or perhaps ‘y + 1’ (the algebra, of course, is infinitely elastic). Richard Bassett – in what is otherwise a brief and readable biography of the man who headed German military intelligence from 1935 to 1944, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris – argues that, if only the British had listened to Canaris, war might have been avoided in 1939 altogether, or, once started, could have been turned into a fight against Soviet Communism with a Hitler-less Germany on the side of the Western Allies. The ‘mystery’ alluded to in the title is little more than this, and it is not difficult to understand why neither counterfactual scenario ever became historical fact.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw
'Thirkell was a product of her time and her class. For her there are no sacred cows, barring those that win ribbons at the Barchester Agricultural.'
The novelist Angela Thirkell is due a revival, says Patricia T O'Conner (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad