Cover Name: Dr. Rantzau

"Cover Name: Dr. Rantzau is an excellent account of German intelligence with its fly open. It has more to do with flopsweat and fiascoes than cloaks and daggers. This aspect makes the book a worthwhile publication. Mary Kathryn Barbier is among the best scholars currently working in the field, and her foreword significantly enhances the manuscript."—Dennis Showalter, recipient of the Pritzker Military Museum and Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing

""All I knew about espionage came from reading spy novels," Nikolaus Ritter writes early in Cover Name: Dr. Rantzau—and then proceeds, with a novelist's flair, to detail how he set about recruiting agents for the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr. At last available in English in this translation by his daughter Katharine R. Wallace, his tale offers a rare glimpse into the workings of the spymaster behind the 1937 theft of plans for America's top-secret Norden bombsight. And what a tale it is: breathtaking close calls, double-crosses, moments of surprising beauty, humor, and self-serving aggrandizement, make for an intriguing, provocative, and—especially—enjoyable read."—Karen Jensen, editor, World War II magazine

"This memoir is quite interesting for the details it gives on the German side of intel ops during the era of the Second World War, a much less security-minded period than the present."—The NYMAS Review: A Publication of The New York Military Affairs Symposium