Churchill, British Intelligence, and the German Opposition Question

Autor: P. R. J. Winter
Rok vydání: 2007
Předmět:
Zdroj: War in History. 14:109-112
ISSN: 1477-0385
0968-3445
DOI: 10.1177/0968344507071043
Popis: In a previous article, ‘British Intelligence and the July Bomb Plot of 1944: A Reappraisal’, it was recorded that in 1949 Winston Churchill had stated to a surviving member of the German opposition that ‘during the war he had been misled by his assistants about the considerable strength and size of the German anti-Hitler resistance’. It also highlighted the fact that historians have argued consistently that the July bomb plot and its antecedents represented ‘an embarrassing failure by British intelligence’ due to an alleged inability to warn its political ‘consumers’ of a developing anti-Hitler conspiracy within the Third Reich. New evidence has now surfaced proving categorically that British intelligence informed Churchill not only of the potential strength of the German army opposition, but also of its determination to overthrow Hitler and his Nazi cohorts by means of a coup d’état. The present article argues that this fresh evidence, in the shape of PREM 7/7, consigns, once and for all, these accusations against British intelligence to the dustbin of history.
Databáze: OpenAIRE