Tag archives for Gestapo
German Penetration of SOE by Jean Overton Fuller [Book Review]
English: Hon. Assistant Section Officer Noor Inayat Khan (code name Madeleine), George Cross, MiD, Croix de Guerre avec Etoile de Vermeil. Noor Inayat Khan served as a wireless operator with F Section, Special Operations Executive. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The German Penetration of SOE by Jean Overton Fuller My rating: 4 of 5 stars I've been reading about SOE for more than three decades. This is the third book about SOE that I've read so far this year, and it is one of the earliest to point to the man behind the curtain. There is a carefully cultivated view of plucky heroism fighting thuggish Nazis, and prevailing eventually. The reality is clearly quite different. Each of the three books I've read this year has pointed that out (see my reviews of books about Vera Atkins & Nancy Wake). That we know…
Gestapo by Lucas Saul [Book Review]
Gestapo by Lucas Saul My rating: 2 of 5 stars Gestapo by Lucas Saul is a reasonable summary overview of the Gestapo, but didn't quite have enough detail for me. If you didn't know anything about the Gestapo before then it might be an OK place to start, although wikipedia would be cheaper. Gestapo by Lucas Saul Gestapo by Lucas Saul doesn't quite live up to the promise of the blurb. What I was hoping for was some analysis of how the Gestapo was formed, where its staff came from and why they joined up. Plaque on former gestapo and communist secret police building, Łódź 7 Anstadta Street (Photo credit: Wikipedia) What you get with this book is a rough chronological history of the Gestapo, and their involvement in the atrocities commited by the nazi state. You also get a series of dramatis…
Hunting Nazis – Commentary on writing the story
I've written a short story titled Hunting Nazis for the End of Module Assessment (EMA) for A215 Creative Writing. The target word count was 2,500 with an upper limit of +10%. The first draft weighed in at 5k words, double the target length. However some of this was because although I plotted it I needed to tell myself the story in the first draft. Once I got to the end it was much easier to re-edit and take out some of it. Hunting Nazis The central premise is that Reggie and Dot (from the earlier story Planting the Past) have been hunting down nazis guilty of war crimes against the members of the French resistance and SOE agents supporting the network that they were both part of during World War Two. The story takes place in Berlin in 1953 when they are tying…