Two years ago, I was ready to abandon a biography I’d spent years trying to write when a fellow historian threw me a lifeline.
The book was about the triple agent Hermann Keller (1905–1970), a Benedictine mole embedded by conspirators against Hitler into the upper echelons of the SS. Keller reported not only to the German resistance but also to the Vatican and the British MI6. In the history of espionage, few spies penetrated deeper into enemy ranks.
The reason I was on the verge of giving up was that all of Keller’s personal papers had been destroyed during the war—or so I thought. Without them I couldn’t bring him to life, no matter how much evidence I had uncovered. Frustrated, I decided to publish an essay about Keller in the American Historical Review and move on.
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