Retired British diplomat Tim Willasey-Wilsey is to be congratulated in bringing back to our collective memory the story of the expatriate Baltic baron who proved to be Britain’s greatest spy in the heart of the Nazi Party’s heart of darkness between 1930 and 1939.
His book, The Spy and the Devil, is a first class account of Baron Bill von de Ropp’s extraordinary deception of the senior Nazi (and fellow Baltic emigre) Alfred Rosenberg, who met his final end on a noose following trial at Nuremberg. Not merely the story of Bill de Ropp extraordinary penetration of the Nazi Party and the intelligence he was able to provide to London as a result, the book is a fascinating account of how MI6 transitioned from the acquisition of prosaic, technical information to the gathering and analysis of strategic intelligence. What little information remains from Bill de Ropp’s reports to London demonstrate the acuity of de Ropp’s assessment of Nazi ideas and plans.
This is a first class portrayal not merely of intelligence gathering during this decade, the use British governments made (or didn’t make) of this, but a remarkable insight into Nazi thinking and the Nazi Party’s dangerous echo chamber in which the murderous madness of Aryan racial theory drove policy. It was the latter that political decision makers in London refused repeatedly to understand, refusing to move from the belief that at the heart of Hitler’s thinking was some sort of random logic that merely needed decoding. This naiveite was to lead directly to British political failures - especially the dominant imperative towards securing a deal with the dictators - all the way through to 1940.
Bill de Ropp was a remarkable man and, despite his birth as a Lithuanian (in fact, he was a Russian born landowner of German ancestry) his loyalty to Britain remained unequivocal. The idea of Britain as a bastion of freedom amidst the looming darkness of totalitarianism was paramount to de Ropp, and other emigres like him. This book does much to redress Britain’s less than generous commitment to one of its greatest ever intelligence stars, whose story needs far greater prominence in the wider story of the long war against fascism.
