Total war necessitates total espionage. The leadership of a country must be capable of finding out about and calculating the entire force of resistan… - Curt Riess

[Goebbels] specialized in articles on [[w:Bolshevism |Bolshevism of a decidedly pro-Russian tone. He worked on a speech, ‘Lenin or Hitler?’ In this comparative study he came to the conclusion that Hitler’s ideas were superior. Nevertheless, the comparison was not necessarily unflattering to the Russian.

German army circles had never cherished any illusions about their Italian partner. It is said that even in the twenties the leading officers of the German General Staff—which by the Treaty of Versailles had no official existence— declared, ‘The next war will be lost by the country which takes Italy for an ally.’ A joke, of course, but it reflects the attitude of Germany’s military men. Their attitude was no different where espionage was concerned.

In a number of contributions published in the Voelkischer Beobachter [Goebbels] celebrated Lenin as the national liberator of his country. ‘The Soviet system does not endure because it is Bolshevist or Marxist or international, but because it is national—because it is Russian,’ he wrote to a leftist friend. ‘No Czar has ever aroused the national passion of the Russian people as Lenin did.’