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

But Goebbels was not a Communist in any sense of the word. And he took pains to say so. ‘Communism is nothing but a grotesque distortion of true Socialist thought,’ he wrote to Count Reventlow, a rightist politician. ‘We and we alone could become the genuine Socialists in Germany, or, for that matter, in Europe.’

Goebbels was well informed indeed on some things the Russians were doing. He knew that the Communist had been the first to co-ordinate propaganda and espionage. He knew that Lenin himself was the inventor of total propaganda, and that he had even coined the word to describe it: agitprop—an abbreviation for agitation and propaganda. Propaganda had meant to Lenin persuasion of the masses, and agitation was the aggressive form of persuasion.

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.