Fortress Third Reich: German Fortifications and Defense Systems in World War II (review)

British officials entrusted with the task of attempting to control the Danes in the interest of the U.K.’s and the Allies’ broader objectives, both military and postwar political. To be sure, the last of the SOE’s “chief organisers” within Denmark, Ole Lipmann, was more successful than his predecessors although he too is depicted in a somewhat equivocal manner. Another crucial factor was nonbelligerent Sweden’s toleration of extensive SOE plotting on its soil. While Jespersen does provide some explanatory information in several appendixes, it is of scant help in grasping the intricate web of events. Synopses of the careers and deeds of the more important personages and of the sequence of developments in Denmark would have served to prevent the obfuscation deriving from the unduly discursive textual account. For example, much is made of the “rising” of 29 August 1943, yet the Anglophone student of the SOE is left entirely in the dark about what actually occurred on that day. The fallacious presupposition seems to be that SOE cognoscenti, whether Danes or not, will know anyway. Parenthetically, it is striking that while there is frequent reference to the countermeasures of the Gestapo, there is but a single citation of a somewhat cryptic primary source in German plus one published work. Although the reviewer has not studied the work of the SOE in the Danish setting, he finds it hard to believe that there are not more German language data concerning the (for Danes) shameful Nazi interlude in the kingdom’s history. In sum, this fundamentally abstruse volume, which less sensitive nonDanes may perceive as a kind of ethnocentric apologia, is not merely an extremely difficult read but contributes only modestly to the general history of the SOE’s role in the struggle against the Third Reich. Its purchase will make sense primarily for libraries that are strongly oriented to Danish history or concerned with the sinuous internal mechanisms of the SOE.