Drunk On Power

After getting his hands on a signed copy of the memoir of a senior member of the Nazi secret police, renowned historical researcher and publisher Robert Temple of Eglantyne Books has had the book translated into English for the first time. Edited by Temple, Drunk On Power offers readers an inside account of a senior member of the Nazi secret police. This is a story - first published in Switzerland in 1945 - which has been suppressed and largely unknown even in the German language. For decades, most copies were bought and destroyed by Nazi sympathizers, to prevent its contents from ever becoming known. The few experts during this period who knew of the work’s existence realized, as the author himself admits, that it was published under a pseudonym, but there was no agreement about who he was. Now Eglantyne Books can prove the true identity of the author and reveal that he was assassinated by a Nazi vengeance squad in 1949.

The author of this true account is Heinrich Pfeifer, former deputy of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich in their security service known as the SD. Pfeifer was one of the most brilliant counter-intelligence agents and spies that Germany ever produced, and was personally involved in the Night of the Long Knives, the selection of Franco to lead Spain, and the commencement of the Spanish Civil War, the Austrian Anschluss, and the disinformation which facilitated the rapid conquest of Poland.

Drunk On Power does not deal with the well-known battles or “outer history” of Nazi Germany, but concentrates on what was going on in the innermost recesses of the SS, SD, and Gestapo offices and operations. Pfeifer names names, some of them surprising, and the book reveals some of Germany’s unexposed foreign spies (such as Helen Hessel, portrayed by Jeanne Moreau in Francois Truffaut’s film Jules et Jim). After his defection, Pfeifer twice visited London to expose the two leading German agents in Britain, who were then forced to leave the country in 1939.

When he defected in late 1938, Pfeifer arranged for the transfer of enormous numbers of secret SD files, which was one of the greatest security breaches of the 20th century, though it has so far gone unreported. In Drunk on Power, it is all laid out: the true story, the structure, the personalities of the Nazis’ Deep State and the sequence of events are all reported at length.

About Robert Temple

ROBERT TEMPLE is a London-based publisher, books editor, and former journalist who has written for the Times, Sunday Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Mail on Sunday, Express, Independent, New Scientist, Economist, Harpers, Spectator and more. He was the first person to reveal the ‘forcible repatriation scandal’ during and after World War II and persuaded Lord Carrington, then U.K. Defense Minister, to release the sealed War Office files which blew away the secrecy of that forbidden subject, which had resulted in the deaths and incarceration of two million people by Stalin, with the shameful secret complicity of the Allied Powers. Temple has been a member of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies (RUSI) since 1972. Professor Temple is the author of numerous books on history and science. He has twice been appointed Visiting Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and he has done archaeological work in Egypt, Greece, and Italy.