The Venlo Incident: A True Story of Double-Dealing, Captivity, and a Murderous Nazi Plot by S. Payne BestMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
The Venlo Incident was a covert German Sicherheitsdienst (SD-Security Service) operation, in the course of which two British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) agents were abducted on the outskirts of the town of Venlo, the Netherlands, on 9 November 1939.[1][2] The incident was later used by the German Nazi government to link Britain to Georg Elser's failed assassination attempt on German Chancellor Adolf Hitler at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, Germany, on 8 November 1939 and to help justify Germany's invasion of the Netherlands, while a neutral country, on 10 May 1940. However the plot, or actually its denouement, is just a brief bit ox exposition here. There is no real details on "Double-Dealing" or a "Murderous Nazi Plot". This is a POW memoir about "Captivity". Yet, it is a fascinating, detailed, and broad POW memoir. Author and British SIS agent Captain Sigismund Payne Best was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen between 1940 and 1945, and for a few months of 1945 in the Dachau concentration camp. So, basically all of WW II. He was really a celebrity inmate and did not have a typical POW experience, let alone a concentration camp experience, yet his many years as a German prisoner and insights into the psychological changes in long internment are engrossing. He also observed or crossed paths with many notable inmates, including Reverend Martin Niemöller (critic of the Nazis and author of the statement "First they came ..."), Leifur H. Muller (an Icelandic trader), and Dietrich Bonhoeffer the German pastor, theologian, spy, anti-Nazi dissident. It was while researching Bonhoeffer fascinating life of resolute convictions that I discovered this book.
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