Subversion deutscher Herrschaft

The book examines the activities of British subversive warfare against the Third Reich. It focuses on the Special Operations Executive's Austrian Section. Beginning in 1940, SOE pursued a strategy to separate Austria from Germany and to re-establish an independent nation-state in order to prevent German hegemony in Central and Southeast Europe in the long run. Thus, the study offers a new interpretation of the reinvention of Austria during WWII. Furthermore the author analyzes the acitivities of SOE's Austrian Section in Great Britain, USA, Turkey, Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, Slovenia, and Austria in organizing resistance among refugees, Wehrmacht soldiers, and opponents of the Nazi regime inside the Third Reich. Based on a wide range of sources, the author reveals that the systematic supply of weapons to the Slovene partisans in Carinthia was SOE's most important practical contribution to build up resistance inside the Third Reich. However, the anti-German cooperation soon was affected by ideological and geopolitcal conflict which reached a dramatic highpoint when SOE officer Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard was murdered on order of the Communist Party of Slovenia. For this study the author was awarded with the dissertation prize of the German Association for the Study of British History and Politics. von Pirker, Peter