REVIEW: Thomas Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser: German Covert Operations in Great Britain during the First World War Era.

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (September 2006)

Thomas Boghardt. _Spies of the Kaiser: German Covert Operations in Great Britain during the First World War Era_. St. Anthony's Series. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. xiv + 224 pages. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 1-4039-3248-4.

Reviewed for H-German by Jeffrey Verhey, Humboldt University, Berlin

German Spying in Great Britain in World War I

The period before World War I was a great time in Great Britain for spy stories. In the last years before the war, German spies seemed to be everywhere and were a standard topic in the columns of the _Daily Mail_, the _Daily Express_ and similar newspapers. Even the greatest detective of all times himself came out of retirement to stop the Germans. In "His Last Bow," a short story published in 1917, Arthur Canon Doyle described how Sherlock Holmes broke up a vast and very efficient German spy ring just as the war was beginning.

How true, how real was the threat? How good, how sophisticated were the German spies?  And how successful were the British in dealing with this threat? These are the questions Thomas Boghardt attempts to answer in his fine account of German spying in Great Britain in World War I. Boghardt is the right man for such a task. An historian at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., his work--the first scholarly account of the activities of the German naval intelligence agency ("N") before and during the First World War--is based on extensive research in German and British archives ...