TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN FOR THE FIRST TIME.
EDITED WITH COMMENTARY BY ROBERT TEMPLE.
This shocking inside story has been suppressed and largely unknown even in the German language, in which it was published in 1945 in Switzerland. For decades, most copies were apparently bought up and destroyed by Nazi sympathisers, to prevent its contents from becoming known.
The few experts in the 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. But Eglantyne can now prove the true identity of the author, and reveal that he was assassinated by a Nazi vengeance squad in 1949.
Drunk On Power is by a former deputy of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich in their security service known as the SD. He was one of the most brilliant counter-intelligence agents and spies in the field which Germany ever produced. He 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. He had so many names and aliases that we will never know them all. His work was so secret even within the SD that Heydrich refused to put his true name on file, and he was forced to work under a pseudonym from the beginning. All record of his work was “off book” and he records the real inner history of Nazi Germany’s “Deep State”. His book does not deal with battles or the “outer history” of Nazi Germany, which is well known, but concentrates on what was going on in the innermost recesses of the SS, SD, and Gestapo offices and operations. He names names, some of them surprising, and the book reveals who some of Germany’s unexposed foreign spies were (such as Helen Hessel, portrayed in Francois Truffaut’s film Jules et Jim).
The author defected in late 1938, bringing with him enormous numbers of secret SD files. This is one of the greatest security breaches of the 20th century, but it has so far gone unreported. In this book 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. Many personal details are revealed, the rude nicknames the Nazi leaders had for each other, their quirks and perversions, their hatred of one another, and most disturbing of all, their relentless descent into a maelstrom of murder, madness, genocide, and all the horrors we know so well. The author defected because he hated the concentration camps, he hated anti- Semitism, and he was a devout Catholic (as many of the Nazis were, including even Hitler originally, and Himmler himself). This is Volume One of Heinrich Pfeifer’s horrifying revelations, which are certain to expand our knowledge and understanding of the Nazi nightmare.
HEINRICH PFEIFER (1905-1949)
– author of Drunk ON Power
Heinrich Pfeifer was born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1905 and was assassinated in Germany by a vengeance squad of former Nazi killers in 1949.
He held senior positions in the Sicherheitsdienst (known as the SD, the security service of the SS) under Reinhard Heydrich, the Deputy to Heinrich Himmler. He was a protégé of Alfred Rosenberg, Werner Best, and other top Nazis. He had at least twenty false names and identities, carried out some dangerous missions in the field, and jointly ran the foreign activities and counterintelligence department of the SD. He reported directly to Heydrich and ran missions after joint consultations with Heydrich, Himmler and occasionally also Rudolf Hess. He was also entrusted with bugging the house of Josef Goebbels and writing reports for Himmler on what his rival was up to.
Pfeifer became disgusted with the murderous reign of his boss Heydrich, whom he describes in the book as ‘satanic’ and the most dangerous of all the Nazis. He tells us that Heydrich thought his boss Heinrich Himmler was ‘too soft’. Pfeifer was never an anti-Semite, was a devout Catholic, and was revolted by the genocide against the Jews, the concentration camps, and the rampage of murders and torture by his psychopathic colleagues. When he was an eye-witness of the Night of the Long Knives he ‘snapped’ and knew he had to get out. But to leave the SD was impossible, and would result in his seizure, torture, and execution within hours. He conceived a gradual but ingenious plan which he carried out successfully, and in September of 1938 he entered Switzerland under a French passport in one of his false names and handed himself in as a defector. He was employed by Swiss Army Intelligence for three years. He travelled twice to London and ‘blew’ the identities of the two top Nazi agents in Britain, who were quietly expelled in 1939 (von Stutterheim and Friedrich), and whose identities have never previously been made public. He worked for at least seven different intelligence agencies, including the British, the Americans, the French, the Dutch, the Polish, and the Hungarians. But he knew too much and inflicted too much damage on the Nazi regime, so he paid the price with his life.
Robert Temple
– editor of Drunk On Power
Robert Temple, editor and publisher of Drunk on Power, is an independent researcher and scholar. He was appointed as a Visiting Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at Tsinghua University in Beijing, which is China’s top university.
It was by his initiative that the present book was acquired (most copies having been destroyed by Nazi sympathisers in 1945) and the true identity of Pfeifer, who wrote under a pseudonym, discovered and proved.
Temple has been a member of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies in London since 1972. He has a keen interest in mid-20th century history, and the nature of crowd and mind control, in order to comprehend the rise of the Nazis and other mass movements. In his 1989 book Open to Suggestion, he explored the underlying psychological phenomena of such subjects at length, surveying 150 years of case histories of the criminal abuses of hypnosis and suggestion. Drunk on Power is his first major project of research into the insidious ‘Deep State’ mind of the Nazis, which is published also with the intention of promoting the bravery of the senior defector Heinrich Pfeifer who has done more than anyone to describe the inner workings of Himmler’s and Heydrich’s secretive security service.
Temple is Chairman of several cultural and historical foundations: The Ancient Egypt Foundation (www.ancientegyptfoundation.org which is funding the restoration of the astronomical ceiling of the Temple of Esna in Egypt), The History of Chinese Science and Culture Foundation (www.chinesehsc.org), and The Montparnasse Cultural Foundation (which deals with culture in Paris between the Wars). As a colleague of the late Dr. Joseph Needham of Cambridge University, he wrote The Genius of China, a history of 3000 years of Chinese science and technology. The book was translated into 43 languages (many by UNESCO) and approved as a textbook for the Chinese school system, and is currently in its sixth translation in China.
For several years he was a frequent history of science reviewer for Nature Magazine. He has written papers for periodicals as diverse as Advances in Astrophysics and The Journal of Cosmology, and The Journal of Cuneiform Studies. He is also a 17th century historian, author of Who Killed the King?, an in-depth study of the trial and execution of King Charles I in 1649, in three volumes, which includes transcriptions of many original documents discovered by him.
He has translated Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke, the fables of Aesop (jointly with his wife Olivia, for Penguin Classics), the Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the book he edited entitled Chaucer’s Pilgrims (where he was the first to reprint the original Caxton woodcuts since 1561), and the Epic of Gilgamesh (which translation was performed at the National Theatre in London). He is editor of the forthcoming English translation of the memoirs of Youki Desnos, wife of both the painter Foujita and the poet Robert Desnos. He has published numerous articles on Aristotle’s zoological writings and has written about various aspects of antiquity.
Temple is also a ‘Top Reviewer’ for the IMDb, the international movie database, concentrating on the history of the cinema. He has been a TV documentary producer and presenter for National Geographic and was formerly a broadcaster on BBC Radio Four.
Throughout his career Temple has published books on many subjects, his most recent being a work of fiction: The Tree’s Sadness and Other Strange Stories.
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