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Interrogation Nation: Refugees and Spies in Cold War Germany. By Keith R. Allen. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Pp. xxxii + 276. Cloth $95.00. ISBN: 978-1538101513.
Throughout the Cold War, the Western parts of Germany and Berlin were bursting with secret agents. They were also awash with wave upon wave of new arrivals: expellees, returning prisoners-of-war, escapees from East Germany, resettlers from Poland, and stray defectors from Soviet-bloc touring companies. A myriad of trajectories could catapult individuals across the border to some processing camp or other: Marienfelde in West Berlin, Friedland near Göttingen, “Camp King” in the Taunus, or dozens of other facilities. Some sites were well known to the public; others are revealed for the first time in this publication. Keith Allen's book offers an entry point for understanding how competing intelligence agencies sought to exploit newcomers in order to gain detailed information about economic operations, military technology, and troop deployments on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
Allen's main interest is procedure. What sorts of interrogations did newcomers undergo, and by whom? He identifies a long list of interested parties: US agencies such as the Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC); West German institutions such as the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV); British spies from the Scientific and Technical Branch (STIB). As Allen shows, these groups...