During World War II, the Vienna branch of the Wehrmacht intelligence service employed several confidential informants that were considered Jews according to Nazi law. At the same time, some of these individuals were also working as couriers for the Jewish Rescue Committee in Budapest, the representation of the Jewish Agency in Istanbul, a ring of American secret agents operating out of Istanbul and for the Hungarian military intelligence service. This complex multi-play and the multiple and changing political, ethnic and personal loyalties that underlie these relationships are investigated against the backdrop of the German-Allied intelligence war and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. In so doing, “role playing, metamorphosis, and changing sides” are mapped out as “social survival techniques” of the modern individual integrated in a diverse range of solidarity and loyalty relationships, as well as the “traitor” as its “paradigmatic figure.”

Winfried Meyer studied German language and literature and political science at the Free University of Berlin. He was a research associate at the German Resistance Memorial Centre, the Free University of Berlin, and at the Memorial and Museum Sachsenhausen. He has been carrying out his own research projects as an employee of the Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Meyer has also been honoured with the Dorothee Fliess Prize for resistance research by the Forschungsgemeinschaft 20. Juli 1944.