"The S.D. unmasks the adversaries of National Socialist ideas and thus orients the activity of the police .... The S.D. will be a police of the mind, the instrument for measuring and controlling thought." Thus was the Secret Service of the S.S. described by its founder Heinrich Himmler, and no sooner had Hitler come to power than the S.D., under Himmler's lieutenant Reinhard Heydrich, who had eliminated his rivals by poisoning them in Hitler's mind, set to work "controlling thought." In this book, journalist Andre? Brissaud recounts the achievements of Heydrich's Secret Service up to 1940: the capture in 1934 of Sosnowski, the Polish spy with the glamorous helpmates, in a tragicomic climax to his farewell party in his Berlin flat, where the waiters turned out to be disguised S.S. men; an anti-Hitler plot invented in order to liquidate Ro?hm and the entire Brownshirt leadership--and anyone else on the S.S. expendable list; a reactionary plot which led Stalin to make a murderous clean sweep of his officer corps; the broad comedy of the Gleiwitz incident, when S.S. men dressed as Poles raided a German border radio station. Based on all available written and spoken evidence, including a long private interview with Walter Schellenberg, S.S. counterespionage chief.--Adapted from book jacket.