Codename Columbine: The SS defector and the secrets of the Final Solution
Christian Jennings

In a freezing cell in a Gestapo prison in Poland, one SS officer waited to die. It was spring 1943, the Holocaust was at its height, and the maverick German soldier had been arrested by his own side. Being found guilty on any of the charges against him would mean facing an SS firing-squad.

His name was SS Lieutenant Hans Zech-Nenntwich and Codename COLUMBINE is his story. He was one of the only whistleblowers, ever, from within the ranks of the SS or the Gestapo who defected to the Allies. Among other things, he passed on vital secrets about the Holocaust. His was inside knowledge:  he was an officer who had reportedly commanded SS execution squads, and who knew about the extermination plans for Europe’s Jews.

He was a young and principled SS cavalry subaltern serving in Poland, who was drawn into a conspiracy of fellow German SS officers virulently opposed to Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. They were disgusted by the actions of Gestapo and the SS, who by 1942 had been executing hundreds of thousands of  Jews on the Eastern Front. Zech-Nenntwich was chosen as the man who would try to reach neutral Sweden, make contact with Allied intelligence, and then get the news to Britain.

But before he could try and flee his SS unit in Warsaw, Zech-Nenntwich was betrayed to the Gestapo, who interrogated him, and discovered he had been supplying captured Red Army weapons to the Polish underground. They left him in a prison cell to await execution.  

But in a dramatic rescue operation, fellow German SS officers, Polish partisans and Swedish intelligence operators came to his rescue, broke him out of prison in Warsaw, and smuggled him from Poland to Denmark and Stockholm, from where MI6 flew him to Scotland. British intelligence assigned him the codename of ‘Columbine,’ and under lengthy interrogation Nenntwich divulged the horrifying secret information he had brought with him from inside occupied Europe.

Then followed the deadly intelligence chess-game with his interrogators from MI5. But who exactly was playing whom? Why had the SS officer changed sides?

The book draws on unpublished material from intelligence files in Britain’s National Archives, Polish wartime documents from Warsaw and London, and archive material from Berlin, Washington, the Vatican, Israel and Stockholm.

The book is a fast-moving and gripping new story of wartime espionage,  bravery, betrayal and love, set against the vast backdrop of World War Two, the Holocaust, and the deadly intelligence face-off between the British, Americans and the Soviet Union.