Quote:
Originally Posted by murg
Why is it that every spy in WWII that has a book written about them 'the most important spy in WWII'?
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I'm sure that that is a rhetorical question, for which you already know the answer. But I'll answer it, in a roundabout way, anyway.
What if the publisher, author, or whoever actually stated the truth of how important the spy was? For example, "this is a book about the 44th most important spy in WWII," or "this spy is the most important spy in WWII, after 61`others which were more important"? I'm sure that none of those books would sell very well at all; a book about a spy that was the first and maybe second most important (and, remember, it's going to be truthful) probably would be the only one that would sell.
Having said that, from what I've read about Eric Erickson, he very well might have been the most important, or at least among the top 5 or so most important, spies for the Allies in WWII. This is at least in part due to the fact that Hitler and Himmler had complete trust in him--Erickson, who was of Swedish ancestry, had expressed early in the War that he was a devotee of the Nazi cause. He convinced Himmler, and then Hitler, to start a synthetic oil industry (obtaining enough oil for Germany's mechanized military was a constant challenge, in part because Germany had little or none in its home territory). He was given a free pass to visit all of the synthetic oil factories in Germany. From those visits, he would obtain detailed information about their locations. He passed this information on to the Allies, and the Allies bombed the daylights out of those plants. Before the end of the War, Germany's synthetic oil industry had been completely destroyed. It is a fact that the War was shortened because of the severe shortage of oil by Germany.