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"Hitler's Traitor: Martin Boorman and the Defeat of the Reich"
By Louis Kilzer
Presidio Press, 336 pp. $29.95

Most of us have a basic understanding of the events surrounding World War II: of Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s, Germany's invasion of Poland that forced the start of the war and the bombing of Pearl Harbor that lured the United States into the war and eventually led to Hitler's defeat.

But history is an elusive lizard, slipping through the cracks of time while scholars, statesmen and journalists scramble to grab a hold and wrest less prominent facts from it.

History, like its contemporary sibling, news, is a product of its time, written through the perspective of those who write it down for posterity. That's why "revisionist" history is so common - the original version simply may not have been accurate.

Although thousands of books have been written about World War II, Louis Kilzer, a Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist for the Rocky Mountain News (and author of "Churchill's Deception"), has taken advantage of the passage of time, and the release of long-classified Soviet documents, to bring new solidity to old rumors. He chronicles the work of a mole in Adolph Hitler's high command - the Oberkommando der Werhmacht, or OKW-- and ultimately concludes the high-level spy could be none other than Hitler's right-hand man, Martin Boorman.

In telling this story, Kilzer first takes the reader through the early stages of the war, setting the stage for Boorman's betrayal. He explains that the Nazi regime at all levels was ripe with traitors who opposed Hitler and tried to organize assassination attempts and negotiations with either the British, Americans or Russia to end the war.

Even at the start of the war, Kilzer writes, "To his rebellious generals, Hitler's determination to act shaped their determination to react. The plotting against the Fuhrer, always simmering from below, bubbled up."

The book painstakingly explains various aspects of such treachery and also how the espionage rings that operated out of Switzerland and France transmitted much of the intelligence that cost Germany the war.

A large part of the book outlines how a certain team of spies -- headed by a Russian spymaster stationed in Switzerland --helped Stalin win the war against Germany on the Eastern front by 1943, and how the USSR became a world power in the process. The team passed along information from the highest echelons of the Third Reich - often within hours of a meeting or discussion -- detailing military strategy, troop movements,even personality clashes and disputes within Hitler's inner circle.

The key spy in the operation is an unnamed source who goes by the codeword "Werther."

"Werther would become Stalin's prehensile grip on the Third Reich's throat," Kilzer writes early in the book. "Day after day, Werther told Stalin exactly where the German panzers were, where they were heading, and how many reserves remained in the rear. And day after day, Stalin countered the German moves, although clumsily at first with the loss of legions of men."

Half battle commentary, half spy-novel, the reader gets caught up in a breathtaking narrative as Werther's information helps Stalin eventually defeat Hitler's Panzer tanks and troops at the critical battle of Kursk in July, 1943.

Using government source materials and researched interviews with survivors of the campaign, Kilzer brings the conflagration to life. "After the Russians christened the battle with their preemptive bombardment - what (Russian General) Zhukov called 'the mighty symphony of the battle' - the Germans were caught off guard."

Switching from the front to the spy network, Kilzer follows the fate of the various players as the Germans eventually tighten the ring around them. The French ring was caught but allowed to stay on as a way to pass along pre-approved information to the Russians. Even then, however, someone in the German High Command seemed to be using the double-agent game for a triple-agent agenda, sending along legitimate details that continued to help the Soviets.

Much of the battle strategy and even the story of the spies scattered throughout Europe will be old hat to war fanatics. So even is the naming of Martin Boorman as the highest-level spy, "Werther." But in the past, Boorman as Werther was a supposition. Kilzer makes the assertion as a fact, based on the communications he researched that have now been made available, and by a painstaking process of elimination of other possible candidates.

If there's a nit to pick with this entertaining and enlightening book, it's that it's so much about the battlefront and the spy ring that it doesn't focus much on Boorman, or tell us much beyond a few paragraphs of biography, why he would have risked his life throughout the entire war to betray his boss.

By the time Kilzer tackles the many trails of rumor that followed Boorman's fate after the war, the fact that his remains were found in Berlin in 1973 seems somewhat anticlimactic.

Werther may finally be unmasked, but Boorman remains an elusive lizard at the end of "Hitler's Traitor."

This review was published by the Rocky Mountain News in June, 2000.