John Lucas

The Baroness John Lucas

The Baroness: Unmasking Himmler's Most Secret Agent is the true story of an enigmatic adventuress suspected of seducing SS chief Heinrich Himmler in a bid to save her son by a Jewish businessman from Nazi persecution. It also sheds new light on the personal stories of those targeted by the regime; secret intelligence operations during the German occupation of Italy; and Himmler's frantic activity in the final days of the war.

Anja Bergroth Manfredi de Blasiis had everything she needed to survive the Third Reich: an elite Teutonic background, an aristocratic husband, an abundance of charm, and a web of high society contacts that would make royalty blush. There was just one problem - a previous marriage to a successful German-Jewish businessman produced a son who was in mortal danger from Hitler's genocidal schemes.

As her former in-laws were persecuted and murdered by the Nazi killing machine, Anja worked on a strategy to save her son by having him 'Aryanised'. It didn't matter who she had to bribe, or how much it cost, Anja was determined to keep him safe. And within months of meeting the architect of the Final Solution, SS chief Heinrich Himmler, she had him wrapped around her little finger - but there was a secret mission waiting for her in return.

Anja faced a unique moral dilemma, with the desire to save her son by a Jewish ex-husband paving the way for her recruitment as a Nazi agent. Just how far she sympathized with her twisted paymasters will be for the reader to determine. At various points, Anja was suspected by the Italians of spying for Russia; by the Allies of spying for Germany; and by the Germans (some of them at least) of spying for the Italian resistance. Again, it will be up to the reader to decide where she might sit on the sliding scale between heroine, adventuress and criminal, and for whom she might really have been working.

Drawing on reams of archive material from Britain, Germany and America, this never-before-told story sheds new light on the final frantic months of World War Two, as the Nazi leadership awoke to the fact that defeat was inevitable and men like Himmler desperately sought to make deals with the Western Allies.