I'm listening to the audio book of Ben McIntyre's Operation Mincemeat, which is a really engaging story.
I've reached a point that discussed briefly a senior intelligence officer/analyst who had Hitler's ear. He wasn't with the Abwehr, rather another intelligence organization.
But then, the book talks about how this individual hated Nazism, and was believed to be deliberately giving misleading information to Hitler in order to thwart the regime. McIntyre then wonders whether this man believed the faked documentation planted by the British was indeed fake, but passed it on to Hitler anyway (while giving it a ringing endorsement).
Apparently he was friends with most of the members of the Scwarze Kapelle (Black Orchestra), and after the failed coup attempt in 1944 was giving a public, kangaroo trial and executed in gruesome fashion (hanging from a meat hook by the throat).
It's unclear what his name is, and I haven't been able to find anything online. It's something like Alexis Baron von ?? (I think the last name starts with "r" maybe?).
I'm hoping someone here knows who I'm talking about, and can talk more about him. How much evidence is there that he was deliberately duping the Nazi regime, including Hitler directly? Do we know why it took so long for his deception to be discovered (to the extent that it was)?
I'm almost certain you mean Baron Alexis Freiherr von Roenne, a Wehrmacht colonel and chief of the Fremde Heere West of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht — the general staff's military intelligence department responsible for monitoring Western armed forces.
Von Roenne was arrested during the roundup of 20 July plotters, and executed at Plötzensee Prison in October 1944. I don't know anything more about him, and there doesn't appear to have been a huge amount written about him in English. All I can find is his (short) German Wikipedia entry; a brief entry on the German Resistance Memorial Center's website; and a bunch of allusory references which all seem to circle back to Ben McIntyre's book.
Not sure how much that helps — but there's the name, at least.