The Liebold Protocol

Winston Churchill’s Scottish goddaughter, Mattie McGary, the adventure-seeking Hearst photojournalist, reluctantly returns to Nazi Germany in the summer of 1934 and once again finds herself in deadly peril in a gangster state where widespread kidnappings and ransoms by the SA and SS are sanctioned by the new government.

Mattie turns down an initial request by her boss Hearst to go to Germany to report on how Hitler will deal with the SA Brown Shirts of Ernst Rohm who want a true socialist ‘second revolution’ to follow Hitler’s stunning first revolution in 1933. Having been away from Germany for over a year, her reputation as “Hitler’s favorite foreign journalist” is fading and she wants to keep it that way.

Instead, at Churchill’s behest, she persuades Hearst to let her investigate one of the best-kept secrets of the Great War—that in 1915, facilitated by a sinister German-American working for Henry Ford, British and Imperial German officials agreed to a treasonous trade with the enemy—Britain would sell badly needed raw rubber to Germany while it would sell precision optical equipment to Britain.  Why? To keep the war going and the profits flowing on both sides of the conflict.  After Mattie interviews Ford’s German-American go-between, however, agents of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch are sent by Churchill’s political opponents in the British government to rough her up and warn her she will be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act unless she backs off the story.

Left no choice, Mattie sets out for Germany to investigate the story from the other side and interview the Imperial German nobleman who negotiated the trading with the enemy deal on Germany’s behalf. There, Mattie lands right in the middle of what Hearst originally wanted her to investigate—Ernst Rohm’s ‘second revolution’ and Adolf Hitler’s ruthless response. Mattie learns that Hitler has ordered the SS to assassinate all the senior leadership of Ernst Rohm’s SA Brown Shirts as well as many other political enemies on Saturday 30 June, an event known to History as ‘The Night of the Long Knives’.

Mattie’s life is in danger because the German-American working for Henry Ford not only wants her story on trading with the enemy killed, he wants her dead along with it. Worse, Mattie’s nemesis, Reinhard Heydrich—the ‘Blond Beast’ of the SS—is in charge of carrying out Hitler’s deadly purge and he’s secretly put her name on his list

Michael McMenamin is the co-author with his son Patrick of the first five award winning 1930s era historical novels featuring Winston Churchill and his fictional Scottish goddaughter, the adventure-seeking Hearst photojournalist Mattie McGary. The first five novels in the series—The DeValera ...