of 1941), his reporting of the Nazi leadership's plans and policies and his factual data were invaluable to the Allies. For example, on 6 June 1941, he advised Tokyo that Germany would invade the Soviet Union on 22 June (see Operation Barbarossa). Another example was in November 1943, when Ōshima was taken on a four-day tour of the Atlantic Wall fortifications on the coast of France. Upon his return to Berlin, he wrote a detailed 20-page report of his visit, giving an account of the location of every German division and its manpower and weaponry. He described tank ditches in detail, armament of turrets located close to the shore, and available mobile forces. That provided valuable intelligence to the planners of the D-Day assault. Connected to that was that the Allies knew that Operation Fortitude was working because just one week before D-Day, Hitler confided to Ōshima that while the Allies might make diversionary feints in Norway, Brittany and Normandy, they will actually open up "an all-out second front in the area of the Straits of Dover". Thus, Ōshima dutifully reported that the bulk of German forces would not be waiting in Normandy but, mistakenly, at the Pas-de-Calais area. His dispatches also proved to be valuable to those involved in the bombing campaign in Europe, as Ōshima provided details on the effect of Allied bombing raids on specific German targets, giving valuable and relatively unbiased bomb damage assessments to the Allies. During and after the war As the war progressed and Germany began to retreat, Ōshima never wavered in his confidence that Germany would emerge victorious. However, in March 1945, he reported to Tokyo on the "danger of Berlin becoming a battlefield" and revealing a fear "that the abandonment of Berlin may take place another month". On 13 April 1945, he met with Ribbentrop (for the last time, it turned out) and vowed to stand with the leaders of Nazi Germany in their hour of crisis. "I do not wish to be treated in the same manner as other diplomats merely by reason of great danger from the ravages of war", he proclaimed, but he was informed that evening by the Foreign Ministry's chief of protocol: all diplomats were to leave Berlin at once by Hitler's direct order. Ōshima subsequently accepted that order then sent his wife to Bad Gastein, a mountain resort in Austria, and, the next day, left