Italy must have appeared an easy target for political foreign intelligence work. Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy were joined in an extensive, although not always unproblematic, political, military, and ideological alliance. German travel to and from Italy was easy and frequent, as was postal communication. The Italian police showed no particular interest in German citizens traveling or living in the country. And after the German annexation of Austria in early 1938, Italy and Germany shared a border. Northern Italy was also home to a sizeable ethnic German minority in South Tyrol. On the other hand, and most probably in order to protect this alliance, any German intelligence work against Italy was initially explicitly banned.

Italy is an ideal nutshell in which to investigate Office VI as an intelligence service. First, there are intelligence efforts in and against an allied country that should have been easy but turned out to be anything but. Secondly, there is the period around Mussolini's ouster in the summer of 1943 when Office VI scrambled first to understand and then to get ahead of the developments. Third, there is a period, beginning in the fall of 1943, when Italian authority had fallen to the wayside and various German authorities – while battling each other – pushed through their agendas. The role of Office VI underwent numerous changes over the years, but its problems as an intelligence agency remained the same: operatives and agents were ideologues; poorly trained and equipped; moved largely in pro-German circles; looked for and found anodyne information based on shared ideological assumptions; regarded the country as a homogenous entity; and furnished reports that closely resembled those of the SD's domestic branch, treating Italy as a living sphere abroad. In addition, Office VI wasted resources battling other German authorities abroad, such as the Auswärtige Amt or the military, and engaged in protracted intramural fights with other RSHA offices active in Italy, most notably the Gestapo.