Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Paddy and Jane Ashdown Partnership 2018

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008257071

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008257057

Version: 2019-08-03

Dedication

To Hans Oster, preux chevalier

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Epigraphs

Introduction

Main Dramatis Personae

Map: Berlin’s administrative district

Map: Germany, 1944

Prologue

1 Carl Goerdeler

2 Ludwig Beck

3 Wilhelm Canaris

4 Madeleine and Paul

5 Germany in the Shadow of War

6 The Emissaries

7 ‘All Our Lovely Plans’

8 March Madness

9 The March to War

10 Switzerland

11 Halina

12 Sitzkrieg

13 Warnings and Premonitions

14 Felix and Sealion

15 The Red Three

16 Belgrade and Barbarossa

17 General Winter

18 The Great God of Prague

19 Rebound

20 Codes and Contacts

21 Of Spies and Spy Chiefs

22 Mistake, Misjudgement, Misfire

23 The Worm Turns

24 The End of Dora

25 Enter Stauffenberg

26 Valkyrie and Tehran

27 Disappointment, Disruption, Desperation

28 The Tip of the Spear

29 Thursday, 20 July 1944

30 Calvary

31 Epilogue

32 After Lives

Afterword: Cock-up or Conspiracy?

Reader’s Note

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Also by Paddy Ashdown

About the Author

About the Publisher

Illustrations

Carl Goerdeler. (Papers of Arthur Primrose Young, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick: MSS.242/X/GO/3)

Wilhelm Canaris. (Popperfoto/Getty Images)

Ludwig Beck. (Ullstein bild Dtl: Getty Images)

Henning von Tresckow. (Ullstein bild Dtl: Getty Images)

Hans Oster. (AfZ: NL Hans Bernd Gisevius/6.7)

Erwin von Lahousen. (ÖNB)

Hans Bernd Gisevius. (SZ Photo/Süddeutsche Zeitung)

Robert Vansittart. (Scherl/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)

Stewart Menzies and his wife Pamela. (Evening Standard/Stringer/Hulton Archive: Getty Images)

Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich, September 1938. (Keystone/Stringer/Hulton Archive: Getty Images)

Paul Thümmel, Agent A54. (UtCon Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

Madeleine Bihet-Richou.

Ursula Hamburger (‘Sonja’).

Ursula with her children, Nina, Micha and Peter Beurton. (Courtesy of Michael Hamburger and Peter Beurton)

Leon ‘Len’ Beurton. (Courtesy of Peter Beurton)

Halina Szymańska. (Courtesy of Marysia Akehurst)

Alexander Foote. (CRIA/Jay Robert Nash Collection)

Rachel Duebendorfer. (The National Archives, ref. KV2/1619)

Allen Dulles. (NARA 306-PS-59-17740)

Rudolf Roessler. (CRIA/Jay Robert Nash Collection)

Sándor Radó with his Geopress staff.

Sándor and Helene Radó with their two sons, June 1941. (Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde)

‘De Favoriet’, the Jelineks’ shop in The Hague, c. 1939.

Bernhard Mayr von Baldegg, Alfred Rosenberg and Max Waibel.

The Wolfsschanze map room after Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt, 20 July 1944. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group: Getty Images)

Stauffenberg, Puttkamer, Bodenschatz, Hitler, Keitel, 15 July 1944. (Photo12/UIG via Getty Images)

Goerdeler on trial. (Keystone/Hulton Archive: Getty Images)

The Tirpitzufer, c.1939.

‘La Taupinière’, c. 1937.

Alexander Foote’s flat in Lausanne.

Halina Szymańska’s fake French passport.

Foote’s radio.

Station Maude, Olga and Edmond Hamel’s radio.

Halina Szymańska’s false passport. (Courtesy of Marysia Akehurst)

The Radó family’s apartment building at 113, rue de Lausanne in Geneva. (Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde)

The Hamels’ radio shop in the Geneva suburb of Carouge, c.1939. (Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde)

Epigraphs

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

From W.H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’

‘The only salvation for the honest man is the conviction that the wicked are prepared for any evil … It is worse than blindness to trust a man who has hell in his heart and chaos in his head. If nothing awaits you but disaster and suffering, at least make the choice that is noble and honourable and that will provide some consolation and comfort if things turn out poorly.’

Baron vom Stein, urging Friedrich Wilhelm III to oppose Napoleon in 1808

Introduction

This book is about those at the very top of Hitler’s Germany who tried to prevent the Second World War, made repeated attempts to kill him, did all they could to ensure his defeat, worked for an early peace with the Western Allies, and ultimately died terribly for their cause.

Most of my books have been about individual events, or people. The canvas of this one, by contrast, encompasses every sector of German society during the war; international statesmanship – or lack of it – in capitals from Berlin, to London, to Washington, to Moscow; battles fought from the shores of the Volga to the shadow of the Pyrenees; and spy rings plying their trade in Geneva, Zürich, Paris, Amsterdam, Istanbul and beyond.

Now that I have written it, I am a little surprised to find that a work I thought would tell the history of the Second World War through different eyes turns out also to be a story on the subject to which I return again and again: how human beings behave when we are faced with the challenges of war – and especially how, when confronted by great evil and personal jeopardy, we decide between submission and resistance: between loyalty and betrayal.

Is it ever possible to be both traitor and patriot? Is it treachery to betray your state if to do otherwise is to betray your humanity? Even if treachery changes nothing, must you still risk being a traitor in the face of great evil, if that is the only way to lighten the guilt that will fall on your children and your future countrymen? How do people make these choices? How do they behave after they have made them?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer – himself one of those murdered for his role in the anti-Hitler resistance – said: ‘Responsible action takes place in the sphere of relativity, completely shrouded in the twilight that the historical situation casts upon good and evil. It takes place in the midst of the countless perspectives from which every phenomenon is seen. Responsible action must decide not just between right and wrong, but between right and right and wrong and wrong.’

So it is, exactly, here. There are no blacks and whites, just choices between blacker blacks and whiter whites. There are no triumphal personal qualities, and no triumphant outcomes. Just flawed individuals who, at a time of what Bonhoeffer referred to as ‘moral twilight’, felt compelled to do the right thing as they saw it. That is a lesser triumph than we might wish for in dangerous times, but it was then – and is now – probably the only triumph we can reasonably expect.

This story is, at its heart, a tragedy. Like all great tragedies it involves personal flaws, the misjudgements of the mighty, and a malevolent fate. There is individual pity and suffering, and a deal of personal stupidity, here.

But – and herein lies the history – since these were human beings of consequence, their personal decisions affected lives and events far beyond their circle and their time.

The two central historical questions posed by this book are stark: did the Second World War have to happen? And if it did, did it have to end with a peace which enslaved Eastern Europe?

My purpose is not to provide definitive answers, but rather to present some facts which are not generally known – or at least not taken account of – and place these against the conventional view of the origins, progress and outcomes of World War II.

In reading this book you may be struck, as I was in writing it, by the similarities between what happened in the build-up to World War II and the age in which we now live. Then as now, nationalism and protectionism were on the rise, and democracies were seen to have failed; people hungered for the government of strong men; those who suffered most from the pain of economic collapse felt alienated and turned towards simplistic solutions and strident voices; public institutions, conventional politics and the old establishments were everywhere mistrusted and disbelieved; compromise was out of fashion; the centre collapsed in favour of the extremes; the normal order of things didn’t function; change – even revolution – was more appealing than the status quo, and ‘fake news’ built around the convincing untruth carried more weight in the public discourse than rational arguments and provable facts.

Painting a lie on the side of a bus and driving it around the country would have seemed perfectly normal in those days.

Nevertheless, I have found myself inspired in writing this story. It has proved to me that, even in such terrible times, there were some who were prepared to stand up against the age, even when their cause was hopeless, and even at the cost of their lives.

I hope that you will find that inspiration here, too.

Main Dramatis Personae

Anulow, Leonid Abramovitsch – Alias ‘Kolja’ – Soviet ‘Rezident’ in Switzerland before Radó

Attolico, Bernardo – Italian ambassador in Berlin

Bartik, Major Josef – Head of Czech intelligence 1938

Beck, General Ludwig – Chief of staff of the German army until dismissed by Hitler in 1938. The army leader of the anti-Hitler plot

Bell, George – Anglican theologian and bishop of Chichester

Beneš, Edvard – Czech president 1935–38

Beurton, Leon Charles – Known as Len. Friend of Alexander Foote. Radio operator Dora Ring

Bihet-Richou, Madeleine – Lover of Erwin Lahousen. French secret services

Blomberg, Field Marshal Werner von – Commander-in-chief of the German army until dismissed by Hitler in 1938

Bock, Field Marshal Fedor von – Von Tresckow’s uncle. Commander of Army Group Centre

Bolli, Margrit – Alias ‘Rosy’. Rote Drei radio operator

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich – Theologian, German pastor and key plotter

Bonhoeffer, Dr Karl – Father of Dietrich. Took part in the September 1938 plot

Bosch, Robert – German industrialist. Founder of the Bosch industrial empire. Supporter of Goerdeler

Brauchitsch, Field Marshal Walther von – Commander-in-chief of the German army up to the defeat at Moscow in 1941

Cadogan, Sir Alexander – Head of the British Foreign Office

Canaris, Erika – Wife of Wilhelm

Canaris, Wilhelm – Head of the German Abwehr until his dismissal in 1944

Chojnacki, Captain Sczcęsny – Polish intelligence spy-master based in Switzerland

Ciano, Galeazzo – Italian foreign minister

Colvin, Ian – Central European correspondent of the London News Chronicle. Arranged von Kleist-Schmenzin’s visit to Britain in 1938

Daladier, Édouard – French prime minister

Dansey, Sir Claude – Deputy head of MI6 and founder of the ‘Z Organisation’. Known as ‘Colonel Z’

Dohnányi, Hans von – Lawyer in the Abwehr and a key conspirator

Donovan, Major General William ‘Wild Bill’ – Head of the US intelligence agency (OSS)

Duebendorfer, Rachel – Alias ‘Sissy’. ‘Dora Ring’ agent

Dulles, Allen – OSS representative in Bern

Eden, Anthony – British foreign secretary

Farrell, Victor – MI6 head in Geneva

Fellgiebel, General Fritz Erich (known as Erich) – Chief of the German army’s Signal Establishment and a key plotter

Foote, Alexander – Alias ‘Jim’. Radio operator, ‘Dora Ring’

Franck, Aloïs – Paul Thümmel’s Czech spy-handler

François-Poncet, André – French ambassador in Berlin at the time of Munich

Fritsch, Colonel General Werner von – Commander-in-chief of the German army until his dismissal on trumped-up charges of homosexuality in January 1938

Gabčik, Josef – Operation Anthropoid Czech agent

Gersdorff, Rudolf-Christoph von – Henning von Tresckow’s staff officer; volunteered to assassinate Hitler by suicide bombing on 21 March 1943

Gibson, Colonel Harold ‘Gibby’ – Head of the MI6 station in Prague

Gisevius, Hans Bernd – The ‘eternal plotter’ in the Abwehr. Key early conspirator and Canaris’s conduit to Halina Szymańska

Goerdeler, Anneliese – Carl Goerdeler’s wife

Goerdeler, Carl – Key early plotter. Ex-mayor of Leipzig

Groscurth, Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth – Canaris’s liaison officer with the army at Zossen

Guisan, General André – Head of the Swiss army

Haeften, Lieutenant Werner von – Von Stauffenberg’s adjutant

Halder, Colonel General Franz – German chief of staff under von Brauchitsch

Halifax, Lord Edward – British foreign secretary under Chamberlain and a key appeaser

Hamburger, Ursula – Née Kuczynski. Code name ‘Sonja’. Soviet spy who arrived in Switzerland in 1936

Hamel, Olga and Edmond – ‘Dora Ring’ radio operators

Hassell, Ulrich von – German ambassador in Italy before the war. Liaison between Beck and Goerdeler

Hausamann, Captain Hans – Founder of the Büro Ha, a private intelligence bureau in Switzerland

Heinz, Lieutenant-Colonel Friedrich – Leader of the commando who were to kill Hitler in 1938

Henderson, Sir Nevile – British ambassador in Berlin before 1939

Hoare, Sir Samuel, MP – One of Chamberlain’s leading appeasement supporters

Hohenlohe von Langenberg, Prince Maximilian Egon – Freelance spy. Friend of Dulles, Canaris and Himmler

Jelinek, Charles and Antoinette – Owners of ‘De Favoriet’ bric-à-brac shop in The Hague

Keitel, Field Marshal Wilhelm – Chief of the German armed forces high command

Kleist-Schmenzin, Ewald von – German emissary of the opposition to Hitler; saw Churchill in London in August 1938

Kluge, Field Marshal Günther von – Commander of Army Group Centre. Reluctant plotter

Kordt, Erich – Head of Ribbentrop’s office in Berlin

Kordt, Theo – Brother of Erich. Official at the German embassy in London

Kubiš, Jan – Operation Anthropoid Czech agent

Lahousen, Major General Erwin von – Head of the Austrian Abwehr and then senior officer in the German Abwehr. Close to Canaris and a key plotter. Lover of Madeleine Bihet-Richou

Manstein, Field Marshal Erich von – Commander of Army Group South and mastermind of the Kursk offensive

March, Juan – Mallorcan businessman and prime mover in Spain – contact of Canaris and MI6

Masson, Roger – Head of Swiss intelligence

Mayr von Baldegg, Captain Bernhard – Staff member of Swiss army intelligence; Waibel’s deputy head

Menzies, Sir Stewart – Head of MI6

Mertz von Quirnheim, Colonel Albrecht – Friend of Stauffenberg; involved in the 20 July 1944 plot

Moltke, Count Helmuth von – Founder of the ‘Kreisau Circle’

Morávec, Colonel František – Head of the Czech intelligence service

Morávek, Václav – Resistance leader in Prague

Mueller, Josef – Canaris’s spy in the Vatican

Navarre, Henri – Madeleine Bihet-Richou’s French intelligence ‘handler’

Niemöller, Martin – Anti-Hitler Lutheran pastor

Olbricht, General Friedrich – Key plotter. Involved in the 20 July coup

Oster, Colonel Hans – ‘Managing director’ of the attempted 1938 coup. Head of Z Section in the Tirpitzufer

Pannwitz, Heinz – SD officer in charge of finding the ‘Dora Ring’

Payne Best, Captain Sigismund – MI6 officer captured at Venlo

Puenter, Dr Otto – ‘Dora’ agent – also in touch with MI6

Radó, Sándor – Head of the ‘Dora’ spy network

Ribbentrop, Joachim von – German ambassador to London and later Hitler’s foreign minister

Rivet, Colonel Louis – Head of French military intelligence (SR)

Roessler, Rudolf – Codename ‘Lucy’. Private purveyor of intelligence in Switzerland

Sas, Gijsbertus Jacobus – Dutch military attaché in Berlin; contact of Oster and Waibel

Schacht, Hjalmar – German minister of economics and president of the Reichsbank

Schellenberg, Walter – Heydrich’s protégé and mastermind of Venlo

Schlabrendorff, Fabian von – German lawyer. Liaison between Tresckow in Russia and Beck in Berlin

Schneider, Christian – Alias ‘Taylor’. Swiss businessman. Cut-out supplying information from Roessler to the Dora Ring

Schulenburg, Friedrich-Werner von der – Pre-war ambassador to Moscow and senior resistant

Schulte, Edouard – German businessman and one of Chojnacki’s agents

Sedláček, Karel – Alias ‘Charles Simpson’. Czech intelligence officer in Bern

Stauffenberg, Colonel Claus Schenk, Graf von – Architect and perpetrator of the 20 July 1944 bomb plot

Stevens, Major Richard – MI6 officer captured at Venlo

Suñer, Serrano – Spanish foreign minister

Szymańska, Halina – Wife of the Polish military attaché in Berlin before the war. Channel for Canaris to pass information to Menzies

Thümmel, Paul – Many aliases. MI6 agent A54. Important spy in the early part of the war

Timoshenko, Marshal Semyon – Commander of Soviet forces at Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk

Tresckow, Henning von – Chief of staff of Army Group Centre; a key plotter

Trott zu Solz, Adam von – German lawyer, diplomat and active resister

Vanden Heuvel, Count Frederick – Head of MI6 in Bern after 1941

Vansittart, Sir Robert – Head of the pre-war British Foreign Office

Waibel, Captain Max – Swiss intelligence officer

Weizsäcker, Ernst von – Head of the German Foreign Office and key plotter

Wilson, Sir Horace – Personal adviser to Chamberlain. Appeasement supporter

Witzleben, General Erwin von – Commander of the Berlin garrison and de facto leader of the September 1938 coup

Young, A.P. – One of Vansittart’s ‘spies’ in contact with Goerdeler

Zaharoff, Basil – Director of Vickers and notorious arms dealer

Prologue

To the millions whose votes helped make Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany, he was the hero who would rescue them from the humiliations of the Versailles Treaty and the shaming chaos that followed.

John Maynard Keynes, who attended the 1919 peace conference, condemned Versailles afterwards in unforgiving and uncannily prophetic terms: ‘If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation.’

Keynes was not the only person to understand that in the punitive conditions imposed by Versailles lay the seeds of another explosion of German militarism. Others referred to it as ‘the peace built on quicksand’.

Under Clause 231 of the Treaty, the ‘War Guilt’ clause, Germany was deprived of all her colonies, 80 per cent of her pre-war fleet, almost half her iron production, 16 per cent of coal output, 13 per cent of her territory (including the great German-speaking port of Danzig) and more than a tenth of her population. To add to these humiliations, the victorious Allies also planted a deadly economic time bomb beneath what was left of the German economy. This took the form of war reparations amounting to some $US32 billion, to be paid largely in shipments of coal and steel.

In 1922, when Germany inevitably defaulted, French and Belgian troops occupied the centre of German coal and steel production in the Ruhr valley. Faced with the collapse of the domestic economy, the German government sought refuge in printing money, with the inevitable consequence of explosive runaway inflation. In 1921 a US dollar was worth 75 German marks. Two years later, each dollar was valued at 4.2 trillion marks. By November 1923, a life’s savings of 100,000 marks would barely buy a loaf of bread.

In the months immediately following the Armistice, an armed uprising inspired by Lenin and the Russian Revolution ended in 1919 with the removal of the kaiser and elections for Germany’s first democratic government, christened the Weimar Republic after the city in which its first Assembly took place. It all began in a blaze of hope, but soon descended into squabbling and dysfunctionality. Unstable, riven with shifting coalitions, burdened with war reparations, incapable of meeting the challenges of the global depression, the new government, along with politicians of every stripe and hue, soon became objects of derision and even hatred. Compromise was seen as failure, easy slogans replaced rational policies, the elite were regarded with suspicion, and the establishment was deluged with accusations of corruption and profiteering.

A new myth – that of the ‘stab in the back’ – began to be promulgated by the German right. This blamed ‘the politicians’ for the defeat of 1918 and the Versailles humiliations that followed. It was claimed that the German army was undefeated, but had been betrayed by the politicians in Berlin who signed the Armistice. It was not long before the Jews were added into the mix, which swiftly mutated into an international conspiracy aimed at the destruction of Germany and its people. The ‘stab in the back’ legend became so deeply imbedded in the German pre-war psyche that it would restrain Hitler’s domestic opponents, and influence the Allies’ terms for peace, right up until the end of the coming war.

Between 1924 and 1929 the German economy stabilised, thanks in large measure to US loans. A period of great artistic renaissance followed. Berlin, reverberating to the talents of Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Max Reinhardt, Marlene Dietrich and the artists and architects of the Bauhaus movement, became the cultural capital of the world.

No sooner was hope reborn than it was broken again on the wheel of a second economic crisis, this time brought about by the Wall Street crash of October 1929. By 1932, with unemployment standing at six million, those, including dependants, directly affected by loss of work amounted to 20 per cent of the German population.

Revolt was once again in the air. Running battles broke out in the streets between communists and Hitler’s stormtroopers. A German commentator on these years wrote, ‘In [these] times, principles are cheap and perfidy, calculation and fear reign supreme.’

These were perfect hothouse conditions for the growth of the most radical forms of extremism. Driven by a mystic and misshapen belief in the moral rebirth of Germany, unencumbered by doubt, unheeding of convention, fed on hate, armoured with conspiracies and slogans and led by a messianic leader who combined charisma with an astonishing ability to move the masses, the Nazi Party’s time had come. In the 1928 elections, the National Socialist Democratic Party – known by its shortened version, ‘Nazi’ – was no more than a tiny fringe party winning only 2.6 per cent of the vote. Just four years later, in July 1932, Hitler’s party secured 13.7 million votes, making it, with 37 per cent of the national vote, by far the largest party in the German Reichstag. A second national election in November of that year saw a drop in the Nazi vote. Nevertheless, after a period of parliamentary stalemate, the ageing German president Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor in 1933, believing that this was the best means to control him. ‘We’ve engaged him for ourselves,’ said former chancellor Franz von Papen, one of the grandest of the grandees in German politics. ‘Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far into the corner that he’ll squeak.’

By these miscalculations the nation of Beethoven and Schiller, of Goethe and Schubert, was given over, lock, stock and barrel to the most primitive, destructive and primeval force for barbarism that Europe had seen since the Dark Ages.

While most of the elite saw Hitler as a harmless eccentric who they could control and who would not last for long, many ordinary Germans, even those who did not vote for him, believed that he might represent a new start and should be given a chance – after all, many argued, things couldn’t get worse, could they?

All of them had misjudged their man.

Adolf Hitler was remarkable in many ways. He was always thinking the unthinkable; always proposing the objectionable; always choosing to shock, rather than to comfort; always rejecting the constraints of convention; always preferring myth and mission to reality; always taking people by surprise with his undiluted radicalism; always trusting his own inner voice in preference to facts and other people’s opinions. ‘I confront everything with a tremendous ice-cold lack of bias,’ he once declared. Because a thing should be, it would be – that was Hitler’s doctrine. On the altar of this absolutism, bolstered by his much-vaunted ‘triumph of the will’, Hitler would lay waste to half of Europe.

But it was not these manic qualities which made Adolf Hitler different. What distinguished him from the many other fascist leaders of his age, and from the myriad self-declared prophets of history, was his genius for political action – he was a mythmaker with a practical understanding of power and how to use it to achieve his ends.

It was this, more than anything else, which caused friend and foe alike to look upon him with a wonder which produced adulation, fear and intrigued curiosity, depending on where you stood in relation to his power.

Foreign capitals, blindly hoping to ‘tame the beast’ who would not be tamed, proposed the usual well-tried European inducements of agreements, pacts, bribes and appeasements in the vain hope of containing the uncontainable. The whole of Europe was mesmerised – paralysed too – by what had happened in Berlin. A German observer in Paris noted among the French ‘a feeling as if a volcano has opened up in their immediate vicinity, the eruption of which may devastate their fields and cities any day. Consequently they are watching its slightest stirrings with astonishment and dread. A natural phenomenon which they are forced to confront … helplessly. Today Germany is again the great international star that appears in every newspaper, in every cinema, fascinating the masses with a mixture of fear and reluctant admiration … Germany [under Hitler] is the great, tragic, uncanny, dangerous adventurer.’

Inside Germany, it did not take long for those who disagreed with Hitler to find out that things could get worse – very much worse.

The first underground opposition to the Nazis grew out of a combination of political groupings which had stood against him in the elections – chiefly the communists and the Social Democrats.

Tainted by their association with the failures of the Weimar Republic, and in the case of the communists by their refusal to join an alliance against Hitler during the economic crises of 1930–33, Hitler’s democratic opponents were easily outmanoeuvred and broken by his ruthless pursuit of power.

Like so many others at home and abroad, Germany’s conventional parties failed to recognise the uniqueness of Hitler’s demonic nature, and presumed that his revolution was just another episode in the normal rhythms of the democratic cycle. ‘Harsh rulers don’t last long,’ said the chairman of the last great Social Democratic Party rally in Berlin in 1933.

A terrible price would soon be paid for this apathy.

On 22 March 1933, just seven weeks after Hitler became chancellor, the first concentration camp opened its gates to admit two hundred political prisoners to an old gunpowder and munitions factory which SS leader Heinrich Himmler had chosen at Dachau, sixteen kilometres from Munich. The camp, with its gates bearing the infamous legend ‘Arbeit macht frei’ – Work will make you free – would remain a byword for torture, every kind of inhumanity and mass extermination, until it was overrun by American troops in the last year of the war. By the end of 1933, 20,000 of Hitler’s political opponents were either in jail or doing their best to survive under the most brutal conditions in Dachau and other concentration camps, now popping up across Germany.

Despite violent anti-communist purges, which started very soon after Hitler became chancellor, communist cells began to reseed themselves in factories and workplaces. Mostly these numbered no more than six or eight people, connected by a sophisticated courier system to other cells, the identities of whose members they often did not know. These networks extended into other European countries, where they were especially active in German émigré communities. In due course, after a brief period of quiescence during the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, and despite being energetically pursued by Hitler’s secret state police, the Gestapo, the German communist underground network would turn to sabotaging the war effort and spying, not least through the great Russian wartime spy network which operated throughout occupied Europe, nicknamed by Himmler’s security structures die Rote Kapelle (the Red Orchestra).*

What was left of Hitler’s political opposition went underground. Among the German resistance’s early supporters were numerous activists in the social democrat cause and many in the trade union movement.

Opposition to Hitler was not confined to the workers. Although some German industrialists and financiers, such as Alfred Krupp, found good commercial reasons to support Hitler, a number of others, like the great engineering industrialist Robert Bosch in Stuttgart, courageously provided active succour to the opposition.

With the communists, liberals and social democrats forced underground, it was left to some elements of the German Church to nurture popular opposition to National Socialism. The Barmen synod of May 1934 in Wuppertal brought together Lutherans who openly condemned the materialism and ungodliness of National Socialism, attracting tens of thousands from all over Germany to an open-air demonstration at which they voiced their opposition to what was happening. In the St Annen-Kirche in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem, the middle class thronged to hear ‘the fighting pastor’ Martin Niemöller preach his incendiary sermons against all the Nazis stood for. In southern German cities like Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Munich, Christians marched in the streets in support of Lutheran bishop Theophil Wurm and his colleague Hans Meiser, bishop of Munich, both of whom had been placed under house arrest for inciting public disturbance. An anti-Nazi tract written by Helmut Kern, a Lutheran pastor from Nuremberg, sold 750,000 copies in short order – the highest circulation for a religious tract since those of Luther himself.

Hitler, despite his by-now unchallenged dominion over the instruments of the German state, shrank from open warfare with the mass ranks of the German Churches, Protestant and Catholic. But he tried every other means to suppress the dissent. Niemöller was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, from which he did not emerge until the war was over. Troublesome pastors were conscripted en masse into the army, the Church’s work with the young was curtailed, teaching permits were withheld for those lecturing in theology at German universities, and permission was refused for the publication of all pamphlets except those acceptable to the Nazi regime. Hitler’s supporters even managed to infiltrate the Church elections of July 1933 to such an extent that he was able to enforce the anti-Semitic ‘Aryan Law’, removing all pastors who were ‘tainted’ by descent from Jewish or half-Jewish forebears.

On 14 March 1937, Pope Pius XI issued a powerful encyclical attacking the new wave of ‘heathenism’ in such strong terms that it became a call to arms against the Nazis. What followed was an open and violent counterattack on the monasteries, led by Hitler’s minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels. In a purge reminiscent of Henry VIII, some were commandeered for military bases, others were banned from accepting new entrants or holding religious processions. Between 1933 and 1945 thousands of brave pastors and friars were to be found among the inmates of the concentration camps, where many of them lost their lives as martyrs for their beliefs.

Although Hitler was finally able to stem ‘the mischief-making of the Church’, religion and religious activists, including the great pastor, theologian and spy Dietrich Bonhoeffer, played a huge part in providing the inspiration, moral underpinning and manpower for the anti-Hitler resistance.

Scattered amongst these organised and semi-organised structures of the German resistance were a number of individuals who, as the excesses and horrors of Nazism became more and more evident, started to wage their own private and lonely struggles against the Nazi state. Among these were the Württemberg carpenter Georg Elser, who, acting entirely alone, missed assassinating Hitler with a bomb by a hair’s breadth because of fog at Munich airport; Otto and Elise Hampel, who distributed over two hundred anti-Hitler messages around Berlin and died under the guillotine as a result, and the students of the White Rose Circle who, led by their tutor, met the same fate for distributing pamphlets around Munich.

These remarkable individuals – Auden’s ‘ironic points of light’ – ignited brief beacons of moral courage in the darkness. But they did not – could not – alter the course of the war.

As they, and many we do not know of, changed their stance from supporting Hitler to actively opposing him, others in the most senior echelons of the Nazi state were tracing similar paths towards their own individual epiphanies.

Chief among these were three men: a civilian who could have been chancellor in Hitler’s place; a general who many believed was destined to lead his armies; and the head of his foreign intelligence service.

* Literally ‘the Red Chapel’. In this usage the word ‘Kapelle’ is meant to indicate that it is a secret organisation. The translation of ‘Kapelle’ as ‘orchestra’ is capricious and confusing. ‘Ring’ would have been better.

1
Carl Goerdeler

Late-evening sunlight streamed through the Palladian windows of the dining room of the National Liberal Club in London. It fell on a damask tablecloth laid with silver and porcelain in a secluded alcove set slightly apart from the other tables. The wooden panels all around glowed a deep mahogany, and the air resonated with the low murmur of diners enjoying themselves, despite the stern gaze of William Gladstone’s twice-life-size statue at the far end of the room.

The six men at the alcove table were not cheerful. They were sombre, quiet-voiced, and listening carefully to one of their number, an imposing figure with boyish good looks, startling light-grey eyes, heavy eyebrows and a forceful personality. The fifty-two-year-old Carl Goerdeler was a serious man who was used to being taken seriously. Ex-lord mayor of the great German city of Leipzig, until recently a key official in the government of Adolf Hitler and a sometime candidate for chancellor of Germany, Goerdeler was a dinner guest whom it was easier to listen to than to converse with.

Born on 31 July 1884 in the west Prussian town of Schneidemuehl, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the son of a district judge, had been a brilliant student at school, a brilliant law graduate at Tübingen University, and by all accounts a brilliant practising lawyer before finding his metier as an economist and senior official in German local government. He soon proved a talented and effective administrator, whose grasp of economics, incorruptible personality and ability to charm were quickly recognised. In 1912, at the age of just twenty-eight, Goerdeler was unanimously elected as principal assistant (effectively deputy) to the mayor of the Rhenish town of Solingen in western Germany. His military service on Germany’s Eastern Front in the First World War ended with a period as the administrator of a large swathe of territory in present-day Lithuania and Belarus which had been occupied by Germany under the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918. Here he added a reputation for humanity and compassion to his other recognised virtues.

The Armistice in November 1918 changed everything for Goerdeler, and for Germany. Like most Germans, he felt that his country’s emasculation in the Versailles settlement inflicted a deep shame and injustice on his Fatherland. It was in these post-war years that Goerdeler the nationalist and patriot began to take form. The brutal amputation of Danzig from the ‘motherland’, in order to give newly-enlarged Poland a corridor to the sea, especially offended his sensitivities, both as a German and as a Prussian. He maintained a vocal opposition to this Versailles humiliation long after most other civil and military leaders had accepted the necessity to move on. This was as admirably fearless as it was tactically stupid. It was also an early example of a stubborn refusal to compromise when Goerdeler considered his cause just, which would become a leitmotif of his life until the very end.

By now Goerdeler’s political views had solidified. He was by upbringing a devout Lutheran, and by political conviction a conservative with an attraction to constitutional monarchism. He was authoritarian, patriotic, consumed by a belief in the power of political ideals and democracy (but only to the point where these did not interfere with efficient government). Economically, he believed in financial rectitude; in his dealings with others he was punctilious, in his personal habits he was frugal, and in his personal life he was guided by an unyielding moral code which even extended to refusing entry into his family home to those who had been divorced. One of his friends, and a future fellow plotter against Hitler, wrote: ‘Goerdeler was a clear-headed, decent, straightforward kind of man who had very little or nothing about him which was sombre, unresolved or enigmatic. He therefore assumed his fellow human beings needed only enlightenment and well-meaning moral instruction to overcome the error of their ways.’

These qualities would have made Carl Goerdeler a great man in any stable age, but they rendered him a hopelessly naïve utopian in the cruel age of turbulence and revolution in which he had to live his life.

After a period as the deputy mayor of Königsberg on the Baltic coast during the 1920s, Goerdeler was elected Oberbürgermeister (lord mayor) of Leipzig in 1930, just two months before his forty-sixth birthday. Now he was a big figure on the national stage. At the time he took over the Leipzig administration, Germany was midway through its second great economic convulsion, following the hyper-inflation of the early 1920s. In December 1931, with unemployment rocketing, Goerdeler accepted an invitation from President Hindenburg to join his government as Reichskommissar (State Commissioner) for price control. His deft handling of this delicate role earned him widespread acclaim. When Hindenburg’s chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, resigned in May 1932, Goerdeler was widely thought of as his successor. But the political turmoil which ensued did not produce a man of rectitude and order – it produced instead Adolf Hitler, who became chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933.

Carl Goerdeler

Goerdeler did not at first oppose Hitler. He saw the new chancellor as potentially an enlightened dictator, who with the right advice could be a force for good and for order after the upheavals and failures of the Weimar years.

It did not take long for the scales to fall from the lord mayor of Leipzig’s eyes.

On 1 April 1933, when the city’s Jewish businesses were threatened by Nazi stormtroopers of the Sturmabteilung (SA) during Hitler’s ‘day of national boycott’, it required an appearance by the mayor in full ceremonial dress, backed by the police, to save the situation from descending into violence and calamity. There followed several instances when Goerdeler had to intervene personally to save Jewish enterprises from the consequences of Hitler’s policy of sequestrating Jewish assets and businesses in order to ‘Aryanise’ the German economy.

There was worse – much worse – to come. On 30 June 1934 Hitler launched the internal putsch which history has come to know as the Night of the Long Knives. The ostensible purpose of this act of national bloodletting was to exterminate the paramilitary SA, which Hitler saw as a growing threat to his power. But the killings extended into a general orgy of score-settling with enemies of the Nazi regime. Among the eighty-five killed were the army general who was Hitler’s immediate predecessor as chancellor, the personal secretary of another chancellor, and several Catholic political leaders. It was now plain to all that Hitler’s government was prepared to behave illegally, unscrupulously, murderously, and completely without reference to either moral or legal codes. This was a turning point for many.

But not, despite all his moral rectitude, for Carl Goerdeler.

On 5 November 1934, barely four months after the Night of the Long Knives, Goerdeler accepted an offer from Hitler to become, for the second time, Germany’s commissioner for price control. His decision to serve Hitler at this time was one he would find difficult to explain later. Why did he do it? The answer provides keys to two of the most puzzling paradoxes of Goerdeler’s complex personality. Alongside an all-consuming conviction of what was right and wrong, including a willingness to accept any personal sacrifice rather than to submit, he also possessed an almost childlike ignorance about the true nature of evil. Because of this, despite his worldly wisdom in matters of politics, government and the economy, he completely overestimated his ability to persuade bad men to do good things, by talking sensibly to them.

The truth was that Goerdeler accepted Hitler’s post because he believed he could change him. His chosen weapons for doing this were a stream of long (in some cases very long) memoranda and papers on the economy, directed at the chancellor. These were read either skimpily or not at all. Following a succession of turf battles and disagreements on public policymaking, the inevitable rupture between the two men occurred in 1936, when Goerdeler lost all power and influence in Hitler’s circle.

This was the moment for which the lord mayor’s Nazi enemies in Leipzig had been waiting.

In early November that year, the Oberbürgermeister was invited to speak at the German-Finnish Chamber of Commerce in Helsinki. At the time Goerdeler was under attack by the local Leipzig Nazi leader because of his refusal to remove the statue of Felix Mendelssohn, the great German-Jewish composer, from its position outside the city’s concert hall. Pointing out the statue to a visitor, the Oberbürgermeister complained: ‘There is one of my problems. They [the Brownshirts] are after me to remove that monument. But if they ever touch it I am finished here.’ To his daughter Marianne he seems to have indicated that what really affronted him was an outrageous attack not so much on a Jew, as on German culture: ‘All of us listened to Mendelssohn’s songs with great pleasure and sang them as well. To deny Mendelssohn is nothing, but an absurd, cowardly act.’

Before leaving for Helsinki, Goerdeler extracted promises from Hitler and Himmler that they would personally ensure the safety of the statue in his absence. Nevertheless, the local Nazis pulled it down while he was away. Returning to Leipzig in a fury, Goerdeler issued an ultimatum that the missing statue should be replaced forthwith. When it wasn’t, in typical Goerdeler style, he resigned. It should be noted that his resignation was far more a protest against the loss of his authority than against anti-Semitism, for his position on the Jews at this time was at best ambivalent. Even so, for this act of principle against tyranny and of protest against an outrage to German culture, Carl Goerdeler became an overnight hero to many across Germany who saw him as having sacrificed his public career rather than lend his name to a shameful deed.

As the bearer of all that was good and great about German culture, order and respect for the law, Goerdeler, who never liked to be without a mission for long, now decided that personal responsibility and conscience demanded that he should henceforth dedicate his superhuman energy, ability and moral purpose to a single end – the removal of Adolf Hitler.

His first task was to warn the world about the true nature of the German dictator and the threat that he posed. But how? Goerdeler was, after all, not only without a job, but also without a passport, which had been confiscated by a local Gauleiter.

What he needed for his new mission was money, and his passport back.

The money came from Robert Bosch, the head of the Bosch industrial empire and leader of a small group of Stuttgart democrats who were hostile to Hitler. Bosch appointed Goerdeler (who had already turned down a post with Alfred Krupp, a man of very different political views) as financial and international adviser to his firm, so providing him with both a reason to go abroad and a comfortable salary to live on.

Goerdeler got his passport back from an unexpected source – Hermann Göring. Göring, who was in charge of the German rearmament programme at the time, was becoming increasingly concerned about the possibility of a future war. Cleverly playing on this (and probably also on Göring’s desire to build up his own private information network) Goerdeler proposed that he should undertake a foreign tour, and report back on opinion in Western capitals. Göring jumped at the idea, arranging for the return of Goerdeler’s passport and instructing his new emissary as they parted that he should always remember on his travels to conduct himself ‘as a patriot’.

The would-be wanderer left Berlin on 3 June 1937, at the beginning of a series of foreign trips which over the next two years would take him to Belgium, Britain (twice), Holland, France (twice), Canada, the USA, Switzerland (twice), Italy, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Turkey.

His message was always the same. Hitler was evil; his government had done evil things, and would do many more; he had neither moral restraint nor human scruple; his aim was war, and if he was left unchallenged, war would be inevitable. The only way to avoid this was for the Western powers to be firm in opposing him – ‘call black, black and white, white’ as he put it. Any equivocation or appeasement would be regarded by Hitler as weakness, and would further inflame his megalomania. If standing firm against Hitler was the policy of the Western powers, Goerdeler promised, he and his friends would get rid of him from inside Germany – even at risk of their lives.

It must have been startling for the quiet English gentlemen sitting around the dining table in the comforting normality of the National Liberal Club in Whitehall to realise that they were being warned of an impending putsch designed to remove Hitler and change the government of Germany.

Standing in the darkness on the pavement outside the club after they had waved their guest goodbye in a London taxi, one of the company said to their host, ‘He has decided with commendable courage to go forth and fearlessly condemn the Hitler regime, regardless of what the personal consequences may be’.

Goerdeler’s fellow diners that night were not in themselves in any way remarkable. They consisted of an ex-World War I fighter pilot, an industrialist, a renowned German educationalist and a middle-ranking civil servant. They had been brought together for the occasion by Arthur Primrose Young. Young (he preferred to be known as ‘A.P.’, in preference to anything which included Primrose) was a senior industrialist and a member of a small group who acted as occasional gatherers of intelligence for Sir Robert Vansittart, permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office and close adviser to Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary. Every word that was said that night would be reported back. Vansittart was the invisible seventh diner at the table on this ordinary July evening in 1937.

Most permanent under secretaries at the British Foreign Office are unobtrusive, background men, whose voices are seldom heard. But Sir Robert Vansittart – widely known in Whitehall as ‘Van’ – was different. Knowledgeable, clever and very well informed, he was so influential over Eden that the foreign secretary was often maliciously referred to behind his back as ‘His Master’s Voice’ – the point of the barb being that ‘Van’ was the foreign secretary’s master, not the other way round.

Vansittart was, in short, anything but quiet and unobtrusive. His frequently-voiced concerns about the rise of Hitler were so contrary to the appeasement policy of His Majesty’s Government of the time that one of prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s close advisers referred to him as ‘an alarmist, [who] hampered all attempts of the Government to make friendly contact with the dictator states’.

A few days later, Goerdeler had a meeting with Vansittart, no doubt as a result of Young’s report on the National Liberal Club dinner. Afterwards, Van wrote a memorandum to Eden for circulation to the cabinet. In it he underlined Goerdeler’s warnings, referring to the visiting German as ‘an impressive, wise and weighty man [who by coming to Britain is] putting his neck in a halter’.

Vansittart’s minute got no further than Eden’s desk. It did not accord with the prevailing government policy of appeasement, and would therefore, the foreign secretary judged, not be welcomed by his cabinet colleagues.

The minute still exists in Van’s private papers. On it, in Vansittart’s hand, are written the words: ‘Suppressed by Eden’.

2
Ludwig Beck

If there was a soldier in the German army who embodied the antithesis of all that Hitler and the Nazi Party stood for, it was Ludwig Beck.

And yet, he was not one of life’s natural rebels. He was too intellectual, too thoughtful, too careful, too considered and too punctilious (that word again) to be a great plotter – and far too straightforward to be a successful conspirator.

And that was his problem. Like Carl Goerdeler, Ludwig Beck was a man made for a different age than the one in which he found himself.

Also like Goerdeler, Beck at first welcomed the arrival of Hitler and the Nazis on the German scene. In the autumn of 1930 he famously defended young officers in his unit who were court-martialled for being members of the Nazi Party, contrary to the rules of the time which prohibited army officers from political activity. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Beck, whose Lutheran faith had incorporated a degree of anti-Semitism since the days of Luther himself, announced, ‘I have wished for years for the political revolution, and now my wishes have come true. It is the first ray of hope since 1918.’

Ludwig August Theodor Beck was born the son of a gifted metallurgical engineer on 29 June 1880 in Biebrich, then a small village on the opposite bank of the Rhine from Mainz. As a middle-class Prussian brought up in the long afterglow of the victories of the Franco-Prussian War and the ensuing unification of Germany, and living little more than a stone’s throw from Frankfurt, where the treaty which sealed these triumphs was signed, the young Beck’s career would probably have been decided from the moment he was born – he was to be a soldier.

What followed was an education in the classic Prussian military tradition. This produced officers of high professional ability, who regarded a commitment to their country as synonymous with loyalty to their regiment and to the brotherhood of their fellow officers. For these men the Prussian military code, characterised by the motto Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit* (Always practise loyalty and sincerity), was more than a slogan – it was a way of life that they were sworn to follow and protect. Later this sense of loyalty and brotherly solidarity among the officer corps would protect even plotters against the German state from discovery by the security services.

Ludwig Beck’s moral compass, founded on Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit, was different from that of Carl Goerdeler – but its pull was no less strong.

Tall, angular, thin, Beck’s physical appearance closely mirrored his personality. He had the look of an ascetic, with what one colleague described as ‘facial skin so tight as to seem ghoulish, especially on the rare occasions when he smiled’. Another noted his ‘tense, sensitive, finely chiselled face with slightly sunken, rather sad eyes’. To his contemporaries Beck seemed a solitary figure, set slightly apart from the crowd, as though close human contact was strange and uncongenial to him. A committed and practising Lutheran, for Beck, austerity, rectitude and restraint were the guiding principles of his life and the cornerstone of his religious beliefs.

Beck the young officer was no moustachioed, boneheaded Prussian militarist of the sort beloved of cartoonists and popular legend. He was what was known in the Germany of the time as an ‘educated officer’. Like Frederick the Great he was keen on music, and played the violin well. Widely read, knowledgeable and engaged in all aspects of German cultural life, he was fluent in English, an admirer of French culture and, unlike most in the Prussian officer class, engaged freely with politicians. Intellectually disciplined, he was widely recognised as a man of refinement and integrity; in later life he would earn the nickname ‘the philosopher general’.

But Ludwig Beck had his flaws too – they were the flaws which can often weaken the soldier who has more intellect than is needed for the job. He was a man of thought rather than of action, who weighed every step so carefully that he could sometimes miss the fleeting opportunity whose lightning exploitation is the true test of the great commander. One contemporary put it more prosaically: ‘Everyone who knew him, knew he could not be persuaded into a cavalry charge.’ Men looked up to Beck not for his battle-readiness, but for his deep spiritual and intellectual qualities, and for his unshakeable integrity.

Ludwig Beck

By the time the First World War came, Ludwig Beck was an experienced thirty-four-year-old professional soldier, widely regarded as a man on the way up. He spent most of the first three years of the war as a staff officer on the Western Front, earning a reputation for diligence and an extraordinary capacity for hard work. He worked such long hours at the front that he was forced to give up his beloved violin. In May 1916 he took a few days’ leave from the front to marry Amalie Pagenstecher, the daughter of a Bremen merchant and, at twenty-three, twelve years Beck’s junior. Nine months later the couple had a daughter, Gertrud. Then, in November 1917, tragedy struck when Amalie suddenly died. Beck arranged for Gertrud’s care and swiftly returned to his duties at the front line. After the war ended he took over his daughter’s upbringing himself, throwing himself into the task with typical dedication and energy.

A period commanding an artillery regiment in present-day Baden-Württemberg followed, before Beck was posted to the Department of the Army in Berlin in 1931. He arrived in the capital just in time to have a ringside seat for the final stages of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Beck’s job was to lead a team tasked with producing the German army’s new operations manual, the Truppenführung, which first appeared in 1933. A modified version of this widely acclaimed work is still in use in the German Federal Army of today. In 1932 Beck was promoted to lieutenant general, and in 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor, he was made head of the army department. By this time the army department had effectively become the German general staff, despite an explicit prohibition against the creation of such an organisation in the Versailles Treaty. Beck threw himself into his new task with his usual ferocious energy. He rose each morning at 5.30 and rode from six to eight, before being driven to army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse at 8.30. He worked in his office overlooking the courtyard from 9 a.m. until seven in the evening, when he returned home to dine. After dinner he did paperwork for a further three hours, before retiring to bed punctually at midnight.

These long hours were not spent only on military matters. By this stage of his life Beck was fully engaged in his second great love – politics.

It did not take him long to realise that his hope that Hitler would be a necessary and passing evil after the chaos of the Weimar years was to be confounded. Like Goerdeler and many others, Beck and his army colleagues were horrified by the lawlessness and bloodletting of the Night of the Long Knives, especially when one of the army’s own, Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher, and his wife were cold-bloodedly murdered in their home.

Three weeks later, an attempted putsch by Austrian Nazis to overthrow their government, in which Hitler’s hand was clearly visible, failed disastrously.

To Beck, who had close contacts in the German Foreign Office, the failed coup confirmed what he had feared for some time: that the long-term consequence – and probably intent – of Hitler’s foreign policy was war. Shortly afterwards, he wrote a memo to his superiors warning that premature foreign adventures would ultimately result in a ‘humiliating retreat’.

Beck, however, went further than predictions. Basing his arguments on religious and moral convictions similar to those of Goerdeler, he asserted, in a way that foreshadows the Nuremberg trials of more than a decade later, that legitimate action by the state and its servants in the army had to be based on morality. To prevent modern conflict becoming total war, he wrote, what was needed was ‘a policy with moral bases which knows to retain its supremacy on the foundation of a new moral idealism in the state itself and in its relations with other nations’. It goes without saying that if such a moral context for state policy and action was what Beck hoped for, he must have known that it could never be found in Hitler and his associates.

On 2 August 1934, a month after the Night of the Long Knives, the death occurred of the eighty-six-year-old President Paul von Hindenburg, the only person whose status and position could act as a counterbalance to Hitler’s growing command of the German state. A little over two weeks later, in a referendum called the day before the old president’s death, 89.9 per cent of Germans voted to combine the offices of president and chancellor, conferring absolute power on Adolf Hitler. All civil servants and members of the armed forces were now required to attend mass rallies and swear an oath of personal allegiance to Hitler (rather than, as previously to ‘the People and Fatherland’): ‘I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life for this oath.’ Beck, who claimed to have been unaware of the full form of the oath until he arrived at the ceremony, declared to a friend afterwards, ‘This the blackest day of my life.’ Later, in a classic Beck afterthought, he confided to another, Hans Bernd Gisevius, that he ‘could never rid himself of the awful thought that at the time he should not, perhaps, have given his oath’.

Very few felt as Beck did. The average officer in the Wehrmacht was delighted by the new mood of militarism in Germany, by the respect the army appeared to receive from Hitler and by the physical consequence of this: increased budgets for the latest arms and equipment, and a massive expansion in numbers. True, some were concerned that the flood of new recruits – especially members of the Hitler Youth, for whom the notion of Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit was as alien as it was quaint – would alter the nature of the German army. Most officers consoled themselves with the thought that the army would change the newcomers before they changed the army; and anyway, since the man to whom they had just sworn absolute fealty clearly needed them, what had they to fear?

Beck was one of very few who understood that the imposition of Hitler’s Führerprinzip (the leader principle), with its demand for absolute obedience, meant the destruction of the normal checks and balances of a democratic state. His answer to this threat was for the army, as Germany’s strongest and most revered institution, to play its role as the essential counterweight needed to keep the state on a safe course. In a normal democratic state, he suggested, military action was tasked and constrained by the political leaders. But if this balance was broken or dysfunctional, the roles should be reversed, and it should become the responsibility of the army to set its own limits for the politicians. ‘It is not what we do,’ he wrote to one of his subordinates in 1935, ‘but how we do it which is so bad. [It is a] policy of violence and perfidy.’ National confidence in Germany’s most illustrious arm, its military, depended, Beck asserted, on the army’s refusal to allow itself to be used as the tool of a foreign policy built on naked adventurism. The army, in short, had a duty to act as the emergency brake on political folly or evil.

Beck was now on territory which was dangerously close to rebellion. Writing to his superior Werner von Fritsch in January 1937, he insisted, ‘All hope is placed in the army. The Wehrmacht will never permit adventure – for able and clever men are its head. Total responsibility rests [on us] for future developments. There is no escaping that.’

It did not take long for Beck to be cruelly disabused of these elaborate niceties.

Hitler’s long-term intentions had for some time been strongly hinted at for those with ears to hear. As early as May 1935, Beck, as chief of staff, had been ordered to start planning for Operation Schulung, an ‘imaginary’ invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the first months of 1937, responding to the mood in Hitler’s Chancellery, Beck began considering how he would implement an order to bring Austria into the German fold.

On 5 November 1937, Hitler finally made plain what had so far only been implied. In a long monologue delivered at a secret meeting with his key military leaders, the chancellor announced that his intention was indeed to go to war with his neighbours: ‘The first German objective … should be to overthrow Austria and Czechoslovakia simultaneously … the descent upon the Czechs [should be carried out] with lightning speed [and might take place] as early as 1938.’ Hitler stressed that he was not predicting a short conflict – his long-term aim, he warned, was to acquire more ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) for Germany’s population by 1943.

Any hope that the army would act as Beck’s hoped-for ‘emergency brake’ on what was now plainly revealed as Hitler’s headlong dash to war vanished in the early months of 1938, when the German army suffered a double blow to both its prestige and its power. It began with a carefully engineered ‘scandal’ which on 27 January ended the career of the then minister of war and commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg. Eight days later the head of the army, Colonel General Fritsch, the man to whom Beck had written a few weeks earlier asserting that the army would never permit ‘adventure’, was forced to resign because of an alleged, but entirely manufactured, homosexual encounter with a male prostitute in a backstreet close to a Berlin railway station. The army, in which Beck had invested ‘all hope’, stood silently by and uttered not a squeak of protest at these public crucifixions of two of its most respected officers, or at the step-by-step emasculation of its power and position which ensued. On 4 February, Hitler, seeing this weakness, seized direct personal control of Germany’s military machine, declaring, ‘I exercise henceforth immediate command over the entire armed forces.’

Following the Fritsch affair and Hitler’s takeover of the army, whispered talk began to circulate about the possibilities of taking direct action. Carl Goerdeler lobbied some generals to initiate a coup d’état by using the army to seize Gestapo headquarters. But Ludwig Beck had not yet crossed the Rubicon. Asked at a meeting about this time if he had any comment on the recent events, he responded that the question was improper: ‘Mutiny and revolution are words which will not be found in a German soldier’s dictionary.’

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Beck, still failing to understand the true nature of Hitler’s demonic will, continued to believe that he could divert the coming war by persuasion and legal means.

Again, he was soon proved wrong.

Hitler swiftly consolidated his mastery of the German machine by appointing his most loyal acolyte, Wilhelm Keitel, as chief of the newly created high command of the armed forces, and Joachim von Ribbentrop as his new foreign minister. Then, following the annexation of Austria in March, he convened a secret meeting with his generals on 30 May, and proclaimed: ‘It is my unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future.’

For Beck, this was the last straw. In a minute to his superior, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, he wrote: ‘The Führer’s remarks demonstrate once again the total insufficiency of the existing military hierarchy at the highest level … If the lever is not applied here soon … the future fate … [of] peace and war and with it the fate of Germany … can only be seen in the blackest colours.’

Now at last Ludwig Beck understood that all attempts to alter Hitler’s ‘unalterable resolve’ were in vain. If war was to be prevented, the time had come, the philosopher general concluded, to pass from protests to the preparation of coups and assassinations.

* The motto is taken from a song of this title that from 1797 to 1945 was played every hour by the bells of Potsdam’s Garrison Church, the burial place of Frederick the Great. The words, by the eighteenth-century poet Ludwig Hölty, were set to the tune of Papageno’s song ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. The motto became closely associated with Prussian values and the creed of Freemasonry.

3
Wilhelm Canaris

At a little before eight o’clock on the morning of 2 January 1935, a slight and rather unprepossessing man with sad china-blue eyes and prematurely white hair for a forty-eight-year-old walked through the front door of Tirpitzufer 72–76, an imposing five-storey granite building a kilometre or so from Hitler’s Chancellery. Standing by the small concierge’s kiosk just inside the front door, a casual observer not in the know (the visitor’s presence that day was a state secret) would not have marked the small figure down as anyone of particular importance. True, his admiral’s uniform and his complexion, ruddy with the lash of salt breezes, told of a life at sea. But senior military figures were two a penny in Berlin these days. This man’s dress looked ‘shop-soiled and old’, and his bearing far from military, so that the observer might have imagined that he was perhaps retired, rather than someone at the very top of Chancellor Hitler’s hierarchy. ‘He gave the impression of a civilian, rather than a senior German officer,’ said one commentator.

The admiral walked up a flight of steps set between two fluted Doric pillars and across the glistening tiled floor of the Tirpitzufer entrance hall to a creaky lift with a reputation for breaking down, positioned to one side of a balustraded stairway sweeping down from the first floor. He entered the lift and, pressing the button for the third floor, was duly deposited in front of a pair of heavy oak doors which led through an outer office to an empty, high-ceilinged room, which echoed to his footsteps. Looking around, the newcomer would have noted to himself, with the habit of a man used to taking over other people’s jobs, that his predecessor had taken all the furniture.

Wilhelm Canaris’s journey to his new post as head of the Abwehr,* Germany’s principal foreign intelligence service, had been a long and romantic one. It had taken an inexperienced young naval officer and made him into what a contemporary described as ‘one of the most interesting phenomena of the period … a combination of disinterested idealism and of shrewdness such as is particularly rare in Germany. In Germany one very seldom finds the cleverness of a snake and the purity of a dove combined in a single personality.’

Born to a wealthy industrialist near Dortmund on 1 January 1887, Wilhelm Franz Canaris was a few years younger than both Ludwig Beck and Carl Goerdeler. According to family legend he was a descendant of the nineteenth-century Greek admiral, liberation hero and politician Constantine Kanaris. Canaris liked to repeat this story in preference to the truth, which was that his ancestors were the Canarisi family from the area around Lake Como in northern Italy, who took their winemaking skills to the Mosel region of Germany in the late seventeenth century. There was indeed something not quite German – something more of the south – about Wilhelm Canaris. In later life he would express a dislike of cold northern climes, and a preference for the warmth, charm and easy living of the south. His personality too seemed more in tune with the sinuosity and subtlety of the Mediterranean than with the eternal search for logic, resolution and mastery of the Atlantic races.

A pious Protestant all his life, he was nevertheless fascinated by the spiritualism and rituals of the Catholic Church, and believed in the supernatural. Moral precepts played an established part in his life – though not as clearly defined a part as with Goerdeler or Beck. Canaris’s compass, unlike theirs, gave him a firm general direction of travel built on strong principles. But when it came to the application of these, he was serpentine, flexible and full of ruses and devices. A few meanderings here and there were of little consequence, provided his basic moral foundation remained uncompromised. His character was founded on a deep strain of ambivalence. One observer commented, ‘Canaris had a profound sense of adventure, including the adventure of evil itself.’ His was a mind capable of coping with paradox, and, in the right circumstances, he did not find it difficult to accept that ends could justify means, provided they were carefully chosen and judiciously applied.

One other unusual feature marked Canaris’s personality. He never looked back. What had gone had gone, and was of no consequence.The only thing that mattered to him was what was ahead.

Wilhelm Canaris had a gentle disposition. ‘He hated violence in itself,’ a friend noted. ‘[He] was repelled by war … [and had] an exaggerated love for animals. “Anyone who does not love dogs, I judge out of hand to be an evil man,” he once announced … I never witnessed in Canaris a trace of crudity or brutality … only sudden revelations of his deep-seated humanity.’ Another of his contemporaries noted that he was, in all his dealings and whatever the provocation, invariably ‘a kind person’. His wife Erika described him as a man of ‘tender emotions’.

Wilhelm Canaris

Politically, Canaris was a natural conservative. But his views were moderately held, and tempered always with an instinct for humanity and an internationalist world view. Later on, possibly under the influence of Goerdeler, he believed that after the war there should be a United States of Europe led by a triumvirate of Britain, France and Germany.

Physically, he was small and slight. Frequently mocked for his lack of stature by his classmates, he left school to enlist in the Imperial German Navy at the age of eighteen, later claiming that his choice of this career was due to his famous (but entirely unrelated) Greek ‘ancestor’.

The young Wilhelm Canaris first came to prominence in Germany (and Britain) as a result of a First World War game of hide-and-seek played out along the west coast of South America between the Royal Navy light cruiser HMS Glasgow and the German light cruiser Dresden, on which Canaris was a junior officer. On 14 March 1915 the Glasgow finally found the Dresden sheltering in a bay on an isolated island in Chilean waters. Following negotiations between the two warships, in which Canaris (who spoke excellent English and had a reputation for exquisite manners) was involved, the Dresden’s captain, realising he was cornered, opened her sea-cocks, scuttled his ship and surrendered his German crew to internment. Canaris, who also spoke perfect Spanish (he was said to be fluent in six languages) did not remain behind bars for long. On 4 August 1915 he escaped captivity and made his way disguised as a peasant by train, foot, boat and horseback over the Andes to Buenos Aires. From there, assuming the identity of a Chilean widower, ‘Señor Reed Rosas’, young Lieutenant Canaris took a slow boat home through, among other places, Falmouth (where he assisted British immigration officials with information on a fellow traveller). He finally arrived back in Germany on 30 September 1915.

Towards the end of that year, the slight figure of ‘Señor Reed Rosas’ turned up again, this time in Madrid, where he took out a lease on a flat not far from the German embassy. Wilhelm Canaris, alias Reed Rosas, alias ‘Carl’, codename ‘Kika’ (a childhood nickname which means ‘peeker’), was on a spying mission for his country.

Despite suffering recurrent bouts of malaria, exacerbated by the excessively hot summers and bleak winters of Madrid, Canaris found that his posting to Spain was the start of a love affair with the Iberian peninsula and its people that would last the rest of his life. ‘I like Italians, just as I like Greeks and Spaniards,’ he told a friend. ‘If a Spaniard gives me his word of honour, I place confidence in it. I am much more cautious towards the Greeks and especially the Italians. In Italy sincerity is often camouflaged behind different colours, like the slices on a Neapolitan cake.’

Ordered home through Italy, Canaris, still masquerading as Señor Rosas, and accompanied by a Spanish priest also travelling under a false identity, left Spain for France on 21 February 1916. Both men claimed to be travelling to Switzerland to take the cure for tuberculosis (an illness it was easy for Canaris to feign because of his malaria). After crossing the French–Italian border without difficulty, the pair headed for Domodossola on the Swiss–Italian border, thirty kilometres north of the Italian lakes.

By now, however, the French and the British had alerted the Italian border guards to look out for a Chilean passport in the name of Reed Rosas. The fugitives were arrested on 24 February, and summarily thrown into jail. An extensive period of interrogation in the none-too-gentle hands of Italian counter-intelligence followed, during which Canaris took to biting his lip so that he could convincingly spit blood to back up his claim to tuberculosis. Soon German and Chilean diplomatic wheels began to turn in Madrid. Under pressure from the Chilean government, the Italian authorities agreed not to hang the pair, and bundled them on board a freighter bound for Cartagena. On 15 March, Canaris arrived back in Madrid, emaciated, convulsed with shivering and racked with a roaring malarial fever.

The experience of being arrested, jailed, very nearly hanged and struck down with malaria ought to have put him off spying forever. But it didn’t. Over the next year he made the contacts and put together the spy networks in Spain and Portugal that would form the foundation of his later work on the Iberian peninsula during the 1930s and 40s.

He swiftly became a familiar of the shadowy demi-monde of spies, corrupt officials, bankers, money-launderers, arms traders, adventurers, and all the hangers-on who circle like scavengers around rotten meat in the neutral spaces of any conflict. Among these were two men who would be of special interest to him in the future. The first was Basil Zaharoff, a director of the British engineering company Vickers Armstrong, an occasional British agent and one of the world’s most notorious arms salesmen. The second was a Mallorcan fisherman and tobacco-smuggler called Juan March. March, whose fingers were in almost every dubious Iberian pie and who ended his life a very rich man because of it, was one of Canaris’s most important agents. According to rumour and the voluminous files held on him in the British National Archives, he also performed the same function for the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6), a fact of which both sides were probably very well aware.

In late 1916, with his work in Spain finished, Canaris made a second attempt to get back to Germany, finally reaching safe territory on 9 October 1916, when he was landed from the German submarine U-35 at the Croatian port of Cattaro.

On his return to Germany he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class and immediately posted back to regular service, commanding a succession of U-Boats in the Mediterranean and sinking several Allied ships before the war ended.

After such a war, what could the thirty-one-year-old Canaris do next for adventure? He began casting around to find a stage on which he could use his talents and his love of conspiracy. Politics was the obvious answer, and there was more than enough of it to go round in the chaos and revolution of post-Versailles Germany. In the early post-war years Canaris was deeply involved in combating the threat of communism, which at the time seemed poised to overwhelm Germany. He was an early activist in the formation of the anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary units which roamed the country. In this role he almost certainly had dealings with his old Iberian adversary Basil Zaharoff, who was at the time busy selling weapons from his German factories to anyone who would buy them.

In the post-Bismarck German constitutional settlement, the army’s position was almost that of a state within a state. High-level politics and high-level military command occupied a deeply enmeshed common space at the pinnacle of the German state, and often flowed into each other in a way unknown in most other European democracies. Although still only a very minor player, this was the space in which Wilhelm Canaris had now arrived, and the space in which he would, with only brief exceptions, spend the rest of his life.

But the young naval lieutenant’s hyperactivity in 1919 was not confined to politics and conspiracies. He was also pursuing romance.

His first love had been an English girl, Edith Hill, the daughter of a wealthy northern industrialist to whom Canaris, a lifelong anglophile, had become more or less engaged. At the outbreak of war, however, Miss Hill terminated the relationship on the grounds that it would be improper to marry a citizen of her nation’s enemy. Around 1917, probably after his well-publicised escape from South America, he met and fell in love with Erika Waag, also the daughter of an industrialist. When peace came, he assiduously tracked her down and, three days after finding her, proposed. They married in 1919, and went on to have two daughters. The marriage was not on the whole a contented one. Erika’s passion for music and the arts, and Wilhelm’s for politics and plotting, did not always sit easily together. Canaris was never likely to be the kind of man who would submit himself to uxorious domesticity.

In June 1923, doubtless in an attempt to keep him away from more political mischief, Canaris was posted to the cadet-training ship the Berlin, a superannuated pre-war cruiser which should have been despatched long ago to the breaker’s yard. He found his fellow officers boorish, the job monotonous, and his enforced exclusion from intrigue unbearable. Depression – always quite close to the surface of the Canaris personality – set in. He believed his naval career was over, and toyed with resignation.

The one bright spot in his life on the Berlin was a slim, fresh-faced, fair-haired young man with an artistic temperament and a high-pitched voice (he was nicknamed ‘Billy Goat’). Despite the age difference between Canaris and Reinhard Heydrich, there was much which brought the two men together. Heydrich was teased by his fellow cadets because of his effeminate appearance, just as Canaris had been teased for his short stature. Both men were outsiders. Neither found the upper-class overlay of life in the German navy either comfortable or congenial. Observers noted the ‘father and son’ relationship that developed between the two. On some occasions young cadet Heydrich, an accomplished violinist, would visit the Canaris home, where he accompanied Erika on the piano, while her husband, complete with chef’s hat, cooked his favourite dish, saddle of wild boar in a croute made of crumbled black bread and red wine. In the years to come, after Heydrich, then the head of Himmler’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD), had himself married, the Canarises and the Heydrichs would twice choose to live as neighbours in the same street.

After the war, Heydrich’s wife Lina described the relationship between the two couples: ‘Mrs Canaris played the violin and so soon we came to see each other frequently, and this social intercourse … was not to be interrupted until the death of my husband … We used to see each other on our birthday parties; the two men went hunting together; no festivities in our houses passed without our taking part in them … We had a picture of the Dresden in the Battle of the Falkland Isles. It was a present from Canaris; he had painted it himself.’

It seems that the relationship between the two couples was actually rather more complex than Lina Heydrich’s post-war description makes it seem. By the time they were next-door neighbours in the area around Berlin’s Schlachtensee lake there was already an atmosphere of wariness between the two men, neither of whom was averse to using his wife or his private contacts to keep an eye on the other. On one occasion Erika Canaris was invited to her next-door neighbours’ for an afternoon coffee party. She did not want to go, but Canaris insisted ‘for appearances’ sake’. At the event, Lina Heydrich, who was well aware that the Canaris’s daughter Eva had been severely incapacitated by meningitis, insisted that, in line with Hitler’s new policy of racial purification, ‘We have to kill all disabled children.’ In any normal relationship, this would have caused a permanent rupture between the two families. Instead, the neighbours’ habit of regular, if guarded, social contact seems to have continued uninterrupted. One of his anti-Hitler co-conspirators would later comment on Canaris’s puzzling habit of socialising with even the most extreme Nazis: ‘Canaris considered them to be thugs and crooks, but he had no objection to observing them. It was like living in some well-written crime story.’

Canaris’s ‘penal servitude’ on his cadet-training ship did not last long. In the spring of 1924, to his huge relief, he exchanged naval uniform for civilian clothes and went undercover again, this time in Japan, where he was engaged in a secret joint enterprise with the Japanese for the construction of the U-Boats Germany was prohibited from having under the terms of Versailles. But the project was stillborn when German defence policy changed from trying to deceive the Royal Navy about the building of illicit U-Boats to cooperating with it, in the hope of achieving some relaxation of the Versailles straitjacket.

Canaris was brought back to a Berlin desk job, which he hated with a passion that left him with a lifetime aversion to staff work, bureaucracies and all sedentary jobs. One of his superiors of this time noted perceptively, ‘His troubled soul is appeased only by the most difficult and unusual of tasks.’

True to form, a Berlin desk job did not hold Wilhelm Canaris, now thirty-seven, for long. By the end of 1924, despite government jitters, he was once again deep in backstreet dealings with right-wing bankers and his old spy networks in Spain,creating a series of front companies to cover another attempt at secret ship- and U-Boat-building, this time in Spain and Greece. It was not long before Canaris, assisted by his Mallorcan fisherman friend Juan March, had woven a powerful network of influence in Spain which included Argentine venture capitalists, German industrialists, Spanish shipbuilders, film-makers, bankers, the chief of the Spanish secret police, corrupt officials, government ministers, right-wing members of the Spanish aristocracy, and even the royal family. Inevitably, Canaris’s old adversary-cum-partner, the king of arms dealers, Basil Zaharoff, got to hear what was going on, and tipped off the British.

It was not only the British who now moved against Canaris. Thanks to his right-wing activities, he had made powerful enemies at home. Their chance came when one of Canaris’s front companies, the film-making enterprise Phoebus, went bankrupt. In the ensuing hullabaloo, his attempts to bypass the Versailles Treaty were exposed, along with his right-wing links. An embarrassment to the navy at home and abroad, he was hurriedly withdrawn from Spain and given a posting away from the public eye on another elderly training ship, the Schlesien, on which he served initially as first officer and then, from 30 September 1932, as captain.

It was in this post that, at Hitler’s review of the fleet in 1933, Canaris first met the new German chancellor. Hermann Göring too paid a visit to the Schlesien that year, but it was far less successful. The future head of the Luftwaffe, who was violently and incessantly seasick, took exception to being the butt of some rather laboured inter-service jokes at his expense from one of the Schlesien’s officers. Canaris had to discipline the officer to save his own career, after which the threat quickly passed.

The next crisis was more serious. Canaris liked to be in command, not under it – he was famous for his tetchy and truculent relations with his senior officers. In the late summer of 1934 his immediate superior complained to the head of the navy, Admiral Raeder, about Canaris’s behaviour. Raeder, who had already had to deal with the fallout from his difficult subordinate’s escapades in Spain and elsewhere, decided that enough was enough, and banished the troublemaker to command an isolated Napoleonic naval fortress at Swinemünde on the Baltic coast. Here Canaris whiled away his time cantering his horse along the deserted beach and waiting for something to come along.

In due course it did. In the last weeks of 1934, after an internal struggle between the army and the navy as to who should fill a vacancy at the head of the Abwehr, Canaris got the job. The fact that he was well known to be on very bad terms with Raeder may have helped. Although the Abwehr was officially the German foreign intelligence service, it was organisationally attached to the army general staff, making Canaris, though a senior naval officer, effectively an ‘adopted son’ of what was known at the time as the Reichswehr (the German army). Appointing Canaris, the Führer, an avid devotee of British spy novels, said, ‘What I want is something like the British Secret Service – an order, doing its work with passion.’

What Hitler saw in the forty-seven-year-old rear admiral (Canaris was promoted on his appointment) was a master right-wing conspirator who could be put to his service. What he didn’t see was the subtly independent spirit, sustained by a strong moral code and firm principles, that was hidden below.

The event which marked the greatest single service Wilhelm Canaris rendered his master during his early years as Abwehr chief began on 25 July 1936.

Returning that evening from Wilhelm Furtwängler’s triumphant production of Wagner’s Die Walküre at Bayreuth’s Festspiel opera house, Hitler was handed a personal letter from a largely unknown forty-three-year-old Spanish colonel called Francisco Franco Bahamonde. Franco, as he soon became known, was trapped in Morocco with 30,000 troops, unable to transport them over the Straits of Gibraltar to the Spanish mainland, where they were desperately needed to stem the advance of Republican forces threatening Seville, because of an embargo enforced by the Spanish navy. What he needed – and desperately – was aircraft to fly him and his men to the beleaguered Spanish city. He had appealed to Mussolini for help, but was refused. He now turned to Hitler.

Though the hour was late, Hitler called in Göring and the armed forces’ commander-in-chief, Werner von Blomberg. At the conclusion of discussions which ended in the early hours of the following morning, Hitler decided to throw his weight behind Franco. It now fell to Canaris to deliver the aid his master had promised. The one-time spy was in his element, using his old contacts in the Spanish government and secret police.

Twenty Junkers 52 transports (ten more than Franco had asked for) and six Heinkel 51 fighters, some flown by British pilots, were swiftly chartered through London – probably with the help of Basil Zaharoff – and despatched to Tetouan airfield in northern Morocco. This was followed by a massive build-up of military aid and arms from Berlin, including the deployment of the German Condor Legion, whose destruction of the defenceless little town of Guernica by bombers in April 1937 was to prove a harbinger of the fate of so many innocent towns and cities across Europe in the years to come. Canaris’s intervention tipped the balance of the Spanish Civil War in Franco’s favour. On 28 March 1939, Franco occupied Madrid. Three days later he was able finally to declare the victory that put an end to Spain’s long and bloody years of conflict.

Hitler’s gamble had paid off – he had now extended his influence to the westernmost limit of Europe. It had paid off for Canaris, too, who had achieved unrivalled influence and leverage with the Spanish dictator and his new government. Spain had become the Abwehr chief’s private playground and refuge – Franco even gave him a villa for his private use as a mark of his gratitude.

Like Ludwig Beck and Carl Goerdeler, Wilhelm Canaris had at first welcomed Hitler as a necessary evil to put Germany back on its feet. Also like his two soon-to-be fellow conspirators, he would become horrified by the blood, conflict and criminality of Hitler’s behaviour in power. But Canaris’s journey from naïve belief in Hitler to understanding the threat he posed to all that he himself stood for was a slow one – for which history has often criticised him.

The turning point in Canaris’s loyalty to his Führer finally came with the Fritsch affair in January 1938. This was the moment when it became evident to Canaris, as to so many of his fellow Germans, that Hitler’s demonic will would not be restrained by the norms of accepted behaviour, by the constraints of the law, or by the limits of democratic government. ‘If you are looking for one specific event that shook Canaris’s allegiance to Hitler, then there [in the Fritsch affair] you have it,’ commented his predecessor as chief of the Abwehr. Canaris’s subordinates in the Abwehr noted the change too: ‘Hitler’s criminal procedure against … Fritsch had a [profound] effect upon the Wehrmacht and the Abwehr. The result … split … opinion … The systematic organisation … among Hitler’s opponents began at this point. The final decision to work for the regime’s overthrow … by the [Canaris] group was … made [at this time],’ one reported after the war.

From this watershed onwards all the formidable energy and cunning of this part Hamlet, part moral mystic, part German patriot, part conspirator at the court of Cesare Borgia, would be directed towards undermining and frustrating his master, Adolf Hitler.

* Its full title was the Amtsgruppe Auslandsnachrichten und Abwehr.

4
Madeleine and Paul

The couple, he magnificent in the red-lined grey cape and gold-trimmed shako of a lieutenant colonel in the Austrian army, and she radiant in a spring dress, seemed like kingfishers flashing along a muddy river as they pushed their way through the tide of humanity pressing – panicking – to find a place on the train to Switzerland.

He led her to the platform and they said their goodbyes as lovers do when they are uncertain whether they will ever see each other again. Then he took her into a carriage, found her a seat amidst the crush, and left.

Three days previously, on 12 March 1938, she had watched the German troops marching into Vienna under brilliant skies. She had felt the tramp of their boots in the pit of her stomach, and heard their chants: ‘Today Vienna; tomorrow Prague; later Paris.’ And Madeleine Bihet-Richou, thirty-six years old, daughter of a French government official, native of Toulouse, divorcee, mother of a son, teacher of French in Vienna and for the last four years the lover of Erwin Lahousen Edler von Vivremont, the head of the Austrian Abwehr, had been frightened.

As Madeleine watched Hitler’s troops streaming into Vienna that day, her lover was with Wilhelm Canaris in Abwehr headquarters not far away. The admiral had dashed to the city by plane ahead of the forward troops in order to seize documents in Lahousen’s files. It would have been embarrassing, to say the least, if these had fallen into the hands of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, for they revealed the extent of cooperation between Canaris and his Austrian counterpart, which had included warnings and plans of the coming German invasion. With the German takeover imminent, Canaris asked Lahousen to gather as many of his most trusted colleagues as possible and join him in the Tirpitzufer in Berlin, adding, ‘Above all, don’t bring in any Nazis to our Berlin headquarters, bring me true Austrians, not thugs.’

Lahousen decided that it would be too dangerous to take Madeleine with him to Berlin – and too dangerous to leave her in Vienna without his protection. She would have to return to France and await events.

On the day of the invasion, Lahousen asked her to take a message to the French military attaché, Colonel Roger Salland, whom he had warned the previous night of the forthcoming German assault. She was to tell her countryman that Lahousen would have to ‘break off all contact with his French friend’. Salland was surprised to receive this message, and on questioning Madeleine he was even more surprised – and interested – to hear of her relationship with the chief of the Austrian Abwehr, who was now to take up a senior post in the German Abwehr in Berlin.

The weather over the three days of the Anschluss seemed to mock the tumult and terror of the times. A high-pressure zone centred near Vienna brought frosty champagne mornings, sparkling blue skies, balmy days and evenings that made the blood sing. The cherry trees in the city’s Hainburger Weg and Stadtpark hung heavy with blossom, as Jews were rounded up and gangs of uniformed paramilitaries hunted down their prey.

With Vienna reeling under the chaos of the German invasion, the two lovers prepared for their enforced separation. Lahousen, tall, athletic and, at forty, four years older than Madeleine, warned her that all those trying to flee were being robbed by the SS gangs roaming Austria; she should leave her valuables in his safekeeping, save for the few Austrian schillings she would need for the journey. The couple also agreed a plain-language code system they could use to keep in touch by telephone, letter and postcard. Finally he bought her a ticket to Switzerland, and they waited for the trains to start running again.

On the morning before her departure, making her way to the French embassy on a last visit, Madeleine was caught up in a vast crowd gathered in Heldenplatz and heard Hitler announce the end of Austria with the triumphant words, ‘The oldest eastern province of the German people shall be, from this point on, the newest bastion of the German Reich.’ Two hundred thousand voices hurled repeated Heil Hitlers back at the diminutive figure standing above them, alone on the balcony of the Hofburg Palace. Madeleine noted that among the women in the crowd were ‘several vulgar uneducated harridans wearing luxurious furs which a few days previously would have been the property of Jews’. She was glad she was leaving, even if it meant leaving her lover behind.

As Lahousen had predicted, the journey from Vienna’s Südbahnhof station to Switzerland was neither quick nor easy. At two in the morning Madeleine’s train, overcrowded well beyond its normal capacity, clanked to a stop at Salzburg station, where armed SS soldiers lined the platform. By the light of torches, the luggage in the baggage wagon was pillaged. Two young men with SS armbands and pistols entered Madeleine’s carriage, demanding papers. A Jew sitting opposite her had the contents of his wallet minutely examined before being left in peace; an Italian singer, mistaken for a Jew because of his olive skin, was badly man-handled, and an old man reduced to a state of quivering panic by the threats and insults.

Their indignities over, the passengers were allowed to continue their journey to the German–Swiss border crossing at Feldkirch, where they arrived at eight in the morning to find their train once again surrounded by a cordon of armed SS guards. Ordered onto the platform with their hand baggage, they were subjected to another, even more violent and intrusive, search.

‘Where is your money?’ an SS man demanded of Madeleine after rifling energetically through every item in her suitcase.

‘I knew you would steal everything,’ she replied coolly, ‘so I left my money in safe hands.’ For her cheek, she was forced to stand naked while her clothes were inspected. Many passengers, especially Jews, were arrested and taken away.

Finally the train was allowed to cross over the Rhine into Switzerland. In due course it reached Basel, whose cavernous, high-arched station hall, lit by blue stained-glass windows, was about to become the first refuge of freedom and safety for thousands fleeing their homelands in terror.

Madeleine arrived in Paris ten days later. The peace and order of the city seemed somehow unreal after the turbulence and violence of Vienna.

Four months later, on a July holiday in La Rochelle, Madeleine received an unexpected message from a certain Colonel Louis Rivet, who, though she did not know it at the time, was the head of French military intelligence. Would she be prepared to meet one of his representatives at a place of her choosing in the near future? A rendezvous was fixed at a hotel in Angoulême, where, sitting on the terrace in the summer sunshine, Madeleine Bihet-Richou was formally recruited to spy for her country. Her job was to pass on the information she received from her lover to her French intelligence ‘handling officer’, Captain Henri Navarre.

A few days before meeting Navarre, Madeleine had received a postcard from Lahousen. It was postmarked Madrid: ‘The time is coming. When can I write to you again? May God protect you and yours.’

And so it was that a line of communication which would over time develop into one of the most valuable spy channels of World War II was opened up between Erwin Lahousen, now a senior officer at Abwehr headquarters in the Tirpitzufer, and Hitler’s enemies. What would follow over the next two years was a stream of information which would prove extremely useful to the Allies and harmful to Hitler’s cause. It was information of a very specific and precise nature, including dates, names, plans and places, all passed in a professional manner from Erwin to Madeleine, not as part of their love affair, but under its cover. Speaking after the war, Madeleine said: ‘He knew nothing explicitly about the true nature of my secret mission [as a French spy]. I thought it preferable to say nothing which might trouble his conscience; we both understood that there were some things which were better left unsaid.’ Lahousen, however, knew well enough that she was working for French intelligence, and that the information he gave her would be passed on to the West, as he admitted in the full report on his activities which he provided to the Allies after the war.

So, if Lahousen knew the true destination of the information he was giving Madeleine, did Wilhelm Canaris know it too? That Lahousen sent Madeleine to the French attaché with her ‘non-message’ immediately after spending a whole day with Canaris, and accepting his invitation to go to Berlin, seems unlikely to be just a coincidence. To this should be added the fact that Canaris and Lahousen were very close, and also very professional. Each was to depend for his very life on the integrity and judgement of the other in the years to come. Given these factors, it seems safe to presume that Canaris knew perfectly well what his subordinate was doing – and that he approved of it.

Erwin Lahousen and the Austrian Abwehr were not the only people to know of the German invasion of Austria before it happened.

Two hundred and fifty kilometres north-west of Vienna, Czech intelligence in Prague were also aware of what was about to happen, thanks to German codes which had been passed to them by an Abwehr officer four months previously.

It had all begun on 8 February 1936, when a man of medium height in his mid-thirties, with a Prussian haircut, prominent eyes surrounded by smile lines, brown hair and slightly bowed legs, boarded the night train from Dresden to the Czechoslovak town of Brück, fifteen kilometres south of the Czech–German border. The following morning he breakfasted in the station buffet, posted a letter in a local postbox, and returned to Dresden on the next train.

So began the career of one of World War II’s most remarkable spies.

It is often possible to gauge the importance of a spy by the number of his or her aliases. Over the next seven years this man would be known as ‘R.V.’, ‘F.M.’, ‘Agent A54’, ‘Voral’, ‘Josef Koehler’, ‘François’, ‘René’, ‘Dr Holm’, ‘Dr Steinberg’, both ‘Eva’ and ‘Peter’ ‘Teman’, ‘Jochen Breitner’, ‘Emil Schwarz’, ‘Karl’, ‘Petr Tooman’ and ‘Traitor X’. Indeed, so elusive was he that his true identity was only established beyond doubt after the war. We now know him as Paul Thümmel, one-time master baker, founder member of the Nazi Party, holder of the party’s golden badge, friend of Himmler, and in 1936 a member of Wilhelm Canaris’s Abwehr station in Dresden, which was charged with spying on Czechoslovakia.

Two days after Thümmel posted his letter, an unmarked blue envelope arrived in the office of Major Josef Bartik of the Czechoslovak intelligence service in Victory Square, Prague. It was postmarked ‘Brück’, and hand-addressed in German to the Ministry of National Defence, Intelligence Section.

When Bartik opened the envelope he found the kind of offer a spy chief can only dream of:

The author of this letter offers his services to the Czech Intelligence Service …

After this greeting, the writer, who wrote in badly-spelt German and signed himself ‘F.M.’, listed the kind of intelligence to which he had access: German intelligence requirements for 1935 and 1936; details of German infantry, armour, air force, police, Gestapo and customs units; the new organisation table of all German intelligence and security structures; the names and addresses of all the senior personnel in the Gestapo, Abwehr and civil service; and the names and codenames of German intelligence officers working on Czechoslovakia, together with their agents, wireless networks and codes. Bartik concluded from this list that the would-be spy clearly had access to information well beyond the reach of a normal junior member of the Abwehr.

Having laid out his wares, ‘F.M.’ set his terms:

1. You shall never know my name

2. I will never meet you on Czech territory

3. If measures have to be taken as a result of the information I give you must use it with extreme care and avoid making the Germans suspicious of me

4. I want 15,000 marks in German currency in old notes, 4,000 marks of which should reach me within three weeks, as I have a debt to pay off.

He ended his letter in a way which left no doubt that he was a professional in the business of spying:

I shall await your reply, poste restante, each time in a different town of Saxony and Bavaria. Your reply to this letter will determine whether I pass my information to you, or offer it to French Intelligence. I also expect to receive, with your reply, an advance to buy a camera and settle other expenses. My offer is genuine and you need have no fear that your money will be wasted. I ask you to reply … by 14 February at the latest. This does not give you much time, but I am at present in Saxony, near the frontier.

On the face of it, this was a sensational offer – almost too good to be true. And that was the problem. ‘F.M.’ was what is known in the spying trade as a ‘walk in’, and they are often used as bait for a trap.

Major Bartik was a cautious man – and he had good reason to be. He had already used just such a ploy to fool Canaris into paying huge sums for totally worthless intelligence. This coup resulted in the Abwehr chief christening his Czech opponent, not without a degree of admiration, ‘the limping devil’ because of his effectiveness and a rolling gait caused by a First World War leg wound. Not long previously, moreover, one of Bartik’s officers had been kidnapped by the Germans at a meeting with an agent close to the Czech–German border. By the time Bartik finally got his man back, he had been so badly tortured by the Gestapo that he had to be confined to a mental institution for the rest of his life.

Bartik’s reply to F.M. was guarded:

Sir, Your communication interests me. Although you give no guarantees, I enclose the advance you asked for. The money is yours even if you fail to supply the information promised in your letter. The total sum will be paid within three weeks if you permit us to examine the material. Please reply to the following address: Karl Schimek, Prague XIX Dostalova 16.

Thus began the cautious minuet played out between spy-master and potential spy, as each tries to assess the balance of advantage and risk involved in a relationship. Finally, after much to-ing and fro-ing, Bartik agreed to meet F.M. at 8.30 on the evening of Saturday, 4 April at a deserted steam mill set amongst trees, fifty metres on the Czech side of the frontier with Germany and close to the village of Vejprty.

It was a cold night, with low cloud and misty rain blown along on a boisterous breeze. The wind buffeted a loose flap on the corrugated-iron roof of the mill, making it bang loudly. The street lamps hanging on wires in the middle of the village roads swung in wild circles, sending strange shadows lurching out in all directions. Two of Bartik’s men, armed with pistols, stood in a deep pool of blackness on one side of the mill, and a little way back, tucked discreetly in a copse of trees, were three cars containing Bartik and half a dozen of his men armed with automatics. The Vejprty church clock struck 8.30. Somewhere a dog barked, and very shortly afterwards a shape emerged from the trees and started up the road. He was sturdily built, walked with the gait of a young man, but cautiously, wore dark clothes and a beret, and carried a haversack.

Bartik’s two watchers left the shadows, and in a few paces had joined the man on the road.

‘Grüss Gott,’ said the stranger in a low voice.

‘Give the password,’ was the sharp retort.

‘Altvater.’

Bartik’s men escorted their charge to the Czech intelligence chief sitting in his car, its engine purring quietly amongst the trees. Safely ensconced in the back seat, the night traveller took several documents from his haversack and handed them to Bartik to examine under the feeble illumination of the car’s roof-light. The papers mostly dealt with the organisational structure of the Abwehr offices in Dresden, Munich and Breslau. But they also included some interesting local Gestapo reports. Bartik sent one of the waiting cars with the documents to the police station in Louny, seventy kilometres distant, where they were carefully photographed. Meanwhile, Bartik himself drove his new charge to an army barracks twenty kilometres away at Komotau for further debriefing. Over the next three hours Thümmel was closely questioned about his background, identity and motives. On the face of it, his story sounded convincing. He claimed to be ‘Jochen Breitner’, a former draughtsman and photographer who worked as a civilian in the Dresden Abwehr office, and said he was offering his services as a spy because he needed the money to marry a girl working as a clerk in the same office. It was his girl, he added, who had access to documents of interest because of her work in the Abwehr registry. His interrogators were impressed by ‘Breitner’s’ quick-wittedness, and swiftly concluded that they were dealing with the genuine article, a trained intelligence agent, not an agent provocateur. Bartik assigned his new agent the codename by which he would be known – ‘A54’. As the first streaks of dawn began to lighten the sky, the Czech spy chief dropped his new recruit back at the old steam mill and watched as he vanished into the trees in the direction of the German frontier.

Bartik’s haul from his new recruit that night was not high-grade. But it was interesting, for it indicated not just Thümmel’s seriousness, but also his access. Over the next months Thümmel proved himself a reliable, professional and productive source. One piece of information he gave Bartik in this period was of special value to the Czechs – full details of the network of spies, secret radios and codes which Canaris’s men were setting up amongst the German-speaking population of Czech Sudetenland. Thanks to deciphered messages from this source, Bartik was able to warn the Czech government a week or so before the Anschluss that SS regiments were gathering on the Austrian border, preparing to march on Vienna. Apart from this, Thümmel’s ‘intelligence product’ for the next year was in the main low-level, low-grade and local, consistent with his apparent position as a medium-level officer in one of Canaris’s many Abwehr outstations across Germany.

But then, suddenly, around the middle of 1938, with the Czech crisis deepening and the world edging towards war, the quality of Thümmel’s intelligence began to change dramatically. In May he told Bartik that the Germans were preparing a campaign of sabotage and disruption leading to a coup in the Sudetenland by the end of that month. It is very probable that these reports from Thümmel were the basis for an urgent message sent by Group Captain Graham Christie, one of Sir Robert Vansittart’s secret informants who operated from Prague, who reported that ‘Both SIS in Prague and Czech military intelligence report German troop manoeuvres on the border which … [point] to an early invasion.’ What followed was a scurry of intense diplomatic activity aimed at averting the coming ‘invasion’. The British ambassador in Berlin warned the head of the German Foreign Office of the gravity of the situation, and reinforced the message in a personal interview with Ribbentrop. Using a most un-Foreign-Office-like double negative, he told the German foreign minister that if Czechoslovakia was attacked, ‘His Majesty’s Government could not guarantee [not] … to become themselves involved’.

In fact the whole thing was an elaborate hoax. There was no German invasion planned for May. Hitler was not yet ready.

There is only one likely explanation for this seemingly bizarre prologue to the coming Czechoslovak crisis – Paul Thümmel had been used by Canaris, or someone very close to him at the top of the Abwehr, to pass false information in order to alert the wider world to Hitler’s plans to invade the Sudetenland in the near future. There is no evidence that Czech intelligence’s confidence in their new agent was shaken by the false alarm he had caused in May 1938 – probably because it served Czechoslovakia’s purposes too, and because they realised that it was intended to do so.

Hitler, however, was furious at being pre-empted, and at the diplomatic furore that ensued.

Now things began to move from elaborate charade to true high drama. Over June and July 1938 Thümmel provided Bartik with the secret order from Hitler instructing his generals to be ready for Operation Green – the invasion of Czechoslovakia – by 1 October. In early September Thümmel followed this with the full details of the invasion plan, including troop deployments, invasion points and other important information.

By now Bartik must have known that A54 was far, far more than just a low-level Abwehr draughtsman/photographer in Dresden. Paul Thümmel was needy, vain and greedy. But he was also a high-level spy with direct access to the most senior levels of the Tirpitzufer in Berlin.

5
Germany in the Shadow of War

By 1938 Goerdeler, Beck and Canaris, together with other Berlin conspirators, were gathering regularly under the cover of the prestigious Free Society for Scholarly Entertainment, colloquially known as the Mittwochgesellschaft (Wednesday Society) after the day of the week on which it met. Slowly the ad hoc resistance network against Hitler was becoming a formal structure gathered around the three men who would be its initial driving force.

Carl Goerdeler was the movement’s Thomas More: formidably intelligent, spiritually resolute, unshakeably optimistic and driven by a burning sense of mission and the conviction that reason always triumphs over evil. But the superiority of his intelligence made him insensitive to others, brittle in personal relationships, uncomfortable in his certainties and annoyingly didactic (his colleagues called him ‘Pfaf’, German slang for preacher). His utopianism rendered him completely devoid of the worldly wisdom and darker political skills necessary to deal with a tyrant, especially one so pathologically barren of moral values as Adolf Hitler.

If Goerdeler was More, then Canaris was Talleyrand, but with charm in place of a repugnant personality, and a powerful moral compass where Talleyrand had none. His subtle, flexible spirit was quite capable of operating simultaneously at two contradictory levels without losing its way; the perfect mind for a spy chief. Canaris preferred the tangential rather than the direct route for dealing with Hitler, delivering little successes to his master, the better subtly to confound his grander megalomaniac designs.

The third member of this trio, ‘the philosopher general’ Ludwig Beck, was a soldier’s soldier in the tradition of Frederick the Great. He admitted no contradiction between his profession and a life sustained by the values of the Enlightenment. He was the man everyone trusted and everyone looked up to – but for his moral and intellectual qualities, not his soldiering ones.

Post-war opinion has often mistakenly believed that Hitler led a united nation into war. This is far from the truth. By the mid-1930s most Germans supported what Hitler had done through his much-vaunted ‘triumph of the will’ to restore German pride, redress the humiliations of Versailles and bring order to the chaos of the Weimar years. They wanted him to continue making Germany strong again, but not – definitely not – at the price of another war. Public support for Hitler’s policy of toughness with Germany’s neighbours was in large measure due to the fact that he successfully portrayed himself in each of the pre-war crises as the peacemaker, not the warmonger. The popular mood in Germany was in favour of the new chancellor, but it was also deeply fearful, and strongly opposed to another war.

Among the institutions of the German state, the picture was rather more mixed.

Obviously those around Hitler knew of his plans for war. Most, such as Himmler and Ribbentrop, supported the Führer. But some, like Göring, were more cautious. Others, such as the minister of economics and president of the Reichsbank Hjalmar Schacht, hovered in the outer circles of the resistance, without ever quite allowing themselves to be drawn fully in.

In 1938, after a spell as ambassador to London, Joachim von Ribbentrop was appointed as Hitler’s new foreign minister. In both jobs he acted as the faithful echo to his master’s opinions and demands. The German Foreign Office over which he presided was, by contrast, a hotbed of active resistance to the Führer and his plans. One of the most prominent of the Foreign Office conspirators was Ernst von Weizsäcker. The father of a future German president, von Weizsäcker believed that Hitler’s foreign policy would inevitably lead to war. Like Canaris, Weizsäcker had served as a naval officer in the First World War. Now, as state secretary, he was the most senior Foreign Office official under Ribbentrop. Also like Canaris, Weizsäcker chose, at least initially, to oppose Hitler by indirect means, through what he described as ‘feigned cooperation’, while conspiring ‘with the potential enemy for the purpose of ensuring peace’. A number of more junior Foreign Office officials shared von Weizsäcker’s views, but were more direct in their opposition, and more deeply engaged in the resistance cause. These included Oxford-educated Adam von Trott zu Solz and the brothers Kordt, one of whom, Erich, held a senior position in Ribbentrop’s Berlin office, while the other, Theo, served in the German embassy in London.

When it came to the German armed forces, the Luftwaffe, being the newest arm and therefore unencumbered with traditions, was in the main loyal to Hitler, and played no part in the resistance. The navy, the Kriegsmarine, with the exception of Canaris, preferred to steer well clear of politics.

It was in the German army that the resistance found its leading figures. These came mostly from the senior ranks and those who had belonged to the professional army before the war. Drawn in large measure from the old aristocracy and trained in the Prussian tradition, the army was an institution like no other in the German state. Sustained by its aristocratic roots, it had – at least in its own eyes – a degree of independence from the government of the day. This included, in extremis, the presumed right to unilateral action as the guardian and physical expression of the German nation. In normal times the army’s leaders enjoyed a large degree of autonomy in the conduct of their operations, and an entitlement to be consulted and listened to when it came to foreign policy and statecraft. Underpinning all this was the Prussian officer code Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit.

Hitler had offended against all these values and beliefs. He was an uncouth parvenu who lacked manners, education, culture and any of the attributes of refinement which army officers so valued in themselves. He demanded allegiance to himself, not the state. He first shamed and then sacked a head of the army (Fritsch), and used the opportunity to take personal command. He had led an assault on the values of decency, and unleashed his supporters and secret police to commit appalling violence against German citizens. Worst of all, he was marching Germany to a war which most senior military figures believed would end in defeat and disaster.

The problem for the generals, however, was that the army (known as the Reichswehr before the Fritsch crisis and the Heer afterwards*) was no longer the same organisation as the one in which they had grown up.

The army’s unwillingness to protest at the horrors of the Night of the Long Knives – even though one of its most senior brethren had been amongst the murdered – and its quiet acquiescence during Beck’s ‘blackest day’, when all the generals meekly lined up to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler, had weakened both its influence and its self-respect. The army’s leaders may have been trained to take bold decisions in battle, but their indecisiveness and hesitancy on the field of politics was – and would continue to be – a fatal brake on their ability to halt or change what all of them believed was a coming catastrophe. A British politician described the Wehrmacht leadership in 1938 as ‘a race of carnivorous sheep’. Even allowing for the fact that this was an easy criticism to make when you did not have to risk your life to oppose your government, there was much truth in the cruel epithet.

The composition of the Wehrmacht was also different from its predecessor. The old professional army, along with the traditional comradeship of its officer corps, had been diluted and submerged under the vast expansion of the army’s numbers. The flood of new equipment, much of it of world-beating quality, along with the attention, promotions, medals – and even in some cases money and estates – which Hitler showered on the Wehrmacht and its senior officers, sapped the army’s will to do what it knew it should to stop the headlong rush to war.

Nevertheless, pre-war opposition to Hitler remained strong amongst the most senior ranks of the Wehrmacht, even to the point of contemplating a coup to remove him. In 1938, those who supported Ludwig Beck’s view that if Hitler could not be stopped, he would have to be removed, included the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, General Walther von Brauchitsch, and the majority of his senior generals, especially in the Reserve Army† based around Berlin.

Although active resistance to Hitler was variably scattered across most German institutions, its highest concentration was in the Abwehr, and particularly in the Tirpitzufer building (nicknamed the Fuchsbau, or Fox’s Lair), which was part of a large Berlin administrative complex called the Bendlerblock. This also housed the Naval Warfare Command and the headquarters of both the Wehrmacht and the Reserve Army. Though physically connected to the Bendlerblock, the closed enclave of Abwehr headquarters was in every other way a world apart. Here Wilhelm Canaris gathered together as many as he could of those who, like him, opposed Hitler. They formed such a tight-knit group that the Tirpitzufer was sometimes referred to in Berlin circles as ‘Canaris Familie GmBH’ (The Canaris Clan Inc.). Among those closest to the Abwehr chief were Hans Bernd Gisevius, a lawyer of formidable physical proportions whom his friends christened the ‘eternal plotter’; Hans von Dohnányi, a gifted young judge who was the son of the famous composer Ernst von Dohnányi and brother-in-law of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and the impetuous, fanatical Hitler hater and member of Pastor Niemöller’s congregation, Colonel Hans Oster. Sleek, fearless, cunning and a gifted amateur cello player, Oster, who made a habit of referring to Hitler as ‘the Swine’, was described by one contemporary as ‘an elegant cavalry officer of the old school, handsome, gallant with the ladies and contemptuous of the national socialist leaders. He was all for striking when the iron was hot; but the admiral had a more hesitant nature.’

Hans Oster

Canaris encouraged his senior lieutenants to do as he did, and recruit those sympathetic to the cause. His often-repeated instruction when it came to new recruits was ‘Being anti-Nazi is more important than any other quality.’ He also went out of his way to use the Abwehr as a refuge for Jews, placing them in posts outside Germany beyond the reach of the Gestapo, and claiming when challenged that they were essential to the Abwehr’s work in gathering foreign intelligence.

In the middle of the 1930s, the Abwehr over which Canaris presided as what one colleague referred to as the ‘grande éminence grise’ was probably the best foreign-intelligence service in the world. The French Deuxième Bureau, one of the most proficient interwar spy services in Europe, went through a series of convulsive reorganisations in the early 1930s which sapped its effectiveness. Britain’s MI6 was going through a difficult period too, after much of its network of intelligence stations across the Continent had been blown. A whole new British spy network was being constructed in great secrecy, and without the knowledge of anyone apart from the MI6 chief Sir Hugh Sinclair and his closest advisers. This was known, rather melodramatically, as the ‘Z Organisation’, after its creator ‘Colonel Z’, otherwise known as Claude Edward Marjoribanks Dansey. The Russian spy agencies, meanwhile, though still capable of effective work, were hobbled by the repeated waves of Stalin’s purges.

Canaris’s value to Hitler lay in the priceless information he was able to bring his chief, including, crucially, both the military plans and the political intentions of his foreign enemies. Britain and France, with their many high-level admirers of Hitler and their public policies of appeasement, were rich sources of information for Canaris’s Abwehr. Before the war Canaris boasted to Juan March (or was it a threat, given March’s dealings with the British?): ‘I have penetrated the [British] Naval Intelligence Division and MI6. So if any German, however important or discreet, felt tempted to work with the British, be sure I should find out.’ According to his own claim, Canaris had one very high-level source close enough to the British cabinet to enable him to assure Hitler in early 1936 that if Germany marched into the Versailles-protected demilitarised zone of the Rhineland, Britain would not energetically oppose this.

The Abwehr chief himself set the tone of his organisation from his Spartan office on the third floor of the Tirpitzufer. At one end of a room of modest proportions was Canaris’s desk, behind which were three full-length windows and a glazed door leading onto a small balcony looking over the Landwehr Canal. The desk was unadorned except for a routine scatter of papers, a model of his old cruiser the Dresden, and a small paperweight in the shape of the three monkeys – ‘See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.’ Otherwise the room was largely empty save for two or three chairs, a bookshelf full of books, many of them on music and the arts, and an iron camp bed on which Canaris would from time to time take a nap. Only three photographs hung on his walls – one of Franco, one of a handsome young Hungarian hussar, and one of his beloved dachshund Seppl, which took pride of place on the wall immediately opposite his desk.

The house near Berlin’s Schlachtensee in which Canaris lived with his wife Erika, their daughters Eva and Brigitte, a Polish cook, a Moroccan former prisoner of war who acted as the family servant, and two dachshunds, was frugal by the standards of high officials in Hitler’s Reich. It had six bedrooms but no grand reception rooms, a modest garden amongst trees and a shared fence with the Heydrichs next door.

Canaris’s style of management was relaxed. One of his senior colleagues described it as ‘passive leadership … under the pretence of the greatest apparent activity’. The Tirpitzufer was the only government building in Berlin where the familiar second-person pronoun ‘du’ was in common usage rather than the more formal ‘Sie’. Canaris (known affectionately as ‘old white head’ and ‘the little sailor’) was not a micro-manager. He set broad tasks, and then let his section chiefs get on with it. He hated bureaucracy, and often caused his subordinates despair by his inability to read and clear documents in a timely fashion. Erwin Lahousen wrote:

Canaris was the most difficult superior I have [ever] encountered. Contradictory in his instructions, given to whims, not always just [but] always mysterious, he had … intellectual and above all human qualities which raised him far above the military rubber stamps and marionettes that most of his colleagues and superiors were … He was not at all a technical expert in his work, rather he was a great dilettante. The underground circles that he … gathered around himself were as colourful and heterogeneous as his own personality. Men of all classes and professions, people whose horizons were broad and narrow, idealists and political adventurers, sober rationalists and imaginative mystics, conservative noblemen and Freemasons, theosophists, half-Jews or Jews, Germans and non-Germans … men and women – all of them united only [by their affection for him] and … by their resistance to Hitler and his system. This circle was by no means directed by secret orders. Rather it was an intellectual circle constantly influenced by slight or direct hints … which he guided by active intervention only in rare cases. Only a few initiates received concrete instructions, and even these were not always clear.

‘Old white head’ was also trusted and, it seems, genuinely loved by the more junior members of the Abwehr: ‘Admiral Canaris was absolutely trustworthy, clever, extremely gifted, honest, talented above [the] average and a person of sterling character,’ wrote one of his subordinates after the war. ‘He was well fitted for his position from a personal point of view. The things he [was] able to do for the Abwehr in the face of every obstacle could have been accomplished by no one else.’

But if Canaris was relaxed in his management style, he was utterly precise when it came to the standards he demanded of the Abwehr. His motto, borrowed from Germany’s great World War I spy chief Walter Nikolai, was ‘Le service de renseignements est l’apanage des gentilhommes. Si il est confié à d’autres, il s’écroule’ (The profession of spying should only be conferred upon gentlemen. If others get involved, disaster follows). He also discouraged an obsessional approach to the job: ‘An intelligence officer worthy of his profession,’ he once said to his staff, ‘should be in bed by ten. After that, all is nonsense and stupidity.’ While women spies were useful, in Canaris’s Abwehr any officer who slept with one would be dismissed. He made it clear to his officers that their job was exclusively to gather intelligence, and did not include assassination, torture, blackmail or coercion – such unpleasant things should be left to others. An ability to lie, on the other hand, was a prerequisite. ‘Lying is our trade,’ he instructed. ‘Lying is an art. If you cannot lie, there is no place for you in the Abwehr.’ The great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose role as the ‘pastor’ of the resistance is often underestimated, famously gave this pragmatic philosophy theological underpinning by proclaiming that God required a lie if this was the only way to protect a deeper truth against evil.

The Abwehr expanded explosively under Canaris’s leadership, growing from 150 staff when he took it over in early 1935, to 1,000 in 1937. By 1943 it had surged in size to 30,000, with an annual budget in today’s terms of close to £100 million. The organisation was based around four ‘operational sections’: Section I, dealing with secret intelligence; Section II, sabotage and disruption; Section III, counter-intelligence; and a foreign department which took responsibility for overseas relations, including political and military evaluation. There was also an ‘administration’ section called ‘Section Z’. On the surface this dealt with mundane administrative matters such as archives, legal affairs, personnel and technical equipment. But Section Z, commanded by the Hitler-hating Hans Oster, was also the home of ‘the Abwehr within the Abwehr’ – a special and highly secret cell whose job it was to frustrate Hitler’s plans and undermine, first his march to war, and later, as things developed, his chances of victory. Known as ‘the Oster circle’ and ‘the Civilians’ – because of Oster’s habit of wearing civilian clothes (despite Canaris’s disapproval) and the culture of informality within his unit – Section Z was treated with some suspicion, even hostility, inside the Abwehr. In time it would become the nerve-centre of the entire high-level German conspiracy against Hitler.

One further addition hugely extended the power and reach of Canaris’s organisation. Though operating under a separate command, a military unit called the Brandenburg Division was attached to and tasked by the Abwehr. The ‘Brandenburgers’, as they were called, were arguably the first ever special forces unit. Unlike British special forces units, which in the early years of the war were used for pinprick raids, they were deployed, like special forces today, exclusively on strategic tasks. Multilingual, multinational (they included many Russian and Caucasian troops), highly mobile and superbly trained and equipped, their job was to operate behind enemy lines ahead of an invading force, disrupting communications and sabotaging bridges and command structures, in much the same way as Britain’s SAS did in the latter stages of the war in Europe.

As 1937 drew to a close, Hitler’s successful occupation of the Rhineland without, as Canaris had predicted, any serious international opposition or criticism, emboldened the Führer to annex Austria. Again, there was little reaction from Britain beyond a diplomatic shrug of resignation. Surely this would now be enough, London hoped, to satisfy the German dictator’s appetite. That was certainly prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s view. Writing to his sister Ida at about this time, he commented that if Hitler was appeased, then sooner or later he would become ‘sated, indolent and quiescent’.

But of course the opposite was the truth. Hitler’s generals understood what the rest of the world should have known: that victories do not satiate a tyrant’s appetite, they sharpen it. As Carl Goerdeler put it, presciently, ‘You know, a dictator must always be bringing along for breakfast a new kill if he is to thrive and survive. This time it is Austria. Next it will be Czechoslovakia, and so on and on.’

In April 1938 Goerdeler returned, accompanied by his wife and daughter, to London, where in two meetings with Vansittart he explained Hitler’s secret plans for the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and expatiated at length on the hostility of the Wehrmacht’s generals towards the Führer. But, following the line set by Chamberlain, Vansittart dismissed this as ‘treasonable talk’. There was also supposed to be a meeting between Goerdeler and Churchill, but this fell through at the last minute due to a misunderstanding over time and place.

Hitler’s secret instruction to his generals in November 1937 that they should prepare for an attack on Czechoslovakia in the following year now began to dominate the work of the planners in Berlin. Amongst the generals, however, there was consternation. This would be bound to lead to war, and that could ultimately end only in catastrophe for Germany. There was a united view that this time Hitler must be diverted; if this proved impossible, he should be removed – if necessary by force. Canaris issued instructions that Abwehr reports to Hitler should exaggerate the strength of the Czech defences, and stress the probability that Britain, France and Russia would go to war if Hitler attacked. On 30 May 1938 Ludwig Beck warned Hitler, ‘the campaign against Czechoslovakia can be very successful, but Germany will lose the war’. He followed this up on 3 June by sending the Führer a courageous memo opposing the planned invasion on military grounds. On 16 July he sent another, even more forthright, memo warning that an attack on Czechoslovakia would involve war with Britain and France. Finally, on 18 August, six weeks before the planned invasion, Beck resigned his post as chief of the army general staff and accepted a posting to command the German First Army on the Western Front. From his new position he opened up a secret and traitorous dialogue with foreign contacts in Basel.

It was around this time that Beck, Canaris, Goerdeler and their fellow conspirators concluded that the only way to stop the coming war was to send secret emissaries to European capitals – especially London and Paris. As Canaris put it to his friend Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, ‘England must lend us a sea-anchor if we are to ride out this storm.’

* The term Wehrmacht was used for the entire armed forces.

† Known as the Ersatzheer, this had the responsibility of training soldiers to reinforce first-line divisions. Sometimes referred to as ‘the Replacement Army’.

6
The Emissaries

Suddenly they came upon a clearing bathed in sunshine. They stopped at the edge, astounded by the light. It seemed to them a symbol of hope, in contrast to the close-hemmed gloom of the trees and the heaviness of their spirits.

The day, 6 August 1938, was stiflingly hot and humid, even by the standards of a Baltic summer. It was evening now, and an offshore breeze blew softly through the stands of silver birch, causing their leaves to shiver and dance in the failing light.

The three men – two Germans and an Englishman – had been walking for nearly two hours. Their conversation had been earnest and conducted in confidential tones, despite their being out in the open and away from prying eyes and ears.

A few days earlier, Carl Goerdeler had sent a message to a mutual contact in Britain asking for an urgent meeting. Sir Robert Vansittart – now, after Anthony Eden’s resignation over appeasement, chief adviser to the new British foreign secretary Lord Halifax – decided that the man to go and see him should be A.P. Young, the host of Goerdeler’s dinner at the National Liberal Club almost a year earlier.

That afternoon, after a brief stay in Berlin, Young arrived at the station of the Baltic seaside resort of Rauschen-Düne. Stepping out onto the platform in a swirl of steam, sand and dust, he spotted the imposing, heavily-built figure of Goerdeler standing discreetly in the shade of the station awning. The two men walked the short distance to Goerdeler’s summer holiday house, a substantial, steep-roofed chalet-style building with shuttered windows set amongst trees and rhododendron bushes. A family supper with Goerdeler’s much-loved brother Fritz, his wife Anneliese and the couple’s two teenage sons followed. Afterwards, at Goerdeler’s suggestion, the three men set off for an evening walk through the woods, beyond the reach of possible Gestapo eavesdroppers.

Goerdeler’s message was sombre. Hitler was determined on war, and would march on Czechoslovakia within weeks. The German dictator had concluded that Britain and France were weak, and bluffing. They would, he was certain, not react if he occupied the German-speaking Czech Sudetenland. He would get away with it, just as he had done over his recent annexation of Austria.

Goerdeler had good news, too. The German public did not want war. Hitler’s closest advisers, from Himmler to Göring, were also against it, and with the economy in dire straits and army reservists only recently called up, Germany was not yet ready for conflict. The generals too were opposed. The message Goerdeler asked Young to transmit to London was that it was Hitler who was bluffing. If Britain stood up to him, then a powerful group, led by Goerdeler himself and including many of Germany’s top industrialists, a significant number of its Foreign Office officials and all of its most senior generals, would remove the dictator in a putsch, and replace him with a government which was ready to move away from the path to war. ‘A revolution is no place for children,’ Goerdeler added darkly, making it clear that the planned coup would be a violent one, if that was what was needed. This was the turning point, Goerdeler insisted. The German opposition to Hitler was ready to act, if Britain and France would do so too.

On his way back to London on 9 August, Young wrote an extensive report on his conversations for Vansittart, who passed it on to both prime minister Chamberlain and foreign secretary Halifax.

Six days after Young’s return to London, at 7.15 a.m. on 17 August, a large black saloon carrying the insignia of German Army Supreme Headquarters cruised past the imposing monumental façade of Berlin’s newly-constructed Tempelhof Airport. It swung into a side entrance which was already open and waiting for its arrival. It did not stop for checks of papers or personnel, but swept on, bypassing customs and immigration, to the steps of the Hansa Airlines 0800 flight from Berlin, via Amsterdam, to London. The Junkers 52 was parked under the airport’s huge semi-circular cantilevered roof, waiting for its passengers to arrive. Two men got out of the limousine, one in the full uniform and regalia of a Wehrmacht general, the other a middle-aged civilian with a cadaverous frame, a receding hairline, and an ascetic face with hard, gimlet-grey eyes which matched his suit. A close observer might have noted from their body language that there was an unusual closeness between the two, for they were in fact uncle and nephew. The general accompanied his charge to the aircraft steps. The captain, in uniform and cap, welcomed the older man with a salute, led him up the steps and settled him into his seat before the other passengers boarded. His task over, the general returned to his car, which swung round and sped away.

Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin

The subject of all this preferential treatment was a Prussian landowner called Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, and he too was a secret envoy. A long-time and vocal opponent of the Nazis, who had narrowly escaped being murdered on the Night of the Long Knives and was closely watched by the Gestapo, Kleist-Schmenzin was not travelling under his own name, but under a false identity provided for him, complete with documents and sterling currency, by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.

Von Kleist-Schmenzin’s mission to London had been well prepared. His task, like that of Goerdeler, was to warn the highest echelons of the British government of Hitler’s imminent plans to invade the Sudetenland, and to inform them on behalf of Hitler’s most senior generals of the putsch they were preparing to launch if Britain would commit to defending Czechoslovakia. Kleist-Schmenzin had received his instructions a few days before his departure from Ludwig Beck: ‘Bring me certain proof that England will fight if Czechoslovakia is attacked and I will make an end of this regime.’

The Gestapo may not have been aware of Kleist-Schmenzin’s travel plans. But London was.

On the day before his departure, the appeasement-supporting British ambassador to Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, sent a coded telegram to Whitehall reporting that Kleist-Schmenzin would be travelling to the British capital claiming to represent the ‘moderates of the German Staff’. Henderson advised: ‘It would be unwise for [him] to be seen in official quarters.’

What the ambassador did not know was that he was already too late to block the secret visitor’s access to senior officials in London.

Two days before his departure Kleist-Schmenzin had asked for a meeting with the Central European correspondent of London’s News Chronicle, the well-informed and well-connected Ian Colvin. It was not their first encounter. Three months previously the two men had met in Berlin’s fashionable Casino Club. Colvin would write of that meeting: ‘For the first time, I heard spoken in a whisper the name of the man who was protecting them [the resistance] and furthering their efforts: the name of Canaris.’ During their earlier discussion Kleist-Schmenzin had asked Colvin’s advice about how to reach senior British politicians, explaining that Canaris was looking for a means to make direct high-level contact with them, but did not want to go through the normal intelligence channels. ‘I must warn you against the British Secret Service for several reasons,’ Canaris had said. ‘Should you work for them it will most probably be brought to my notice, as I think I have penetrated here and there. They will want to send messages about you in cipher and from time to time we can break a cipher. Your names would appear in files and registers. That is bad too. It would be difficult to overlook such activities in the long run. It has also been my experience that the British Secret Service will reward you badly – if it is a matter of money, let me tell you, they do not reward services well, and if they have the least suspicion, they will not hesitate to betray you to me or to my colleagues of [Himmler’s] Reich Security Service.’

This time, Colvin’s meeting with von Kleist-Schmenzin took place not in a well-known Berlin club, but in a dimly-lit backstreet bar in Bendlerstrasse, close to army headquarters. The German had something important to say ‘in a few short sentences, any one of which would have been enough to send him to instant execution’. Kleist-Schmenzin informed Colvin of the purpose of his forthcoming visit to the British capital: ‘The Admiral [Canaris] wants someone to go to London … We have an offer to make to the British and a warning to give them.’ That night Colvin wrote from the Adlon Hotel to his fellow journalist and friend, Winston Churchill’s son Randolph: ‘A friend of mine will be staying at the Park Lane Hotel from the 18th to the 23rd. I think it essential he should meet your father. Please put nothing about him in your column or mention him to any of your colleagues. The visitor will have information of great interest to your father.’

On his arrival at Croydon Aerodrome, Kleist-Schmenzin was observed to board a coach for London, where he booked into the Park Lane Hotel. The following afternoon the German visitor, describing himself as ‘a conservative, a Prussian and a Christian’, met Sir Robert Vansittart for tea – ‘[But not] I need hardly add … at the Foreign Office,’ Vansittart was careful to explain in his subsequent report.

The Foreign Office mandarin was impressed with Kleist-Schmenzin: ‘He spoke with the utmost frankness and sincerity … [He] has come out of Germany with a rope around his neck, staking his last chance of life on preventing [the war],’ he reported, adding: ‘Of all the Germans I saw, Kleist had the stuff in him for a revolution against Hitler.’

Over tea, Kleist-Schmenzin told Vansittart that war was now ‘a complete certainty’ unless Britain acted. ‘Hitler has made up his mind … the mine is to be exploded [after 27 September] … All [the generals] … without exception … are dead against the war. But they will not have the power to stop it unless they get encouragement from outside. We are no longer in danger of war, but in the presence of the certainty of it … [But if Britain acted to defend Czechoslovakia] it would be the prelude to the end of the [Hitler] regime. [His army friends were unanimous] … they had taken the risk and he had taken the risk of coming out of Germany at this crucial moment … but they alone could do nothing [if Britain did nothing].’

The following day, 19 August, Kleist-Schmenzin was driven south through the ripening fields and orchards of Kent to Chartwell House, where Winston Churchill, out of government, was struggling to catch up on a missed deadline for his magnum opus, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. The two met that afternoon in the room Churchill had set aside for important visitors. It was a space that would have been very familiar to a Prussian with an ancient lineage, with its heavy dark-oak carved furniture and Gothic-style beamed ceiling hung with a banner bearing the Churchill coat of arms. In one corner, where the sunlight streamed through a south-facing latticed window, was a table cluttered with family photographs. Close by, two comfortable chairs were drawn up in front of an Elizabethan fireplace. Churchill’s son Randolph sat to one side on an upright chair, taking notes in shorthand.

‘Kleist started by saying that he thought an attack on Czechoslovakia was imminent and was most likely to occur … [before] the end of September,’ Randolph scribbled. ‘The generals are for peace … and … if only they could receive a little encouragement they might refuse to march … Particularly was it necessary to do all that was possible to encourage the generals who alone had the power to stop war … In the event of the generals deciding to insist on peace, there would be a new system of government within forty-eight hours … [which would] end the fear of war.’

Winston Churchill understood very well what Kleist-Schmenzin was telling him. He would later write: ‘There can be no doubt of the existence of a plot … and of serious measures taken to make it effective.’

Kleist-Schmenzin seems to have asked Churchill for a personal assurance he could take to Ludwig Beck in Berlin that Britain would act militarily if Hitler attacked Czechoslovakia, for at one point Churchill broke off the conversation to ring Halifax. The foreign secretary agreed the outlines of a letter which Churchill could secretly send to Kleist-Schmenzin in the near future, to ‘re-assure his friends’ that Britain would defend the Czechs.

Travelling back to London through the failing light of an English summer’s evening, with Churchill’s promise ringing in his ears, Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin must have felt that his dangerous trip had been worth it – he had what Beck and his friends in Germany had asked him to get: a clear commitment that London would act if Hitler moved against Czechoslovakia. Now they could get on with planning the coup to remove the dictator and prevent the coming war.

The next day, Churchill sent the record of his meeting to prime minister Chamberlain, foreign secretary Halifax, Halifax’s predecessor Anthony Eden, and shortly afterwards to the French prime minister, Édouard Daladier.

Chamberlain was again dismissive. In a note to Halifax he wrote that Kleist-Schmenzin and his friends ‘remind me of the Jacobites at the Court of France in King William’s time and I think we must discount a good deal of what he says’. But a double negative in the last sentence of the prime minister’s minute seems to betray some uncertainty: ‘Nevertheless I confess to some feeling of uneasiness and I don’t feel sure that we ought not to do something … Inform [Sir Nevile] Henderson … and tell him … to make some warning gesture.’

A few days later a diplomat at the British embassy in Berlin discreetly slipped an unaddressed envelope to Ian Colvin, who passed it on to Kleist-Schmenzin in the backstreet bar in Bendlerstrasse where the two men had met before the German emissary’s departure for London.

Inside the envelope a letter from Churchill read:

My Dear Sir,

I have welcomed you here as one who is ready to run risks to preserve the peace of Europe … I am sure that the crossing of the frontier of Czecho-slovakia … will bring about a renewal of the world war. I am as certain as I was at the end of July 1914 that England will march with France and … the United States … the spectacle of an armed attack by Germany upon a small neighbour … will rouse the whole British Empire and compel the gravest decisions.

Do not, I pray be misled upon this point. Such a war, once started, would be fought out like the last, to the bitter end …

As I feel you should have some definite message to take back to your friends in Germany … I believe that a peaceful solution of the Czecho-slovak problem would pave the way for the true reunion of our countries on the basis of the greatness and the freedom of both.

In time to come, Churchill’s brief note would fall into the wrong hands, and become a death warrant for Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin and many of his colleagues.

Three weeks after Kleist-Schmenzin’s visit to London, on Monday, 5 September, a young woman also checked in at Tempelhof ostensibly on a short visit to the British capital. Her luggage was light, but her mind bore a very important message. This was not the first text too secret to be written down which Susanne Simonis, the European correspondent for the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, had memorised for her cousin Erich Kordt, the head of foreign minister Ribbentrop’s personal office – but it was the most important. For this was a piece of secret information to be passed to the very top of the British government by Kordt’s brother Theo, a senior diplomat at the German embassy in London – and it had the potential to avoid a world war. The message was that a high-level ‘conspiracy against Hitler exists in Germany and that a firm and unmistakable attitude by Britain and France would give the conspirators their opportunity [to remove the Führer] on the day that the German mobilization [for the invasion of Czechoslovakia] is announced’.

The day after Simonis’s arrival in London, Theo Kordt was smuggled into 10 Downing Street by the ‘secret’ door which leads from Horse Guards Parade into the prime minister’s garden. From there he was led up to the office of Chamberlain’s personal emissary to Hitler, Sir Horace Wilson. Wilson, who was also a convinced appeaser, listened attentively to Kordt’s message, and his assurance that if Britain and France stood up to Hitler on Czechoslovakia, the Wehrmacht would depose him at the instant he ordered the invasion. Wilson, who had met Kordt previously and trusted him, was impressed, and asked the German diplomat to return the following day to meet the foreign secretary, Halifax.

After listening to Kordt’s message the following evening, Halifax said he would do his best to ensure that the prime minister was informed – and perhaps some other cabinet colleagues too. Kordt was experienced enough to know that this was the kind of politeness the English use to cover lack of enthusiasm. He was shown back to the Downing Street garden door, and walked out onto Horse Guards Parade and into the London night puzzled and worried by Halifax’s muted response. And well he might have been. For Halifax could not tell his visitor that his master, Neville Chamberlain, had already decided not to resist Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland, but to yield to them. ‘We could not be as candid with you as you were with us,’ Halifax was later to tell Kordt – long after the damage was done.

On Sunday, 11 September, four days after Kordt’s second backdoor visit to Downing Street, Vansittart’s secret emissary A.P. Young flew to Switzerland for another meeting with Carl Goerdeler in Zürich, once again at the German’s urgent request. The two met in the St Gotthard Hotel and strolled to Zürich’s Belvoir Park, where they spent two hours walking in the autumn sunshine among the flowerbeds and carefully manicured lawns, discussing the coming war and how it could now be stopped only by a combination of strong British and French action, backed by a coup to remove Hitler. At Zürich station that evening, as the world teetered towards the brink of war, Goerdeler waved goodbye to Young with the words, ‘Remember always that we shall win the last battle.’

7
‘All Our Lovely Plans’

In the early hours of Wednesday, 28 September 1938 an armed raiding party, nicknamed ‘Commando Heinz’ after its leader, gathered in the Hohenzollerndamm headquarters of the Wehrmacht’s Third Army Corps, responsible for the defence of Berlin. The unit consisted of fifty or sixty assorted desperadoes, ranging from Abwehr and Wehrmacht officers, to armed civilians and civil servants, to student leaders. Under the command of an ex-Nazi thug and serial revolutionary called Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, they were ready for action and equipped with weapons supplied on the instructions of Admiral Canaris. ‘The silence of pre-dawn Berlin,’ a commentator wrote later, ‘was broken by the click-click-click of ammunition being loaded into [the magazines of] carbines and automatic weapons.’

Commando Heinz’s orders were to arrest Adolf Hitler at the moment he gave the order to invade Czechoslovakia at two o’clock that afternoon, and take him to a nearby hospital. There the dictator would be seen by the psychiatrist Dr Karl Bonhoeffer, the father of the great theologian, who would declare the Führer insane and commit him to a lunatic asylum. But some in the group did not intend to let Hitler get that far. They had secretly sworn to kill him in the confusion of the arrest.

The conspirators’ task was, on the face of it, not a difficult one. Only fifteen SS soldiers guarded Hitler in his Chancellery at any one time. The great double doors of the building would be secretly unlocked from the inside by one of the Foreign Office conspirators so as to give the raiding party easy access. There were plenty of reinforcements ready to come to the raiders’ assistance if required. In the Foreign Office and the Interior Ministry, anti-Nazi diplomats and officials had been issued with arms, and were ready to play their part. Other reserve forces made up of small groups of officers were waiting in private houses and apartments across the German capital, like the group holed up in the ornate white-stuccoed art-nouveau block of flats at Eisenacher Strasse 118, close to the government quarter. One of the plotters told his brother over dinner that evening, ‘Tonight Hitler will be arrested.’

There were good reasons for this confidence. Among those backing the putsch were the chief of the German staff and his predecessor, the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, the political and operational leaders of the criminal police, the commander of the Berlin military district and one of his subordinates, the state secretary of the Foreign Office and his chief of ministerial office, the president of the Reichsbank, a senior official in the German embassy in London, another in the Department of Justice, and Hitler’s personal interpreter.*

The plot had been meticulously prepared.

Two weeks earlier, on 14 September, after several days spent carrying out a detailed reconnaissance of all the key sites, there was a full paper rehearsal of the coup plans, which incorporated the seizure of key Berlin police stations, an armed takeover of the state wireless transmitters, telephone installations and repeater stations, and the occupation of Hitler’s Chancellery and key ministries. When the exercise ended, General Erwin von Witzleben, the commander of the Berlin garrison and the coup’s de facto leader, declared that all preparations had been completed. They were ready. The moment Hitler gave the order to invade the Sudetenland, they would make their move.

But in all his careful preparations, Erwin von Witzleben had missed one crucial factor – the British prime minister.

On the evening of 14 September, as the coup rehearsal concluded in Berlin, Neville Chamberlain, in London, suddenly stunned everyone, including his own cabinet and Hitler (who was ‘flabbergasted’), by announcing that he would fly to the Führer’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps for talks the following day.

It is important at this point to record the precise sequence of events.

As a result of the messages from Goerdeler in early August and mid-September, and of the visit of Kleist-Schmenzin to London in mid-August, we can presume that the British government must have known of the existence of the plot against Hitler, although we cannot be certain that this knowledge extended to No. 10 and the prime minister. However, after Theo Kordt’s backdoor visit to No. 10 and his discussion with Halifax on the evening of 7 September, no such uncertainty is possible. From this moment onwards No. 10 knew of the plot, and it is overwhelmingly likely that the prime minister knew of it too. It is a matter of record that, at least from the end of August, Neville Chamberlain and his closest advisers had been secretly considering a personal last-minute appeal to Hitler. But the fact that this took place – stunning everyone, including the cabinet – just eight days after the Kordt visit raises the strong suspicion that the British prime minister’s sudden visit to Berchtesgaden was, if only in part, designed to pre-empt the coming coup so as to give Chamberlain the peacemaker his time upon the stage.

Erwin von Witzleben

Whatever the truth of this, Chamberlain’s unexpected flight in a specially chartered aircraft (it was his first time on a plane) to join Hitler at Berchtesgaden left the plotters crestfallen and discomfited. They had no option but to put their plans on ice and wait for developments.

In the talks that followed, Chamberlain privately conceded the Sudetenland to Hitler, subject to a plebiscite in the disputed territory and a number of other weak safeguards. Afterwards the British prime minister gave his impressions of the meeting and of Hitler in a letter to his sister, which concluded: ‘I thought I saw in his face … that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.’ Returning to London, Chamberlain met with the French and persuaded them to help pressure the Czechs into accepting the deal, despite the fact that it would effectively dismember their country. Eventually, the Czech president Edvard Beneš had no option but to cave in.

If Chamberlain expected a welcome from his cabinet on his return from Berchtesgaden, he did not get one. Their meeting of 17 September was fractious, and treated the prime minister’s ‘peace deal’ with deep scepticism. Even Halifax, Chamberlain’s right-hand man in the business of appeasement, expressed his opposition: ‘Hitler has given us nothing and is dictating terms as if he had won a war,’ he said. Duff Cooper, the First Lord of the Admiralty, was even blunter, warning the cabinet of the ‘danger of being accused of truckling to dictators and offending our best friends’. Britain should, he said, ‘make it plain that we would rather fight than agree to an abject surrender’.

But Chamberlain would not be diverted. Still determined to push through his peace plan, on 22 September he flew back to see Hitler at Bad Godesberg, near Bonn, expecting to sign the final agreement that would settle the Czech crisis.

He had another shock waiting for him. Instead of signing the deal, Hitler upped his demands with a new set of conditions for ‘peace’, accompanied by an ultimatum requiring the full and unconditional withdrawal of Czech forces from the Sudetenland by 1 October. Chamberlain was forced to fly home that evening crestfallen and empty-handed.

On 26 September the prime minister’s adviser Horace Wilson was despatched back to Berlin as Chamberlain’s ‘personal envoy’. His instructions were to deliver two messages. The first was the carrot: there should be a meeting between the Germans and the Czechs ‘with a view to settling by agreement the way in which the territory [of the Sudetenland] could be handed over’. The second, and more important, part of Wilson’s message was the stick: if Hitler rejected this course of action and invaded, then he should be clear that France’s treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia meant she would have to defend her ally with force, and Britain would join her.

Wilson met Hitler at 5 p.m. that day. The Führer, preparing for a big speech in the evening, was in a foul temper. As soon as he heard Chamberlain’s proposal for more talks he flew into a towering rage, shrieking that there would be no talks unless the Czechs first accepted his terms as outlined at Bad Godesberg. He followed this outburst by issuing another ultimatum – now he must have the Czechs’ answer by 2 p.m. on 28 September – just two days away.

The Führer abruptly terminated the meeting before Chamberlain’s envoy had the opportunity to deliver the crucial second part of the prime minister’s message, containing the threat of a British and French response in kind if Hitler chose the path of military action instead of talks.

The Berlin conspirators were delighted with this outcome. Now, at last, there was a precise date and time for the coup, and it was a mere two days away. ‘Finally we have clear proof that Hitler wants war, no matter what. Now [if he invades] there can be no going back,’ Hans Oster commented to a friend. The carefully laid plans to remove Adolf Hitler were reinstated, and the key coup plotters began moving into position.

On the morning of the next day, 27 September, there were the first signs of a stronger British line: the Royal Navy was ordered to move to battle stations. Hitler, taken aback, said to Göring, ‘The English fleet might shoot after all.’

At midday Wilson, at Chamberlain’s insistence, returned to see the Führer, this time finally giving the strong warning that the prime minister had asked him to deliver the previous day: if Hitler attacked, France would act and Britain would follow.

According to insiders in Berlin, Hitler had already started to wobble. At 9 a.m. Carl Goerdeler sent an urgent telegram to Vansittart: ‘Don’t give away another foot. Hitler is in a most uncomfortable position …’

But then the rollercoaster lurched again.

Whatever ‘tough’ message was meant by the mobilisation of the British fleet and the warning Wilson delivered to Hitler, what the British prime minister said in his now infamous BBC broadcast to the nation at 6.15 that evening could not have been read by the German leader as anything other than a signal that Britain would not act if Czechoslovakia was invaded:

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel that has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war … However much we may sympathise with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbour, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account. If we have to fight it must be on larger issues than that.

All eyes now focused on Hitler’s deadline – 2 p.m. the following day. The coup plotters and their forces were on hairtrigger alert, and the world held its breath.

The morning hours of 28 September ticked past in much scurrying to and fro between the various groups of plotters in their secret locations across Berlin. Von Witzleben calmed one of his colleagues who tried to persuade him to launch early: ‘It won’t be long now.’ At 11 a.m. Erich Kordt got a call from his brother Theo at the German embassy in London informing him, on apparently good information, that Britain would indeed declare war if Hitler launched his armies at 2 p.m.

What Theo Kordt did not know, however, was that an hour earlier, at 10 a.m., Chamberlain had rung the British ambassador in Rome and instructed him to get a message to Mussolini asking the Italian dictator to intervene ‘in the last useful hours to save peace and civilization’. The ambassador swiftly passed the message on to Il Duce. At 11 a.m., as Erich Kordt was being assured that Britain was ready to go to war at two o’clock that afternoon, Mussolini, who had been something of a bystander up to now, was ringing the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Bernardo Attolico: ‘Go to the Führer and tell him, considering that I will be by his side, whatever may happen, that I advise him to delay the start of hostilities for twenty-four hours. In the meantime I intend to study what can be done to resolve the problem.’

Shortly afterwards a second message from No. 10 arrived at the British embassy in Rome instructing the ambassador to get a message to the Italians ‘suggesting Mussolini supports Chamberlain’s proposal for a conference in Germany involving Italy, Germany, France and Britain to solve the Sudetenland problem’. A little later a telegram arrived in Downing Street from the ambassador in Rome saying that Mussolini had agreed to Chamberlain’s proposal, and would recommend it to Hitler.

As all this was going on, a constant stream of visitors flowed in and out of Hitler’s Chancellery. At 11.15 the French ambassador, the luxuriantly moustachioed André François-Poncet, speaking on behalf of both Paris and London and unaware of what had been happening between London and Rome, urged Hitler to accept Chamberlain’s proposal for more talks. Twenty-five minutes later a portly, stooped figure emerged from a taxi. Bald, bespectacled, sweating, breathless and without his hat, ambassador Attolico scurried in through the Chancellery doors, bearing the message from Mussolini. Hitler broke off from seeing François-Poncet to meet the new arrival. ‘Il Duce informs you,’ Attolico said, his high-pitched voice rising several notes from the tension, ‘that whatever you decide, Führer, Fascist Italy stands behind you. Il Duce is, however of the opinion that it would be wise to accept the British proposal and begs you to refrain from mobilisation.’ Finally, with just two hours to go to the 2 p.m. deadline, Hitler, the man whose reputation had been built on ‘the triumph of the will’, backed down, announcing that, instead of invading Czechoslovakia, he would accept talks at Munich.

Chamberlain heard the news in the House of Commons at a little before 4.20 that afternoon, and immediately announced he would go to Munich the following day. There was a moment of stunned silence, and then the Commons chamber erupted with shouts of elation and joy.

And so there was no order to invade, no launching of armies, and no trigger for a coup. It was over.

A senior army general involved in the aborted coup said later, ‘I had already passed the order to Witzleben to start the coup when the information reached us that Chamberlain and Daladier were coming to Munich and therefore I had to withdraw the order … the coup d’état was to have been justified before the people by saying that Hitler was provoking a war and that, without a violent coup d’état war could not be prevented. Now that was no longer possible.’ Another asked sharply, ‘What can troops possibly do against a leader this victorious?’

Though they would try again many times in the coming years to replicate the coup of 1938, this was the best chance the conspirators would get to remove Hitler – and, thanks to the British prime minister, they had lost it.

French ambassador François-Poncet, as famous for his merciless eye as he was for his magnificent moustaches, described Chamberlain arriving at Munich on 30 September: ‘Grey, stooped, with bushy eyebrows, blotched skin and chapped hands – he seemed typical of a grand Englishman from a bygone age.’

As all the world knows, what followed was the Munich agreement which gifted the Sudetenland to Hitler without a shot being fired.

Chamberlain returned in triumph to Croydon Aerodrome, with a flutter of paper in his hand, announcing ‘peace for our time’. In the House of Commons and across Britain that day there was cheering and jubilation. But not from Winston Churchill, who denounced Chamberlain’s deal as ‘the first foretaste of a bitter cup’ to shouts of abuse from all sides of the Commons chamber. For a Britain dangerously underprepared for war, there was a substantial upside to Munich – the country now had more time to get ready. But the cost to national prestige, standing and influence was huge. And the consequence of now having to deal with a Hitler magnified in size to his own people, and in his own sense of destiny, would be very great.

The French prime minister Édouard Daladier understood perhaps better than Chamberlain what had happened. Waving to cheering crowds on his return to Paris, he was heard to mutter under his breath. ‘Ah, les cons. S’ils savaient!’†

Hitler celebrated a triumph too, though it was not the one he had wanted. He was initially furious at the outcome of Munich, flying into a rage and shouting that Chamberlain had tricked him out of the military victory over the whole of Czechoslovakia that he wanted so badly. But he soon realised that the British prime minister had delivered him victory enough for the moment. The rest of Czechoslovakia could come later.

As the Commons debated in London, German troops marched through jubilant crowds into the Czech Sudetenland. They were followed four days later by the Führer standing in the front of an open-topped Mercedes, his right arm stretched out ramrod-straight in the Nazi salute, which the crowd returned with cheers, children bearing flowers and a forest of extended arms. Czechoslovakia, brought into existence by the Versailles Treaty, would over the next years lose 70 per cent of its iron, steel and electricity production, a third of its people, and enough weapons and ammunition from its arsenals and armaments factories to equip half the Wehrmacht.

Two days later, on 5 October, Churchill pronounced a final accusatory obsequy in the House of Commons over the dismembered remains of Hitler’s prey: ‘Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness … terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”’

On 4 November, five weeks after Munich, members of Churchill’s Epping Constituency Conservative Association moved a motion of no confidence in their MP. Churchill survived by the skin of his teeth, thanks to what he later described as ‘the speech of my life’. Thus was Hitler denied a double victory: one at Munich which gave him the Sudetenland; and one at Epping, where fate came within a hair’s breadth of removing his most capable adversary in the coming conflict.

The Abwehr’s ‘eternal plotter’ Hans Bernd Gisevius, who had been amongst the most active of the conspirators right from the start, commented bitterly after the war: ‘Peace for our time? Let us put it a bit more realistically. Chamberlain saved Hitler.’

In a letter to an American friend, Carl Goerdeler wrote: ‘The Munich agreement was just sheer capitulation by France and England … By refusing to take a small risk, Chamberlain has made a war inevitable. Both the British and French nations will now have to defend their freedom with arms in hand …’

In his memoirs written after the war, Erich Kordt recorded: ‘Never since 1933 was there such a good chance to free Germany and the world.’

On the evening the Munich agreement was signed, the key Berlin plotters gathered in the grand house of the commander of the Berlin garrison, Erwin von Witzleben. In the words of one of those present, ‘all our lovely plans’ were unceremoniously burnt in Witzleben’s baronial fireplace.

One general wept, and the world, unchecked, marched on to war.

* Respectively: Generals Franz Halder and Ludwig Beck; General Walther von Brauchitsch; Graf Wolf von Heldorf, Graf Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenberg and Arthur Nebe; General Erwin von Witzleben and Walter Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt; Ernst von Weizsäcker and Erich Kordt; Hjalmar Schacht; Theo Kordt; Hans von Dohnányi; and Paul Schmidt.

† The polite English translation would be, ‘Ah, the bloody idiots. If they only knew!’

8
March Madness

It did not take long for London to understand the opportunities that had been lost at Munich by its failure to act on the warnings it had received of Hitler’s intentions towards Czechoslovakia.

A late-1938 MI6 analysis concluded that the German generals ‘strove unremittingly and courageously to restrain Hitler’. Even the strongly pro-appeasement British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, found himself unable to gloss what had happened in his customary diplomatic language. ‘By keeping the peace, we have saved Hitler and his regime,’ he wrote to foreign secretary Halifax a week after Munich was signed. In December 1938 the British chargé d’affaires in Berlin noted that ‘authoritative circles’ in London now hoped that a revolt would remove Hitler, the man Chamberlain’s flight to Munich had rescued from removal just two months previously.

But the damage was done.

The West’s surrender to Hitler’s demands at Munich caused a catastrophic decline of morale and will amongst the September plotters. Carl Goerdeler, who had spent the week of the Czech crisis in Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Constance, waiting for the call to take up his post as the new chancellor of Germany, wrote to a friend predicting that war was now inevitable. The majority of those closely involved in the plot considered that they had risked their lives to rid the world of a war-obsessed tyrant, only to be abandoned by those they had most trusted among the Western powers. The word ‘betrayal’ was on many lips.

The truth was that there had been a shameful failure of communication between the Berlin plotters and the governments of France and, perhaps especially, of Britain. There were several factors which produced this ‘dialogue of the deaf’ in which the last, best chance of avoiding the coming war was lost.

Chief among these was Chamberlain’s conviction that Hitler would be amenable to reason, and that appeasement (in the 1930s the word meant putting peace first, and did not carry the pejorative overtones it does today) was the way to persuade him to back away from war. This, added to the sense of personal responsibility Chamberlain felt for ensuring the peace of his age, created a deadly cocktail in which hubris and sense of mission combined to distort the British prime minister’s judgement and reduce his capacity to take measured, thought-through actions.

Chamberlain’s appeasement, however, was not based only on a naïvely utopian view of Hitler’s true nature. It was also firmly founded on what had been, with the terrible exception of the Great War, British foreign policy for the past hundred years. It is important to remember that Chamberlain’s analysis was shared by the majority of British political and public opinion of the day – especially among the generals: ‘Of our top military and air people whom I questioned on the subject, I don’t think I found one who did not think that appeasement was right,’ wrote Sir Alexander Cadogan, who succeeded Sir Robert Vansittart as head of the Foreign Office in 1938.

It was Churchill and those closest to him, along with the Labour Party and the Liberals, who were regarded as being out of step with reality and with history, not Chamberlain.

Since the post-Napoleonic settlement, Britain’s strategy had been to stay out of military engagements on the European mainland. Successive British governments were, in the main, sniffily indifferent to what the Europeans did on their continent, so long as they did not threaten the wider peace or interfere in the process of building and maintaining the British Empire. The Europeans could have the Continent, was London’s unspoken motto, provided Britain could have the sea. Chamberlain’s ‘betrayal’ of Czechoslovakia was thus fully consistent with Britain’s traditional policy of managing the European peace not through armies, but through constantly-shifting diplomatic alliances designed to preserve the balance of power established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. What matter if this policy earned Britain the French insult ‘Albion perfide’ – so long as it kept her powerful, prosperous, peaceful, and out of the wars that convulsed Europe in the nineteenth century. In the view of the appeasers in 1938, it was the abandonment of this policy in 1914 that had caused such ghastly consequences for the generation that had fought in the First World War, and who now governed Britain. It was to this traditional policy that the country should now return, they insisted, so that the terrible blood sacrifice which was the inevitable consequence of modern total war should never again be allowed to happen. When Hitler hinted, in a ‘peace speech’ to the Reichstag on 21 May 1935, that he favoured a broad settlement based on ‘leaving Europe to the Europeans and letting Britain have the sea’, he was skilfully playing both to Britain’s traditional foreign policy and to popular and official British sentiment.

It was for this reason that when Goerdeler and his plotters started appearing in Whitehall in 1937 and 1938 with their warnings of an approaching apocalypse, they were seen not as good men seeking to save the world from tyranny, but as meddlers and interferers in a policy which everyone believed in, and which had proved its worth over the previous hundred years. If it is the case, as seems likely, that Chamberlain’s hurried first flight to Bad Godesberg on 15 September 1938 was intended, at least in part to forestall the plot Goerdeler and his friends had been hatching, then in all probability what would have been on his mind was ‘Better the devil you know, than the conspirators you don’t.’

Herein also lay the last major ingredient of the tragically missed opportunity of September 1938. Goerdeler and his fellow plotters knew and understood the exceptional nature of the demonic power they were seeking to remove. Chamberlain and the British, on the other hand, saw Hitler as just the latest in the long line of Continental tyrants behaving badly, as Continental tyrants always had, from Napoleon to Bismarck to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Worse still, the 1938 plotters were, in the British government’s eyes, yet another bunch of conservative Prussian landowners, monarchists and militarists with no attachment to democracy. Their primary aim, like that of Hitler, was to recover the lands Germany had lost under the Versailles settlement. What Chamberlain, Halifax and Henderson did not see was that, whatever the democratic deficiencies of the September plotters, they were nevertheless motivated by conventional religious and European values of morality, which were totally absent from the character and actions of Adolf Hitler. The plotters understood the unique moral bankruptcy of the Hitler phenomenon. Chamberlain and his government, it seems, did not.

Behind the September plotters’ complaints about the moral failures of Britain and France during the Czech crisis lay a crucial failure of their own – one which was fatally to hobble them right through to 1944. They wanted to be rid of Hitler, but they were never prepared to take the initiative to do so. They shied away from triggering events themselves, and depended on others to do this for them (in the case of the Czech crisis, the trigger was Hitler’s order to mobilise). They were actors in the wings, always waiting for a cue to come onto the stage which never came. Eventually, as successive ‘ripe moments’ for their ‘lovely plans’ came and went, waiting became a kind of strategy in itself – until finally an impetuous, headstrong young man strode into their midst in 1944 and shook them from their torpor.

In the immediate aftermath of Munich, most of the plotters slunk away into the shadows to wait and watch for the next propitious moment to strike. Goerdeler spent the end of September and the first week of October writing a series of long, impatient and rather self-righteous memos to London and Washington – including his first proposition for a united Europe as a solution to the rising threat of European nationalism. In the middle of October he called Vansittart’s ‘agent’ A.P. Young to a meeting at a private address in Zürich. There he passed on some useful intelligence, including the information that Hitler had sent Canaris to persuade Franco into an alliance aimed at capturing Gibraltar and sealing off the Mediterranean from the British.

A further meeting between Young and Goerdeler took place on 4 December, this time in a hotel room in Zürich. On this occasion Goerdeler, using two fingers and a typewriter borrowed from the hotel, laboriously typed out ten paragraphs of a suggested ‘Heads of Agreement between Great Britain and Germany’. Despite the fact that nearly all his recommendations had already been incorporated in Foreign Office forward papers, his proposals were roundly rejected by the mandarins of King Charles’s Street, who, having been proved wrong about Goerdeler’s warnings about the Sudetenland, were now finding his preachy style irksome and patronising.

It was not just the British who were put off by Goerdeler’s didacticism. Hans Bernd Gisevius wrote at this time that Goerdeler’s ‘finest virtue was also his gravest weakness. The passion for justice burned so fiercely in him that he forgot all moderation. He preached and preached and preached, until … people … lost all patience with him.’

On 10 December 1938, Sir Alexander Cadogan reflected the same weariness with the German emissary in his diary: ‘had a message from G [Goerdeler] outlining a plan of [an army] revolution in Germany to take place before the end of the month. G wants a message from us … He had already sent us a “programme” which we couldn’t subscribe to – too much like Mein Kampf – and that rather put me off him. But he may want something merely to show his fellow conspirators that we shan’t fall upon a divided Germany and would want to work with any decent regime that may come out of this mess … I don’t believe much in this,’ he concluded, but added a wary codicil: ‘but if there is anything in it, it’s the biggest thing for centuries’.

Along with his recommendations for British policy, Goerdeler also included a report predicting, among other things, that Hitler would soon turn his attention to Holland, Belgium and Switzerland. Over the next year, Goerdeler’s use to the British changed from being an occasional (and by now mostly unwanted) diplomatic adviser on Germany, to a primary source of intelligence on Hitler’s plans and intentions.

Madeleine Bihet-Richou was not able to enjoy autumn in Paris for long after her narrow escape from Vienna. In the last days of September her French intelligence handler, Henri Navarre, asked her to return to Berlin, where a job had been arranged for her at the French Institute. She was now able to continue her affair with Lahousen, who was by this time installed as one of Canaris’s closest advisers in the Tirpitzufer. At the end of October the two lovers were taking advantage of a brilliant late-autumn day to pay a visit to the Berlin Zoo. Admiring the giraffes, Lahousen said in a quiet voice that Hitler had just ordered plans to be drawn up for the takeover of the remains of Czechoslovakia in the middle of March the following year.

‘This time,’ he added, ‘if France and Britain react, it will be war.’

Madeleine rushed, first to the French embassy to send a brief coded telegram to Navarre in Paris, and then to the Anhalter station in Potsdamer Platz, where she caught a train to the French capital to report personally on what she had learned. She met Navarre and Louis Rivet, the chief of French military intelligence, at a restaurant on the Rond-point des Champs-Élysées and gave them the whole story. A report was sent to French foreign minister Georges Bonnet, who responded that if Hitler went ahead with his plan, France could only react if Britain did – and Britain showed no signs of wanting to.

Rivet, conscious that he now had a very high-level source in Madeleine, instructed his new spy that she was never again to visit the French embassy in Berlin. In future she should pass her information by telephone to the French military attaché in the city, using a secret number which she should dial only from public phoneboxes.

On the evening of 8 November, not long after Madeleine’s return to the German capital, she was strolling with Lahousen down Kleiststrasse when he mentioned the assassination the previous day of a German diplomat in Paris by a Polish Jew. ‘The government,’ he told her, ‘has secretly ordered a “spontaneous wave” of reprisals to be launched by paramilitaries against the Jews, under cover of which their private wealth will be pillaged and Jewish synagogues will be burnt. Fire engines will be pre-positioned around the synagogues – not to stop them burning, but to save neighbouring buildings.’

The following night, Germany was convulsed and the world shocked by yet another outrage against the Jews. Kristallnacht was so named because of the carpets of broken glass which littered German streets after violent nationwide attacks on Jews and their property. Over a thousand synagogues were set on fire, many of them being totally destroyed; more than 7,500 Jewish businesses were demolished; at least ninety-one Jews were killed, and 30,000 arrested and incarcerated in Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. For Carl Goerdeler, himself not immune to a degree of anti-Semitism, this was a turning point. ‘The shame and bitterness of the most patriotic went so far as to make them be ashamed before the world of the name German which we loved and of which we were so proud … For many who hesitated there was now no possibility of reconciliation with this regime of violence,’ wrote one witness after the war.

Some of the September plotters went further, actively helping the Jews to escape the mobs and the Gestapo. Canaris was later thanked by Jewish leaders for what he did that night to save members of their community. Hans Oster offered to smuggle his Jewish neighbours out of harm’s way:

In the afternoon of 9th November 1938 our neighbour, the wife of Colonel, later General Hans Oster, called on us to offer the shelter of their home to my father, who was a lawyer aged 58. The news of the arrest of Jewish men had spread to both our families. The Osters and our family lived on the same floor of a Berlin apartment block. There were two staircases, one for tradesmen and one for us. Mrs Oster proposed that if the Gestapo called at the front door, my father could easily slip across to their flat by the back door.

Afterwards, Canaris, Oster and the Abwehr lawyer Hans von Dohnányi set up a secret organisation to smuggle Jews out of Germany, often by recruiting them into the Abwehr and then sending them abroad as Abwehr ‘agents’. The son of Canaris’s pastor recalled one among many recorded examples of Canaris and the Abwehr helping Jews to escape:

Thirteen Jewish men who had married non-Jewish women … were deported to different camps … all of them were released thanks to the combined efforts of Canaris and his staff … the Admiral succeeded in organising their transport in a closed train compartment to Madrid, where they came under Franco’s protection. Canaris used his connections to put thirteen of them up in private homes in Madrid before some of them were flown to England. Most … joined the British military.

On New Year’s Day 1939, with international tension rising again over Czechoslovakia, Canaris appointed Erwin Lahousen as the head of Section II of the Abwehr (sabotage and disruption), and gave him two sets of orders. One was designed for official consumption; the other was ‘unofficial’, and described Lahousen’s real task, which Canaris ordered should be to form ‘a secret organisation within Abwehr II and the Brandenburg Regiment, with the purpose of bringing together all anti-Nazi forces and preparing them for illegal acts … against the system … With the successful incorporation of Czechoslovakia into … the Third Reich … the way to war with Poland has been opened for Hitler and his clique of criminals. I am convinced that the other great Powers will not be caught this time by the political … tricks of this pathological liar. War will result in a catastrophe … [not just] for Germany [but also] for all mankind … if there were victory for the Nazi system.’

With her lover busy out of Berlin taking over his new organisation, Madeleine Bihet-Richou used the opportunity for a swift visit to Paris. There she received training in the use of secret ink, and underwent a deep-level interrogation about her relationship with Lahousen and his possible motives in talking to her so openly.

The early months of 1939 were full of intense diplomatic manoeuvring as everyone waited for Hitler’s next play. On 20 February, Spain, under substantial German and Italian pressure, agreed ‘in principle’ to join Hitler’s Anti-Comintern pact, insisting, however, that it should do so secretly. Five days later, to even up the balance and keep everyone on their toes, Franco signed an agreement with France that Madrid would stay neutral. Most small states in Europe, inferring from the Czech crisis that the Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century was now a dead letter, began negotiating bilateral non-aggression pacts with Hitler. The British government for its part resolved that, since it was no longer able to honour guarantees, it should avoid giving any. Meanwhile, after a government study into how France could defend itself against air attack had concluded that it couldn’t, French foreign minister Bonnet decided that the best protection for his country lay not in anti-aircraft batteries, but in a piece of paper declaring lasting friendship between Paris and Berlin. In all this scurry of diplomatic to-ings and fro-ings, one assumption was commonly held by all: that, given Hitler’s high-octane, high-volume and high-frequency warnings of the communist threat to Europe (accompanied by insults to match), the one pact that was out of the question was an alliance between Hitler and Stalin. In February, however, both Canaris and Churchill simultaneously picked up tremors that all was not as it seemed, and that there were signs of a growing rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow. Unaware of this, the Bank of England, at the government’s behest, offered the German Reichsbank a huge loan designed to encourage Hitler to make his next move for ‘Lebensraum’ east towards the Ukraine and Russia, rather than west.

In the spring of 1939, the shadow-boxing suddenly turned into the real thing.

In early March Lahousen told Paris, through Madeleine, that German armour and troops were concentrating near the Bohemia–Moravia border, where they would be within swift striking distance of Prague. A little later he followed this up by providing Madeleine with the complete German plan for the invasion of what remained of Czechoslovakia. What Hans Bernd Gisevius was to call ‘the March madness’ had begun.

At 7 a.m. on 11 March, at Paul Thümmel’s request the Abwehr spy met his Czech handler in the station buffet of the Czech market town of Turnov. ‘The final decision has been taken in Berlin,’ Thümmel reported. ‘On 15 March Czechoslovakia will no longer exist.’ Thümmel was swiftly bundled into a car and driven to Prague, where in a Czech intelligence safe house he outlined in detail, complete with supporting documents, the German plan of attack on Czechoslovakia. He also handed over an original Gestapo document which contained orders for all Czech intelligence officers to be rounded up after the invasion and submitted to ‘interrogation with great severity’. Thümmel’s information was rushed to Colonel František Morávec, the head of the Czech intelligence service, who instructed that the German spy should be given six emergency ‘accommodation’ addresses through which he could keep in contact if the Czech government was forced to go into exile. Two of these were in The Hague, two in London, one in Sweden and one in Zürich. As he left to return to Germany, Thümmel turned to Morávec: ‘Good luck, Colonel. This is not goodbye, but auf Wiedersehen.’

The Czech spy chief passed Thümmel’s information to the pro-German Czech foreign minister, who dismissed it as alarmist: ‘If such events were in store, I, as Foreign Minister, would be the first to know … In future do not bring such upsetting reports which could spread alarm and disturb the peace.’

This view was shared by the British ambassador in Berlin, Nevile Henderson, who sent a telegram to London anticipating ‘in the immediate future, a period of relative calm’. He backed this up with a report a week later, on 9 March, predicting that if the remains of Czechoslovakia were to be ‘absorbed’ into the German Reich, it would not happen for ‘a year or two’. The following day, the MP Sir Samuel Hoare, one of Chamberlain’s close supporters, made a speech to his constituents in Chelsea confidently predicting that Europe could now look forward to a ‘Golden Age’ of peace, prosperity and stability.

František Morávec did not share this Panglossian view. He arranged a swift meeting with Colonel Harold ‘Gibby’ Gibson, the head of the MI6 station in Prague, and asked for help. As a result, at around one o’clock on the afternoon of 14 March, a DC Douglas aircraft belonging to KLM made an unscheduled stop at Ruzyně airfield, twelve kilometres east of the Czech capital. There it was loaded with eleven men of the Czech intelligence service and numerous boxes of files. At 5.15 p.m. the plane took off for Rotterdam, where after dropping off one of its passengers, Aloïs Franck, who had orders to establish himself in The Hague, it continued its journey to Croydon Aerodrome outside London.

At dawn the following day, German armoured units stormed over the Sudetenland frontier and occupied Prague. By this time Thümmel’s files, codes and contacts were safely in London. From now on, the ultimate destination of his priceless intelligence would be the British government, and in due course its great wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill.

9
The March to War

Up to the final act in the destruction of Czechoslovakia, Hitler had always defended his aggressions under the pretence of protecting the rights of self-determination of German-speaking people, claiming that they were ‘under foreign occupation’ as a result of Versailles. With the occupation of Prague, he finally crossed the Rubicon by launching a naked assault for which there was nothing but the very flimsiest attempt at justification. This was a genuine watershed moment, and ought to have been a trigger for the plotters to act. But the Führer had deliberately kept his plans close to his chest, revealing them to his officer corps only at the last moment.

In the days following the assault on Prague, Ludwig Beck met with General Franz Halder, his successor as head of the Army High Command (the Oberkommando des Heeres – OKH) at his secluded mansion on Berlin’s tree-lined Goethestrasse. They agreed that Hitler was determined on war, and that he must be got rid of by force. But they couldn’t agree on when or how. Halder thought they should wait until war was imminent. Beck warned that a putsch would be more difficult once hostilities started, and was irked by his successor’s caution: ‘As an experienced rider, Halder must have known that one had first to throw one’s heart over the obstacle,’ he commented tartly afterwards. The two men parted company, divided in their opinions and on strained terms.

Despite these disagreements at the top, elsewhere in army circles there were some attempts to reassemble and strengthen the resistance networks scattered by Munich and the failure of the September 1938 coup. These steps included sending Erwin Lahousen to Stockholm, ostensibly to secure assurances from Swedish firms that they would continue to deliver iron ore to Germany if war broke out. The other, hidden purpose of his visit was to bring back a British-made bomb for use in any early plan to kill Hitler.

Despite these scurryings after the event, the truth was that the September plotters had been caught scattered and flatfooted by Hitler’s swift occupation of Prague, and once again had to be content with grumbling in private while lauding Hitler’s victory in public. Another opportunity had been lost; they would have to fall back once more on preparing and waiting.

Waiting seemed to be Neville Chamberlain’s policy too – that is, waiting and hoping for Hitler’s appetite to be satiated. Speaking in the House of Commons on the day after the Führer’s triumphal entry into Prague he said, more in sorrow than in anger, ‘It is natural that I should bitterly regret what has occurred … [but] do not let us … be deflected from our course. The aim of the Government is now, as it has always been, to substitute the method of discussion, for the method of force in the settlement of differences.’

Wilhelm Canaris’s ‘eternal plotter’ Hans Bernd Gisevius was determined on a more active course. Taking the early steps which would eventually lead him down the path of full-scale treason, he made a series of trips to Basel in Switzerland to meet representatives of the Western powers. ‘We wanted to establish closer connections with the British and French, and it no longer seemed advisable to do this in Berlin,’ he commented after the war. On 23 March he, Hjalmar Schacht and Goerdeler met ‘a person of considerable influence in London and Paris political circles’ near the Château d’Ouchy in Lausanne. The Germans asked for an urgent warning to be passed to London and Paris that Hitler was now intent on an invasion of Poland in the early autumn.

It is tempting to think that it was this warning which finally alerted Neville Chamberlain to the coming threat, for eight days later, on 31 March 1939, he announced a hardening of British policy in the House of Commons: ‘In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence … His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power … The French Government have authorised me to make it plain that they stand in the same position in this matter as do His Majesty’s Government.’ A week later, on 6 April, during a visit to London by the Polish foreign minister, Chamberlain’s statement of intent was widened into a formal Anglo–Polish military alliance, reinforced by British promises to help other smaller European nations with rearmament. The immediate effect was to make the Poles more intransigent in talks on the future of Danzig, which were by this time under way.

According to Canaris, Hitler, taken aback by this unexpected stiffening of British backs, flew into a rage, banged his fist on the table and shouted, ‘Now I will mix for them a witches’ brew!’ It was another watershed moment. Hitler, who had hoped for an arrangement with Britain against Russia, now concluded that Britain could not be persuaded to support his plans, and would have to be defeated before he could look eastward for Lebensraum through the conquest of the Ukraine and Russia.

Three days after Chamberlain’s announcement, on 3 April the Führer issued a secret directive to his generals to start planning for the invasion of Poland, ordering that what was to be known as Operation White ‘must be ready to be launched from 1 September onwards’. That evening Lahousen relayed the information to Madeleine Bihet-Richou, who passed it on to Paris without delay.

During the next three months, hardly a day passed in London when the city was not playing host to clandestine visitors from Berlin bearing calamitous warnings. Carl Goerdeler was the first, in mid-March. In May he was back again, at the start of an international tour that took him to Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey and Switzerland. He was one of no fewer than five key anti-Hitler plotters* who visited the British capital during May and June 1939, all with the same message for Vansittart (now serving as the government’s chief diplomatic adviser) and the Foreign Office: Hitler was secretly working for a deal with Stalin. To one of these bearers of bad news the great Van replied, ‘Keep calm, it is we who will sign the deal with Russia.’

Goerdeler claimed that during his May visit he also met with Churchill, but there is no record of this in Churchill’s diaries or papers, or in the Chartwell visitors’ book. In June 1939, Canaris and Oster tried to persuade Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin to pay another visit to London, as a follow-up to his attempt to warn of the impending Czech crisis in September 1938: ‘What have we to offer?’ the Prussian responded. ‘I am not going to London with empty hands.’ Eventually they persuaded one of the German general staff to make the journey. He met the British service chiefs, but achieved nothing.

All Europe was now making dispositions for war.

Over the summer, Soviet intelligence agents in Germany started setting up the great spy network die Rote Kapelle, which in time would reach into every corner of occupied Europe.

British intelligence too was about its spying business. In early May, MI6 issued a false British passport in the name of Charles Simpson to one of František Morávec’s Czech intelligence officers, Karel Sedláček, who had operated undercover as a journalist in Zürich since 1934. Sedláček’s task was to be Paul Thümmel’s ‘postman’. He was to organise the safe reception of Thümmel’s secret letters to the Zürich accommodation address Morávec had given him on the eve of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, and to ensure that these were quickly and safely passed on to London.

Aloïs Franck, the Czech intelligence officer dropped off in The Hague as his colleagues fled Prague for London, was also equipped with a false British identity as the Dutch representative of a coal-importing firm, Foster & Co., from Bristol. Franck’s orders were to act as Thümmel’s contact in the city, using a Jewish couple called Charles and Antoinette Jelinek. The Jelineks ran a bric-à-brac shop, ‘De Favoriet’, on the ground floor of an old lattice-windowed, redbrick, step-gabled merchant’s house in a narrow, cobbled backstreet of The Hague† – another of the accommodation addresses Morávec had given Thümmel for his secret messages.

On 2 April 1939, just two weeks after the German occupation of Prague, the first return card from Thümmel, postmarked Dresden, arrived at De Favoriet. It contained no information – its purpose was simply to say that Agent A54 was back in touch.

London communicated with Thümmel through messages in invisible ink on what appeared to be an innocuous postcard. These were sent through the diplomatic bag to the British embassy in The Hague, which passed them to Franck, who passed them to a German refugee, who passed them to a nun, who smuggled them in her habit to Aachen, from where they completed their journey to Thümmel through the German postal system.

In the first days of June a second postcard from Thümmel, now using the codename ‘Carl Voral’, arrived in Zürich and was collected by Sedláček, who forwarded it to London in the Czech diplomatic bag. It read: ‘Dear Uncle, I think I am in love. I have met a girl …’ Between the lines of the visible text, another message, written in milk, appeared when the paper was gently heated: ‘I will be in The Hague shortly. Would like to meet you or your deputy. Place: Hotel des Indes. Name: Lustig. Date: June 15. Carl.’ At the meeting which followed, Thümmel explained that he was now working in the Tirpitzufer in Berlin, and told Franck that the plan for Operation White – the German invasion of Poland – was now almost ready. It would involve nine Panzer divisions, and the target date for its launch had been fixed as no later than 1 September 1939. Morávec, in London, passed the information on to the British, who in turn passed it on – in a form sufficiently bowdlerised to conceal its source – to the Poles, who were alarmed, and to the French, who were sceptical.

As Thümmel was handing over Hitler’s plans for the invasion of Poland, a twenty-five-year-old junior diplomat at the British embassy in Berlin was sent to the German Foreign Ministry to complain about a consignment of German arms that had been ordered and paid for by London, but had not yet been delivered. ‘My dear fellow,’ his German counterpart replied, in a languorous upper-class drawl, ‘you will be very lucky if you get these now … at least not in the form that you were expecting them!’

The weather in The Hague on 3 August 1939 was brilliant and swelteringly hot. As evening fell, a brisk offshore breeze set the great sails turning on the windmills that stood like sentinels on the flat land around the city. Shortly after dusk, just as the street lights came on, a burly figure appeared in the arched doorway of De Favoriet. ‘Grüss Gott,’ he said, smiling at Aloïs Franck, who was waiting for him in the dimly-lit, high-vaulted space of the Jelineks’ shop. Without another word, the new arrival walked through to a back room, empty save for a table, a chair, a typewriter and neat stacks of white cardboard boxes marked with stencils proclaiming ‘Gloves – Made in Czechoslovakia’.

Paul Thümmel, alias Agent A54, sat down and began typing, hesitantly and with two fingers, for he was not used to a typewriter:

Nazi leaders think that France and England will not intervene in the event of a clash with Poland and that support for Poland will be limited to the supply of war materials and financial aid … If France does decide to fight … she will not be attacked … The Germans will take up defensive positions behind their ‘Western Wall’ lines of defence …

As Thümmel worked, occasionally pulling on a cigarette burning in an ashtray beside him, the stack of typed A4 pages by his typewriter grew. At around 2 a.m., with the room thick with the fug of cigarette smoke, his ashtray full of butt-ends and a sizeable pile of paper by his typewriter, he pushed back his chair and proclaimed his work finished. A final cigarette, a glass of schnapps, a few words with Franck about their next meeting, and Thümmel left as swiftly as he had come, into the night.

The following morning, Thümmel’s report was taken to the British embassy in The Hague and sent to London by diplomatic bag. It was voluminous, detailed and, in intelligence terms, a goldmine. It contained, among other things, the entire detailed battle plan for the invasion of Poland, including a sketch map showing the invasion routes, the details of the two army groups that were to spearhead the attack, and the names of the German commanders involved down to divisional level. It also provided a complete list of Polish agents working for the Abwehr, along with a curious and seemingly puzzling piece of extra information: Hitler had ordered Canaris to provide SS chief Heinrich Himmler with 150 Polish army uniforms and firearms from the infiltration equipment store used by the special forces of the Brandenburg Regiment. Quizzed about this, Thümmel presumed that the uniforms were needed for some kind of manufactured ‘incident’ involving an act of fake ‘aggression by Polish troops’. This was important information, not just for its own sake, but also because it showed that A54 had access, if not to Canaris himself, then to someone very close to him. In the event, Canaris deftly used the rivalries in Hitler’s administration to divert Himmler from getting his hands on the Abwehr’s Polish uniforms, scoring a small but satisfying bureaucratic victory. But since Himmler then managed to get the uniforms from another source, this had no effect at all on the progress of events, which were by now moving at increasing speed towards their ineluctable conclusion.

Not long after Thümmel’s second meeting with Franck, Madeleine Bihet-Richou heard news from Paris that her son Pierre was critically ill with pneumonia. As she said a hurried goodbye to Lahousen, he whispered to her that a plot to eliminate Hitler had been prepared, but there was hesitation amongst the plotters because of the overwhelming popularity of the Führer. Madeleine packed a small overnight bag so as not to give the impression that she was fleeing Berlin for good with the clouds of war gathering, and took the first train to Paris. She arrived just in time to get Pierre into hospital for an emergency operation.

Lahousen’s whispered farewell message was accurate. Throughout June, July and August there had been regular secret plotters’ meetings, involving, among others, Goerdeler, Oster, Canaris, Beck, von Witzleben and the senior Foreign Office official and previous ambassador to Rome, Ulrich von Hassell, who, using an English parliamentary phrase, christened the group of resisters ‘His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition’. There was unanimous agreement that Hitler must go, but, as before, none at all about when and how the deed was to be done.

On 22 August Hitler called his generals to Berchtesgaden. Leaning on a grand piano and holding his notes in his left hand, he informed his audience that the pact with Stalin being secretly negotiated by Ribbentrop was imminent. As soon as it was signed, he would strike Poland. The target date was Saturday, 26 August. Canaris, propped against a pillar at the back of the room, and against Hitler’s specific instructions, took notes of the meeting. He reported to his Abwehr officers afterwards that the Führer had declared: ‘Poland is now right where I want her … Our opponents are little worms [who will not move against us]. I saw them in Munich. [My chief concern is that] … at the last minute, some bastard will produce a mediation plan.’

The following day, 23 August, to the astonishment of all – especially in London, where the government believed that it was about to conclude its own agreement with Stalin – Hitler, with appropriate flourish, unveiled the Soviet–German Non-Aggression Pact. It contained a secret protocol stipulating that Poland and Eastern Europe were to be divided up and parcelled out in two packages – one for Führer Adolf Hitler, and the other for ‘Uncle’ Joseph Stalin.

As the world reverberated to Hitler’s astonishing diplomatic coup, Madeleine Bihet-Richou in Paris began to receive the first of a stream of postcards from Lahousen. Each was sent from a different location close to the Siegfried Line, which protected Germany’s western border. Using the secret code the two had devised between them, Lahousen informed Madeleine about Hitler’s Berchtesgaden meeting and the new launch date for Operation White, the invasion of Poland: Saturday, 26 August 1939.

On 25 August, the day before Hitler’s projected start date for the attack, Carl Goerdeler flew to Stockholm, ostensibly on business for Robert Bosch, but in reality to set up a secret channel to London which could be used if war broke out. The main conduits for this were two Swedish bankers, Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg, who used their Enskilda Bank in the Swedish capital to communicate with London.

Now began a wild scramble to prevent the coming catastrophe, through diplomatic means in the West and by means of Hitler’s assassination in Berlin.

On the morning Goerdeler flew to Stockholm expecting war, Hitler called in British ambassador Nevile Henderson and announced that he wanted to make a ‘big proposal’ for peace. Henderson arrived in the Chancellery at 1.30 p.m., to be told by Hitler that ‘under the condition that, during a lengthy period, Germany’s colonial demands would be fulfilled through peaceful negotiations, and under the further condition that Germany’s relations to Italy [sic] and the Soviet Union would not be prejudiced, he would not only guarantee the existence of the British Empire, but promise German assistance whenever and wherever it would be required’. It was a feint designed to hoodwink London into believing that the danger of war had passed. No sooner had Henderson left than Hitler called one of his adjutants and instructed him to issue the order that the attack on Poland was to be launched at 5 a.m. the following day. Then the Führer sent a message to the French ambassador, calling him to the Chancellery at 5.30. Hitler’s aim in seeing the Frenchman was to sow further confusion by asking him to seek Paris’s views on his ‘big proposal’ for peace.

Things started to go wrong for Hitler’s plans at around 3.30 p.m., when, following an urgent request, he agreed to see the Italian ambassador. Attolico, his voice again an octave higher than normal, said, ‘I must unfortunately inform you that Italy, without the supply of the necessary raw materials, cannot enter the war.’ Mussolini had picked up word of a new Anglo–Polish treaty which was just about to be signed, and had suddenly been overtaken with another attack of cold feet.

The meeting which followed with the French ambassador was short and perfunctory, ending at 6.15 p.m. As soon as the French emissary was safely out of the building, Hitler promptly rescinded the order he had given only four hours earlier to launch the attack on Poland.

What Hitler did not know, any more than he knew that his last-minute hesitation on Czechoslovakia a year previously had saved his life, was that history had almost precisely repeated itself.

A few days earlier, Hans Oster had instructed Friedrich Heinz, the man in charge of the commando raiding party in the September 1938 coup attempt, to be ready to carry out the same operation to capture and kill the Führer at very short notice. Over the following days, all the ‘lovely plans’ which had been burnt in General von Witzleben’s fireplace on the evening of Munich were painstakingly reconstructed. The intention was to launch a coup at the moment Hitler gave the order to attack Poland.

As Hitler was seeing his succession of ambassadors on the afternoon of 25 August, Hans Bernd Gisevius, accompanied by Georg Thomas, the general in charge of German army logistics and armaments, and Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht, were on their way to pick up Canaris from the Tirpitzufer. Their intention was to drive to army headquarters at Zossen, thirty kilometres south of Berlin. There they would confront army commander-in-chief Walther von Brauchitsch and Ludwig Beck’s successor as chief of staff, Franz Halder, and demand that they choose between joining them in arresting Hitler that afternoon, or being exposed as members of the coup that had sought to remove him in September the previous year. Arriving at the Tirpitzufer, the three plotters were met by Oster, who, ‘shaking his head’ and ‘laughing heartily’, told them that Hitler had once again changed plan, and the coup was off. Gisevius wanted to continue with the putsch anyway, but none of the others would join him. There was jubilation. All present thought war had been conclusively avoided.

They ought to have known better.

Over the next three days, Hitler’s will returned. The first inkling of this was uncovered by Max Waibel, a Swiss intelligence officer with very good high-level contacts in Berlin (probably Oster), who signalled his headquarters on the afternoon of 27 August, reporting that the new launch date for Hitler’s attack on Poland was to be 1 September. Given the close relations between Swiss intelligence and MI6 at the time, it seems certain that this message reached London and Paris either that day, or the one following.

Finally, on 31 August, after some further diplomatic shadow-boxing designed to conceal his intentions, the Führer again gave the order to launch the attack on Poland at dawn the following day.

A few minutes after eight o’clock that evening, a small group of German SS troops dressed in Polish uniforms ‘seized’ the German wireless station at Gleiwitz, close to the Polish frontier, broadcasting some violently anti-German messages before withdrawing and leaving behind several of their dead. In fact the ‘dead Polish attackers’ were pro-Polish German Silesians captured the previous day. Along with several prisoners from Dachau, the captured men had been first dressed in Polish uniforms, then killed with lethal injections, and finally shot and disfigured to prevent identification. Their corpses were left scattered around Gleiwitz as ‘Polish casualties’ of the ‘attack’.

At dawn the following morning, on the pretence of retaliating for the previous night’s provocations, Hitler launched five Panzer divisions in a massive two-pronged attack supported by aircraft and tanks. Their orders were to wipe Poland off the map. Two days later, the world was at war.

Bumping into Hans Bernd Gisevius in a Tirpitzufer corridor on the day war was declared, Wilhelm Canaris growled, ‘Finis Germaniae’ – thus ends Germany.

* The others were Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Theo and Erich Kordt, and Lieutenant Colonel Count Gerhard von Schwerin, who was sent by the German general staff.

† The building is still there, at Noordeinde 148. It is now a restaurant called ‘Het Heden’ (The Future). During the war it was owned by a Mrs Jansen, who also operated another accommodation address for Thümmel at her home. Thanks to Mike Van der Heijden for his help in finding this address and the history attached to it. See Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog – Deel 2 – Neutraal.

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