Nein!

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.