Nein!

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.