Fighting to Lose (16 page)

Heydrich was delighted and basked in the glow. The British government was mortified. German broadcast radio blared, claiming that Best and Stevens had been suckered into capture by means of a phony tale of treacherous generals plotting a coup. At the round table in Whitehall, Stewart Menzies, speaking for MI6, insisted that the offer from von Rundstedt and von Wietersheim had been genuine. A Foreign Office post-mortem intoned: “We must therefore conclude that the balance of evidence shows that the ‘feelers’ we received were not, originally at any rate, part of a plot organized by Herr Himmler.”17

In other words, Chamberlain and his government — which included Churchill as head of the navy — actually did figure out the truth. They could only guess at what had gone wrong, however, and still held out hope that the generals might yet pull off their coup.

During the hullabaloo, the Nazi police and intelligence personnel involved never identified who the generals were supposed to have been. The British did not make public the names either.

As for Elser, despite the enormity of his crime and all the publicity, he was never brought to trial. According to exclusively Nazi sources, he was secretly shot at the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945 on Hitler’s order. There is no way to prove this; just as there is no way to find hard evidence that he had been a stooge of Heydrich and Canaris all along.18

Air reconnaissance, the reports of spies, and the interception of the enemy’s wireless traffic were important sources of intelligence on the disposition of the Anglo-French forces facing Germany, and by the end of April, Fremde Heere, the army headquarters agency responsible for collating intelligence from all sources, had a comprehensive picture of the location and strengths of the opposition armies along France’s northern border. This it displayed at Zossen on a large terrain map of Western Europe, which was updated constantly. General Halder, now committed to the upcoming struggle, is said to have looked down on the map and pointed to the area of the Forest of the Ardennes: “Here is where they are weakest. Here we must go through!” 19

The man responsible for maintaining the map was forty-year-old Captain Alexis Baron von Rönne, later to die for his role in denying Hitler victory in Normandy in 1944.

For his part, aside from the spies he already had in place, Canaris planted agents with wireless transmitters just over the borders of the target countries. Their specific task was to report any last-minute troop movements or other developments. Andreas Folmer was probably typical of these Abwehr infiltration agents.

Folmer was a thirty-two-year-old Luxembourger who had served fourteen years in the Belgian army before going off to the Belgian Congo to seek his fortune. Finding only heat and disease, he came back to Belgium and dabbled in illegal currency activities that soon landed him in jail. In 1938, the Belgian Deuxième Bureau recruited him for a secret photographic survey of the German fortifications along the border with Luxembourg, a mission he carried out with great success. Then, early the next year, he secretly went over to the Germans. His new spymaster, Captain Oscar Reile of Abt IIIF (Counter-espionage) at Ast Wiesbaden, gave him a transmitter and sent him back to Brussels as an “E-Mann” — the Abwehr term for a spy who has penetrated a foreign intelligence service. Folmer wirelessed numerous reports on the Belgian Deuxième Bureau’s activities right up to May 9, when Reile told him to cross into Germany immediately. The invasion began the next day.20

The Abwehr’s other task, one that was even more important, was to devise a deceptive cover for the invasion plan. Surprise was essential because the Forest of the Ardennes was a nightmare maze of narrow roads tight to the trees. Infantry and panzer units would be slow making their way through, and if the French caught on to what was happening too early, the German forces could be trapped there, densely packed, easy victims to air and artillery bombardment.

In solving this problem, Canaris decisively contributed to the success of the campaign. He made two moves: First, during the fall of 1939, MI5’s star double agent, Arthur Owens — A-3504 to the Germans — repeatedly returned from his visits to his Abwehr controller across the Channel with reports that the Germans were planning to attack France through Belgium. These reports were true, but for the first two months of the war that did not matter since Canaris was expecting Hitler to be overthrown. With the collapse of the plot and the decision to go with the Ardennes, it then became simply a matter of cementing in the minds of the British and French the intelligence they had already been given.21 This was achieved by allowing MI8(c), the wireless listening agency that Major Gill and Lieutenant Trevor-Roper put such store in, to pick the reports of Abwehr spies operating in France and the Low Countries who just happened to be using easy-to-break ciphers. This gave the impression that was where Germany’s attention was directed.22

Second, Canaris allowed the peace overtures through the Pope to continue. By the New Year, this had led to the Pope privately informing the British envoy to the Vatican that a “violent” attack through Belgium was impending and that several highly placed generals were prepared to prevent it by overthrowing Hitler if they could expect reasonable peace terms. The Foreign Office, still unsure of what exactly had happened at Venlo, showed cautious interest.

Meanwhile, Oster had been warning the Dutch military attaché in Berlin, Major Gijsbertus Sas, that Holland was in the path of the coming offensive, tipping him off throughout the fall and winter to each tentative start date. He continued to do so into the spring, not knowing that the focus of the attack had shifted to the Ardennes. The Dutch government was skeptical, for Germany during the First World War had respected Holland’s neutrality, but the British and the French heard about the warnings and took heed.23

At the beginning of May, when it seemed to Oster and Beck that the attack in the West was going to take place before their efforts through the Vatican matured, they sought to absolve “decent Germans” of blame. They authorized Müller to deliver this note to His Holiness:

To the regret of my principal, I must inform you that our negotiations cannot continue because we have been unable to persuade the generals to act in the wake of the successful operation in Norway. The offensive is imminent. Hitler will probably violate the neutrality of Belgium and Holland.24

They asked that the message be transmitted to the Belgians, Dutch, British, and French. The Pope complied.

Two days later, on May 9, on the eve of the offensive, the Nazi wireless intercept service, the Forschungsamt, listened in on a late-evening telephone call from Sas to the duty officer at the Dutch Ministry of Defence. “Tomorrow at dawn,” he said. “Hold tight. Will you please repeat? You understand what I mean, of course.”25 There could be no doubt what he meant. In Rome, the Belgian envoy was also alerted and his cable to his government intercepted; copies went to Canaris, Himmler, and Hitler. The latter is said to have been furious.

German forces invaded Belgium and Holland the following morning and the French and British leaped forward to meet them. As they did so, German panzers burst out of the Forest of the Ardennes, crossed the Meuse, passed Sedan, and then cut behind in a sprint for the Channel. It worked perfectly. The Allied armies had used up much of their fuel and fell back with difficulty. The British reached the coast at Dunkirk in disarray, there to be encircled. On May 20–21, the greater part of the British force was evacuated to England, but without its arms and transport. The Germans then turned toward Paris. France surrendered on June 22.

The world was astonished. Hitler crowed that it was the biggest victory in history. The issue of the leaked warnings was only feebly pursued. This suggests that Canaris told Hitler that the leaks were deception.26 And so they had been. One can imagine Hitler clapping him on the shoulder and beaming: “Well done!”

Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service — MI6 — was devastated. In the interwar years it had invested primarily in communications intelligence, which had served it very well in the First World War. The Government Code & Cipher School had endeavoured to remain up-to-date on all the latest advances in cryptology, so that it could read the cable and wireless traffic of foreign diplomats and, hopefully, the wireless traffic of Germany’s armed forces in the event of war. Conventional espionage was carried on much as always.

Such overseas networks of spies and informers as MI6 did have were mostly built around field staff stationed in the British embassies and consulates, usually under the nominal cover of passport control officers but also including a handful of independent spy networks. Little provision had been made for what would happen if the embassies and consulates were forced suddenly to close and the staffs to flee. Even MI6’s secret wireless network collapsed after the German offensive, its teams having to pack up their transmitters and make for the coast.27 As Hitler’s armies drew up along the Channel opposite Dover, the British were faced with a virtual blackout on German activities in Western Europe.

This sorry situation is testimony to how completely MI6 had allowed the art of espionage to lapse. Spy-running was a passive activity dependant on Britons travelling abroad or locally recruited agents reporting to the MI6 officer at the British embassy. Little thought had been given to organizing stay-behind networks that could continue to report to Britain by clandestine wireless, by secret courier, or by letters in invisible ink if a country were overrun.28 The defeat of Holland, Belgium, and France obliterated the main British foreign intelligence sources. With England facing invasion and the government and service chiefs clamouring for intelligence on German intentions, MI6 had nothing to offer.

An MI6 officer arriving back home after being ousted from his overseas posting was shocked by how desperate he found things:

I could hardly believe my ears when I heard that crystal-gazing had become the rage in certain circles. It was true though. An enterprising fortune-teller had managed to convince some highly-placed officials that his glass ball could forecast events in the future and advise on current affairs. For a short time he had enjoyed a monopoly in the field of Western European intelligence and was even patronized by the Service Intelligence chiefs. It was argued that since no information was coming in, any sort was better than none; and consequently crystal-gazing was worth a try. I only hope none of our operations suffered from this naive outlook….”29

The “crystal gazer” was, in fact, a stargazer, the Hungarian astrologer Louis de Wohl. He had been in Britain since 1935 and had acquired a modest following in some of the more exalted female social circles. This he parlayed — in Britain’s hour of crisis — into a dinner party that included Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax.

In fairness to Halifax, and to those in British intelligence who gave de Wohl hearings over the months that followed, he sold himself by a basic lie. He claimed that at the very least he would be able to indicate what Hitler’s astrologer was probably telling him, and that this would give some hint as to when the Nazi leader was likely or unlikely to undertake a major action.30 This suggestion had a certain appeal, except that in reality Hitler hated astrologers, regarded the practice as dangerous quackery, and put its proponents into concentration camps. He was a hard-nosed pragmatist who had no time for organized religion much less astrological hocus-pocus. It is surprising that Britain’s Foreign Office had not picked up on this.

De Wohl was made a captain in the army, given an office at Grosvenor House, one of London’s fashionable hotels, and allowed to set up shop as the War Office’s one-man Psychological Warfare Department. He then proceeded to issue pamphlets describing the stellar aspects of the leading Nazis, with special emphasis on those who were born under lucky stars. On the subject of Germany following up its victory with an attack across the Channel, he had this to say:

The first good aspect favouring a combined operation that I could find was in the last ten days in May, when Jupiter would be in conjunction with the position of Neptune at Hitler’s birth….31