by Max Hastings
This was a broadly accurate version of events: Walter Schellenberg served for the rest of the war as Hitler’s foreign intelligence chief, and the RSHA progressively absorbed the Abwehr. Following the July 1944 plot against Hitler, some of its most senior officers and ex-officers were imprisoned and sooner or later executed, including Canaris, Oster, Hansen, Freytag von Loringhoven – the former head of sabotage section, who killed himself – and Graf Marogna-Redwitz, the able head of the Vienna station. Wilhelm Kuebart was arrested and tried, but miraculously escaped the hangman.
4 THE ‘GOOD’ NAZI
Walter Schellenberg was a notably handsome man with sensitive features who presented himself to the outside world, with some success, as the acceptable face of the SS: mild-mannered, courteous, rendered vulnerable by chronic liver trouble. Unlike the thugs around him, the RSHA’s foreign intelligence chief could talk sensitively about music and the arts. He was successful in convincing some of those with whom he trafficked, notably the Swede Count Bernadotte, that he was ‘a decent and humane person’. Posterity should not doubt, however, that Schellenberg was a committed Nazi, fully complicit in the regime’s crimes; he was merely intelligent enough to discern from an early stage that Hitler could lose the war, and thereafter to hedge his bets with serpentine intent, if not success.
He was a builder’s son from Saarbrucken, born in 1910. After some legal training he joined the National Socialist Party in April 1933. Less than a year later, seized by the glamour of the black uniform, he became a member of the SS. Schellenberg showed himself an ingenious secret policeman, who won the special approval of his superiors after the 1939 occupation of Poland: rifling Warsaw’s intelligence records, he identified 430 Germans who were acting as Polish informants, conveniently indexed for removal by the SD to the gallows or concentration camps. He became a protégé of Heydrich and Himmler, though his relationship with the former was damaged for some time by rumours that he was having an affair with Lena, Frau Heydrich. In October 1940, following a divorce of his own, Schellenberg married Irene Grosse-Schönepauck. He seems to have had few, if any, friendships outside his work. An ambitious and boundlessly devious loner, he was less clever than he supposed himself. An American analyst of German intelligence wrote after the war: ‘He tends to confuse his magnificent schemes with actual accomplishments.’
There were plenty of schemes. In 1940 Schellenberg was dispatched to Lisbon with Hitler’s personal mandate to snatch the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII. He declined to execute a crude kidnapping, preferring instead to attempt a seduction, and before this could take place he was obliged to watch from the German embassy balcony in August, as the duke and his wife sailed away towards the governorship of the British Bahamas. Thereafter, he spent some time compiling a ‘Wanted G.B.’ roster of high-profile figures to be detained following a German occupation of Britain. Though Schellenberg often expressed a respect for Churchill’s nation, his list revealed an epic ignorance and naïveté about who was who among its elite. He was sent back to Lisbon with orders to poison a German émigré, Otto Strasse, using a substance provided by a Munich bacteriologist. Strasse survived because he failed to turn up as scheduled in the Portuguese capital. Schellenberg was next appointed by Himmler to head Section VI, the RSHA’s foreign intelligence branch, despite having a poor relationship with Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the Reich security chief. He exploited this role to indulge more foreign travel than most men, even spies, contrived in the midst of a world war. Schellenberg cultivated the Swedish minister in Berlin, Arvid Richert, securing his goodwill by arranging the release of some Nordic prisoners in whom Sweden had an interest – Danish policemen and Norwegian students.
In 1941 the RSHA officer flew to Stockholm for a meeting with Martin Lindquist, chief of the Swedish security police; the two men got on well, partly because they shared a deep hostility to communism. The friendship became important in the following year, when the Gestapo charged with espionage five top managers of the Polish arm of a big Swedish company. Two were acquitted, but one was sentenced to life imprisonment and four were condemned to death. Schellenberg intervened, first to secure better conditions for the captives, and eventually to secure their release, the last before Christmas 1944. He conducted personal negotiations about the case with Swedish business leaders Axel Brandin, Jacob Wallenberg and Alvar Moeller.
Schellenberg’s ascent to high office was founded upon his skills as an intriguer at home and abroad, rather than upon any conspicuous skills as an intelligence officer. He was perceptive enough to understand the damage being done by rivalry between the Nazi empires, but himself became a prominent part of it. A few months before Reinhard Heydrich’s killing in June 1942, Hitler’s Czech proconsul invited Canaris and Schellenberg to a grand shooting party. The two men argued so heatedly about the responsibilities and boundaries of their respective services that they failed to notice the pheasants streaming unscathed over their heads.
The SS officer used Switzerland in the same fashion as did the Allies – partly as a battlefield on which to duel against enemy intelligence services, and partly as a rendezvous for making contacts that would be treasonable inside Germany. Himmler said dismissively about Section VI’s Swiss dalliances: ‘Well, I don’t wish to know all the details – that’s your responsibility.’ From an early stage, it is likely that Schellenberg was looking ahead to Switzerland as a prospective refuge for himself if the Nazi cause foundered, and his chief may have shared his aspirations. Never the type to relish participation in a Berlin Götterdämmerung, Schellenberg opened lines of communication that might enable him to survive a day of reckoning for the Third Reich.
He was thus a natural intermediary when, in the autumn of 1942, Swiss intelligence chief Roger Masson became apprehensive that the Nazis were considering an invasion of his country. After a negotiation conducted by Otto Kocher, the German minister in Bern, the two men met on 8 September near Waldshut, just inside Hitler’s territory. SS Sturmbannführer Hans Eggen escorted the colonel to the frontier, then watched him cross the Rhine bridge alone and on foot. Masson was desperately nervous, as well he might be, about both his personal safety and that of his country. He and Schellenberg met at a nearby hotel, then walked and talked by the Rhine, where they felt safe from eavesdroppers.
Masson sought to wheedle back from the Section VI chief documents that revealed Swiss intelligence’s pre-war collaboration with the Czechs, which Hitler might exploit to justify an invasion. The colonel also asked for the release of Ernst Morgeli, one of the Swiss consulate’s Stuttgart staff, sentenced to death for espionage. He requested Schellenberg to curb the activities of a Vienna press agency run by two Swiss Nazis, who sustained a propaganda bombardment against their own country, and especially its army commander-in-chief, Gen. Henri Guisan. The Nazi spy chief agreed to all these requests, but needled Masson by showing him a copy of a 1940 cable from the US military attaché in Bern, who had reported to Washington that his Swiss sources said that twenty-five German divisions were poised to invade Switzerland. Surely, the SS man enquired mildly, this proved that the Swiss were working with the Allies? As Masson immediately realised, it also showed off the reach of German intelligence, which in those days was reading such American cipher traffic.
Schellenberg and Masson achieved a better understanding at a second meeting, held on 16 October 1942 inside Switzerland, at the Lake Constance estate of businessman Wolfsberg Meyer-Schertenbach. The two men wore civilian clothes, and Schellenberg gossiped freely about his own life and early career, extolling the joys of marriage. He spoke warmly of Switzerland, and expressed sympathy with its difficulties and dilemmas, isolated amid a warring Europe. Masson briefly pondered whether Schellenberg was probing for the possibility of Swiss mediation in opening negotiations with the Allies. Then the German revealed that Berlin had decrypted two of the ‘Lucy’ Ring’s December 1941 messages to Moscow: Schellenberg was convinced that there was a serious leak inside OKW. This caused Masson to decide that his visitor
was not a peace envoy, but simply an intelligence chief seeking clues to assist in identifying traitors. The two spent three days together before the SS man departed for Germany under cover of darkness.
What did Schellenberg get out of the meetings? He made significant concessions to Swiss interests, and it is impossible to believe that he did so without getting a return – both officers were traders. Masson never revealed what he himself told the SD chief, but it is likely that he fed him titbits about Allied intelligence activities in Switzerland. The colonel sought to show sufficient friendliness towards Germany to deter an invasion. Schellenberg was surely reconnoitring a line of retreat for himself if his Führer’s vision collapsed. Moreover, he was able to cover his back in Berlin by reporting that his exchanges with the colonel provided important intelligence material. On 6 January 1943 he passed a note to Hitler warning – on the authority of his Swiss sources – that the RAF was planning a bombing campaign to close the Brenner Pass linking Austria and Italy. He also said that the Swiss were considering a new mobilisation of their army, prompted by nervousness about Nazi intentions.
On 30 January 1943 the Swiss ‘Viking’ intelligence line, controlled from Lucerne by Major Max Waibel, reported to Masson that Hitler and his high command had held a meeting the previous October to discuss an invasion of Switzerland. The colonel decided that he must meet Schellenberg again, this time accompanied by the Swiss army’s C-in-C. On 3 March the SD chief flew by Lufthansa to Zürich, accompanied by two security men. Hans Eggen met them at the airport. They were initially booked into the Bellevue hotel, but Schellenberg preferred to stay at the Schweizerhof, before driving to Biglen, twelve miles from Bern, for his meeting with Masson and Gen. Guisan at the Baran hotel. Himmler had given his man explicit instructions: he was to press the Swiss publicly to emphasise their commitment to strict neutrality. On 4 March a statement declaring Switzerland’s determination to resist any incursion by any foreign army was drawn up on Swiss army notepaper, and signed by the commander-in-chief. The Baran’s proprietor, much excited by his exalted visitors, persuaded them all to sign the hotel’s visitors’ book, but a Swiss RSHA contact afterwards prudently tore out the page.
Although Guisan left at this stage, Schellenberg stayed for a further week, and held several more meetings with Masson. He pressed the intelligence officer for details of the German traitors who were feeding the ‘Lucy’ Ring, but Masson was sincere in pleading ignorance. The Swiss, in his turn, asked the visitor to secure the release of the family of Gen. Henri Giraud, who had been seized by the Gestapo following the French officer’s escape from fortress captivity. Schellenberg assented – and again fulfilled his promise. Masson told the German he was much concerned that Hitler still appeared to be considering an invasion of his country. This was tactically inept, because it alerted Schellenberg to the fact that Bern, too, had secret sources within the Nazi high command. But on 27 March the Viking Line’s sources changed tack completely, and said there was no longer any danger at all of an invasion of Switzerland. The whole exercise by the Germans, orchestrated by Schellenberg, had been designed to intimidate the Swiss, to galvanise them to take harsher countermeasures against Allied intelligence agents in their country, especially the Soviet networks – which Masson eventually did, rounding up much of the ‘Lucy’ Ring. Meanwhile, the head of the Swiss government’s military affairs department exploded in fury at the disclosure of Gen. Guisan’s unauthorised negotiations with the Nazis.
When Allen Dulles told Washington – many months later – about the contacts between Schellenberg and Masson, he commented that he himself remained confident that the Swiss government favoured an Allied victory. However, some of the country’s military men were so morbidly fearful of Soviet communism that they hoped for a compromise peace, which would leave some bastion between Stalin’s empire and the West. It was this threat, Dulles suggested, that induced them to traffic with the likes of Schellenberg, and he was probably right. There is no evidence about which unnamed Swiss intelligence officer tipped off the Abwehr in August 1943 – allegedly on the basis of information received from a Swiss-American source – that the Allies had broken German U-boat codes. But it is not impossible that it could have been Masson, as a gambit in his continuing horse-trading with the Nazis.
Schellenberg’s other foreign plots were ingenious, fanciful, and no more successful than those of Canaris. In 1941 he wasted thousands of Reichsmarks on two communists, worknamed ‘George and Joanna Wilmer’, who were turned in Plötzensee jail, then dispatched to Switzerland to try to break into the ‘Lucy’ Ring. They spent the RSHA’s cash enthusiastically, but Alexander Foote rejected their advances with contempt. During a July 1942 visit to Portugal and Spain, Schellenberg conducted negotiations with a Brazilian exile, Plínio Salgado, who promised great things for the German cause, but delivered nothing. The spy chief also trafficked with Dr Felix Kersten, a German masseur with Finnish nationality, one of the legion of charlatans who extracted large sums of cash from Himmler, whom he introduced to the prominent Swedish lawyer Dr Carl Langbehn. Langbehn was one of many neutrals eager to exploit the war for his personal enrichment: he demanded 80,000 kronor from the Stockholm government as a fee for helping to negotiate the release of several Swedish citizens held by the Germans in Poland. Dr Wilhelm Bitter, a psychoanalyst at a Berlin hospital, was sent abroad by the RSHA with a mission to find a channel through which Germany might negotiate with the Allies. Having got himself a safe distance from Germany, Bitter sent just one hysterical message home, saying that the only answer was to overthrow Hitler, then vanished forever.
With the encouragement of Himmler, Schellenberg gave the wife of Ribbentrop’s former foreign press chief ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl a wad of cash to start an art shop in Paris, with the implausible purpose of opening a line to the British prime minister’s son Randolph, whom she had known in London. A chronically overwrought woman, she duly visited Paris in July and September and spent the money, but made no contact with any Churchill. In April 1944 one of Albert Speer’s officials suggested that Schellenberg contact Coco Chanel, who he said was violently anti-Soviet, and on sufficiently friendly terms with Churchill to make her a credible intermediary for peace negotiations. Chanel, then sixty and living at the Paris Ritz with her Abwehr friend Hans-Gunther von Dincklage, was duly brought to Berlin. The couturier told the Germans she had just the right friend to make a connection with the British – Vera Bate, an Englishwoman married to an Italian named Lombardi, currently interned because of her links to the Badoglio government. Schellenberg acceded at once: Signora Lombardi was released, and just a week later was sent by air to Madrid, carrying a letter addressed to Churchill for presentation at the British embassy; Dincklage was appointed as her go-between, to convey the British response to Schellenberg. Once arrived in Madrid, however, the ungrateful Signora Lombardi told all, denouncing Chanel as the Nazi stooge she was.
Schellenberg heard no more from Vera Bate, yet he was adept at evading blame for such failures. In November 1942, when Hitler and Göbbels raged at Canaris and the Abwehr for their failure to predict the Anglo-American ‘Torch’ landings in North Africa, the chief of the RSHA’s Department VI merely shrugged that military intelligence was not his responsibility. Two months later, he invited a delegation of top Turkish police and intelligence officers to tour Germany, for what was intended to be a display of the Reich’s might. Schellenberg strove to woo Pepyli, the police president, a staunch anti-communist who was indeed responsive, and gave a lavish party on the Golden Horn when the SS officer visited Turkey later in the year – the Turk shared the Nazis’ loathing of communists and Russians. But for all his hosts’ elaborate courtesy, Schellenberg got nowhere in securing greater latitude for his officers in their country. The Ankara government, conscious of the way the war was going, was so dismayed by the hospitality Pepyli extended to the Nazi foreign intelligence chief that it sacked him from the police presidency.
In May 1943 Schellenberg and Ribbentrop agreed that a
Nazi propaganda team should be dispatched to the US to influence the 1944 presidential election against Roosevelt. They were duly trained and dispatched, but the U-boat carrying them vanished without trace, presumed sunk. Two other men who did get ashore north of New York in July were soon arrested by the Americans, who assumed them to be saboteurs. In truth, they had been sent on an absurd political intelligence mission. Meanwhile, when the Allies invaded Italy Schellenberg went to elaborate lengths to rescue the exiled grand mufti of Jerusalem. He was successful in transporting this violently anti-British, anti-Semitic Muslim leader from Rome to Berlin, but quickly tired of the mufti’s company and despaired of his usefulness.
He recruited for the SD Irna, Baroness von Rothkirch, a former singer and the widow of an industrialist, now in her forties and serving as mistress to the Portuguese ambassador in Berlin. After a stint gathering gossip on the German capital’s diplomatic circuit, she was dispatched to Lisbon on a fishing expedition. She ran up some impressive bills there before securing a transfer to Switzerland, where her son was attending school. Here too she squandered the SD’s money until Schellenberg recognised her worthlessness, common to most ‘social spies’. In October 1943 he paid a personal visit to Stockholm, supposedly in pursuit of medical advice about his own liver troubles, but chiefly to put out a cautious feeler to the Allies. The Swedish mood had shifted dramatically now that Allied victory loomed: British and American intelligence officers operated with a freedom denied to them earlier in the war, while Nazi visitors had become much less popular dining companions. Schellenberg called on the hotel of a notable rich American guest, one Abram Stevens Hewitt, who held some vague status as a ‘European observer’ for President Roosevelt. The SD chief advanced a proposal astoundingly crass and naïve: that the Germans should negotiate a compromise peace with the Western Allies, while continuing the war on the Eastern Front. At a second meeting Hewitt agreed that if this proposal found favour in Washington he would insert a personal advertisement in the Svenska Dagbladet: ‘For sale, valuable goldfish aquarium for 1,524 Kr.’ Hewitt returned to the US and appears to have passed on Schellenberg’s message, but unsurprisingly the aquarium remained unadvertised. In November 1943 the Swedish government was emboldened to break off economic relations with Germany: the Nazis were running out of neutral friends.
