by Max Hastings
In February 1944 this would-be ‘good Nazi’ inherited from Canaris control of the Abwehr, in a condition of decay which it was too late to reverse. Germany had lost the power to attract foreign informants because it was plainly destined to lose the war, and also lacked the military and naval capability to exploit good strategic intelligence even if it secured this. Thus Schellenberg spent ever more time in dalliances with foreign intermediaries, of a kind that would have caused him to be shot had he not enjoyed the backing of Heinrich Himmler. RSHA chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who disliked Schellenberg, wielded more power, but the latter retained the ear of the SS overlord, while playing a perilous game amid the crumbling Third Reich. Schellenberg was skilled in providing reassurance – his soothing bedside manner sustained Himmler’s trust in him.
In August 1944, following the Hitler bomb plot, the RSHA officer was commissioned to drive to the house in the Betazielestrasse at Zehlendorf where Wilhelm Canaris lived in enforced retirement. He found the admiral entertaining two visitors, to whom he bade farewell before accompanying Schellenberg to meet his jailers at the Sipo school in Fürstenberg. Canaris seemed untroubled, perhaps sincerely so, since he lacked the courage of his convictions, and had not participated in the failed coup. Before he was handed over to the SS he merely asked Schellenberg to arrange an interview with Himmler for him. The Reichsführer-SS initially promised to help with the admiral’s case, but a subsequent discussion with Kaltenbrunner persuaded him to let injustice take its course: Canaris remained imprisoned until he was hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp in April 1945. Schellenberg did intervene, however, to save the life of another plotter, Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who had once urged him to assassinate Göring.
In the last months of the war, under Schellenberg’s direction the German intelligence-gathering machine adopted ever more desperate expedients. Its officers recruited hundreds of Russian PoWs as expendable line-crossers, to be herded into Soviet-held territory to discover whatever they could before their inevitable capture – this was designated as Operation ‘Zeppelin’. Rough-and-ready, indeed barbaric, methods were employed to insure against their defection: many were photographed by the Germans executing fellow-countrymen. Schellenberg’s officers also recruited prostitutes. The RSHA’s Section V, responsible for licensing the girls, issued a directive to its regional offices: ‘I ask that you look around in your areas … for suitable women … very good-looking … who have flawless manners, intelligence, and tact and if possible knowledge of foreign languages … Report them … to Department VI.’ The project’s outcome is unrecorded, but it seems unlikely that many such dazzlingly qualified women were to be found in brothels.
In September 1944, among the mass of fanciful intelligence material that crossed Schellenberg’s desk came a warning via Sweden that the Allies planned an airborne landing in Holland, to seize a Rhine bridge. He took no action, perhaps because he mistrusted the source. The message came from a supposed British informant, but was in truth an inspired guess by Dr Kramer, the Abwehr’s resident fantasist in Stockholm. Schellenberg was anyway now devoting almost all his energies to intrigues that might serve himself or his master in the wake of a German defeat. In October, he introduced to Himmler Jean-Marie Musy, an elderly Swiss Catholic conservative, to discuss an exchange of trucks for Jews. The upshot of these negotiations was that in February 1945 Schellenberg personally handled the departure of 1,200 Jews for Switzerland; a second exodus of 1,800 was agreed, but never took place. When Himmler was given an army command on the Eastern Front in February 1945, Schellenberg urged him to throw all the military resources left to Germany into holding back the Russians, and effectively to open the Western Front to the Anglo-Americans.
He sustained a friendly dialogue with the Swiss, who at his behest agreed to destroy an Me-110 which forced-landed at one of their airfields, thus pre-empting Otto Skorzeny, who was eager to lead a commando raid to recapture it. Schellenberg’s adjutant Franz Göring played a role in countermanding an order for the liquidation of Ravensbrück’s prisoners in the last weeks of the war – 10,000 of its inmates were instead shipped to Denmark. On 20 April 1945 Schellenberg had breakfast with Norbert Masur, a representative of the World Jewish Congress, an action for which Hitler would almost certainly have had him shot, had he become aware of it. The RHSA officer’s belated good deeds towards Jews might have merited respect had they been carried out in 1942 or 1943; as it was, they seem to represent mere gestures in support of his claims upon Allied clemency. On 1 May Kaltenbrunner sacked Schellenberg, but now his Swedish connections paid off: Count Folke Bernadotte, whom he had first met at Gottfried Bismarck’s home, assisted the Abwehr boss to fly to Sweden on a Red Cross plane.
The story of the Abwehr, of Canaris and Schellenberg, may be viewed as a mere marginal scribble on the vast canvas of world war, as in considerable degree it was. Even if Hitler’s strategic intelligence had been better, and if he had been willing to heed it, it is unlikely that he could have altered the course of history – for instance, by repelling the vast Russian and Anglo-American offensives of 1943–45 – though he could have made their victories much more costly. The fundamental lesson of the Abwehr experience was that the democracies handled intelligence better than the dictatorships – including that of Stalin – because they understood the merit of truth, objective assessment of evidence, not as a virtue, but as a weapon of war. Moreover, few prospective Abwehr agents of any nationality were attracted to Hitler’s service by ideological enthusiasm: in the early war years they served because they supposed Germany likely to win. Once this belief faded, as it did from 1942 onwards, it became implausible that any intelligent man or woman with a choice would espouse the Nazi cause. Only human dross was available for recruitment.
Not for a moment should posterity be deluded into thinking Walter Schellenberg a ‘good’ Nazi, far less a competent intelligence officer, because he boasted some manners and a charm lacking in most of the gangsters who managed Hitler’s Germany. He was merely one who weighed the odds more carefully and cynically than most. Not for Schellenberg, at the end, a cyanide capsule or a bullet from his own gun; given his relative youth, he might have become one of the rare survivors from Hitler’s high priesthood, had not his liver betrayed him. His conceit would have been pricked by the verdict of Allied interrogators on Hitler’s last intelligence chief, after he returned from Sweden in 1945 to face captivity: they reported that he did not seem very intelligent.
18
Battlefields
1 WIELDING THE ULTRA WAND
In advance of D-Day in Normandy on 6 June 1944, some rational German commanders believed that the Allied invasion of the Continent offered them a final opportunity to avoid losing the war, by repelling the Anglo-American invaders then committing the entire strength of the Wehrmacht against the Red Army. Forecasting the time and place of the Anglo-American landings thus represented the supreme challenge for their intelligence officers. Every casual reader of the world’s press in 1944 knew that an invasion of the Continent was almost certain to come during the summer. But when, exactly? The codebreakers of OKH/GdNA said 4 June. Col. Alexis von Rönne, who headed the thirty officers and 110 other ranks of Fremde Heer West, or FHW, the intelligence department of von Rundstedt’s armies manning the Atlantic Wall, was the only important soldier who took this prediction seriously. Most German commanders in the theatre, including Rommel, their judgement heavily influenced by lack of Atlantic weather stations, chose instead to believe that no landing was likely before 10 June. They were thus absent from their headquarters when the invasion started.
Yet forecasting the date was far less useful to the defenders than guessing where the invaders would strike. The Allies’ deception operation ‘Fortitude’ made an important contribution to creating and sustaining enemy confusion. This should be set in context, however. The defenders’ uncertainty before D-Day was hardly a unique wartime phenomenon. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1940 the British were in a state of chroni
c bewilderment about when or whether Hitler might invade them; during the Mediterranean campaigns they were often surprised. The Russians were wrongfooted not merely by ‘Barbarossa’, but repeatedly thereafter, likewise the Americans and British in the Far East. ‘Fortitude’, like other 1943–44 deceptions, could only work its spell because the Western Allies owned the hard power – absolute command of sea and air – to provide them with a genuine variety of invasion options along hundreds of miles of coastline.
Given the erratic influence of Hitler, if an Abwehr intelligence officer had announced a week before D-Day that he was assured by agents that Normandy was the target, it is unlikely that the Germans would have altered their deployments. By June 1944 trust in the Abwehr, OKW/Chi and OKH/GdNA was low, at least as far as the Western war was concerned. Germany’s field commanders were increasingly willing to accept only what they and their staffs could see before their eyes in their own operational areas; to believe only in what their troops and tanks could achieve by the expenditure of blood and iron.
Hitler was far from the only one who thought the Pas de Calais the obvious place to attack: there had been forceful advocates in the Allied camp for making the landings there rather than in Normandy. It was not merely in Berlin that some strategists believed the British and Americans could also make a second thrust, perhaps in Brittany: until the last moment Churchill was urging Roosevelt to do just that. Far from the Germans displaying bullet-headed stupidity by questioning whether the Allies would attack solely or at all in Normandy, they would have been foolish not to acknowledge several alternatives. It was as necessary for the Wehrmacht in 1944 to fortify and defend a great swathe of northern France as it had been for the British in 1940 to build pillboxes behind their own beaches from Devon to Norfolk.
None of this is to say that ‘Fortitude’ was unsuccessful. Some people in the German camp – though certainly not all – took seriously the signals of ‘Garbo’ and other double agents controlled by the British Twenty Committee. Allied deception fed an enemy uncertainty that was anyway inevitable. It is merely necessary yet again to cite Churchill’s dictum: ‘All things are always on the move simultaneously.’ What was of decisive importance to the success of D-Day was not that the Germans believed the Allies might land in the Pas de Calais, but that Berlin was denied assured knowledge that they would do so in Normandy. Protection of the secrecy of Operation ‘Overlord’ mattered more than promotion of Operation ‘Fortitude’ – at least until the Allies had got ashore. Britain’s island status, the peerless moat provided by the Channel, was the most important factor here.
Allied radio deception, which was brilliantly sophisticated, probably played a larger role in deceiving the Germans about Allied plans before and after D-Day than did double agents, because Germany’s generals had more faith in its reliability. On 16 May 1944, after studying the latest Ultra, ‘Tar’ Robertson of MI5 told Guy Liddell that the Germans seemed to have exploited wireless traffic analysis to build up a reasonable assessment of the disposition of Allied formations in Britain, some of them fictional: ‘the whole picture is built up from a number of details. Agents’ reports do not appear to play a very big part.’ Liddell commented: ‘I cannot help feeling that the enemy, as is the case of ourselves, are more likely to depend on Y information and wireless intelligence than on anything they may receive from other sources, when formulating their plans. All that agents can really do is to fill in the picture.’ This was so. The Allied wireless deception element of ‘Fortitude’, its simulation of the fictitious First US Army Group in south-east England, almost certainly influenced the Germans’ thinking, their massive overestimate of Allied strength, more than did material transmitted by the Abwehr’s informants controlled by MI5, though the latter excite more twenty-first-century imaginations.
Exceptionally, in June 1944 Hut 8 placed a temporary interception station inside Bletchley Park, to hasten the flow of decrypts to operational commanders. Through those vital days, the codebreakers provided a drastically accelerated intelligence feed to commanders: decrypted Kriegsmarine traffic reached the Admiralty within an average of thirty minutes of interception – the record for one signal was nineteen minutes for reception, registration, deciphering, translation and teleprint dispatch to the Royal Navy. On the other side, the Wehrmacht’s Albert Praun later paid rueful tribute to the excellence of Allied signals discipline: ‘The radio picture did not change noticeably until the last day before the invasion … No radio deception was recognised. No kind of radio alert was observed before the landing.’ The German intelligence apparatus never swallowed Allied deception plans suggesting an impending descent on Norway – but Hitler was morbidly protective of his northern fastness, which was what mattered in determining deployments. Praun asserted that after 6 June his own organisation was sceptical about the notion of a second Allied landing in the Pas de Calais because most of the available Allied forces seemed committed to Normandy, but he acknowledged that OKW remained for weeks sold on the second landing scenario, especially after chance washed ashore an Allied landing-craft at Boulogne.
Ultra in the latter part of the war fortified the confidence – latterly over-confidence – of the Allies’ ground commanders. They believed that they could launch their own operations without fear that the enemy was about to unleash some fearsome surprise of his own. While tension in the Allied camp before D-Day was acute, because the stakes were so high, all the odds were on the invaders’ side. Never before in history had armies gone into battle as well briefed as were those of Britain and the United States before 6 June. Beyond bulging files prepared by the War Office’s MI14 on the German units identified in the invasion area, among tons of intelligence material distributed to the invaders was a breakdown of all known German facilities across the whole of northern France. In Amiens, for instance, were listed ‘Hôtel du Commerce, Rue du Jacobins – food store; 164, Rue Jeanne d’Arc – German police; 219, Rue Jules Barni – hospital.’ Similar inventories, partly compiled from agent reports, partly from Ultra, covered scores of major towns and cities. MI6 informants in Belgium and northern France made a significant contribution by mapping, photographing and drawing, at mortal risk, hundreds of installations along the Atlantic Wall, though such humint was weakest about positions on the immediate Normandy invasion front.
Bletchley supplied to Allied commanders a reasonably comprehensive German order of battle. The invaders knew most about the paratroop formations, because these signalled in the ever-vulnerable Luftwaffe ciphers. The roster was incomplete: little was known about the army’s 352nd Division, which wreaked some havoc among the Americans landing on Omaha beach, nor about the 711th and 716th divisions further east, but it is absurd to make much of this, as have a few historians: no army can expect to know everything about its foe. What mattered was that all Hitler’s ‘heavy’ formations were accurately pinpointed, and their movements towards the beachhead could be tracked. Once the Allies were ashore, Ultra was able to give real-time warning of – for instance – the 12 June German counterattack on Carentan, and of most impending Luftwaffe raids. Nonetheless, it deserves notice that on 10 June Bletchley lost Fish teleprinter decrypts for some days, when the Germans tweaked their encryption system; it was fortunate for Allied peace of mind that no such blackout had occurred a week or two earlier.
On the other side of the hill, even though German intelligence got the big things wrong in June 1944, once battle was joined local commanders and staffs in Normandy displayed their usual competence in exploiting information gained from patrolling, prisoner interrogation, interception of radio voice traffic. The Wehrmacht’s Albert Praun thought that overweening confidence in their own strength made the Americans and British lazy about preserving wireless silence before they launched operations: ‘This carelessness was possibly due to a feeling of absolute superiority … [that] offered the weaker defenders much information which cost the attackers losses which could have been avoided … Many attacks of division strength and greater could be predic
ted one to five days in advance.’
Some American messages sent by the M-209 field cipher machine were broken, said the German, and the RAF ‘continued to be careless’ in its voice chatter, especially its air liaison officers attached to ground units. Allied reconnaissance aircraft often reported sightings in plain language, including map references, sometimes in time for the Germans to bolt, and especially to move out artillery batteries. Patton’s army had the worst radio discipline, said Praun, Gen. Alexander Patch’s the best. French communications continued to be easily read, as they had been since 1940 – the Germans followed Gen. Leclerc’s advance on Paris kilometre by kilometre. Meanwhile the Wehrmacht became morbidly sensitive to Allied monitoring of its own communications: ‘A radio psychosis developed among German troops,’ said Praun. ‘They became most reluctant to signal’ – to avoid precipitating a storm of bombs and shells. Moreover, a fundamental problem now beset the Germans, which would dog them for the rest of the war: it was fruitless to garner enemy secrets if military strength was lacking to exploit them. On 7 June in Normandy German troops captured a detailed American operational order, but were quite unable to do anything with it, because all their available forces were fighting desperately to stave off an Allied breakthrough. Likewise sigint operators identified Chicksands as a key RAF transmission and interception station, but the Luftwaffe was incapable of bombing it.
