During the days after the surrender, Sergeant Kirby was fully occupied escorting German liaison officers and also interviewed an Englishwoman who had remained in Germany throughout the war with her German husband. On 14 May, he escorted two German officers in a German staff car to the Headquarters of Colonel General Johannes Blaskowitz in Hilversum, in Holland, to organize the surrender of his Army Group to the Canadians. Captain Norval Rodgers, the 93 FSO, was given a driver and a jeep and instructed to meet three German officers near Hamburg who would take him to General Gunther Blumentritt to deliver the surrender terms of his disparate Army Group. Landing in Normandy in October 1944, 93 FSS had been given Luneburg as its target town, which it reached with a SAS troop ahead of advancing armoured cars. Among others arrested by the section were Field Marshal Erhard Milch, the half-Jewish Luftwaffe commander, and SS-Colonel Baumgarten, who commanded Hitler’s special train. Over the next two years, the section arrested 1,000 suspects in the Luneburg area. After meeting the German officers, there was an uncertain exchange of who should salute who and then Rodgers was taken to a large country house where, in a convivial atmosphere, Blumentritt agreed that German forces had been outnumbered on the Eastern Front. Four days later, General Eisenhower accepted unconditional surrender from Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff to the German High Command, which then precipitated surrenders to the Soviets in Berlin.
An uneasy calm hovered over a Germany battered by defeat for the second time in twenty-seven years. The transport and communication infrastructure was barely functioning after four years of bombing and in Berlin half the homes were ruined while, in Cologne, it was about three-quarters; 20 million people were homeless. About 17 million people – mainly former prisoners of war, forced labourers and concentration camp detainees – were roaming the country seeking food, shelter and revenge. Many of the surviving German men languishing in prison camps were unable to intervene. Add to the mix a further seven million Germans forced from Poland and five million from East Europe. In the Soviet-occupied zone, one tyranny was replaced by another. In the British occupation zone of Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine/Westphalia, where most rail and road bridges were destroyed or badly damaged, the Controller for one million refugees and 90,000 displaced persons in Westphalia was Lieutenant Colonel Frank Davis. Politically, the Soviet Union demanded that Germany be reduced to a pastoral state while France wanted it relegated to a canton. America was ambivalent. The newly-elected Labour Government of Clement Attlee was tempted to punish and dreamt of closer links with Moscow, but Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin recognized, as had Churchill, that if Stalin was left unchecked, Soviet politics posed a significant threat to global security. He hoped that Germany could form a government and buffer Soviet expansionist ambitions.
Among the liberated prisoners of war were several Intelligence Corps. Several others had died in captivity. Corporal John Coulthard was an Oxford University lecturer and member of 32 (45th Division) FSP when he was captured by a German patrol on 20 May 1940 near Amiens on his motorcycle while trying to find Divisional HQ. Sent to Stalag XA near Thorn in Poland, the camp commandant instructed him to disseminate information from German newspapers broadcasting Allied defeats, which he did but added that it was lies. This earned him a fortnight in solitary. In 1942, the Polish Resistance supplied him and another prisoner with civilian clothes and with Coulthard masquerading as ‘Herr Doktor Neumen’ of Siemens, they travelled in style to Munich and reached the Swiss border where Coulthard bluffed his way across. But his companion was questioned by the frontier policeman and when he returned to help, it was then that their passports were exposed as false. In January 1944 the Polish Resistance helped Coulthard to reach the port of Gydia, where he was recaptured while looking for a Swedish ship. Unfortunately, he died, aged 26 years, near Domitz on the banks of the River Elbe from dysentery and exposure in March 1945 when, in the grip of a very severe winter, the Germans marched 100,000 Allied prisoners away from the Soviet advance.
On 9 September 1944, sixteen of the thirty-seven SOE prisoners, including Captains Hubble, Macalister and Pickersgill, had slowly suffocated hung from hooks in the Buchenwald execution cellar. Yeo-Thomas escaped in 1945 but was recaptured near US lines and ended up in a prison camp full of French where the senior NCO suspected him of being a stool-pigeon. Yeo-Thomas satisfied his suspicion by showing him Hubble’s chess set with its inscription ‘Made in England’. It is now on display in the Imperial War Museum. Their murders were commemorated at Buchenwald in October 2010 by representatives of the Corps. Also attending was one of Captain Hubble’s three daughters. Major Philip Chamier, born in Frankfurt to an Australian father and German mother, was educated in Germany. Commissioned into the Intelligence Corps, he was posted to the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, Cairo, in February 1942 and had joined 102 Military Mission with the Libyan Arab Force before joining MI6. Shortly before the Battle of El Alamein, Private Friedrich Reschke walked into the British lines and, talent-spotted by MI6, was sent to England to be trained as a radio operator to Chamier. During the night of 11 April 1944, they parachuted to near the village of Gründingen, west of Stuttgart; however, their 161 (Special Duties) Squadron Halifax had been spotted and they were arrested. Their papers passed scrutinization but as Chamier boarded a train at Pforzheim, Reschke betrayed him to the station master. Post-war investigations into his fate suggest that he sent messages under duress. Was Reschke an Abwehr agent sent to infiltrate a British intelligence organization or was he a genuine escaper, in which case he was the only German to escape from Great Britain? As Germany began collapsing, MI6 despatched several Corps sergeants of Austrian and German extraction to Germany, of which four were captured and executed. Sergeant Frederick Benson was born of German Jewish parents as Fritz Becker. He escaped to England after his parents were arrested and initially enlisted in the Pioneer Corps. Spotted by MI6, he and a radio operator parachuted into Germany in September 1944 and travelled by train and on foot about 250 miles to reach their operational area. Benson was active for several weeks transmitting information to London before he was tracked down by the Gestapo and killed whilst attempting to escape.
During the advance through Europe, Intelligence Corps (Field) had become highly experienced in organizing arrests and raiding homes, factories, warehouses and shops. Factors influencing counter-intelligence included:
• Identification of espionage. Gestapo documents seized in Kiel listing local communists referred to Klaus Fuchs, who later passed Atom bomb secrets to the Soviets.
• Compilation of personality files/cards on each suspect.
• The need to maintain a network that included an interrogation structure linked to an organization capable of collecting, collating and disseminating information.
• The investigation of the Nazi leadership from the Regional, County, Local Group, Cell Leaders and more than 500,000 Block Leaders. Denunciations were rife, even among former colleagues.
• Removal of Nazi Party members from industry.
• Rectification of Nazi Party injustices.
• The prohibition of the Nazi Party and the replacement of propaganda with a programme of re-education in democracy – denazification.
Some information was given to the Special Allied Airborne Reconnaisance Force, which was tasked to search for and interrogate prominent Germans before being disbanded in May. A subtle division of attitude had emerged between the SS accepting capture with some docility while the Gestapo and SD reckoned that they had bargaining chips of knowledge about the Soviet Union likely to be of value. In some respects this was correct. Eventually, about twenty-two train-loads of documents, some historical and others of considerable scientific importance, were collected. Although Allied counter-intelligence had become proficient in interpreting German pay books and identity documents, collators experienced difficulties in cross-checking information but, as always, luck contributed in the hunt, including the find of a detailed Nazi Party card index that a printer had
failed to destroy being seized in the American sector. Nearly ninety per cent of SS records were captured by General George Patton’s troops. Radio Hamburg records recovered from a salt mine by Soviet troops listed staff and contributors, including British and Commonwealth broadcasters. The only record missing was that of William Joyce – ‘Lord Haw Haw’.
After the surrender, several FS sections and FSRDs fanned across the area occupied by the British to ‘pinch points’, such as river and canal bridges, to trap those on their Arrest Lists. Politically isolated, Heinrich Himmler advised his supporters at a meeting in Flensburg on 5 May to disperse and avoid capture by mingling with the armed forces. In the belief that he could negotiate a settlement with the Western Allies and offer the German Army to defeat the Russians, he decided to return to Munich. Gathering several close colleagues, including the chief SS surgeon and his personal physician, the chief of Central Security Department III (Internal Security) and an SS escort, he shaved his moustache and covered his left eye with a black patch. Along with others in his party, he dressed in non-descript civilian clothing and equipped himself with a demobilization certificate dated 3 May 1945 in the name of former ‘Sergeant Heinrich Hinzinger’, of a Special Armoured Company, Secret Field Police. Leaving Flensburg on 10 May, his party of nineteen crossed the Elbe and merged with thousands of German prisoners. By 18 May they had reached a farmhouse near Bremervörde on the banks of the River Oste, where a military Bailey Bridge was the only crossing between Hamburg and Bremen. Supported by the Black Watch, 45 FSS and 1004 FSRD, who were based in a mill, were checking documents. Section HQ was at Zeven, several miles to the south. While Himmler and two escorts, both SS, remained at the farmhouse, in the mid-afternoon the remainder aroused suspicion and were escorted to Sergeant Ken Baisbrown in a mill overlooking the bridge, where they said they had left three sick colleagues at the farm. Giving the impression that everything was in order, Baisbrown sent two lorries to collect their three comrades and then advised Staff-Sergeant John Hogg, of 1003 FSRD, about his suspicions of two men he believed to be Secret Field Police. When Sergeant Arthur Britton checked their documents, he noticed that they all bore the same unit and date stamp. Britton and Baisbrown interrogated the youngest, who admitted that his stamp was from SD headquarters and that he was part of the group. When Hogg returned empty-handed, HQ XXX Corps issued an alert that three wanted Secret Field Police were in the area. That night the suspects were transferred to the Internment Camp 031 at Barnstedt, near Westertimke, that was holding German prisoners and about 600 Indian soldiers who served in the German Army.
After several attempts to cross the river, during the afternoon on 22 May, Himmler and the two SS officers walked through Bremerworde toward the bridge, the two escorts dressed in long green military overcoats whilst Himmler was insignificant in a blue raincoat. Both escorts continuously looked behind them. They were stopped by a patrol in Bremervörde’s main street and were taken to the mill. An unsubstantiated account is that the three were picked up by a patrol, made up of five gunners from 73 Anti-Tank Regiment and three former Russian prisoners from Stalag XB at Meinstedt as they tried to cross a bridge three miles south of Bremervörde. When the camp was liberated, its gates were opened. At the mill, while Sergeant Britton was interviewing the ‘sergeant, he noted that underneath the Wehrmacht stamp of his identity document, there was a trace of the Secret Field Police stamp. He also noted that while ‘Hinzinger’ was not particularly soldierly, he maintained military hierarchy by presenting himself before the two escorts. After Corporal Richard Forrest had searched their belongings, they were taken to a bakery for interrogation and then formally arrested, The three spent the night sleeping on the grain on the first floor of the mill. The three prisoners spent most of the next day in the back of the section lorry as Sergeant Britton and two soldiers first drove them to Zeven where Captain Excell, at the HQ 45 FSS, instructed they should be transferred to the internment camp Westertimke for registration before being allocated a camp.
At about 6.30pm, Sergeant Britton arrived at 031 Civil Interrogation Camp at Kolkhagen Camp on the western side of the village of Barnstedt, south of Lüneburg. The former Governor of Hamburg Kaufman was watching the three prisoners being admitted from an inner compound when the insignificant figure went behind a bush and then emerge as Himmler wearing his pince-nez glasses. When the three then insisted on seeing the camp commandant, Captain Thomas Selvester, he sensed something unusual and, having ordered the two officers to be held under close arrest, was then confronted by the third prisoner admitting that he was Himmler. Somewhat nonplussed, Selvester immediately informed HQ 2nd Army and when Major Rice, an intelligence officer, arrived, he confirmed Himmler’s identity by matching his signature and ordered that he be strip-searched, during which two phials of poison were found. Himmler refused to wear the issue British Battledress because he did not want to be shot in a British uniform but under threat of being transferred to Montgomery’s HQ naked, he dressed in a shirt, shorts and socks and was then taken to a house holding important prisoners in Lüneburg. Next day, Colonel Michael Murphy, 2nd Army’s chief intelligence officer, arrived to take personal charge. Major Norman Whittaker, who commanded the HQ 2nd Army’s Defence Company, witnessed Captain C.J. Wells RAMC carry out a thorough medical examination. Wells noted a small blue capsule between Himmler’s cheek and teeth but as he tried to pluck it out, Himmler bit him, snapped the glass capsule, breathed deeply and was pronounced dead within twelve minutes, again admitting that he was Himmler. Determined that hardline Nazis should not find the body, as had happened when Mussolini and his mistress were shot at Mezzegra near Lake Como and then taken to Milan where they were hung upside down, Whittaker and his CSM Edwin Austin wrapped it in an Army blanket and camouflage net and buried it in an unmarked grave on Lüneburg Heath. When, in early 1946, reports reached the War Office that the body had been found, Whittaker, who had been demobbed and was working for the Control Commission, Germany, checked the gravesite and reported that nothing had been disturbed. The cell in which Himmler had been confined was stripped by souvenir hunters, except for his partly-used tube of shaving cream and razor blades. They are now in the Military Intelligence Museum.
At the same time, the existence of the Flensburg Government was under increasing pressure, in particular by the Soviet Union accusing the Western Allies of colluding with Admiral Doenitz until, on 23 May, General Eisenhower announced that it was to be dismantled. With support from 159 Infantry Brigade, CSM William Henry of 61 (11th Armoured Division) FSS arrested Doenitz at his Naval HQ as a war criminal, and not as a prisoner of war, as the Admiral expected, and transferred him and several others to Brigade Headquarters, much to the annoyance of a US officer sent to confine him to a US warship. In October 1944, 61 FSS had lost Sergeant Harry Wheel shot by a sniper while searching a house in Bree, Belgium. Next day, 61 and 41 (XII Corps) FSS arrested Colonel General Arthur Jodl, Chief of Staff of the German Armed Forces, Major General Eric Dethleffsen, who had served on the General Staff at Hitler’s HQ, Admiral Gerhard Wagner, who had negotiated the German surrender, two Reich ministers and six State Secretaries. However, correspondents and observers from the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force ‘lifted’ wallets and other items of intelligence interest as souvenirs. Doenitz was sentenced to ten years while Jodl was hanged.
On 5 June, the Allied representatives signed the ‘Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany and the Assumption of Supreme Authority by Allied Power’, dividing Germany and Berlin into four Zones. HQ 21st Army Group moved from Brussels to Bad Oeynhausen to administer the British Zone of Occupation of North Rhine/Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein. Headquarters Intelligence Corps (Field) established its offices at Parkstrasse 30. In August, Captain Searle arrived in Germany by train:
The HQ was situated in Bad Oeynhausen, a rather dreary little spa town in the middle of the North German plain, made drearier by the fact that the entire German population had been evacuated from it, and the town
contained nothing but troops. The work entailed sorting endless information obtained from German prisoners. (Quadrille With a Raven).
Initially, he was involved in tracking down Gestapo and fifty-five German wanted at large but, when Hitler’s will was apparently discovered, he was put in charge of the inquiries until Major Hugh Trevor-Roper arrived to supervise the work. Searle translated Hitler’s personal and political testament and Goebbels’s will, which had been smuggled from the Bunker in Berlin.
When the 136 FSO, Captain Leo Whitely, learnt that Joachim von Ribbentrop, the former ambassador to London and Nazi Foreign Minister from 1938 until 1945, was in lodgings near Hamburg railway station, he contacted 65 (Special Operations Executive) FSS, which had been specially trained to detain German VIPs, and the Belgian Special Air Service. On 14 June, Lieutenant James Adam, CSM Holland, Sergeant Gibson and the Belgian Sergeant Jacques Goffinet arrested him in his bed. Ironically, Adam had heckled him in a pre-war Nuremberg rally. Von Ribbentrop was executed.
At the beginning of July, an officer and four other ranks from Intelligence Corps (Field) were among the first to collect ‘demob’ suits and join the search for employment as the War Office responded to the dire economic circumstances in Great Britain by beginning to disband its wartime Armed Forces and returning requisitioned properties to their owners. Demobilization was based on age and length of service and soon gathered pace, gaps being filled by existing Intelligence Corps and transferees. The Corps establishment stood at 3,027 officers and 6,585 other ranks. The Interrogation Wing in Cambridge closed and the Intelligence School moved from Matlock to Frensham in Surrey, where it remained for a year before moving again to the former Detailed Interrogation Centre at Wilton Park, Beaconsfield. Wentworth Woodhouse was returned to the Fitzwilliam family and to sorry decline. The HQ and Depot moved to Oudenarde Barracks, Aldershot. When the Officers Mess at Oriel College was returned to Oxford University, it was presented with a commemorative silver cup in return for a silver bonbon dish. A permanent invitation was also extended to the Depot, Officer Commanding to be a member of the College Senior Dining Room for as long as the Corps existed. Brigadier Brian Parritt invoked the invitation when he was Director and chatted with a professor who remembered the exchange and commented that the cup was to ‘celebrate our departure!’ The Corps retained its links with Winchester when General Sir Bernard Paget, the first Colonel Commandant (1943-52), lodged the Second World War Roll of Honour of 214 names housed in an oak lectern in the Cathedral. Ten are badged as Corps of Military Police but are listed as Corps. The golden weather vane ‘Angel of Guildford Cathedral’ was presented by the parents of Corporal Reginald Adgey-Edgar, who died during a road crash in January 1944 while serving with 41 FSS. The onestar appointment of Inspector of Intelligence Establishments was discontinued in September.
Sharing the Secret Page 24
