Public Servant, Secret Agent

by Paul Routledge

  This setback did not affect preparations for Operation Pegasus, which went ahead on schedule on 22 October. From their clandestine telephone links, IS9 now knew the number of men of the 1st Airborne Division in hiding was much greater than first envisaged. Assault boats were carried to the banks of the Rhine under night cover. Meanwhile, alerted by the Baker episode, the Germans increased military activity on the other side of the river and began expelling Dutch civilians. For Neave, Pegasus had become an operation combining ‘military planning and secret intelligence’. He plainly revelled in the latter. His communications lines through Room 900 and IS9 worked at fever pitch to ensure the success of the enterprise. Neave and Fraser went to the forward command post at a farmhouse near Randwijk on the Allied side, to act as ‘beachmasters’ to the incoming human cargo. A Bofors gun firing ten rounds at intervals signalled the start of the operation, and soon after midnight Neave watched the Canadian engineers embark. A Morse code signal from the other side was 400 yards from where he expected it, but within twenty minutes of the launch the men began to return, bringing 138 evaders, including several Dutchmen. Neave recognised two of the latter: they were fellow escapers from Colditz.

  The entire party got through enemy territory with remarkable ease, bringing information that a further 150 evaders were still at large, some of them badly wounded. Neave came under pressure to mount a second operation – Pegasus II – to bring them out. This would not be so easy. Enemy reinforcements had moved into the area north of the Rhine, and unfortunate publicity given to Pegasus I by jubilant survivors on their return had also alerted the Germans. However, he began planning a second mercy mission, provisionally fixed for 16 November. The crossing point this time would be the village of Heteren, four miles east of Randwijk and closer to the Arnhem battle zone. Autumn rains now ruled out the use of rowing boats, and Neave wangled a dozen flat-bottomed ‘storm boats’ fitted with silenced outboard motors from the Canadians now occupying Nijmegen. Even so, he began to harbour doubts about repeating the success of Pegasus I. With so many Dutch evaders making their way into Allied territory under their own steam, there was an obvious risk to security. But it was decided to go ahead six days later than originally planned. The Rhine was running high on the night of 22 November. It was very dark and windy. All night Neave’s party, under fitful shelling from German batteries, watched for the Morse signal from the other side that would indicate they were on their way. It did not come, but at 3.00 a.m. on 24 November they heard an Irish voice carry across the river. A storm boat hurried across and came back with three men: an RAF sergeant and two Dutchmen, all in civilian clothes. It transpired that they were all that survived from a group of 120 men who had set off to walk in stockinged feet to the crossing place two days earlier, only to be ambushed by a German patrol that opened fire, killing several and taking the rest prisoner. Only seven got away. Later that night, another voice called across the river and an American lieutenant insisted on paddling a canoe across the treacherous current. Neither he nor the mystery caller came back. Neave confessed to being deeply depressed by the failure of his mission. It had been a grim disappointment and marked the end of large-scale rescue attempts until the following spring. On reflection, he decided, ‘only a miracle could have prevented disaster’. The unwise publicity given to Pegasus I had put the Germans on a high state of alert.

  Neave returned to London in December 1944, leaving Hugh Fraser in charge of IS9 at Nijmegen. His task now was to organise a small-scale crossing of men still at large and the dropping of supplies to MI9’s agents in Holland. To Neave’s obvious pleasure, his old unit reverted to clandestine operations supplying the British and Canadian forces with military intelligence. ‘This was not the accepted function of IS9 (WEA) and the War Office would have protested had they known about it,’ Neave mentioned with some satisfaction.11 His own operations from Room 900 brought out more than thirty more officers and men of the 1st Airborne through the maze of Dutch waterways. Among them was Brigadier (later General Sir) John Hackett, badly wounded while commanding the 4th Parachute Brigade at Arnhem, who strongly supported Neave’s bid for extra equipment, particularly wireless sets for his agents.

  However, the war in Europe was drawing to a close and with it the need for Room 900’s evasion operations. Crockatt and Neave debated a number of alternative ideas, including an incredible plan to send paratroopers into prisoner of war camps, including Colditz, to forestall wholesale killings by the retreating Nazis. Neave fondly imagined himself landing in the courtyard of the castle whence he had escaped three years earlier. The plan was dropped on the grounds that it would put POWs’ lives at risk. Neave returned to Holland in the first week of April 1945 and crossed the Rhine into Arnhem in the wake of the German retreat. Two days before the official VE Day, he contrived to get permission to cross the German lines after a truce was signed at Wageningen, and drove at breakneck speed to Amsterdam and The Hague in search of his MI9 helpers. Their hour of thanks and reward had come. Neave was ordered to set up an Awards Bureau in The Hague for Dutch nationals who had risked their lives to help Allied servicemen. This ‘congenial task’ kept him occupied for almost five months.

  It also brought to an end his wartime involvement with IS9, which, according to Jimmy Langley, was concentrated at Bad Salzufflen in the British Occupation Zone in July 1945 prior to being disbanded. He also recorded that MI9 was disbanded. However, the work of both organisations continued in a discreet manner long after the war, and under a different name it continues today. Neave continued to have a key role in these peacetime activities. He took keen satisfaction in the work his organisation had done, not merely in freeing Allied servicemen from their captors but combating totalitarianism in all its forms, particularly Soviet Communism. In his memoirs of MI9 service, he paid tribute to the – mostly young – people who, inspired by a sense of outrage, resisted tyranny and oppression. In an illuminating sentence, he argued: ‘Their counterparts can be found today all over the world, especially among the opponents of Soviet imperialism.’ Neave paid tribute to the young Czechs who chalked swastikas on tanks in defiance of the Red Army. ‘The difference is that, in war, these emotions have to be organised.’12 IS9 (TA) did precisely that, in preparation for a possible war with the Soviet Union. Neave lectured widely, including to the SAS, in the techniques of combat survival.

  The work of IS9/MI9 remains little known, except among military historians. It was, said its leader Jimmy Langley, ‘a brilliant conception, not so big as to give rise to the criticism that it was an unnecessary appendage to the invading forces, not too little so as to be ineffective. It met and solved the problems of escape and evasion to a triumphant conclusion.’13 Overall, more than 3,000 Allied aircrews shot down over France, Belgium and Holland before D-Day were successfully returned. The number of Room 900’s helpers who died – shot, tortured or starved in concentration camps – will never be known. Langley argues that it is far in excess of the 500 recorded names. Every returnee probably cost the life of a helper.

  10

  Nuremberg

  The Britain that Neave found on his return from a Europe restored to peace was a very different landscape from the pre-war society that he had fought to preserve. While hostilities still raged across Europe, social reforms were afoot to make Britain ‘a land fit for heroes’. As part of the wartime coalition government, the Conservatives played a key role in this radical change. R.A. Butler introduced the 1944 Education Act, which brought free, compulsory secondary education and raised the school leaving age to fifteen, a measure widely regarded as the most important social reform of the first half of the twentieth century. It was supplemented by a White Paper presaging the establishment of a National Health Service, another strong contender for the accolade. A wind of change was blowing through the nation. After so much sacrifice, there was a widespread feeling that things could not – and should not – ever be the same again.

  On 5 July 1945, the British people turned their backs on Winston Churchi
ll and elected a Labour government by a landslide. The new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was, like Neave, a major, but there the similarities ended. Neave was a natural Tory. His upbringing, education and preference for the Territorial Army and the Junior Carlton Club rather than fashionable causes of the left in the thirties marked him out as a man who would tread an orthodox political path, if he took to politics at all (his forebears had not). If his pre-war days among the Myrmidons at Oxford had exposed a dilettante side, his wartime ordeal as a prisoner of the Nazis and subsequent experience in the secret services fired the serious side of his nature. He abhorred the totalitarian state and by sustaining his links with IS9 he signalled a readiness to fight that challenge from wherever it came.

  On the international front, a new world order was already taking shape. In October 1944, the four great powers – America, Britain, China and the USSR – announced the setting up of the United Nations, a global security body to supersede the discredited League of Nations. New international financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, were established to avert a post-war economic collapse that might plunge the world into fresh political instability or even war.

  Much thought was also given to the question of punishing Nazi war criminals. An Allied body, the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crime, went to work identifying those who should be brought to book. The Allied powers could not agree on how to dispose of the guilty men. Initially, Churchill favoured summary execution of Hitler and his clique, and some senior advisers to Franklin D. Roosevelt shared this view. Indeed, the American President, reacting to the mass slaughter of French civilians as early as 1941, had warned: ‘One day, a frightful retribution will be exacted.’ The Soviets preferred a show trial, at which they were expert, followed by the firing squad. Stalin had his own little list comprising 50,000 members of the German General Staff. More sober counsels prevailed when Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met in Tehran in November 1944. The big three agreed to take Hitler’s fiends through a judicial process, though no court of international law to try them yet existed.

  The Americans swiftly set about drawing one up. At its heart was the novel crime of conspiracy to wage war. While it had long been a feature of British law, conspiracy was a concept alien to US and European jurisprudence. But in the context of Hitler’s subjection and maltreatment of millions, it had obvious advantages. The Nazis had engaged in a criminal enterprise to wage aggressive war and proof of participation in this conspiracy would ensure a guilty verdict. Initially, the British were reluctant to go down this road. On 12 April 1945, the day Roosevelt died, the War Cabinet confirmed its view that ‘executive action’ was the right way to dispose of the top Nazis. The new US President, Harry Truman, however, pressed the case for an international tribunal and by early June the American view prevailed. Furthermore, Washington insisted that ‘if we are going to have a trial, then it must be an actual trial’ not a judicial confirmation of a political decision to convict. There would have to be genuine, compelling evidence of war crimes. Fortunately, the advancing Allies were accumulating masses of captured documents tracing the proof of responsibility for atrocities which the Germans had recorded in minute detail. Robert Jackson, a US Supreme Court judge charged with setting up the International Military Tribunal, reported to a London conference of ministers: ‘I did not think men would ever be so foolish as to put in writing some of the things the Germans did put in writing. The stupidity of it and the brutality of it would simply appal you.’ In late July, Nuremberg was chosen as the venue for the greatest trial of the century. Despite saturation bombing by the Allies, which killed two thirds of its 450,000 population, the city where Hitler staged his greatest pre-war rallies still had a courthouse, a luxury hotel, a prison and agreeable houses for the 600 Tribunal lawyers and staff. Here, the twenty-three top Nazi war criminals would be put in the dock, in the city where their hideous decree depriving Jews of their rights and forbidding them to marry Aryans had been promulgated in 1938.

  The Allies’ first priority was to bring together the damning evidence. And despite the official disbandment of MI9 and his return to London, for Neave the war against Nazism was not quite over. In August 1945, he was appointed to the British War Crimes Executive. It was an appropriate decision. His Oxford degree in jurisprudence had given him a grasp of international law, though he could not have been familiar with the new dispensation created to punish Nazi war crimes. He spoke some German and he had personal experience of the Gestapo. His work with MI9 had also drawn him into the wider European theatre. But Neave did not take the job in any spirit of personal revenge. He felt he had had his triumph when he escaped the Nazis’ clutches in January 1942. The requital he sought was posthumous justice for the agents he had lost, some in the most appalling circumstances in concentration camps.

  Neave’s initial task was to gather evidence to incriminate Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, head of the firm that was the engine of Hitler’s war machine. In line with the novel doctrine of war conspiracy, he had to substantiate the charge that Krupp participated in military and economic preparations for war, and committed war crimes and crimes against humanity involving the use and abuse of slave labour. Neave reached the bombed-out city of Essen in late August 1945. The giant Krupp Works was largely a ruin, demolished by RAF raids culminating in a devastating 1,000-bomber onslaught five months earlier. Walking around the shattered factory, he found the silence oppressive. That evening, his unit ensconced itself in the Villa Tegelmann, a modern house in a middle-class suburb that had survived the attentions of ‘Bomber’ Harris. Promptly the next morning, he began his investigation at the Villa Huegel, the Krupp family mansion set in its own grounds overlooking the city. This overblown monstrosity, with 200 rooms and a 100-foot reception hall ornamented by larger-than-life family portraits, was built by Alfried Krupp, the firm’s founder, in 1870. Neave’s assignment was to make it give up its secrets.

  It was not an easy task. The firm’s remaining staff stayed stubbornly loyal to their boss, who was not even a Krupp himself but the scion of a minor Prussian diplomatic family who had married the formidable Bertha, granddaughter of Alfried Krupp. Their marriage in 1906 was attended by Kaiser Wilhelm himself, who urged Gustav to help make Germany a great military nation. He needed no bidding and boasted of being ‘the nation’s armourer’. After the First World War, he had been indicted as a war criminal in the ineffectual campaign to demilitarise Germany. Sentenced by a French court in 1923 to fifteen years’ imprisonment, he served only five months before returning to become Hitler’s munitions manufacturer. His production lines turned out the Panzer tanks that spearheaded the Nazi Blitzkrieg. Neave painstakingly assembled evidence that Gustav had secretly rearmed Germany for offensive war in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. He was helped by Krupp’s own swagger, for he had several times boasted in speeches and articles of his support for the Führer. A family album contained photographs of Hitler in the grounds of the Villa Huegel, and of his deputy, Rudolf Hess, awarding Gustav with the Nazi ‘Gold Banner of Industry’ for his contribution to the war effort in 1940.

  Within a matter of days, nearly a ton of Krupp documents was in Neave’s hands, and on 9 September he was instructed by the War Crimes Executive to arrest the firm’s directors and executives. Accompanied by members of the British Field Security Police (‘scholarly sergeants in spectacles, very different from the Gestapo’) and an armed guard from the Manchester Regiment, Neave’s diminutive force of four armoured cars and jeeps rolled into the Essen plant. They locked in the entire staff, who stood by their desks in a quasi-military show of disobedience. Neave was amused by their Prussian contempt for the victors but angry at their pretence that slave labourers had not been maltreated and starved to death. Nine directors were arrested in their homes the next day, an exercise that Neave found ‘rather pathetic’. Neave housed them in the cellars of Essen’s bombed-out gaol, but he could not make them talk. Through their lawyer, the Krup
p bosses protested about the ‘inhuman and illegal’ conditions of their imprisonment. An enraged Neave received the lawyer after reading a report by a Krupp director about the extremely bad conditions in which foreign workers had been kept: forced to walk barefoot in winter, eating only bad meat and suffering a quadrupled rate of tuberculosis. Neave turned on him with fury. Very young children had been employed by his clients in much worse conditions, he assured the disbelieving lawyer, whose protests went unheeded. In the immediate aftermath of war, and the exposure of so much Nazi brutality, it was as difficult for him as many other British officers to accept the German habit of denial: that they had not known or they were only carrying out orders. In fact, Krupp had employed 70,000 of the 4.8 million foreign workers driven into slavery by Hitler. Some of them came from Auschwitz to manufacture weapons, among them Jews forced to labour in a plant named Berthawerk after Gustav’s wife.