Midnight in Berlin

by James MacManus

  Macrae was ushered to one of several chairs around a low coffee table, which had been laid for tea. The minister immediately joined him, shook his hand, enquired briefly about the flight and then said, “Tell me everything about this conspiracy within the German army.”

  Macrae relayed almost the exact words that Koenig had told him a few days earlier. Hore-Belisha listened carefully while his secretary took notes.

  “You say they will arrest Hitler and put him on trial?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wouldn’t that be risky? The man is the legally recognised head of state and quite popular, is he not?”

  “The army will make it clear that they are acting to prevent another European war. That will trump any feeling of loyalty to the Führer. People are worried sick about a new war. Every Sunday, the cemeteries of all major German cities are full of people laying flowers on the graves of relatives fallen in the last war. They do not want another one – and neither does the army. On this issue, the Nazis are isolated, and people like Göring and Goebbels know it.”

  “You think there will be a trial?”

  “No. They’ll have to kill him. It’ll be the usual story – shot while resisting arrest, something like that. They know his powers of oratory. They will never give him a public platform.”

  The minister looked at Macrae and smiled. “It might be wiser to omit that last point from your briefing to the cabinet. An army coup that removes a dictator and places him on trial is one thing; assassination is a rather different matter.”

  “Thank you,” said Macrae.

  The minister looked at his watch and nodded to his secretary. A waitress came in with a tray of tea and biscuits.

  “You are certain of your sources?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And they won’t act unless we do?”

  “No. They want to see Britain and France take a firm stand, backed with the threat of military action.”

  “That is going to be very difficult for the prime minister to swallow. He simply won’t believe you.”

  “I know, but I’d appreciate the chance to try.”

  “You haven’t heard this from me, but he didn’t want to see you. You’ve got a reputation as a troublemaker – did you know that?”

  “The ambassador and I have had our differences.”

  Hore-Belisha gave such a broad smile at this remark that Macrae thought he was about to break into laughter. He got up, indicating the interview was over.

  “There is one thing,” said Macrae.

  The minister looked at him and waited.

  “I have a good contact there, a young German woman I believe to be in danger. I would like to get travel documents for her, if possible.”

  “Doesn’t she have a passport?”

  “The Gestapo has it.”

  The minister looked directly at Macrae for the first time.

  “This woman is …?”

  “Jewish? Yes.”

  “And you say she is a contact.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t the embassy do something?”

  “There is no quota as such, but the embassy doesn’t make it easy for … certain people to get the necessary visa.”

  “You mean Jews?”

  “Yes. We are not alone. No one wants them. Even the Australians have turned them down, and God knows they have enough room.”

  Hore-Belisha sat down and spoke softly.

  “I have tried to bring this home to the cabinet. How I’ve tried. But they are terrified of upsetting Hitler, and then, of course …”

  The minister walked to the window and gazed out over the Thames. He held his hands behind his back and Macrae could see the nails digging into the flesh of the palms. When he spoke, it was with a voice that seemed to come from elsewhere in the room, as if an invisible presence had suddenly joined their conversation.

  “The truth is, Colonel Macrae, that large-scale immigration of Jews into this country from Germany presents the government with political difficulties, if you know what I mean. We, that is the government, do not wish to encourage emigration to Palestine because that creates problems in the region, but at the same time, and unofficially of course, His Majesty’s Government is not encouraging Jews from Germany to find refuge in large numbers here.”

  Hore-Belisha swung round. His face had coloured but his voice was calm. He must have had this conversation many times over with Jewish leaders in Britain.

  “And that is a disgrace, a craven attitude born of cowardice and prejudice,” he said. He walked over to Macrae and shook his hand. “I hope the prime minister and my colleagues in cabinet listen as carefully as I have to your information. I will be in cabinet, but we may not meet again. I wish you a safe journey back to Berlin.”

  The minister walked back to his desk, pressed a buzzer on a console and picked up a set of papers. His secretary walked in and held the door open for Macrae.

  “Oh,” said Hore-Belisha. “Leave the details of that woman with my secretary, would you?”

  The first meeting of Neville Chamberlain’s day at 10 Downing Street was always with his diary secretary. The prime minister encouraged his staff to arrange an orderly series of meetings that had a certain logic in their progression through the day.

  There was no point, he remarked, in having a discussion about agricultural subsidies for Welsh hill farmers sandwiched between a confidential brief from the chief whip about the sexual transgression of a junior minister and a plea from the head of the Secret Service for unbudgeted exceptional expenditure. It was also particularity important that the prime minister should have fifteen minutes before the weekly cabinet meeting every Tuesday at eleven, to examine the agenda and consider the required tactics to achieve a consensus on the increasingly difficult issues of foreign policy.

  Thus it was with irritation that Neville Chamberlain found on the Tuesday in that first week of exceptionally hot weather in August that a meeting with the British military attaché in Berlin had been inserted in the diary immediately before the cabinet session.

  When he queried the diary entry, his secretary told him that the minister for war had personally requested the meeting but would not be attending himself. Furthermore, the secretary said the minister had arranged for the attaché to address the full cabinet.

  “I don’t have time for this,” said Chamberlain. “When was it agreed?”

  “When you were in Birmingham last week, sir. The foreign secretary approved.”

  Chamberlain at once saw the trap. If Hore-Belisha and Lord Halifax both wanted him to see this man, he would have to go along with it. And he would have to agree to the fellow addressing cabinet. He did not wish to be accused of refusing to listen to voices and views that disagreed with his own. And from what he had heard of this attaché, that is exactly what he was going to do.

  “Very well,” he said, “but all these military men smoke like chimneys. Make sure he knows that it is not permitted in my office or cabinet.”

  The prime minister was seated at his desk when Macrae was ushered into his office about an hour later, and he rose to greet his visitor with a handshake. Neville Chamberlain looked older than his photographs, with short grey hair fading to white at the sides, a neat moustache and steel-rimmed spectacles. He was wearing a dark suit with a stiff wing collar and a gold watch chain across his waistcoat. Macrae felt like an errant customer who had come to see his bank manager to explain an unapproved overdraft.

  A stenographer took her seat at the back of the room while the cabinet secretary, who had been introduced as Sir Maurice Hankey, sat on a chair positioned to the left of the prime minister’s desk. Macrae took a chair facing the desk. He noticed that Hankey had folded his arms and was looking at the ceiling. Macrae now felt less like a bank customer and more like a schoolboy facing his headmaster. Chamberlain pulled his watch from a waistcoat pocket, looked at it and said, “Don’t think me impolite, Colonel, but we have only fifteen minutes, so may I suggest that you begin.”


  The prime minister grasped his chin between forefinger and thumb and gazed at his blotting pad while the attaché repeated what he had told the minister for war that morning.

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘stand with Czechoslovakia’?” said the prime minister.

  “We must threaten hostilities. Hitler won’t fight. Call his bluff.”

  “No democratic state can make a threat of war unless it is ready and prepared to carry it out. Wouldn’t you agree, Maurice?”

  The cabinet secretary lowered his gaze from the ceiling and nodded his agreement.

  “Then, Prime Minister, with respect, I think we should be ready to follow up our threat. The whole point is that if the Nazi regime truly believes we will act, Hitler will be forced into a humiliating climb-down or a reckless act of folly, either of which will trigger the military coup.”

  The prime minister leant forward on the desk, clasped his hands and said, “Surely this talk of a coup is just that, is it not? Talk, rumours. Walk around the pubs of Westminster and you will find plenty of people who want to get rid of me, but it’s all talk, isn’t it? What do you say, Maurice?”

  “I don’t think you are in any danger of a coup, Prime Minister.”

  The two men laughed at their little joke, nodding to each other.

  “I think it would be useful to hear more about Colonel Macrae’s sources,” said the cabinet secretary. Chamberlain raised an expectant eyebrow at his visitor.

  Macrae told them in greater detail than he had vouchsafed to the ambassador that, well beyond the army, there were cells in the Abwehr whose military intelligence operations were controlled by Admiral Canaris, all of whom were prepared to cooperate in the high-risk venture of a coup. Furthermore, the Catholic Church would give moral support, with announcements from pulpits across the country, once the operation had begun. The plan was to arrest Hitler in Berlin by …

  The prime minister raised a hand to halt the briefing. The door had opened and a uniformed messenger entered and without a word handed a note to Sir Maurice Hankey. The cabinet secretary read the note and silently left the room. A whispered conversation was heard outside, then Hankey returned and whispered something in the prime minister’s ear.

  “We have just received an urgent cable from the embassy in Berlin. I had better study it before cabinet, so if you will excuse me.”

  Chamberlain rose and extended his hand. Macrae shook hands and turned to the door.

  “Oh, Colonel,” said Chamberlain. “That was most interesting. I hear what you say.”

  Macrae knew exactly what those words meant. His journey had been wasted.

  A secretary handed him a cup of coffee while he waited in a corridor. The coffee was thin and bitter, but Macrae reflected that anything he drank at that moment would probably have tasted the same.

  He waited twenty minutes before his name was called and he was ushered into the Cabinet Room, where seventeen ministers were sitting around the long oval table. The room seemed too warm to be comfortable but no one had taken off his jacket. Macrae was introduced by the prime minister, who asked him to make an opening statement.

  The ministers looked curiously at the colonel standing at the head of the table. They had mostly been called from holidays on the salmon rivers or grouse moors of Scotland or in country houses in the fashionable counties of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Somerset and Devon. None resented their recall, because the crisis in European affairs was obvious to all. But they were surprised that they were to be given a briefing by a military attaché from the Berlin embassy. The ambassador had already made his views known and had supplied sufficient information to justify the retention of the current policy.

  Macrae cleared his throat and looked at his text. He knew fears of another war ran deep among these decent, intelligent and utterly complacent men. He knew most had served in the last conflict, in which many had lost friends or relatives. He knew too that clubby, consensual cabinet discussions among men who had been to similar schools and universities, married similar women and wined and dined in similar clubs rarely strayed from the path carefully laid down by the prime minister and his immediate advisers.

  Neville Chamberlain proudly called his policy towards the Third German Reich one of appeasement, and he defied anyone to explain how else one was supposed to deal with a man who was merely behaving as a patriotic nationalist, a man who did not want war with Britain and expressed nothing but admiration for her history and empire.

  “Let me tell you exactly what is happening on the ground in Germany – at this very moment,” Macrae said. “All military leave has been cancelled, the army has bolstered fuel reserves through large purchases on the international market, labour has been conscripted to improve the fortifications facing France, airspace along the left bank of the Rhine has been closed and several armoured divisions are on the move at key points on the border with Czechoslovakia.”

  He waited while the cabinet mulled over this new and unwelcome news.

  “Furthermore, the planning staff of the High Command in Berlin has been instructed by the Führer in person to update plans for the invasion of Russia.”

  Silence descended on the cabinet. Ministers frowned and looked hard at their blotters.

  “I thought we were talking about Czechoslovakia,” said the foreign secretary.

  “We are,” said Macrae, “but I wish to alert you to the extent of Nazi ambitions in the east. Hitler will not stop at Prague or Warsaw; he is intent on domination of everything up to the Urals. His aim is a race war, to drive the Slav peoples back into the far reaches of the Eurasian continent.”

  The ensuing shocked silence was finally broken by Duff Cooper, first lord of the admiralty, whom Macrae knew to be the only opponent of the appeasement policy in the government.

  “What do you suggest we do about it?”

  “There is strong evidence, of which your colleague the secretary of state for war is aware” – Macrae turned to the prime minister, who was sitting with a face as hard and grey as granite – “and of which I have just informed the prime minister, namely that significant numbers of senior officers within the German High Command are conspiring to remove Herr Hitler from power.”

  “Unsubstantiated rumours,” said Chamberlain.

  “Let him finish,” said Hore-Belisha.

  “And let the conspirators finish Hitler – good luck to them,” said another voice.

  Macrae looked down the table and recognised Duff Cooper again.

  “They will only move if Britain issues an unambiguous warning that any German attack on Czechoslovakia will be met with force. That is the precondition for the coup.”

  The prime minister rose.

  “Forgive the interruption, Colonel. Colleagues, I think I should share with you this cable from our ambassador in Berlin, which has just been decoded.”

  Macrae stepped back from the table. He had wondered when the long oar of the ambassador would be poked into his meetings in London.

  “‘I am aware that cabinet is discussing a response to the increasingly provocative nature of German statements and actions in relation to Czechoslovakia,’” the prime minister read. “‘Ministers should be aware that last night I was given an audience by a senior member of the government, a minister close to the Führer, who affirmed that the door to negotiation remained wide open but who warned me that any bellicose statements from London would precipitate the very action we seek to avoid.’”

  Chamberlain turned to Macrae with a slight smile.

  “I do not wish to embarrass you, Colonel, by reading further, but I think it right to let colleagues in this room know that the ambassador goes on to dismiss reports of a military coup against Hitler as, and I quote, ‘not based on a realistic assessment of the opinions and operation capabilities of disaffected members of the German High Command’. I know you do not share these views, but I think it is right that the cabinet should hear the latest report from our ambassador.”

  “This is ou
trageous.” Duff Cooper had risen from his chair and was leaning on his fists on the table. “Colonel Macrae has not even finished his report to cabinet, and you have interrupted with a contradictory report from Berlin. Frankly, Prime Minister, I am shocked.”

  Hore-Belisha had also risen.

  “May I echo those sentiments and express my disappointment. Our ambassador in Berlin is known to be more enthusiastic about the policy of appeasing Hitler than most of us in this room, and thus it is only natural he would dismiss reports of military disaffection. Personally, I think we should do all we can to encourage such treachery.”

  The rest of the cabinet shifted uneasily in their seats, uncertain how to respond to these remarks, looking to their prime minister for guidance. Chamberlain rose, gripping the lapels of his jacket.

  “May I remind you that Herr Hitler is both the legal head of government and head of state, thus occupying a position analogous to that of our own king and myself as prime minister. There will be no talk of regicide in this room. Thank you, gentlemen.”

  He turned to Macrae.

  “Now, Colonel Macrae, we all thank you, but if you will forgive us, we will move to the next item on the agenda. On behalf of us all, I bid you a safe journey back to Berlin.”

  Macrae just had time for a large gin and tonic before his plane left Croydon airport late that afternoon. The weather was fine and as the plane cleared the South Downs, the pilot announced that seat belts could be unfastened, which was the signal for stewardesses to start serving drinks.

  Macrae ordered another large gin. His rage had subsided. He had been treated with contempt by the prime minister and betrayed by his own ambassador. Hore-Belisha had said nothing after the cabinet meeting but merely bade him farewell with a limp handshake. Macrae drank deeply of his gin and looked through the large porthole windows of the aircraft at the green fields and woods below. Romans had carved roads through the soft chalk down there, planted vineyards, built elegant villas, tended livestock and raised families. The conquerors had pushed their empire north to the borders of his own country, Scotland, then less a nation and more a collection of warring clans. There the Romans had stopped and built a wall that survived to this day. But Hitler would not stop, nor would his conquest bring light and learning to the land below, as the Romans had done. A Nazi conquest would unleash terror and mass murder on the country basking in the summer heat beneath him, ignorant of the tyranny that threatened them only a few hundred miles across the Channel.