The Royal family needed no persuasion: the murder of Tsar Nicholas and his family by the Bolsheviks in 1917 was still raw in their memory. Banking and financial circles were equally concerned by the threat to the economy if the war continued, and the danger of becoming dependent on US finance. For politicians of many colours the potentially ruinous costs and the scale of state intervention war would bring threatened liberal democracy itself. On 20 September, David Lloyd George, Prime Minister during the first war, added his powerful voice to the doubters, telling a meeting of concerned MPs it was time to take stock of the military position; if the chances of victory were less than even, ‘we should certainly make peace at the earliest opportunity.’27
This mood, which touched all classes, was not lost on German intelligence. After Warsaw fell on 27 September, peace feelers began reaching London from Hitler’s ministers.
PEACE FEELERS
The majority of significant German peace probes – those deemed worthy of filing at the Foreign Office – came from Göring, the early ones through Dahlerus. Chamberlain, while wishing to negotiate an end to the unwanted war, refused to deal with a government led by Hitler, whom he could not trust; his private secretary suspected there was also an element of damaged vanity. In early October Hitler himself, in an impassioned speech to the Reichstag at the Kroll Opera, Berlin, called for Britain to come to an understanding.
It is no doubt a coincidence that a letter from Clydesdale, drafted with Halifax’s advice, appeared in The Times on the day Hitler made his appeal. It began by recognising that if the German people really were ‘behind Hitler in his cruelties and treacheries’, the war had to be fought to the bitter end:
But I believe that the moment the menace of aggression and bad faith has been removed, war against Germany becomes wrong and meaningless. This generation is conscious that injustices were done to the German people in the era after the last war. There must be no repetition of that …28
He looked forward to ‘a trusted Germany’ again coming into her own, when ‘a healing peace’ could be negotiated – but a precondition had to be effective guarantees against any race being treated as Hitler had treated the Jews on 9 November the previous year. Noted in Berlin, the letter was broadcast on the German news that night.
A few days later Chamberlain delivered a blunt rejection of Hitler’s appeal to reason. Hitler drew the conclusion that before he could bring Britain to terms he had to teach her a lesson: as Goebbels put it in his diary after a talk alone with him on 23 October, ‘The Führer thinks no more of peace. He wants to put England to the sword’;29 and after another talk in early November, ‘He is of opinion England must receive a K.O. blow … or there will be no peace in the world … The strike against the Western powers will not be long in coming.’30
For the moment, peace feelers continued to arrive in London, designed more to sow dissension and probe the strength of the various British peace movements than to initiate serious talks. Chamberlain and Halifax, who had been approached by genuine members of the German opposition and still hoped that Hitler might be toppled in a military coup and replaced by Göring, had their imaginations fanned by agents of the regime. That October Halifax’s undersecretary at the Foreign Office, R.A. ‘Rab’ Butler, a thoroughgoing appeaser, was sent to meet one of these, the Sudeten German landowner, Prince Max zu Hohenlohe, in Switzerland. Their meeting was very secret: so secret it has been expunged from the Foreign Office ‘Peace feeler’ files, if indeed it was ever recorded. At Lausanne Butler discussed possible peace terms should Hitler be replaced by Göring.31
Simultaneously Heydrich was playing a deception on the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in western Europe. It was apparently designed to set the political conditions – or excuse – for the strike west, on which Hitler had set his mind. The details remain obscure. It may have started as a feeler from genuine opposition circles in the German Army, which leaked to MI6.32 Directly Heydrich took control it became an intelligence game to entrap two senior MI6 officers in the Netherlands, Major Richard Stevens and Captain Sigismund Payne Best, who believed they were negotiating with a general leading a coup against Hitler. Stevens gained approval from London to continue talking, and was sent briefing notes on peace terms drafted in the Foreign Office and approved by Chamberlain.33 These expressed a desire to treat with a ‘reasonable’ Germany – with Hitler removed – and to create a league of European states under the leadership of Great Britain to provide a front against militant Communism. The lead German agent, posing, with monocle, as Captain Schaemmel of the Transport Division – actually Walther Schellenberg, chief of Heydrich’s foreign Counter-Intelligence Division – feigned satisfaction with the terms and promised to bring the general leading the revolt to Holland to meet the British officers on 8 November. At the last moment he postponed the meeting until the next day.
There are reasons to suppose that a rigged assassination attempt on Hitler on 8 November formed a part of the plan. On that evening every year the ‘old fighters’ of the Nazi Party gathered in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich to celebrate the 1923 ‘Beerhall Putsch’. This year was no exception. Hitler was received with storms of applause when he entered with Hess, Goebbels, Himmler and other leaders, and the speech, in which he made cutting attacks on England and promised to settle accounts with her, was received, as Goebbels recorded it, with ‘mad enthusiasm’.34 Afterwards, instead of staying to reminisce with the old comrades, as he had always done in the past, he left in some haste with his retinue of ministers to catch a scheduled express train for Berlin. Minutes later an explosion in a pillar behind the podium from which he had been speaking brought down part of the ceiling, killing eight of those beneath and injuring dozens more.
Hitler received the news when his train stopped at Nuremberg. Goebbels noted in his diary that if the programme followed in all previous years had been adhered to, none of those in their party would now be alive. ‘The Führer began [his speech] half an hour earlier than in previous times and ended in good time,’ he wrote. ‘He stood under the protection of the Almighty. He will only die when his mission is fulfilled.’35 In directives to Press and radio Goebbels pursued the theme of Providence protecting the Führer, and Heydrich targeted a whispering campaign at parish priests to persuade them to spread from their pulpits the idea of Divine intervention to preserve the Führer.
Goebbels’ diary entry for that night continued with a phrase that surely gives the lie to the authenticity of the Attentat: ‘When we catch the perpetrator there will be vengeance that conforms to the magnitude of the crime.’36 For, unlike the later conspirators in the failed 1944 bomb plot to kill Hitler, who were hanged with piano wire, there was no vengeance. A joiner named Georg Elser was caught on the German–Swiss border on the night of the explosion trying to flee the country. He had a Communist badge inside his lapel – he was indeed a former Communist – and in his pocket a picture postcard of the Bürgerbräukeller with the pillar in which the bomb had been concealed marked with a red cross. After interrogation by the Gestapo he was neither tortured nor executed, but locked away in solitary confinement in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in a cell converted from two single cells and fitted out as a carpenter’s workshop. In the dying months of the war he was transferred to Dachau, and on 29 April, the day before Hitler committed suicide in Berlin, he was executed with a shot to the neck on orders from Himmler’s Security Service headquarters.
Given Hitler’s pitiless nature it seems inconceivable that Elser would have survived to serve a sentence, let alone been treated as a privileged prisoner if it was thought he was guilty of a real attempt on his life. Captain Payne Best, who was also to find himself in Sachsenhausen – as will appear – claimed that Elser had smuggled notes to him which told a rather different story: early in the war the joiner had been plucked from Dachau, where he had been sentenced for being antisocial and workshy, and offered freedom and a new life in Switzerland if he would build the bomb in
to the Bürgerbräu pillar. Naturally he had accepted.37 During his time in the camps after the deed, Elser was isolated from other inmates; finally he was silenced for ever.
In his notes to Payne Best Elser said that he was being kept as principal witness in a show trial to be held when Britain had been defeated; he had been coached in a story implicating the two British agents (Payne Best and Stevens) in the bomb attempt on Hitler’s life. Nevertheless, a transcript of Elser’s Gestapo interrogation revealing him as the sole perpetrator of the bomb attempt has convinced German historians that he was indeed acting on his own and intended to assassinate the Führer.38 If so he was a truly remarkable man, fully deserving the memorials erected to him as a hero of the German resistance to Nazism.
At all events, the German newspapers on the morning of 9 November led with the sensational story of Hitler’s providential escape, leading Stevens and Best to wonder whether the opposition general they were going to meet had been involved. Their rendezvous with ‘Schaemmel’ was in the Café Backus at Venlo, some 50 yards from the Dutch–German border. As their car approached the café, an SS squad in an armoured car crashed the border barrier, in reverse in order to make a smart getaway afterwards. There was a brief exchange of gunfire, in which a Dutch intelligence officer accompanying the two British officers was mortally wounded, and before the border guards could react both Britons were snatched and driven into Germany.
There is no proof, but Heydrich’s biographer, Eduard Calic, is in no doubt that the Bürgerbräu Attentat and the ‘Venlo incident’ were engineered by Heydrich to provide the pretext for the assault on the Western powers through neutral Holland which Hitler hoped to launch in mid-November. Stevens and Best were accused by Goebbels’ propaganda agencies of having commissioned and paid for the attempt on Hitler’s life from British Secret Service European headquarters in the Hague. In the event the assault on the West was postponed, apparently because of the weather, but when it was launched the following spring, accusations of British and Dutch involvement in the Bürgerbräu bomb were resurrected by Ribbentrop as pretexts. In the meantime the German people, who had been showing dissatisfaction and unhappiness at shortages in the shops and the prospect of war with the Western powers, had become, according to an internal Security Service report, united behind the Führer in gratitude for his escape, and spoke bitterly about England and the Jews.39
The German Security Service gleaned sufficient from Stevens and Best to roll up virtually the entire British intelligence operation in western Europe.40 Moreover, the generals who were contemplating action against Hitler took fright when they heard that the two British officers were being interrogated about just such a plot at Gestapo headquarters. This was, perhaps, the most significant effect of Heydrich’s coup. After questioning, Stevens and Best were sent to concentration camps. Both survived the war, which again would not have been the case had Hitler believed they were in any way implicated in a plot to kill him.
LONSDALE BRYANS
The ‘Venlo incident’ served to ensure that MI6 and the Foreign Office treated further approaches from the German military opposition with utmost scepticism. Nonetheless, peace feelers continued to arrive from Göring via Dahlerus and another Swedish emissary, Baron Knut Bonde, a diplomat serving in the Swedish Legation in the Swiss capital, Berne, married to the daughter of a Scottish former Guards officer and on the Swedish side close to Count Eric Rosen, brother of Göring’s first wife, Karin – after whom Göring had named his estate. His approach was based on the unlikely premise that Göring would take over from Hitler.
In early January 1940 Lord Brocket’s agent, Lonsdale Bryans, arrived in London from Rome with von Hassell’s proposed ‘peace terms’, again for a Germany without Hitler, and took them, together with an introductory letter from Pirzio, to Halifax at the Foreign Office on the 8th. Halifax found them so encouraging he had the Passport Office grant Bryans ‘all possible facilities’ to return to Rome,41 while Cadogan, Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, arranged with the Treasury to fund him. Bryans’ cover this time was to see his publishers in Rome about a possible Italian translation of his book, but he told the passport officer it might be assumed that he was ‘undertaking some special work for the Foreign Office’.
On Bryans’ return to Rome, Pirzio, who was now married to Fey von Hassell, began a code correspondence with his father-in-law to set up a face-to-face meeting between him and Bryans. This was eventually accomplished by von Hassell’s wife taking their eldest son, who was asthmatic, to Zurich. From there she was able to telephone to Rome without fear of Gestapo interception, and it was arranged that she and her son would travel to Arosa, near St Moritz. Her husband (code name Charles) would join her; Bryans (code name the Doctor – i.e. attending their son) would meet him there.42
They met as planned on 22 February when they had three conversations: before lunch, in the afternoon and in the evening. Bryans made a favourable impression on the German diplomat and they met again the following morning when von Hassell gave Bryans a handwritten statement in English to take to Halifax stipulating terms for a lasting European peace. So far as territory was concerned, the union of Austria and the Sudeten with Germany, and the eastern frontiers of the Reich were not for discussion – in other words Hitler’s conquests were to be rewarded. The final section, evidently intended to convince the British government they would be dealing with a thoroughly de-Nazified Germany, stipulated certain political and moral principles to be accepted in the reconstruction of Europe; these included Christian ethics, justice and law, and liberty of thought, conscience and intellectual activity.43
Von Hassell’s diary entries make it clear that Bryans was following Halifax’s intentions to the letter:
B’s [Bryans’] aim is: to get a Statement from Halifax that, on the approximate basis of my Statement, he would do all in his power to ensure that a possible regime-change in Germany would in no way be exploited by the other side, but on the contrary would be used to arrive at a lasting peace. Especially in this case the English side would attempt to arrange an immediate armistice. On the other hand B maintained that a peace agreement with the present German government was totally out of the question …44
Von Hassell told Bryans he was not in a position to reveal the names of the men behind him, but could assure him that a statement from Halifax would get to the right people. He stressed that his own statement was valid only before the start of major military operations, commenting in his diary, ‘Mr B himself urged very great haste in view of a possible German offensive.’45
After their talk on the 23rd Bryans left for Zürich, thence flew via Paris to London, arriving on the 24th. He gave the statement he had received in Arosa to Cadogan to pass on to Halifax with a note stressing that von Hassell could not initiate any action against Hitler without clear documentary proof that Britain would not take advantage of the consequent internal disruption.46 Such a note was refused since, he was told, something similar had been given to another group in Germany a week before.47 There were two other channels to German opposition groups, one running through the Vatican, another also through Switzerland; both groups had indeed received assurances that favourable peace terms would be offered to a non-Nazi Germany.
The fastidiousness of Chamberlain’s government was not shared by all: the grandees of the peace movement – Buccleuch, Brocket, Londonderry, Tavistock – wrote constantly to Chamberlain or Halifax calling for negotiations with Germany before the bombing and destruction started. A similar campaign was mounted by a small Labour group led by the MP for Ipswich, R.R. ‘Dick’ Stokes. Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Express newspaper group, backed Stokes and published articles by the distinguished military historian Basil Liddell Hart, whose views on Britain’s strategic position could not have been more pessimistic. Asked in private by one editor what could be done, he replied, ‘Come to the best possible terms [with Germany] as soon as possible.’48
In February th
e US Assistant Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, sailed from New York on an official ‘fact-finding’ mission to Europe. It was hailed in the Press as Roosevelt’s peace mission. If Welles had such expectations they evaporated when he met Hitler, Hess and other Nazi leaders in early March: he was left in no doubt that Hitler was securely in control and that he and his entourage felt themselves masters of the future of Europe – or as Goebbels put it more bluntly in his diary: ‘Victory and not a rotten compromise must be the result of this war’;49 and after a talk with Hitler at the end of the month, ‘one way or another he [the Führer] will strike England to the ground. Of which I am also firmly convinced.’50
In this atmosphere the German generals on whom von Hassell, Chamberlain and Halifax had to depend for any coup against Hitler found themselves, for practical, cultural, historical and psychological reasons, unable to act. By the time Pirzio had managed to arrange another meeting between ‘Charles’ and ‘the Doctor’, again in Arosa, Hitler had unleashed his campaign in the west.51 The moment, if it had ever existed, had passed.
CHAPTER SIX
Churchill – and the Jews
HITLER’S ASSAULT in the west began in April with amphibious strikes on Denmark and Norway. British expeditionary forces landed in Norway were unable to stem the German advance. On 21 April Goebbels noted:
Hess, Hitler and Churchill Page 10
