by John Bryden
With the blessings of Chamberlain, and at the direction of his War Cabinet, the two MI6 officers at The Hague had several preliminary meetings with representatives of the two generals, giving them a wireless set and a secret cipher so that they could maintain contact inside Germany. On November 3, the Germans wirelessed that the generals agreed in principle to the British terms and wanted to know what kind of negotiators would be acceptable.6
On November 4 all seemed well. Halder issued a secret alert to the conspirators to make ready. Then, the next day, everything fell apart. General von Brauchitsch had taken it upon himself to give Hitler one last chance by trying personally to persuade him to give up launching the attack. Hitler turned on him like an angry dog.
Brauchitsch was not a strong personality. Hitler threw one of his famous tantrums, which usually involved stomping about the room, slamming his fist on the furniture, and pounding on the walls, then alternating between raging at the top of his voice and holding his breath until his face went purple. The performance peaked with a slur about the defeatist “spirit of Zossen,” a direct allusion to the general staff then headquartered near the village of Zossen. Brauchitsch wilted. Then Hitler paused. His voice dropped and his eyes bore into those of the army chief: “What are you planning?” Brauchitsch left the room, shaking.
Halder panicked when Brauchitsch told him what happened. He called off the plot forthwith and ordered all involved immediately to destroy any incriminating evidence. If Hitler wanted an offensive in the West, he was to get it. The conspirators had no choice but to set their plotting aside and bend their energies toward beating the French.7
It was not going to be easy. An assault on the string of forts the French dubbed the Maginot Line between Luxembourg and Switzerland seemed unlikely to succeed, while a straight thrust through Belgium was bound to be halted sooner or later, just as Beck predicted, with the familiar war in the trenches following. What this meant in blood and misery was still a current memory from the First World War. Nevertheless, the army’s general staff dutifully resumed working on plans to attack through Belgium, as done in 1914, this time with Holland thrown in.
Hitler was aware of the army’s misgivings, and it irked him. He regarded France as a rotten apple to be knocked down with a tap, but he, too, could see that the formula of 1914 was problematic. At the end of October, this had led him to propose using armoured forces to try to punch a hole through the right wing of the Anglo/French armies where they rested on Luxembourg, the idea being to go through the forested area known as the Ardennes and break out into the open country in France around Sedan.8 The army general staff had been cool to the idea while it looked like the Nazis were to be overthrown; when the plot was shelved, they considered it more seriously. This, again, was where Canaris came in.
By late 1939, certainly thanks to Ast Hamburg’s spy A-3504 — Arthur Owens in England — and thanks to the network of Abwehr spies in France strung out along its northern frontier,9 Canaris was able to assure Hitler with great confidence that the British and French were grouping their forces along the western frontier of Belgium in expectation of a German attack through the Low Countries, and that they intended immediately to advance to meet it. Opposite the Forest of the Ardennes, however, the enemy was thinly spread. A blow there, Hitler was told, and the enemy front could split. By swinging to the west from the penetration, and driving toward the Channel, “the entire northern enemy group could be encircled and eliminated.”10
On November 12, Hitler unilaterally ordered two panzer divisions and a motorized infantry division to army Group A, then commanded by von Rundstedt and holding the line facing the Ardennes. Von Rundstedt and his chief of staff, Erich von Manstein, had been badgering OKH for more forces for some time, but unsuccessfully. Now they were told they were to undertake what was to be a second major thrust into France — an armoured strike out of the Ardennes and across the Meuse River at Sedan.11
The idea quickly gained traction. That previous summer, the British military theorist B.H. Liddell Hart had come out with a new book that seemed to state the obvious: if the Germans should attack France, their best bet was to go through Belgium. The Forest of the Ardennes was least best, Liddell Hart wrote, because its narrow roads and deep gullies were easily defended. Hart was considered the leading theorist in armoured warfare, a still-novel concept, and his writings during the 1920s and ’30s had made a deep impression on the German general staff, as well as with the staffs of other European armies. If Liddell Hart said the Ardennes was impractical for motorized forces, then the Germans could assume that the British and French thought so too. It was the perfect recipe for surprise.12
When Germany’s most respected mobile warfare strategist, General Heinz Guderian, declared that the Ardennes could be crossed, and the attack should be as powerful as possible, planning began in earnest. Even General Halder was won over. A really strong blow in the solar plexus of the French defence just might knock the enemy off its feet. The three divisions allocated to von Rundstedt by Hitler were upped to a corps, and then to three, two-thirds of the available armoured formations. Instead of the attack through Holland and northern Belgium being the main thrust, it was to be diversionary, and this is where Canaris again came in. It was the Abwehr’s job to ensure that the attackers had the best and latest information on the dispositions of the enemy. It was also the Abwehr’s job to hide the real plan. Canaris succeeded brilliantly on both counts.13
First, however, Canaris had an urgent problem to solve. Halder’s abrupt cancellation of the coup attempt had left the talks with the British in Holland dangling. They had got to the point where the two MI6 officers involved, Major Richard Stevens and Captain S. Payne Best, were poised to wrap things up whenever General Wietersheim became available in person. Now the whole thing had to be aborted. It could be many months before another coup attempt, and the longer it took, the more certain it was that something of the generals’ peace overtures would leak back to the Nazis. Von Rundstedt and von Wietersheim were in deadly danger.
Canaris was famous among those close to him for his creativity in pulling hot irons from hot fires, and he demonstrated it this time. He and Germany’s most dangerous man, Nazi security service chief Reinhardt Heydrich, were close, like cobra and mongoose, both socially and in their work, the younger man treating the older with wary respect. It seems that Canaris now told Heydrich that he had a sting operation underway that could lead to the kidnapping of two British intelligence officers. Heydrich’s SD was just then in the process of amalgamating with the German police forces, including the Gestapo, to form the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) — the Office for National Security. Canaris offered the new Nazi police and intelligence supremo-to-be an early chance to show his spurs.14 Naturally, there is no written record of their plan, but it can be seen through the sequence of events that followed.
Halder called the plot off on November 5. Nevertheless, two days later Stevens reported to London that General Wietersheim was prepared to meet with him shortly. Then, on November 8, at 9:20 p.m., a bomb exploded at a reunion of Nazi party faithful at the Bürgerbräukeller, a famous beer hall in Munich, killing eight people and injuring sixty-three. Hitler had been the evening’s speaker and had just left.
The Führer was shaken by the near miss. His train had just pulled into Nuremberg station when a pair of grim-faced officers boarded. Hitler met them in the corridor.
“What’s happened?” he asked.
“Mein Führer, I have just received a report from Munich that an attempt has been made on your life. Roughly an hour after you left the Bürgerbräukeller there was a powerful explosion. The people who were still there in the hall were buried under the falling ceiling.”
Hitler went pale. Gasping for breath, he asked for Himmler. He was told the SS chief was still in Munich. Hitler became excited. He ordered that Himmler stay until the criminals were caught: “Tell him that he should proceed ruthlessly and exterminate the whole pack of them, root and branch.”15
The next day, on November 9, Stevens telephoned London to say that he and Best were on their way to meet the “Big Man.” They never returned.
Best and Stevens arrived that afternoon at Venlo, a town on the border between Holland and Germany, enthused and full of hope, accompanied by a Dutch intelligence officer and a driver. The encounter with von Wietersheim was to take place in the patch of road between the crossing barriers. The Germans were waiting when the car carrying the English and Dutchmen pulled up. The parties got out.
Suddenly, the Germans sprang at Best and Stevens. They were manhandled into the German vehicles. Shots were fired. The Dutch officer fell. The German cars sped back over the border.
The kidnappings made headlines in Germany. Photographs of Stevens and Best were splashed across the newspapers next to that of Johann Georg Elser, an unemployed carpenter and sometime Communist who had been caught the same day. He had been held at the Swiss border a few hours before the explosion when found to be carrying some notes on making explosives, a postcard of the Bürgerbräukeller, and some suspicious metal parts. When news of the Munich bombing reached the frontier post, the officials there knew they had the man. In the newspapers, Best and Stevens were labelled the evil geniuses behind Elser’s cowardly act, nabbed by the new amalgamated Nazi police and intelligence service.16
Heydrich was delighted and basked in the glow. The British government was mortified. German broadcast radio blared, claiming that Best and Stevens had been suckered into capture by means of a phony tale of treacherous generals plotting a coup. At the round table in Whitehall, Stewart Menzies, speaking for MI6, insisted that the offer from von Rundstedt and von Wietersheim had been genuine. A Foreign Office post-mortem intoned: “We must therefore conclude that the balance of evidence shows that the ‘feelers’ we received were not, originally at any rate, part of a plot organized by Herr Himmler.”17
In other words, Chamberlain and his government — which included Churchill as head of the navy — actually did figure out the truth. They could only guess at what had gone wrong, however, and still held out hope that the generals might yet pull off their coup.
During the hullabaloo, the Nazi police and intelligence personnel involved never identified who the generals were supposed to have been. The British did not make public the names either.
As for Elser, despite the enormity of his crime and all the publicity, he was never brought to trial. According to exclusively Nazi sources, he was secretly shot at the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945 on Hitler’s order. There is no way to prove this; just as there is no way to find hard evidence that he had been a stooge of Heydrich and Canaris all along.18
Air reconnaissance, the reports of spies, and the interception of the enemy’s wireless traffic were important sources of intelligence on the disposition of the Anglo-French forces facing Germany, and by the end of April, Fremde Heere, the army headquarters agency responsible for collating intelligence from all sources, had a comprehensive picture of the location and strengths of the opposition armies along France’s northern border. This it displayed at Zossen on a large terrain map of Western Europe, which was updated constantly. General Halder, now committed to the upcoming struggle, is said to have looked down on the map and pointed to the area of the Forest of the Ardennes: “Here is where they are weakest. Here we must go through!” 19
The man responsible for maintaining the map was forty-year-old Captain Alexis Baron von Rönne, later to die for his role in denying Hitler victory in Normandy in 1944.
For his part, aside from the spies he already had in place, Canaris planted agents with wireless transmitters just over the borders of the target countries. Their specific task was to report any last-minute troop movements or other developments. Andreas Folmer was probably typical of these Abwehr infiltration agents.
Folmer was a thirty-two-year-old Luxembourger who had served fourteen years in the Belgian army before going off to the Belgian Congo to seek his fortune. Finding only heat and disease, he came back to Belgium and dabbled in illegal currency activities that soon landed him in jail. In 1938, the Belgian Deuxième Bureau recruited him for a secret photographic survey of the German fortifications along the border with Luxembourg, a mission he carried out with great success. Then, early the next year, he secretly went over to the Germans. His new spymaster, Captain Oscar Reile of Abt IIIF (Counter-espionage) at Ast Wiesbaden, gave him a transmitter and sent him back to Brussels as an “E-Mann” — the Abwehr term for a spy who has penetrated a foreign intelligence service. Folmer wirelessed numerous reports on the Belgian Deuxième Bureau’s activities right up to May 9, when Reile told him to cross into Germany immediately. The invasion began the next day.20
The Abwehr’s other task, one that was even more important, was to devise a deceptive cover for the invasion plan. Surprise was essential because the Forest of the Ardennes was a nightmare maze of narrow roads tight to the trees. Infantry and panzer units would be slow making their way through, and if the French caught on to what was happening too early, the German forces could be trapped there, densely packed, easy victims to air and artillery bombardment.
In solving this problem, Canaris decisively contributed to the success of the campaign. He made two moves: First, during the fall of 1939, MI5’s star double agent, Arthur Owens — A-3504 to the Germans — repeatedly returned from his visits to his Abwehr controller across the Channel with reports that the Germans were planning to attack France through Belgium. These reports were true, but for the first two months of the war that did not matter since Canaris was expecting Hitler to be overthrown. With the collapse of the plot and the decision to go with the Ardennes, it then became simply a matter of cementing in the minds of the British and French the intelligence they had already been given.21 This was achieved by allowing MI8(c), the wireless listening agency that Major Gill and Lieutenant Trevor-Roper put such store in, to pick the reports of Abwehr spies operating in France and the Low Countries who just happened to be using easy-to-break ciphers. This gave the impression that was where Germany’s attention was directed.22
Second, Canaris allowed the peace overtures through the Pope to continue. By the New Year, this had led to the Pope privately informing the British envoy to the Vatican that a “violent” attack through Belgium was impending and that several highly placed generals were prepared to prevent it by overthrowing Hitler if they could expect reasonable peace terms. The Foreign Office, still unsure of what exactly had happened at Venlo, showed cautious interest.
Meanwhile, Oster had been warning the Dutch military attaché in Berlin, Major Gijsbertus Sas, that Holland was in the path of the coming offensive, tipping him off throughout the fall and winter to each tentative start date. He continued to do so into the spring, not knowing that the focus of the attack had shifted to the Ardennes. The Dutch government was skeptical, for Germany during the First World War had respected Holland’s neutrality, but the British and the French heard about the warnings and took heed.23
At the beginning of May, when it seemed to Oster and Beck that the attack in the West was going to take place before their efforts through the Vatican matured, they sought to absolve “decent Germans” of blame. They authorized Müller to deliver this note to His Holiness:
To the regret of my principal, I must inform you that our negotiations cannot continue because we have been unable to persuade the generals to act in the wake of the successful operation in Norway. The offensive is imminent. Hitler will probably violate the neutrality of Belgium and Holland.24
They asked that the message be transmitted to the Belgians, Dutch, British, and French. The Pope complied.
Two days later, on May 9, on the eve of the offensive, the Nazi wireless intercept service, the Forschungsamt, listened in on a late-evening telephone call from Sas to the duty officer at the Dutch Ministry of Defence. “Tomorrow at dawn,” he said. “Hold tight. Will you please repeat? You understand what I mean, of course.”25 There could be no doubt what he meant. In Rom
e, the Belgian envoy was also alerted and his cable to his government intercepted; copies went to Canaris, Himmler, and Hitler. The latter is said to have been furious.
German forces invaded Belgium and Holland the following morning and the French and British leaped forward to meet them. As they did so, German panzers burst out of the Forest of the Ardennes, crossed the Meuse, passed Sedan, and then cut behind in a sprint for the Channel. It worked perfectly. The Allied armies had used up much of their fuel and fell back with difficulty. The British reached the coast at Dunkirk in disarray, there to be encircled. On May 20–21, the greater part of the British force was evacuated to England, but without its arms and transport. The Germans then turned toward Paris. France surrendered on June 22.
The world was astonished. Hitler crowed that it was the biggest victory in history. The issue of the leaked warnings was only feebly pursued. This suggests that Canaris told Hitler that the leaks were deception.26 And so they had been. One can imagine Hitler clapping him on the shoulder and beaming: “Well done!”
Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service — MI6 — was devastated. In the interwar years it had invested primarily in communications intelligence, which had served it very well in the First World War. The Government Code & Cipher School had endeavoured to remain up-to-date on all the latest advances in cryptology, so that it could read the cable and wireless traffic of foreign diplomats and, hopefully, the wireless traffic of Germany’s armed forces in the event of war. Conventional espionage was carried on much as always.
