The Bedbug (18 page)

It seems that SIS [MI6] are in touch with certain disaffected elements in the Reichswehr [German armed forces], who are proposing to organise a coup d’état within the next few days. Their programme is to arrest all the principal leaders of the Party on the grounds that they have sold their country, and laid up large balances for themselves abroad. Hitler is to be the only exception and will be allowed to remain as a puppet head. The Army could not attack him on account of their oath of allegiance, but they would see to it that he was rendered entirely innocuous.

Two envoys are said to have come to Holland on this mission and were anxious to see a British Cabinet Minister to get some assurance that if they took over and proposed the restoration of Poland and Czechoslovakia, Germany would be given an honourable settlement. They were told that it was impossible for a British Cabinet Minister to be involved in a matter of this sort but that if a notice which they had prepared found its way into the Basler Nachrichten before Thursday they could go ahead. The message in the paper is that it is reported that there is a movement by certain elements in the German Army to arrest all Party leaders on the grounds that they have betrayed the State etc.

U35 in order to get this message through to the BN approached a contact of his in the Swiss legation. This was necessary in order to get the use of the Press telephone line. The Swiss legation must have had some idea of what is intended but they put U35 in touch with the representative here of the BN, which is generally speaking anti-Nazi in tone. This representative thought the story was a good one and worth publication, and a message was telephoned through last night. When it appears it will be broadcast two or three times as a news item by the BBC and this is supposed to give the signal for a general revolt.
¹⁵⁰

Liddell was not convinced by the German story, any more than Best was, although the form of the proposed coup described fairly accurately what the real dissidents had in mind. The stumbling block of the officers’ oath of allegiance did prey on their minds. Stevens, however, does seem to have been taken in. He and Klop had obviously been working on it together for some time. Klop had
also spent some time in Switzerland on an unspecified mission. On a brief visit to London in the middle of the operation, Klop invited Putlitz round to his flat and Stevens regaled him with stories of how they had celebrated Putlitz’s escape from the Gestapo with champagne and oysters at the Restaurant Royale in The Hague. He then revealed that he was in radio contact with army dissidents in Germany and predicted confidently that Hitler was ‘nearly finished’. The war would be over before it began. Putlitz cautioned him against Gestapo double-dealing but Stevens assured him everything was under control. His confidence was misplaced.
¹⁵¹

According to Best, the BBC message appeared to have the desired effect and he was told by Fischer that General von Wietersheim was prepared to meet him to discuss terms. At this point Stevens and Best decided they had better tell the Dutch Secret Service what was afoot and, to help things run smoothly at the border, they were assigned a Dutch escort officer. He was Lieutenant Dirk Klop, an extraordinary coincidence given Klop Ustinov’s involvement. On 20 October, two junior German officers using the names Seydlitz and Grosch crossed the border into Holland and were taken by Fischer to meet Stevens, Best and Lt Klop in a café at Dinxperlo. There were Dutch soldiers in the café and Best decided it would be more discreet to continue the conversation at the home of his cousin in Arnhem. The soldiers in the café had been suspicious and called the police, who raided the house in Arnhem. With some difficulty Lt Klop persuaded them that all was above board.

After some delays a further meeting took place in The Hague on 30 October. By now Fischer had faded from the scene and von Wietersheim did not show up. In his place, with Grosch, came Major Schaemmel and Colonel Martini. These two were, in reality, Walther Schellenberg, head of counter intelligence in the Gestapo, and his friend, Professor Max de Crinis, a psychologist. The bogus Major Schaemmel impressed the British delegates and in lengthy discussions they drew up proposals that would involve German withdrawal from Czechoslovakia and Poland, plebiscites
in Sudetenland and Austria and restoration of Jewish rights. Best was sufficiently encouraged to entertain the German party to dinner at his home and allow them to sleep over. Next morning Stevens presented them with a two-way wireless set to make communication possible without hazardous border crossings.

These developments were reported back to Stewart Menzies, acting head of MI6, who in turn briefed the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister. Chamberlain authorised MI6 to pursue the talks ‘with energy’ and notified the War Cabinet on 1 November. They approved his action although Churchill, in particular, was unenthusiastic.

After radio contact Best and Stevens met ‘Major Schaemmel’ again on the 7th and 8th of November at the Café Backus, just on the Dutch side of the German border near Venlo. Von Wietersheim still did not materialise, the excuse being that he could not get away because he was obliged to be on hand to attend meetings with Hitler at short notice. On the morning of 8 November, the Queen of the Netherlands and the King of the Belgians, fearing an imminent invasion, had issued a joint appeal for peace. It was promised that von Wietersheim would show up on 9 November.

On that fateful, overcast day Best, Stevens, Lt Klop and their chauffeur Jan Lemmens intended to set out early. They were delayed by a long coded message coming in over the wireless that they had given to Schaemmel, although when deciphered it contained little of consequence. By the time they set off they were aware that an attempt had been made on Hitler’s life the night before when a bomb went off in the Bürgerbräu Keller in Munich, the traditional gathering place of the Nazi Party. As they travelled the 120 miles to the border in Best’s distinctive two-door American Lincoln Zephyr car, they considered the significance of that event, although they knew only the bare details. On the face of it, it lent credence to the idea that there were forces at work in Germany ready to remove Hitler from power by whatever means necessary.

It was getting dark as they drove through the pine woods to the red brick café with its first-floor veranda and children’s playground
with swings and see-saws. It was almost opposite the Dutch border post and only 200 yards from the black-and-white painted barrier that marked the German frontier. Best was driving, despite the presence of the chauffeur, and recalled a feeling of impending danger although outwardly there was nothing to fear. A German customs officer was lounging at the roadside; a little girl was playing ball with a black dog. As the Lincoln cruised slowly into the car park Major Schaemmel appeared on the veranda and raised his hat to signal the all clear.
¹⁵²

But as Best reversed into a passageway to park, his way out was blocked by a German Adler car. A snatch squad of ten SS men led by Major Alfred Naujocks came running towards them, firing their weapons to scare off any Dutch customs officers who might otherwise consider intervening. Naujocks was already a veteran of Nazi intimidation techniques: he had murdered a Czech dissident famous for broadcasting anti-German propaganda and he had faked an attack on a German radio station which was then blamed on the Poles and used as justification for Germany to invade Poland. In due course Hitler would use the Venlo incident to justify the invasion of Holland.
¹⁵³

The gallant Lt Dirk Klop was the only one of the British party to put up a fight. He leapt from the front passenger seat and opened fire, and was gunned down for his trouble. He died later the same day in hospital in Düsseldorf. The other three members of the party were captured and driven at high speed into Germany where Best and Stevens were interrogated and made scapegoats for the Bürgerbräu Keller bomb, of which they knew nothing. The chauffeur Jan Lemmens was later released but the two MI6 officers spent the war in prison and concentration camps.

Walter Schellenberg would claim after the war that he had embarked on this exercise with the intention of discovering whether Britain might be prepared to reach a peace settlement without denying Germany the territorial gains she had already made. He had the authority of his boss Heinrich Himmler and, initially, the
acquiescence of Hitler, who had believed that Britain would not go to war over Poland. But Hitler was quickly losing patience as his projected date approached for invasion via Holland and Belgium into France. By 9 November it was only three days away, although he was later persuaded to postpone it repeatedly until May 1940. And he was understandably enraged by the Munich beer hall bomb on 8 November which he escaped only because he left early. It remains the most likely explanation that this outrage had been engineered by his own people as a propaganda weapon against the West just as they had faked provocative incidents to justify military actions in the East. Schellenberg maintained that he was only told on the morning of 9 November that he was to act as the bait for the SS hit squad.

On the face of it, Klop Ustinov’s role in this fiasco was peripheral. But there remain many unanswered questions and there were other figures lurking in the shadows. It is known that Klop was working with Stevens in London in October – hence the meeting with Putlitz – and that he was at some point in Switzerland. And it is apparent from Group Captain Christie’s personal papers that his talks with Prince Max von Hohenlohe were not just taking place in parallel but were inextricably interlinked. Moreover, Prince Max at one point had talks with a second Englishman, who may have been Klop. Christie seems to have been in no doubt that Prince Max was genuine, that he acted on behalf of Göring and that he also briefed Hitler from time to time. Christie adopted a fairly transparent disguise for his communications with Max, and his reports back to Vansittart in London, presenting them in terms of competing groups of shareholders and directors of a Mexican oil company. Sir Nevil Bland, ambassador in The Hague, was being kept in the loop.

So on 12 November 1938, three days after the Venlo incident, Christie told Prince Max that his shareholders were deeply dissatisfied with the way the merger was being handled and added:

The fact is that the Mexican chairman and his supporters have exhibited so often the worst side of their treacherous characters, amounting to sharp practice and misrepresentation of the company’s affairs that my company’s directors and shareholders will have nothing more to do with them. … If you want my company’s cooperation in price adjustment, an entirely new operating company must be formed to deal with your Mexican interests.
¹⁵⁴

These comments make apparent the disillusion and dismay that must have been felt in London at the loss of two valuable agents and the diplomatic loss of face at falling for a Gestapo sting. They also imply that a peace manoeuvre was still considered viable. A series of scribbled jottings on rough notepaper with frequent crossings out and over-writing capture something of the confusion and panic that gripped both sides. It is not always clear whether Christie was making notes of conversations with Vansittart or Prince Max. But it emerges that the Prince had been in Holland at around the time of the Venlo incident and that he was trying to set up a face-to-face meeting with Christie or better still Vansittart. A Royal personage was lurking in the shadows, ready to take on the role of peacemaker if Göring could be persuaded there was a real prospect that he could emerge with a favourable peace. Several names were mentioned in this context – the British Duke of Kent, the King of Sweden, or the King and Queen of Belgium and the Netherlands respectively. The latter pair had made a public appeal to Hitler to talk. On the German side, Prince Louis Ferdinand, grandson of the Kaiser and a sympathiser with the anti-Hitler social democrat factions, was mooted as a potential monarch in a reformed state if Hitler could be deposed.

After the Venlo incident Prince Max, using the codename Smiler, called to make excuses and Christie reported back to London, in his Mexican oil company code:

The Rowdy meeting down South was not at the Chairman’s incentive or that of his supporters. On the contrary, the entourage of the Vice-Chairman was perhaps not entirely blameless in this hooliganism.

The implication appears to be that Göring played a part in the sabotage of discussions controlled by his rival Himmler while simultaneously conducting his own negotiations via Prince Max and Christie.

Post-war even this episode took on an element of conspiratorial farce as SS officer Klaus Huegel revealed that they were so cock-a-hoop over their success at Venlo that they planned to kidnap Vansittart by luring him to a meeting in Switzerland.
¹⁵⁵

Astonishingly, the Venlo operation did not end with the capture of Best and Stevens. MI6 maintained radio traffic with the wireless set they had given to ‘Major Schaemmel’ because they were not certain that he did not genuinely represent the dissident generals. It seemed possible that Schaemmel had been as surprised as Best and Stevens by the arrival of the SS hit squad. Since MI6 knew that Hitler had planned to invade Holland on 12 November, and that did not happen, they suspected that the Army dissidents had prevented it.

Schellenberg kept the game running by sending a message on the two-way radio on 13 November asking what had happened to the British representatives at Venlo. On 16 November, the acting head of MI6, Stewart Menzies drafted a message to be returned by radio from The Hague to the German dissident faction. In the absence of Richard Stevens, who was by then under interrogation in Germany, it may have been Klop who took responsibility for the radio traffic. The message repeated an earlier British stipulation that for peace talks to progress there would have to be regime change in Germany. Schellenberg replied, asking which British politician would be nominated to conduct the negotiations. This charade continued, with Chamberlain and his Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax still discussing how to handle the conspirators, until Schellenberg brought it to an end with an abusive message on 22 November.