The Bedbug (24 page)

Otto John, Wolfgang zu Putlitz and other Germans who found refuge in Britain were frustrated at the political restrictions imposed upon them. Whether Communist, Social Democrat or Conservative, they saw themselves as the guardians of the future once Hitler had been defeated. At first the BBC welcomed their contributions, or at least consulted them. They were not keen on Jewish broadcasters, because they thought their accents would be suspect to German ears, and they discouraged politicians attempting to raise their personal profiles. Black propaganda was handled in the early stages of the war by a special department at Electra House run by Sir Campbell Stuart whose experience began with propaganda under Lord Northcliffe at the Ministry of Information in the First World War and then as a journalist at
The Times
and
Daily Mail
. He was invited to make use of Putlitz soon after his escape from Holland in 1939 and was utterly contemptuous of his abilities. He told Sir Alec Cadogan, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, that he had nicknamed Putlitz ‘William Putter’, and regarded him as an intellectual lightweight, possibly a spy, who refused to look him in the eye and appeared to know nobody in Britain, except for spending weekends with Sir Robert
Vansittart, and was of no use for broadcasting. It might be helpful to pick his brains provided he was given no information in return. Cadogan wholeheartedly agreed, which led to an explosion of rage from Vansittart. He commented:

He came over here hoping to help to win the war; and if the Germans had secured the services of one of our Counsellors they would no doubt have made good use of him. Sir Campbell Stuart’s organisation has not known how to do so, and Putlitz long ago resigned himself to this disheartening experience. He and I have watched mistake after mistake being made, and a cast iron case simply being frittered away … Putlitz has worked with me and MI5 for years; he has consistently risked his life in our interests and was only just got out of Holland with an hour to spare … MI5 always referred to him as ‘our most trustworthy source’. The sole reward for a man who has sacrificed everything in our cause is that Sir Campbell Stuart – without the slightest knowledge or justification – goes libelling him behind my back … If we continue to reject his [Putlitz’s] advice we shall continue to lose the propaganda war.
²⁰⁰

Initially the German exiles were encouraged by the Labour minister Hugh Dalton, who was head of the Special Operations Executive and responsible for propaganda, and by Sefton Delmer, who had worked in Germany for years. Events quickly changed Delmer’s priorities. The pact with Stalin meant that promoting democracy was not the priority; propaganda was to be crude and demoralising, holding out no hope to the German population of anything other than crushing defeat.
²⁰¹
Despite that, Delmer succeeded in recruiting a team of émigrés to help prepare the material.

Some of them, including John and Putlitz, eventually returned to play a part in the rebuilding of their country but it was not always the role they wished for, or that those who had protected them expected. A significant number, including John and Putlitz, ended
up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. It cast a shadow over the intelligence services who sought to manipulate them during the Cold War. It may well have contributed to Klop eventually retiring from the service in circumstances of mutual suspicion and recrimination.

While Klop’s involvement with Otto John remains unconfirmed by official sources, his links to another anti-Nazi German were recorded by Guy Liddell in his diary in March 1944: ‘U35 has succeeded in making contact with Mariaux, a German journalist whom he knew formerly in Brussels. This ought to make a very profitable beginning.’

Franz Mariaux was a conservative-minded journalist, a critic of the Weimar Republic but also opposed to Hitler. In the early 1930s he worked closely with Edgar Jung, publicity adviser to Chancellor Franz von Papen who had tried to prevent Hitler replacing him. Under the circumstances, Mariaux was lucky to be alive. Towards the end of June 1934 he had been arrested by the Gestapo. He was suspected of being an intermediary to General Kurt von Schleicher, the army officer who had been behind the
Black Reichswehr
– the secret army constructed in defiance of the Versailles Treaty – and who briefly became the last Chancellor of Germany before Hitler. On 30 June, within days of Mariaux’s arrest, Hitler had launched the Night of the Long Knives in which he purged the Brownshirts – the thuggish paramilitary force that had helped bring him to power. Its leader, Ernst Röhm, and his henchmen were murdered as were many more of Hitler’s opponents, among them Schleicher and Edgar Jung. Goebbels accused Schleicher of treason for seeking the support of the French government against the Nazi regime and claimed that Mariaux had been his go-between. The outraged protests of the French ambassador may have saved Mariaux from execution and in due course he moved to Paris, where he worked for most of the war. He was correspondent of the
Kölnischen Zeitung
, the daily newspaper of Cologne until it was suppressed for failing to toe the Nazi line, and an informant
for the Abwehr. Simultaneously he worked for the Johannssen Service, a news outlet controlled by the German Foreign Office as a competitor to the Propaganda Ministry run by Joseph Goebbels. So he was potentially of immediate use to Klop as a double agent and he also had long-term significance.

One of Klop’s old army friends from the First World War, Hans Speidel, had also been in Paris, arriving in 1940 with the invading army and becoming chief of staff to the military governor. Speidel would later claim that as an army officer he tried to mitigate the worst excesses of the Gestapo and that he helped maintain a cultural détente. In 1942 he was transferred to the Eastern Front but he left behind a group known as the George V circle, named after the luxury hotel where they met. A central figure was company commander Ernst Jünger, who was a renowned writer and philosopher in Germany and maintained social contacts with artists like Picasso and Jean Cocteau. Speidel had first met him during the First World War when Jünger was an officer in the 73
^rd
Grenadiers who relieved the 123
^rd
at Guillemont. It is likely, therefore, that Klop had also known him then. Jünger was a war hero who had been wounded three times in the earlier conflict. He was an anti-Nazi who referred openly and contemptuously to Hitler by the nickname Kniebolo – roughly translatable as kneel to the devil – and believed that he thrived on cult-worship. Even in 1941, at the zenith of Hitler’s power, Jünger was working on an ethical peace manifesto that assumed German defeat and a Europe which had to be the homeland of the different mother countries. There were others in the George V circle who were of a like mind, among them Rolf Pauls who became Germany’s first post-war ambassador to Israel.
²⁰²
A number of journalists were members of the group and it seems likely that Mariaux was among them. Although they were anti-Nazi, they were politically conservative or right wing, credentials which would have appealed to the Western Allied governments as they contemplated the future of Europe, after unconditional surrender by Germany, and
the increasingly obvious aspirations of the Soviet Union to extend Communist control. They were a more attractive proposition than the likes of Otto John, whose co-conspirators were thought to have social democrat and left-wing sympathies.

Speidel returned to the Western Front in April 1944 when he was appointed chief of staff to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of Army Group B whose main task was to defend northern France against the expected Allied invasion. This was just at the time that Klop was having fruitful contact with Mariaux. Speidel, among others, was instrumental in persuading Rommel to lend his name to the conspiracy to depose Hitler, but not to assassinate him. All of them knew in advance of the 20 July bomb plot.

Rommel was apparently deeply impressed by Jünger’s redrafted philosophy, first shown to Speidel three years earlier, which encompassed in its structural design a United States of Europe infused with a spirit of Christian humanism.
²⁰³
This vision was not too dissimilar from the various anti-Soviet pan-European movements which attracted MI6 support in the immediate post-war period.

Among Mariaux’s pre-war contacts had been Konrad Adenauer, the mayor of Cologne until 1933 when he was forced out of office by Hitler, and the wealthy industrialist Paul Silverberg. Silverberg had been chairman of the Cologne Chamber of Commerce, a powerful figure in the coal industry and politically active in economic and union affairs. Mariaux, who edited his speeches and letters, described him as having the ‘sharpest critical intelligence’ among the business leaders of the period.
²⁰⁴
Despite having converted from Judaism to Christianity, Silverberg soon fell foul of the Nazis and fled to exile in Switzerland, renouncing his German citizenship. But he retained his loyalty to his old home town and to his friend Adenauer.

In 1945 the former mayor was reinstated and Mariaux returned to become his press spokesman. Adenauer had been imprisoned twice by the Hitler regime, narrowly escaped deportation to Eastern
Europe and lost his home. Now he set about building a new political institution, the Christian Democratic Union, which sought to unite German Protestants and Catholics in an anti-Communist political party. His early efforts were made possible by Silverberg, who sent him gifts of food and medicine for his sick wife that were unavailable in post-war Germany. The Adenauer family spent holidays with Silverberg in Switzerland.
²⁰⁵
The CDU was an almost instant success and has been the dominant force in German politics ever since. Mariaux continued to work for Adenauer when he became Germany’s first post-war Chancellor in 1949.

Clearly Mariaux could have had a valuable role to play, both in filtering British propaganda into his newspaper reports, supplying intelligence from occupied Paris or in putting Klop in touch with leaders of the German resistance. Although his resistance contacts did not have such a high profile within the 20 July conspiracy as Otto John’s, they did continue to exert a long-term influence on Germany’s future. And they fitted the profile that MI6 had already determined by 1944 was to be the foundation of its long-term strategy against Communism and the Soviet Union.

The Germans seem to have had no inkling of Mariaux’s role. Under interrogation after the war, Walther Schellenberg, who replaced Canaris as head of the reformed Abwehr, described Mariaux as ‘a priggish journalist who had only joined up as a collaborator in order not to have to join the Army’.
²⁰⁶

When he returned to London in mid-July 1944, Klop went for an unofficial debriefing session with Liddell at Dick White’s flat. He was less than complimentary about his new MI6 colleagues, painting a ‘positively lamentable’ picture. The head of station, Cecil Gledhill, was initially hostile, regarding Klop as a rival, and then bad-mouthing other members of the embassy staff, including the ambassador Henry Hopkinson. Klop in turn told Liddell that his male colleagues in Lisbon were very nice people but complete amateurs and pretty indiscreet. The best elements were the women. Liddell noted in his diaries:

U35 is horrified by the way Gledhill and Charles de Salis go about their business. They do not appear to exercise any reasonable precautions and are obviously being led up the garden path in a number of cases. Attempts were made to put U35 himself in touch with all sorts of undesirable people who would have ruined all the work he was doing with Mariaux. He tactfully declined.

The office itself is overlooked and no attempt is made to screen it. People can be seen from the other side of the street photographing letters and every sort of thing. The only part of the work that he seemed to think was any good was the facilities for examining air mail.
²⁰⁷

Klop also voiced concern that the chief of Portuguese police was often taken into their confidence even though they knew he was receiving huge bribes from German intelligence and inevitably compromising any secrets they might tell him.

He was conscious that he risked betrayal from the dubious company he was obliged to keep and had been warned to beware of assassins sent to wipe him out. He would always stand nervously at the back of a lift, against the wall, hoping to avoid being stabbed from behind with a hypodermic needle, fretted that his food was poisoned, or that a honey-trap with a homicidal femme fatal might be set for him.
²⁰⁸

But his duties in Lisbon also had a more agreeable aspect. Klop’s was running an attractive 22-year-old Czech agent codenamed Ecclesiastic. She was the mistress of an Abwehr officer in Lisbon, Franz Koschnik, an expert on air force technical information. MI6 set Ecclesiastic up with a job in an office staffed by RAF personnel and provided her with ‘chicken feed’, low-level intelligence she could use to tempt her lover into indiscretions of his own which were of use to MI6. Klop managed to have twenty-six meetings with her in the space of five months and even obtained a photograph, taken by Koschnik, of Ecclesiastic copying the supposedly secret documents for him. Guy Liddell, apparently amused by Klop’s
antics, suggested the photograph of Ecclesiastic would make a good frontispiece for his memoirs when he wrote himself up as a master spy. Klop found she enjoyed the game of mobilising her ample female resources against normal male instincts. Though he was very susceptible to such charms himself, he did find it necessary to reproach her that