Nein!: Standing up to Hitler 1935–1944. Paddy Ashdown

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СКАЧАТЬ to London and Paris that Hitler was now intent on an invasion of Poland in the early autumn.

      It is tempting to think that it was this warning which finally alerted Neville Chamberlain to the coming threat, for eight days later, on 31 March 1939, he announced a hardening of British policy in the House of Commons: ‘In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence … His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power … The French Government have authorised me to make it plain that they stand in the same position in this matter as do His Majesty’s Government.’ A week later, on 6 April, during a visit to London by the Polish foreign minister, Chamberlain’s statement of intent was widened into a formal Anglo–Polish military alliance, reinforced by British promises to help other smaller European nations with rearmament. The immediate effect was to make the Poles more intransigent in talks on the future of Danzig, which were by this time under way.

      According to Canaris, Hitler, taken aback by this unexpected stiffening of British backs, flew into a rage, banged his fist on the table and shouted, ‘Now I will mix for them a witches’ brew!’ It was another watershed moment. Hitler, who had hoped for an arrangement with Britain against Russia, now concluded that Britain could not be persuaded to support his plans, and would have to be defeated before he could look eastward for Lebensraum through the conquest of the Ukraine and Russia.

      Three days after Chamberlain’s announcement, on 3 April the Führer issued a secret directive to his generals to start planning for the invasion of Poland, ordering that what was to be known as Operation White ‘must be ready to be launched from 1 September onwards’. That evening Lahousen relayed the information to Madeleine Bihet-Richou, who passed it on to Paris without delay.

During the next three months, hardly a day passed in London when the city was not playing host to clandestine visitors from Berlin bearing calamitous warnings. Carl Goerdeler was the first, in mid-March. In May he was back again, at the start of an international tour that took him to Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey and Switzerland. He was one of no fewer than five key anti-Hitler plotters* who visited the British capital during May and June 1939, all with the same message for Vansittart (now serving as the government’s chief diplomatic adviser) and the Foreign Office: Hitler was secretly working for a deal with Stalin. To one of these bearers of bad news the great Van replied, ‘Keep calm, it is we who will sign the deal with Russia.’

      Goerdeler claimed that during his May visit he also met with Churchill, but there is no record of this in Churchill’s diaries or papers, or in the Chartwell visitors’ book. In June 1939, Canaris and Oster tried to persuade Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin to pay another visit to London, as a follow-up to his attempt to warn of the impending Czech crisis in September 1938: ‘What have we to offer?’ the Prussian responded. ‘I am not going to London with empty hands.’ Eventually they persuaded one of the German general staff to make the journey. He met the British service chiefs, but achieved nothing.

      All Europe was now making dispositions for war.

      Over the summer, Soviet intelligence agents in Germany started setting up the great spy network die Rote Kapelle, which in time would reach into every corner of occupied Europe.

      British intelligence too was about its spying business. In early May, MI6 issued a false British passport in the name of Charles Simpson to one of František Morávec’s Czech intelligence officers, Karel Sedláček, who had operated undercover as a journalist in Zürich since 1934. Sedláček’s task was to be Paul Thümmel’s ‘postman’. He was to organise the safe reception of Thümmel’s secret letters to the Zürich accommodation address Morávec had given him on the eve of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, and to ensure that these were quickly and safely passed on to London.

Aloïs Franck, the Czech intelligence officer dropped off in The Hague as his colleagues fled Prague for London, was also equipped with a false British identity as the Dutch representative of a coal-importing firm, Foster & Co., from Bristol. Franck’s orders were to act as Thümmel’s contact in the city, using a Jewish couple called Charles and Antoinette Jelinek. The Jelineks ran a bric-à-brac shop, ‘De Favoriet’, on the ground floor of an old lattice-windowed, redbrick, step-gabled merchant’s house in a narrow, cobbled backstreet of The Hague† – another of the accommodation addresses Morávec had given Thümmel for his secret messages.

      On 2 April 1939, just two weeks after the German occupation of Prague, the first return card from Thümmel, postmarked Dresden, arrived at De Favoriet. It contained no information – its purpose was simply to say that Agent A54 was back in touch.

      London communicated with Thümmel through messages in invisible ink on what appeared to be an innocuous postcard. These were sent through the diplomatic bag to the British embassy in The Hague, which passed them to Franck, who passed them to a German refugee, who passed them to a nun, who smuggled them in her habit to Aachen, from where they completed their journey to Thümmel through the German postal system.

      In the first days of June a second postcard from Thümmel, now using the codename ‘Carl Voral’, arrived in Zürich and was collected by Sedláček, who forwarded it to London in the Czech diplomatic bag. It read: ‘Dear Uncle, I think I am in love. I have met a girl …’ Between the lines of the visible text, another message, written in milk, appeared when the paper was gently heated: ‘I will be in The Hague shortly. Would like to meet you or your deputy. Place: Hotel des Indes. Name: Lustig. Date: June 15. Carl.’ At the meeting which followed, Thümmel explained that he was now working in the Tirpitzufer in Berlin, and told Franck that the plan for Operation White – the German invasion of Poland – was now almost ready. It would involve nine Panzer divisions, and the target date for its launch had been fixed as no later than 1 September 1939. Morávec, in London, passed the information on to the British, who in turn passed it on – in a form sufficiently bowdlerised to conceal its source – to the Poles, who were alarmed, and to the French, who were sceptical.

      As Thümmel was handing over Hitler’s plans for the invasion of Poland, a twenty-five-year-old junior diplomat at the British embassy in Berlin was sent to the German Foreign Ministry to complain about a consignment of German arms that had been ordered and paid for by London, but had not yet been delivered. ‘My dear fellow,’ his German counterpart replied, in a languorous upper-class drawl, ‘you will be very lucky if you get these now … at least not in the form that you were expecting them!’

      The weather in The Hague on 3 August 1939 was brilliant and swelteringly hot. As evening fell, a brisk offshore breeze set the great sails turning on the windmills that stood like sentinels on the flat land around the city. Shortly after dusk, just as the street lights came on, a burly figure appeared in the arched doorway of De Favoriet. ‘Grüss Gott,’ he said, smiling at Aloïs Franck, who was waiting for him in the dimly-lit, high-vaulted space of the Jelineks’ shop. Without another word, the new arrival walked through to a back room, empty save for a table, a chair, a typewriter and neat stacks of white cardboard boxes marked with stencils proclaiming ‘Gloves – Made in Czechoslovakia’.

      Paul Thümmel, alias Agent A54, sat down and began typing, hesitantly and with two fingers, for he was not used to a typewriter:

      Nazi leaders think that France and England will not intervene in the event of a clash with Poland and that support for Poland will be limited to the supply of war materials and financial aid … If France does decide to fight … she will not be attacked … The Germans will take up defensive positions behind their ‘Western Wall’ lines of defence …

      As Thümmel worked, occasionally pulling on a cigarette burning in an ashtray beside him, the stack of typed A4 pages by his typewriter grew. At around 2 a.m., with the room СКАЧАТЬ