Have you ever gotten around to reading one of those books that you've meant to read for years, but never had the time to read? I know just how you feel. But this week I'm actually doing something about one of my long neglected reads. I'm reading Bodyguard of Lies by Anthony Cave Brown. I dusted a copy of this book at least a thousand times at my parent's house and the title always fascinated me, but I never actually picked the silly thing up and read it. More the fool I. While this book was originally published thirty years ago, it's a wonderfully written account of the intelligence, counter-intelligence and downright deception that was needed to keep the time and location of D-Day a secret. Brown's style is engaging and the meticulously researched material, which could have been as dry as James Bond's martini, is instead fascinating because of the way the author relays it. He takes his time to set up the situation and to introduce you to the players and what their motivations were and the book is all the more fascinating because of it.
Some of the chapters that I've found particularly fascinating describes the motivations and movements of the Schwarz Kapelle---which translates as "The Black Band----who were the main group of German army and intelligence officers opposed to Hitler's reign and who tried to depose him, it turns out, many times before Poland was invaded. Led by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr (the secret intelligence and counter-espionage service of the German General Staff), who thought that Hitler would ultimately turn out to be the downfall of his country, they failed mainly because they were wary because Hitler had no problems retaliatiating against army officers who stood up against him and because of a lack of external support from Britain and France.
It's stunning to read this one particular chapter which details Canaris' and the Schwarz Kapelle's movements immediately preceding Hitler's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, for it sounds so familiar given the appeasement by certain unnamed countries today during the War on Terror.
If you're interested, take the jump.
First off, here's a little who's who and what's what that might help you to navigate this excerpt:
Oster: Canaris' second in command at the Abwehr
Beck: German general disgraced by Hitler for opposing him, who lost his career, yet remained one of the first and foremost members of the Schwarz Kapelle
Ultra:: Code name for intelligence derived from decrypting German Enigma-enciphered wireless traffic
Menzies: "C" or the head of MI-6
Cadogan: Permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office and diarist
Part II, The Roots of Conspiracy 1934-1943, Chapter 5: The Outbreak of War. Bodyguard of Lies by Anthony Cave Brown, Copyright 1975. All Rights Reserved.
In trying to asses the purpose of Canaris's activities during the least months of 1938 and the first half of 1939, Britain was confronted with ambiguity from every side. It seemed that Canaris was playing three hands at once. He was endeavoring to infiltrate agents into Britian, or to suborn men and women who might be useful to the Abwehr; his agents sought to inflame the world situation with rumor and counter-rumor; and still more agents arrived in London for the ostensible purpose of building a secret bridge between the Abwehr, the German General Staff and the British government. Only in the afterlight of those furious months would Canaris's true purpose finally emerge.It was a period of unprecedented tension in the affairs of Britain and Germany. The Germans and the Italians announced the Pact of Steel, and Mussolini appeared ready to invadde the Balkans. In March of 1939 German troops completed the occupation of Czechoslovakia and Hitler proclaimed the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia." Chamberlain accused Hitler of breaking his word that he would not invade the rest of the Czech state; Hitler rejected the Anglo-French protest notes. Chamberlain announced British and French guarantees to Poland and ordered military conscription. The world staggered under the blow and counter-blow of this diplomatic battle of wills. The preparations for war were everywhere, and in London that Easter, the fluctuating, high-pitched moan of sirens were heard for the first time as Britain tested its air-raid defenses.
Although Ultra was not yet operational, the British government was well informed of Hitler's intentions, both through its own intelligence sources and through the continuing stream of emissaries from the Schwarze Kapelle. A procession of Germans with illustrious names came secretly to London at the behest of Canaris, Oster and Beck to try to get Chamberlain and the British government to block Hitler's next move---"Case White," the invasion of Poland---among them the young Major Fabian von Schlabrendorff and Helmuth Count von Moltke, the great-great-nephew of the venerated field marshal who helped found the German General Staff. No state secrets in history were as badly kept as Hitler's that last year of the peace, and the persistent warnings were not ignored. Although the British made no overty military move to oppose Hitler, the Committee of Imperial Defence, virtually Britain's supreme war council, accelerated its preparations for war, including the defense of the realm against air attack. The production of military aircraft was stepped up from 250 to 600 units a month---and that precaution, when combined with the intelligence that derived from Ultra, would cost Hitler the Battle of Britain. Thus Canaris and the other conspirators fo the Schwarze Kapelle had, at least indirectly, accomplished a part of their goal. They would not succeed in preventing a war, but they would help ensure that Hitler could not win it.
The British government was as well-informed about Hitler's moods as about his intentions. In January 1939 Cadogan had warned the goverment that "...Hitler's mental condition, his insensate rage against Great Britain and his megalomania, which are alarming the moderates around him, are entirely consistent with the execution of a desperate coup against the western powers." Moreover, he added, "...the authorities in Germany whom we have consulted including anti-Nazi Germans of sound judgement are agreed that Hitler's orders would be carried out and that no revolt can be anticipated at all events during the initial stages of the war."
Perhaps in response to this appreciation and other warnings of the state of affairs in Germany, the British government considered a scheme to assassinate Hitler. Menzies would later state that he was in sympathy with the plan, which was suggested by General Sir Mason-MacFarlane, the miltiary attache at the British Embassy in Berlin. MacFarlane, a clever man (he would secretly go into Rome to negotiate the Italian surrender in 1943), whose occasional red-faced bluster concealed a natural clandestine's mind, proposed that Hitler should be shot with a high-powered marksman's rifle equipped with a telescopic sight from an apartment overlooking the Chancellery. According to an article in the German magazine Der Spiegel, published in 1971 on the basis of what it described as a note on the proposition found at the Imperial War Museum, MacFarlane's conclusion was that "Hitler's death at that time could have led to the overthrow of National Socialism and that millions of lives could have been saved." But, said the magazine, the British government vetoed the scheme on the grounds that it was "unsportsmanlike," and that there was "antipathy on principle against murder in democratic states." Later, the British government would be somewhat less concerned with scruples.
Soon after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, when, as Cadogan would write, "We were being swept along on a rapid series of surprises sprung upon us by Hitler with a speed that took one's breath away," Canaris attempted another strategy. On April 3, 1939, he planted a report that the Luftwaffe might make a surprise attack on the British fleet. A second such report warned that German submarines were patrolling the English Channel and the Thames estuary. The Cabinet believed these reports and met; that same day Lord Stanhope, the First Lord of the Admiralty, boarded the aircraft carrier Ark Royal. to announce that "Shortly before I left the Admiralty it became necessary to give orders to man the anti-aircraft guns of the Fleet, so as to be ready for anything that might happen." The world reverberated with the announcement. The powreful British fleet was ready for immediate and determined action; war, it seemed, was imminent and unavoidable.
Like an earlier warning, which probably also originated with Canaris, that Hitler planned to bomb London in March of 1939, these reports proved to be false. And in planting them, so it appeared at the time, Canaris had overplayed his hand. UT was generally believed that they were part of Hitler's clever, unending war of nerves, and Canaris was blamed for concocting elaborate rumors and deception schemes to trouble the security of the western powers. His credibility was destroyed. But in the light of his future actions, his campaign of scare tactics might be traced to an entirely different motive. Disappointed by the failure of the British to respond to the warnings of his emissaries, he wanted to frighten them into taking positive action that would deter Hitler. All he succeeded in doing was to make the British doubt his sincerity.
Yet again, the flood of rumors and reports that inundated the British government that spring and summer would eventually work to the benefit of Canaris and the Schwarz Kapelle, and to the detriment of Hitler. Most of these rumors and reportss were found to be, after the fact, quite accurate; the surprises of which Cadogan wrote were surprises only because the British were ill-equipped to assess the truth of the intelligence that they had gathered from a wide variety of sources. Part of the problem lay in the very nature of some of those sources. The emissaries of the Schwarz Kapelle could be considered, at best, disgruntled monarchists and, at worst, traitors----neither a very reliable source of the truth. Canaris himself seemed little more than an agent provocateur. But just as their warnings had induced the British to strengthen their military defenses, so they also led to the strengthening of the British intelligence apparatus. A new organization, the Situation Report Centre, was created and a Foreign Office man, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, a relative of the Duke of Portland, and a product of Wellington and the Grenadier Guards, was put in charge. Thereafter, the other intelligence organizations would report to him and a committee made up of the directors of the army, navy and air force intelligence services, which would be responsible for the collation, assessment, dissemination of all intelligence, whatever its source. Gradually, Cavendish-Bentinck, a man of exceptional perception and a wide knowledge of Germany, would expand his sphere to control all intelligence work---offensive, defensive, secret, technical, subversive and political; and the Situation Report Centre would be the forerunner of the Joint Intelligence Committee, also headed by Cavendish-Bentinck and the organization with which Britain would conduct its triumphant intelligence operations during the Second World War.
In the final moments of peace, Canaris and his group made one last attempt to avert the looming catastrophe. An officer of the German General Staff was sent to London overtly as a military observer, but covertly to make contact with "officers of the military and of British intelligence." He was Lieutenant Colonel Gerhardt Count von Schwerin, chief of the English section of the department that would become FHW, an important intelligence arm of OKW and, in 1943 and 1944, a major center of conspiracy intrigue between General Ulrich Liss, the chief of FHW, and his friend the deputy British military attache at the embassy in Berlin, Major Kenneth W.D. Strong, the man who would become, for D-Day, chief of intelligence to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander.
The count's stay in London was not a secret matter for either the Germans or the British; it was customary even at this moment European history for the German and British general staffs to exchange observers; Liss himself had been in Britain a few months earlier. Schwerin, a panzer specialist, took no pains to disguise himself or his overt mission. He took a flat in Piccadilly and behaved like a German artistocrat. He had calling cards printed and distributed them wherever he went. He was to be seen riding in Rotten Row, practicing the haute ecole of a German gentleman. He appeared at Ascot, Sandhurst, and the Guards' Ball. But few except Strong and the director of naval intelligence, Admiral John Godfre, knew the true purpose of his visit. On March 28, 1939, he had warned the British Embassy in Berlin that "Hitler had decided to push his eastern expansion policy" that year; he was in Britain now to warn that Hitler had decalred on May 23, 1939, that he was determined to "attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity." Under Godfrey's "management," Schwerin met "a careful selection of Foreign Office and intelligence officials and MP's." To all he carried the same message; the only way to prevent the attack on Poland was for Britain to "impress Hitler both with its strength and determination."
On July 14, 1939, Schwerin was a guest at a dinner part at Godfrey's flat in Cadogan Place. Present were General Sir James Marshall-Cornwall, an old MI-6 hand who had been military attache in Berlin from 1928-1932 and was not Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Cadogan, Menzies and the directors of the military intelligence services. There was, Marshall-Cornwall would record in his diary, "a good deal of good champagne consumed," and Schwerin reiterated his message. Marshall-Cornwall would record:
Count Schwerin wanted Britain to make a series of gestures on the Continent. He told us that Hitler would attack Poland but that he might be restrained if, in the first place, Britain made a powerful naval demonstration---something like a squadron of battleships, he proposed---in the Baltic. He also suggested that we should station a group of heavy bombers in France, and send to France the two fully-equipped divisions we had at that time. The next day we forwarded Schwerin's proposals to the various interested authorities, including the Prime Minister, and Schwerin returned to Germany with an expression of cordiality from Menzies to Canaris. But, alas, Schwerin's proposals fell upon poor soil.Prime Minister Chamberlain and Lord Halifax made it known that Britain would do nothing at this stage; if she did so, the statesmen averred, such demonstrations would serve only to provoke Hitler.
Hitler did not require provocation; On August 22, 1939, the highest commanders of the Wehrmacht were ordered to report for a conference at athe Adlerhorst (the Eagle's Nest), the Fuehrer's eyrie on a mountaintop in the Obersalzburg of Bavaria. Their steam of staff cars purred along the white concrete autobahn through mountain valleys, into the village of Berchtesgaden with its sixteenth-century houses, and out toward the Hohergoll. They climbed up the winding Kehlsteinstrasse until the road ended abruptly in the side of the Kehlstein Mountain. Two great bronze doors opened at the touch of a button from SS guards and, leaving the valleys in bright sunshine below, the procession entered a long, marble-walled tunnel lit by bronze lanterns. The chauffeurs parked the cars in the smaller tunnel to the big, copper-lined elevator outfitted with deep leather seats. They were whisked up a shaft bored through the heart of the mountain for 400 feet, and when the doors opened they found themselves at 6184 feet in the Eagle's Nest.
Hitler kept his generals and admirals waiting for a few minutes in the anteroom where he displayed hyis collection of Nymphenburg and Frankenthal porcelain. Then, at a signal from the blond giant who wa chief of Hitler's SS bodyguard, they entered the Fuehrer's salon for the conference. The view from his wide panoramic window was Wagnerian: the Untersberg, the highest mountain near Salzburg, where the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, according to legend, awaited the call to rise and restore the glories of the German Empire; the steeples and hills of Salzburg itself, where Mozart was born. The commanders settled themselves into large rustic furniture in a room that was dominated by a massive clock crowned by a bronze eagle and a bronze bust of Richard Wagner. The walls were covered with large oils, including a nude that was said to have been painted by Titian, two soft and haunting tapestries, a landscape by Spitzweg, some Roman ruins by Pannini and a structure by Eduard von Steinle that resembled an altar.
Hitler began to speak: "There will probably never again in the future be a man with more authority than I have. My existence is therefore a factor of great value. But I can be eliminated at any time by a criminal or a lunatic...There is no time to lose. War must come in my lifetime."
Displaying unbounded self-assurance, Hitler then announced that Ribbentrop had signed a Treaty of Friendship with the Soviet Union and that, whereas previously he had believed an attack upon Poland would mean war with England and France, now he was certain there would be no war. "I have," Hitler declared, "struck this instrument {assistance from Russia} from the hands of the western powers. Now we can strike at the heart of Poland. To the best of our knowledge the military road is free."
His declaration drew considerable surprise from his audience. The Fuehrer continued with a statement that he thought no British stateman would risk a long war with Germany while Russia remained out of the conflict. As for France, he said that she had been dragged along against her will by England and could not afford a long and bloody war without the help of Russia; French casualties in the First World War had seen to that. Moreover, he believed that "Our enemies are little worms: I saw them in Munich." And he added, "I am only afraid that at the last minute some Schweinhund will produce a plan of mediation."
Hitler spoke with such great force that all those present were silent. Why must there be war, he asked? "We have nothing to lose; we can only gain." He reviewed the tense world situation and concluded:
All these fortunate circumstances will no longer prevail in two or three years. No one knows how long I shall live. Therefore war is better now. Hannibal at Cannae, Frederick the Great at Leuthen, and Hindenburd and Ludendorff at Tannenberg---they took chances. So now we also must take risks which can only be mastered by iron determination.With that the gathering broke up for a late lunch. According to an account in a Nuremberg document, Goering, beside himself with excitement, jumped onto the long table in the salon and gave "bloodthirsty thanks and bloody promises. He danced around like a savage." When the conference resumed, Hitler continued his harangue, exhorting his commanders to "Have no pity! Brutal attitude. Eighty million people must get what is their right." And then the Fuehrer announced that Case White was to be put into effect immediately. X-Day was August 26, 1939; Zero Hour was 0430. The object of the operation: "The destruction of Poland."
In the main Hitler's commanders favored this decision; had not the Wehrmacht swept through Austria and Czechoslovakia virtually unopposed? But several men---Halder, Witzleben, Steulpnagel, Fellgeibel, Canaris---kept silent. In their view, war was inevitable if Hitler was allowed to proceed. But how could he be stopped? Once again Canaris saw an opportunity to frustrate Hitler's plans, and he took it. He drove from Berchtesgaden to the Hotel of the Four Seasons in Munich, and there he made some notes and handed them to his deputy, Oster. Oster took the night express to Berlin, and shortly after the train left the Munich station, he met a man in civilian clothes in the corridor outside his sleeper---Major Gijsbertus Jacob Sas, an assistant military attache at the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, who had been a friend of Oster's for many years. Oster gave him Canaris' notes and by the evening of August 23, a report of Hitler's speech was on the desk of Major Foley in Berlin {Ed. British military attache), just as it was on the desks of all the other intelligence services friendly to the Dutch.
The leakage was effective, for it reached both London and Paris. The French reaction was immediate and drasticl Premier Edouard Daladier gave the Alerte, the signal that put the Maginot Line on a war footing. The British government also took precautionary measures. Orders were issued for key parties of the coast and anti-aircraft defenses to assemble, and for the protection of vulnerable points. Telegrams sent to the dominions and colonies warned tha tit might be necessary to enter a precautionary stance for war, the Lord Privy Seal was authorized to bring all civil defense and evacuation procedures to a war footing, and the Admiralty was given Cabinet authority to requisition twenty-five merchant ships for conversion into armed merchant cruisers. The Admiralty issued warnings to all merchantmen, all leave was stopped throughout the armed services, the anti-aircraft defenses were fully deployed, and reservists were called up in large numbers.
Such was the effect of Canaris' warning. On August 25, OKW and army headquarters at Zossen received a signal. Case White was to be postponed. Hitler had been informed that, the Nazi-Soviet Pact notwithstanding, if Germany attacked Poland, Britain and France would decalre war. And to show the Fuehrer it meant business, the British government had announced through the Foreign Office than an alliance had just been concluded with Poland. In Rome, Mussolini, who had recieved his own copy of Hitler's address, declared that Italy could not support Germany in a great war without substantial assistance in war materials and military supplies.
At Abwehr headquarters Canaris and Oster were jubliant. The man who claimed to be the "greatest strategist of all times, a war lord of a new kind," and who had issued orders to attack one minute and canceled them the next, could not be taken seriously by the generals. Oster said there was no longer any reason for a coup; Hitler would now fall through his own actions. And at the Kolonne the little Admiral declared: "Peace has been save for the next twenty years."
It was not to be. Hitler was determined to proceed. He told Brauchitsch at the Reichskanzlei that he was to regard X-Day as September 1, 1939. He would, he said, if he was pushed to it, wage a two-front war---the one type of war that all German strategists in modern history had declared Germany could not win. When Canaris heard the news, he faced the future with a shattered spirit. Across the years to come he saw in prospect the defeat and dissolution of all that he and many of his co-conspirators held dear: the Riech, the existence of the armed forces, the Officer Corpos, power, privilege, position---all would go.
In the predawn twilight of September 1, 1939, 1600 aircraft of the Luftwaffe opened the bombardment of Poland, and at five o'clock that same morning five German armies crossed the frontier. On September 3, the French and British declared war upon the Third Reich.
Interesting, no? Get the book and read more for yourself.
Posted by Kathy at August 11, 2005 12:13 AM | TrackBack