The Venlo Incident Read online

  THE

  VENLO INCIDENT

  (Photo by Charles Doran, Newton Abbot, Devon)

  The Author.

  THE

  VENLO INCIDENT

  A True Story of Double-Dealing, Captivity, and a Murderous Nazi Plot

  S. PAYNE BEST

  Introduction by Nigel Jones

  The Venlo Incident: A True Story of Double-Dealing, Captivity, and a Murderous Nazi Plot

  This edition published in 2009 by Frontline Books,

  an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Limited,

  47 Church Street, Barnsley, S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS

  www.frontline-books.com

  and

  Published and distributed in the United States of America and Canada

  by Skyhorse Publishing, 555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 903, New York, NY 10018

  www.skyhorsepublishing.com

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion,

  corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created

  to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing,

  555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 903, New York, NY 10018 or email [email protected].

  © 1950 Sigismund Payne Best

  Introduction © Pen & Sword Books Ltd, 2009

  United Kingdom edition © Pen & Sword Books Ltd, 2009

  North America edition © Skyhorse Publishing, 2009

  Frontline edition: ISBN 978-1-84832-558-6

  Skyhorse edition: ISBN 978-1-60239-946-4

  Publishing History

  The Venlo Incident was first published by Hutchinson & Co (London) in 1950. This edition

  includes a new introduction by Nigel Jones.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into

  a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to

  criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP data record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available on file.

  For more information on our books, please visit www.frontline-books.com,

  email [email protected] or write to us at the above address.

  Printed in the UK by the MPG Books Group

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Map: The route of Captain S. Payne Best

  Introduction by Nigel Jones

  The Venlo Incident

  Appendix

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  The Author

  Café Backus on the Dutch German Frontier near Venlo

  Lt. Dirk Klop

  Jan Lemmens

  First pictures released by the Gestapo to the German Press, showing Major R. H. Stevens, Captain S. Payne Best, and Georg Elesr

  Plan of the ‘Bunker’ at Sachsenhausen where the author spent five and a quarter years

  Pages from the author’s diaries

  Self-portrait by Marie ‘May’ Payne Best, the author’s wife

  Roster of the guards for the year

  Specimen page from the author’s diary for 1942

  Colonel-General Franz Haider, late Chief of the German General Staff and his wife

  Major J. B. ‘Johnny’ Dodge, D. S. C., D. S. O., M. C.

  General Alexander Baron von Falkenhausen, Commander-in-Chief in Belgium

  Prags Wildbad Hotel near Niederdorf in the Puster Tal, South Tirol

  Dr. and Mrs. Hjalmar Schacht

  Prince Friedrich Leopold of Prussia

  Colonel Bogislav von Bonin

  Photograph of German document captured from the Gestapo at Niederdorf

  Photograph of German document (continued)

  Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, late Austrian Chancellor, with his wife and Sissie

  Group-Captain H. M. A. ‘Wings’ Day, R.A.F., D.S.O., O.B.E. , A.M.

  INTRODUCTION

  In post-war accounts of the secret intelligence war between Britain and Nazi Germany, most of the spotlight – and the kudos – has focused on British intelligence agencies for such coups as the Double Cross system for ‘turning’ Nazi agents; and the breaking at Bletchley Park of Germany’s military signals encoded on its reputedly impenetrable Enigma machines – the material code-named Ultra and called ‘the golden eggs’ by Churchill – knowledge of which helped the Allies to anticipate almost every German military move, and thus win the war.

  Far less attention, for understandable reasons of national pride, has been paid to Germany’s intelligence triumphs. Chief among these were the ‘Funkspielen’ or ‘Radio games’ in which, by capturing and ‘turning’ Allied radio operators working in occupied France and Holland, the Germans managed to destroy entire networks of Allied agents, virtually crippling intelligence gathering in those two countries. But the most audacious and successful single stroke played by the German secret services was the story of the ‘Venlo Incident’ – recounted in this remarkable and revealing book by its chief victim, Captain Sigismund Payne Best.

  The author was a British intelligence officer of the old school, familiar from W. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden’ stories, which tell of the writer’s work as a spymaster running agents from neutral Switzerland during the First World War. Payne Best was similarly employed by military intelligence in neutral Holland during the same conflict. Tali, tweedy, spats-wearing and monocled, Best was almost a caricature of the British officer and gentleman. Married to a Dutch woman, Maria van Bess, Best remained in the country after the war, becoming a well-known member of the upper-class British community in the Netherlands.

  Best ran a legitimate import-export business, specialising in pharmaceuticals, which also provided a convenient cover for his second profession: espionage. Although apparently de-activated in the 1920s by the cash-strapped secret foreign intelligence service, MI6, spies never really retire, and with Nazism on the rise in the 1930s, Best was approached again by an old acquaintance from the Great War: Colonel Claude Dansey. The deputy chief of MI6/SIS, Dansey, a more ruthless player than the gentlemanly Best, was setting up his ‘Z’ organisation, an outfit that paralleled MI6’s ‘official’ spy stations, which were based on the Passport Control Offices (PCOs) in British embassies around the world. Run from Bush House in the Aldwych, the home of the B BC World Service, Dansey’s Z network was based on British businessmen working in foreign cities, and was supposed to be kept quite separate from the MI6 stations, so that if one was penetrated, the other could continue to function.

  Best became Dansey’s ‘Z man’ in the Netherlands, a position that, with his extensive contacts and experience, suited him well. But at the outbreak of war in 1939, Dansey took the decision to merge his Z organisation with the official MI6 PCO network. Probably this was a move designed to promote Dansey’s claims to succeed Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair – who was dying of cancer – as ‘C’, the head of MI6. But, in the Netherlands at least, it proved a fatal error. Based in The Hague, the Dutch PCO network had recently been taken over by an inexperienced former Indian Army Officer, Major Richard Stevens. Neither he nor Best knew that Stevens’ PCO network had already been penetrated by the German secret services. The Germans had even set up a camera in a barge permanently moored on a canal opposite Stevens’ office from which every visitor to the PCO was photographed. As a result, several of MI6’s spies and informers in Holland were double agents working for the Nazis.

  The Ge
rmans were playing a classic espionage game. Rather than wrapping up Britain’s spy network in Holland, they continued to monitor it, steadily accumulating more information, and identifying its agents for future arrest. Germany’s most feared spymaster – Reinhard Heydrich, the ice-cold chief of the Nazi party’s security service, the Sicherheitsdienst [SD] – personally kept his eye on the Dutch’game’ and made sure that his bosses, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler, were informed of its progress. The Nazi leadership held the legendary British secret services in awe – rumour had it Heydrich even signed his letters ‘C’ and wrote them in green ink after the supposed style of all MI6 chiefs – which the bungling displayed by the service in the Venlo Incident shows was somewhat misplaced. In September 1939, with the outbreak of war, Heydrich decided to bring the game to a close and snapped his trap shut.

  The Venlo Incident is an extraordinary story on several levels, reading as it does like a spy fiction by Eric Ambler or John le Carré. Indeed, the Incident finds its way – only slightly disguised – into William Boyd’s acclaimed superior spy novel Restless. At its most basic level, therefore, The Venlo Incident is a real-life spy thriller. It was, however, much more than that. Best and Stevens were mere pawns in a greater game than local espionage. In the autumn of 1939 the newly co-operating but unwittingly compromised spy chiefs had been holding talks at a series of clandestine meetings with a group of shady Germans. Best and Stevens believed these men to be emissaries of the Wehrmacht High Command who were plotting a putsch against Hitler. They did not know, however, that the talks had been authorised at the very highest levels of Whitehall policy-making, in fact by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain himself.

  Most people in Britain assumed that when Chamberlain, speaking in the funereal tones that earned him the nickname of ‘the undertaker’, announced Britain’s declaration of war on Germany on 3 September 1939, that was the death of the policy that he most embodied: appeasement. Chamberlain said as much himself in his broadcast when he spoke of ‘the bitter blow to me that my long struggle to win peace has failed’. In fact, behind the scenes, and carefully hidden from a public who were preparing for a long and cruel war, Chamberlain’s ‘struggle to win peace’ continued even after he had declared war on Germany. Unlike Winston Churchill, the man who he had reluctantly taken into his cabinet on the outbreak of war and who would eventually succeed him, Chamberlain was a man with no military experience, and no understanding of war. With his reedy voice, his ubiquitous umbrella and his old-fashioned wing collars, Chamberlain was hardly an inspiring war leader, even discounting his past record as the man of Munich, the arch appeaser who had bent over backwards to accommodate Hitler’s appetite for chunks of European real estate: Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia and finally Poland.

  The first two months of the war underlined Chamberlain’s bizarre policy of being at war without actually fighting. A proposal to bomb German forests with incendiaries was ruled out on the grounds that the trees were ‘private property’. And beyond moving the tiny British Expeditionary Force over to France, Britain sat with folded arms while Flitler’s Blitzkrieg destroyed Poland – the nation on whose behalf she had entered the war. It was dubbed the ‘Phoney War’ with justification. Unknown to all but a handful of close colleagues who shared his appeasing views – including his Foreign Secretary and favoured successor, Lord Halifax – Chamberlain was putting out desperate feelers seeking a compromise peace with Germany before too much blood had been shed.

  The most promising such approach in Whitehall’s eyes was the one being pursued by Best and Stevens in the Netherlands. As Best relates in this book, his direct contacts with the Germans had begun on the eve of war in August 1939 when London had asked him to meet a mysterious German exile named Franz Fischer. This man was a shady character who had been forced to flee Germany for Paris to escape charges of embezzlement. In the French capital he had made contact with anti-Nazi German exiles, but also become entangled with the SD, who offered to waive the fraud charges if he would work for them. Fischer agreed, betraying his new exile friends. The SD then sent Fischer to The Hague in 1938 to repeat the trick with anti-Nazi exiles there. He represented himself as the front man for a group of German Generals who were planning to overthrow Hitler and halt Germany’s aggressive expansionism.

  In the Netherlands Fischer succeeded in winning the confidence of an exiled Catholic leader, Dr Klaus Speicker, who was also one of Claude Dansey’s Z informers. In this way, Fischer was put in touch with Best. With the instincts of an old spymaster, Best was instantly suspicious, regarding Fischer as an obvious plant, but his MI6 bosses, keen to win Chamberlain’s approval, told him to pursue the relationship. ‘I had the damn fellow up to my office’ wrote Best, ‘and spent a morning interrogating him’. The meeting only confirmed Best’s suspicions that Fischer was an agent provocateur seeking to sow mischief. Best wrote a damning report complaining that merely meeting such an obvious Nazi stooge had compromised him, and recommended that Fischer be lured to London and banged up for the duration.

  Best’s report was ignored. Dansey was away in Switzerland, MI6’s main European listening post. Stewart Menzies, head of MI6’s military section, who was acting as ‘C’ during Sinclair’s sick leave, decided to tell Chamberlain what he wanted to hear: that there was a serious possibility that Hitler would be overthrown by a German ‘peace party’. Menzies certainly ‘sexed up’ this possibility for Chamberlain’s benefit as a way of strengthening his claim to succeed Sinclair as ‘C’, but his words fell on fertile ground anyway. Not only was Chamberlain eager to end the war peacefully, but there was a genuine German opposition in Germany’s Wehrmacht and Foreign Office who had already made contact with Britain at the time of the Munich conference a year before the war. From this knowledge, it was but a short step for London to believe that Fischer was a real representative of these anti-Hitler elements.

  It would spoil Best’s story to rehearse the details of the Venlo Incident itself in advance. Suffice to say that a series of tense and tantalising meetings with a changing cast of German SD men masquerading as German officers, led by a certain bright young Major Schaemmel – actually the SD’s head of counter-intelligence, Walther Schellenberg – eventually led to the dramatic denouement, the ‘Incident’ itself. On November 9th, in the car park outside the Cafe Backus – a sleepy pull-up in the unremarkable town of Venlo on the Dutch-German frontier – a snatch squad of SS goons roared across the border, abducted Best Stevens, and their driver in a few violent seconds, and fatally shot their Dutch intelligence ‘minder’ Dirk Klop.

  Heydrich had chosen his most trusted thug to carry out the clinically ruthless kidnap. Alfred Naujocks was fresh from an equally ruthless and murderous operation on another frontier – that between Germany and Poland – that had started the Second World War. In late August 1939 Naujocks had commanded another hit squad, dressed in Polish uniforms, who had commandeered a local radio station at Gleiwitz, just inside the German border, gabbled a few phrases in Polish onto the airwaves, and made their escape. Naujocks left behind the bodies of a few murdered concentration camp inmates – also dressed as Polish soldiers – as ‘evidence’ of an intolerable Polish provocation. The Gleiwitz incident had provided the totally bogus casus belli for Hitler to invade Poland. Once again, at Venlo, Naujocks carried out his murderous mission to his superiors’ complete satisfaction.

  The previous night, in distant Munich, fate had provided the Germans with the perfect post facto justification for their illegal incursion into Dutch territory. On one of the most sacred dates in the Nazi calendar – November 9th was the anniversary of Hitler’s bloody and unsuccessful first bid for power, the 1923 Beerhall Putsch – a devastating explosion had wrecked the Burgerbraukellar beer hall, killing seven people, just minutes after Hitler had concluded his annual anniversary address unexpectedly early and left the premises. A carefully constructed time bomb made and planted by a leftist watchmaker and artisan named Georg Elser had caused the blast. Workin
g entirely alone for more than a year, Elser had laboriously assembled his bomb and concealed it in a pillar behind the podium from which Hitler spoke. Had the Führer not left the beer hall when he had, the bomb would certainly have killed him and changed the course of history.

  Elser himself was arrested that night attempting to cross into Switzerland. Tasked by Hitler with uncovering the ‘conspiracy’ behind the bomb, Heinrich Himmler refused to accept Elser’s story that he had acted entirely alone out of moral revulsion for Hitler’s policies. With their paranoid mix of respect and loathing for the mythical powers of MI6, Hitler and Himmler were convinced that the long arm of London had placed the bomb. Even after repeated torture sessions – included one administered personally by Himmler – had failed to shake Elser’s story, the Nazis’ belief in an MI6 plot remained undimmed. Elser even constructed a perfect replica of his bomb unaided to prove his capabilities, but the SS chiefs remained unconvinced. It was then that it occurred to Himmler that the two real MI6 men whom Heydrich, Fischer, Schellenberg and Naujocks had placed in his hands could be useful beyond their obvious utility as a source of information about British secret service methods and operations. (Unbelievably, the Nazis had found a list of his agents in Stevens’ pocket after they had seized him).

  Himmler decided to use Best and Stevens as co-defendants with Elser in a propaganda trial that would follow Germany’s victory in the war and would prove to the world that the wicked MI6 had been behind the attempt on Hitler’s life. For this purpose, after their initial interrogations, all three men were kept alive in relatively comfortable conditions in a special block for VIP prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin, though care was taken to ensure that they had no chance of meeting and comparing notes. Despite this, Best managed to make indirect contact with Elser. On entirely inadequate evidence Best became convinced that the courageous little craftsman was an SS scapegoat, and that his beer hall bomb had been an inside job planned and planted by the SS as a way of drumming up popular support for Hitler dented by the lukewarm public enthusiasm for his war. Most historians have concluded that Best’s theory is wholly misplaced – would the SS really have risked Hitler’s life by leaving a live bomb ticking away a few feet from where he was speaking? – and that Elser really did act heroically and alone.