Mediterranean from the British.
A further meeting between Young and Goerdeler took place on 4 December, this time in a hotel room in Zürich. On this occasion Goerdeler, using two fingers and a typewriter borrowed from the hotel, laboriously typed out ten paragraphs of a suggested ‘Heads of Agreement between Great Britain and Germany’. Despite the fact that nearly all his recommendations had already been incorporated in Foreign Office forward papers, his proposals were roundly rejected by the mandarins of King Charles’s Street, who, having been proved wrong about Goerdeler’s warnings about the Sudetenland, were now finding his preachy style irksome and patronising.
It was not just the British who were put off by Goerdeler’s didacticism. Hans Bernd Gisevius wrote at this time that Goerdeler’s ‘finest virtue was also his gravest weakness. The passion for justice burned so fiercely in him that he forgot all moderation. He preached and preached and preached, until … people … lost all patience with him.’
On 10 December 1938, Sir Alexander Cadogan reflected the same weariness with the German emissary in his diary: ‘had a message from G [Goerdeler] outlining a plan of [an army] revolution in Germany to take place before the end of the month. G wants a message from us … He had already sent us a “programme” which we couldn’t subscribe to – too much like Mein Kampf – and that rather put me off him. But he may want something merely to show his fellow conspirators that we shan’t fall upon a divided Germany and would want to work with any decent regime that may come out of this mess … I don’t believe much in this,’ he concluded, but added a wary codicil: ‘but if there is anything in it, it’s the biggest thing for centuries’.
Along with his recommendations for British policy, Goerdeler also included a report predicting, among other things, that Hitler would soon turn his attention to Holland, Belgium and Switzerland. Over the next year, Goerdeler’s use to the British changed from being an occasional (and by now mostly unwanted) diplomatic adviser on Germany, to a primary source of intelligence on Hitler’s plans and intentions.
Madeleine Bihet-Richou was not able to enjoy autumn in Paris for long after her narrow escape from Vienna. In the last days of September her French intelligence handler, Henri Navarre, asked her to return to Berlin, where a job had been arranged for her at the French Institute. She was now able to continue her affair with Lahousen, who was by this time installed as one of Canaris’s closest advisers in the Tirpitzufer. At the end of October the two lovers were taking advantage of a brilliant late-autumn day to pay a visit to the Berlin Zoo. Admiring the giraffes, Lahousen said in a quiet voice that Hitler had just ordered plans to be drawn up for the takeover of the remains of Czechoslovakia in the middle of March the following year.
‘This time,’ he added, ‘if France and Britain react, it will be war.’
Madeleine rushed, first to the French embassy to send a brief coded telegram to Navarre in Paris, and then to the Anhalter station in Potsdamer Platz, where she caught a train to the French capital to report personally on what she had learned. She met Navarre and Louis Rivet, the chief of French military intelligence, at a restaurant on the Rond-point des Champs-Élysées and gave them the whole story. A report was sent to French foreign minister Georges Bonnet, who responded that if Hitler went ahead with his plan, France could only react if Britain did – and Britain showed no signs of wanting to.
Rivet, conscious that he now had a very high-level source in Madeleine, instructed his new spy that she was never again to visit the French embassy in Berlin. In future she should pass her information by telephone to the French military attaché in the city, using a secret number which she should dial only from public phoneboxes.
On the evening of 8 November, not long after Madeleine’s return to the German capital, she was strolling with Lahousen down Kleiststrasse when he mentioned the assassination the previous day of a German diplomat in Paris by a Polish Jew. ‘The government,’ he told her, ‘has secretly ordered a “spontaneous wave” of reprisals to be launched by paramilitaries against the Jews, under cover of which their private wealth will be pillaged and Jewish synagogues will be burnt. Fire engines will be pre-positioned around the synagogues – not to stop them burning, but to save neighbouring buildings.’
The following night, Germany was convulsed and the world shocked by yet another outrage against the Jews. Kristallnacht was so named because of the carpets of broken glass which littered German streets after violent nationwide attacks on Jews and their property. Over a thousand synagogues were set on fire, many of them being totally destroyed; more than 7,500 Jewish businesses were demolished; at least ninety-one Jews were killed, and 30,000 arrested and incarcerated in Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. For Carl Goerdeler, himself not immune to a degree of anti-Semitism, this was a turning point. ‘The shame and bitterness of the most patriotic went so far as to make them be ashamed before the world of the name German which we loved and of which we were so proud … For many who hesitated there was now no possibility of reconciliation with this regime of violence,’ wrote one witness after the war.
Some of the September plotters went further, actively helping the Jews to escape the mobs and the Gestapo. Canaris was later thanked by Jewish leaders for what he did that night to save members of their community. Hans Oster offered to smuggle his Jewish neighbours out of harm’s way:
In the afternoon of 9th November 1938 our neighbour, the wife of Colonel, later General Hans Oster, called on us to offer the shelter of their home to my father, who was a lawyer aged 58. The news of the arrest of Jewish men had spread to both our families. The Osters and our family lived on the same floor of a Berlin apartment block. There were two staircases, one for tradesmen and one for us. Mrs Oster proposed that if the Gestapo called at the front door, my father could easily slip across to their flat by the back door.
Afterwards, Canaris, Oster and the Abwehr lawyer Hans von Dohnányi set up a secret organisation to smuggle Jews out of Germany, often by recruiting them into the Abwehr and then sending them abroad as Abwehr ‘agents’. The son of Canaris’s pastor recalled one among many recorded examples of Canaris and the Abwehr helping Jews to escape:
Thirteen Jewish men who had married non-Jewish women … were deported to different camps … all of them were released thanks to the combined efforts of Canaris and his staff … the Admiral succeeded in organising their transport in a closed train compartment to Madrid, where they came under Franco’s protection. Canaris used his connections to put thirteen of them up in private homes in Madrid before some of them were flown to England. Most … joined the British military.
On New Year’s Day 1939, with international tension rising again over Czechoslovakia, Canaris appointed Erwin Lahousen as the head of Section II of the Abwehr (sabotage and disruption), and gave him two sets of orders. One was designed for official consumption; the other was ‘unofficial’, and described Lahousen’s real task, which Canaris ordered should be to form ‘a secret organisation within Abwehr II and the Brandenburg Regiment, with the purpose of bringing together all anti-Nazi forces and preparing them for illegal acts … against the system … With the successful incorporation of Czechoslovakia into … the Third Reich … the way to war with Poland has been opened for Hitler and his clique of criminals. I am convinced that the other great Powers will not be caught this time by the political … tricks of this pathological liar. War will result in a catastrophe … [not just] for Germany [but also] for all mankind … if there were victory for the Nazi system.’
With her lover busy out of Berlin taking over his new organisation, Madeleine Bihet-Richou used the opportunity for a swift visit to Paris. There she received training in the use of secret ink, and underwent a deep-level interrogation about her relationship with Lahousen and his possible motives in talking to her so openly.
The early months of 1939 were full of intense diplomatic manoeuvring as everyone waited for Hitler’s next play. On 20 February, Spain, under substantial German and Italian pressure,
