Hide and Seek: The Irish Priest in the Vatican who Defied the Nazi Command. The dramatic true story of rivalry and survival during WWII.. Stephen Walker
next twelve months the carpenter planned his attack for the following year’s event at the beer hall. He became a regular diner there and over time he built a bomb which he would eventually place in a pillar close to the hall’s podium. As anticipated, on 8 November Hitler was to deliver a speech in the Burgerbräukeller in the evening and Elser had timed the device to go off at around 9.20 p.m.
Shocked at how close someone had come to killing the Führer, the Nazi high command handed the investigation over to the Gestapo. When Kappler arrived in Berlin he was assigned to be part of the team interrogating Elser, who initially had refused to say anything. The police attaché had been in this position many times before: in Austria he had interrogated anti-Nazi dissidents and in Rome he had begun the same work. Now, as he sat opposite Elser, his main job was to break the man’s silence.
Elser was bombarded with questions. How did he prepare the bomb? When did he go to Munich? But perhaps most interesting for Kappler and his Gestapo colleagues was the question of who had helped the carpenter. They began to track down anyone who knew Elser and had been in contact with him in recent months. Investigators caught up with Else Stephan, Elser’s girlfriend, who was questioned personally by Himmler and then taken to Hitler. Of the latter encounter she later said, ‘Behind a table sat a man in a field-grey uniform. He didn’t look up when one of the SS men reported: “My Führer! This is the woman!” Good Lord, it really was Hitler. Hitler put down a folder he had been reading and looked at me. He didn’t say anything. I felt most embarrassed. I wanted to salute but I just couldn’t raise my arm.’
Hitler looked at his visitor for a while before speaking. Then he said, ‘So you are Elser’s woman. Well, tell me about it.’ Else Stephan told Hitler her story just as she had done with Himmler, who was in charge of the investigation. Eventually, after Elser was beaten, investigators secured a confession. Postcards from the Burgerbräukeller had been found in his coat and one of the waitresses recognized him as a regular customer.
Elser was then tortured by the Gestapo, who initially found it difficult to accept that the carpenter had acted alone. Hitler himself was convinced that he had been helped by British Secret Service agents. Under questioning Elser insisted that he had carried out the operation without any help. Himmler personally took part in a number of the interrogations and on one occasion told the suspect, ‘I’ll have you burnt alive, you swine. Limb by limb quite slowly … do you understand?’
Kappler would maintain in an interview some years later that he treated Elser properly during the interrogations. ‘I always spoke to Elser very calmly. He opened up to me without reservation. And I also had the impression that he was telling us the truth on all points – and this was corroborated when his statements were checked.’
Elser made a confession that ran to hundreds of pages. He would be imprisoned at Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps, remaining at the second until the final weeks of the war, when he was taken from his cell and killed. The American forces were nearby but with the war about to end the German high command clearly had some old scores to settle.
Back in 1939, hours after Elser’s arrest, Kappler would find himself examining another ‘plot’ to topple Hitler. This one, bizarre and complicated, did involve Britain’s Secret Service at the highest level.
It began one winter’s morning and involved two British intelligence agents and one Dutch. Before dawn, Sigismund Payne Best was awake. A man in his fifties, he headed Britain’s highly secretive Section Z in the Netherlands. He got up and as he shaved he thought of what lay ahead over the next few hours, and he was nervous. He had reservations but knew he had little choice. He kissed his wife goodbye, told her he might be late, then hurried to his office. There he glanced at the morning paper. A stop-press item about the attempt on Hitler’s life in a beer hall caught his eye. It reported how the Führer had escaped but others had been killed. Best then headed to meet some colleagues, all the time wondering if the incident in Munich he had just read about had anything to do with a group of German officers he had recently become acquainted with.
Payne Best called at a house to pick up two colleagues. Richard Stevens, a less experienced British intelligence officer likewise based in The Hague, was an agent with whom he had recently begun working. The other man was Dirk Klop, who had been seconded from the Dutch intelligence service. The three men chatted about the day ahead and Stevens produced loaded Browning automatic pistols which they each pocketed. Then, as storm clouds gathered, they made their way to the border with Germany.
In the cold November air they arrived at Café Backus, an eating house near the Dutch town of Venlo, close to the border with Germany. The men were familiar with the building, which was of red brick with a veranda and at the back had a large garden with children’s swings.
The venue for the meeting had been carefully chosen. It was in the Netherlands, but stood in a stretch of land between the German and Dutch customs posts. Best, Stevens and Klop had come to the border to continue discussions with high-ranking Nazi officers who wanted to overthrow Hitler. In previous meetings the trio had been told that there was support for Hitler’s removal and the restoration of democracy, which would lead to an Anglo-German front against the Soviet Union. In London senior military officials and politicians including the Prime Minister were kept informed about the discussions. The story had one problem. It was not true. The British and Dutch intelligence officers had been duped as part of a ‘sting’ organized by the German intelligence service.
Best and Stevens had been dealing with an officer named Major Schämmel, who claimed to be a member of an anti-Hitler plot. Schämmel was in fact Walter Schellenberg, a rising star in the world of German military intelligence who would later become the head of the SS’s foreign-intelligence section.
When the three agents arrived at the café the scene was peaceful. A little girl was playing ball with a dog in the middle of the road and nearby a German customs officer was standing watching for traffic. However, this time something seemed different. When they had been to the café before, the barrier to the German side had been closed, but they now noticed that it had been raised. Best sensed danger. As they drove into the car park their contact Schämmel spotted them and waved at them from the veranda. At that moment a large car came from the German side of the border and drew up behind the visitors. Within seconds shots were fired in the air and the two Britons, Dirk Klop and their driver were surrounded by German soldiers and ordered to surrender.
Stevens turned to his colleague and said simply, ‘Our number is up, Best.’ They would be the last words the pair would exchange for five years.
Within hours they were in Berlin and Herbert Kappler had more interviews to conduct. The so-called Venlo incident was a coup for German military intelligence and a source of embarrassment for the British government. The Germans had captured senior British intelligence figures and their removal from clandestine activities was also a crucial blow to British espionage efforts across Europe. Kappler remained in Berlin to help in the interrogation of Best and Stevens. The pair were questioned at length and were later imprisoned at Sachsenhausen and Dachau, where Best reportedly came into contact with Hitler’s would-be assassin Georg Elser.
The Elser affair kept the issue of Hitler’s leadership in the headlines and stories about plots and coups against the Nazi leader continued to surface. When Kappler returned to Rome to resume his duties as police attaché there, Hitler’s future was a subject that was dominating the chatter among the city’s diplomatic circles.
In January 1940 Sir D’Arcy Osborne was called to meet Pope Pius for a private audience. The pair discussed the war and considered a series of scenarios. The Pope claimed he knew the names of German generals who said that Hitler was planning an offensive through the Netherlands in the weeks ahead. He said this need not happen if the generals could be guaranteed a peace deal by the Allies that would see Hitler deposed, and in return Poland and Czechoslovakia would be free of German rule. The Pope was nervous and asked Osborne to keep the contents of the discussion secret, telling him, ‘If anything should become known, the lives of the unnamed German generals would be forfeit.’
Osborne refused the Holy Father’s request and reported the contents of the encounter to officials in London. In his official report the Minister to the Holy See wrote that he thought the discussions