Dachau to Dolomites. Tom Wall
pastor and renowned opponent of the Nazi regime who was arrested on Hitler’s orders.
Prince Phillip of Hesse was an active Nazi who considered himself to be an intimate of Hitler until he was arrested in 1943. He was closely related to German and British royalty and his wife was a sister of the King of Italy.
Sigmund Rascher was a doctor in Dachau who conducted appalling, cruel experiments on prisoners.
Hjalmar Schacht was president of the Reichsbank and economics minister in the Nazi administration before he fell out of favour.
Alexander von Stauffenberg was a brother of Clause and Berthold von Stauffenberg, both of whom were executed for their roles in the attempt to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944. Alexander was arrested under the Sippenhaft (‘kin liability’) laws.
Fritz Thyssen was a leading German industrialist and financier of the Nazi regime. He was arrested after announcing his opposition to the invasion of Poland.
Isa Vermehren was a popular cabaret artist who was arrested after her brother, who was a German intelligence officer, defected to the British.
Wilhelm Visintainer was a former circus clown who became a prisoner trustee assigned to service the needs of the special prisoners.
Paul Wauer was a Jehovah’s Witness who, like most of his fellow co-religionists, was imprisoned and later assigned as a trustee to service the special prisoners.
SS Guards
Ernst Bader was an SS lieutenant in charge of one element of the SS guards that were believed to have earlier been part of an Einzsatzgruppen unit involved in the murder of civilians behind the lines in Poland and Russia.
Edgar Stiller was the Lieutenant in charge of the special prisoners in Dachau, and assigned the duty of escorting the Prominenten to the Alps.
Hungarians
Miklós Horthy was the son of Admiral Horthy, the Regent of Hungary.
Miklós Kállay was formerly the Prime Minister of Hungary.
The Soviets
General Ivan Bessonov was a senior NKVD officer, who, after his capture in 1941, agreed to work for the Germans. Before falling into disfavour, the Germans intended that he would command a group of turned Russian POWs to act as anti-Soviet partisans.
Lieutenant Yakov Dzhugashvili was Stalin’s son from his first marriage. He was captured and used by the Nazis for propaganda purposes. He was imprisoned at Sachsenhausen with some of the Irish captives.
Lieutenant Vassily Kokorin was a nephew of the Soviet Foreign Minister. An officer in the Soviet Air Force, he was a close friend of Stalin’s son, with whom he shared a cell at Sachsenhausen.
Major General Pyotr Privalov was a former university lecturer and decorated solider. The highest-ranking among the Soviet contingent, he was captured near Stalingrad.
Yugoslav
Colonel Hinko Dragic was an officer in the Yugoslavian Army. He was arrested after the German invasion and imprisoned in Flossenburg Concentration Camp, where he managed to become part of the Prominenten.
PART I
SPECIAL PRISONERS
Each concentration camp had an elite of privileged prisoners, no more than ten percent of the population, and admission to this exclusive club depended on an inmate’s position in the internal hierarchy, which was determined by myriad factors such as ethnicity, nationality, profession, political beliefs, language, age, and the time of arrival in the camp.
–Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL
Following the defeat of France, about 40,000 British troops joined an estimated 1.8 million French, Belgium and Dutch prisoners of war in Germany. The provisions of the Geneva Convention were largely observed, although, in breach of its terns, a small proportion of prisoners were transferred to concentration camps. Some were selected for punishment due to repeated escape attempts or for political or security reasons. While some had to endure the deprivations of ordinary concentration camp inmates, others were given special status, housed in isolated compounds and allowed more favourable treatment. These included a number of the British Army and Air Force prisoners, who were held with Russians and natives of other combatant countries. They were placed in Sachsenhausen and later Dachau, where they were joined by prominent Germans suspected of traitorous intentions against the Nazi regime. Two British Intelligence officers were included in the group.
CHAPTER ONE
KIDNAPPED AT VENLO
Captain Sigismund Payne Best seems to have relished being a spy for he did not go out of his way to hide it. In his mid-fifties, tall and gaunt, his grey hair combed back, he sported a monocle and was fond of wearing tweed suits and spats. Comparisons with P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster come to mind and a contemporary colleague regarded him as ‘an ostentatious ass, blown up with self-importance’.1
While there seems little doubt that Payne Best had an inflated opinion of himself, his upper-class twit appearance could mislead. Although quite the English country gentleman, with all the mannerisms and prejudices of his time and class, he was well travelled and spoke Dutch, French and German fluently, having been a student in Munich for a number of years. He worked for British Intelligence during the First World War before settling in Holland, where he married and established an import–export business which provided him with cover when he resumed his intelligence work before the outbreak of the Second World War.
The Hague, 9 November 1939
Payne Best was not in the best of form as he entered his office in The Hague on that fateful morning. It was still quite early and he had only had a few hours’ sleep. He wasn’t looking forward to the long drive to Venlo, which was close to the German frontier. He picked up the morning newspaper and glanced at the headline. It appeared that there had been an attempt to kill Hitler the previous day. A bomb had exploded in a beer hall where Hitler had been speaking and a number of people were killed, but not the Führer, who had left the venue beforehand. This perplexed Payne Best, who wondered if this had anything to do with the German officers he was due to meet in Venlo.2 They claimed to represent an anti-Hitler faction within the Wehrmacht and the meeting was to discuss a possible coup. However, before proceeding, they needed assurances that the British would treat with them after their accession to power. Such an assurance was required, they informed the British, before the coup could be attempted. Payne Best must have wondered, reading the newspaper, if the coup had already begun. The news added to his anxiety about the planned rendezvous.
A number of clandestine meetings had already taken place in The Hague. These involved a Major Schaemmel and another German officer, both claiming to be emissaries of senior Wehrmacht generals. Also in attendance was Major Richard Stevens, a fellow British Intelligence officer based in the Passport Control Office (PCO) of the British embassy. Less exotic in appearance than his colleague, he was, at forty-six years old, the younger man. Although his hairline was receding, his hair was suspiciously dark for a man of his age and he sported a toothbrush moustache. Before the war he had been based in India and had mastered a number of languages. The Secret Intelligence Service traditionally ran their agents from embassy PCOs. It provided them with diplomatic immunity, but made for poor cover when the practice became common knowledge. It was for this reason that Claude Dansey, the deputy chief of MI6, established a parallel foreign intelligence network, known as the ‘Z’ organisation. Payne Best was Dansey’s man in the neutral Netherlands.3
The covert contacts with the Germans convinced a doubtful Payne Best that the emissaries were genuine and Stevens shared his optimism. Following approval from London, the two Englishmen were in a position to respond positively, if cautiously, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government. They had been authorised to promise aid and support to the plotters. As evidence of this, their German contacts had been supplied with a radio transmitter with which to maintain contact with a British Secret Service station in The Hague. Schaemmel had promised that while a post-Hitler administration would restore independence to Poland,