Dachau to Dolomites. Tom Wall
of former German colonies in Africa.4
The meeting in Venlo was to finalise matters and it was anticipated that one of the leading German generals involved in the conspiracy would attend. So that he would be fresh for the planned meeting, Payne Best arranged for his trusted Dutch chauffeur to drive himself, Stevens and a Dutch Intelligence officer named Lieutenant Dirk Klop to Venlo. All four set off in Payne Best’s distinctive Lincoln Zephyr for the three-hour journey. It was only two months since the declaration of war and so far only minor skirmishes had occurred. Their discussions with the Germans raised the alluring prospect of the war ending while still in its early stages. As they journeyed towards their rendezvous the two Englishmen must have believed they were about to make history. The glittering prospect of being instrumental in ending the war seemed almost within their grasp. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, ever keen for a negotiated settlement, was excited about the prospect, as was Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Payne Best was initially suspicious about the contact who had initiated the process, even writing to his superiors in London, stating that the man was most likely an agent provocateur. The report was ignored. Instead, Steward Menzies, then acting head of MI6, told Chamberlain and Halifax what they both wanted to hear: that there was a real prospect of Hitler being overthrown, of peace being restored.5 Payne Best put aside his earlier suspicion after meeting the German contacts. There were, at that time, a number of German generals plotting against Hitler, the most prominent of which was General Franz Halder, the chief of the Wehrmacht General Staff, but the people they were about to encounter were not part of this conspiracy. The British had fallen for a well-executed German intelligence sting.
When they reached the meeting place – a café close to the German frontier – they were confronted by SS troops armed with submachine guns. Their leader, ‘Schaemmel’, was in reality Walter Schellenberg, an SS protégée of Reinhard Heydrich. Klop tried to resist and was shot and fatally wounded. At gunpoint, Stevens and Payne Best were handcuffed and hustled into a car which sped across the nearby border into Germany.6 Schellenberg won plaudits for his leading role in the kidnapping and was personally congratulated by Hitler. He later became head of foreign intelligence within the SS; it was in this role that he tried to arrange for Stevens and Payne Best to be exchanged for German POWs, but this action was vetoed by Himmler.7 When we encounter him again in our story, he will be acting as Himmler’s emissary in a number of attempts to use hostages as bargaining chips near the end of the war.
The capture of the two intelligence officers was more than just an embarrassment for the British. Unaccountably, Payne Best had in his possession a list of the names and addresses of British agents and Stevens was carrying secret codes.8 Both are believed to have supplemented this material by telling the Germans all they knew about MI6 operations in continental Europe.9 As a result, a number of British agents and informers are likely to have been shot. The Venlo Incident, as it was to become known, was a disaster for British Intelligence and made the British wary of all future contacts with Germans purported to be anti-Hitlerite.
***
The bomb intended to kill Hitler was planted by an obscure young man acting alone : Georg Elser, a skilled carpenter and clock-maker from a small Swabian town. Of the many attempts to assassinate Hitler, none was as carefully planned and as skilfully executed as the time bomb he planted at the Bürgerbräkeller in Munich the day before Payne Best and Stevens were captured. Only unforeseen circumstances prevented him from altering world history.
Every year since 1933, the Nazis have commemorated the ‘Beer Hall Putsch’, a failed coup attempt in 1923 that centred on the Bürgerbräkeller, a beer hall in Munich. The finale of the commemorative event would always involve a lengthy address by Hitler to a gathering of Nazi dignitaries and Brown Shirt veterans. His speech would invariably begin at 8:30 p.m. and last for two hours. Elser had worked for months before the 1939 event to create a double-clock time bomb, which he managed to install inside a pillar where Hitler was due to make his address. The bomb was primed to explode at 9:20 p.m. when, as on all previous occasions, Hitler should be about half-way through his speech. However, on this occasion fog threatened to close Munich airport and Hitler, anxious to return to Berlin that night, started speaking earlier than planned and left at 9:07 p,m., having cut his speech short. The bomb exploded, as planned, thirteen minutes later. It killed seven people positioned near the lectern Hitler had used. Elser was arrested that night while trying to cross into Switzerland.
The Germans planned to kidnap Payne Best and Stevens months before Elser’s attempted assassination of Hitler, so any connection made between these events could only have been an afterthought. Nevertheless, it was not unreasonable for the Germans to suspect a link. It seemed inconceivable that Elser could have acted alone. The Nazis were convinced that he had had assistance and was acting under the direction of others. Now they had proof that British Intelligence were intent on supporting an anti-Hitler plot. All three suspects were handed over to the Gestapo and interrogated separately. Elser alone was tortured, and savagely so. He was beaten to a pulp and, on Hitler’s orders, was heavily injected with Pervertin, a stimulant then believed to be a truth serum. The top leadership of the SS and Gestapo were involved. Dr Albrecht Böhme, then in charge of Munich Kripo, the Criminal Police, described a scene he witnessed:
I happened to became witness to a brutal scene that was played out, in the presence of Nebe [Arthur Nebe, Chief of Kripo, and later also an anti-Hitler conspirator] and me, between SS Reichsfϋhrer and Chief of German Police Heinrich Himmler and the prisoner Georg Elser. Elser was bound up, and Himmler was kicking him hard with his boots and cursing wildly. Then he had a Gestapo operative unknown to me drag him into the adjoining washroom of the Munich Gestapo chief and beat him there with a whip or (I couldn’t see) some similar instrument, so that he cried out in pain. Then he was bundled, quick time, before Himmler and kicked again. But Elser, who was groaning and bleeding profusely from his mouth and nose, made no confession; he would not have been physically able to, even if he wanted to.10
From an early stage Elser confessed to the bombing, but insisted that he acted alone. He was tortured to make him identify his supposed accomplices, and to connect him to Stevens and Payne Best. Another suspected accomplice, the mastermind in Hitler’s mind, was the hated Otto Strasser, a former Nazi who had formed a leftist fascist break-away, the ‘Black Front’. Strasser was based in Switzerland at that time and it was assumed that Elser was attempting to join him there when he was arrested. Strasser, like Payne Best and Stevens, had no prior knowledge of the assassination attempt. Hitler, though, continued to believe Strasser was involved and later tasked Schellenberg with poisoning him in Lisbon, but the SS man failed to locate him. Strasser survived the war.
Elser was quite prepared to relate all the details of his workings, but he was not going to invent collaborators. Apart from truthfulness, he was proud of his work. He didn’t hide his motives; he hated Hitler, whom he deemed a warmonger and responsible for his brother’s imprisonment. The Gestapo decided to test his ability. They demanded that he replicate the time bomb after providing him with the necessary materials. He readily assembled the clock mechanism wiring, detonators and housing cabinet. This astonished his interrogators, who came to accept that he acted alone. 11 But matters had gone too far for this to be admitted. German newspapers had headlined the capture of the British agents and declared them complicit in the plot to kill Hitler. The event became world news. It was a propaganda triumph for the Nazis. There was no possibility that Stevens and Payne Best, now notoriously linked to Elser, could be exonerated. Payne Best and Stevens faced the prospect of a show trial with a predetermined outcome; their extinction. But Hitler was in no hurry; it was best left until the end of the war, when victory was secured. Then it could be demonstrated to the people of a conquered Britain that their own government was to blame for their misfortune. The event, though, had a more immediate benefit for Hitler: he later used the involvement of the unfortunate Klop as a pretext for the invasion of the Netherlands.
Sachsenhausen Prison Section, 1940–3
After weeks of interrogation in Berlin, Stevens and Payne Best were taken to the prison section of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, known as the Zellenbau (‘bunker’). The prison section was used to house prisoners under interrogation for political ‘crimes’, with execution frequently being the final stage of the process. Elser was later brought there also. They were each held in isolation cells with no natural light,