Nein!. Paddy Ashdown
would be the first to know … In future do not bring such upsetting reports which could spread alarm and disturb the peace.’
This view was shared by the British ambassador in Berlin, Nevile Henderson, who sent a telegram to London anticipating ‘in the immediate future, a period of relative calm’. He backed this up with a report a week later, on 9 March, predicting that if the remains of Czechoslovakia were to be ‘absorbed’ into the German Reich, it would not happen for ‘a year or two’. The following day, the MP Sir Samuel Hoare, one of Chamberlain’s close supporters, made a speech to his constituents in Chelsea confidently predicting that Europe could now look forward to a ‘Golden Age’ of peace, prosperity and stability.
František Morávec did not share this Panglossian view. He arranged a swift meeting with Colonel Harold ‘Gibby’ Gibson, the head of the MI6 station in Prague, and asked for help. As a result, at around one o’clock on the afternoon of 14 March, a DC Douglas aircraft belonging to KLM made an unscheduled stop at Ruzyně airfield, twelve kilometres east of the Czech capital. There it was loaded with eleven men of the Czech intelligence service and numerous boxes of files. At 5.15 p.m. the plane took off for Rotterdam, where after dropping off one of its passengers, Aloïs Franck, who had orders to establish himself in The Hague, it continued its journey to Croydon Aerodrome outside London.
At dawn the following day, German armoured units stormed over the Sudetenland frontier and occupied Prague. By this time Thümmel’s files, codes and contacts were safely in London. From now on, the ultimate destination of his priceless intelligence would be the British government, and in due course its great wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill.
9
Up to the final act in the destruction of Czechoslovakia, Hitler had always defended his aggressions under the pretence of protecting the rights of self-determination of German-speaking people, claiming that they were ‘under foreign occupation’ as a result of Versailles. With the occupation of Prague, he finally crossed the Rubicon by launching a naked assault for which there was nothing but the very flimsiest attempt at justification. This was a genuine watershed moment, and ought to have been a trigger for the plotters to act. But the Führer had deliberately kept his plans close to his chest, revealing them to his officer corps only at the last moment.
In the days following the assault on Prague, Ludwig Beck met with General Franz Halder, his successor as head of the Army High Command (the Oberkommando des Heeres – OKH) at his secluded mansion on Berlin’s tree-lined Goethestrasse. They agreed that Hitler was determined on war, and that he must be got rid of by force. But they couldn’t agree on when or how. Halder thought they should wait until war was imminent. Beck warned that a putsch would be more difficult once hostilities started, and was irked by his successor’s caution: ‘As an experienced rider, Halder must have known that one had first to throw one’s heart over the obstacle,’ he commented tartly afterwards. The two men parted company, divided in their opinions and on strained terms.
Despite these disagreements at the top, elsewhere in army circles there were some attempts to reassemble and strengthen the resistance networks scattered by Munich and the failure of the September 1938 coup. These steps included sending Erwin Lahousen to Stockholm, ostensibly to secure assurances from Swedish firms that they would continue to deliver iron ore to Germany if war broke out. The other, hidden purpose of his visit was to bring back a British-made bomb for use in any early plan to kill Hitler.
Despite these scurryings after the event, the truth was that the September plotters had been caught scattered and flatfooted by Hitler’s swift occupation of Prague, and once again had to be content with grumbling in private while lauding Hitler’s victory in public. Another opportunity had been lost; they would have to fall back once more on preparing and waiting.
Waiting seemed to be Neville Chamberlain’s policy too – that is, waiting and hoping for Hitler’s appetite to be satiated. Speaking in the House of Commons on the day after the Führer’s triumphal entry into Prague he said, more in sorrow than in anger, ‘It is natural that I should bitterly regret what has occurred … [but] do not let us … be deflected from our course. The aim of the Government is now, as it has always been, to substitute the method of discussion, for the method of force in the settlement of differences.’
Wilhelm Canaris’s ‘eternal plotter’ Hans Bernd Gisevius was determined on a more active course. Taking the early steps which would eventually lead him down the path of full-scale treason, he made a series of trips to Basel in Switzerland to meet representatives of the Western powers. ‘We wanted to establish closer connections with the British and French, and it no longer seemed advisable to do this in Berlin,’ he commented after the war. On 23 March he, Hjalmar Schacht and Goerdeler met ‘a person of considerable influence in London and Paris political circles’ near the Château d’Ouchy in Lausanne. The Germans asked for an urgent warning to be passed to London and Paris that Hitler was now intent on an invasion of Poland in the early autumn.
It is tempting to think that it was this warning which finally alerted Neville Chamberlain to the coming threat, for eight days later, on 31 March 1939, he announced a hardening of British policy in the House of Commons: ‘In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence … His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power … The French Government have authorised me to make it plain that they stand in the same position in this matter as do His Majesty’s Government.’ A week later, on 6 April, during a visit to London by the Polish foreign minister, Chamberlain’s statement of intent was widened into a formal Anglo–Polish military alliance, reinforced by British promises to help other smaller European nations with rearmament. The immediate effect was to make the Poles more intransigent in talks on the future of Danzig, which were by this time under way.
According to Canaris, Hitler, taken aback by this unexpected stiffening of British backs, flew into a rage, banged his fist on the table and shouted, ‘Now I will mix for them a witches’ brew!’ It was another watershed moment. Hitler, who had hoped for an arrangement with Britain against Russia, now concluded that Britain could not be persuaded to support his plans, and would have to be defeated before he could look eastward for Lebensraum through the conquest of the Ukraine and Russia.
Three days after Chamberlain’s announcement, on 3 April the Führer issued a secret directive to his generals to start planning for the invasion of Poland, ordering that what was to be known as Operation White ‘must be ready to be launched from 1 September onwards’. That evening Lahousen relayed the information to Madeleine Bihet-Richou, who passed it on to Paris without delay.
During the next three months, hardly a day passed in London when the city was not playing host to clandestine visitors from Berlin bearing calamitous warnings. Carl Goerdeler was the first, in mid-March. In May he was back again, at the start of an international tour that took him to Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey and Switzerland. He was one of no fewer than five key anti-Hitler plotters* who visited the British capital during May and June 1939, all with the same message for Vansittart (now serving as the government’s chief diplomatic adviser) and the Foreign Office: Hitler was secretly working for a deal with Stalin. To one of these bearers of bad news the great Van replied, ‘Keep calm, it is we who will sign the deal with Russia.’
Goerdeler claimed that during his May visit he also met with Churchill, but there is no record of this in Churchill’s diaries or papers, or in the Chartwell visitors’ book. In June 1939, Canaris and Oster tried to persuade Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin to pay another visit to London, as a follow-up to his attempt to warn of the impending Czech crisis in September 1938: ‘What have we to offer?’ the Prussian responded. ‘I am not going to London with empty hands.’ Eventually they persuaded one of the German general staff to make the journey. He met the British service chiefs, but achieved nothing.
All Europe was now making dispositions for war.
Over