Bartik’s two watchers left the shadows, and in a few paces had joined the man on the road.
‘Grüss Gott,’ said the stranger in a low voice.
‘Give the password,’ was the sharp retort.
‘Altvater.’
Bartik’s men escorted their charge to the Czech intelligence chief sitting in his car, its engine purring quietly amongst the trees. Safely ensconced in the back seat, the night traveller took several documents from his haversack and handed them to Bartik to examine under the feeble illumination of the car’s roof-light. The papers mostly dealt with the organisational structure of the Abwehr offices in Dresden, Munich and Breslau. But they also included some interesting local Gestapo reports. Bartik sent one of the waiting cars with the documents to the police station in Louny, seventy kilometres distant, where they were carefully photographed. Meanwhile, Bartik himself drove his new charge to an army barracks twenty kilometres away at Komotau for further debriefing. Over the next three hours Thümmel was closely questioned about his background, identity and motives. On the face of it, his story sounded convincing. He claimed to be ‘Jochen Breitner’, a former draughtsman and photographer who worked as a civilian in the Dresden Abwehr office, and said he was offering his services as a spy because he needed the money to marry a girl working as a clerk in the same office. It was his girl, he added, who had access to documents of interest because of her work in the Abwehr registry. His interrogators were impressed by ‘Breitner’s’ quick-wittedness, and swiftly concluded that they were dealing with the genuine article, a trained intelligence agent, not an agent provocateur. Bartik assigned his new agent the codename by which he would be known – ‘A54’. As the first streaks of dawn began to lighten the sky, the Czech spy chief dropped his new recruit back at the old steam mill and watched as he vanished into the trees in the direction of the German frontier.
Bartik’s haul from his new recruit that night was not high-grade. But it was interesting, for it indicated not just Thümmel’s seriousness, but also his access. Over the next months Thümmel proved himself a reliable, professional and productive source. One piece of information he gave Bartik in this period was of special value to the Czechs – full details of the network of spies, secret radios and codes which Canaris’s men were setting up amongst the German-speaking population of Czech Sudetenland. Thanks to deciphered messages from this source, Bartik was able to warn the Czech government a week or so before the Anschluss that SS regiments were gathering on the Austrian border, preparing to march on Vienna. Apart from this, Thümmel’s ‘intelligence product’ for the next year was in the main low-level, low-grade and local, consistent with his apparent position as a medium-level officer in one of Canaris’s many Abwehr outstations across Germany.
But then, suddenly, around the middle of 1938, with the Czech crisis deepening and the world edging towards war, the quality of Thümmel’s intelligence began to change dramatically. In May he told Bartik that the Germans were preparing a campaign of sabotage and disruption leading to a coup in the Sudetenland by the end of that month. It is very probable that these reports from Thümmel were the basis for an urgent message sent by Group Captain Graham Christie, one of Sir Robert Vansittart’s secret informants who operated from Prague, who reported that ‘Both SIS in Prague and Czech military intelligence report German troop manoeuvres on the border which … [point] to an early invasion.’ What followed was a scurry of intense diplomatic activity aimed at averting the coming ‘invasion’. The British ambassador in Berlin warned the head of the German Foreign Office of the gravity of the situation, and reinforced the message in a personal interview with Ribbentrop. Using a most un-Foreign-Office-like double negative, he told the German foreign minister that if Czechoslovakia was attacked, ‘His Majesty’s Government could not guarantee [not] … to become themselves involved’.
In fact the whole thing was an elaborate hoax. There was no German invasion planned for May. Hitler was not yet ready.
There is only one likely explanation for this seemingly bizarre prologue to the coming Czechoslovak crisis – Paul Thümmel had been used by Canaris, or someone very close to him at the top of the Abwehr, to pass false information in order to alert the wider world to Hitler’s plans to invade the Sudetenland in the near future. There is no evidence that Czech intelligence’s confidence in their new agent was shaken by the false alarm he had caused in May 1938 – probably because it served Czechoslovakia’s purposes too, and because they realised that it was intended to do so.
Hitler, however, was furious at being pre-empted, and at the diplomatic furore that ensued.
Now things began to move from elaborate charade to true high drama. Over June and July 1938 Thümmel provided Bartik with the secret order from Hitler instructing his generals to be ready for Operation Green – the invasion of Czechoslovakia – by 1 October. In early September Thümmel followed this with the full details of the invasion plan, including troop deployments, invasion points and other important information.
By now Bartik must have known that A54 was far, far more than just a low-level Abwehr draughtsman/photographer in Dresden. Paul Thümmel was needy, vain and greedy. But he was also a high-level spy with direct access to the most senior levels of the Tirpitzufer in Berlin.
5
By 1938 Goerdeler, Beck and Canaris, together with other Berlin conspirators, were gathering regularly under the cover of the prestigious Free Society for Scholarly Entertainment, colloquially known as the Mittwochgesellschaft (Wednesday Society) after the day of the week on which it met. Slowly the ad hoc resistance network against Hitler was becoming a formal structure gathered around the three men who would be its initial driving force.
Carl Goerdeler was the movement’s Thomas More: formidably intelligent, spiritually resolute, unshakeably optimistic and driven by a burning sense of mission and the conviction that reason always triumphs over evil. But the superiority of his intelligence made him insensitive to others, brittle in personal relationships, uncomfortable in his certainties and annoyingly didactic (his colleagues called him ‘Pfaf’, German slang for preacher). His utopianism rendered him completely devoid of the worldly wisdom and darker political skills necessary to deal with a tyrant, especially one so pathologically barren of moral values as Adolf Hitler.
If Goerdeler was More, then Canaris was Talleyrand, but with charm in place of a repugnant personality, and a powerful moral compass where Talleyrand had none. His subtle, flexible spirit was quite capable of operating simultaneously at two contradictory levels without losing its way; the perfect mind for a spy chief. Canaris preferred the tangential rather than the direct route for dealing with Hitler, delivering little successes to his master, the better subtly to confound his grander megalomaniac designs.
The third member of this trio, ‘the philosopher general’ Ludwig Beck, was a soldier’s soldier in the tradition of Frederick the Great. He admitted no contradiction between his profession and a life sustained by the values of the Enlightenment. He was the man everyone trusted and everyone looked up to – but for his moral and intellectual qualities, not his soldiering ones.
Post-war opinion has often mistakenly believed that Hitler led a united nation into war. This is far from the truth. By the mid-1930s most Germans supported what Hitler had done through his much-vaunted ‘triumph of the will’ to restore German pride, redress the humiliations of Versailles and bring order to the chaos of the Weimar years. They wanted him to continue making Germany strong again, but not – definitely not – at the price of another war. Public support for Hitler’s policy of toughness with Germany’s neighbours was in large measure due to the fact that he successfully portrayed himself in each of the pre-war crises as the peacemaker, not the warmonger. The popular mood in Germany was in favour of the new chancellor, but it was also deeply fearful, and strongly opposed to another war.
Among the institutions of the German state, the picture