The day after Simonis’s arrival in London, Theo Kordt was smuggled into 10 Downing Street by the ‘secret’ door which leads from Horse Guards Parade into the prime minister’s garden. From there he was led up to the office of Chamberlain’s personal emissary to Hitler, Sir Horace Wilson. Wilson, who was also a convinced appeaser, listened attentively to Kordt’s message, and his assurance that if Britain and France stood up to Hitler on Czechoslovakia, the Wehrmacht would depose him at the instant he ordered the invasion. Wilson, who had met Kordt previously and trusted him, was impressed, and asked the German diplomat to return the following day to meet the foreign secretary, Halifax.
After listening to Kordt’s message the following evening, Halifax said he would do his best to ensure that the prime minister was informed – and perhaps some other cabinet colleagues too. Kordt was experienced enough to know that this was the kind of politeness the English use to cover lack of enthusiasm. He was shown back to the Downing Street garden door, and walked out onto Horse Guards Parade and into the London night puzzled and worried by Halifax’s muted response. And well he might have been. For Halifax could not tell his visitor that his master, Neville Chamberlain, had already decided not to resist Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland, but to yield to them. ‘We could not be as candid with you as you were with us,’ Halifax was later to tell Kordt – long after the damage was done.
On Sunday, 11 September, four days after Kordt’s second backdoor visit to Downing Street, Vansittart’s secret emissary A.P. Young flew to Switzerland for another meeting with Carl Goerdeler in Zürich, once again at the German’s urgent request. The two met in the St Gotthard Hotel and strolled to Zürich’s Belvoir Park, where they spent two hours walking in the autumn sunshine among the flowerbeds and carefully manicured lawns, discussing the coming war and how it could now be stopped only by a combination of strong British and French action, backed by a coup to remove Hitler. At Zürich station that evening, as the world teetered towards the brink of war, Goerdeler waved goodbye to Young with the words, ‘Remember always that we shall win the last battle.’
7
In the early hours of Wednesday, 28 September 1938 an armed raiding party, nicknamed ‘Commando Heinz’ after its leader, gathered in the Hohenzollerndamm headquarters of the Wehrmacht’s Third Army Corps, responsible for the defence of Berlin. The unit consisted of fifty or sixty assorted desperadoes, ranging from Abwehr and Wehrmacht officers, to armed civilians and civil servants, to student leaders. Under the command of an ex-Nazi thug and serial revolutionary called Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, they were ready for action and equipped with weapons supplied on the instructions of Admiral Canaris. ‘The silence of pre-dawn Berlin,’ a commentator wrote later, ‘was broken by the click-click-click of ammunition being loaded into [the magazines of] carbines and automatic weapons.’
Commando Heinz’s orders were to arrest Adolf Hitler at the moment he gave the order to invade Czechoslovakia at two o’clock that afternoon, and take him to a nearby hospital. There the dictator would be seen by the psychiatrist Dr Karl Bonhoeffer, the father of the great theologian, who would declare the Führer insane and commit him to a lunatic asylum. But some in the group did not intend to let Hitler get that far. They had secretly sworn to kill him in the confusion of the arrest.
The conspirators’ task was, on the face of it, not a difficult one. Only fifteen SS soldiers guarded Hitler in his Chancellery at any one time. The great double doors of the building would be secretly unlocked from the inside by one of the Foreign Office conspirators so as to give the raiding party easy access. There were plenty of reinforcements ready to come to the raiders’ assistance if required. In the Foreign Office and the Interior Ministry, anti-Nazi diplomats and officials had been issued with arms, and were ready to play their part. Other reserve forces made up of small groups of officers were waiting in private houses and apartments across the German capital, like the group holed up in the ornate white-stuccoed art-nouveau block of flats at Eisenacher Strasse 118, close to the government quarter. One of the plotters told his brother over dinner that evening, ‘Tonight Hitler will be arrested.’
There were good reasons for this confidence. Among those backing the putsch were the chief of the German staff and his predecessor, the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, the political and operational leaders of the criminal police, the commander of the Berlin military district and one of his subordinates, the state secretary of the Foreign Office and his chief of ministerial office, the president of the Reichsbank, a senior official in the German embassy in London, another in the Department of Justice, and Hitler’s personal interpreter.*
The plot had been meticulously prepared.
Two weeks earlier, on 14 September, after several days spent carrying out a detailed reconnaissance of all the key sites, there was a full paper rehearsal of the coup plans, which incorporated the seizure of key Berlin police stations, an armed takeover of the state wireless transmitters, telephone installations and repeater stations, and the occupation of Hitler’s Chancellery and key ministries. When the exercise ended, General Erwin von Witzleben, the commander of the Berlin garrison and the coup’s de facto leader, declared that all preparations had been completed. They were ready. The moment Hitler gave the order to invade the Sudetenland, they would make their move.
But in all his careful preparations, Erwin von Witzleben had missed one crucial factor – the British prime minister.
On the evening of 14 September, as the coup rehearsal concluded in Berlin, Neville Chamberlain, in London, suddenly stunned everyone, including his own cabinet and Hitler (who was ‘flabbergasted’), by announcing that he would fly to the Führer’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps for talks the following day.
It is important at this point to record the precise sequence of events.
As a result of the messages from Goerdeler in early August and mid-September, and of the visit of Kleist-Schmenzin to London in mid-August, we can presume that the British government must have known of the existence of the plot against Hitler, although we cannot be certain that this knowledge extended to No. 10 and the prime minister. However, after Theo Kordt’s backdoor visit to No. 10 and his discussion with Halifax on the evening of 7 September, no such uncertainty is possible. From this moment onwards No. 10 knew of the plot, and it is overwhelmingly likely that the prime minister knew of it too. It is a matter of record that, at least from the end of August, Neville Chamberlain and his closest advisers had been secretly considering a personal last-minute appeal to Hitler. But the fact that this took place – stunning everyone, including the cabinet – just eight days after the Kordt visit raises the strong suspicion that the British prime minister’s sudden visit to Berchtesgaden was, if only in part, designed to pre-empt the coming coup so as to give Chamberlain the peacemaker his time upon the stage.
Erwin von Witzleben
Whatever the truth of this, Chamberlain’s unexpected flight