Aloïs Franck, the Czech intelligence officer dropped off in The Hague as his colleagues fled Prague for London, was also equipped with a false British identity as the Dutch representative of a coal-importing firm, Foster & Co., from Bristol. Franck’s orders were to act as Thümmel’s contact in the city, using a Jewish couple called Charles and Antoinette Jelinek. The Jelineks ran a bric-à-brac shop, ‘De Favoriet’, on the ground floor of an old lattice-windowed, redbrick, step-gabled merchant’s house in a narrow, cobbled backstreet of The Hague† – another of the accommodation addresses Morávec had given Thümmel for his secret messages.
On 2 April 1939, just two weeks after the German occupation of Prague, the first return card from Thümmel, postmarked Dresden, arrived at De Favoriet. It contained no information – its purpose was simply to say that Agent A54 was back in touch.
London communicated with Thümmel through messages in invisible ink on what appeared to be an innocuous postcard. These were sent through the diplomatic bag to the British embassy in The Hague, which passed them to Franck, who passed them to a German refugee, who passed them to a nun, who smuggled them in her habit to Aachen, from where they completed their journey to Thümmel through the German postal system.
In the first days of June a second postcard from Thümmel, now using the codename ‘Carl Voral’, arrived in Zürich and was collected by Sedláček, who forwarded it to London in the Czech diplomatic bag. It read: ‘Dear Uncle, I think I am in love. I have met a girl …’ Between the lines of the visible text, another message, written in milk, appeared when the paper was gently heated: ‘I will be in The Hague shortly. Would like to meet you or your deputy. Place: Hotel des Indes. Name: Lustig. Date: June 15. Carl.’ At the meeting which followed, Thümmel explained that he was now working in the Tirpitzufer in Berlin, and told Franck that the plan for Operation White – the German invasion of Poland – was now almost ready. It would involve nine Panzer divisions, and the target date for its launch had been fixed as no later than 1 September 1939. Morávec, in London, passed the information on to the British, who in turn passed it on – in a form sufficiently bowdlerised to conceal its source – to the Poles, who were alarmed, and to the French, who were sceptical.
As Thümmel was handing over Hitler’s plans for the invasion of Poland, a twenty-five-year-old junior diplomat at the British embassy in Berlin was sent to the German Foreign Ministry to complain about a consignment of German arms that had been ordered and paid for by London, but had not yet been delivered. ‘My dear fellow,’ his German counterpart replied, in a languorous upper-class drawl, ‘you will be very lucky if you get these now … at least not in the form that you were expecting them!’
The weather in The Hague on 3 August 1939 was brilliant and swelteringly hot. As evening fell, a brisk offshore breeze set the great sails turning on the windmills that stood like sentinels on the flat land around the city. Shortly after dusk, just as the street lights came on, a burly figure appeared in the arched doorway of De Favoriet. ‘Grüss Gott,’ he said, smiling at Aloïs Franck, who was waiting for him in the dimly-lit, high-vaulted space of the Jelineks’ shop. Without another word, the new arrival walked through to a back room, empty save for a table, a chair, a typewriter and neat stacks of white cardboard boxes marked with stencils proclaiming ‘Gloves – Made in Czechoslovakia’.
Paul Thümmel, alias Agent A54, sat down and began typing, hesitantly and with two fingers, for he was not used to a typewriter:
Nazi leaders think that France and England will not intervene in the event of a clash with Poland and that support for Poland will be limited to the supply of war materials and financial aid … If France does decide to fight … she will not be attacked … The Germans will take up defensive positions behind their ‘Western Wall’ lines of defence …
As Thümmel worked, occasionally pulling on a cigarette burning in an ashtray beside him, the stack of typed A4 pages by his typewriter grew. At around 2 a.m., with the room thick with the fug of cigarette smoke, his ashtray full of butt-ends and a sizeable pile of paper by his typewriter, he pushed back his chair and proclaimed his work finished. A final cigarette, a glass of schnapps, a few words with Franck about their next meeting, and Thümmel left as swiftly as he had come, into the night.
The following morning, Thümmel’s report was taken to the British embassy in The Hague and sent to London by diplomatic bag. It was voluminous, detailed and, in intelligence terms, a goldmine. It contained, among other things, the entire detailed battle plan for the invasion of Poland, including a sketch map showing the invasion routes, the details of the two army groups that were to spearhead the attack, and the names of the German commanders involved down to divisional level. It also provided a complete list of Polish agents working for the Abwehr, along with a curious and seemingly puzzling piece of extra information: Hitler had ordered Canaris to provide SS chief Heinrich Himmler with 150 Polish army uniforms and firearms from the infiltration equipment store used by the special forces of the Brandenburg Regiment. Quizzed about this, Thümmel presumed that the uniforms were needed for some kind of manufactured ‘incident’ involving an act of fake ‘aggression by Polish troops’. This was important information, not just for its own sake, but also because it showed that A54 had access, if not to Canaris himself, then to someone very close to him. In the event, Canaris deftly used the rivalries in Hitler’s administration to divert Himmler from getting his hands on the Abwehr’s Polish uniforms, scoring a small but satisfying bureaucratic victory. But since Himmler then managed to get the uniforms from another source, this had no effect at all on the progress of events, which were by now moving at increasing speed towards their ineluctable conclusion.
Not long after Thümmel’s second meeting with Franck, Madeleine Bihet-Richou heard news from Paris that her son Pierre was critically ill with pneumonia. As she said a hurried goodbye to Lahousen, he whispered to her that a plot to eliminate Hitler had been prepared, but there was hesitation amongst the plotters because of the overwhelming popularity of the Führer. Madeleine packed a small overnight bag so as not to give the impression that she was fleeing Berlin for good with the clouds of war gathering, and took the first train to Paris. She arrived just in time to get Pierre into hospital for an emergency operation.
Lahousen’s whispered farewell message was accurate. Throughout June, July and August there had been regular secret plotters’ meetings, involving, among others, Goerdeler, Oster, Canaris, Beck, von Witzleben and the senior Foreign Office official and previous ambassador to Rome, Ulrich von Hassell, who, using an English parliamentary phrase, christened the group of resisters ‘His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition’. There was unanimous agreement that Hitler must go, but, as before, none at all about when and how the deed was to be done.
On 22 August Hitler called his generals to Berchtesgaden. Leaning on a grand piano and holding his notes in his left hand, he informed his audience that the pact with Stalin being secretly negotiated by Ribbentrop was imminent. As soon as it was signed, he would strike Poland. The target date was Saturday, 26 August. Canaris, propped against a pillar at the back of the room, and against Hitler’s specific instructions, took notes of the meeting. He reported to his Abwehr officers afterwards that the Führer had declared: ‘Poland is now right where I want her … Our opponents are little worms [who will not move against us]. I saw them in Munich. [My chief concern is that] … at the last minute, some bastard will produce a mediation plan.’
The following day, 23 August, to the astonishment of all – especially in London, where the government believed that it was about to conclude its own agreement with Stalin – Hitler, with appropriate flourish, unveiled the Soviet–German Non-Aggression Pact. It contained a secret protocol stipulating that Poland and Eastern Europe were to be divided up and parcelled out in two packages – one for Führer Adolf Hitler, and the other for ‘Uncle’ Joseph Stalin.
As the world reverberated to Hitler’s astonishing diplomatic coup, Madeleine Bihet-Richou in Paris began to receive the first of a stream of postcards from Lahousen. Each was sent from a different location close to the Siegfried Line, which protected Germany’s western border. Using the secret code