On 25 August, the day before Hitler’s projected start date for the attack, Carl Goerdeler flew to Stockholm, ostensibly on business for Robert Bosch, but in reality to set up a secret channel to London which could be used if war broke out. The main conduits for this were two Swedish bankers, Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg, who used their Enskilda Bank in the Swedish capital to communicate with London.
Now began a wild scramble to prevent the coming catastrophe, through diplomatic means in the West and by means of Hitler’s assassination in Berlin.
On the morning Goerdeler flew to Stockholm expecting war, Hitler called in British ambassador Nevile Henderson and announced that he wanted to make a ‘big proposal’ for peace. Henderson arrived in the Chancellery at 1.30 p.m., to be told by Hitler that ‘under the condition that, during a lengthy period, Germany’s colonial demands would be fulfilled through peaceful negotiations, and under the further condition that Germany’s relations to Italy [sic] and the Soviet Union would not be prejudiced, he would not only guarantee the existence of the British Empire, but promise German assistance whenever and wherever it would be required’. It was a feint designed to hoodwink London into believing that the danger of war had passed. No sooner had Henderson left than Hitler called one of his adjutants and instructed him to issue the order that the attack on Poland was to be launched at 5 a.m. the following day. Then the Führer sent a message to the French ambassador, calling him to the Chancellery at 5.30. Hitler’s aim in seeing the Frenchman was to sow further confusion by asking him to seek Paris’s views on his ‘big proposal’ for peace.
Things started to go wrong for Hitler’s plans at around 3.30 p.m., when, following an urgent request, he agreed to see the Italian ambassador. Attolico, his voice again an octave higher than normal, said, ‘I must unfortunately inform you that Italy, without the supply of the necessary raw materials, cannot enter the war.’ Mussolini had picked up word of a new Anglo–Polish treaty which was just about to be signed, and had suddenly been overtaken with another attack of cold feet.
The meeting which followed with the French ambassador was short and perfunctory, ending at 6.15 p.m. As soon as the French emissary was safely out of the building, Hitler promptly rescinded the order he had given only four hours earlier to launch the attack on Poland.
What Hitler did not know, any more than he knew that his last-minute hesitation on Czechoslovakia a year previously had saved his life, was that history had almost precisely repeated itself.
A few days earlier, Hans Oster had instructed Friedrich Heinz, the man in charge of the commando raiding party in the September 1938 coup attempt, to be ready to carry out the same operation to capture and kill the Führer at very short notice. Over the following days, all the ‘lovely plans’ which had been burnt in General von Witzleben’s fireplace on the evening of Munich were painstakingly reconstructed. The intention was to launch a coup at the moment Hitler gave the order to attack Poland.
As Hitler was seeing his succession of ambassadors on the afternoon of 25 August, Hans Bernd Gisevius, accompanied by Georg Thomas, the general in charge of German army logistics and armaments, and Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht, were on their way to pick up Canaris from the Tirpitzufer. Their intention was to drive to army headquarters at Zossen, thirty kilometres south of Berlin. There they would confront army commander-in-chief Walther von Brauchitsch and Ludwig Beck’s successor as chief of staff, Franz Halder, and demand that they choose between joining them in arresting Hitler that afternoon, or being exposed as members of the coup that had sought to remove him in September the previous year. Arriving at the Tirpitzufer, the three plotters were met by Oster, who, ‘shaking his head’ and ‘laughing heartily’, told them that Hitler had once again changed plan, and the coup was off. Gisevius wanted to continue with the putsch anyway, but none of the others would join him. There was jubilation. All present thought war had been conclusively avoided.
They ought to have known better.
Over the next three days, Hitler’s will returned. The first inkling of this was uncovered by Max Waibel, a Swiss intelligence officer with very good high-level contacts in Berlin (probably Oster), who signalled his headquarters on the afternoon of 27 August, reporting that the new launch date for Hitler’s attack on Poland was to be 1 September. Given the close relations between Swiss intelligence and MI6 at the time, it seems certain that this message reached London and Paris either that day, or the one following.
Finally, on 31 August, after some further diplomatic shadow-boxing designed to conceal his intentions, the Führer again gave the order to launch the attack on Poland at dawn the following day.
A few minutes after eight o’clock that evening, a small group of German SS troops dressed in Polish uniforms ‘seized’ the German wireless station at Gleiwitz, close to the Polish frontier, broadcasting some violently anti-German messages before withdrawing and leaving behind several of their dead. In fact the ‘dead Polish attackers’ were pro-Polish German Silesians captured the previous day. Along with several prisoners from Dachau, the captured men had been first dressed in Polish uniforms, then killed with lethal injections, and finally shot and disfigured to prevent identification. Their corpses were left scattered around Gleiwitz as ‘Polish casualties’ of the ‘attack’.
At dawn the following morning, on the pretence of retaliating for the previous night’s provocations, Hitler launched five Panzer divisions in a massive two-pronged attack supported by aircraft and tanks. Their orders were to wipe Poland off the map. Two days later, the world was at war.
Bumping into Hans Bernd Gisevius in a Tirpitzufer corridor on the day war was declared, Wilhelm Canaris growled, ‘Finis Germaniae’ – thus ends Germany.
* The others were Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Theo and Erich Kordt, and Lieutenant Colonel Count Gerhard von Schwerin, who was sent by the German general staff.
† The building is still there, at Noordeinde 148. It is now a restaurant called ‘Het Heden’ (The Future). During the war it was owned by a Mrs Jansen, who also operated another accommodation address for Thümmel at her home. Thanks to Mike Van der Heijden for his help in finding this address and the history attached to it. See Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog – Deel 2 – Neutraal.
10
In war, neutral countries always become hotbeds for espionage.
In World War II, these neutral spaces were Spain, Turkey and Switzerland. The greatest of these, in spying terms, was Switzerland, which after the fall of France in June 1940 became a tiny enclave of freedom at the heart of the Axis behemoth.
It was through Switzerland, more than any other neutral country, that the German resistance probed for an early peace with the Allies and passed them, especially via Hans Oster, crucial intelligence on Hitler’s battle plans.
The invasion of Poland started a flood of secret agents and intelligence organisations taking refuge in the Swiss Federation. As the countries of Western Europe fell to Hitler’s stormtroopers, many more made their way to this small, isolated redoubt of freedom to ply their trade.
The Swiss government, for obvious reasons, had a strong interest in knowing what was going on around their encircled state. Almost all the major combatants in the war, including those which would in due course have governments-in-exile in London, had legations and consulates scattered across Switzerland. These housed, as the Swiss well knew, not just diplomats, but also nests of spy-masters running agents into their home countries, and especially into Germany. The Swiss response to all this spying in their country was to adopt a policy of benign ignorance. Provided it was not so blatant as to cause a diplomatic protest which could endanger Switzerland’s neutrality, and provided the Swiss got a fair share of any intelligence which