Jelinek, Charles and Antoinette – Owners of ‘De Favoriet’ bric-à-brac shop in The Hague
Keitel, Field Marshal Wilhelm – Chief of the German armed forces high command
Kleist-Schmenzin, Ewald von – German emissary of the opposition to Hitler; saw Churchill in London in August 1938
Kluge, Field Marshal Günther von – Commander of Army Group Centre. Reluctant plotter
Kordt, Erich – Head of Ribbentrop’s office in Berlin
Kordt, Theo – Brother of Erich. Official at the German embassy in London
Kubiš, Jan – Operation Anthropoid Czech agent
Lahousen, Major General Erwin von – Head of the Austrian Abwehr and then senior officer in the German Abwehr. Close to Canaris and a key plotter. Lover of Madeleine Bihet-Richou
Manstein, Field Marshal Erich von – Commander of Army Group South and mastermind of the Kursk offensive
March, Juan – Mallorcan businessman and prime mover in Spain – contact of Canaris and MI6
Masson, Roger – Head of Swiss intelligence
Mayr von Baldegg, Captain Bernhard – Staff member of Swiss army intelligence; Waibel’s deputy head
Menzies, Sir Stewart – Head of MI6
Mertz von Quirnheim, Colonel Albrecht – Friend of Stauffenberg; involved in the 20 July 1944 plot
Moltke, Count Helmuth von – Founder of the ‘Kreisau Circle’
Morávec, Colonel František – Head of the Czech intelligence service
Morávek, Václav – Resistance leader in Prague
Mueller, Josef – Canaris’s spy in the Vatican
Navarre, Henri – Madeleine Bihet-Richou’s French intelligence ‘handler’
Niemöller, Martin – Anti-Hitler Lutheran pastor
Olbricht, General Friedrich – Key plotter. Involved in the 20 July coup
Oster, Colonel Hans – ‘Managing director’ of the attempted 1938 coup. Head of Z Section in the Tirpitzufer
Pannwitz, Heinz – SD officer in charge of finding the ‘Dora Ring’
Payne Best, Captain Sigismund – MI6 officer captured at Venlo
Puenter, Dr Otto – ‘Dora’ agent – also in touch with MI6
Radó, Sándor – Head of the ‘Dora’ spy network
Ribbentrop, Joachim von – German ambassador to London and later Hitler’s foreign minister
Rivet, Colonel Louis – Head of French military intelligence (SR)
Roessler, Rudolf – Codename ‘Lucy’. Private purveyor of intelligence in Switzerland
Sas, Gijsbertus Jacobus – Dutch military attaché in Berlin; contact of Oster and Waibel
Schacht, Hjalmar – German minister of economics and president of the Reichsbank
Schellenberg, Walter – Heydrich’s protégé and mastermind of Venlo
Schlabrendorff, Fabian von – German lawyer. Liaison between Tresckow in Russia and Beck in Berlin
Schneider, Christian – Alias ‘Taylor’. Swiss businessman. Cut-out supplying information from Roessler to the Dora Ring
Schulenburg, Friedrich-Werner von der – Pre-war ambassador to Moscow and senior resistant
Schulte, Edouard – German businessman and one of Chojnacki’s agents
Sedláček, Karel – Alias ‘Charles Simpson’. Czech intelligence officer in Bern
Stauffenberg, Colonel Claus Schenk, Graf von – Architect and perpetrator of the 20 July 1944 bomb plot
Stevens, Major Richard – MI6 officer captured at Venlo
Suñer, Serrano – Spanish foreign minister
Szymańska, Halina – Wife of the Polish military attaché in Berlin before the war. Channel for Canaris to pass information to Menzies
Thümmel, Paul – Many aliases. MI6 agent A54. Important spy in the early part of the war
Timoshenko, Marshal Semyon – Commander of Soviet forces at Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk
Tresckow, Henning von – Chief of staff of Army Group Centre; a key plotter
Trott zu Solz, Adam von – German lawyer, diplomat and active resister
Vanden Heuvel, Count Frederick – Head of MI6 in Bern after 1941
Vansittart, Sir Robert – Head of the pre-war British Foreign Office
Waibel, Captain Max – Swiss intelligence officer
Weizsäcker, Ernst von – Head of the German Foreign Office and key plotter
Wilson, Sir Horace – Personal adviser to Chamberlain. Appeasement supporter
Witzleben, General Erwin von – Commander of the Berlin garrison and de facto leader of the September 1938 coup
Young, A.P. – One of Vansittart’s ‘spies’ in contact with Goerdeler
Zaharoff, Basil – Director of Vickers and notorious arms dealer
To the millions whose votes helped make Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany, he was the hero who would rescue them from the humiliations of the Versailles Treaty and the shaming chaos that followed.
John Maynard Keynes, who attended the 1919 peace conference, condemned Versailles afterwards in unforgiving and uncannily prophetic terms: ‘If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation.’
Keynes was not the only person to understand that in the punitive conditions imposed by Versailles lay the seeds of another explosion of German militarism. Others referred to it as ‘the peace built on quicksand’.
Under Clause 231 of the Treaty, the ‘War Guilt’ clause, Germany was deprived of all her colonies, 80 per cent of her pre-war fleet, almost half her iron production, 16 per cent of coal output, 13 per cent of her territory (including the great German-speaking port of Danzig) and more than a tenth of her population. To add to these humiliations, the victorious Allies also planted a deadly economic time bomb beneath what was left of the German economy. This took the form of war reparations amounting to some $US32 billion, to be paid largely in shipments of coal and steel.
In 1922, when Germany inevitably defaulted, French and Belgian troops occupied the centre of German coal and steel production in the Ruhr valley. Faced with the collapse of the domestic economy, the German government sought refuge in printing money, with the inevitable