Operation Mincemeat

by Ben MacIntyre

  The Führer was in need of some good news. In four months, Hitler had lost one eighth of his fighting men on the battlefields of North Africa and the eastern front. Fleets of bombers were tearing German cities and industries to shreds. Germany was now losing the underwater war: forty-seven U-boats were sunk in May, triple the number sunk in March, thanks to the code breakers’ pinpointing the “wolf pack.” Hitler blamed his military leaders. “He is absolutely sick of the generals,”24 Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary. “All generals lie. All generals are disloyal.” Hitler needed to be told something he could believe in, to counter the lies of his generals, to bolster the mad myth of his own invincibility. The German intelligence service would now oblige.

  Presiding over FHW was Lieutenant Colonel Alexis Baron von Roenne. A small, bespectacled aristocrat whose family had once ruled swaths of Baltic Germany, von Roenne was a former banker and still looked like one; he was meticulous, pedantic, snobbish, intensely Christian, and glintingly intelligent. “Behind his rimless spectacles25 and compressed lips there worked a brain as clear as glass,” wrote one historian. Von Roenne had volunteered to fight on the eastern front, suffered a serious wound, and been transferred back to military intelligence, where he ascended rapidly, developing his own intelligence technique, which involved piecing together a picture of the enemy, a Feinbild, from tiny fragments of information. As a result, he enjoyed an almost mystical reputation for divining and predicting Allied intentions. The myth of von Roenne’s infallibility was largely undeserved, but, critically, it was believed by Hitler, who held von Roenne in the highest regard: when the command of FHW fell vacant in the spring of 1943, the Führer personally ordered the appointment of the small, clever, Latvian-born aristocrat. Von Roenne had been in control of the western intelligence arm of the German army for just two months when the Mincemeat letters landed on his desk at Zossen.

  Montagu had rightly predicted that the Germans would examine such a trove of information with profound suspicion and extreme caution. The Spaniards had handed over the two crucial letters, but the Germans had also obtained a full inventory and description of every item in the briefcase, wallet, and pockets of the dead man: “The Germans studied each phrase26 of the material letters with great care and also were fully informed about the documentary build-up of Major Martin’s personality.”

  The first full German intelligence assessment of the documents was written on May 11 and signed by Baron von Roenne himself. It was addressed to the OKW Operations Staff, or Wehrmachtführungsstab, headed by General Alfred Jodl, and entitled, portentously, “Discovery of the English Courier.”27 It began: “On the corpse of an English courier28 which was found on the Spanish coast, were three letters from senior British Officers to high Allied Officers in North Africa. … They give information concerning the decisions taken on the 23rd April, 1943, regarding Anglo-American strategy for the conduct of the war in the Mediterranean after the conclusion of the Tunisian campaign.” Major Martin is described as “an experienced specialist29 in amphibious operations.”

  Von Roenne went on to lay out, point by point, the misinformation prepared by Cholmondeley and Montagu. “Large scale amphibious operations30 in both the Western and Eastern Mediterranean are intended. The proposed operation in the eastern Mediterranean, under the command of General Wilson, is to be made on the coast round Kalamata, and the section of the coast south of Cape Araxos. The code name for the landings on the Peloponnesus is ‘Husky.’ … The operation to be conducted in the Western Mediterranean by General Alexander was mentioned, but without naming any objective.” Von Roenne, however, had picked up on the reference to sardines. “A jocular remark in this letter31 refers to Sardinia,” he wrote. “The code name for this operation is ‘Brimstone.’” The attack on Sardinia, he surmised, must be “a minor ‘commando type’ since Mountbatten had requested the return of Major Martin after the operation. This indication points to the invasion of an island rather than of a major undertaking. … This is another point in favour of Sardinia.”

  Just as important, Von Roenne relayed the news that Sicily was not a real target for the Allies, but a decoy: “The proposed cover operation32 for ‘Brimstone’ is Sicily.” That lie would sit, immovably, at the center of German strategic thinking over the coming months: the attacks would come in the east, in Greece, and in the west, most probably in Sardinia; evidence of any planned assault on Sicily could safely be dismissed as a hoax. The only uncertainty, von Roenne warned, was that of timing. If the two divisions identified in Nye’s letter—the Fifty-sixth Infantry attacking Kalamata and the Fifth Infantry Division aimed at Cape Araxos—were deployed at less than full strength, then the “operation could be mounted33 immediately” and the offensive might start at any time. However, the Fifty-sixth Division, von Roenne noted, had two brigades “still in action”34 at Enfidaville. If the entire division was to be used in the assault, these troops “must first be rested35 and then embarked. This possibility, which necessitates a certain time lag before the launching of the operation, is, judging by the form of the letters, the most likely.” In von Roenne’s mature estimation, Germany still had “at least two or three weeks”36 to reinforce the Greek coast before the attack.

  That was also enough time for the British to change their plans, which they might well do if they knew the information had reached the Germans. Von Roenne now turned to this important consideration. “It is known to the British Staff37 that the courier’s despatches to [sic] Major Martin fell into Spanish hands,” he wrote, but “it is not perhaps known to the British General Staff that these letters came to our notice, since an English Consul was present at the examination of the letters by Spanish officials.” The letters had been reinserted in the envelopes and returned to the British, and a senior officer of the Madrid Abwehr station had personally inspected the resealed envelopes before they were returned to Alan Hillgarth. The British might suspect but would have no proof that the letters had been read, let alone passed to the Germans and copied. “It is, therefore, to be hoped38 that the British General Staff will continue with these projected operations and thereby make possible a resounding Abwehr success.” In order to convince the British that their secrets were still safe, von Roenne suggested that the Germans mount their own deception: they should give no indication that they feared simultaneous attacks in the eastern and western Mediterranean and instead “initiate a misleading plan39 of action which will deceive the enemy by painting a picture of growing Axis concern regarding Sicily.” The Germans should pretend to reinforce Sicily, while doing nothing of the sort.

  Von Roenne ended with a security warning. “News of this discovery will40 be treated with the greatest secrecy, and knowledge of it confined to as few as possible.” The baron’s assessment was remarkable in many ways: it hauled on board every single aspect of the deception and even launched a corresponding deception plan to reinforce it. But perhaps most astonishing of all was the ringing endorsement that accompanied the appraisal: “The circumstances of the discovery,41 together with the form and contents of the despatches, are absolutely convincing proof of the reliability of the letters.” The army’s chief intelligence analyst, from the outset, utterly dismissed the possibility of a plant.

  This was, to say the least, strange. The analysts of FHW usually distrusted uncorroborated information emanating directly from the Abwehr, knowing the inefficiency and corruption of that organization, and tended to be skeptical of Abwehr revelations “unless these were clearly42 corroborated by more tangible evidence.” Von Roenne’s natural caution seems to have deserted him. He knew only what the Madrid Abwehr station had told him about the discovery of the body, which was secondhand information derived through Adolf Clauss. The report detailing the results of the second meeting with Pardo on May 10 had not yet reached Berlin. No additional checks had been made, the body had not been examined, and the original documents had remained in German hands for only one hour, far too short a time for forensic testing. And yet he chose to describe the
documents as incontrovertibly genuine.

  Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived. The betrayed lover sees only the signs of love and blocks out the evidence of faithlessness, however glaring. This unconscious willingness to see the lie as truth—“wishfulness”43 was Admiral Godfrey’s word for it—comes in many forms: Adolf Clauss in Huelva wanted to believe the false documents because his reputation depended on believing them; for Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, any intelligence breakthrough to his credit, no matter how fantastic, made him safer, a Jew among anti-Semitic killers. Von Roenne, however, may have chosen to believe in the fake documents for an entirely different reason: because he loathed Hitler, wanted to undermine the Nazi war effort, and was intent on passing false information to the high command in the certain knowledge that it was wholly false and extremely damaging.

  It is quite possible that Lieutenant Colonel Alexis Baron von Roenne did not believe the Mincemeat deception for an instant.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Mincemeat Digested

  BARON ALEXIS VON ROENNE appeared, on the outside, to be the consummate Nazi intelligence officer: a veteran of the First World War, a wounded war hero, holder of the Iron Cross, loyal to his oath, and the Führer’s favorite intelligence analyst. “Hitler had implicit faith1 in Von Roenne and in his reasoning ability, and seems to have liked him personally.” The aristocratic former banker had fought in the celebrated Potsdam Regiment, attended the War Academy, and demonstrated his intellectual mettle from the outset of the war. In 1939, he had been entrusted with the task of assessing whether Britain and France would come to Poland’s aid if Germany attacked that country, and had sent a special report to Hitler, predicting that “the Western allies would protest2 a German attack, but would take no military action.” Von Roenne’s prediction was “exactly what Hitler wanted to hear;”3 he was exceptionally attuned to the Führer’s wishful thinking. “Hitler was greatly impressed4 by Von Roenne’s intuition, as well as by the accuracy of his evaluation,” writes the historian David Johnson. In 1940, von Roenne predicted that the Maginot Line, supposedly protecting France’s eastern border, could be circumvented, enabling a successful German assault. Again, he was correct. By May 1943, von Roenne had become Hitler’s most trusted reader of the intelligence runes, a fearsome responsibility. “It was his mission to produce5 for the high command the definitive intelligence they needed. … It was at his desk that the buck-passing ended.”

  Colleagues described von Roenne as cold and distant, “an intellectual but6 aloof person, impossible to make friends with.” Von Roenne’s unapproachable manner was, perhaps, unsurprising, for there was another side to him, the obverse of the prim fascist functionary, of which his Nazi colleagues—and, most important, Hitler—knew nothing whatsoever. Von Roenne was a secret but committed opponent of Nazism, living a double life. He detested Hitler and the uncouth thugs surrounding him. He was an old-fashioned monarchist with a military cast of mind, steeped in feudal tradition and the belief that certain people (like himself) “because of their origins,7 have title to be a higher class among the people.” His Christian conscience had been outraged by the appalling SS terror unleashed in Poland. Quietly, but with absolute conviction, he had turned against the Nazi regime. From 1943 onward, he deliberately and consistently inflated the Allied order of battle, overstating the strength of the British and American armies in a successful effort to mislead Hitler and his generals. His precise motive is still uncertain. Von Roenne may simply have been compensating for the tendency of his superiors to deflate military numbers. He may have been trying to impress his bosses. He was a fanatical opponent of Bolshevism, which threatened to destroy the class system to which he was heir, and he may have calculated, in common with other German anticommunists, that “if Germany should give in to8 superior force in the West the Allies would help hold back the Soviets: and inflating Allied strength was a means to that end.” Perhaps, like other German anti-Nazi conspirators, he just wanted Germany to lose the war as swiftly as possible, to avoid further bloodletting and remove Hitler and his repellent circle from power. Whatever his reasons, and despite his reputation as an intelligence guru, by 1943 von Roenne was deliberately passing information he knew to be false, directly to Hitler’s desk.

  Von Roenne’s finest hour would come with the invasion of Normandy in 1944. In the buildup to D-day, he faithfully passed on every deception ruse fed to him, accepted the existence of every bogus unit regardless of evidence, and inflated forty-four divisions in Britain to an astonishing eighty-nine. Without von Roenne’s willing connivance, the entire elaborate net of deception woven for D-day might have unraveled. In the words of one historian, “his way of fighting the Nazi war9 machine was to inflate estimates of Allied troop strength in England and convince Hitler and OKW that the main attack would be Calais,” when he may well have known that the real attack was aimed at Normandy. His determination to be deceived played a crucial part in the last chapter of the war.

  Von Roenne was not directly involved in the failed plot, led by Claus von Stauffenberg, to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. But he was close friends with Stauffenberg and the other conspirators of the Schwarze Kapelle, the Black Orchestra, and his links with the planned rebellion were sufficient to ensure a grim fate in the ferocious Gestapo reprisals that followed. Hitler’s revenge was breathtakingly brutal. A month after the July plot, von Roenne was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death after a show trial by the “People’s Court.” In his own defense, von Roenne simply declared that Nazi race policies were inconsistent with Christian values. On October 11, 1944, with other alleged conspirators, he was bound hand and foot in Berlin-Plötzensee Prison, hung on a meat hook, and left to die slowly. In an additional exercise in barbarity, Hitler ordered some of the executions to be filmed for his viewing pleasure. On the eve of his death, von Roenne wrote a martyr’s epitaph to his wife: “In a moment now I shall be going10 home to our Lord in complete calm and in the certainty of salvation.” Von Roenne undoubtedly helped the Allies to win the war, but his precise reasons for doing so are an enduring mystery. If Kühlenthal was losing the intelligence war by accident, then von Roenne seemed to be losing it by design.

  In May 1943, the allegation that Colonel von Roenne was an anti-Nazi conspirator working to undermine Hitler would have been unthinkable, even treasonable. The diminutive baron was still Hitler’s favorite intelligence analyst, and if he declared that there was “absolutely convincing proof11 of the reliability” of this “resounding Abwehr success,”12 then that is what Hitler was most likely to believe.

  For two weeks, during the wait for news from Spain, the atmosphere in Room 13 had been “frousty, peevish and petulant.”13 Montagu had intensified his grumbling, complaining that “he had to duck each time he had14 to go under the air duct, and approach Room 13 in a stooping position.” Given the pressure, he muttered, it was “surprising that we only have five15 breakdowns among the female staff.”

  On May 12, the very day that Hillgarth reported the safe return of the briefcase, Juliette Ponsonby, the secretary of Section 17M, went to collect the latest Bletchley Park dispatches from the teleprinter room in the Admiralty. Montagu began leafing through the printouts and then suddenly uttered a loud whoop and banged the table so hard his coffee cup flew off the desk. That morning, the interceptors had picked up a wireless message sent by General Alfred Jodl, the OKW chief of the Operations Staff responsible for all strategic, executive, and war-operations planning, stating that “an enemy landing on a large scale16 is projected in the near future in both the East and West Mediterranean.” The information, sent to the senior German commanders southeast and south, with copies to the Naval Staff Operations Division and Air Force Operations Staff, was described by Jodl as coming from “a source which may be regarded17 as being absolutely reliable.” The message then furnished full details of the planned attack on Greece, precisely as des
cribed in Nye’s letter. Jodl himself gave his seal of approval to the documents: “It is very unusual for an intelligence18 report to be passed on in operational traffic or by someone of [such] seniority with so high a recommendation of reliability,” wrote Montagu, who had studied thousands of such signals. “So far as I can recollect19 it is almost unknown that such a thing should happen.”