He entered the Nazi movement and found a place inside the Party’s intelligence organization and an opportunity to rise through blackmail. He learned that a high-ranking Prussian official was secretly corresponding with Hitler’s arch rival within the Nazi Party, the ill-fated party theoretician Gregor Strasser. Heydrich courted the official’s wife and became her lover. Between amorous embraces in the lady’s apartment, he discovered the hiding place of the incriminating letters and stole the correspondence.
Armed with these letters, he extorted a place for himself with the Munich Elite Guard. After that, his rise was rapid. He was not yet twenty-seven years old in 1931 when he was made chief of the Party’s special intelligence division and commandant of its goons, raw-boned giants of blonde Nordic appearance and of ruthless, sadistic disposition.
Young as Heydrich was, he looked still younger; powerful as he was, he thirsted for still more power. He was tall, lean, with an excellent figure which made him look extremely well in the sleek, black SS uniform. His beardless face gave him a somewhat effeminate appearance, but that impression was quickly destroyed by his eyes, which were frigid and mirrored a truly cynical soul. Wilhelm Hoettl, who served under him in the SD, compared Heydrich with Cesare Borgia. “Both men”, he said, “were imbued with the same complete disregard for all ethical values, both possessed the same passion for power, the same cold intelligence, the same frigidity of heart, the same systematically calculated ambition and even the same physical beauty of a fallen angel.”
Heydrich looms large in the history of contemporary secret service because, in an age of enlightened and mechanized intrigue, he was the only practitioner of medieval, brute cabal. His life was an unbroken chain of murders. He had people put to death on the principle that a dead enemy is better than a live one, and he made no squeamish distinction between proven foes and presumed friends. He liquidated people he instinctively disliked, colleagues he thought might endanger his rise, Nazis he regarded as untrustworthy.
His achievements even before the war were phenomenal, but they were trivial compared with his later victories. The war he helped to “justify” was to give him great opportunities. He looked forward to it with a glutton’s anticipation of an epicurean meal.
3
Canaris Paves the Way
Hans Piekenbrock looked like a prosperous wine merchant, but he was a spymaster of superb competence. A fun-loving, jovial Rhinelander, he was a colonel of the German General Staff and the chief of Canaris’ Section I, the branch of the Abwehr charged with espionage. He was a tall, heavy-set man, broad-shouldered, bluff and immensely popular with his subordinates, who called him “Pieki.” There were few missions they would not undertake for him.
Because Canaris had little time or inclination to deal with the detail work of Section I, preferring the rarefied atmosphere of political and diplomatic intelligence, Piekenbrock enjoyed great autonomy and he made the most of it.
The vital secrets of Germany’s actual and potential enemies were in his files. Because of the enormous difficulties of obtaining secret intelligence from inside the Soviet Union, Piekenbrock chose to neglect the U.S.S.R. He did manage from time to time to smuggle agents into the Soviet Union and a few of them did succeed in returning, but the bulk of his information was developed by reading between the lines of Soviet publications, by interviewing returning travelers and by that other effective means of remote control, desk-bound intelligence.
Piekenbrock had his difficulties in other sensitive areas as well. The Foreign Ministry, anxious to avoid friction with Britain, France and the United States (to lull them into complacency and keep them out of war), muted the Section’s espionage activities in those countries. Until 1936, the service had been actually forbidden to maintain a network in Britain. Not until 1937, when Canaris personally appealed to Hitler, was the Abwehr permitted to spy against England without restrictions.
Less than two years sufficed to build up the Abwehr files on Britain, with exact details of the country’s small peacetime army, the complex RAF and the sprawling Royal Navy. During those prewar years, the Special Branch of Scotland Yard and M.I.5 of the War Office’s Intelligence Directorate (the two major British counter-espionage organs) managed to unmask a number of petty spies, but the big fish evaded them. The backbone of German espionage in Britain was not broken until the outbreak of the Second World War.
England was not even a major target of the Abwehr. France was considered far more important. It was the traditional enemy and the historic stamping ground of German spies.
The Abwehr’s tactics against France were not new at all. Bismarck’s secret agent, Dr. Wilhelm Stieber, prepared for the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 by moving thirty thousand spies into France in 1869. France was similarly pre-invaded on the eve of the First World War.
On the eve of the Second World War, the pattern was the same. Even Churchill was fooled. On August 15th, only nineteen days before the outbreak of the war with France, he was taken by General Georges, commander-in-chief of the French armies in the field, to inspect the Maginot Line. Upon his return, Churchill presented a confidential report to the War Office.
“The French Front cannot be surprised,” he wrote. “It cannot be broken at any point except by an effort which would be enormously costly in life, and would take so much time that the general situation would be transformed while it was in progress.”
But the Line Churchill described as “unbreakable” had already been broken—not by German Landsers, who were to accomplish this feat only a few months later—but by the agents of Pieki and Canaris.
A special branch was set up in Section I for the exclusive purpose of cracking the secrets of the Maginot Line. Innumerable surreptitious approaches were made and several German agents, sent boldly against the target, were caught. The Abwehr’s persistent efforts were finally crowned with success, due to the corruption of two French officers in key positions. One was a Captain Credle, aide to the commanding officer of the Metz sector of the fortifications, from whom—by way of an agent de liaison, an Alsatian named Paul Denz—the Germans received a partial blueprint of the Line. Conclusive information was procured from another French traitor named Georges Froge, an army captain in charge of provisioning the troops of the Line. By frequent travels up and down the system, and by access to maps and papers containing the vital statistics of those garrisons, Captain Froge gained extensive knowledge of the Maginot Line.
Froge was a strangely wayward man who looked with sympathetic eyes at the totalitarian system of the Nazis. With so much knowledge of his country’s defenses and so little sympathy for its political system, he became a natural target for the Germans.
As soon as he had been “fingered” as a potential spy with invaluable information, the Germans embarked on “Operation Z,” as the special maneuver to ensnare Forge came to be called. It was discovered that the captain was in straitened financial circumstances and loved money as much as he hated his country. After that it did not take long to land Captain Froge.
Confirmation of his information came into the Abwehr’s possession accidentally, the morning after the occupation of Prague in 1939. Marching with the German army into the Czechoslovak capital were special agents of the Abwehr under orders to seize intact the files of the Czechoslovak General Staff, especially the archives of its Second Section. Contact was promptly established with a traitor in the Czech General Staff, Colonel Emanuel Morawetz, who took his Abwehr friends to a hidden safe in which the Czechs kept, not their own, but France’s greatest secret—the complete blueprint of the Maginot Line.
How this blueprint came to be in that safe is a story in itself. When the Czechs decided to build their own system of fortifications and to pattern it after the Maginot Line, a Czech technical commission was permitted to inspect the French Line and make detailed drawings of anything they liked. The Czechs had added their own estimates to the blueprint, annotated, analyzed and criticized the French system and, in one of those General Staff “exercise
s,” even demonstrated how it could be pierced.
The second most important item on the Abwehr’s shopping list was the French navy. With agents based in Belgium, Section IM (Piekenbrock’s naval intelligence division) made a systematic survey of the French fleet and French coast, from battleships to speedboats, from the Channel to Cannes. The intelligence was supplied by a network of agents created especially for the purpose. A few of these were Frenchmen. One, a handsome young naval lieutenant of excellent family, fell into the arms of a pretty Abwehr decoy, a certain Lydia Oswald, who was delegated to seduce him. The lieutenant had access to the private files of Admiral Darlan, commander-in-chief of the French navy.
This source was remarkable, not only for the quality of the intelligence supplied, but for the speed with which it was transmitted. At one point during the crisis Darlan dictated an order to mobilize the fleet. The lieutenant got hold of it and four hours later the Abwehr received the order—before it reached the French fleet. And in 1939 an Abwehr agent named Otto Baltes had returned to Berlin with a list of every single French airport and a detailed report on the planes and men at each. The man from whom Baltes obtained this detailed intelligence was a young captain of the French air force, working in the cabinet of Pierre Cot, the Minister of Air. Like so many before him, he had turned traitor for love as well as money. He was lured into the trap by an attractive Alsatian decoy working as a midinette on Rue de la Paix. When she became his full-time mistress—a liaison that needed far more money than the captain earned—Baltes stepped in to supply the cash. In return he received the precious report.
This was the last scrap of intelligence Canaris needed to complete the French dossier. It now included everything the German High Command needed to know about France.
Despite this traditional preoccupation with France, the busiest desk of the whole Abwehr was the Polish Branch of Colonel Piekenbrocks’ Section. Poland was an ideal hunting preserve. Many German nationals lived in Poland, and the colonel shrewdly organized them into a special Meldedienst, an ad hoc information service. He also established long before the war a so-called “covering network”—a veritable spiderweb of confidential agents. This was spread across the land and included every point of military interest. This was a dormant network. The agents had instructions to remain quiescent in order to avoid detection, and to go into action only in emergencies or when they happened to have information of extraordinary importance. They were to be saved for the coming war.
In addition, Piekenbrock organized a special group in Poland to report on the Polish army. Very few of these were Germans; the majority were native Poles who, with a variety of motives, had decided to betray their country to the Germans.
For several years before the war, Piekenbrock’s talent scouts combed Poland for recruits. The colonel did not find it difficult to recruit a sizable army of traitors. A large number of senior officers and important officials actually volunteered their services. But the German-Polish espionage contest was not quite a one-way street. The Poles also displayed industry, ingenuity, and even some efficiency in espionage. Up to the war itself, they scored as many coups against the Germans as did the Abwehr against Poland.
Section II (Intelligence) of the Polish General Staff was a big and powerful organization. Housed in the heart of Warsaw in a battered, mystery-shrouded, gloomy old building on Pilsudskego Square, it had reports that presented as good a picture of Germany and the Wehrmacht as the Germans had of Poland and the Polish army.
The major outpost of Polish Intelligence, specializing in Germany, was located in Bromberg, not far from the German border. It had eleven subsidiary branches, including one in Danzig. The Poles even succeeded in penetrating to the heart of the Danzig substation of the Abwehr. They achieved this with the hoary methods of old-fashioned espionage, using a pretty woman as a decoy—one Clara Shebinska. A comely Polish lady, as so many Polish ladies are, Clara lived in Danzig and held down a humdrum secretarial job with a firm that was above suspicion.
But she had been planted in the Free City for the specific purpose of striking up friendships with the gentlemen of the Abwehr. She was well-briefed and supplied with incidental intelligence about the personal habits of the Lotharios she was expected to entrap. Her major asset was, of course, her voluptuous beauty: she was a petite blonde with a round baby face, startled big brown eyes, sensuous lips, and a figure as well-rounded as her education. She was vivacious, infinitely charming, and evidently blessed with a romantic disposition.
She frequented the haunts of the Abwehr people, was picked up by several of them and soon enough was on intimate terms with the resident manager of the local Abwehr office. She knew how to coax from her lover abundant information about the Abwehr’s activities in Danzig, and even inside Poland.
Behind the Danzig operation, and the generally brilliant performance of the entire Bromberg network, was a strange individual. He was called Zychon, although that may not have been his real name. He was a professional soldier, totally unknown to the world at large, but in the Polish army he was famous and respected. Even his enemies conceded that he was by far the best intelligence officer the Poles had. And yet (now in his forties), he was still only a major, a perennial major.
Zychon was always passed over when the promotions were handed out because he was an eccentric and an iconoclast. He was constantly stepping on sensitive toes, crossing up the schemes of others, insulting his superiors, and in general making mockery of discipline and rules. In appearance, he looked like a hobo; in manners, he was a bum.
He would have been cashiered long before had he not been indispensable. Just when it was decided to retire or court-martial him for one or another of his astounding capers, he would come through with one of his phenomenal scoops. He didn’t care. He was always drunk.
Zychon was a dipsomaniac and probably also a lunatic. He dispensed with secrecy in the most secretive of all professions. As soon as he arrived in Danzig, for instance, he would put in a call to his German opposite number to announce his presence in town. Sometimes he would chat amiably with the German, his shoptalk abounding in tantalizing loose ends. More often he would call his antagonist to curse him roundly in the most uncouth fashion. On these occasions, the German would say, “That damned fool Zychon is drunk again”, and never was there more truth in a piece of incidental intelligence.
From time to time, the Germans tried to infiltrate the Bromberg network by exploiting one or another of Zychon’s weaknesses, and once in a while they seemed to be on the verge of success. But just when the arrangements appeared concluded, Zychon would disappoint them. This caustic jester was no fool. He was a king of spies.
It, therefore, caused a profound sensation within the Abwehr when Subsection East reported to topside in Berlin that vague feelers had come from the Zychon organization that held out the promise of a real break. At first it appeared that Major Zychon himself was putting out the feelers, but when contact was established with the would-be traitor, he turned out to be Zychon’s second in command, Captain Kasimir Tolodzietzki.
He offered a plausible explanation for his defection : hatred of his capricious boss. Tolodzietzki was Zychon’s whipping boy and scapegoat. The major made life miserable for his hapless aide and gradually built up in him a blind rancor. Tolodzietzki may not have intended to harm Poland, but merely to hurt Zychon. His plot was simple. He would slip some intelligence to the Abwehr in order to get Zychon into hot water. He so arranged his treachery as to make it appear that the major was the real culprit. Then he wrote poison-pen letters to Warsaw hinting that Zychon was involved in sordid deals with the Germans. His zeal finally became so great that he put the Germans on their guard. The Abwehr suspected that Tolodzietzki was merely a plant through whom Zychon was trying to smuggle misleading information into the Abwehr’s files.
Just as the Germans were set to drop Tolodzietzki altogether, the Poles stepped in and proved that the German suspicions were without foundation. His aide’s defection had not escaped
Zychon. Tolodzietzki was placed under surveillance and his treacherous activities were discovered. He was arrested and hanged. The Poles made the mistake of publicizing the hanging. The execution opened the Germans’ eyes. The reports they had refused to regard as genuine were now vindicated, dusted off, and, in due course, made their contribution to the German triumph over Poland.
Another major source of information for the Germans was an officer of the Polish army whose identity is still clouded in secrecy. He managed to escape Tolodzietzki’s fate, and the Germans, in their gratitude, still refuse to identify him. This man also volunteered his services to the Abwehr and offered to enlist a number of Polish officers to act as spies. He, too, was received with a great deal of suspicion and at first his offer was rejected. After the Tolodzietzki affair, however, the Germans realized their mistake and tried frantically to re-establish contact with the volunteer. What with the mills of espionage grinding rather slowly, they needed more than two years to regain contact, which was finally made at a most crucial time—on the eve of the Second World War.
After that, everything worked smoothly. The agent delivered to the Abwehr a number of Polish officers stationed at key posts and from them, bit by bit, the Germans acquired the entire Polish mobilization order and deployment plan.
Thus Canaris’ organization delivered to Hitler all he needed to know about France and Poland. His Eastern flank was protected by the Nazi-Soviet pact. There was only one more thing he wanted—the neutrality of Britain.
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