Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  According to Malaparte, Lenin planned to overthrow the Russian democratic regime that had followed the Czar by mass demonstrations and the conventional means of revolution; but Trotsky claimed he could achieve the same result with a handful of terrorists and saboteurs, simply by paralyzing the government through cutting it off from the outside world. In his account of Trotsky’s coup, Malaparte described in fascinating (though fictitious) detail how Trotsky accomplished the task; how he sent out his men to practice the coup in “invisible maneuvers” ; how his agents located the sensitive focal points of the government—telephone exchanges, power stations, even pinpoints like individual railroad switches—and how they eventually struck. Instead of moving the masses, as Lenin proposed, Trotsky’s men blew fuses, threw switches, and within a couple of hours they had completely isolated the government which had to surrender in its impotence.

  This was exactly how Liedig planned to conquer Copenhagen. In a report of one of his agents he discovered that the nerve center of the whole Danish Army was in an ancient fortress on the outskirts of the capital. He figured that if he could seize the fort right at the outset of the campaign, he would be able to paralyze the Danish Army completely and make resistance impossible.

  Liedig’s plan was accepted and this was, in fact, how Copenhagen was “captured.” He needed only a small contingent of soldiers for the coup, and a few agents to assure that the roads leading to the fortress had not been mined. He put the troops into a floating Trojan Horse, a German freighter which sailed peacefully into Copenhagen harbor with nothing to indicate that her “cargo” consisted of German storm troopers specially trained for the coup à la Trotsky.

  One thing could have wrecked Liedig’s scheme. A colleague of his within the Abwehr, the determined anti-Nazi Colonel Oster, was exasperated by the prospect of Hitler’s continuing aggrandizement, and betrayed, not Liedig’s shrewd design of which he knew nothing, but the imminent invasion of Norway and Denmark. On April 1, only eight days before the projected D-day, Oster sneaked information to the Danish Naval Attaché in Berlin about the invasion plans; and on April 4, he alerted the Norwegian Military Attaché.

  The Norwegian was apparently incredulous, at best, since he did not even forward the information to Oslo. The Dane relayed the message to Copenhagen but his superiors simply refused to believe it.

  On April 9, 1940, Denmark fell to the Germans, exactly as Commander Liedig had planned and scheduled it.

  In capturing Copenhagen, the Germans also fell into possession of something which might have been the most important booty of the war—had they only known it. That “something” was a laboratory at the Copenhagen University, directed by Dr. Niels Bohr, the celebrated Nobel Prize physicist. To the Germans he was just an egghead and they let him alone. Dr. Bohr on his part, busied himself with teaching and lived quietly to encourage the Germans in their indifference. But behind closed doors, in the utmost privacy of his private laboratory, he worked on a mysterious project whose secret would have been worth millions to the Nazis. He was collaborating with his American friends on a program of atomic research. The Bohr laboratory was as important a way-station on the road to the atomic bomb as anything that then existed anywhere in the United States and Britain. It was, indeed, an integral part of the project, except that it was behind the brown curtain, within the reach of the Nazis.

  For years during the occupation, Dr. Bohr continued his fantastic double life in science. He had a small supply of heavy water, a precious possession for this particular research. Had the Nazis found out about it, they would probably have been alerted to Bohr’s secret. To conceal it, he kept the heavy water in a large beer bottle and stored it in his refrigerator with the rest of his beer.

  As Bohr’s work advanced, it became necessary to bring him out of Denmark. By then, it was 1944. The British secret service organized the escape. The scientist was told to be at a pier at a given hour after dark where a small boat would meet him and take him to Sweden. He startled his companions when they saw him lugging along a large bottle of beer. They decided for themselves that the funny scientist must be a beer addict. In Sweden Dr. Bohr went straight to the Nobel Laboratory for a reunion with Dr. Lise Meitner, a colleague who had preceded him there, and handed her the precious bottle for safekeeping. Dr. Meitner examined its contents more for sentimental than scientific purposes, and she exclaimed in a voice of real anguish. It was real beer. The bottle with the heavy water still reposed in Bohr’s Copenhagen refrigerator.

  For the next twenty-four hours that confounded bottle became the most important target for the Allied secret services. A team of the Danish underground sneaked into the abandoned Bohr house, reached the icebox without incident, took the important bottle and smuggled it safely to Bohr in Sweden.

  They never did understand why they had to go to so much trouble just to get a bottle of Danish beer for a bibulous old professor.

  8

  Behind the Battle of Europe

  Between the fall of Poland and the opening of the Norwegian invasion lay one of the strangest periods in history—the months of the “phony war”. Standing on the ruins of Warsaw in September, 1939, Hitler appeared to be satisfied with the carnage he had wrought, but deep within himself he was perplexed. What to do next?

  He toyed with both peace and war. On October 6, 1939, he invited Britain and France to talk peace, but was rebuffed. Groping for something else, he kept his generals on pins and needles while he played with half a dozen ideas; for each they had to design a possible campaign. “Sunflower” was the name for a possible campaign in North Africa aimed at Tripoli. “Alp Violet” was to be aimed at Albania. “Felix” contemplated crossing Spain to seize Gibraltar. And “Operation Yellow” was to conquer the Low Countries.

  Traveling salesmen flocked to Berlin—native conspirators from Holland, Belgium and Norway—peddling their countries to Hitler. From Holland came a fluffy, shifty-eyed philistine named Anton Mussert, a puppet dangling from strings held by the Abwehr. From Belgium came a scheming, pampered dandy, Leon Degrelle. Before long, Hitler succumbed to their siren songs. He pushed “Yellow” to the top of his shopping list and issued top-secret Order No. 4402/39, instructing Army Group B of General von Bock “to make all preparations according to special orders, for immediate invasion of Dutch and Belgian territory if the political situation so demands”. Shortly after-wards, A-Day (as it was called) was fixed for the invasion. Weather permitting, it was to be November 12. A phony war, indeed !

  This pending campaign was consistently jeopardized by the twin scourges of the secret service, delays and leaks. The invasion had to be postponed again and again, and, during the procrastination, details of the design came to be known.

  Among the first to learn of the plan were the Italians, many of whom hated the Nazis in spite of their formal alliance. The Italian military attaché in Berlin tipped off both his Belgian and Dutch opposite numbers. (The Dutchman, Colonel Sas, already had the information from Oster.) In Rome, the Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, also warned the Belgians and Dutch. At great personal risk, a leading member of the German opposition, Minister von Buelow-Schwante, went to Brussels and, in a clandestine audience, delivered a warning in person to King Leopold. Both the Belgians and the Dutch skeptically shrugged off the warnings.

  Just then something quite extraordinary happened that should have lent weight to these scattered storm signals. On January 10, 1940, a Luftwaffe plane, piloted by a Major Hoenemanns, was on a flight to Cologne with a copy of the Dutch-Belgian deployment plan for the command of Army Group B. Hoenemanns was unaware of the exact nature of the papers he carried and took his mission somewhat lightly. For one thing, he took a hitchhiker along, a General Staff officer; for another, he was somewhat careless in plotting his course. He lost his way and came down in a field near Machelen on the Meuse inside Belgium.

  Hoenemanns and his hitchhiker were duly alarmed when they found out where they were and decided to burn the papers. It so happened that both men were
non-smokers and they had no matches on hand. The first man to reach the spot was a Belgian and Hoenemanns immediately asked him for matches. He complied and they set to burning the papers. Before the two men could get too far with it, a Belgian patrol closed in, extinguished the blaze and arrested the Germans. Interrogation revealed that Major Hoenemanns belonged to the 7th Luftwaffe Division of parachutists with headquarters in Berlin and that he was attached to the Luftwaffe Unit 220, whose plans were to transport the 22nd Infantry Division by air to points of attack. British combat intelligence identified the division as specially trained for the landing of airborne troops in Belgian territory.

  Although badly charred, the documents could still be salvaged. They were three in number, containing instructions for the Luftwaffe’s VIII Aviation Corps, describing in detail the impending attack on Belgium and the role parachutists and airborne infantry were to play. It was a complete blueprint of the campaign.

  Although they became somewhat apprehensive, the Belgians were not unduly alarmed. They evaluated their find from all angles and finally decided that the whole incident was a clever ruse staged by the Germans to drive fear into Belgian hearts in order to tighten their neutrality. Anxious to avoid any complications, the Belgians hastily repatriated their unwelcome guests, returned the stray plane and closed the incident.

  In Germany, Hoenemanns’ ill-fated mission created understandable consternation and led to another postponement of the operation. What’s more, it induced the High Command to redraft the whole plan.

  While this was going on, Allied intelligence preoccupied itself with fantastic projects rather than with the business at hand. Some efforts were made to establish the order of battle of the German Army, but virtually nothing was seriously undertaken to discover the intentions of Hitler or to cover the movements of his forces and to conclude from these movements the direction in which he planned to go. While Germany was feverishly preparing for the campaign in the West, Allied intelligence concluded, from the apparent idleness of the Wehrmacht, that Hitler had shot his bolt and was bogged down in melancholy confusion, accompanied by growing dissidence within the Wehrmacht High Command.

  French Service de Renseignement was now headed by General Rivet, an excellent and a gallant officer, but a stranger to the specific problems of a secret service at war. The deficiencies of the organization baffled those in the field. “To be perfectly frank,” wrote the historian Marc Block, then serving as a reserve officer in the field, “more than once, I found myself wondering how much of this muddled thinking was due to lack of skill, how much to conscious guile. Every officer in charge of an Intelligence section lived in a state of constant terror that, when the blow fell, events might blow sky-high all the conclusions that he had told the general in command were ‘absolutely certain’. To put before him a wide choice of mutually contradictory inferences ensured that no matter what might happen, one could say with an air of triumph—’If only you had listened to my advice!’ Officers whose job resembled mine never got any information at all about the enemy, save what they were lucky enough to pick up in general conversations, or as a result of some chance meeting—in other words, almost exactly nil.”

  French combat intelligence officers in the field tried to take matters into their own hands, but their efforts were sabotaged from above. For example, it was imperative to establish what stocks of motor fuel the French could expect to find on the spot should they be forced to move into Belgium to meet the Germans. The Belgian General Staff, inspired by the King’s devotion to strict neutrality, proved highly un-cooperative. A French intelligence officer with General Blanchard’s army heard of a certain Belgian fuel dump and established contact with a confidential informant who gave him the required data about the capacity of the tanks. Moreover, the man volunteered to keep the tanks filled to capacity if that was what the French General Staff wanted. “This would make your supply problem easier,” he said, “in the event of your finding yourselves constrained, some day, to move your troops into the territory in which they are situated. Alternatively, I can maintain the bare minimum necessary for the requirements of peaceful commerce, thereby avoiding the danger of having to abandon the valuable resources to the Germans. It is for the French General Staff to decide. As soon as I know what they want done, I will take the necessary steps.”

  The matter was referred to a higher echelon of intelligence, but the officer in charge said, “Our job is to collect information, not to make decisions”, and refused to have anything to do with the matter. The young officer was shunted from one office to another and in each he heard the same formula. Thus rebuffed, the young man decided to resolve the issue on his own level. He sent his contact a coded message, “Don’t fill the tanks,” justifying his insubordination with a melancholy rationalization: “Unbroken silence on our part,” he said, “would have betrayed to this foreigner the shilly-shallying state of mind of the French General Staff. It was bad enough to know it ourselves.”

  The German preparations, of course, were moving rapidly ahead. One problem plagued the top brass: how could the Germans prevent the bridges over the River Maas and the Albert Canal from being destroyed? If they could be seized intact, the army could sweep over them and seal the fate of the Low Countries in a matter of days. Early in November, a conference was held in the Chancellery to discuss this problem. Hitler presided and Canaris was in attendance. The Abwehr was ordered to prepare a plan for the seizure of those bridges by a ruse de guerre, by sabotage troops dressed in Dutch and Belgian uniforms.

  Back in the Fuchsbau, Canaris called the keeper of his depot at Quenzsee to inquire how the Abwehr stood with Dutch army uniforms. He was told Quenzsee had some, but they were out of date. The Abwehr needed a few up-to-date pattern uniforms to enable the tailors (inmates of concentration camps) to make enough uniforms for the adventurous admiral’s little land army.

  The problem was referred to Commander Kilwen, head of the Dutch desk of the Abwehr, and he in turn got in touch with Mussert in Holland. The Dutch Fuehrer decided to steal the uniforms, but to camouflage the theft as common, garden-variety burglary. Mussert handed the job to a trusted member of his bodyguard who was a professional burglar in private life.

  The raid on the Dutch army depot was reminiscent of what New York burglars call a “Seventh Avenue heist.” Mussert’s burglars got what Canaris needed, but the thief was caught on Belgian soil with the uniforms in his possession and the cat was out of the bag: he confessed that he had been in the process of doing a “job” for the Germans and that Canaris was the mastermind behind the burglary.

  Strangely enough, the incident struck the Dutch and the Belgians as extremely funny. They were far more amused at the plight of the clumsy burglar than alarmed by the implications of the burglary. A Flemish newspaper published a cartoon showing a grinning Goering, dressed in the uniform of a Brussels street car conductor, admiring himself in front of a mirror.

  Canaris was called on the carpet by Hitler and Goering. He went to the meeting well prepared, with newspaper clippings and agent reports, assuring his bosses that the Dutch and the Belgians suspected nothing or else they wouldn’t have treated the whole thing as a joke.

  But Canaris still did not have the uniforms. He sent to Holland one of his best agents, whose specialty was surreptitious entry. Where the burglar failed, the Abwehr thief succeeded brilliantly. With the help of the Mussert organization, he sneaked into the depot—on a night when it was guarded by a Dutch soldier who was a Nazi sympathizer—picked a full selection of Dutch uniforms and sent them, in the German Military Attache’s bulging pouch (which, of course, enjoyed immunity from search), to Quenzsee. From there on, General von Lahousen, a former Austrian intelligence officer who was taken over by the Abwehr after the Anschluss, did the planning. Lahousen had his own sabotage troops, the Brandenburg Regiment, but it was not big enough to handle such a complex operation. Lahousen flew to Breslau and from that location with Abwehr volunteers organized Special Battalion 100 to take care of t
he Maastricht bridges, with one of his officers, Lieutenant Hocke, in command. From his regular sabotage troops he then formed Special Battalion 800, with Lieutenant Walther in command, to carry out the operation at Gennep.

  At Gennep a platoon of Battalion 800 was to be “captured” by agents of Mussert disguised as Dutch frontier guards; the German “prisoners” were then to be escorted to the bridges, which they were to seize with the active co-operation of their hosts. On A-Day, May 10, 1940, well before zero hour, Walther led his Battalion 800 to the rendezvous with the Mussert agents. The Dutch traitors apparently disarmed their “prisoners”, but left with them handgrenades and automatic pistols concealed under unseasonable greatcoats. With the help of their “captors”, these “prisoners” pounced upon the Dutch guards at the Gennep bridges, who did not even know the war was on. The operation was a resounding success.

  Things did not go as well at Maastricht, perhaps because (1) those Abwehr volunteers from Breslau did not have the savvy of the men of Battalion 800; (2) they lacked the assistance of Mussert’s men; and (3) because the Dutch regulars guarding the bridges were not paralyzed by the sudden appearance of transparently phony Dutch soldiers driving up in cars. The bogus Dutchmen were greeted by volleys of shots. Lieutenant Hocke was killed and, in the ensuing confusion, the real Dutchmen managed to blow up the three bridges.

  The mishap stunned Canaris. He drove to the spot and was visibly depressed when he realized he could not hand up to Hitler this special invasion-day gift. He found whole columns of German tanks and trucks jammed on the roads, waiting while engineers were building pontoon bridges. Even so, Dutch resistance was crumbling rapidly. The fiasco was forgiven and forgotten when, only five days later, Dutch resistance collapsed and the campaign was over.