He wasn’t much of a soldier. Nor did he look like one, even though his bearing was erect and his manner tended towards formality. In the khaki uniform of a British lieutenant colonel, Robert Currie Thomson looked stiff and uncomfortable, a man who would rather be elsewhere. It was a curious chain of circumstances which placed the taciturn Scotsman at the heart of a discovery that would eventually involve British war leader Winston Churchill, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and a clutch of American presidents.
The son of an impoverished market gardener from Corstorphine on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Thomson was an exceptionally bright boy who was educated at a local high school thanks to the generosity of his uncle. In 1906, at a time when only the sons of the privately educated joined the civil service, Thomson, then eighteen, won a civil service scholarship and took up an appointment at the prison service in Edinburgh before being transferred shortly afterwards to the Foreign Office in London. In those leisurely days, work did not begin until eleven in the morning, and Thomson discovered that members of staff who took the trouble to learn foreign languages earned a salary increment. Over the next few years he became proficient in German, French, Spanish, Russian, Polish, and Italian, his skills as a translator earning him a place on the diplomatic staff of two major international treaties, at Rapallo in 1922 and at the milestone Locarno treaty conference, which secured a postwar territorial settlement for Western Europe, signed in London in 1925.
As well as achieving the rank of chief translator, he was a king’s messenger, carrying diplomatic communications to foreign embassies and accompanying the diplomatic bag to and from British embassies abroad. This gave him diplomatic immunity at border crossings, Thomson using this privilege to extend his trips and undertake undercover work as a missionary, carrying Bibles and other Christian literature in the diplomatic pouch. During the 1920s and ’30s he travelled far and wide, focusing on Eastern Europe and Russia, where he preached in remote villages. As he had been raised in poverty and adversity, the primitive conditions—travel was often by horse and cart—were hardships he bore with fortitude. He would frequently ask his travelling companions: “Are you ready to sleep in a haystack? Can you eat stale bread? Can you shave in cold water?”
As both missionary and diplomat, he built up a network of contacts, often entertaining fellow believers at his home in Pinner, a well-to-do London suburb, where he lived with his Swedish-born wife, Anna, who worked as a nurse.
Yet his contacts and linguistic talents were consistently overlooked by his superiors. While he harboured dreams of joining the diplomatic corps, his primary career inside the Foreign Office was as an archivist and librarian. In this backwater, the Scotsman became increasingly embittered as he watched those with less ability but from the right families and class promoted over his head. By birth and geography, he would never be a member of the Old Boys’ Club. He never forgot—nor was allowed to forget—his modest Scottish roots, nor was he able to hide the resentment he felt towards the English Establishment. If, during his travels, he was mistaken for an Englishman, he would say: “I am nothing of the kind. Haven’t you heard of Scotland?” As his friend Roger Weil recalls: “He had contempt for the English ruling class and indifference towards the royal family.”
When he was later awarded the MBE for his Foreign Office service, he refused to go to Buckingham Palace to accept the honour from King George VI. Eventually, in a gesture of disdain and indifference towards the ruling classes, he gave his medals away to a youngster from his church.
As much as he may have bridled at the system, his Foreign Office work as a translator and librarian brought him into contact with the European elite, Thomson making lifelong friendships. One such individual was Wilhelm Achilles, a consul at the German embassy in London during the tenure of ambassador von Ribbentrop in the mid-1930s. Achilles refused to join the Nazi Party and, sensing the oncoming rush of war, sent his wife to Zurich in Switzerland to escape the imminent conflict. The couple saved what money they could and, shortly before he was transferred back to Berlin, he asked his trusted friend Robert Currie Thomson if he would forward funds from London to Switzerland to help his wife see out the war. Even though the two friends were now on opposite sides, Thomson was as good as his word, regularly transferring money to Achilles’s wife.
In the closing months of the war, with Germany about to capitulate, Achilles managed to get a message through to Thomson via his wife in Switzerland. He told Thomson that because of the sustained Allied bombardment of Berlin and the approach of the Soviet armies, the entire records of the German Foreign Office, together with the coffins of Frederick the Great and Field Marshal von Hindenburg and his wife, had been removed from Potsdam and sent in secrecy to remote castles in the Harz Mountains in Thuringia, at one time the home of composer J. S. Bach.
When Thomson received this message, Thuringia was in the American zone of operations, though it was shortly to be handed over to the Russians. Once the Soviets arrived there was no telling what would happen to these vital documents. It was imperative that the German archives be found and moved to the permanent British or American zones of occupation.
Once he briefed his superiors, it was decided that Thomson was the best man for the job of finding the papers and spiriting them away from the Harz Mountains. In the late spring of 1945, as the war reached its bloody conclusion, Thomson, then fifty-seven, found himself fitted out in an officer’s uniform, swapping his position as assistant librarian at the Foreign Office, albeit temporarily, for the exalted rank of lieutenant colonel. This would ensure that Thomson, now head of the Foreign Office field team, had sufficient seniority to deal with any American and British officers he may meet.
On May 1, just days before Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 9, Thomson received a hasty briefing on the rudiments of military etiquette and flew to France on the first leg of an adventure that would change the course of history.
This was no haphazard mission. Under what was known as the Goldcup Plan, the Allies had been plotting the capture of key German documents for several years. Indeed, by December 1944, Thomson was in regular contact with Dr. E. Ralph Perkins of the State Department’s research division, trying to work out a common policy on how to deal with these vital archives. The British in particular had learned a harsh lesson from the First World War; Germany may have lost the war but it won the subsequent propaganda battle. “The records will play a vital part in the ideological battles of the future,” noted E. Wilder Spaulding in a State Department memo of January 1944. In a later note, sent in August, Spaulding, who was head of the research and publication division, underlined the hunger for the Nazi archive: “The Germans have doubtless raped half of the diplomatic archives of Europe and it would be most unfortunate should we not seize this opportunity to obtain some of their most important records.”
During the First World War, the German empire seized archives in occupied areas and used them—for instance, through the publication of seized documents from occupied Belgium—as weapons of propaganda. The practice of publishing enemy documents, forged or authentic, for one’s own advantage was brought to perfection by the Nazi regime. As the Allied armies advanced, they discovered whole Nazi technical units dedicated to the forgery of documents relating to nations the Germans had conquered.
German officials had long realized the essential value of records, and as the Allied bombing of Berlin and other cities intensified, orders went out to move the files to safe places in rural areas. At first the relocation of records was carried out under the greatest secrecy, as any action of this kind would have been seen as pure defeatism. In November 1944 orders were given to relocate the records officially to the Riesen Mountains near the Czech border. Just three months later, further Soviet advances forced the German High Command to move them once more, to Meisdorf and Falkenstein in the Harz Mountains. In the final days of the war, German librarians were ordered to destroy the secret records, SS units sent to ensure the task was completed. These instructions
were largely circumvented by German civil servants who hid the files or burned only inconsequential or duplicate documents, hoping that this service would help them save their own skins when the Allies arrived. The destruction of archives was treated very seriously by the Allies. Civilians faced severe criminal penalties if they wilfully destroyed or concealed official German government records. One German woman who lived near Aachen, for instance, was jailed for six years in October 1944 for destroying records of her local Nazi women’s organization.
During this elaborate game of hide-and-seek, the Allies had drawn up a so-called Black List of high-value targets, focusing essentially on the records of Hitler, Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Office, and the Japanese embassy. Allied teams of document hunters known as Target Forces or simply T-Forces stood ready to sniff out hidden or missing documents. The identification and protection of German archives became a top priority, so that by January 1945 some 287 officers and nearly 900 soldiers awaited deployment for this task. As document hunter E. Ralph Perkins asked of his boss, E. Wilder Spaulding: “Wish me good hunting.”
While the Allies were eager to snag high-worth German documents, in the confusion of war no one was quite sure where they were hidden—hence the value of Thomson’s private intelligence. It was a haphazard process of discovery, which seemingly relied as much on dumb luck as smart planning. In January 1945 Robert Murphy, political advisor to the State Department—essentially the department’s czar in Europe—was given a list of eleven locations where the archives of the Auswärtiges Amt, the German Foreign Ministry, were stored. Only four turned out to be accurate.
For all the discussion and planning, the two most important discoveries of German documents took place thanks to Lady Luck and personal altruism. On April 12, Captain David Silverberg, a young Jew who fled Germany in 1936, was part of the American First Army advancing through the Harz Mountains and still meeting stiff resistance. As Silverberg and his men reached the town of Meisdorf he noticed a German army vehicle lying in a ditch with a confetti of papers strewn around. When he investigated further he was astonished to discover a document signed by Nazi foreign minister von Ribbentrop. As he later told documentary filmmaker Denys Blakeway: “Quite frankly, when you come right down to it, it was a simple piece of paper, wet and wrinkled, the signature smeared, but I recognized that one signature and it was the most important piece of paper I think that I have ever had in my hands.”
Clutching his booty, Silverberg and his unit drove into town to find out more about this mystery. After questioning several locals, he discovered that since 1943 the quiet little town of Meisdorf had been regularly disturbed by heavy trucks carrying bundles of documents to the local schloss that villagers had helped unload. Silverberg followed the trail to the castle. After cautiously walking down a few steps at the entrance, he heard a trembling voice cry out: “Please don’t shoot. Please don’t shoot.”
Emerging from the shadows was a middle-aged German, smartly dressed in a suit and tie. Once he calmed down he explained that Meisdorf was one of four locations where German Foreign Office documents had been stored. He went on to explain that the guards were under orders to destroy the archives rather than allow them to get into the hands of the Allies. They secured the archive at Meisdorf and then, armed with this fresh intelligence, Silverberg and his men sped off to the nearby schloss at Degenershausen, where they were assured more documents were stored. “We were absolutely stunned,” recalled Silverberg when he described entering a room and discovering an archival treasure trove. There were documents going back to the nineteenth century, some bearing the signatures of Kaiser Wilhelm I and Bismarck. Others were signed by Hitler and von Hindenburg. There was also a copy of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, the partly secret 1939 agreement between Germany and Russia pledging non-aggression, as well as maps, some bearing the writing of the two foreign ministers. One room was filled to the rafters with documents, wrapped in brown waxed paper and secured with twine. One word was prominently displayed: Geheim, or Secret.
These documents, together with others discovered at three other locations in the region, formed the overwhelming bulk of target P-67, the Allied identification for German Foreign Office documents.
The immediate problem facing the Allies was the fact that the region containing these vital records had been assigned to the Soviet zone of influence. As there was no appetite to share this booty with the Russians, the British and American authorities decided to transport the four hundred tons of documents west into the American zone. With the Russians gathering at the River Elbe there was little time to waste. After consultation with the British, US political advisor Robert Murphy decided to have the German records transported 150 miles by road to the castle of Marburg, north of Frankfurt. It took 237 trucks travelling in shuttle convoys several days to move the precious booty.
Once safely stored—ironically, the Americans used Russian labour for the heavy lifting—the documents were catalogued, microfilmed, and finally analysed by a team of experts. This slow and painstaking procedure was overseen by American intelligence representative Gardner C. Carpenter and Lieutenant Colonel Thomson. It was the hope of Thomson—and the Foreign Office—that the documents would provide proof that Germany had been planning the war for the past twenty years. Not everyone was convinced. As one official noted: “Do not believe that Thomson’s optimism in finding what he wants is especially justified, since the most interesting information is probably not on record.”
Besides analysing the bundles of papers, senior officers were busily questioning German archivists, diplomats, and other officials about the trove of documents. With his excellent German, Thomson took a leading role. He left Carpenter supervising the evacuation of documents and headed to Thuringia to interview Foreign Office staff. While there, he was reunited with his old friend Wilhelm Achilles, the former chancellor of the German embassy in London who had first contacted him about the archives. With his help, Thomson secured another fifteen truckloads of Foreign Office archives, which were duly dispatched to Marburg. Achilles was part of that convoy, Thomson anxious for his old friend to find safe passage into the American zone. Achilles subsequently supervised the German clerical staff who helped organize and catalogue the mountain of paper files.
With Achilles safely out of harm’s way, Thomson was returning alone from Mühlhausen, Thuringia, after interviewing a key German Foreign Ministry official, when he was approached by a German, aged about thirty-six, who spoke to him in faultless English.
According to Thomson’s report about the extraordinary episode, the smartly dressed gentleman had an extraordinary request. He asked him to take a letter to Duncan Sandys, Churchill’s son-in-law and the then British minister for housing. Thomson was taken aback and told him that he could take the letter only if he had some idea of the contents.
The mysterious German then revealed himself as Carl von Loesch, the understudy to Hitler’s personal interpreter Dr. Paul Otto Schmidt. Both men had been present during virtually all of the Führer’s meetings, both official and private, with world leaders and Axis politicians. Loesch explained that he was at Oxford University at the same time as Sandys, hence the letter to the Conservative member of Parliament.
Loesch had an offer that he hoped the Allies would be unable to refuse. He explained that in February 1945, when von Ribbentrop’s office was evacuated, he was sent to Thuringia with the most secret German archives from the years 1933 onwards. The haul included the original files and microfilm copies. As the Allies advanced he was ordered to destroy these highly sensitive documents. He obeyed orders, burning the original archive and the cardboard cartons in which the microfilm had been packed. He had repacked the film in a metal container and buried the container, wrapped in an old plastic raincoat, in the grounds of a country estate in the vicinity of Mühlhausen.
In return for revealing the whereabouts of this hidden treasure, von Loesch wanted to be flown to Britain. As his mother was English and he himself h
ad been born in London, he thought this would be possible. It was a calculated gamble, as an unforgiving conqueror could have tried him for treason. Loesch reckoned that the cards he held in his hand were worth the gamble. “I would stress the fact,” he wrote to Sandys, “that this lot contains only the essential but also all the essential documents. There has never existed a similar collection in Germany.”
Furthermore, he offered to help in the evaluation and examination of the trove, placing the documents in historical context. “I honestly believe them to be the clue to the true history of our times when used as a complement to those in possession of the British Government,” von Loesch wrote to Sandys.
On the surface it seemed a remarkable fluke for Thomson, the only British officer in the area, to have met von Loesch. In fact the German had already been identified as a person of interest to the Allies. As early as April 30, 1945, a top secret CIOS (Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee) memorandum was already in circulation describing von Loesch as living on a farm after having hidden thirty cases of Foreign Office documents. The memo recommended that the man be found “if possible.”
This intelligence, however, was not acted on. As Thomson wrote in his subsequent report: “It transpired later that the man had no idea that I was searching for the very things which he was willing to reveal but merely spoke to me because I was a British officer, a somewhat rare specimen in Thuringia.”
Given the fact that both he and von Loesch were experienced Foreign Office interpreters who may have met before the war and that Thomson had travelled to Thuringia in part to secure the safe passage of his diplomat friend Wilhelm Achilles, who had alerted him to the whereabouts of German Foreign Office files in the first place, it seems that more planning and forethought had gone into this “chance encounter” than Thomson subsequently revealed. Over the next few months Thomson’s solicitous attitude towards von Loesch aroused the suspicion of his American opposite number, Gardner Carpenter, who wrote a long memo of complaint to Robert Murphy.
17 Carnations: The Windsors, The Nazis and The Cover-Up Page 25