To their surprise and that of everyone present in Nuremberg that night, 12 September 1938, Hitler held back. The menace and the threats were there, as was the undisguised racial hatred of the Slavonic people, who were derided as the Jews of Europe. But as the diplomats, the army and the senior Nazis present noted, Hitler did not commit himself openly to war that night. He demanded justice for the German population in Sudetenland and left it at that.
Later that night, as Macrae joined the crowds streaming from the stadium, he felt two hands descending on his shoulder. He tried to twist around but could not turn against the grip. He glimpsed an army uniform and heard a low hissed whisper.
“Where are your ships? Where is the British fleet?” The grip was released. Macrae turned to see Koenig walking away from him, pushing through the crowd.
“Friend of yours?” Halliday had fallen in beside him. Both were hoping for a lift to their hotel in Nuremberg with the ambassador, but this was an offer that Sir Nevile must have forgotten, because there was no sign of him.
“No,” said Macrae.
“He looked a worried man,” said Halliday.
Not for the first time, Macrae wondered just how much Halliday knew and who he was really working for.
“I think we’re all worried, aren’t we?” he said carefully.
“What worries me is not this lot here,” said Halliday, “it’s the home team.”
“Home team?”
“Number 10. The PM and his merry men will be running around like rabbits after this. Something in my water tells me that they are going to do something really, really stupid.”
14
The news that the British prime minister had flown to Germany for a face-to-face meeting with Hitler broke like a bombshell around Europe. It was just three days after the Nuremberg speech and this was Britain’s response. Headlines from Moscow to Madrid heralded the initiative as a new era of peace in Europe, while politicians and diplomats scrambled to identify the real significance of what was widely described in the press as a masterstroke of diplomacy.
As he flew to Munich, Chamberlain congratulated himself both on what The Times had called a diplomatic bolt of lightning and on the Machiavellian skill with which he had handled his cabinet.
The morning after the Führer’s Nuremberg outburst, Chamberlain had summoned an informal meeting of his inner circle of ministers shortly before the full cabinet assembled. Headlines in every paper across the continent had reported Hitler’s venomous attacks on Czechoslovakia. As Lord Halifax, Sir John Simon and Sir Samuel Hoare stepped into 10 Downing Street, the BBC was reporting an uprising of the German ethnic minority in Sudetenland. Martial law was declared as the Czech government clamped an iron hand on the riots and demonstrations.
Across Germany, radio stations amplified reports in the morning press with detailed accounts of atrocities committed against German speakers across the border. The reports of rape and pillage were so colourful, and so similar in detail, that it was clear that they had been fabricated within the Propaganda Ministry on Wilhelmstrasse. But Joseph Goebbels, the street-sharp outsider who had been crippled by polio as a child and forced to conceal his disability during years of bullying at school, knew the value of an oft-told lie. The fiction of Czech brutality against helpless German women and children was repeated until it became fact.
Britain’s official policy of appeasement lay in ruins; at least, that is the way it appeared to the press and most of the government. Chamberlain took an entirely different view. An untitled brown folder lay before ministers as they took their seats in the Cabinet Room. This was unusual, and Lord Halifax looked sharply at the prime minister. The foreign secretary didn’t like changes to the official routine of government business, and he didn’t like surprises. He suspected the folder contained both. He opened it, to see a typewritten agenda.
The first eight items concerned routine reports. A number of British warships in Scapa Flow had been brought out of the reserve in which they had effectively been mothballed since the last war. Crews of the 7th Destroyer Flotilla had been summoned from leave and returned to full complement. There was a question about the need to improve cipher facilities at the embassy in Berlin.
Halifax and his ministerial colleagues round the table stiffened as they saw that item nine was described simply as “The Z Plan”. Item ten was “Publicity for the Z Plan”.
Sir Neville Chamberlain watched as his most loyal ministers scanned the agenda and turned to him with questioning faces. The Z Plan was his initiative, his answer to Herr Hitler, and it carried with it his hopes for preventing a second world war. He alone, Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of Great Britain, would take responsibility for the high risk it entailed. But he could not argue the case for the Z Plan to his full cabinet alone. He needed his most trusted ministers with him when he put the plan to what he suspected would be a sceptical, if not hostile, meeting later that morning.
“May I suggest we take items one to eight as read and approved and move to item nine.” The dry tones of Lord Halifax elicited nods around the table.
Chamberlain turned to his new cabinet secretary, Edward Bridges, who had been told of the Z Plan. Bridges was a civil servant whose orderly mind mirrored the workings of the antique clocks on the mantelpiece. The difference was that the clocks told the prime minister the right time. The cabinet secretary merely told him he was right.
“Yes, of course,” said Chamberlain. For a man as certain as he was of the righteousness of his political principles, and especially of the inarguable case for his appeasement policy, he felt unusually nervous. Sir Robert Vansittart was in the room. The powerful permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office had made and unmade more than one foreign secretary in previous governments, and had recently drifted dangerously close to criticising government policy in relation to Germany.
Chamberlain cleared his throat, took hold of his lapels and leant forward in his chair, looking in turn at his ministers as he spoke.
“Gentlemen, I intend to ask our ambassador in Berlin to convey a message this morning to Herr Hitler. I will offer to fly immediately to Germany to conduct face-to-face negotiations, to settle once and for all his territorial claims. I have studied his speech last night at Nuremberg and he has not done anything irrevocable. Herr Hitler has opened the door to peace, gentlemen, and I intend to step through it.”
There was a pause as ministers sought to understand what they had just been told. More than one of them thought that this was a premature and undignified reaction to a crisis that had yet to unfold. But they said nothing.
“With cabinet approval, of course?” said Vansittart.
“Of course; that is why we are here. I want to take soundings with you all first. By the way, have we heard from the French?”
Vansittart realised the prime minister had been made aware of the cable that morning from the French premier, Édouard Daladier. The government in Paris had been unable to decide how to act in the event of German aggression against Czechoslovakia, a nation it was bound by treaty to defend. Daladier had appealed to Chamberlain to strike whatever bargain was necessary with Hitler to prevent just such action.
“Yes, Prime Minister,” said Vansittart wearily. “The French are out of the game. The ball is in our court.”
And that, he reflected, gave Chamberlain a free hand to launch a diplomatic mission that would probably encourage the very war it was designed to prevent. Chamberlain had been clever. The one minister with the weight to oppose him, the secretary of state for war, Sir Leslie Hore-Belisha, had not been asked to attend the informal meeting. Hore-Belisha would speak at the full cabinet but, whatever his criticism, he would find little support. The prime minister would justify his one-man diplomacy in the name of securing a lasting European peace. Few would have the nerve to argue with that.
Vansittart played the only card left in his hand.
“With respect, I suggest you don’t send a message to the German chancellor saying you are prepar
ed to fly immediately to meet him. It sends the wrong signal.”
“And what signal would you like me to send him?”
“Mobilise the fleet. Send our capital ships into the North Sea. Have them deploy within sight of the German coast. Show Hitler that if he attacks Czechoslovakia he will face, at the very least, a naval blockade.”
Those present in the room would remember for a long time the face of the prime minister as he reacted to this statement. The grey pallor that characterised Chamberlain’s features suffused into a deep red. Sir John Simon told his wife later that evening that the prime minister’s salt-and-pepper moustache seemed to darken and bristle.
The prime minister spoke slowly, chopping his reply into words of almost one syllable, like a headmaster talking to an errant schoolboy.
“Have you not read the reports from our ambassador in Berlin – of whose appointment to that post two years ago I believe you personally approved? Are you aware that Sir Nevile Henderson has advised that any further threats or warnings to Herr Hitler will push him over the edge, if not of madness then of mad action? Are these warnings of no account? Do they mean nothing to you?”
Vansittart had never been spoken to in such a manner in the Cabinet Room, least of all in front of his colleagues. He was framing a suitably curt reply when Sir John Simon spoke.
“Assuming cabinet approval, when would you go?”
Chamberlain smiled benignly on his home secretary. He could see that he and his colleagues were reacting well to his lightning stroke of diplomacy. Vansittart had been neutralised and would not be invited to full cabinet later that day.
“The day after tomorrow. I have never travelled in an aeroplane, but I am told that the flight will take only three hours and that the weather is good.”
An hour later, Chamberlain repeated his plans to the full cabinet.
To his slight surprise, he carried his ministers without dissent. It was only when he revealed that he had already sent a message to Sir Nevile Henderson asking him to arrange the meeting with Hitler that there was a rumble of irritation around the table. The prime minister had clearly pre-empted cabinet approval, but these were dangerous times and despite the breach of constitutional protocol and the risks of a humiliating diplomatic disaster, there was unanimous agreement. Their sixty-nine-year-old leader would make his maiden flight in forty-eight hours, flying to Munich for talks with the German chancellor.
In the British embassy in Berlin, the staff were as surprised by the news as anyone. The previous night, Sir Nevile Henderson had left by train for Munich, where he was to meet Chamberlain’s plane. He was unaccompanied and had told no one the reason for his journey.
Macrae and Halliday found themselves in the ambassador’s outer office with David Buckland and staff from the press-relations section. They were all trying to respond to an avalanche of calls from newspapers and radio stations. The two phones on the secretary’s desk in the outer office were ringing furiously and a teleprinter machine in the corner was clattering out reams of copy. The secretary herself was close to tears. All she could tell them was that Sir Nevile Henderson had left on a late train to Munich the previous evening and he had told her to keep his journey absolutely secret.
Halliday steered Macrae to an empty office. The two men sat down. They had heard the news of Chamberlain’s mission to meet Hitler only an hour earlier, on German state radio.
“Well?” said Macrae.
“Man’s a genius,” said Halliday.
“You’re mad!” said Macrae. “Time you went home.”
Halliday smiled. “I’m talking about Hitler. He’s got the British prime minister on bended knee, desperate to strike any bargain, make any concession, sacrifice any territory, as long as it’s not ours, of course; anything as long as he can go home and say …” Halliday stood up and raised his arms to the ceiling. “‘Peace, my friends! Peace! I have achieved peace!’”
Halliday sat down. “I don’t even think the bastard knows how clever he is.”
“Go on.”
“Because he’s put the kibosh on those plans your friends have.”
Chamberlain’s sudden arrival in Germany had been such a surprise that Macrae had forgotten about Koenig. He would have been trying to get in touch, trying to understand if there was a devilish subplot to the dramatic news of Chamberlain’s mission. Halliday was right. Britain had played the peace card, allowing Hitler to play for time. There was no chance the army would move now.
“See you later,” Halliday said.
15
Joachim Bonner sat in his office, trying to make sense of the press reports clattering in on the tape machine from Munich. There were Union Jacks flying alongside the swastika on the main road from the airport. The official cars taking Neville Chamberlain and his party to the railway station had been cheered by people along the route. Men old and young had raised their hats to the British party and women had waved scarves and handkerchiefs. The news had seemed so unlikely that Bonner had phoned Gestapo headquarters in Munich asking for confirmation. He had been told that people were overjoyed at the prospect of peace and that in the bars and cafés toasts were being raised both to Hitler and, more significantly, to the British prime minister.
Bonner called Hilde into his office. The woman would have a view on the situation and he was curious to know what it was.
“What do you think of this business of the British prime minister suddenly flying to see the Führer?”
Hilde thought for a moment and said, “I lost my father in the last war. Would you like a coffee?”
He watched her leave, swinging that rounded rear at him as if in invitation. She was clever and probably capable of great cruelty. She never raised an eyebrow when the occasional scream penetrated the office. She had also shown an interest in the reports of the interrogation sessions and had once asked if there were any opportunities for training and a transfer to an operational department. He had turned her down because she was too useful to him; anyway, finding someone you could trust with the intelligence that crossed his desk wasn’t easy. But he knew that she was due for training and promotion. Men broke under torture and interrogation more quickly when a woman asked the questions and inflicted the pain. Statistics gathered over the last five years had proved the point, but not many women liked the job. Hilde would. She was tough. And Hilde, like everyone else in Germany, it seemed, wanted peace.
Bonner thought for a while. What would the Gestapo do if there were peace in Europe? Suppose the British, those romantic dreamers in that soggy island of theirs, actually persuaded the Führer to accept the Sudetenland in exchange for a peace treaty? What would the Nazis and their National Socialist Party do? Beat their swords into ploughshares, turn their tanks into cars? Dig up all the mines laid along the border with France? What would happen to the new Me 109 fighter that was supposed to outfly anything the British could put in the air? And that advanced long-range artillery gun that Krupp was bringing into production? Above all, what would happen to people like him, whose whole career had been based on the detection and suppression of opposition to the regime? Where would an outbreak of peace and prosperity leave the communists, the anarchists, the fascist-hating leftists and all those feeble-minded sexually confused critics of National Socialism in the media and the arts? Was it conceivable that the sworn enemies of the Reich would salute a man who had restored German pride, united its people and committed his great nation to peace and prosperity?
Bonner relaxed and reached for a cigarette. Hilde didn’t like him smoking in the office, but with luck she had taken her fat arse off to the canteen for coffee. It wasn’t going to happen. Peace was unthinkable. Every single step that the Führer had taken since he came to power in 1933 pointed in one direction. You didn’t have to be a genius to see that deep in Hitler’s gut was a craving for war, a visceral yearning to avenge the humiliation of 1918.
Perhaps if you plumbed the depths of the man, you would find another dark secret, a desire to extinguish m
emories of a shameful past, when he lived rough on the streets of Vienna in those years when the city was an imperial capital. There, little better off than the beggars crouched outside the opera house pleading for coins, the young Führer had failed at everything he tried to do, especially his pathetic efforts to become an architect. Like most in the Gestapo, Bonner knew the history well, although Goebbels had been careful to destroy the records and sanitise biographies for public consumption.
The fact was that Adolf Hitler was a broken failure of a young man when he joined up in 1914. In the trenches of Flanders, where he ran messages under fire, he suddenly discovered that he could do something useful. That is when a nobody who had done nothing and meant nothing to anyone suddenly became a somebody. He had won an Iron Cross 2nd Class, although no one knew exactly what it was for, and at the end of the war they were dishing the medals out like rations just to keep the troops going. Still, Hitler loved his medal. He was said to keep it in a purple velvet-lined box on his dressing table and prop it up so that he could see it first thing in the morning. He wore it on every occasion, especially when meeting foreign dignitaries.
No, peace wasn’t going to happen. In any case, there would always be the communists and the Jews. The reds would never give up the struggle, and as for the Jews, the Gypsies and the Roma, there was going to be no peace for them and plenty of work for a policeman, a secret policeman, of his calibre.
Bonner put out his cigarette, tipped the contents of the ashtray into the waste bin and walked to the window. He wondered what Reinhard Heydrich would make of the Munich talks. Knowing his boss, he would dismiss the whole exercise as a stunt designed to throw dust into the eyes of the British. And Heydrich was probably right. He knew better than anyone that there wasn’t going to be peace. All that man wanted was to get on with his work and his womanising. His work was now concentrated on the Jews and their future. Heydrich had a whole department working on ways of speeding up their forced emigration.
Midnight in Berlin Page 23