The Venlo Incident

by Nigel Jones

To the

  Commandant of the K L.

  Dachau

  SS-Obersturmbannführer Weiter

  Personal

  On orders of the R(eichs) F(ührer) SS and after obtaining the decision of the highest authority the prisoners scheduled below are immediately to be admitted to the KL. Dachau.

  The former Colonel-General Haider

  „ „ General Thomas

  Hjalmar Schacht

  Schuschnigg with wife and child

  The former General v. Falkenhausen

  The Englishman Best (Wolf)

  Molotov’s Nephew Kokorin

  The Colonel, General Staff, v. Bonin

  As I know that you only dispose of very limited space in the Cell Building I beg you, after examination to put these prisoners together. Please, however, take steps so that the prisoner Schuschnigg, who bears the pseudonym Oyster under which name kindly have him registered, is allotted a larger living cell. The wife has shared his imprisonment of her own free will and is therefore not a ‘prisoner-in-protective-custody’. I request that she may be allowed the same freedom as she has hitherto enjoyed.

  The RF-SS directs that Haider, Thomas, Schacht, Schuschnigg, and v. Falkenhausen are to be well treated.

  I beg you on all accounts to ensure that the prisoner Best (pseudonym Wolf) does not make contact with the Englishman Stevens who is already there.

  v. Bonin was employed at the Führer’s Head Quarters and is now in a kind of honourable detention. He is still a Colonel on the Active List and will presumably retain this status. I beg you therefore to treat him particularly well.

  The question of our prisoner in special protective custody, ‘Eller’, has also again been discussed at highest level. The following directions have been issued:

  On the occasion of one of the next ‘Terror’ Attacks on Munich, or, as the case may be, the neighbourhood of Dachau, it shall be pretended that ‘Eller’ suffered fatal injuries.

  I request you therefore, when such an occasion arises to liquidate ‘Eller’ as discreetly as possible. Please take steps that only very few people, who must be specially pledged to silence, hear about this. The notification to me regarding the execution of this order should be worded something like this:

  On… on the occasion of a Terror Attack on… the prisoner in protective custody ‘Eller’ was fatally wounded.

  After noting the contents and carrying out the orders contained in it kindly destroy this letter.

  Signature: illegible.”

  ‘Eller’ was, of course, the pseudonym of Elser just as mine was Wolf and Stevens’s ‘Fuchs’ (fox).

  It is perhaps worth noting that the above letter, although written to the camp commandant, was contained in an envelope addressed to Untersturmführer Stiller with a note that, in the event of the latter’s death, it should be destroyed unopened. Stiller appears to have been a direct representative of the SD at Dachau and thus, although a subordinate, possessed of more real authority than the commandant. This was directly in line with Nazi policy which, as is the case in Soviet Russia, always took care that every man holding a position of any importance was kept under observation. There was another man, a Hauptscharführer, who appeared to spy on Stiller in turn.

  Although for the better part of the first week after our arrival I was really very ill with dysentery, getting so weak that I could hardly stand, I have the most pleasant memories of the days we spent, a band of absolutely united friends, in that garden at Dachau. Our two charming ladies, Vera von Schuschnigg and Gisela Rhode, looked after me with the utmost devotion and each in turn brought me little gifts, such as eggs, which they had been able to obtain, for both were voluntary prisoners and could visit Munich when they liked. I managed to get hold of the camp doctor, but when I asked him to prescribe something for me his answer was: “We need all the medicines we have for our own wounded. Why should I give anything to an Englishman?” Anyhow, Wouwer managed to get me some medicinal charcoal which I swallowed in vast quantities and Rhode brought me an electric warming cushion which I later learnt he had borrowed from Pastor Niemöller, and gradually I got better. By this time though I had got so thin (I weighed under eight stone against my normal weight of twelve) that when I went under the shower the joke was made of calling me Gandhi.

  For the first week of our stay at Dachau our little group from the ‘Grüne Minna’ remained the only inhabitants of our part of the building, and we came in contact with no one else except the Rhodes who, as it were, lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain. They were young people, he about thirty-five and she in her early twenties; she very sweet and pretty, and he a long, lanky, and rather untidy ‘intellectual’. He was head of a big radio firm at Munich and a few months before we reached Dachau had been denounced by an employee for listening to foreign broadcasts. He had been arrested by the Gestapo who, suspecting that he might have used the facilities of his business for the purpose of espionage, had resorted to physical violence in the hope of forcing him to confess. He had been flogged in all due form whilst his wife had been knocked about during interrogation and had received an injury above her eye which affected her sight. The Gestapo succeeded in establishing the fact that, even if he were not a spy, he was certainly an opponent of the Nazi regime, and at one time it seemed quite probable that they might have him shot out of hand.

  Rhode owed his escape to the fact that he claimed to be on the point of discovering a means of putting the ignition system of enemy planes out of action by a special radio beam and, as at that time Hitler was immediately interested in any idea, however fantastic, which might add to the list of secret weapons upon which his last hopes of victory were based, Rhode’s life was spared. He was brought to Dachau and given a large room which he filled with all manner of complicated radio equipment and ostensibly continued his search for the magic ray which would end hostile air attacks on Germany, though really all that he did besides some research work in the normal course of his profession, was to listen to B.B.C. broadcasts and to the conversations between the leaders of British and American planes as they passed over the camp. As he spent most of the day with headphones over his ears he could listen to whatever stations he liked without danger of being spotted.

  Photograph of German document captured from the Gestapo at Niederdor

  One of the first things that was done after our arrival was the construction of an air-raid shelter in our garden, which was nothing more than a shallow hole dug in the ground roofed over with timber and a thin covering of sods—hardly strong enough to withstand a large shell splinter. Nevertheless, whenever Allied planes passed overhead, which generally occurred two or three times daily, we were all driven in to take shelter and, what was far more annoying, the same at night. It was rather funny the way my life seemed to fluctuate in value. At Sachsenhausen I was supposed to take cover but didn’t, at Berlin and Dachau, I was given no choice, while at Buchenwald it was the guards and not I who went to ground.

  Our garden had originally been an execution yard, and that part of the building in which we were housed had contained the death cells. These had been redecorated and partly rebuilt to accommodate a party of distinguished Roumanians, and since they had objected to the presence of a gallows in their place of exercise and to executions being carried out there during their meal times, steps had been taken to convert it into a garden. When we arrived this work had not been quite completed and a prisoner, who acted as gardener, was busy making a new bed near one of the walls. He pointed out to me thousands of pit marks on the wall and described to me how prisoners had been brought in through a narrow doorway, ordered to turn with their faces to the wall, and had then been shot through the back of the neck. He said that digging up the beds he had removed a hundredweight and a half of pistol bullets. This gardener was a most amusing little fellow. He had originally been a circus clown and had travelled pretty well all over the world—he always acted and looked like a clown too. During the war the Germans had an economy campaign in the use of fuel, an
d in their press advertising used drawings of a scrubby, grubby little man whom they called ‘Kohlenklau’ (Coal pincher) and, as our little friend looked very like him, he was always known by this name. He was very knowledgeable, and as he was apparently free to go wherever he liked in the camp he had much interesting information to give. For some reason he seemed to have a liking for me and I found him most useful.

  The Schuschniggs had been able to bring their radio set with them from Sachsenhausen, and every afternoon we went to their room to hear the German war bulletin at three o’clock, after which our three generals and von Bonin would carefully mark up positions on a map, analyse every statement made, and finally deliver considered judgment on the military situation, reconstructing truth out of propaganda. These debates were most interesting, and I am sure that very few prisoners of war have ever been privileged to listen to discussions between an ex-C.G.S., two full generals, and the late G.S.O.(i) Operations, of the enemy’s staff. My presence certainly made no difference of any kind in the freedom of such discussions, for none looked upon me as an enemy; I was just one of the family, a family firmly cemented by the bond of common danger. I had many most interesting conversations with these officers, and even if it would not perhaps be indiscreet to repeat what was told me, in any case it would be out of place in this book. Anyone though who is interested to know more cannot do better than to read Liddell Hart’s book, The Other Side of the Hill, in which he gives details of his conversations with German generals who told him almost exactly the same things that I heard from them in Dachau. They were all men who hated Hitler bitterly; hated him most of all because he had involved their country in a war which from the first they had declared could not be won—whether they would have felt the same hatred for him had he been willing to accept advice and to postpone war until a propitious moment, I dare not venture to say. Who should blame them? Certainly none were men given to rattling the sword in its scabbard, or had any wish for war, but first and last they were Germans for whom their country came first, and when she was in danger could be counted on to perform the duties for which they had been trained with the utmost devotion.

  Generals in mufti tend to look very much like anyone else, but our two generals, Haider and Thomas, had absolutely nothing of the popular conception of a German officer about them; indeed, nothing distinctively German at all. Travelling in a suburban train from London, Haider would probably have been taken for the secretary of some important and highly respectable company, and Thomas for a lawyer. The attitude of both men towards the war was purely professional, and both seemed to derive a certain satisfaction from German-defeat since it tended to prove that war waged in defiance of established General Staff theory could never be successful. In numerous conversations with them I never had the impression that either felt any personal responsibility for the events which were rapidly leading to the destruction of their country—these were matters of politics and as such, entirely out of their range of interest. They were soldiers who, copying Moltke, regarded war dispassionately as though it were a game of chess; as long as they were players they devoted their best skill to the game, planning their moves and moving their pieces without thought of any purpose beyond that of playing strictly to rule. Hitler was for them an intrusive amateur who, ignorant of the rules, did not play the game.

  During our hours in the garden, our ladies, Vera von Schuschnigg and Gisela Rhode, held court, sitting on deck-chairs with all men their slaves. We did not talk about our own circumstances, indeed, for most of the time we did not even feel that we were prisoners—the sun shone, it was peaceful, and we were free to talk without fear of being overheard. The ladies, and that applies to all the women prisoners I met, showed the most perfect courage; that of simply ignoring the fact that danger existed—I cannot attempt to express what we men owed to them for this cheerful heroism and for the way in which, through their own behaviour, they re-educated us in the manners of civilized life, which for us were so far distant as to have become almost forgotten. Then there was little Sissie, aged four, who had never known such freedom or experienced life in such wide open spaces before. She had immediately the freedom of the house and for her there were no taboos, and no enmities. People for her were divided not into prisoners and jailers, but into nice people who gave her cake and sweets and uninteresting people who had nothing. She went everywhere and knew everyone. Every day she came back laden with the treasures which she had accumulated, chocolates, cake, sweets, and even some things which might pass as toys—everywhere she passed she left sweetness and new hope behind her. I, alas, had neither cakes nor sweets and so was unworthy of her attention; nevertheless, I was sufficiently happy watching her and envying her unconscious adaptation to the strange conditions of our life.

  At meals little Wassilli came to the cells of von Falkenhausen and myself, and, indeed, was always with us as much as possible. He was a very lovable sort of boy, quite unspoilt and unaffected, though strangely like his uncle Molotov in appearance. He could understand German quite well, but spoke it in a schoolboyish fashion which often added savour to the things which he said:

  “Stalin very beautiful man.” “He love my mother very much.” “She go to him every day after supper.” “Stalin very lazy man and hate work; he like good eating, good drink, and beautiful girls.” “Stalin marry a girl from my class at school and love her very much, but he soon get tired.” “Stalin always let Politbureau do what it like but my mother read all the letters which come to him and if she see too many people don’t like what done she tell him and he say Politbureau must do other things.” “Stalin beautiful character and never cross about anything but like much to laugh.”

  Wassilli said that his father was one of the heroes of the October revolution who had lost his life fighting the Whites; he had been a great friend of Stalin’s and his mother was the person he liked and trusted most. They lived in a house on the Red Square in Moscow, as Wassilli proudly said, with eight rooms and two servants; if they wanted a car this was provided from the Kremlin. He seemed, from what he told me, to have closer relations with Stalin than with his uncle who was inclined to look upon him as a lazy young devil who would never do much in life: “Molotov always busy. He do all things that Stalin doesn’t like and so people don’t like him like Stalin.” I asked him once why on earth he and Stalin’s son had been sent on such a dangerous mission as being parachuted amongst Russian partizans behind the lines. His answer was: “This great honour. Stalin can’t trust other people to go away from army as perhaps never come back and join Germans. Lots Russian officers and soldiers desert and fight for Germans so Stalin send me and other family of party leaders, but now Stalin very cross that I am prisoner. I must fight till dead, but my feet frozen and I could only lie down so Germans made me prisoner. Other prisoners shot or sent to labour camp after war and perhaps I too be badly punished.”

  Another time, talking about Russian prisoners who died or were executed at Sachsenhausen, I spoke about the Nazi terror His answer was: “German terror, ten, fifteen men, Russian terror ten—fifteen thousand men. What will you?” “Prisoners no good in war and no good after war. No man fight if easy be prisoner. In Russia, if man won’t fight, is shot; if becomes prisoner, is also shot—so better fight.”

  The general impression I got from my conversations with him was that he and everyone else in Russia lived in conditions of complete insecurity, and that these were accepted as quite natural and normal. He belonged to a privileged class, had had a good education, and, as long as Stalin held the reins, could look forward to promotion and favouritism; yet, he also had obvious fear of returning home after the end of the war, and the words: “I think Stalin he very angry with me,” constantly recurred in our talks. For the future, his ambition was to be sent on some diplomatic mission abroad, and then he said: “I stay away and don’t go back to Russia any more.” His ideal was to go to live in America.

  The Rhodes knew Stevens well and told me a lot about his life at Dachau. Although I
had caught a glimpse of him once or twice as I looked down his corridor when I went to the garden, I had made no attempt to enter into contact with him as obviously this was one of the things which were forbidden and I felt, that in any case, it would not be long before we could meet freely. The 14th April was my birthday and Stiller having provided some bottles of wine, we had a little celebration in the evening in an unoccupied cell which we used as a general sitting-room. We enjoyed this so much that next day, having managed to get hold of a cask of beer (Dachau and all contents of the canteen were being sold up, it seemed) we had a beer evening at which one of the warders, quite a pleasant young fellow, came and entertained us with songs to a lute. He and another warder named Lechner were professional musicians and had originally been in the army; both had been wounded and after recovery, instead of returning to their units had been drafted into the SS—to their great disgust. They were nice, well-behaved fellows, who treated all of us with the utmost courtesy, and obviously felt that they stood closer to us than to the professional jailers, some of whom looked to me pretty evil.

  After our beer evening had ended and we were all ready for bed, one of them whispered to me, “stay behind for a bit.” Shortly afterwards Lechner came in, bringing with him Stevens. He looked to me very fit and almost unchanged since I had last seen him. As soon as he came in he flung his arms round me and kept saying how glad he was to see me again. After this we sat down and talked about our experiences over a bottle of wine which Lechner brought in, telling us at the same time, that Stevens must not stay too long.

  That same morning I had had a long letter from Colonel McGrath hidden in a basketful of Red Cross delicacies which, having heard of my birthday, he had most kindly sent. Of course I thought that he had only sent me some of his surplus, but when later I got to know him personally I found out that his parcels had been stolen just as mine had been, and that he had practically cleared himself out in order to make me this present; he was a most kind and generous Irishman. In his letter he told me about his stay in cell No. 38 at Sachsenhausen, and of having once caught sight of me there though he had been unable to make his presence known to me. He had been wounded and captured during the Dunkirk period, and had for a time been commandant of a prisoner-of-war camp reserved for Irishmen, whom the Germans always deluded themselves into believing might be induced to transfer their allegiance from Great Britain to her enemies. McGrath took advantage of the more favourable conditions accorded to Irish prisoners to organize escapes and, when the Germans tumbled to it, was transferred to the Bunker at Sachsenhausen where he was kept in strict solitary confinement, being allowed neither to send, or receive letters. When I met him in 1945 he had been without news from home for three years, and suffered greatly from anxiety about his aged mother who, in fact, had died in the meantime.