sent to French foreign minister Georges Bonnet, who responded that if Hitler went ahead with his plan, France could only react if Britain did – and Britain showed no signs of wanting to.
Rivet, conscious that he now had a very high-level source in Madeleine, instructed his new spy that she was never again to visit the French embassy in Berlin. In future she should pass her information by telephone to the French military attaché in the city, using a secret number which she should dial only from public phoneboxes.
On the evening of 8 November, not long after Madeleine’s return to the German capital, she was strolling with Lahousen down Kleiststrasse when he mentioned the assassination the previous day of a German diplomat in Paris by a Polish Jew. ‘The government,’ he told her, ‘has secretly ordered a “spontaneous wave” of reprisals to be launched by paramilitaries against the Jews, under cover of which their private wealth will be pillaged and Jewish synagogues will be burnt. Fire engines will be pre-positioned around the synagogues – not to stop them burning, but to save neighbouring buildings.’
The following night, Germany was convulsed and the world shocked by yet another outrage against the Jews. Kristallnacht was so named because of the carpets of broken glass which littered German streets after violent nationwide attacks on Jews and their property. Over a thousand synagogues were set on fire, many of them being totally destroyed; more than 7,500 Jewish businesses were demolished; at least ninety-one Jews were killed, and 30,000 arrested and incarcerated in Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. For Carl Goerdeler, himself not immune to a degree of anti-Semitism, this was a turning point. ‘The shame and bitterness of the most patriotic went so far as to make them be ashamed before the world of the name German which we loved and of which we were so proud … For many who hesitated there was now no possibility of reconciliation with this regime of violence,’ wrote one witness after the war.
Some of the September plotters went further, actively helping the Jews to escape the mobs and the Gestapo. Canaris was later thanked by Jewish leaders for what he did that night to save members of their community. Hans Oster offered to smuggle his Jewish neighbours out of harm’s way:
In the afternoon of 9th November 1938 our neighbour, the wife of Colonel, later General Hans Oster, called on us to offer the shelter of their home to my father, who was a lawyer aged 58. The news of the arrest of Jewish men had spread to both our families. The Osters and our family lived on the same floor of a Berlin apartment block. There were two staircases, one for tradesmen and one for us. Mrs Oster proposed that if the Gestapo called at the front door, my father could easily slip across to their flat by the back door.
Afterwards, Canaris, Oster and the Abwehr lawyer Hans von Dohnányi set up a secret organisation to smuggle Jews out of Germany, often by recruiting them into the Abwehr and then sending them abroad as Abwehr ‘agents’. The son of Canaris’s pastor recalled one among many recorded examples of Canaris and the Abwehr helping Jews to escape:
Thirteen Jewish men who had married non-Jewish women … were deported to different camps … all of them were released thanks to the combined efforts of Canaris and his staff … the Admiral succeeded in organising their transport in a closed train compartment to Madrid, where they came under Franco’s protection. Canaris used his connections to put thirteen of them up in private homes in Madrid before some of them were flown to England. Most … joined the British military.
On New Year’s Day 1939, with international tension rising again over Czechoslovakia, Canaris appointed Erwin Lahousen as the head of Section II of the Abwehr (sabotage and disruption), and gave him two sets of orders. One was designed for official consumption; the other was ‘unofficial’, and described Lahousen’s real task, which Canaris ordered should be to form ‘a secret organisation within Abwehr II and the Brandenburg Regiment, with the purpose of bringing together all anti-Nazi forces and preparing them for illegal acts … against the system … With the successful incorporation of Czechoslovakia into … the Third Reich … the way to war with Poland has been opened for Hitler and his clique of criminals. I am convinced that the other great Powers will not be caught this time by the political … tricks of this pathological liar. War will result in a catastrophe … [not just] for Germany [but also] for all mankind … if there were victory for the Nazi system.’
With her lover busy out of Berlin taking over his new organisation, Madeleine Bihet-Richou used the opportunity for a swift visit to Paris. There she received training in the use of secret ink, and underwent a deep-level interrogation about her relationship with Lahousen and his possible motives in talking to her so openly.
The early months of 1939 were full of intense diplomatic manoeuvring as everyone waited for Hitler’s next play. On 20 February, Spain, under substantial German and Italian pressure, agreed ‘in principle’ to join Hitler’s Anti-Comintern pact, insisting, however, that it should do so secretly. Five days later, to even up the balance and keep everyone on their toes, Franco signed an agreement with France that Madrid would stay neutral. Most small states in Europe, inferring from the Czech crisis that the Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century was now a dead letter, began negotiating bilateral non-aggression pacts with Hitler. The British government for its part resolved that, since it was no longer able to honour guarantees, it should avoid giving any. Meanwhile, after a government study into how France could defend itself against air attack had concluded that it couldn’t, French foreign minister Bonnet decided that the best protection for his country lay not in anti-aircraft batteries, but in a piece of paper declaring lasting friendship between Paris and Berlin. In all this scurry of diplomatic to-ings and fro-ings, one assumption was commonly held by all: that, given Hitler’s high-octane, high-volume and high-frequency warnings of the communist threat to Europe (accompanied by insults to match), the one pact that was out of the question was an alliance between Hitler and Stalin. In February, however, both Canaris and Churchill simultaneously picked up tremors that all was not as it seemed, and that there were signs of a growing rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow. Unaware of this, the Bank of England, at the government’s behest, offered the German Reichsbank a huge loan designed to encourage Hitler to make his next move for ‘Lebensraum’ east towards the Ukraine and Russia, rather than west.
In the spring of 1939, the shadow-boxing suddenly turned into the real thing.
In early March Lahousen told Paris, through Madeleine, that German armour and troops were concentrating near the Bohemia–Moravia border, where they would be within swift striking distance of Prague. A little later he followed this up by providing Madeleine with the complete German plan for the invasion of what remained of Czechoslovakia. What Hans Bernd Gisevius was to call ‘the March madness’ had begun.
At 7 a.m. on 11 March, at Paul Thümmel’s request the Abwehr spy met his Czech handler in the station buffet of the Czech market town of Turnov. ‘The final decision has been taken in Berlin,’ Thümmel reported. ‘On 15 March Czechoslovakia will no longer exist.’ Thümmel was swiftly bundled into a car and driven to Prague, where in a Czech intelligence safe house he outlined in detail, complete with supporting documents, the German plan of attack on Czechoslovakia. He also handed over an original Gestapo document which contained orders for all Czech intelligence officers to be rounded up after the invasion and submitted to ‘interrogation with great severity’. Thümmel’s information was rushed to Colonel František Morávec, the head of the Czech intelligence service, who instructed that the German spy should be given six emergency ‘accommodation’ addresses through which he could keep in contact if the Czech government was forced to go into exile. Two of these were in The Hague, two in London, one in Sweden and one in Zürich. As he left to return to Germany, Thümmel turned to Morávec: ‘Good luck, Colonel. This is not goodbye, but auf Wiedersehen.’
The Czech spy chief passed Thümmel’s information to the pro-German Czech foreign minister, who dismissed it as alarmist: ‘If such events were in store, I, as Foreign Minister, would be the first to know … In future do not bring such upsetting reports which could spread alarm and disturb the peace.’
This view was shared by the British ambassador in Berlin, Nevile Henderson, who sent a telegram to London anticipating ‘in the immediate future, a period of relative calm’. He backed this up with a report a week later, on 9 March, predicting that if the remains of Czechoslovakia