Chapter Nineteen

THE early autumn of 1944 my friends in S.O.E. began toying with the idea of a Skorzeny type commando raid on Ithe Fuhrer-headquarters. They thought it would be a neat way of shortening the war if they could bump off Hitler and Himmler.

And so too it would have been. I say would have been, because in the end this plan, like so many others before it, was rejected. Not however before a most meticulous intelligence survey had been made, recording every relevant and irrelevant detail that could be collected about the set-up in the Fiihrerheadquarters and the ancillary headquarters of Himmler and Ribbentrop.

Captured German generals and staff officers were carefully interrogated about what they remembered from their visits to the headquarters, maps were drawn of the various Fuhrer and Reichsfuhrer SS camps and of the trains of Pullman cars in which Germany's leaders ate, slept, worked, and travelled. The security system with its rings of guards and strong points was described and analysed. Lists were made of the permanent denizens of the headquarters. And they were sketched with a detail which would have enraptured a gossip columnist. And then, as I have said, the project was abandoned.

But the intelligence that had been collected was not wasted. The monitored conversations between the generals, the interrogations, the maps all travelled down to MB. And there they were built up into news stories about the hitherto top secret private life of Hitler and his suite that tortured the ailing Fuhrer with the suspicion that the British had their spies right inside his H.Q. Clifton Child was a genius at freshening up a piece of intelligence with a new development that made it sound like something that had happened the night before. We told of the adventures of the popsies brought in to amuse the tired Fuhrer, of the boisterous jinks of blonde Blanda-Elizabeth, the young wife of Dr. Walter Hewel who represented the German Foreign Office at the H.Q. How, for instance, at a gay party in the Berchtesgadener Hof on the Fiihrer's Obersalzberg she had shown off her prowess as a barber by soaping and shaving Herrmann Fegelein, the SS general who had become the Fuhrer's unofficial brother-in-law by marrying the sister of his mistress Eva Braun.

We told stories about the drugs with which the Fuhrer's court physician Professor Morell had been injecting him, and how these had turned Hitler into a half-paralysed trembling dotard. Shady deals in gold watches and human lives pulled off by Himmler's masseur, the plump and ever hungry Felix Kersten, came under the merciless publicity of the Soldatensender's news bulletins. Kersten, we said, had gained such an ascendancy over Himmler by massaging away his stomach cramps that the `Reichsheini' could refuse him nothing. Himmler, according to the Soldatensender, even let Kersten have slave labour from concentration camps for his estate at Harzwalde.

We reported the jealousies and bickering between Hitler's sycophant courtiers. And nearly all of it was true, or was so close to the truth as to be most disturbing to the great man who had ordered a special monitoring watch of the Soldatensender. Quite early on we got Hitler to the point where he commanded Goebbels and Schellenberg to check our news items to find out whether they were true and if they were, to try and hunt down our source.

Hitler's suspicions reached their climax when the Soldatensender, using the same technique of intelligent deduction and anticipation which had served us so well in the past, reported an order issued by the Fuhrer at a conference in his headquarters, and did so within twenty-four hours of his having given it and before it had been carried out.

On March the 7th, 1945 the Americans, by an historic piece of dash and improvisation, had managed to capture the great railway bridge across the Rhine at Remagen without the Germans having time to blow it up. Donald and I were discussing the talk in which Sepp Obermeyer had said the Luftwaffe bombers had been ordered to make Japanese style suicide dives on the bridge with blockbuster bombs.

" Of course the real people to have a go at the bridge should be the Navy with their frogmen," said Donald as much in joke as anything. I immediately turned to Frankie Lynder.

" Where are the nearest frogmen units?" I asked.

" I think Admiral Heye's K-force has some at Nimwegen. We could easily move them up-stream and have them make an underwater attack against the bridge with those special torpedo mines-the T.M.C., you know, sir."

Frankie had never lost his admirable habit of saying `Sir' to his superior officers which had won him three stripes in the Pioneer Corps.

" Oh, I don't think we want to report an actual attack, Sergeant. We'll just say that the Fiihrer had the brilliant idea of an underwater attack and that Admiral Heye, eager to add diamonds to his oak leaves, or whatever else it is he covets in the way of decorations, has graciously consented to sacrifice frogmen on operation `Lorelei'. I think you should make a great play of some chap arguing that the whole scheme is impossible rubbish owing to the incalculable underwater currents of the Rhine."

It was just a routine `black' story like hundreds of others we had thought up. But what a commotion it caused in Hitler's headquarters in the underground shelter at the Reich chancellery in Berlin, when we put it on the air on March the i i th ! For, unknown to us at the time, the Fuhrer had in fact ordered the German Navy's C.-in-C. Grand Admiral Dcenitz to lay on an underwater operation by naval frogmen against the bridge. The whole episode is most painstakingly recorded in the Secret Minutes of the Fiihrer conferences on Naval Affairs.*

Hitler, it appears from the minutes, had ordered the operation on March the 8th, 1945- On March the 9th at 17.oo hrs. Admiral Doenitz reported to his Fuhrer that two detachments of frogmen had been selected for the operation and that they were being sent up river as fast as possible. They would use torpedo mines attached to one another-exactly the technique Sergeant Lynder had recommended!

Then on March the 11th, the Soldatensender and its twin brother the short-wave Atlantiksender made our announcement. And here is the Minute taken at the Fiihrer conference on the following day.

" Berlin March 12, 1945, 16.00 hrs.

Remagen Bridge. The British Atlantiksender has announced German plans to use amphibious commandos to blow up the bridge at Remagen. The C.-in-C. Navy informs the Fuhrer that he intends to carry out his plan regardless of this broadcast, because there is a possibility that the British made the announcement in order to bluff us."

Doenitz was trying to make light of the `leak' of his operational plans. Not so however Hitler or the unfortunate frogmen commandos. For Hitler, it was the supreme proof that he was surrounded by traitors. His secrets had become so cheap that the enemy broadcast them to the world. For the frogmen it was catastrophic. They felt like condemned men when they finally set out for their underwater swim to the bridge. Vicky had played them the Lorelei song by way of greeting and as they flippered their way through the swirling icy-cold currents with their unwieldy twin torpedos they felt the eyes of the enemy upon them all the way. They surfaced and surrendered to the Americans before they got anywhere near the bridge.

Which did not, however, prevent Doenitz from claiming the destruction of Remagen Bridge as the work of his brave frogmen when at last it did collapse, not from any damage the Germans had managed to do, but from the after-effects of the pasting it had received from the K.A.F. and the U.S.A.F. while it was still in German hands.

" I was right, mein Fuhrer," triumphed Dcenitz. "The Atlantiksender was bluffing. We have destroyed the bridge despite their claim to know our plans."

But Hitler just stared ahead of him without looking at his Grand Admiral.

" Perhaps . . ." he said, and that was all.

In these last few months of the war, the German section of S.O.E. had been given a new boss, a man of immense energy and drive who was determined to harass the Germans with every means at our disposal. He now co-opted me to sit in at a regular weekly meeting at which we discussed new plans and new ideas. And it was as a result of one of these meetings that my unit carried out its last and most bizarre counterfeiting operation of the war. ' The new boss was Lieutenant General Gerald Templer.*

He had been badly shattered during the campaign in Southern Italy when his car collided with a retreating German army lorry and a looted piano which the Germans were carrying off in the lorry fell on Templer and broke his back. Now Templer, effervescent and enthusiastic as ever, presided over our meetings, strapped in a corset of steel and plaster.

We had been discussing `Operation Periwig', a scheme for harrassing the SD and Gestapo and submitting them to the utmost strain. The talk had got around to dropping fake agents by parachute-dummies that were got up in battle dress and fired off crackers which sounded like automatics-when young Squadron-Leader Potter of S.O.E. mentioned carrier pigeons.

" I believe, sir," he said to Templer, "that we still have a considerable stock of carrier pigeons for which no one seems to have any use. The sort, sir, which we used to drop over the occupied territories for resistance-minded inhabitants to pick up and send back to us with intelligence about the Germans in their district." Potter explained that the pigeons were parachuted to the ground in air holed cartons which contained, in addition to the pigeons, a questionnaire concerning troop movements and other matters of interest to the intelligence people. Also a set of instructions on how to feed and water the birds and how to attach the filled in questionnaire before setting the pigeon free to fly home to its S.O.E, loft.. .

Someone now suggested dropping these birds m Germany and giving the Germans a chance to repudiate Hitler by giving useful information. This was the cue for me.

" That is a splendid idea. But I think we might be able to do even better, sir," I said, speaking in my full dignity as the only ' Psychological Warrior on the committee. "I suggest that in addition to parachuting live birds with questionnaires in their boxes we should also drop a few dead ones without boxes but with questionnaires attached to their legs which have already been completed-by . . . er ... ourselves!"

Templer, who had-and still has-a schoolboy's delight in mischief, roared with laughter and immediately approved the scheme.

The object, of course, was that the birds and their completed questionnaires should fall into the hands of the Gestapo who would try and detect from the answers what traitor had written them. We would phrase the answers in such a way, I suggested, that the Gestapo would be led into arresting some of their own trusted Party functionaries-men who they would be led to believe were now trying to buy themselves a little slice of last minute reinsurance with the allies. And if the dead bird was picked up by an ordinary civilian who did not hand it over to the police, it would still provide admirable evidence that wellinformed and authoritative party comrades were defecting. It would encourage him to do so himself:

" One snag, sir, that occurs to me is," I said to Templer, "can we devise a way of landing a dead bird without it smashing to pulp when it strikes the ground ? If it does, it will rather give the show away. For a tired pigeon or even one which had been killed in mid-air would surely not fall from such a height as to smash."

Squadron-Leader Potter immediately promised to take care of this aspect, and I was authorised to go ahead and prepare the questionnaires-with and without answers.

The pigeons were duly dropped and duly picked up by the Germans. Quite a number arrived back with questionnaires that had been filled in by our German correspondents. But one pigeon scrambled into its loft with this polite `Thank you' message scrawled over an otherwise blank sheet. "I had the sister of this one for supper. Delicious. Please send us some more."

Whether the Gestapo fell for our deception, as I hoped they would, I never got a chance to check. But I think that anyone who knew that slow witted and gullible Security Service and its methods will agree with me that it is a safe bet that they did.

Chapter's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Aspistdistra Photos - Milton Bryan Photos - Contents

The Soul of Hitler : Series of articles published in July 1939 in the Daily Express "H.M.G.'s secret pornographer" : Article by Sefton Delmer Ian Fleming : Secret Memo Sefton Delmer Attack on Morale of German Forces in Norway : Article by Sefton Delmer on Lord Haw Haw