Chapter Four

LEONARD INGRAMS was among the select few of my friends whom I knew to have something to do with the Cloak-and-Dagger side of the War, and he looked the part of the mysterious Mr. X to perfection.

He was tall and athletic (he won a Half-Blue at Oxford for the long jump immediately after the first War), and his eyes and mouth had just the right expression of drawling sardonic pity for the world around him. Victoria, his wife, a member of the influential Baring family, was his devoted slave. So too were her brothers, and so for that matter was I. Leonard had been one of my special friends in Berlin where he was known as `the flying banker' because of his habit of piloting himself around Europe in his private Puss Moth plane on his business trips for the Chemical Bank of New York.

Hitherto, he had side-stepped all my requests that he should help me get a job more actively connected with the war than reporting defeats and retreats for the Daily Express. But now at last, in September 1940, with the bombs dropping all around us, Leonard was relenting. He had a job for me.

" How would it be," he said, "if you resigned from the Express and came in full-time on this racket of broadcasting to the Germans? It really is in urgent need of being improved and you have impressed everyone with these talks of yours." He grinned at me, and added "the money, of course is bad. Nothing like the Express." It was like Leonard to end his invitation with a sneer like that. But I told him that I would do anything he suggested, and I meant it. So Leonard got moving. Not with the B.B.C. but with the secret department that `gave advice' to the B.B.C. Leonard arranged for me to meet Valentine Williams, the secret department's deputy director, at Boodles. Valentine Williams, a former 'golden-haired boy' of Lord Northcliffe, was the successful author of such novels of suspense as Clubfoot. And Valentine saw to it that ours was the most hush-hush meeting ever just like a scene from one of his own thrillers. Stealthily the three of us crept upstairs to a card-room, assured ourselves it was empty, and carefully sat down in the comfortable chairs by the fire.

Valentine Williams was a neat, compact man with thick black curly hair, a humorous crinkly red face and laughing blue eyes. But there was no laughter in him now. He lowered his voice almost to a whisper, and started to ask me questions.

At the end of the questioning he said he would like me to join his outfit. I said I would be delighted, and I was. For I believed I was to enter the secret war at last.

" It will take a little time," Valentine whispered when I had filled in the forms. "You have to be vetted, you know. You must be patient. I'll let you know when it's all fixed."

I did not mind the melodrama. For I thought I was in at last. But I waited and waited, and nothing happened. And then I learned from hints which Leonard gave me, that much to his and Valentine Williams's disgust the Security people had turned me down yet once again.

The real irony of this security bar against me was that while one branch of M.I5 was telling Leonard Ingrams and his friends that it would be unwise to have me join the Psychological Warfare Department, a red-haired young Oxford man from another branch of the same service was inviting me to help him catch German spies masquerading as American reporters covering the Battle of Britain.

The red-haired young man called on me one morning at my flat-before it had been bombed and, with remarkably little preliminary skirmishing, revealed himself as an officer in Field Security. He asked me whether I would help him in his work. Needless to say I assented with alacrity. And as we lunched at Scott's and Christopher Catamole explained to me in greater detail what he wanted me to do, I once more thrilled to the hope that the real war was beginning to come my way after all.

" If you have to break the law while you are working for us," he said, "do so without hesitation. We shall be behind you. If you are arrested you will be released immediately. There will be no prosecution. All you have to do is to get the police to call this number, and ask for this extension. That will be enough." And he presented me with a card with two numbers on it. It sounded almost too romantic to be true.

But when I came to work on that first assignment, the whole thing petered out most prosaically. What little I did manage to discover did not fit in with any theory of espionage activities. That, however, did not upset `Kit-kat'-a most scholarly young man with an enviable first in Greats, and a praiseworthy thirst for the objective truth. He thanked me effusively for what I had done, and asked me to go on helping him. And as it turned out, there was one fellow I was able to help in catching.

To this day, I don't understand how anyone could have been so simple and naive as this American, and still be a German agent. In compliance with Christopher's instructions, I made friends with him while we were out on a story together. Then back at my flat we had drinks. Fortunately my kind friend John Hill of Hedges & Butler had enabled me to lay in a good stock of their whisky. As glass followed glass we discovered a common admiration for the finer points in National Socialism, the heroism and readiness of the Nazis for self-sacrifice, the cultivation of leadership qualities in the young, and all that. I derided British security.

To my infinite astonishment these transparent and primitive tactics worked. My American boon companion-he was of German stock-began to boast to me of the ease with which he had acquired information which the dilettante British ought to have covered up. I cannot remember now what it was he told me. I do remember, however, that as soon as he had left me, I sat down and wrote a report for Kit-kat. It started off with the over-exuberant and boastful phrase "We have got him!" In a taxi, I then drove round to deliver my report at the house in a Knightsbridge Square which Kit-kat had given me as a post-box in cases of emergency.

I don't know whether it was my un-British fervour that shocked him, or whether I was merely duplicating information he and his department already possessed. My young friend seemed distinctly cold and subdued when next we met. He did not convey to me the congratulations and thanks I had hoped for. All he told me was that he had arrested the American, that it was the first arrest he had ever had to make, and that he had loathed every second of it-the squalid bedroom, the girl, the shock of the man. But the American was a spy all right, he said, and he had confessed. He would be held to the end of the war. I longed to ask what contribution, if any, my little drinking party had made to the spy's undoing. But I refrained. And I suspect it was very small indeed. Most probably M-1-5 had him sewed up all along.

Christopher and I went on meeting regularly. He even made me write him little essays on such pet subjects of mine as the possible Communist infiltration of Home Guard Units in preparation for a coup. When, at the end of October, Christiansen ordered me to fly to Lisbon for him, Christopher Catamole asked me whether I would be prepared to lend his people a hand while I was there.

" Of course," he said, when I had accepted, "I don't know whether they will in fact require your services for anything. But if they should, they will contact you. There is nothing you need do about finding them." Isabel was furious with me for going abroad at this time. For, just before Christiansen had decided I should fly out to Portugal, we had found in a green East Anglian valley running down to the River Stour a deserted but inhabitable 16th-century farmhouse set in seventy acres of derelict land. The Valley Farm was a perfect refuge for our furniture and pictures from bombed Lincoln's Inn. And it would also make an ideal retreat in which to spend restful weekends shooting rabbits. But now there was the moving to be done and, as Isabel indignantly pointed out, I was going to be enjoying myself among the lights of Lisbon, while she would have to struggle alone.

There was nothing, however, that I could do about it. Hitler and Franco had just met at Hendaye and reports were coming through which spoke of German and Spanish preparations for an assault on Gibraltar. Christiansen understandably wanted me to be on hand nearby, if it took place.

So early one dark and foggy November morning I said goodbye to Isabel in Poole, and took my seat in the heavily curtained cabin of a B.O.A.C. Flying-boat. Five hours later, having successfully run the gauntlet of the Luftwaffe interceptor planes in the Atlantic, we slid down on to the waters of the Tagus River in neutral Lisbon.

My expedition to Lisbon provided little in the way of headlines for the Express. For Hitler abandoned his Gibraltar project just as he had previously abandoned the invasion of Britain. Nevertheless, looking back on it now, I see the weeks I spent in Lisbon as one of the most important assignments of my life. In the first place, because it finally persuaded the Security men to lift the barrier against me, and secondly because it gave me a fresh and intimate contact with Germans who had been living and working in Hitler's Germany, now at the apex of its power.My Lisbon refresher course in German affairs proved of vital importance to me when, a few months later, I began to forge the new weapon of psychological warfare which twenty years later was to become the subject of that German thriller film.

Who were these Germans who so obligingly brought me upto-date on Germany? They were Jews. Men and women, young, middle-aged and old. In return for a fat payment to the SD or the Gestapo, they were being allowed to bypass the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and travel instead to Lisbon, in order to emigrate to their relations in North and South America.

With two friends whom I had engaged to help me-one of them, amazingly, was Albrecht Ernst, the German left-wing journalist whom I had first met during the Spanish civil war, when he was the deputy chief-of-staff of the Communist General Kleber in besieged Madrid, I surreptitiously contacted the Jews as they arrived, and questioned them about life in Germany.

Not by any means all of them were old and decrepit. A surprisingly large number were young and strong. And many had been working in German armaments factories. From them I picked up a great deal of interesting information and colourful gossip, all of which I carefully noted down, meaning to use it for a series of articles on `Inside Germany'.

I learned the names and foibles of the foremen, engineers, and Nazi party officials in the munition workshops where the refugees had been working. I learned what they had been manufacturing, and I also learned many of the new German war-time expressions. But above all I got the feel of life in Hitler's war-time Reich.

Not all the Jewish refugees were ready to talk to the questioning British reporter and his assistants. Some were still so cowed, that they feared the Gestapo might catch up with them even here in Lisbon, if they talked. Others still thought of Germany and Austria as their Fatherland, and despite all that had happened and despite their emigration they still preserved a stubborn remnant of their old German national loyalty. Somehow I found these old Jewish men and women, with their unhappy love for Germany, even more tragic and pitiable than the others. In my work during the years to come I was to think back often to one old couple in particular. They remained for me always a supreme example of the almost mystic hold which the conquering-hero figure of Hitler had over Germans-even outcast Jews.

Dr. Bloch, a wizened and bent little man of seventy-one, had been a medical practitioner in Hitler's home town of Linz. And even now in the autumn of igq.o, after all that had happened to him and his race at the hands of this Hitler, it was Dr. Bloch's great pride that he had been the Hitler family's physician and that little Adolf had sat on his knee and called him `Uncle Doctor'.

Ernst had discovered the old man in one of the parties of emigrants and he took me along to meet Dr. Bloch and his wife in the sleazy back street boarding-house where they were staying. I was anxious to find out from the doctor among other things all that I could about the medical history of Hitler-for there had long been rumours that he suffered from a congenital disease.I plied the old man with questions. I thought he would be only too ready to reveal the secrets of his persecutor.

But Dr. Bloch was an oyster. " I have never disclosed anything concerning the illness of the family Hitler," was his tantalising answer, "and I never shall!" "

Do you know, Herr Delmer," his wife chipped in, "Adolf Hitler had not forgotten my husband? When he drove through Linz in his Mercedes after his entry into Austria in 1938 at the time of the Anschluss, he passed our house, and as he passed, he waved up at our window with a special smile."

The old doctor nodded confirmation. "That is to say, my dear, that is what they told us. You see," he turned to me, "as Jews we were not permitted to be at the window when the Fiihrer passed." " Did the Fuhrer grant you any privileges for old times' sake, Herr Doktor ?Preferential treatment as compared with other Jews in Linz, for instance?" I asked. The old man smiled wistfully.

" I had hoped that perhaps I would be permitted to continue to practise in Linz. I thought that perhaps the Fuhrer would recall how I attended his mother in her last illness. But it was not to be. All that the authorities would concede was that I should be allowed to open a new practice in Vienna-an impossibility for me at my age. I was too well-known in Linz as a Jew, they said. It would compromise the Fuhrer if I were allowed to go on being a doctor there. He could make no exceptions." But, added Dr. Bloch, he was allowed one privilege not accorded to other Jews. He was allowed to continue to use the telephone. From the way he told me about this `exceptional favour' I could see he felt that Adolf Hitler had done his best for his old Jewish family doctor, the man who had looked after him as a child, and who later when young Adolf was an untalented art student in Vienna, had bought some of his uncouth watercolours to encourage him and help him financially.*

Nor did Dr. Bloch have anything but friendly feelings for the people of Linz or bear them a grudge for what had been done to him at the end of his long life of service among them. " Before my wife and I left," the old man said, "many of my friends and former patients came to see us despite the danger to themselves. They tried to dissuade us from leaving and making this long trip to join our son in New York. They were very kind." He smiled a little to himself as though at a pleasant memory. " `Uncle Doctor' they said to me, `how can you think of emigrating to the United States at your age? And Auntie too? Stay with us. Things will soon be different.' I think in Linz they really loved us. Don't you think so too, my dear?" he asked his wife. But Frau Bloch could not answer. She had tears in her eyes.

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