Chapter Seven

GUSTAV SIEGFRIED EINS went on the air for the first time on the evening of May the 23rd, 1941 - It was a rough and by no means ready performance. For 'Der Chef' had to appear without an adjutant to announce him-an appalling solecism under the social protocol of the Third Reich where even the lesser dignitaries of the Party and the Armed Services never ventured forth without having at least one aide-de-camp in attendance. Nor had I been able yet to coach `Der Chef' out of a bad habit of dropping his voice monotonously at the end of each sentence.

But there was no avoiding it. The Pioneer Corps Corporal who was to play the part of `Der Chef' was the only member of my team to have arrived so far at the discreet redbricked house in the little Bedfordshire village of Aspley Guise which had been assigned to serve as the top-secret home for Isabel - who had also now signed the formidable Official Secrets documents - me, and my team. The chief's adjutant was not yet through his security check, and we could not wait for him any longer. It was urgent we got on with the job, whether he was there or not. It was urgent because only twelve days before the impossible had become accomplished fact: Hitler's deputy, the faithful Rudolf Hess had parachuted into Scotland and presented Britain's political warriors with a priceless opportunity for causing confusion among our enemies.

And in those twelve days it had become clear that `Der Chef' must get in on the act. For, to the amazed chagrin of Dick Crossman and the rest of us, Winston Churchill was giving the B.B.C. no opportunity to exploit it. No information was being passed to the propagandists beyond the bald announcement that Hess had arrived and had been made prisoner. Worse than that, the B.B.C, and the `Luftpost', a news sheet dropped on the Germans by the R.A.F., were asked to abstain from all speculation and comment. It was almost as though Churchill feared that if the facts about Hess's `Peace Mission' leaked to the British public there would be a rush by Britain's phantom `Peace Party' to unseat him and avail themselves of Hess's services.

`Der Chef', however, was not subject to the restrictions of truthfulness and obedience to policy imposed on the B.B.C. If he had no facts, he could invent them. So it was up to him to get going and do his little bit to exploit the situation. It could in any case only be a very little bit. For in its first broadcasts a `Black Radio' can only have the tiniest of audiences, operating as if does on a short wave frequency, enjoying no preparatory publicity, and relying exclusively on the few chance knob twiddlers who may happen to tune in on it at the right moment.

Punctually at half past two in the afternoon of May the 23rd, 1941 a small black limousine drove up the larch-hedged gravel drive to our villa. A khaki-uniformed girl driver saluted smartly, and `Der Chef', still in his Pioneer Corps battle dress, climbed in, followed by me. Twenty minutes later we stepped out again in what looked like a London stockbroker's more than comfortable country retreat. Rhododendron bushes, spreading chestnuts and a few venerable monkey puzzle trees hid a lawn from which came the click of croquet mallets.

" You're sure this is the right place?" I asked the driver. And I was even more puzzled when I went inside. For there, confronting my astonished eyes, were a shiny mahogany table with books and a vase of cut flowers, a large settee and easy chairs, an elegant staircase leading to what would be the bedroom stories, and a grand piano, with a fresh and pretty blonde tinkling something that sounded like Mozart's `Eine kleine Nachtmusik'. Nothing suggested that this was a recording studio of the Secret Service.

I was just about to apologise and retreat, when the blonde got up from the piano and came towards us." G-3?" she inquired brightly, announcing our unit's code number, as she gave us the medicated smile of a dentist's receptionist. "We have everything ready for you, if you will follow me." And forthwith she led the two of us into a billiard room. The billiard table, however, was shrouded in dust covers, and the windows were shuttered and curtained. Three chromium-plated R.C.A. microphones twinkled at us invitingly under a strip of ultra-modern fluorescent lights. One microphone was suspended from the ceiling, a second topped an adjustable stand, the third stood on a very businesslike desk with two chairs in front of it.

" Let me adjust this so that you are comfortable," said the blonde, more like a dentist's receptionist than ever. "Are you going to be sitting or standing?"

Later, when Gustav Siegfried Eins and `Der Chef' had won a large audience in Germany, all kinds of theories were spread from mouth to mouth as to his identity and the location of his transmitter. One, mentioned in his reminiscences by Paul Schmidt,* Hitler's Foreign Office interpreter, was that The Chief operated from a barge on the River Spree. Another was that he kept on the move through Hitler's Europe, dodging from hideout to hideout. All theories coincided in assigning primitive and extremely uncomfortable quarters to the Chief and his intrepid signals unit. Had his listeners been able to take a peep at the surroundings in which his messages were, in fact, recorded our audience would I am sure have shrunk to zero.

`Der Chef', in that first broadcast, began very soberly by announcing his call sign and then dictating some code signals. "Here is Gustav Siegfried Eins . . . here is Gustav Siegfried Eins . . ." he repeated monotonously for about forty-five seconds. And then "calling Gustav Siegfried 18, here is a message for Gustav Siegfried 18 . . . calling Gustav Siegfried 18, a message for Gustav Siegfried 18 . . ." There followed a message in a number code. It was not a high grade cypher and when broken and decoded by the monitors of the Reich Central Security Office, as it was bound to be, I reckoned it would produce quite an acceptable flurry in the Gestapo dove-cotes all over Germany. For the message said: "Willy meet Jochen Friday row five parquet stalls second performance Union Theater".

There were hundreds of Union Theater cinemas all over Germany, and I fondly imagined leather-coated Gestapo thugs attending every one of them on the look-out for `Willy' and `Jochen'. The Gestapo with their radio detection instruments would be quick to fix our signal as coming from Britain. They could not ignore the possibility that Willy and Jochen were British agents, and that the message to them was genuine.

Then, at last, code dictation done, it was time for `Der Chef' to launch into his special address. He was answering queries, he said, which had followed his last message. (Of course there had been no previous transmission, but I thought it a good idea for him to talk as if there had been several, in order to cause trouble for the German Security monitors. They would be accused of having missed them.) In that message, so The Chief let it be understood, he had warned that this obscenity of a dilettante Deputy Fuhrer was about to do something idiotic and he ordered his comrades to lie low because of the witchhunt which was bound to follow the fellow's folly. He had been off the air himself for a few days as a consequence. But now the coast was reasonably clear again and he could answer the queries.

" First, let's get this straight," rasped `Der Chef', "this fellow is by no means the worst of the lot. He was a good comrade of ours in the days of the Free Corps. But like the rest of this clique of cranks, megalomaniacs, string-pullers and parlour Bolsheviks who call themselves our leaders, he simply has no nerves for a crisis. As soon as he learns a little of the darker side of the developments that lie ahead, what happens? He loses his head completely, packs himself a satchel full of hormone pills and a white flag, and flies off to throw himself and us on the mercy of that flat-footed bastard of a drunken old Jew Churchill. And he overlooks completely that he is the bearer of the Reich's most precious secrets, all of which the obscenity British will now suck out of him as easily as if he was a bottle of Berlin White-Beer." Dramatic pause.

" I must however deny one thing that some of the lickspittles in the Fiihrer headquarters are putting around," `Der Chef' went on, "namely that the fellow flew to Britain under orders of the Fuhrer. That I am convinced is quite out of the question. The Fuhrer would never have authorised a man with such an intimate knowledge of our operational plans to go into enemy country. And that is proved too, by the drastic way the Fuhrer is dealing with those who have, by their negligence, permitted this grave blow against the future of our fatherland to be struck, namely the security snoops, who, if they had been anywhere near as good as they say they are, would have stopped the poor idiot in time.

Unfortunately, however, that supreme obscenity of a Reich Security Chief, to get himself out of the mess, has seen fit to arrest a number of men-leaders of Industry, leaders of the Abwehr-true German patriots, all of them, men of the deepest national devotion and fatherland-loyalty, men whose one fault was that they misjudged the nerve strength of this so-called deputy leader and placed before him, in the last days of April, the grave misgivings which, owing to the hedge of liars and lickspittle sycophants that surround him, they had been unable to place before the Fuhrer himself."

There followed a list of alleged arrestees. But the amazing thing is, that though we invented them all, several of the men we said had been arrested, it turned out later actually had been detained on suspicion of having been initiates of Hess's schemes.

A certain Dr. Jahncke, for instance. I remembered having heard of him as the top espionage expert in Hess's office. So we put him on the list. And to my great pleasure, when I visited Germany after the war, I learned that The Chief had not misled his listeners. Nor did I have the slightest idea that when I got The Chief to talk of `a grave crisis' and `dangerous developments ahead' Germany was in fact on the verge of the most dangerous development since 1939-Hitler's invasion of Russia.

The Chief finished off his transmission with an undramatic : "That is all for now. I shall be repeating this-all being well every hour at seven minutes to the full hour. Immer sieben Minuten vor voll!"

As I listened to the playback-the whole performance had been recorded-the bit I liked best was the denunciation of Churchill as a "flat-footed bastard of a drunken old Jew". Here, with one phrase, which cost no one any broken bones, we had won credibility as a genuinely German Station. No member of the great German public, I felt convinced, would ever suspect that British propagandists could be capable of using such outrageous language about their beloved Prime Minister. This was a phrase, I decided, which was well worth repeating in other broadcasts.

The corporal and I were just being ushered out of the house when one of the recording engineers, a long lanky man in tweeds with the spectacled eyes and wavy locks of a musician, leaned over the banisters and hailed me.

" Don't you think, Mr. Delmer, that G.3 should have a signature tune?" he asked. "Makes it easier for the listeners to tune in, you know. I should be delighted to fix you up with one, anything you like." I thought for a moment.

" A signature tune is not really in character with an army signals station, is it?" I said. "But you are right, it will help our listeners. And that is what we are after; listeners."

So there and then I got my new musician friend Jim Dougherty was his name-to sit down at his piano and record for us the answering phrase to the call-sign of Hitler's own Deutschlandsender. This German equivalent of the B.B.C. used the first few bars of a pleasant little 18th-century folksong by Ludwig Holty, as it was played on the carillon of the Potsdam garrison chapel.

" Ub immer Treu und Redlichkeit . . ." "Always practise troth and probity . . ." tinkled the Deutschlandsender. And now Gustav Siegfried Eins replied with the second line played on what sounded wonderfully like a cracked piano stationed in some primitive front line billet:

"Bis an dein kuhles Grab..." "Untill your cool, cool grave..." It remained The Chief's signature tune untill he broke off in mid transmission one evening eighteen months latercaught by the Gestapo at last!

Who was The Chief, and how did he come to join me? Corporal Paul Sanders was a Berliner of about my own age who had earned his living as a writer of detective stories. In 1938, sickened by the outrages against the Jews, he had turned his back on Germany and come to Britain.

On the outbreak of war he immediately enlisted in the Pioneer Corps and was sent to France. When I first met him in April 1941 he was in a bomb disposal squad, risking his life day after day to dig out the Luftwaffe's time-bombs and remove their fuses. Not content with this hazardous job, he had volunteered to be parachuted behind the German lines in one of the Cloak-and-Dagger commandos of 5.0.2. That was how Leonard Ingrams had come across him, and Leonard passed him on to me.

I liked him enormously, this man with the sallow face, watchful observant eyes and the aristocratic hawk nose. His voice seemed to me just right for `The Chief' as I envisaged him, virile and resonant with just that slight trace of a Berlin drawl which I had found so often in the speech of Junker officers of the Kaiser's guards regiments.

The second man in the team, Johannes Reinholz, was a German journalist. He was a genuine German Conservative who had fled to Britain with his Jewish wife only at the last moment in 1939 -just before the war broke out. Reinholz had worked with the Right-wing opposition to Hitler first under the leadership of Walter Stennes,* then after Stennes had escaped to China, under such doughty old Pomeranian Junker antagonists of Hitler as von Oldenburg Januschau and von Rohr-Demmin.

I was much relieved when the security people at last allowed Reinholz to join me. For the Corporal had not been able to get the hang of what I wanted and in those earliest days I was having to write most of The Chief's talks myself. Now Johannes Reinholz took on that task and very well he performed it. He also played the part of `The Chief's' aide-de-camp in the broadcasts, dictating the code messages and introducing `The Chief'. His metallic baritone and his clipped accent, pregnant with generations of heel-clicking, goose-stepping, command-barking Pomeranian forebears gave just the right military tone to the station. And when he announced:

" Es spricht der Chef... The Chief speaks. . ." I could almost see Hitler himself walking gravely and stiffly up to the microphone in the small interval the Corporal allowed to elapse before, solemn and deep-voiced, he went into his act.

The advent of Reinholz worked wonders in the Corporal. Now, at last, he began to get the knack of how to handle his voice at the microphone. With every transmission he was growing more and more into the role of `Der Chef'. One day he asked me whether he could alter the script to suit his way of talking. I immediately agreed. His alterations were superb. Those salty, vividly impudent Berlinese phrases I had hoped for after my first conversations with him now at last began to blossom forth in all sorts of unexpected places. Soon the Corporal asked me whether he might write a piece on his own. He did, and it was a masterpiece, caustic, witty, even moving. I now had two good writers.

But what G.3 did not have was intelligence material with which to give body to our campaign of subversion by rumour. In those earliest experimental months we had to live off our own knowledge and our own imagination. As Goebbels would have said: we were `sucking the news out of our fingers'. Fortunately we had the stories and personalities I had brought back with me from interrogation of Jewish refugees in Lisbon, with which to give flesh, colour and background to our inventions.

Around the foremen, engineers, and Nazi party pepmen from my Lisbon note-book we were able to build up some convincing inside stories. Reinholz was able to clothe any incidents we liked to locate in Pomerania with details of old von Rohr and his cronies at Demmin. And Max Braun, the Socialist leader who had led the anti-Hitler front in the Saar, was able to help us a great deal from his own Socialist Intelligence contacts in Europe and his remarkably acute reading and interpretation of German newspapers. Max was the third man to join my team.

When I had first met Max seven years earlier in the Saar I had thought him a pathetic and rather ridiculous figure, as he stood on the platform at the status quo rallies, his dumpy pot-bellied figure swathed in a grass green Socialist version of the Nazi brown shirt uniform. But over the four years that we worked together during the war, I got to know him not only as a brilliant intelligence expert, but as a most upright and sincere German patriot. It is one of Germany's tragedies that Max Braun died in April 1945, just when the war was won and his country needed his services most.

I believe that had Max Braun been able to influence the decisions of the German Socialist Party after the war we would not have seen that party become the ineffective unrealistic bunch of sterile officeseekers whose weakness has caused Germany to be left without a competent opposition to the illusionist eastern policies of Chancellor Adenauer.

I have given Max Braun's real name because his true identity was never secret. It was disclosed the morning after his arrival. Foolishly I had given him the cover name `Albert Simon' through ignorance of the old rule that cover names should, whenever at all possible, preserve the initials of the true name. Sure enough, the very first morning before I could intercept him, Max came down to breakfast in a beautiful silk dressinggown with the initials M.B. embroidered on the breast pocket. Reinholz who already the previous evening thought he had recognised the newcomer as Max Braun from newspaper pictures of Max, now did a "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" `Simon' confessed and the secret was out. I learned the lesson.

And when, at my request, my friends from Spain's International Brigade, Albrecht Ernst and Alexander Maass, were contacted by Leonard's cloak-and-dagger friends and brought over to Britain to join me from Lisbon and French North Africa respectively, I was most careful to see that their new initials were identical with their old ones.

* Stennes was an ex-officer who after serving in the German `Black Reichswehr' after the collapse in 1918, became a police officer, resigned from the police to lead Hitler's Stormtroops in Berlin, and later still led a revolt against the appointment of Ernst Rohm as chief of all Stormtroops * Dr. Paul Schmidt Der Statist auf der Gallerie, Bonn 1951- Schmidt says G.S.c was the "cleverest propaganda from the British side". From his description of G.S.i however I think he has muddled it with `Soldatensender Calais' which came later.

 

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