Churchill's Wizards (26 page)

Sefton Delmer met Winston Churchill for the first and only time face to face in March 1933, in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire. As a Tory with Kiplingesque views, Delmer was an enormous admirer of Churchill. Nevertheless their encounter at Lord Beaverbrook's London home, Stornoway House, was not a success. The
Daily Express
leader writer, Frank Owen, introduced the two men after dinner. Churchill had a glass of brandy in one hand and a big cigar in the other, and he was red-faced and truculent as he talked with Owen about India. Churchill's views on India were reactionary and imperialist – he detested Gandhi as ‘a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir', and once said that Indians were ‘the beastliest people in the world, next to the Germans'. Delmer had no experience of the place, and so stayed silent. Then there came an opportunity. ‘This aspect of the problem, sir,' he chipped in, ‘is something on which I have frequently heard the views of Adolf Hitler…' Churchill swung round, anger blazing in his light blue eyes, said, ‘That imposhible fellow Hitler! I don't want to hear anything about him,' and stumped off. Delmer thought a statesman should be readier to listen to intelligence, particularly as he knew Churchill had tried unsuccessfully to meet Hitler when he visited Munich the year before. Churchill's son Randolph had phoned Putzi Hanfstängl to invite him to dinner, but Hitler declined several times. In the end the press officer came alone and was taxed by Churchill about Hitler's anti-Jewish views. ‘Tell your boss from me,' said Churchill, ‘that anti-Semitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad sticker.' After dinner, however, Churchill had asked Hanfstängl quietly what his chief might feel about an alliance between Germany, France and Britain against Russia.

Sefton Delmer left Germany because Beaverbrook, flattering him that he was the best foreign correspondent the paper had ever had, told him he would need the experience of working in Paris and New York to be truly international. Delmer knew he would miss his contacts in Berlin. Where else could his parrot Popitzschka leave its white droppings down the large dinner jacket of a heartily laughing Hermann Göring? On one of Delmer's final evenings in Berlin, Ernst
Röhm brought Heinrich Himmler to dinner and the subject of concentration camps came up. Joseph Stalin in Russia had already started massively expanding the system of work and prison camps he inherited from the Czars, and Hitler's regime (aping the Marxists whom in theory they loathed, as Victor Serge has pointed out) was building its own German gulag of concentration camps to deal with the enemy within. Heinrich Himmler was now chief of police in Bavaria and had opened a model institution at a place called Dachau. All those reports of brutalities were complete inventions, he insisted.

‘If that is the case,' said Delmer, ‘why don't you let me spend a few days there? Let me be treated as an ordinary internee and see what happens to me … What do you say?'

Himmler said it was a good idea and he would arrange it.

‘It is a masterly idea,' laughed the jovial bully Röhm. ‘We'll put you through the whole process from the initial beating up to the last bit where you get shot while escaping.
Prost!
' And roaring with laughter the guests downed another vodka, though Himmler only raised his glass primly.

Delmer could see the headline: ‘Delmer in Dachau'. ‘When can we do this, Herr Himmler? Could we make it this weekend?' Himmler demurred; after Easter would be best. When Delmer telephoned the Tuesday after Easter, an adjutant explained that the visit would have to be postponed because of an outbreak of cholera, and Delmer instantly envisaged a new headline: ‘Cholera in Dachau'. Now the lads in black and brown were actually in power, his credit with them was running out.

He moved to Paris, but could not escape the pull of German affairs. In June 1934, he was in Venice for the historic first meeting between Hitler and Mussolini. There, he got a tip that Ernst Röhm had quarrelled with Hitler and was now plotting with General Kurt von Schleicher. He flew to London to brief Lord Beaverbrook, who confided that the former German Chancellor, Dr Brüning, had said on a secret visit to London that an attempt would soon be made to oust Hitler and substitute a Conservative government based on the army.

Delmer went back to Germany after a year away. His successor at the
Daily Express
Berlin bureau, Pembroke Stephens, had been expelled for finding out too much about Göring's secret rearmament schemes. The press were regularly shown a pasteboard
Reichswehr
,
disarmed by Versailles, training with dummy tanks and wooden artillery, while the real guns and tanks were hidden. Delmer found that Beaverbrook's information was essentially correct: von Papen and the conservatives wanted to use Hindenburg and the army to overthrow Hitler and restore the Hohenzollern monarchy. Opposing them was the Göring–Himmler alliance, with Himmler now in control of the SS and the Gestapo. In the middle was Röhm's troublesome
Sturmabteilung
(SA, or Storm Troopers). Ernst Röhm wanted his three million brownshirts incorporated into the army under his command, but the army detested this idea as much as it did the homosexual Röhm and his undisciplined storm troopers. The stage was set for a showdown.

‘The Night of the Long Knives', 30 June 1934, is like the scene in classic gangster movies when many scores are settled in one bloodbath. By personally turning on his old friend Röhm, massacring him and the SA leadership, Hitler got rid of a potential rival and at the same time placated the regular armed forces. But General von Schleicher and his wife were shot; so were von Papen's secretary and speech writer, as a warning to the military of just how ruthless Hitler could be. No one knows exactly how many murders and executions there were, but Sefton Delmer printed a list of 108 names in the
Daily
Express
, and was asked to leave the country by the Gestapo.

When Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, Adolf Hitler proclaimed himself
Führer und Reichskanzler
, effectively making Germany a one-party state under a dictator. From 4–10 September 1934, the NSDAP Reich Party Rally was staged in Nuremberg. It was a big story for the American reporter William L. Shirer, just returned to Germany and shocked by how many free-thinking Germans he had known in Weimar days had become fanatical Nazis. Shirer saw screaming crowds fainting in an almost religious ecstasy at the sight of Hitler. He heard proclamations that the Third Reich would last for a thousand years, listened to the execration of Jews and Bolsheviks, and watched 50,000 members of the new labour corps, the
Arbeitdienst
, doing military drill with shining spades instead of the guns denied them by the Versailles Treaty. Shirer hated – but was awed by – the way hysteria and joy could be induced in half a million people.

Dudley Clarke was also on the streets of Nuremberg that September, visiting Germany in the long vacation of his second year at the Army
Staff College in Camberley. He too was impressed by how the Nazis marshalled people – nearly 500 trains bringing in Party officials, the SS and the SA, the Labour Corps and the Hitler Youth from all over the country. He watched Hitler pass by ‘standing up in a big Mercedes car going very fast and flanked on each side by car-loads of body-guards, alternatively driving past or falling back so that it would be almost impossible for a marksman on either side to get in a shot'. Leni Riefenstahl captured the drive-by sequence in
Triumph das Willens
or
Triumph of the Will
, her second attempt to film the Nazi party Nuremberg rally. She used a huge crew of 170 this time and multiple camera angles, cutting the choreographed conformity to create the ultimate Nazi propaganda film, where no one was out of step. Her earlier film had the embarrassment of the fat, sweaty, scarred figure of Ernst Röhm, now a non-person. The penultimate chunk of the new film was given over to a huge parade of SA men listening to Hitler's speech absolving them of blame for the ‘dark shadow' of Röhm. At the end of the rally Rudolf Hess shouted ‘The Party is Hitler, and Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler!'

Triumph of the Will
, staged like a pseudo-religious Busby Berkeley movie within a huge set built by Albert Speer on the Nuremberg Zeppelin Field, had its glittering premiere at Berlin's Ufa-Palast am Zoo on 28 March 1935. It is Leni Riefenstahl's love song to Adolf Hitler, and a masterpiece of propaganda. Earlier that month, the Nazis defiantly tore up the Versailles Treaty's military restrictions. Germany revealed an air force equal to Britain's, and announced compulsory military service.

Even when he was covering the Spanish Civil War in 1936–7, Sefton Delmer could never quite escape the Germans, who were secretly assisting the rebel Nationalists, Generals Franco and Mola. Delmer had set out for Spain from Paris in his Ford V8 convertible (together with his typewriter, his wife Isabel, her paints and easel and their Siamese cat, Pilbul) the day after Franco announced his right-wing rebellion against the left-wing Spanish Republic in July 1936. At first, Delmer covered the campaign of Mola's Nationalists. He saw burnt-out vehicles, charred corpses and blasted body parts littering the Somosierra pass, white-faced trembling prisoners being led off to be shot, and the looting of San Sebastian and Irún. But he was soon
expelled, because the Germans were coming. The Nationalists thought he was a British spy; they did not want an expert on Germany like him around when the German Condor Legion secretly landed, in defiance of Non-Intervention.

When Delmer arrived in Madrid by bus to report from the other, Republican, side at the beginning of the winter of 1936, the elected Republican government had fled to Valencia, and Madrid was waging its own exhilarating fight for survival against Franco's Nationalists, who were besieging the city. Once again Delmer was seen as suspect, for the opposite reasons: he knew personally the Führer whose air force planes had just begun dropping bombs on the Spanish capital. ‘He's a bloody Nazi,' said one zealot in the International Brigades. Another Briton, who knew just how generous Delmer was with food, drink, cigarettes and money to the Brigadistas, replied: ‘If you're a good Communist, I'd sooner be a bloody Nazi like him.'

Delmer moved early in 1937 into the Hotel Florida overlooking the Plaza Callao in the Gran Via, ‘the friendliest, funniest, and most adventure-laden Hotel in which I have ever stayed'. In the bathroom Delmer installed a bar which he stocked with looted wine and spirits from King Alfonso XIII's cellar, purchased cheap from an Anarchist pub off the Puerta de Sol. Delmer liked to drink, though only after he had done his work. The American reporter Virginia Cowles remembered the Hotel Florida as a multinational haunt of ‘idealists and mercenaries; scoundrels and martyrs; adventurers and
embusqués
; fanatics, traitors and plain down-and-outs', many of them in Tom's room with its electric burners and chafing dishes, a ham hanging from a coat-hanger, a litter of sardine tins and packets of crackers. The press who gathered there after eleven at night when they had finished the long wait to file their stories by phone from the Telefonica, the tallest building in Madrid, included Ernest Hemingway of the North American Newspaper Alliance and Martha Gellhorn of
Collier's
. When it was hot, Delmer would switch the light out and open the windows and play Beethoven's Fifth on his wind-up gramophone. The parties would go on till two or three in the morning, but they all ended when the room, luckily empty, was pulverised by a shell.

Delmer was putting on weight again after losing two stone at a German spa, and described himself as

This garb annoyed Constancia de la Mora in the Foreign Press Office who thought his scruffiness showed disrespect for the Spanish Republic. In her memoirs she said no one liked or trusted the
Daily
Express
man, and she clearly did not share his sense of humour: ‘Delmer always talked and behaved as though the Spanish were some tribe of strange and ignorant savages caught up in some absurd and primitive battle with bows and arrows.'

Sefton Delmer was honest enough to admit that he never saw the Nazi–Soviet pact coming. When he went to Russia with a British trade delegation in late March 1939, he misread the Soviet Union, whose chaotic muddle and inefficiency led him to believe it could neither fight nor supply its armed forces. The cynical Non-Aggression Treaty between Germany and the USSR on 23 August 1939 took Britain and France by surprise and doomed Poland. German troops invaded from one side on 1 September and a fortnight later Russians from the other. The Gestapo joined hands with OGPU, the forerunner of the KGB; as Evelyn Waugh wrote, ‘east and west the prisoners rolled away to slavery'.

For Delmer the best thing about his Russian trip was that on the train journey from Warsaw to Moscow he made friends with the reporter representing
The Times
, a tall debonair type with a broken nose, whose name was Ian Fleming. The two journalists shared a suite at the National, the antique Intourist hotel opposite the Kremlin, drank vodka martinis and picked up a couple of girls from Odessa. It was through Fleming that Sefton Delmer would find his central role in political warfare and black propaganda when war broke out.

Clare Hollingworth always wanted to get away. The woman who became the doyenne of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club determined early to escape from conventional Leicestershire to see the reality of the foreign lands whose maps she had clipped out from WW1 newspapers as a small child. She left the world of point-to-points and hunt balls first for Slavonic Studies at London University under Professor R. W. Seton-Watson (who had been a key figure in propaganda for Crewe House in WW1), and then to work for the League of Nations Union. She was 27 years old when she was hired in 1939 by the editor of the
Daily Telegraph
in Fleet Street to go as a correspondent to Poland, where she had previously worked in Warsaw and Katowice, helping refugees from Nazi Germany to get visas to escape. The Continent was on the cusp of another war, and Hollingworth's first professional newspaper assignment was about to get her one of the scoops of the century. With brand-new luggage from Harrods, she flew out the next morning from Hendon Airport to Warsaw, via Berlin.

It was Saturday, 26 August 1939, twenty-five years to the day since the British Expeditionary Force, retreating from Mons at the start of WW1, had briefly held up the invading Germans at the Battle of Le Cateau. It was also the anniversary of Crécy, one of the many battlefields to which Clare Hollingworth's father had taken her as a girl, and John Buchan's 64th, and last, birthday.

Berlin
was the destination marked on the shabbier luggage of another passenger leaving London that day, on the boat-train from Victoria. ‘Berlin?' remarked his chatty railway porter. ‘Rum place to be going right now.' The owner of the cases, who bore a razor scar the colour of raw pork looping from his right ear to his mouth, was the fascist William Joyce, on his way to becoming the Nazi broadcaster
nicknamed ‘Lord Haw-Haw'. The Irishman was one jump ahead of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, taking the ferry to Ostend.

Clare's flight to Warsaw took six hours. Noel Coward had flown the same route two months before. The entertainer had somehow imagined Warsaw as grey-stoned, medieval, twisting, but found it flat, wide and yellowish. He stayed at the Europejski Hotel, across the square from the impressive and well-guarded Polish Foreign Ministry building. In the same hotel, tiny Clare now met the
Daily Telegraph'
s man in the Polish capital, Hugh Carleton Greene, the younger brother of the novelist Graham Greene and a future director general of the BBC. Tall, thin, shambling Greene was a fluent German speaker who had been expelled as a correspondent from Berlin after ten years. He had visited Dachau concentration camp in 1933 and found the guards more criminal and brutal than their Communist prisoners. ‘One of us has got to go to the border,' he said. Clare volunteered to take the train south to the German frontier. At railway stations along the line officials were posting notices of the mobilisation of the Polish Army.

Back in Katowice again she borrowed the official car of her friend the British Consul General, and the Union Jack fluttering from its bonnet helped her cross the closed frontier at Beuthen. Inside German Silesia she bought newspapers, aspirin, film, electric torches and bottles of wine, which were hard to obtain in Poland. She was driving back along the fortified frontier road towards Gleiwitz, the last town in Germany, when sixty-five military motorcycle dispatch riders, bunched together, overtook her. As she drove up a hillside towards the frontier, she found tarpaulins and screens of hessian erected along the road, concealing the valley on her left from view. But the wind blew on the afternoon of 29 August 1939 and lifted the curtain. Through the hole in the hide, the reporter Clare Hollingworth saw with her own eyes scores of German tanks lined up, ready to invade Poland.

Adolf Hitler told the commanders of his armed forces at Obersalzburg on 22 August: ‘I shall supply a propaganda justification to bring about hostilities. It is of little consequence whether the reasons are believed. No one asks the victor whether he has told the truth.'

On 31 August 1939, two days after Clare Hollingworth's reconnaissance trip, a pair of black Ford V8s drove down the same road from Gleiwitz towards the Polish frontier. In early evening daylight
they turned off into a clearing in the Ratibor Wood. The car boots were unlocked and all seven Germans changed into bits of Polish Army clothing and picked up black Luger pistols. A man called Karl put on headphones and squatted down by the other car boot to get a signal from the radio inside. At 19.27 he heard the code words ‘
Großmutter tot
' (Grandmother dead). They got into the cars and drove back towards the tall wooden radio transmitting tower that was visible for miles around.

Their leader, SS Sturmbannführer (Major) Alfred Helmut Naujocks, now looking entirely Polish, was the first man up the stairs and through the glass doors of Gleiwitzsender, the German radio station. He pistol-whipped a man in an office who fell heavily, knocking over a chair and a hatstand which crashed on to a metal filing cabinet. Then Naujocks was through into the studio where another of his team, the announcer Heinrich, had already taken a seat at the green baize table with the microphone on it, holding the fake script they had prepared with its lines praising independent Poland and denouncing Hitler and the Nazis.

Through the soundproof glass Naujocks could see Karl the radio engineer getting frantic in the cubicle as he failed to find the landline switch to Breslau to make any kind of broadcast. But eventually Karl banged ‘go' on the glass. Heinrich read the phoney script rapidly and loudly. Then Naujocks faked interruption by shouting and firing four banging pistol shots inside the small studio. The pretend Polish rebels cut off the signal and ran out of the building.

Heinrich Müller of the Gestapo had also done his part of the job, operation konserve, delivering what they called the ‘tinned goods'. A fresh corpse now lay sprawled on the radio-station steps, dressed in civilian clothes. The dead man was tall and fair, about 30, with a strong, handsome face. This ‘tin' was originally going to be selected from among the inmates of Sachsenhausen, the Nazi concentration camp north of Berlin opened in 1933, but indenting for an already processed prisoner would have left a paper trail through the ever-meticulous bureaucracy. So a local Polish-Silesian man with strongly patriotic views called Franciszek Honiok had been secretly arrested, drugged, dressed and killed with a bullet to the head, so he could be left on the steps, one of the apparent Polish perpetrators of the raid on the wireless station.

At 7 a.m. the next morning, Friday, 1 September 1939, Naujocks was sitting unshaven in the office of his boss, the ‘Blond Beast', SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt
(RSHA), the Reich Central Security Office, being congratulated on a secret agent's job well done. Three weeks before, the ruthless and calculating Heydrich had told him, ‘Actual proof of these attacks by the Poles is needed for the foreign press as well as for German propaganda purposes.' It had worked: the fake Poles had provided ‘proof of these attacks' and the Chancellor himself, Adolf Hitler, had telephoned Heydrich at 5 a.m. to praise the provocation. No one would be allowed to find out the truth about the raid from abroad. On 1 September 1939 all Germans were banned from listening to foreign radio broadcasts, on pain of imprisonment or penal servitude. The penalty for spreading news from foreign broadcasts was death.

That same day, the front-page story of the
Völkischer Beobachter
, the Nazi party official paper, was all about the outrageous ‘Polish' attacks of the 31 August, on a gamekeeper's house at Pitschen, on the customs post at Hochlinden – and particularly on the Gleiwitz radio station. ‘Armed insurgents' had apparently managed to read out a propaganda statement in Polish and German before alarmed listeners to the broadcast could alert the local police. During the ensuing shoot-out, the newspaper said, one of the Polish ‘bandits' had been killed. (This of course was Franciszek Honiok, the ‘tinned goods'.)

And that was why, early in the morning of 1 September 1939, young Clare Hollingworth could be seen holding a telephone receiver out of the window of her hotel room in Katowice so that the British embassy in Warsaw could hear for itself the sound of the guns, tanks and planes from Generaloberst Gerd von Rundstedt's
Armeegruppe
Süd
, invading Poland with the dawn chorus.

The use of propaganda and deception seen at Gleiwitz had long been a leitmotiv of Nazi behaviour. From the Reichstag fire, through the Berlin Olympics and the activities of Joseph Goebbels's Ministry for National Enlightenment and Propaganda, one can trace a deliberate policy of deceiving the outside world. Gleiwitz or Gliwice in southern Poland later became a satellite of the industrial extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the site of a factory plant where forced labour packed the chemicals for Wehrmacht smokescreens. The
Nazis always believed in
Verschleierungsfähigkeit
, ‘the obscuring power of smoke'.

The Gleiwitz raid was also a kind of tribute by imitation to similar British operations. Heydrich, the architect of the Nazi racist state despite persistent if ill-founded rumours of his own Jewishness, was just one among many Nazis who were, as the historian and wartime SIS officer Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed out, ‘indefatigable readers of novelettes, especially about the British Secret Service – that Machiavellian institution which, they believed, had built up the British world-empire'. Heydrich wanted to be called ‘C' too, like the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service. He went on to become the
Reichsprotektor
of Bohemia and Moravia, and was assassinated in Prague. The two roadsweepers who attacked his car with grenades in June 1942 were really Czech soldiers – but they were trained at Aston House in Hertfordshire by a British secret service, the SOE. The man who taught them to throw hand grenades like cricket balls was Alfgar Hesketh Prichard, a keen sportsman and crack shot just like his late father.

On the evening of Friday, 1 September 1939, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain, lamented ‘this terrible catastrophe' in the House of Commons. Of course, nobody could yet foresee the horrors that those German divisions were dragging behind them into Poland: destruction, looting, rape, torture and the murder of millions. Nor could anyone imagine the worldwide ripples of damage and death in the six years to follow. But because both Britain and France were pledged by treaty to defend Poland from aggression, and because the German Government did not withdraw its military forces by 11 a.m. British Summer Time on Sunday 3 September 1939, two decades of a dubious ‘peace' came to a close.

Just after 11 o'clock on that Sunday morning, following a recorded talk on
Making the Most of Tinned Foods
, 70-year-old Neville Chamberlain came on the BBC wireless to announce from the Cabinet Room in Downing Street, in a tired and sad voice that sounded to one listener like ‘stale digestive biscuits', that the ultimatum to the German government had expired, ‘and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany'.

Britain began the Second World War as it ended the First: scattering twenty million pages of propaganda over Germany. ‘Truth raids', the
Air Minister, Sir Kingsley Wood, proudly called them. From ponderous Whitley bombers, the RAF dropped thousands of blocks of leaflets in German-style Gothic type that fluttered apart into separate sheets as they fell. What A. P. Herbert in
Punch
called ‘bomphlets' or ‘bomphs', Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Harris grumpily saw as tonnage of ‘free toilet paper'. These first propaganda leaflets, printed by HM Stationery Office and following a line of thought emanating from Lord Halifax's Foreign Office, were aimed at encouraging the many ‘good Germans' who, it was hoped and believed, opposed Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. Their tone was more like a highbrow newspaper editorial than a punchy popular advertisement, because they had been written by the author of a literary travel book,
The Road to Oxiana
, Robert Byron.

The very first sheet, dropped on 3 September 1939, was a note to the German people warning them that they had been deceived by their leaders: ‘For years their iron censorship has kept from you truths that even uncivilized peoples know. It has imprisoned your minds in, as it were, a concentration camp.' Not only to German civilians were these sheets officially
verboten
. When an American war correspondent asked a censor at the British Ministry of Information for the text of the leaflet, he was refused on the grounds that ‘We are not allowed to disclose information which might be of value to the enemy.' The journalist pointed out that the enemy now had two million copies of the sheet, so could he please have one as well. The hapless official blinked and agreed that there must be something wrong there. (This sort of embarrassment was only resolved in early November when the head of the secret department producing the leaflets began taking all the newspaper proprietors into his confidence.)

The Franco-British plan on the outbreak of war in September 1939 was much as it had been in 1914. Another two-corps British Expeditionary Force was soon over in Flanders, on the left of the French line, ready to block the Germans should they advance once again through Belgium. It seemed like a rerun with different names. Instead of Calais and Boulogne, the disembarkation ports were Cherbourg and Brest. Although Winston Churchill was soon again in charge of the navy as he had been from 1911 to 1915, the army corps were commanded this time by John Dill and Alan Brooke, and the commander-in-chief was the gallant Grenadier Guardsman Lord Gort,
who had won the VC, three DSOs and nine mentions in dispatches in WW1, but had never had a major command.

In the murky linoleumed corridors and shabby offices of the War Office in London, the mufti of city suits and stiff collars vanished ‘for the duration' on 1 September, and people tried not to show too much curiosity about each other's shoulder badges, buttons and ribbons, which told the stories of their previous wars. Dudley Clarke, now lieutenant colonel, carried on at his deputy assistant military secretary's desk. He noticed Lord Gort's daughter, one of the new generation of young women then appearing in Whitehall, looking trim in her new ATS uniform and black shoes. Another was the remarkable administrator Joan Bright, who became fond of the old War Office as a mausoleum: