Burn After Reading (11 page)

As Bohr's work advanced, it became necessary to bring him out of Denmark. By then, it was 1944. The British secret service organized the escape. The scientist was told to be at a pier at a given hour after dark where a small boat would meet him and take him to Sweden. He startled his companions when they saw him lugging along a large bottle of beer. They decided for themselves that the funny scientist must be a beer addict. In Sweden Dr. Bohr went straight to the Nobel Laboratory for a reunion with Dr. Lise Meitner, a colleague who had preceded him there, and handed her the precious bottle for safekeeping. Dr. Meitner examined its contents more for sentimental than scientific purposes, and she exclaimed in a voice of real anguish. It was real beer. The bottle with the heavy water still reposed in Bohr's Copenhagen refrigerator.

For the next twenty-four hours that confounded bottle became the most important target for the Allied secret services. A team of the Danish underground sneaked into the abandoned Bohr house, reached the icebox without incident, took the important bottle and smuggled it safely to Bohr in Sweden.

They never did understand why they had to go to so much trouble just to get a bottle of Danish beer for a bibulous old professor.

Between the fall of Poland and the opening of the Norwegian invasion lay one of the strangest periods in history—the months of the “phony war”. Standing on the ruins of Warsaw in September, 1939, Hitler appeared to be satisfied with the carnage he had wrought, but deep within himself he was perplexed. What to do next?

He toyed with both peace and war. On October 6, 1939, he invited Britain and France to talk peace, but was rebuffed. Groping for something else, he kept his generals on pins and needles while he played with half a dozen ideas; for each they had to design a possible campaign. “Sunflower” was the name for a possible campaign in North Africa aimed at Tripoli. “Alp Violet” was to be aimed at Albania. “Felix” contemplated crossing Spain to seize Gibraltar. And “Operation Yellow” was to conquer the Low Countries.

Traveling salesmen flocked to Berlin—native conspirators from Holland, Belgium and Norway—peddling their countries to Hitler. From Holland came a fluffy, shifty-eyed philistine named Anton Mussert, a puppet dangling from strings held by the
Abwehr
. From Belgium came a scheming, pampered dandy, Leon Degrelle. Before long, Hitler succumbed to their siren songs. He pushed “Yellow” to the top of his shopping list and issued top-secret Order No. 4402/39, instructing Army Group B of General von Bock “to make all preparations according to special orders, for immediate invasion of Dutch and Belgian territory if the political situation so demands”. Shortly
after-wards, A-Day (as it was called) was fixed for the invasion. Weather permitting, it was to be November 12. A phony war, indeed !

This pending campaign was consistently jeopardized by the twin scourges of the secret service, delays and leaks. The invasion had to be postponed again and again, and, during the procrastination, details of the design came to be known.

Among the first to learn of the plan were the Italians, many of whom hated the Nazis in spite of their formal alliance. The Italian military attaché in Berlin tipped off both his Belgian and Dutch opposite numbers. (The Dutchman, Colonel Sas, already had the information from Oster.) In Rome, the Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, also warned the Belgians and Dutch. At great personal risk, a leading member of the German opposition, Minister von Buelow-Schwante, went to Brussels and, in a clandestine audience, delivered a warning in person to King Leopold. Both the Belgians and the Dutch skeptically shrugged off the warnings.

Just then something quite extraordinary happened that should have lent weight to these scattered storm signals. On January 10, 1940, a
Luftwaffe
plane, piloted by a Major Hoenemanns, was on a flight to Cologne with a copy of the Dutch-Belgian deployment plan for the command of Army Group B. Hoenemanns was unaware of the exact nature of the papers he carried and took his mission somewhat lightly. For one thing, he took a hitchhiker along, a General Staff officer; for another, he was somewhat careless in plotting his course. He lost his way and came down in a field near Machelen on the Meuse inside Belgium.

Hoenemanns and his hitchhiker were duly alarmed when they found out where they were and decided to burn the papers. It so happened that both men were non-smokers and they had no matches on hand. The first man to reach the spot was a Belgian and Hoenemanns immediately asked him for matches. He complied and they set to burning the papers. Before the
two men could get too far with it, a Belgian patrol closed in, extinguished the blaze and arrested the Germans. Interrogation revealed that Major Hoenemanns belonged to the 7th
Luftwaffe
Division of parachutists with headquarters in Berlin and that he was attached to the
Luftwaffe
Unit 220, whose plans were to transport the 22nd Infantry Division by air to points of attack. British combat intelligence identified the division as specially trained for the landing of airborne troops in Belgian territory.

Although badly charred, the documents could still be salvaged. They were three in number, containing instructions for the
Luftwaffe's
VIII Aviation Corps, describing in detail the impending attack on Belgium and the role parachutists and airborne infantry were to play. It was a complete blueprint of the campaign.

Although they became somewhat apprehensive, the Belgians were not unduly alarmed. They evaluated their find from all angles and finally decided that the whole incident was a clever ruse staged by the Germans to drive fear into Belgian hearts in order to tighten their neutrality. Anxious to avoid any complications, the Belgians hastily repatriated their unwelcome guests, returned the stray plane and closed the incident.

In Germany, Hoenemanns' ill-fated mission created understandable consternation and led to another postponement of the operation. What's more, it induced the High Command to redraft the whole plan.

While this was going on, Allied intelligence preoccupied itself with fantastic projects rather than with the business at hand. Some efforts were made to establish the order of battle of the German Army, but virtually nothing was seriously undertaken to discover the intentions of Hitler or to cover the movements of his forces and to conclude from these movements the direction in which he planned to go. While Germany was feverishly preparing for the campaign in the West, Allied intelligence concluded, from the apparent idleness of the
Wehrmacht,
that
Hitler had shot his bolt and was bogged down in melancholy confusion, accompanied by growing dissidence within the
Wehrmacht
High Command.

French
Service de Renseignement
was now headed by General Rivet, an excellent and a gallant officer, but a stranger to the specific problems of a secret service at war. The deficiencies of the organization baffled those in the field. “To be perfectly frank,” wrote the historian Marc Block, then serving as a reserve officer in the field, “more than once, I found myself wondering how much of this muddled thinking was due to lack of skill, how much to conscious guile. Every officer in charge of an Intelligence section lived in a state of constant terror that, when the blow fell, events might blow sky-high all the conclusions that he had told the general in command were ‘absolutely certain'. To put before him a wide choice of mutually contradictory inferences ensured that no matter what might happen, one could say with an air of triumph—'If
only
you had listened to my advice!' Officers whose job resembled mine never got any information at all about the enemy, save what they were lucky enough to pick up in general conversations, or as a result of some chance meeting—in other words, almost exactly nil.”

French combat intelligence officers in the field tried to take matters into their own hands, but their efforts were sabotaged from above. For example, it was imperative to establish what stocks of motor fuel the French could expect to find on the spot should they be forced to move into Belgium to meet the Germans. The Belgian General Staff, inspired by the King's devotion to strict neutrality, proved highly un-cooperative. A French intelligence officer with General Blanchard's army heard of a certain Belgian fuel dump and established contact with a confidential informant who gave him the required data about the capacity of the tanks. Moreover, the man volunteered to keep the tanks filled to capacity if that was what the French General Staff wanted. “This would make your supply problem easier,” he said, “in the event of your finding yourselves constrained, some day, to move your troops into the territory in which they
are situated. Alternatively, I can maintain the bare minimum necessary for the requirements of peaceful commerce, thereby avoiding the danger of having to abandon the valuable resources to the Germans. It is for the French General Staff to decide. As soon as I know what they want done, I will take the necessary steps.”

The matter was referred to a higher echelon of intelligence, but the officer in charge said, “Our job is to collect information, not to make decisions”, and refused to have anything to do with the matter. The young officer was shunted from one office to another and in each he heard the same formula. Thus rebuffed, the young man decided to resolve the issue on his own level. He sent his contact a coded message, “Don't fill the tanks,” justifying his insubordination with a melancholy rationalization: “Unbroken silence on our part,” he said, “would have betrayed to this foreigner the shilly-shallying state of mind of the French General Staff. It was bad enough to know it ourselves.”

The German preparations, of course, were moving rapidly ahead. One problem plagued the top brass: how could the Germans prevent the bridges over the River Maas and the Albert Canal from being destroyed? If they could be seized intact, the army could sweep over them and seal the fate of the Low Countries in a matter of days. Early in November, a conference was held in the Chancellery to discuss this problem. Hitler presided and Canaris was in attendance. The
Abwehr
was ordered to prepare a plan for the seizure of those bridges by a
ruse de guerre
, by sabotage troops dressed in Dutch and Belgian uniforms.

Back in the
Fuchsbau
, Canaris called the keeper of his depot at Quenzsee to inquire how the
Abwehr
stood with Dutch army uniforms. He was told Quenzsee had some, but they were out of date. The
Abwehr
needed a few up-to-date pattern uniforms to enable the tailors (inmates of concentration camps) to make enough uniforms for the adventurous admiral's little land army.

The problem was referred to Commander Kilwen, head
of the Dutch desk of the
Abwehr,
and he in turn got in touch with Mussert in Holland. The Dutch Fuehrer decided to steal the uniforms, but to camouflage the theft as common, garden-variety burglary. Mussert handed the job to a trusted member of his bodyguard who was a professional burglar in private life.

The raid on the Dutch army depot was reminiscent of what New York burglars call a “Seventh Avenue heist.” Mussert's burglars got what Canaris needed, but the thief was caught on Belgian soil with the uniforms in his possession and the cat was out of the bag: he confessed that he had been in the process of doing a “job” for the Germans and that Canaris was the mastermind behind the burglary.

Strangely enough, the incident struck the Dutch and the Belgians as extremely funny. They were far more amused at the plight of the clumsy burglar than alarmed by the implications of the burglary. A Flemish newspaper published a cartoon showing a grinning Goering, dressed in the uniform of a Brussels street car conductor, admiring himself in front of a mirror.

Canaris was called on the carpet by Hitler and Goering. He went to the meeting well prepared, with newspaper clippings and agent reports, assuring his bosses that the Dutch and the Belgians suspected nothing or else they wouldn't have treated the whole thing as a joke.

But Canaris still did not have the uniforms. He sent to Holland one of his best agents, whose specialty was surreptitious entry. Where the burglar failed, the
Abwehr
thief succeeded brilliantly. With the help of the Mussert organization, he sneaked into the depot—on a night when it was guarded by a Dutch soldier who was a Nazi sympathizer—picked a full selection of Dutch uniforms and sent them, in the German Military Attache's bulging pouch (which, of course, enjoyed immunity from search), to Quenzsee. From there on, General von Lahousen, a former Austrian intelligence officer who was taken over by the
Abwehr
after the
Anschluss
, did the planning. Lahousen had his own sabotage troops, the Brandenburg Regiment, but it was not big enough to handle such a complex operation. Lahousen
flew to Breslau and from that location with
Abwehr
volunteers organized Special Battalion 100 to take care of the Maastricht bridges, with one of his officers, Lieutenant Hocke, in command. From his regular sabotage troops he then formed Special Battalion 800, with Lieutenant Walther in command, to carry out the operation at Gennep.

At Gennep a platoon of Battalion 800 was to be “captured” by agents of Mussert disguised as Dutch frontier guards; the German “prisoners” were then to be escorted to the bridges, which they were to seize with the active co-operation of their hosts. On A-Day, May 10, 1940, well before zero hour, Walther led his Battalion 800 to the rendezvous with the Mussert agents. The Dutch traitors apparently disarmed their “prisoners”, but left with them handgrenades and automatic pistols concealed under unseasonable greatcoats. With the help of their “captors”, these “prisoners” pounced upon the Dutch guards at the Gennep bridges, who did not even know the war was on. The operation was a resounding success.