Only two of these three leaders of the German armed forces survived plots against them by Adolf Hitler. From the left: General Werner von Fritsch, Admiral Erich Raeder, and General Werner von Blomberg. (National Archives)
A CLEAR BLUE SKY hovered over Berlin on the afternoon of June 29, 1934, when the chief of the German General Staff, General Ludwig Beck, was escorted into the cavernous office of Adolf Hitler, a World War I corporal. Hitler had seized absolute control of the government after being appointed chancellor seventeen months earlier by aging, senile President Paul von Hindenburg.
The fifty-four-year-old Beck was highly regarded at home and abroad as the most efficient and humane German soldier of his generation. He had sought the appointment because of mounting evidence that the new German leader was planning on rearming the nation of eighty million persons to launch a war of conquest. In measured terms, Beck told Hitler that he did not intend to build an army to conquer other countries; his purpose was to create an efficient army to defend Germany.
Hitler, noted for a quick temper, replied testily: “General Beck, it is impossible to build up an army and give it a sense of worth if the object of its existence is not the preparation for battle. Armies for the preparation of peace do not exist; they exist for triumphant execution in war.”
Before he departed, Beck told Hitler that another war would become a multifront conflict that Germany could not survive.
Only minutes after returning to the imposing building on the Bendler-strasse that housed the headquarters of the General Staff, Beck received a telephone call from Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, a cagey and highly productive spy in World War I whom Hitler had appointed chief of the Abwehr, the German secret service, six months earlier, on Canaris’s forty-seventh birthday.
A slight, prematurely white-haired man who spoke with a lisp, Canaris was well educated and could speak the languages of Germany’s potential enemies—England, France, and the Soviet Union. He, too, feared Hitler was embarking on a war path that would eventually destroy Germany as a nation.
Speaking in guarded tones, Canaris told Beck that the dictator was preparing to launch a purge to wipe out all sources of opposition to his Nazi regime. Among the officers on the hit list were General Kurt von Schleicher, Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, and Schleicher’s close friend and assistant General Kurt von Bredow, who had once held a high post in the Abwehr.
Canaris told Beck that Hitler was convinced that Schleicher was conspiring with the French ambassador to get rid of the Nazi regime by restoring the Hohenzollerns, descendants of the traditional royal family, to the throne of Germany. Beck knew that Hitler’s suspicions were well founded, and he sent a trusted aide to warn Schleicher of the danger. Schleicher, however, seemed unconcerned.
At high noon on June 30, less than twenty-four hours after Beck had clashed with Hitler, five men in civilian clothes barged into General Schleicher’s villa. They went to the study, where Schleicher was working on some papers, pulled out pistols, and shot the former chancellor. Frau von Schleicher, who had been in another room, rushed to the study. She, too, was shot and killed.
Two hours later, General von Bredow was at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin drinking tea with a French diplomat when a messenger from General Ludwig Beck brought him an envelope with a short note telling him that Schleicher had been murdered. Bredow’s face flushed in anger. Turning to the Frenchman, he said with a snarl, “I wonder why the pigs haven’t killed me yet!”
Bredow told his companion that Schleicher was the only man who could have saved Germany. “He was my leader. Now there is nothing for me,” he declared.
Bredow took a taxi to his home, and just past five o’clock that afternoon, he answered a ring at his front door. Two men whipped out pistols and riddled the general with bullets, killing him almost instantly.
Adolf Hitler had launched one of the bloodiest purges that European history had ever known. He realized that war was the last thing most of his generals wanted, and he was convinced that they were conspiring to restore the Hohenzollerns.
Hitler had set into motion a series of sinister plots to not only eradicate suspected foes bodily, but also to besmirch their honor. That approach began promptly when the war minister, General Werner von Blomberg, ordered that Schleicher and Bredow were to be regarded as traitors and that no general or admiral was to attend their funerals.
Despite the risk to their careers—or even to their lives—General Ludwig Beck and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris ignored the strict order and dressed in full uniform, and carrying Schleicher’s medals on silk cushions, they walked behind the cortege to the cemetery. At the gates they were halted by a group of black-uniformed Schutzstaffel (SS), an elite corps that served as Hitler’s bodyguard and was fanatically loyal to him.
On August 2, 1934, a month after Schleicher and Bredow were branded as traitors and buried, the long-senile, eighty-seven-year-old President Paul Ludwig von Hindenburg died at his estate in East Prussia. Earlier, Hitler had obtained a political testament from the Old Warrior that named Hitler to succeed him as president.
Now Hitler moved swiftly. He had no interest in merely being president of a great nation. Only minutes after Hindenburg died, Hitler proclaimed himself führer (supreme leader) and launched a strategy to induce his admirals and generals to swear allegiance to him.
No doubt acting on the führer’s orders, War Minister von Blomberg directed all of Germany’s generals—some three hundred of them—to assemble at three o’clock that same afternoon at the foot of the Siegessäule, the towering Column of Victory in Berlin. Unknown to the high brass, Hitler was preparing to inflict a coup d’état that would give him total control of Germany and the armed forces.
The generals had been told that they were to participate in ceremonies to honor the dead President Hindenburg. Cannons were fired. A band played mournful tunes. There were two minutes of silence. Then General von Blomberg stepped forward to take the Fahneneid—the blood oath of the Teutonic knights. The army commander, General Werner von Fritsch, and General Ludwig Beck followed. Each held the flag of Germany in one hand and the Bible in the other while reciting:
I swear by God this holy oath, that I will render to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German nation and people, supreme commander of the armed forces, unconditional obedience, and I am ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath.
All over Germany at the same time the rank and file of the armed forces recited the same blood oath.
Walking with General Fritsch back to his headquarters, Beck stopped suddenly and said solemnly: “This is a fateful hour. [The oath] means physical and moral suicide.”
Further along the way, Beck halted again. Both generals realized that they had been tricked into taking an oath, not to Germany or the constitution, but to Adolf Hitler.
“He took us unawares,” Beck said mournfully. “I did not realize that we were swearing a completely new form of oath.”
Führer Hitler in the months ahead continued to rearm Germany. But to carry out his plans for widespread conquest, he would have to rid himself of all those on the General Staff who might oppose him and replace them with those who would do his every bidding without argument or hesitation. Strangely, perhaps, one of the first targets was Werner von Blomberg, the war minister, who had been the first general to be elevated to field marshal by the führer.
Blomberg was known in the officer corps as the Rubber Lion—one willing to bend whichever way the ftihrer desired. In December 1937 Blomberg, fifty-nine years old and a widower, asked Hitler’s permission to marry a twenty-six-year-old typist. The fiihrer gave his blessing and was a witness at the wedding ceremony.
Only two of these three leaders of the German armed forces survived plots against them by Adolf Hitler. From the left: General Werner von Fritsch, Admiral Erich Raeder, and General Werner von Blomberg. (National Archives)
Blomberg and his new young wife departed for a honeymoon on the romantic Isle of Capri.
A longtime crony of Hitler, General Hermann Goering, immediately began to hatch a scheme to oust the war minister. Known behind his back as Fat Hermann, Goering deeply coveted Blomberg’s job.
Goering turned over the exacting task of discrediting Blomberg to an expert in the field, tall, hawk-nosed Reinhard Heydrich, the young chief of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the security branch of the SS. Brilliant and with the instincts of a barracuda, the highly ambitious Heydrich and his underlings began poking into Blomberg’s private life and found that he was quite fond of women. That was no crime in the Third Reich, but it could be a valuable blackmail weapon at some future date. Blomberg, Heydrich’s agents discovered, occasionally donned civilian clothes and spent evenings in some of Berlin’s more exotic nightspots.
At the same time, SD men began sifting through old reports of the Krim-inalpolizei (Civil Police) and hit the jackpot. Blomberg’s beautiful new wife, Erna Gruhn, had had convictions for prostitution. Her mother was also well known to Berlin police as the proprietress of a “massage parlor” that was patronized by well-heeled men, presumably in urgent need of rubdowns.
Goering was ecstatic. He rushed to see the führer and showed him the police docket. Hitler professed to be deeply distressed and immediately ordered the war minister to return to Berlin from his honeymoon.
Blomberg was promptly sacked and went into exile with his wife. He ignored suggestions from German generals he had known for many years to take a Luger and blow his brains out.
Now Hitler pondered the question about who would succeed Blomberg as head of Germany’s rapidly expanding military organization. The führer was leaning toward appointing General Werner von Fritsch, whom Hindenburg had appointed commander of the army in May 1935. Aghast that he himself had not been chosen, Goering set about to “dig up dirt” on General von Fritsch.
Again Reinhard Heydrich’s sleuths scanned old police vice files and came up with the name of a German officer who had been blackmailed by an ex-convict and male prostitute named Otto Schmidt. No doubt frightened to be grilled by agents of a high government official, Schmidt, known as Bavarian Joe, admitted he had committed a homosexual act with a man he identified as General von Fritsch at the Wannsee railroad station.
Hoping to gain more “proof” that Fritsch was a practicing homosexual, Heydrich’s agents fanned out through Germany to interview officers in Fritsch’s command. None would claim any knowledge of their boss’s alleged homosexuality.
Despite a total lack of confirmation of the charges, trial papers were drawn up against Fritsch.
Learning of the trumped-up charges, Fritsch was apoplectic, and he demanded an immediate interview with the führer. Unknown to the general, Hermann Goering had arranged for Bavarian Joe to be present.
In the library of the Reichskanzlei (Chancellery), Bavarian Joe repeated his story in front of a frowning Hitler. Schmidt had been well coached. The notorious ex-convict claimed that an “elderly gentleman” wearing a monocle, a short coat with a fur collar, and carrying a silver-headed cane entered the railroad station. In the lavatory, Bavarian Joe picked up the military officer and went with him to a nearby dark lane, he claimed.
Fritsch protested that he had not been in the Wannsee railroad station for many years and that he had never owned a silver-headed cane. A soft-spoken man innocent of political throat-cutting, Fritsch played right into Goering’s hands by not reacting violently to Bavarian Joe’s story, the only “evidence” against him. Consequently, Hitler immediately sacked the high-ranking general.
When it was later discovered that Bavarian Joe’s true client had been an obscure cavalry officer with a similar last name, Achim von Frisch, the führer refused to restore the disgraced general to his former rank.
Meanwhile, Hitler vastly reorganized the armed forces to make certain that when he was ready to go to war, the General Staff would have to comply to orders without argument. The führer created the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), the supreme command of the armed forces. All unit staffs would be subordinate to the OKW. Hitler took the title of supreme commander. His two top aides were both führertreu—totally loyal to him. They were General Wilhelm Keitel, who would be Hitler’s chief of staff, and General Alfred Jodl, who was designated to be Hitler’s chief of operations.
On February 4, 1938, Radio Berlin, which, like every institution in Germany, was controlled by the führer, broadcast a long statement from the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. Field Marshal von Blomberg and General von Fritsch had retired for “health reasons,” it was stated. Then the names of thirty-five other illustrious generals, who may not have been considered führer-treu by Hitler or Hermann Goering, were read by the announcer. They, too, had gone into early retirement because of “health reasons.”
Word of the “failing-health epidemic” that had riddled the ranks of Germany’s generals was flashed throughout the world by the news wire services. In the capitals of Europe it was clear: through a series of crafty schemes and ruthless maneuvers, the Führer had gained total control of eighty million people and the now powerful army, navy, and Luftwaffe.1
Lieutenant Commander Ellis M. Zacharias, who was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in Washington, D.C., had become convinced that Imperial Navy Captain Tamon Yamaguchi was the Japanese espionage leader in the United States. Yamaguchi, the Japanese military attaché, was suave and charismatic. He spoke English fluently and seemed to enjoy the social life in Washington.
Because of his suspicions, Zacharias made it a point to have personal contact with Yamaguchi as often as possible. On one of these occasions, in January 1936, Zacharias and his wife were guests at a gala party given by Yamaguchi in the Chinese Room of the ornate Mayflower Hotel.
Sipping casually on a cocktail, the forty-four-year-old Zacharias, one of the few Jewish Naval Academy graduates of his generation, noticed that two German military attachés, Vice Admiral Robert Witthoft-Emden and Lieutenant General Friedrich von Boetticher, had become quite friendly with Yamaguchi. This development surprised the ONI sleuth. Previously, the relationship between the two Nazis and Yamaguchi had been quite frigid, reflecting the views of their respective governments.
When the party was drawing to a close, Zacharias told his wife that the couple must remain as long as possible to see what would happen between the two Germans and the Japanese host. In social events given by Yamaguchi in the past, the two Germans had always departed after only a few minutes. Now the Nazis had stayed for nearly three hours. Zacharias felt that the party was held to provide an opportunity for the two Germans and Yamaguchi to discuss some important matters without attracting undue attention.
Across the spacious room, now thinning of guests, General Boetticher and Admiral Witthoft-Emden were still clinging to Yamaguchi. The Germans cast periodic glances toward Zacharias. Plainly, they were irritated that he had not left the party.
Nodding toward the two Germans and the Japanese, Zacharias told his wife, “Something’s afoot!”
The situation evolved into a cat-and-mouse game. Who would outwait whom?
Finally, after the waiters had cleared all the dishes, Zacharias and his wife hurried to Yamaguchi’s side to make certain that he, the two Nazis, and the Zachariases all left at the same time, thereby depriving the Germans of a chance to conclude their business with their host.
Early the next morning, Zacharias discussed with his boss, Captain William D. Puleston, the puzzling German-Japanese lovefest at the Mayflower. Because the principal mission of military attachés at embassies is to be espionage agents, the ONI officers agreed that the German and Japanese intelligence agencies were now working in close alliance.
Although the two ONI sleuths had no way of knowing the precise developments, their educated hunch was accurate. German Colonel Walter Nicolai, who had been in charge of Kaiser Wilhelm’s far-flung intelligence apparatus in the Great War, had held secret meetings with his Japanese counterparts in Tokyo only two weeks earlier. Nicolai had suggested that the two nations pool their espionage resources.
Nicolai stressed that only Caucasians could be effective spies in the United States because Oriental agents could be more easily detected. The Japanese bought the proposal. They would spy for the Germans in the Pacific regions, where Caucasian agents would be conspicuous. In turn, the Germans would pass along intelligence gleaned from the United States and the Panama Canal Zone.
Adolf Hitler was enthusiastic over the arrangement, and he appointed Eugen Ott to be ambassador to Japan and to coordinate the two nations’ intelligence exchanges.
Now, within forty-eight hours of the Mayflower Hotel party, the ONI began a surveillance of the Alban Towers, an imposing apartment building at the intersection of Wisconsin and Massachusetts Avenues in Washington. In a high-level suite, Captain Yamaguchi maintained his living quarters. Captain Zacharias believed that the suite also served as a command post for Japanese espionage activities in the United States.
On the first night of the surveillance, ONI technicians, huddled in an enclosed truck parked near the Alban Towers and using electronic devices, picked up mysterious noises somewhere in the building. Zacharias concluded that these sounds were being generated by a machine that encoded messages to be sent to Tokyo by sacrosanct diplomatic courier pouch or by radio transmittal.
Consequently, an elaborate scheme was hatched to gain what intelligence agencies call a “surreptitious entry” to Yamaguchi’s suite, inspect the encoding machine, and “requisition” any codes or other materials customarily used in espionage work.
A major concern was that Yamaguchi might be home and catch the ONI “cat burglars” in the act, thereby igniting a major hullabaloo between the governments of Japan and the United States. Zacharias came up with the perfect answer: he and Mrs. Zacharias would invite their good friend Yamaguchi to have dinner at their home in suburban Washington on the night scheduled for the caper.
When Yamaguchi, smiling and courteous as always, arrived at the Zacharias residence, the ONI officer excused himself, went into another room, and telephoned his headquarters. He recited one code word that meant the Japanese had arrived and the “burglars” could go to work.
Meanwhile, earlier in the evening, Navy Lieutenant Jack S. Holtwick, a cryptanalyst (one who breaks codes), and a Navy radio expert named McGregor donned civilian electricians’ outfits. Then they drove to the Alban Towers in a van with the name of a phony firm painted in large letters on the side. Explaining to the doorman that they had been called by a tenant, the two men took an elevator to Yamaguchi’s floor, tiptoed down the corridor to his suite, and listened for any sound that might indicate there were armed guards inside.
Working swiftly and with ears tuned to any noise that might mean the approach of someone, the two intruders used a special instrument to open the door without leaving a telltale mark. They conducted a thorough search, being careful not to betray their presence by moving objects. No electronic encoding device was found.
After pocketing numerous documents from Yamaguchi’s desk (hopefully he would believe he had only misplaced them), the “electricians” took the elevator to the lobby, walked past the bored doorman, and drove off in their van.
The source of the ominous clicking noises in the building continued to mystify Zacharias. He thought it was possible that some unidentified American had leased another suite in the building for Yamaguchi to use as his communications center to keep in clandestine contact with intelligence sources in Tokyo.
ONI continued its surveillance of the Alban Towers, and it became clear that Yamaguchi’s suite was now the command post for the combined Japanese-German espionage alliance in the United States. Several months later, on November 25, 1936, the cozy relationship between Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Emperor Hirohito’s Japanese Empire became publicly known. In an elaborate ceremony in Berlin, Japanese and German diplomats signed what was called the Anti-Comintern Pact, binding both nations to counter what was described as subversive activity all over the world.
Two years later, Tamon Yamaguchi was called back to Tokyo, promoted to rear admiral, and assigned to the Navy Ministry as a principal aide to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, chief of the combined Imperial Fleet. In that capacity Yamaguchi played a key role in developing a top-secret project: a sneak attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.2
Switzerland, a small country high in the snowcapped Alps and with a population of some five million, is a land of beautiful scenery. The calm, hardworking people produce the world’s finest watches and raise the choicest cows. But their most precious asset is their neutrality: the constitution of the Swiss Federation dictates absolute impartiality in case of any war in which their own country is not invaded.
Because Switzerland had for decades been an island of peace and is located in the cockpit of continental Europe adjoining the Great Powers—Germany, France, and Italy—it became a mecca for spies for many nations beginning in the late 1930s. Two German espionage services, the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), had a higher concentration of secret agents in the tiny country than in any other nation.
Leaders of these two competing German spy agencies had, quite correctly, presumed in advance that any internal opposition to Adolf Hitler and his regime would center in Switzerland. Therefore, these organizations established branches in Stuttgart, eighty miles north of the Swiss border, to deal specifically with matters in Switzerland.
The secret offices in Stuttgart had twenty thousand files on Swiss citizens who might be “of use” to the Third Reich. Each year emissaries from Stuttgart slipped into Switzerland and recruited agents, who were trained in the Reich and then sent back to their own country to enlist accomplices.
At the same time that the Nazi espionage agencies were beefing up their operations in Switzerland, Alexander Radolfi, a respected Hungarian geographer, arrived in Geneva with his wife, Helene. He told neighbors that he was seeking a new challenge, and the couple opened a map publishing business, GeoPress. Actually, the company was a cover. Radolfi was a colonel in the Soviet Army, and he had been sent to Geneva with instructions to build a large espionage network in Switzerland to report on rapidly rearming Germany.
Born in Hungary but trained at Sekhjodnya, a school operated by the Soviet intelligence service just outside Moscow, Rado (as he was known to friends) had spent the past few years working for the Comintern (the Soviet Communist Party leadership), fomenting revolutions in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany.
Rado’s primary source of intelligence during his early months in Switzerland in 1937 was a keen-witted spy, Otto Pünter (code-named Pakbo), who had set up his own small espionage net, Rot, in southern Germany with natives hostile to the Nazi regime.
A former Swiss journalist, Pünter had been a staunch Communist secret agent since July 10, 1930, when he had taken part in an airplane flight over Milan, Italy. Thousands of printed pieces denouncing the new dictator there, Benito Mussolini, had been scattered over the city.
A couple of years after Rado settled in Geneva, another Soviet agent, Alexander A. “Jim” Foote, came to the city. Thirty-three years of age, he was a big man, six feet three, handsome, and charming. An offspring of a comfortable British middle-class family, he had been a failure in several business enterprises and blamed everyone but himself.
In 1936, when the Spanish Civil War had erupted, pitting the Loyalist army of the existing regime against the rebel, Nationalist forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who was provided arms, funds, intelligence, and “volunteer” German combat units by Adolf Hitler, Foote had finally found a cause worth fighting for. Within weeks he was near Madrid as a member of the British battalion of the Communist International Brigade on the side of the current government.
With the Spanish regime collapsing in September 1938, Foote returned to London and was invited to the Communist Party headquarters on King Street. There he received a surprise. Douglas Springhall, who had been the political commissar of the International Brigade in Spain, had strongly recommended him for a special post: working as a spy for the Soviet Union in Switzerland, with Germany as his main target.
Foote had wanted to be a secret agent since boyhood, so he eagerly accepted the offer and was given instructions.
He was to be outside the general post office in the Rue du Mont-Blanc in Geneva on October 10, 1938. He was to wear a white scarf around his neck and hold a leather belt in his right hand. At noon a woman would approach and ask him the time of day. In one hand would be an orange, and in her other, a green parcel.
Foote’s contact turned out to be the alluring Ursula Schultz (code-named Sonia), a German-born Jewish woman who had been directing her own small Soviet cell operating from Switzerland against Germany since 1936. A tall, shapely, attractive woman of thirty-five, she resided with her two children and a housekeeper in a large villa at Caux, an upscale resort overlooking Lake Geneva, in the western tip of Switzerland.
Sonia lived in comfort on her monthly salary of a thousand Swiss francs (the equivalent to about thirty-five hundred dollars in 1999), paid by Soviet intelligence. Concealed from random eyes, a long aerial of her transmitter-receiver was set up in the garden, and the set was concealed in a bread box in her dining room. She broadcast to Moscow at regular intervals every two weeks, and received information from a handful of her agents in Germany.
Sonia gave Foote the hefty sum of two thousand Swiss francs, then ordered him to travel to Munich, in southern Germany, search out useful military information, and return to Geneva in three months. On January 10, 1939, they rendezvoused, this time in front of the post office in Lausanne. The Englishman was bursting with excitement. He had discovered that when Adolf Hitler was in Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi Party, he often dined at Osteria Bavaria, a chic restaurant near Karlsplatz. Why not have someone set a time bomb and blow up the führer?
Sonia was shocked. Hitler was always so closely guarded that the perpetrators most certainly would be detected, probably resulting in the Soviet spy network in Switzerland being unmasked and its agents in Germany caught and shot.
After cooling his assassination scheme, Sonia told Foote to go back to Munich. She said that one of her agents would contact him in April and give him more funds.
At the designated place, Foote was surprised to see that his contact was an old friend, William Philips, also an Englishman. The two had served together during the Spanish Civil War in the International Brigade. Three months later, in August 1939, Sonia ordered her two British spies to return to Switzerland. Rumors were rampant that Germany was preparing to go to war soon.
Meanwhile, two middle-aged men in civilian clothes got off a train in Lucerne, Switzerland, and went to the home of an old friend, Rudolf Roessler. The visitors were German generals who, along with eight other high-ranking officers in the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (High Command) in Berlin, were engaged in a conspiracy to prevent Adolf Hitler from carrying out his plans for widespread conquest in Europe.
Roessler, a soft-spoken, slightly built man whose horn-rimmed glasses gave him an owlish facial appearance, had fought as a teenager in the German Army in the Great War and been honorably discharged as a corporal. During his military service, he had made friends with ten young men who later were accepted into the peacetime Reichswehr (army). Five of them, including the two who were now visiting Roessler in Lucerne, had risen to the rank of general in the German Army, while the others had become colonels and majors.
Unlike his friends, Roessler had chosen not to be a career officer because he abhorred violence. Instead, he became a pacifist, and viewed with deep concern the rise of the Brown Shirts, as the early Nazis were called, under the firebrand former army corporal Adolf Hitler.
Roessler decided he would do all he could to awaken the Herrenvolk (German people) about the danger of Nazism, so he took a job as a reporter with the Augsburg Post Zeitung and wrote scathing articles about the Brown Shirts. Soon he became a marked man. All the while, he was meeting with his ten old army friends and discovered that they, too, were deeply alarmed about the rise of Nazism.
In the summer of 1934, eighteen months after Hitler became chancellor of Germany and began cracking down on his enemies, thirty-six-year-old Rudolf Roessler and his wife, Olga, a pretty woman much younger, had fled to Switzerland. In Lucerne he established a book publishing firm, Vita Nova (New Life).
Now the two German generals in disguise got right to the point. One of them told Rudolph Roessler, “War will break out in a matter of weeks.”
They urged their old friend to play a key role in the conspiracy to keep Nazism from spreading throughout Europe by force of arms.
The generals explained that the ten conspirators could readily obtain in advance the führer’s strategies because they were among the officers whose job it was to draw up his plans. One of the men in Roessler’s home was the top aide of General Erich F. Fellgiebel, who was the Wehrmacht’s chief of communications, so the aide had ongoing access to the huge broadcast center of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht in Berlin, where there was almost incessant noise from the nearly one hundred transmitter-receivers. The wireless operators simply sent thousands of coded messages and likewise jotted down, with no knowledge of their meaning, the deluge of dots and dashes they received.
One general explained to Roessler that the Berlin moles wanted to radio him top-secret information. The conspirators would always do the encoding, so the wireless operators would never suspect anything. “Give the information away or sell it, as you see fit,” one visitor said. “But preferably to the staunchest enemies of Hitler and Nazism.”
Roessler pondered the proposal for several moments, then solemnly agreed to it.
At great personal risk, the two generals had brought with them to Lucerne a small trunk containing the newest-design shortwave radio. The transmitter-receiver was in many parts, as each component had been sneaked out of the Wehrmacht communications center in Berlin.
Did Roessler have a friend in Switzerland whom he could trust to assemble the pieces and who knew Morse code well enough to be his operator? Roessler knew just the man: a German national, Christian Schneider, who was passionately anti-Nazi.
“Das ist gut!” one general said. Before leaving, the visitors turned over codes and procedures for regular communications between the ten moles in the German High Command and Roessler in Lucerne.
Now Roessler was confronted by the most momentous decision of his life: To whom should be given the mass of secret intelligence that would soon be pouring over the radio into his home? Should he discreetly make the rounds of Allied embassies, his wares in a briefcase? No diplomat would take him seriously. He finally decided that his priceless intelligence would be offered to his adopted country—Switzerland. If Swiss intelligence so desired, it could distribute the information to other friendly nations.
A few days after the German generals had returned to Berlin, Roessler arranged a meeting with Xavier Schnieper, a young Swiss who had become a close friend. Schnieper, Roessler knew, had been serving part-time as a member of the Swiss secret service, and he had often sneaked across the border into the Third Reich wearing the uniform of a German corporal.
While being scrupulously careful not to disclose the entire truth, Roessler told his friend that he had secret contacts in Berlin who would provide him with accurate and continuing intelligence, which he wanted to communicate to the Swiss. Schnieper agreed to speak about the proposal to higher-ups.
Soon word reached Roessler that Brigadier Colonel Roger Masson, the keen-witted, seventy-year-old chief of Swiss intelligence, had agreed to allow Roessler’s espionage activities on the condition that all information radioed from Berlin would also be passed along to him.
Masson had been confronted with a serious bout with his conscience for accepting intelligence from a secret agent operating on Swiss soil. Yet he knew that Adolf Hitler was on the brink of launching a widespread war of conquest in Europe, and his sympathy for the Allies caused him to search for a way to warn them of German military plans without directly involving Switzerland.
Masson’s top aide, Major Hans Hausamann, a bitter foe of Nazi Germany, came up with a solution. An acquaintance known as “Uncle Tom,” a Czech national, agreed to act as a go-between with the British secret service. Actually, he was Colonel Thomas Sedlacek, who would continue in that undercover role for more than five years.
Meanwhile, Rudolf Roessler had second thoughts about the trustworthiness of Christian Schneider, so he had Schneider assemble the radio left by the two German generals in Roessler’s home, and teach him how to operate it. He himself would send messages to and receive them from the coconspirators in Berlin.
Unbeknownst to Roessler, Schneider (code-named Taylor) was a key agent in a Soviet spy ring headed by Rachel Duebendorfer (code-named Sissi), which operated in Geneva from the International Labor office where she worked. She lived with her young daughter Tamara and her boyfriend, Paul Boetcher, a former clergyman in his native Germany.
Early in May 1940, the conspirators in Berlin radioed Roessler that Hitler was about ready to launch Case Yellow, a massive invasion of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. “Uncle Tom” rushed to inform the British, Dutch, and Belgian embassies, but when the Wehrmacht struck at dawn on May 10, the defenders were taken by total surprise. Roessler’s warning had been ignored.
In only six weeks the powerful German juggernaut conquered much of western Europe and was poised to leap the British Channel and invade nearly defenseless Great Britain. At this point Moscow ordered Jim Foote to become the radio operator for Rado, the chief Soviet spymaster, who lived in Geneva. For security reasons Foote would operate in Lausanne, some forty miles northeast of Geneva.
Renting an apartment on the top floor of a large building, he reflected that this was an ideal location for his clandestine broadcasting. Any intruders would have to pass through two heavy, tightly locked doors, so he would have ample time while the second door was being forced to sabotage his radio and destroy his message files and secret codes.
Foote located a technician who would install an extra-large antenna on the roof without informing the police of this unusual activity by a foreigner. The oversized aerial was crucial for him to contact Moscow. Foote achieved his goal by convincing the installer that he was an eccentric British millionaire trapped in Switzerland by the outbreak of war who wanted to pick up the news broadcasts on BBC radio from London.
There was another reason why Foote needed the large aerial: to ensure that his messages could reach London. While masquerading as a staunch Communist, he actually was a double agent employed by the British secret service to penetrate the Soviet espionage networks in Switzerland and to radio London with information about Nazi Germany.
Back in 1938, after returning to London from fighting in the Spanish Civil War, Foote had soured on communism, so he had contacted Claude Dansey, deputy chief of MI-6 (the British secret service responsible for overseas operations), who recruited him as a spy. When Dansey instructed him to accept the offer made by the Communist Party headquarters on King Street to ostensibly work for the Soviet Union in Switzerland, Foote had become a double agent.
In November 1940 Foote’s boss in the Soviet spy ring, Sonia, told him that she had fallen in love with her other British agent, William Philips, and the two were going to London to live. Foote was stunned. He knew that the highly efficient British counterintelligence service painstakingly screened anyone entering the country. So he drew a startling conclusion: Sonia and Philips had also been working for the British as double agents. Three days before Christmas, the couple left for England by way of Lisbon.
In the meantime, at Lucerne, Rudolf Roessler had been getting a steady flow of high-grade intelligence from his Berlin friends. A few days after Christmas 1940, he received a blockbuster message spread out over a period of forty-eight hours. It took him twelve hours more to decipher it. When his work was done, he had a complete copy of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s planned invasion of the Soviet Union. The attack was to kick off in the spring of 1941.
Roessler was thunderstruck. He tried desperately to find a third party to warn the Soviets. Finally he contacted Christian Schneider, the man who had assembled his radio and who was thought to have Communist leanings.
Roessler minced no words. “The Germans intend to invade Russia in the spring,” he told Schneider. “Do you know how I can talk to Soviet agents?” Roessler reminded Schneider of the radio and assured him that he had high-placed contacts in Berlin.
A month later, Schneider informed Roessler that “my people” have been in touch with the Ministry of State Security—known as “the Center” to Soviet spies —in Moscow and that they had agreed to put the German émigré on the payroll. Thus Roessler, a Protestant from a respectable, conservative, upper-middle-class background, became, out of hatred for Nazism, a Soviet spy.
Brigadier Colonel Masson had given his blessing to the arrangement on the condition that Roessler (whom the Center had code-named Lucy) continue to furnish the Swiss with intelligence from Berlin that would be useful to the British.
A system was worked out whereby Rachel Duebendorfer (Sissi) and Christian Schneider (Taylor) passed the information from Berlin each day from Rudolf Roessler to Jim Foote, who had recently replaced Rado as head of the Soviet spy apparatus in Switzerland.
Rado had learned that BUPO—the Swiss intelligence—was about to arrest him, so he had rapidly given Foote’s address and telephone number to members of the network. Then Rado; his wife, Helene; and their two sons fled the country.
Now Jim Foote, the double agent, found himself in an incredible position. He was being inundated by intelligence from both Berlin and the entire Soviet espionage network in Switzerland. Most of his days and many nights were consumed in radioing this voluminous amount of information to Moscow and to London.
All the while, Moscow Center repeatedly demanded to know the source of Roessler’s intelligence. Just as steadfastly, he refused to unmask his Berlin coconspirators. So when the German émigré warned the Soviets that Adolf Hitler was going to invade Russia along a thousand-mile front at dawn on June 22, 1941, this intelligence was ignored. Adolf Hitler’s war machine gained total surprise and plunged deep into the Soviet Union.
For more than two months, Moscow Center had stubbornly refused to listen to Roessler’s shouts of alarm. Now, twenty-four hours after the Wehrmacht struck, he had gained instant credibility, and the Center offered him more money than it had ever paid a secret agent—a monthly salary of seven thousand Swiss francs (about sixteen thousand U.S. dollars in 1999).
During most of the remainder of the war, Roessler, through his superbly placed contacts, supplied the intelligence that permitted Josef Stalin’s army to stay one crucial jump ahead of the Wehrmacht.
Jim Foote, the double agent who had radioed Moscow Center thousands of pages of high-grade information, was notified early in 1943 that a grateful Soviet Union had made him a major in the Red Army.3
Shadows were lengthening over Berlin late on the afternoon of November 5, 1937, when an elite gathering of top generals and admirals in the Wehrmacht settled into plush chairs in the Little Cabinet Room at the Reichskanzelei on the Wilhelmstrasse. These leaders had been summoned by Adolf Hitler, dictator of the Third Reich, as he now called Germany.
Then forty-eight years old and slightly stooped with the beginning of kyphosis of the spine, the führer was of medium height and build, and his straight, jet-black hair draped over his forehead. His most dominating facial feature was a brush mustache, which he had worn during his entire manhood.
During the Great War, Hitler had served as an infantry corporal in the muddy front-line trenches of France for nearly four years, and he had been gassed and decorated with the Iron Cross, First Class, for valor, the latter event a unique distinction for an enlisted man.
Now as the fiihrer strode into the Little Cabinet Room, his generals and admirals leaped to their feet and stood at attention. After he had motioned for them to be seated, Hitler swore his military leaders to secrecy. Then he shocked them with a startling announcement: he was going to immediately launch a policy of acquiring Lebensraum (living space) for the German people.
As the high brass listened silently in amazement, the führer, a spellbinding orator, spoke for four hours on the reason for his decision and his plans for implementing it. Even if general war were to erupt, he was determined to annex, either by diplomacy, subterfuge, or a combination of these categories, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Then, when the Wehrmacht had become sufficiently powerful, he planned to invade the Soviet Union.
No doubt anticipating the commanders’ qualms, Hitler asserted that France, which was thought to have the world’s best and strongest army, and Great Britain would only launch a war of words and not interfere as the Lebensraum campaign unfolded.
In closing his marathon dissertation, the führer declared that he would accept only total obedience from his generals and admirals, and he gave them a timetable for conquest: operations were to be launched in 1938 and completed by 1943.
A hush fell over the room, as Hitler’s plans had an enormous impact on the audience. However, he brushed off ensuing arguments, claiming that Great Britain and France were too timid to oppose him.
Now it was clear: Hitler was getting ready for a widespread war of conquest. There also remained no doubt about his utter contempt for his General Staff. Later he told one of his few confidants: “This presumptuous Junker caste is in reality nothing more than a collection of muddleheads, vacillators, and stuffed shirts.”
Convinced that Hitler was going to take Germany hell-bent down the road to eventual destruction, a group of high-ranking officers, civilian leaders, and government officials created a conspiratorial group the Gestapo would later brand the Schwarze Kapelle (Black Orchestra).
Heading the covert clan was General Ludwig Beck, a curious mixture of intellectualism and military genius, who, as chief of the German General Staff, had directed the army’s enormous expansion during the previous three years. He was regarded by other German generals and by foreign leaders as a man of high honor and integrity.
A positive plan to get rid of Hitler by a coup d’état was drawn up by the conspirators. The fiihrer was to be arrested in Berlin, but not killed. Rather, he would be put on trial before the German people, with procedures worked out by legal experts involved with the Schwarze Kapelle.
The conspirators had managed to obtain Corporal Adolf Hitler’s medical history for his service in the Great War. It seemed to indicate that Hitler had “gone mad” from being gassed. Consequently, the Schwarze Kapelle set up a secret panel of psychiatrists to issue a report on his mental fitness.
The keen military minds of the conspirators had created a plan in minute detail. At the proper time, General Erich Fellgiebel, chief Wehrmacht signals officer, would cut all communications throughout Germany, thereby isolating Hitler in Berlin. At the same time, General Erwin von Witzleben, the commander of the Berlin military district, would rush reinforcements into the capital and issue orders for them to arrest Hitler and two top aides, General Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Gestapo and the Schutzstaffel (SS), the führer’s elite bodyguard.
Himmler, a lapsed Catholic and former chicken farmer, was a rare mixture of crackpot and organizational genius. As commander of Hitler’s SS bodyguard and the Gestapo, he would have to be “neutralized” if the conspirators’ plot were to succeed.
Hitler, Himmler, Goering, and other Nazi leaders were to be rushed southward to Bavaria by a heavily armed contingent of General Witzleben’s soldiers and locked up securely in the dungeon of an ancient castle near Munich.
At his trial, according to the established scenario, Hitler was to be exposed as criminally insane and unfit to hold the office of fiihrer. His madness had prompted him to create grandiose plans for world conquest that would destroy Germany forever as a nation. Once the trial judges ruled that Hitler was insane, he would be safely ensconced, with heavily armed guards around the clock, in a mental institution. Then a civilian of prominence and respectability not yet selected was to form a new German government along democratic lines.
Now the leaders of the Schwarze Kapelle were confronted by a knotty problem: when to strike. Although German generals and admirals were almost unanimous in their contempt for the one-time army corporal, they were confronted by the fact that Hitler had the undeniable love and trust of most of the Herrenvolk and the support of the rank and file of the Heer (army) and Kriegsmarine (navy). Titans of industry also were firmly in the führer’s corner: his huge military buildup was making arms manufacturers extremely wealthy men of enormous influence.
Reluctantly, the Schwarze Kapelle decided to bide its time, waiting for Hitler to perpetrate some sort of disaster that would turn many of the German people against him.4
Seated at his desk in Berlin in March 1937, Reinhard Heydrich, at age thirty-three a general in the elite Schutzstaffel (SS) and one of the Third Reich’s most powerful figures, was poring over a report he had just received from Nikolai Skoblin, a former general in the Russian White Army who was now an agent in Paris for the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). Brilliant and ruthless, Heydrich was chief of the SD, the intelligence branch of the black-uniformed SS, Adolf Hitler’s private army.
Skoblin said in his report that a Soviet group, led by Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the Red Army’s youngest marshal, was conspiring to assassinate dictator Josef Stalin. Heydrich mulled over the startling disclosure, then hatched a plot to convert the scheme into a highly favorable scenario for the fiihrer, Adolf Hitler.
Documents would be skillfully concocted to make it appear that the Soviet generals were conniving with German generals to murder Stalin. The “evidence” would then be planted in the Kremlin. Then the führer and the other top Nazi officials could watch gleefully from afar as Stalin wreaked bloody revenge on the “conspirators.”
Moving with typical alacrity, General Heydrich gave the task to a trusted aide, Alfred Naujocks, who had been assigned to many of Heydrich’s most brutal missions, including kidnapping and murder.
Naujocks rapidly collected a group of skilled forgers, several of whom had served prison terms for practicing their trade. Near Berlin, Naujocks located an engraver who could precisely reproduce signatures—in this case, those of Soviet officials. From musty archives, team members obtained copies of correspondence from the past fifteen years when the Soviet and German armies had secretly collaborated to reach rearmament goals.
Within a few weeks, Naujocks and his task force had produced a thick file of damning “evidence”—all fraudulent. There were typed documents containing signatures of top Soviet military leaders and government officials; notes scribbled in longhand in the margins of the reports; and secret stamps and seals to inject bureaucratic authenticity.
Meanwhile, SD agents planted hints about the plot to murder Stalin with sources that would assure that the information reached the ears of the leaders of the NKVD, the Soviet intelligence agency.
Reinhard Heydrich’s devious scheme worked to perfection. When sources friendly to Moscow disclosed that the dossier could be had by the NKVD—for a heavy price —Stalin’s secret service operatives sneaked into Berlin and paid for the phony dossier.
Heydrich, whose ruthlessness had earned him the nickname of the Blond Beast among German officers, soon learned that his endeavor had achieved its purpose far beyond his wildest expectations. Stalin ordered the execution of not only young Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky but also of seven other generals. Later, seven of the nine judges who had presided at the “trial” of the doomed officers were also murdered. But these actions were only the beginning. Before the wave of executions of Red Army military men had concluded, the death toll reached thirty thousand—including three of every five marshals.
The highly ambitious Reinhard Heydrich regularly kept Adolf Hitler informed about the ongoing bloodbath that Stalin was inflicting. Because the führer’s plans called for the eventual invasion and conquest of the Soviet Union to “wipe out the menace of communism,” the leader of ninety million Germans showered his disciple with praise for the clever machination that greatly weakened the Red Army.
Neither Hitler nor Heydrich would live to learn that it had not been Stalin, but the Blond Beast who had been victimized by the Soviets’ own crafty ruse. After the war, evidence would be uncovered disclosing that Stalin had been planning to launch the bloodbath against the Red Army leaders many weeks before Naujocks’ forged dossier reached the Kremlin. Moreover, Nikolai Skoblin, the former White Russian Army general who had triggered Heydrich’s scheme, was actually a double agent for the NKVD.5
On march 11, 1938, Hitler announced the Anschluss, the union of the Third Reich and Austria, whose eight million people were largely ethnic Germans. General Ludwig Beck, the Schwarze Kapelle leader, issued orders for the invasion of Austria to army and SS troops assembled at the locale where the Danube and Inn Rivers join. Hitler’s plan was for the invading force to fan out over Austria to “establish constitutional conditions.” At 9:00 A.M. on March 12, armored spearheads began flowing across the frontier.
A day later, with a lieutenant colonel named Erwin Rommel in command of his army escort, the führer made a triumphant entry into Vienna and received a tumultuous welcome from Austrian citizens. They peppered him and his troops with a cascade of floral tributes in what came to be known as the Battle of the Flowers.
His return as a conquering hero was an emotionally supercharged event for Hitler, who had been born in Austria and had begun his political life in Vienna, where he stayed from 1909 until 1913. There he had been an impoverished vagrant, sleeping in flophouses, doing odd jobs, and often eating at charity soup kitchens. Now he was the absolute master of the city that, he felt, had once consigned him to the gutter.
When the hoopla and pomp and circumstance died and Hitler returned to the Reichskanzelei in Berlin, he began to analyze the efficiency with which his peaceful occupation of Vienna had been carried out. He was flabbergasted —and furious.
Although the German officers who had drawn up the tactical plan were highly skilled in their profession, the operation had, in fact, been botched. The main road leading from Salzburg to Vienna had been littered with tanks and trucks that had broken down en route, and there had been confusion at times in the armored spearheads.
Had the weak and outgunned Austrian Army resisted, the führer might well have suffered an embarrassing setback that would have opened the door for the Schwarze Kapelle to launch its scheme to get rid of him. The entire invasion indicated sabotage. Only the barrage of flowers from wildly enthusiastic Austrians instead of shells and bullets may have saved the day for the führer, who now was a greater idol than ever in Germany.6
Adolf Hitler’s triumphant entry into Vienna. Did his generals try to sabotage the operation? (National Archives)
A Teutonic Falstaff tipping the scales at 290 pounds, General Hermann Goering was known behind his back as Der Dicke (Fatty). He had been führertreu (extremely loyal to Hitler) since hearing the future leader of Germany speak in 1922 in a Munich beer hall. However, he was secretly aghast over his leader’s plans for conquest.
On February 4, 1938, Adolf Hitler announced that he was taking over as commander of Germany’s armed forces. His jawbreaker title would be: der Führer und Oberste Befehlshaber der Wehrmacht des Grossdeutschen Reichs. At the same time, he rewarded his faithful right-hand man Goering with the rank of field marshal.
Through ruthless manipulations, Der Dicke had become one of the Third Reich’s wealthiest men. No one, of course, dared complain about his sharp financial practices—and Hitler was too busy to notice. With the shameless use of government funds, Goering converted a former imperial hunting lodge on one hundred thousand acres, twenty-five miles north of Berlin, as his personal residence and playground. He called his estate Karinhall.
In June 1938 Goering invited to Karinhall a clever, scheming social climber whose original name had been Stefanie Richter—Steffi to her friends. Daughter of a Viennese lawyer, red-haired, statuesque Steffi had married Prince Friedrich François Augustin Marie Hohenlohe-Waldenburg. The couple was divorced in 1920 (she charged adultery). Steffi retained her royal title and encouraged everyone to continue to address her as Your Serene Highness.
Over the years, Steffi had been a familiar figure flitting about the capitals of Europe, entertaining lavishly with funds provided by an elderly British admirer, and living the high life. Her Nazi sympathies had become well known, and she had been enthralled on being introduced to Adolf Hitler, a bachelor with a gift for mesmerizing many women with his charm.
During a lengthy conversation at Karinhall, Goering told Princess Stefanie of his pet scheme for easing mounting tensions in Europe: he personally would work secretly to gain British concessions advantageous to the Third Reich and thereby avoid a bloody war.
As Her Serene Highness listened avidly and in awe, Goering outlined his plot. He would sneak covertly into London and confer with Edward F. L. W. Halifax, the British foreign secretary. Goering had known Lord Halifax personally since the twilight of 1937, when the Briton had been invited to visit Berlin and spend a few days shooting foxes in Saxony. Halifax, the Germans knew, had been an avid huntsman since boyhood.
Despite his misgivings, the tall, reedy Halifax had accepted the invitation because his superior had thought some undefined good toward maintaining peace in Europe might accrue. Actually, the invitation apparently had been offered to give German leaders an insight into current thinking of the British government, especially toward rearming England.
While in Berlin, Halifax had been given the red-carpet treatment. He was wined, dined, and feted. Meetings were held with Adolf Hitler; Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels; and Goering, who threw a lavish party for his British guest at Karinhall.
Goering’s proposed incognito trek to London would have to be arranged with a great deal of finesse so as not to step on the toes of Foreign Minister Ulrich Friedrich Willy Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was an enemy of Der Dicke but highly regarded by Adolf Hitler. Ribbentrop must not learn that Goering was going to inject himself into the realm of foreign policy.
What was vitally needed, Goering explained to Princess Stefanie, was someone to make discreet contact with Lord Halifax and arrange for the field marshal’s visit. Numerous names were discussed before the two schemers hit upon the ideal candidate—forty-five-year-old Fritz Wiedemann. Debonair and articulate, Wiedemann was widely known and respected in the Third Reich and in embassies of the world. He had been commander of an infantry company with which Corporal Adolf Hitler had been awarded the Iron Cross for valor in the muddy trenches of France in the Great War.
General Hermann Goering (left) plotted behind the back of Adolf Hitler (right) to gain concessions from the British without going to war. (National Archives)
When approached by Her Serene Highness, the tall, handsome Wiedemann was horrified. Go to London behind Ribbentrop’s back—behind the führer’s back? Steffi was persistent. Finally, Wiedemann agreed to take on the task, but only after obtaining Hitler’s approval. Surprisingly—to Wiedemann, at least—Hitler gave him the green light.
Princess Stefanie was delighted to learn of the führer’s approval. Now she was in the thick of things at the highest levels. She promptly hopped the English Channel and, through her elite social connections, rapidly arranged to meet with Lord Halifax, who agreed to confer secretly with Goering’s emissary, Fritz Wiedemann.
A few days later, Halifax and Wiedemann held a long discussion. Princess Stefanie was not present, but Hitler’s onetime infantry commander told her later that the conference was “quite successful.” Then the scheme began to fall apart. Before Hermann Goering could sneak into England to see Halifax and wring concessions from him to avoid war in Europe, all hell broke loose in Berlin.
A furious Joachim von Ribbentrop had gotten wind of Goering’s plot behind his back, and he rushed to the Reichskanzlei and talked the führer into squashing any future negotiations with Lord Halifax by Wiedemann.7
Kapitaen-Leutnant Erich Pfeiffer, chief of the Abwehr Nebenstellen (nest) in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, and directly responsible for espionage in North America, began putting the heat on his spies abroad to obtain more military secrets. Adolf Hitler had repudiated the restrictions imposed by the Versailles Treaty, the symbol of Germany’s crushing defeat in the Great War, and was rapidly building up the Wehrmacht armed forces and preparing for war. It was December 1937.
One of Pfeiffer’s slickest and most productive spies in the United States was slightly built, mild-mannered Günther Gustav Rumrich, who had been born twenty-six years earlier in Chicago, where his father, Alphonse, was secretary of the Austro-Hungarian consulate. When Günther was two years old, his father was transferred to Bremen, Germany. Learning that he was a U.S. citizen because of his birth there, he returned alone to Chicago at age eighteen to seek his fortune.
Rumrich was a curious mixture of shiftlessness, arrogance, and cunning. He joined the U.S. Army in 1930, and later was booted out of the service when caught stealing money from the Fort Missoula, Montana, hospital fund. Broke and jobless, Rumrich managed to make contact with the Abwehr in Wilhelmshaven, volunteered his services as an undercover agent, and after his background was carefully scrutinized by two Gestapo men in the United States, was accepted and given the code name Crown.
Six months after he had first made contact with the Abwehr, Rumrich was handed his first “job”—to identify the units (and their strengths) guarding the Panama Canal, together with the names of the commanding officers. Within two weeks this “secret” information was on Pfeiffer’s desk in Wilhelmshaven. Pfeiffer was astonished and amazed at the speed. Rumrich had not told him that he had known most of the data through memory—he had served in the Panama Canal Zone on army duty.
In the months ahead, Crown shuttled a bonanza of military intelligence to Wilhelmshaven. Then, in January 1938, Pfeiffer handed Crown an incredible mission—to steal secret plans for the defense of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.
Undaunted by the seemingly impossible assignment, Rumrich set about devising a bizarre scheme. His target was Colonel Henry W. T. Eglin, commander of the 62nd Coast Artillery, an antiaircraft outfit, at Fort Totten in New York City. A former corporal in the U.S. Army who was familiar with military terminology agreed—for a hefty fee—to write bogus orders over the signature of Major General Malin Craig, the army’s chief of staff in Washington. The phony orders would direct Colonel Eglin to gather all the Eastern Seaboard defense information and bring it to a secret meeting at the McAlpin Hotel at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street in midtown Manhattan. Another Crown contact with a military background would then telephone Craig’s “orders” directly to Eglin at Fort Totten.
Ace Nazi spy Günther Rumrich concocted a scheme to obtain secret U.S. plans for East Coast defenses. (FBI)
Eglin would be instructed not to divulge the nature of the secret conference to anyone, to arrive alone at 12:20 P.M. on a specified day, and to wear civilian clothes. On arrival at the McAlpin, the colonel was to take a seat in the main lobby and await being paged by Thomas W. Conway, after which he would identify himself by that name to a bogus army officer (a Crown associate) in civilian clothes. This “officer” would lead Eglin into a trap, a guest room where two of Crown’s men posing as window washers would overpower the colonel and flee with his secret papers.
As an added touch to convince New York City police that the mugging—or murder—had been pulled off by Communist agents, the strong-arm men would leave the window washers’ garb behind together with a copy of the Daily Worker, the Communist newspaper published in New York.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, MI-5, Great Britain’s highly efficient counterintelligence service, acted on a tip from a suspicious postal carrier and began intercepting mail sent to Mrs. Jennie Jordan, a fifty-one-year-old hairdresser at No. 1 Kinloch, Dundee, Scotland. Surveillance disclosed that the correspondence bore the signature Crown and was postmarked in New York City.
Mrs. Jordan removed sealed envelopes inside Crown’s letters, which were written to an N. Spielman, and, using her own return address, mailed them to a post-office box in Germany, from where the letters were shuttled to N. Spielman. At the time MI-5 knew that N. Spielman was obviously a Nazi master spy but was unaware that N. Spielman was one of the numerous aliases used by Dr. Erich Pfeiffer, the chief at the Wilhelmshaven Abwehr nest.
After intercepting Mrs. Jordan’s mail, the British sleuths steamed open the N. Spielman envelopes, made copies of Crown’s letters, then carefully resealed the covering and allowed the mail to continue to Germany routinely through the mail system.
Captain Guy Liddell of MI-5 flew copies of the incriminating series of letters to Washington and turned them over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Deciphering experts concluded that Crown, whoever he was, planned to kidnap Colonel Eglin, the antiaircraft commander at Fort Totten.
When informed of the Nazi plot by the FBI, Eglin laughed it off, insisting that he would never have been taken in by the phony orders from General Craig in Washington. But he agreed to play the key role of “pigeon” in a coun-tertrap that the FBI, working with army intelligence, planned to spring to capture Crown and his unidentified cohorts.
Eglin was to follow the bogus orders from Craig, go to the McAlpin in civilian clothes, carry a bulging briefcase stuffed with newspapers, and identify himself as Thomas W. Conway to Crown’s confederate in the lobby. At that point FBI agents, disguised as hotel employees and as guests idling in the lobby, would pounce on and apprehend the Nazi agents.
All was in readiness for the FBI counterplot, which would be triggered when Colonel Eglin received the telephone call from “General Craig.” But the bogus call never came. Rumrich’s comrades in the kidnapping had gotten nervous over the brazen plot, to be perpetrated in broad daylight in the center of bustling Manhattan.
Rumrich was depressed by the cancellation of the scheme. The badly needed thousand-dollar bonus he was to have received from Adolf Hitler’s cash register for delivering plans for the defense of the Eastern Seaboard had slipped through his fingers.
About six weeks later, on February 17, 1938, the New York Times carried a brief story stating that Günther Gustav Rumrich, aged twenty-seven, of the Bronx, had been arrested by two New York Alien Squad detectives. He was charged with trying to fraudulently obtain fifty passport blanks at the U.S. State Department’s Passport Division at Wall and Pine Streets.
Driving downtown with their prisoners, the detectives thought they had nabbed a low-level con artist. Only after Rumrich had been interrogated by FBI agents did he confess that he was indeed the mysterious Crown. N. Spielman had promised to pay five hundred dollars for the genuine passports, to be used for slipping more Nazi spies into the United States.8
French ambassador André François-Poncet, who was regarded in global diplomatic circles as being highly knowledgeable about the Third Reich, arrived at his country’s consulate in Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city. A port inland from the North Sea, Hamburg in certain years handled a volume of shipping that was exceeded only by that of London and New York City. It was late summer of 1938, and war clouds were starting to gather over Europe.
As François-Poncet strolled through the consulate, he passed and spoke to a wiry blond man in his early thirties who had been a janitor there for the past two years. Mild-mannered and well liked, Hans Sorenson was a German, and he had applied for the job at the behest of Navy Captain Joachim Burghardt, who was chief of the Abwehr outpost in Hamburg.
Captain Burghardt had been quite successful in creating a widespread spy ring in the British Isles. But in early 1938 he found himself caught up in an internal Abwehr power struggle, and he was bounced from his post. His replacement was Navy Captain Herbert Wichmann, a clever operative who possessed a key ingredient for success as a spymaster: an intense passion for anonymity.
Now at the French consulate in Hamburg, Ambassador François-Poncet held a long discussion with the consul-general in his private office. Reaching into his briefcase, the ambassador pulled out a thick sheaf of papers and handed them to the consul, who placed them in his safe. Neither Frenchman knew that the soft-spoken Hans Sorenson had been filching secret papers from the safe and having them photocopied for more than a year.
One of the reasons that Captain Burghardt had chosen Sorenson for the French consulate mission was because the new recruit had intricate skills in opening safes that were supposed to be burglarproof. Sorenson had managed to get the job because of collusion between the Abwehr and the German labor exchange in Hamburg.
After only a few weeks, Sorenson discovered that the consul had a strictly regimented lifestyle. Each Sunday morning at precisely the same minute, he left to attend Mass. When he had departed, the janitor stole upstairs to the consul’s office and, within minutes, opened the safe. He rapidly sifted through the documents, removing any that seemed to have a high security classification and others that appeared significant. On a pocket-size pad he carefully wrote down the location of each document.
On a few previous Sundays, the spy had cautiously trailed the consul to church, and he noted that Mass always ended at almost the same time. Then the consul habitually drove back to the consulate, coming through the front door at 11:00 A.M.
After removing the documents, Sorenson would climb on his motorcycle, specially provided by the Abwehr for the task, and race through the quiet Hamburg streets to the Abwehr office on Sophien Terrace. There the photography experts were always on duty. They took the documents, disappeared into their darkroom, and photographed all the papers. Then Sorenson sped back to the consulate in plenty of time to return the documents to their proper place in the safe.
For many months Sorenson had been supplying the Abwehr and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht with a choice selection of French secret documents. Now he sensed, with the arrival of Ambassador François-Poncet, that there would be the most secret papers yet in the “burglarproof” safe.
A new factor entered the equation. With the ambassador in the consulate, the consul’s customarily punctual lifestyle was altered. That night, the ambassador and the consul left to attend a social function, and Sorenson hurried to the safe. He extracted what looked like new documents that the ambassador must have brought with him.
Once again the Abwehr spy went through the routine of getting the papers photographed. He was in the process of returning them to the safe when a chill raced through him—there was the unexpected sound of an automobile outside. Moments later, the two French officials, chattering loudly, came inside the building.
Hastily the spy closed the safe door, then stole downstairs to his bedroom. He was deeply worried, convinced that he had not replaced the documents in the same places they had been when he had extracted them. If the consul examined the safe, he most certainly would know that someone had been inside. All that night the Abwehr agent tossed and turned in his bed, expecting French security police to barge in at any moment.
Sorenson convinced himself that the consul had been in the safe. But in the morning, the two French officials said nothing to him. Were they playing some sort of cat-and-mouse game to trick him into confessing that he was a German spy?
Finally, he decided that he would have to create a cover story for having been in the safe. As soon as he had the chance, he slipped into the consul’s office, opened the safe, and took from it the ten thousand marks he had noticed the previous night. Clever man that he was, the spy left clues that would point to him as the money thief. Stealing funds could result in only a short jail term; being pegged as a German spy could have serious consequences.
Before he closed the safe, Sorenson turned the contents topsy-turvy, so the theft was discovered before nightfall. Curiously, the consul, instead of using his own security force, summoned the German Kriminalpolizei, who quickly tracked down the thief, not knowing that Sorenson was an Abwehr agent. The janitor was hauled off to jail to await trial. Within two weeks, he appeared in court on a charge of theft and was found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison.
Meanwhile, Captain Herbert Wichmann at the Hamburg Abwehr branch had been in contact with German police. When Sorenson was being returned to jail to serve his sentence, he somehow managed to slip away—while the two police escorts happened to be looking in the opposite direction.
Sorenson was told to report immediately to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris at the Abwehr headquarters in Berlin. There the spy received a hero’s welcome. One of the French ambassador’s documents he had photographed turned out to be an intelligence bonanza—a top-secret list of the names of all the French spies operating in the Third Reich.
Canaris, a cagey operative long schooled in the nuances of intelligence operations, merely filed the list. He gave orders that the telephones of all the French spies were to be bugged and their conversations recorded.
A year later, when Adolf Hitler was ready to begin the war in Europe by invading Poland, Canaris leaped into action. Abwehr agents began fanning out across Germany in a mammoth roundup of French spies. When the highly potent Wehrmacht was preparing to plunge into France in May 1940, French commanders had no “eyes” in Germany and their armies were taken by total surprise.9
Early in 1939 it was widely known throughout Europe that Adolf Hitler was preparing for war and that he no doubt would be joined by his crony Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy. In London, forty-one-year-old Frederick W. Winterbotham, chief of the Air Section of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), was especially concerned because there had been a sharp clampdown on information leaving the Third Reich. The few British agents planted there were terrified of discovery and rapid execution.
Even before the Nazis came to power in 1933, Winterbotham, a clever spymaster, spent much time in Germany with the mission of befriending the German leaders under the guise of being pro-Nazi to learn as much as possible about their plans.
In the years ahead, Winterbotham played his role so well that the Nazis accepted him as a true friend. He met with Hitler, Hermann Goering, Josef Goebbels, and numerous field marshals and generals. Many of them boastfully provided detailed information about the mighty war machine that was being built, mostly under a veil of secrecy.
Through his top-level connections, the British spymaster even learned which high French leaders were on the Nazi payroll, and he spent many nights entertaining Luftwaffe pilots and plying them with alcoholic drinks so he could subtly extract secret information from them.
Toward the end of 1938 the Nazis made it known that Winterbotham was no longer welcome in Germany. No doubt they had begun to suspect his true motives in ingratiating himself with so many prominent German government and military leaders.
Although Winterbotham and his handful of agents had obtained much intelligence on the size and composition of the German Air Force during the past four years, much crucial data from within the Third Reich were still needed. This included any expansion of aircraft factories and the sites and capacity of new airfields and other military installations.
Winterbotham decided that this intelligence blackout would have to be penetrated by clandestine aerial photography, a field that the British had virtually ignored since the pioneer experiments in the Great War twenty years earlier. So he launched an intricate scheme to achieve that goal.
First, he prevailed on the Air Ministry to approve of his covertly acquiring a two-engined Lockheed executive-type airplane that was built in the United States. The craft had a heated cabin and could hold five persons, along with a pilot and a copilot. By European standards for civilian aircraft the Lockheed was far advanced.
It was arranged for the civilian British Imperial Airways to purchase and take delivery of the aircraft. Then the Air Ministry reimbursed the buyer. Winterbotham used his contacts with high British officials to “borrow” the latest cameras and equipment from a reluctant Royal Air Force.
After these photographic accoutrements were installed in the Lockheed, Winterbotham launched a search for a capable civilian pilot, one who would be patient enough to carry out experiments in high-altitude photography and sufficiently bold enough to fly over Germany to take pictures. He found just the man he wanted: Sydney Cotton, who had earned a reputation as an adventurous type.
Cotton had considerable knowledge of photography. Moreover, he already had cover. As an executive with a firm engaged in the development of color photography in England and Germany, he would be able to fly into the Third Reich without raising suspicion.
Although cameras had been greatly improved during the previous two decades, photos still had to be taken from only eight thousand feet, making it impossible to leisurely fly over Germany at this height in peacetime without being shot down by antiaircraft guns or Luftwaffe pilots.
Winterbotham and Cotton tried out the Lockheed at a height of twenty-two thousand feet, and after countless experiments, developed a procedure for taking clear photographs at that altitude. Ironically, Leica cameras purchased in Germany were used.
Before flying over the Third Reich, Winterbotham decided to make a lengthy test in the Mediterranean region, where Benito Mussolini was building defenses and military facilities. It was decided that a young Canadian would go along with Cotton as copilot.
Forged documents were made for Cotton in which he was portrayed as a wealthy movie tycoon making a survey of locations for a film. His copilot’s papers identified him as a movie director.
Cotton left England in April 1939 and, flying at twenty-two thousand feet, he photographed every Italian air facility and naval base on the North African coast and did the same thing along the northern Mediterranean Sea. It had been an intelligence bonanza.
General (later Field Marshal) Albrecht Kesselring unknowingly spied on himself for the British. (U.S. Army)
Now Winterbotham was ready for the main event—penetrating the tightly guarded Third Reich. Cotton made several flying trips to Berlin—without the camera equipment. Ostensibly he had come to talk with the executives on the German side of his color photography development firm. On the ground, German security men inspected the Lockheed cabin, but soon they became used to the Briton’s arrival and paid no attention to his plane.
Then the sophisticated cameras—German-built cameras—were installed in the aircraft. Cotton now varied his route to Berlin, refueling at Frankfurt, Hamburg, Aachen, or other airfields, a procedure that gave his cameras a shot at new landing fields or factories turning out war materials. As the Germans believed that aerial photos could not be taken above eight thousand feet, they apparently never suspected that Cotton was snapping hundreds of pictures.
To reinforce his phony image as a wealthy tycoon gallivanting around Europe in his own expensive private aircraft, Sydney Cotton flew to the annual summer Frankfurt Air Show in Germany. He left the cameras in place, knowing that the Germans did not believe photos could be taken above eight thousand feet.
The Lockheed executive aircraft gained much attention, including that of General Albrecht Kesselring, who commanded the Luftwaffe’s Air Fleet I, which was already earmarked to pace Adolf Hitler’s looming invasion of Poland a few weeks in the future.
Perhaps hoping to obtain a similar executive aircraft, Kesselring asked Cotton if he could take a ride in the Lockheed. Cotton agreed. Soon the plane was winging along above the Rhine River when the general accepted Cotton’s invitation to take over the controls.
Knowing that there were several important airports and other facilities along the Rhine, the Briton flipped on the camera. Green lights began flashing in the cockpit, indicating that photographs were being taken. Mildly curious, Kesselring asked the meaning of the green lights. Cotton replied nonchalantly that they merely indicated that the fuel was running evenly to the engine.
It was a peculiar episode. One of the three top commanders in the Luftwaffe was piloting a British spy plane in which German-built cameras were furiously snapping photographs of secret German facilities. In essence, Kesselring was spying on himself.10
Morris “Moe” berg was an extraordinary individual by any yardstick. Tall and ruggedly handsome, Berg graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and spoke German, French, Italian, Russian, and Japanese. In an era when hardly any of his compatriots had even attended college, he was a catcher on the Boston Red Sox major league baseball team.
Noted mainly for his defensive ability behind home plate, Berg, the son of a Newark, New Jersey, pharmacist, was once kidded by a teammate, “Moe, all them college dee-grees ain’t goin’ to help ya hit a curveball!”
Berg was also a patriot, believing that he owed a debt to the country that had been so kind to his immigrant Jewish parents. So, in the late 1930s, with war clouds gathering around the globe, he apparently agreed to act as an undercover agent for the U.S. government when leaving for a short-time assignment as a lecturer at the University of Tokyo in February 1939.
For more than ten years the generals and admirals who had an iron grip on the Japanese government held that an armed conflict with the United States was inevitable. So the warlords had drawn up a secret plan called the Tanaka Memorial. It was a blueprint for military conquests of vast expanses of the western Pacific and for war with America.
President Franklin Roosevelt suspected that the Japanese were preparing for an armed clash with the United States, but he had virtually no specifics. Incredibly, the United States was the only industrialized country that did not have a global intelligence service. Roosevelt, therefore, was “flying blind,” having to make crucial decisions with regard to Japan without knowing what that nation was doing behind its bamboo curtain.
After reaching the Japanese capital, Berg’s nimble brain and scientific approach to problems resulted in his going to a large civilian hospital, ostensibly to see the U.S. consul’s wife, who had undergone surgery. Once inside the hospital, Moe, carrying a suitcase, located the stairs and climbed to the roof.
There he paused briefly, looked around to see that he was not being followed, and removed a 16mm Bell & Howell movie camera. With it he took hundreds of feet of panoramic views of sprawling Tokyo, which could be seen for many miles in all directions.
A little more than three years later, while outmanned, outgunned, and inadequately trained U.S. forces were being kicked around the Pacific by the powerful Japanese war machine, Lieutenant Colonel James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle had been handed a crucial but seemingly impossible mission. On April 18, 1942, Doolittle’s flight of sixteen B-25 bombers lifted off from the carrier Hornet and set a course for Tokyo, eight hundred miles away. Six hours later, the first American bombs exploded on the Japanese capital.
Doolittle’s bold raid was but a pinprick in the overall war effort. But its primary purpose was to lift the hearts and spirits of the home front and to cause the Japanese warlords to “lose face.” They had boasted that no American bomb would ever be dropped on the Japanese homeland.
Jimmy Doolittle was one of the few insiders who knew that one of the reasons for the astonishing success of the Tokyo spectacular was that the planners had used the panoramic film footage taken from the hospital roof by the major league baseball player turned secret agent, Moe Berg, several years earlier.11
Late in June 1939, the British embassy in Washington sent an alarming warning to London. The Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, was receiving military secrets obtained somewhere in England. So agents of MI-5, the security service handling counterintelligence within Great Britain, began surveillance of all known Soviet citizens, including A. A. Doschenko, an official of the Soviet trade delegation in London.
In early August, Doschenko boarded a train and got off at the sleepy hamlet of Leighton Buzzard, thirty-five miles north of London. The two MI-5 men tailing him were puzzled about what kind of legitimate business a high Soviet trade official could have in a tiny town like Leighton Buzzard.
After leaving the train, Doschenko began walking casually along Grand Union Canal, unaware that he was being followed. A short time later the Soviet was joined by another man, whom the MI-5 agents did not recognize. The stranger was seen slipping some papers to Doschenko, and the two men parted, walking away in opposite directions.
One British agent followed Doschenko, who was going to the Leighton Buzzard railroad station for the return trip, and the other MI-5 man tailed the stranger back to Bletchley Park, a serene village a few miles away.
Subsequent investigation disclosed that the man who had rendezvoused with Doschenko was a British citizen employed at the Foreign Office’s Communications Department and its top-secret Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. His job was handling Foreign Office coded messages, giving him access to secrets being sent to British embassies around the world. Because of his sensitive position, he had more information at his fingertips about the Foreign Office’s plans and views than did most high-ranking officials in London.
A rash of nervous tics erupted among the handful of British government and military leaders who were privy to one of the nation’s most jealously guarded secrets. Leading British scientists, mathematicians, and cryptanalysts had been laboring in an old Victorian mansion at Bletchley Park to develop an apparatus that would intercept and decode German wireless messages sent on a machine called Enigma. Previous to the arrival of the machine cipher system, enciphering had been done slowly by human hand. Now Enigma could produce an almost infinite number of different cipher alphabets merely by changing the keying procedure. Even if the British were to crack the Enigma code, the German messages would be safe because a new key was used each day. That meant that the odds were perhaps a billion to one that a snooper could decode Enigma signals.
Because Enigma was considered to be impenetrable, it had been adopted for use throughout the army, navy, Luftwaffe, and was used to encipher Hitler’s communications and those of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. U-boats and even small ships liable to capture were equipped with the machine, for the seizure of an Enigma by an enemy would not be sufficient to enable him to read encoded messages, the Germans were convinced.
As the months passed and Europe drifted closer to armed conflict, the brainy Britons struggling with the seemingly hopeless task at Bletchley Park began to despair. But they persevered. In August 1939, while Adolf Hitler was massing his mighty legions on the Polish border ready to launch Case White, the invasion of that neighboring nation, the efforts of the British specialists were crowned with success.
The astonishing revolutionary development was nicknamed The Bomb by its creators. It was able to match the electrical circuits of Enigma, permitting The Bomb to imitate each daily change in keying procedure by the Germans.
The Bomb would prove to be an intelligence bonanza of unprecedented magnitude. Coded German messages intercepted and decoded by it would be called Ultra. From this point onward, the British (and later the Americans) had a pipeline into German headquarters at all levels. Often British commanders and government leaders would learn of German plans before the orders reached the Wehrmacht generals and admirals.
Meanwhile, after the espionage rendezvous at Leighton Buzzard, MI-5 sleuths knew that A. A. Doschenko’s position as a Soviet trade delegation official was a cover for his true mission: obtaining information about the Foreign Office’s communications activities at Bletchley Park.
That conclusion deeply worried the high British leaders who knew about the Ultra development. Had Doschenko been able to obtain information about The Bomb? If that were the case, Hitler would soon know about it, because he and Josef Stalin had signed a pact on August 23, 1939, in which the two countries agreed not to go to war with one another. If the fiihrer, as a result of an intelligence coup by Doschenko, was aware of Ultra, the German signal corps would junk Enigma, thereby depriving the Western Allies of foreknowledge of German actions.
On September 27, 1939, about three weeks after Great Britain declared war on Germany following the Wehrmacht invasion of Poland, MI-5 agents arrested the British citizen who was working for the Foreign Office at Bletchley Park. Claiming to be a blackmail victim, the man confessed that he had been slipping Doschenko secret information for many months. Some of this material, it would be learned, had enabled the Soviet secret service to read coded British diplomatic messages.
The Briton was tried in court and sentenced to ten years at hard labor. He had escaped being executed for treason because his actions had taken place at a time when Britain was not at war. Apparently he had cooperated with British security officials who were seeking to determine if Ultra had been compromised. It was concluded that the spy had not had access to Ultra secrets—but MI-5 did not know that fact for certain. Only time would prove the conclusion accurate.
Meanwhile, A. A. Doschenko, a slick operative, was quietly expelled from Britain, the customary procedure for getting rid of an uncovered spy of a country that was officially neutral. Soon Doschenko’s post was filled by another Soviet, who resumed espionage activities in England.12
