part0016

I t was October 1939, and the Second World War had just begun. I was in a town in neutral Holland. I sat waiting. Suddenly another car drove up and the passenger side door opened. The driver looked like a typical English gentleman. He was tall and had an aristocratic manner. He wore a tweed suit. His hair was carefully oiled, and he wore a monocle.

He was a spy. He lived in Holland with his Dutch wife and ran a small business importing bicycles. He was a member of the Z branch. It was an independent group of agents which formed Britain's Special Intelligence Service, SIS. His credentials were impressive. He spoke four languages and during the First World War, he’d run a successful network of spies behind enemy lines. Now, he was trying to make contact with dissatisfied Germans willing to fight against Hitler and the Nazis. As far as he could tell, things were going very well for him. His name was Evans and he’d been contacted weeks earlier by a refugee who had fled from persecution in Germany.

The refugee said he knew many high-ranking officers within the German army. He’d assured Evans that there'd be a great deal of resentment against Hitler. The bitterness had built up to a strong resistance movement. Evans probed deeper and he was given my name and that I was an officer involved with the resistance movement.

Evans was the man I now sat in the car with. He spoke German well, and we drove through the Dutch countryside chatting about classical music and our dissatisfaction with Hitler. We stopped in a small Dutch town and picked up two more of Evans’s colleagues. One was an English officer named Major Stevens, and the other a Dutch officer named Captain Janssen. Although Holland was neutral at the time, Captain Janssen was assisting the British. He wanted to keep his nationality a secret, so he pretended to be Canadian and use the name, Coppin. This was a convincing alias because Captain Coppin lived in Canada for several years, and the country was an ally of Britain.

As Evans drove on, I reeled off a list of officers who were eager to see Hitler's downfall and named a distinguished general who was prepared to lead the resistance. I promised to bring the general to the next meeting, which we set for October 30. What Evans didn't know was that we were one step ahead of him. The refugee who’d introduced him to me was, in fact, a German spy. The resistance movement I was telling Evans about didn't exist. I didn't exist as he knew me either. I was really Walter Schmidt, A 31-year-old ex-lawyer, now head of German Foreign Intelligence. Instead of being a spy for Evans and the British, I wanted to annihilate them.

My plan was simple. Over the upcoming weeks, I intended to lure the British and the Dutch agents into a false sense of security by pretending to be a willing collaborator. Then I'd bait them into meetings, which would enable me to penetrate the SIS and find out about their operations.

My first task was to convince Evans and the British that I was genuinely working against the Nazis. When I returned to Holland from Germany on October 30, I brought two army friends. One of the men was silver-haired with old-fashioned elegance. This gave the illusion that he might be a disgruntled aristocrat seeking to overthrow the Nazis. It was a plausible disguise because many upper-class Germans did regard Hitler as an upstart.

We crossed the border and drove to a small Dutch town where Evans had agreed to meet us. But as we arrived, he wasn’t there. We waited for over an hour. Right before we were about to leave, we saw two figures approaching our car. These were not the British agents we were expecting. They were Dutch police officers, and they got into our car and ordered us to drive to the police station. This isn’t what I planned at all. We were meant to be deceiving them and now it looked like they’d caught us.

I was the head of the German foreign intelligence and quite a prize. At the Dutch police station, we were searched. Our clothes and luggage were gone over from top to bottom. This was nearly our undoing; in one of my accomplice's bags laid on the table open and ready for inspection was a small packet of aspirins. Unfortunately for us, these weren't any old aspirins. These were type issued to the SS and bore the official SS medical office label on them. When I spotted the pills, I turned white with alarm and felt my face flush and heart race.

I looked around the room and noticed that the police officers searching the luggage were occupied with another bag. I swiftly snatched the aspirins and swallowed them wrapper and all. The bitter taste was still in my mouth. There was a knock at the door, and it was Captain Coppin and Evans. My stomach dropped, and I felt beads of sweat pouring down my face. Luckily for us, Captain Coppin had come to our rescue. He apologized for the trouble and explained it was all an unfortunate misunderstanding. But I'm no fool. He knew exactly what was going on. The British and the Dutch still suspected us and this whole exercise had been a test to see if they could expose any Germans. If the police had found anything suspicious, such as those SS aspirins, we would have most certainly been arrested.

In a lucky twist of fate, the paper and silver foil of the aspirin wrapper prevented my stomach from absorbing the drug, which would have severely damaged my body. After that, everything went smoothly. We were driven to the SIS headquarters in the Hague and wined and dined like we were visiting royalty. The next day, I was given a radio and a call sign. We were told to keep in contact by radio and that a future meeting would soon be arranged. We shook hands and were driven back to the German border. Over the next few weeks, I was in daily radio contact with Evans’ group. Two more meetings were held, and I felt confident they’d accepted me as a genuine spy. But then, a major fly landed in my ointment, and flies didn't come much bigger than Henrich Himmler, the head of the SS.

There was an assassination attempt on Hitler. A bomb exploded shortly after he left the Nazi Party celebration in Munich. Hitler was convinced the SIS was behind the plot and wanted Evans and his men captured immediately. I protested that this would ruin my carefully thought out plan. I said to Himmler:

Himmler was brusque in his reply :

I had no options, so I devised a new plan. I had already arranged my next meeting with the British at a small town on the Dutch-German border. I contacted Captain Müller of the SS and arranged for a squad of 12 men to accompany him. We only had time for a quick briefing and then sped off to the border. The captain of the 12 SS men was a thuggish character and had a nickname as the man who started the Second World War.

Two months earlier, Captain Müller handpicked a squad of men dressed as Polish soldiers and staged a fake raid on a German radio station at the German-Polish border. This allowed the Nazis to claim they’d been attacked by the Poles. An excuse to offer the world for invading Poland, which they’d always wanted to turn into a German colony. This German captain was not impressed with me.

I heard he called me behind my back a pasty-faced, namby-pamby little man . He wondered how I’d cope with the dangerous business we were about to undertake. The rendezvous with the British was set for 2 p.m. at a small cafe situated in No Man's Land, between the Dutch and German border. I was feeling queasy, and I ordered a brandy to steady my nerves. At almost 3:30 p.m.—an hour and a half late—I saw the British car come into sight. It turned into an alley by the cafe. Evans and Captain Coppin got out. A third man stayed in the car. As I walked over to greet them, I heard the bang-bang of shots ring out, and a car roared down the street.

Captain Müller and the twelve SS men who'd been lurking on the other side of the border had driven straight over firing at the British car. This broke all rules of neutrality. Holland was not at war, and German soldiers had no right to cross that border.

It was instant chaos. Captain Coppin drew his pistol and fired at me. I flung myself to the side; an SS car pulled up at the end of the alley. Soldiers hung from the doors with machine guns. Captain Coppin ducked and shifted his aim. He fired, then let loose another shot, narrowly missing the SS Captain Müller in the front seat of the car. He jumped out and returned fire from behind the open door. Men scattered for cover, their guns blazing. The SS Captain ran up and shouted in my face:

I jumped around the corner to avoid the shots and ran head-on into another SS soldier. This man wasn’t at the briefing and didn't recognize me. He assumed I was one of the British. The soldier grabbed me and stuck a pistol in my face. I told him not to be stupid and put the gun away. We struggled and then the soldier pulled the trigger. I grabbed his hand and felt the bullet skim past my head. At that same moment, the SS Captain ran up and told the soldier he had the wrong man.

He probably saved my namby-pamby life that day. I peered around the corner and saw Captain Coppin make a break for it. He was hit and limped to get across the street. Spent shells pumped from his pistol as he fired, but it was no use. A burst of machine-gun fire brought him to his knees, and he crumbled into a heap. As he fell, SS men dragged Evans into their car. Soldiers picked up Captain Coppin and tossed him into the car like he was a sack of potatoes. He was already dead. The German cars sped off to the border with a roar of over-revved engines, burned rubber tattooed into the asphalt road.

In the moments after they left, a strange silence hung over the scene. Passersby and border guards emerged from doorways and blockhouses and stood open mouth and motionless. Engine exhaust, burnt rubber, and an acrid tang of spent bullet cartridges hung in the air. Dark red bloodstains littered the road, glistening sickly in the autumn afternoon.

The operation was a huge success. We'd learned much about the methods of the SIS and we had obliterated Z branch in Holland. They were a significant threat to the Nazi Party and had been put out of operation for good, and the war was only two months old. The Dutch spy incident was easily the British Secret Service's most embarrassing blunder of the entire war, and it had huge repercussions. Hitler used the event to justify the German invasion of Holland in 1940. He claimed that it proved the Dutch weren’t neutral after all.

When Germans who were genuinely opposed to Hitler tried to contact the British intelligence agents later in the war. They were treated with such a suspicion that nothing ever came of their approaches.

Following his capture, Evans was interrogated at length by the Germans and gave much away. Evans even carried a list of all the British agents in Holland when he fell into the German trap. He was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he remained for the rest of the war. He was freed when the camp was liberated by American soldiers in April 1945.