A DANGEROUS GAME
Tensions continued between the socialists and the fascists, even after the end of the civil war in February 1934. Anger bubbling below the surface in the Austrian population threatened to erupt into further violence. Any periods of calm were short-lived, with more violence breaking out as different factions continued to vie for power and influence. On 25 July 1934, a group of Nazi activists broke into Chancellor Dollfuss’s offices on the Ballhausplatz. Dollfuss was shot dead by Otto Planetta, a 35-year-old ex-soldier and Nazi. Dollfuss’s Patriotic Front had succeeded for a long time in frustrating the Nazis in Austria, but the consequence of this policy was his assassination. The long-term dangers were understood by Eric Gedye, who reported at this time that Austria would be dominated by the Nazis within a matter of weeks. Although the timeline of his prediction was inaccurate, ultimately he was proved correct as Austria capitulated to Nazi forces just four years later, in March 1938.
Mussolini, although a fascist dictator himself, had signed a treaty with Britain and France to guard Austrian independence against Germany. He now intervened to protect Austria, by mobilizing Italian troops across the Brenner Pass. Mussolini’s intervention at this time is believed to have averted Hitler’s plans to invade Austria in 1934. On 2 August, German President Hindenburg died at the age of 86, paving the way for Adolf Hitler to gain a tighter hold on power and be proclaimed ‘Führer and Reichskanzler’ (chancellor) of Germany.
On 9 October 1934, King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Jean Barthou were murdered in Marseilles by Bulgarian and Croat terrorists. Kendrick’s mind must have been cast back to the outbreak of the Great War, which had been sparked by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. With its sparse financial resources, SIS was stretched to the limit, as bemoaned by its chief, Sinclair.1 However, there is no evidence that the lack of funds hampered or compromised Kendrick’s operations. By the mid-1930s, his reports included information about foreign agents working within Yugoslavia for the intelligence services of three major European countries: France, Germany and Italy.2 With growing concern within SIS about Mussolini’s threat to the region, Kendrick’s portfolio expanded to include intelligence on the Italian secret service, which was very active in Yugoslavia.3 It was undertaking military, political, financial and economic surveillance and counter-espionage, and it boasted that no other country had such an effective intelligence service. Operating from two insurance companies to mask its real activities, it claimed that it ‘could easily bring about a revolution in Croatia and Macedonia through their agents in the Yugoslav Communist Party who could cause social disorder in all parts of the Kingdom’.4
Kendrick wrote:
The service has contact with individual informers in various commercial and society circles from whom they pump information . . . Hungarian, Bulgarian and Albanian agents carry out, under Italian instructions, intelligence services of a local nature, each in the frontier region of their own country.5
German military intelligence – the Abwehr – began to operate on the territory of Yugoslavia, independently of its allies (the Italians). It sought to establish a branch in Zagreb, making use of its commercial connections and representatives among the German minority in the country. It had as its main objective ‘the propagation of Hitler ideals among Germans abroad but, in point of fact, it is an Intelligence Service and its headquarters are in Hamburg’.6
Although these reports offer a limited view on SIS work, the information does provide an insight into the scope of Kendrick’s work, and further adds to our understanding of why SIS considered its station in Vienna to be its most important in the inter-war period. Kendrick’s greatest asset was his ability to organize and run his networks with competence and efficiency. It places him as one of the most important, yet undiscovered, characters in SIS’s history.
The Abyssinian war
In October 1935, Mussolini mounted an invasion of Abyssinia (today’s Ethiopia). With its rich fertile land, Abyssinia lay between the two Italian colonies of Eritrea and Somaliland. Mussolini succeeded in creating an Italian East African Empire, as part of his vision of bringing greatness to the Italian people. Kendrick’s brief now included the monitoring of Italian naval vessels leaving their bases in Italy during the Abyssinian war, which lasted from October 1936 until February 1937.7 He ran agents into Italy and became SIS’s predominant source of Italian intelligence during the crisis. At the same time, he undertook surveillance of Italian fascist activities.8 The lack of funds during the Abyssinian crisis again caused Sinclair to complain that SIS was carrying out work in peacetime that was not its usual activity. It had caused him to divert money away from other operations and to spend funds on covering Italy and Abyssinia.9 Kendrick dispatched one of his own SIS secretaries from Vienna into Italy. Clara Holmes was instructed ‘to get close’ to an unnamed Italian naval officer, to whom she was giving English lessons. It was one of the oldest tricks in espionage tradecraft. Holmes was successful in gaining ‘pillow secrets’ for Kendrick, although the precise details of that intelligence are not known.10
Kendrick’s colleague Claude Dansey was stationed at the British passport control office in Rome, working under the same cover for SIS. The Rome SIS station was beset with its own problems when it was discovered in 1935 that an Italian official there, Secondo Constantini, was a ‘mole’ in the station, stealing papers and documents and passing them back to the Italians. Against the background of these difficulties, Dansey had to leave Kendrick to cover the Abyssinian crisis. Dansey ran his own part-time agents from Italy into Germany.
Still on the scene was Vera Atkins, whose father’s trade had enabled him to penetrate Nazi society. Vera often accompanied him in his work to act as a translator. After his death, the family moved to Vienna, before returning to England, where Vera’s mother, Hilda, had been born. With relatives still in Vienna, Vera and her mother visited the Kendricks whenever they returned to the capital.11 Another of Kendrick’s trusted agents at this time was an Austrian Jew named Edmund Pollitzer, who will come back into focus after the annexation of Austria in 1938 (see chapter 6). Also in Vienna and working on unspecified intelligence was Bernard Edge. While little is known about his precise work for SIS, it is believed that he was working along similar lines to Kendrick. Edge remained in SIS and later acted as a referee for Kendrick’s granddaughter when she joined the service.12 Kendrick built up contacts with British expatriates living in Vienna. One of these was the British-born pianist Alfred Kitchin, whose talent took him to Germany. He studied in Leipzig under Robert Teichmüller in the period immediately after the First World War. When, years later, the Nazis tore down a statue of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Kitchin left Germany in protest and went to Vienna, where he studied music under Karl Steiner and Paul Weingarten. Kitchin enjoyed the same musical circle that was to bring him into contact with Kendrick, who recruited him in Vienna and later – on account of his being a fluent German speaker – drafted him into his secret unit in the Second World War.
Kendrick’s manager in Vienna for operations was Fred (Siegfried) Richter. On the surface, he carried out routine paperwork at the British passport office; but, in reality, he was tasked with finding suitable agents to send into Italy. He became the man who recruited most of Kendrick’s agents and who acted as intermediary, enabling Kendrick to remain in the shadows. Although born in Vienna, Richter grew up in Rechnitz (then part of Hungary). His father was a Jewish horse-trader; his mother a Roman Catholic. In 1908, Richter applied for naturalization as a British subject, having married an Irish woman whom he had met on a visit to Ireland. Returning to Vienna in 1912, he managed a set of stables for the Schlesingers, the famous Jewish family of horse-breeders. During the First World War, he served in the Imperial Austrian Army, even though he had dual nationality. Sometime from the mid-1920s, he began to work for Kendrick. Richter was a verger in the Anglican church in Vienna and a colleague of another SIS operative, Revd Hugh Grimes. It is thought that Grimes may have introduced Richter to Kendrick. During the Abyssinian crisis, Kendrick asked Richter to find agents to send into Italy. Richter knew a corvette captain in the German navy – one von Gatterer. Although he failed to recruit von Gatterer for Kendrick, the captain suggested another contact – Rudolf Koren, who was secretary of the Navy League. Richter persuaded Koren to travel to Italy to spy on the Italian navy. Much of what was passed back to Kendrick was in the form of verbal reports and therefore precise details of the intelligence gained are not known.
The news from Germany continued to cause concern, with Hitler actively rearming his forces, in direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles. In March 1935, he formed the Luftwaffe (German air force) and on 16 March introduced conscription for men between the ages of 18 and 45. In July 1936, Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland in a further erosion of the Treaty of Versailles. Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg was forced to take two Nazi sympathizers into his government and to lift the ban on Nazi newspapers. The situation facing Germany’s Jews deteriorated even further with the passage of the Nuremberg Laws that summer: these denied Jews any civil rights and ostracized them from all areas of society. By now, the SIS network had spread extensively across Europe. From the 1920s, it had had Frank Foley – functioning as the British passport officer – to run the SIS station in Berlin.13 Foley operated his own networks in Germany, but left Kendrick to dispatch agents to German naval bases, such as Wilhelmshaven, to monitor the new battleships that were being constructed. Bertie Acton Burnell, who had served with Foley and Kendrick in France during the First World War, and then in Cologne in 1918, was posted to Berlin in 1936 as assistant passport officer under Foley.14 Kendrick’s brother-in-law, Rex Pearson, had left Vienna, along with SIS colleague Dick Ellis, to undertake intelligence work out of Switzerland.
The Z Organisation
With the increasing menace from Nazi Germany, Claude Dansey was tasked by ‘C’ with creating a new top-secret organization to carry out espionage – especially industrial espionage in Europe. It was called the Z Organisation and was to gain intelligence on Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. It is not clear whether the Z Organisation was intended to replace the SIS if the latter ceased to be able to operate – for example, if Hitler invaded Britain.15
Dansey recruited Kendrick’s own brother-in-law, Rex Pearson, into this new organization (with operational cover from Unilever in Switzerland) and also Sigismund Payne Best, who worked out of The Hague as director of the pharmaceutical firm Menoline Ltd. Payne Best’s marriage to a Dutch painter gave him important social contacts, including access to royal circles, and he was an ideal recruit for Dansey. He was also an old colleague of Dansey, Kendrick and Pearson from military intelligence in the First World War.
Although the two main centres of operation were Holland and Switzerland, the Z Organisation was headquartered in offices on the eighth floor of Bush House on Aldwych in London. Dansey used a hidden back entrance, through offices next to those of an old friend, the barrister Geoffrey Duveen.16 On the floor below were the Joel brothers, the wealthy diamond magnates from South Africa who had been part of the Kendrick/Atkins circle since the Boer War. The Joel brothers provided a respectable facade for the Z Organisation, as part of its diamond-exporting business, and funded it together with another major diamond company from South Africa, De Beers.
Hungarian Jewish film producer Alexander Korda, who set up the London Film Productions company in 1932, also provided funds for Dansey’s new network.17 In 1937, Dansey dispatched a young Cambridge graduate named Andrew King to Vienna, under cover of the film business, as part of the Z Organisation. King was also drafted into the SIS. From Vienna, he travelled the region to send back information on the German order of battle and other military details. He reported to Dansey, possibly via Kendrick.18 The extent to which Kendrick was involved in running agents in Vienna for the Z Organisation is an open question. Remembering that his own brother-in-law worked for both SIS and the Z Organisation, it is plausible. Especially since the new Z Organisation was also tasked with gaining intelligence on Italy, which fell within Kendrick’s SIS domain. Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Cohen (later working closely with Kendrick in SIS and MI9) recruited operatives for Dansey, but found that, with only rudimentary training and no proper instructions, they only sent back low-level intelligence.19
Working out of Kitzbühel in the 1930s for Dansey’s Z Organisation as Agent Z3, Conrad O’Brien-ffrench had links to Kendrick. He had been recruited into SIS by Stewart Menzies in 1918, and his cover was as a tour operator and playboy.20 It is understood from an unnamed source that O’Brien-ffrench worked closely with Kendrick, reporting back to Dansey. Later, in 1938, O’Brien-ffrench observed German troop movements just prior to Hitler’s annexation of Austria and reported on them for SIS. The future author Ian Fleming was another principal figure living in Kitzbühel in the early 1930s, attending Forbes-Dennis’s finishing school there. Fleming is believed to have been recruited into SIS at the school and was linked personally to O’Brien-ffrench, Kendrick and Dansey, as well as Forbes-Dennis.21 These men moved in the same intelligence circles in that region of Austria and all worked for SIS. Fleming spent time in Vienna, where he met one of his Austrian girlfriends, Edith Maria Thonet (née von Morpurgo). They spent time together in Kitzbühel in 1934 and embarked on a tempestuous relationship. When Fleming returned to London, Thonet visited him there; but the relationship did not last and she went back to Vienna. Kendrick and Fleming worked closely together during the Second World War, with Fleming recruiting the naval intelligence section at Kendrick’s ‘M Room’ operations.22
The Z Organisation had numerous other agents and officers, but a complete list of their names is difficult to reconstruct today without access to the MI6 archives.23 A picture emerges here of SIS and the Z Organisation, in which the leading spymasters and operatives were known to each other in military intelligence from either the Boer War or the First World War.
The Benton memoirs
Kenneth Benton was 26 when he arrived in Vienna in 1935 to take up a post as an English teacher at the Theresianum College, a Catholic institution.24 Two years later, he met a lady who changed the direction of his life and introduced him to Kendrick. Peggy Lambert worked as a secretary in the commercial department of the British embassy, compiling economic reports and linking up with local intelligence agencies. She invited him to accompany her to one of Kendrick’s parties, where he also met the two SIS secretaries, Clara Holmes and Betty Hodgson. Nothing was revealed that evening to suggest that any of the guests were involved in clandestine work. Kendrick took an immediate interest in Benton when he learned that he spoke Italian. Kendrick needed a fluent Italian speaker for his intelligence work on fascist Italy and he dispatched Benton to London for an interview with Maurice Jeffes, head of the Passport Control Department. The interview took place in an office on the first floor of Broadway Buildings, the SIS headquarters. Benton was unaware that the Passport Control Department shared the same building as SIS. The interview was brief because, though Benton had no inkling of it, the real reason for his interview was not passport work, but intelligence. He was escorted to the back of the building, through a door, and into another building at the rear, which was in Queen Anne’s Gate. There, in an apartment, sat a short, red-faced man with a bowler hat. This was Benton’s first encounter with Hugh Sinclair, ‘C’ and head of SIS. Benton was quizzed about his degree in languages and knowledge of other foreign countries.
On Kendrick’s recommendation, Sinclair engaged Benton with SIS on a tax-free salary of £500 a year, with the warning that if he was not up to the job, he would be dismissed without any right of appeal. Benton agreed, still unaware that he had been engaged by SIS. He returned to Vienna with the notion that he would be dealing with visas. On the first morning, he learned the truth that Kendrick carried out very few passport responsibilities because he was engaged in intelligence work with the help of Hodgson and Holmes. Benton’s reminiscences offer a rare glimpse into Kendrick’s clandestine world: nothing has ever been released about it by MI6. He was taken into a rear room, where Holmes passed him a letter with a Czech name on it and asked him to translate. He opened the letter, and then called Holmes back into the room.
‘Look, I can’t do this. It is in Czech,’ he said.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she replied. ‘How stupid. Hang on for a moment.’
At the back of my desk there was a little open bottle of colourless liquid with a brush, and she dipped the brush in the liquid, passed it over the whole of the front of the letter and to my amazed eyes, red writing appeared at right angles to the Czech text and it was in German. Then she turned the letter over and did the same on the rear side, so that I had two sides of what was in fact a German report. I began to translate – it was obviously from somebody in Czechoslovakia reporting about events in the Sudetenland where the Germans were already planning to take over. After that, almost all my work was of this kind.
Holmes and Hodgson were corresponding with agents in various parts of Europe, using invisible ink. They wrote to agents in Czechoslovakia and Hungary; but there was a particular focus on southern Italy and Sicily. The agents had been recruited by Kendrick’s intermediary, Richter, to send back reports from the region on military and naval activity by the Italians. The reports were mostly in German, but sometimes Italian – hence Benton’s recruitment by Kendrick. Benton recalled that some of the reports were from Augusta in Sicily and gave details of Italian battleships and other vessels in the naval base:
We received quite a number of reports about the Tenth Flotilla MAS (Decima Flotilla MAS), the special naval unit headed by Prince Borghese, which employed the E-boats in which our Admiralty was very much interested. They were very fast boats, each with two torpedo tubes, and the idea was that they would penetrate our naval ports like Alexandria and Gibraltar, loose off their torpedoes under cover of night, and escape by sheer speed from the immediate response of our guns and aircraft.25
As Kendrick gathered vital intelligence for Sinclair back in London, he seemed too extrovert an ‘English gentleman’ to be suspected of being a spymaster. As he carried out his duties with utter loyalty to the British Crown, he was prepared to go to the edge of the precipice to gain secrets for his country. Unwittingly, and with approval from London, he entered a dangerous game of double agents and Nazi spies. The world of SIS was about to be beset with double agents and traitors, who placed Kendrick himself at direct personal risk.
Agent Tucek
One of those agents was an Austrian-born inventor, Karl Tucek. His work and his encounters with Kendrick are known today and can be reconstructed here, because the details survive in Abwehr reports that were captured by the Allies at the end of the Second World War.26 Fred Richter, who was working for Kendrick, first met Tucek in June 1937. Tucek appeared to have great potential as an agent for SIS. He wanted to offer two inventions to an English firm: one was a concrete-breaking machine and the other was a hand-operated concrete rammer.27 Tucek needed a translator in the negotiations and thought of approaching Richter at the British embassy. During their initial discussion, Richter thought of Kendrick, knowing that his boss was always seeking to cultivate potential espionage opportunities in the industrial world. Tucek had revealed enough information to convince Richter that he would be a valuable asset for Kendrick. He had served in the Austrian navy and had a vast amount of technical knowledge. He also spoke fluent Italian – coming to the attention of Richter at a time when Kendrick still needed fluent Italian speakers for operations against Mussolini and fascist Italy. Richter made an educated guess that Tucek was probably short of money – he had a wife to support and needed cash to finance his inventions and pass them through the appropriate channels. Richter made him an offer: he would provide cash for Tucek’s inventions, if the latter agreed to travel to Italy.
Tucek immediately recognized the offer for what it was – and refused. He told Richter that spying was a dangerous game and he would ‘pay with his head’ if discovered. Richter failed to persuade him to travel to Italy. However, during the conversation it emerged that Tucek had significant connections with two companies in Germany, Demag in Düsseldorf and Knorr-Bremse AG Berlin. He also had a close friend in construction at Schichau in Elbing (today Elblag, in Poland). and business contacts in Hungary. The headquarters of Demag in Germany had already disappointed Tucek by turning down his inventions, even though Johann Kroschel (Demag’s representative in Vienna) had shown an interest and had offered to pay from his own private funds. Tucek desperately wanted to succeed with his inventions and realized that, if he handled Richter with care, he might secure all the funds he needed. In spite of his original reservations about spying, he did agree to take a solo trip to Knorr-Bremse in Germany, in exchange for a cash advance of 1,000 Schillings. Richter reported back to Kendrick that Tucek would not spy in Italy, but was prepared to travel to Germany, as he felt that his existing contacts with Knorr-Bremse would place him above suspicion. During the time that he worked for Kendrick, Tucek never knew his real name: he always referred to him as ‘the elusive Englishman’, and all correspondence between them was conducted through Richter.
Tucek hid from Richter his close friendship with another leading constructor, Johannes Kroetice, at Schichau-Werke in the port of Danzig (modern-day Gdańsk). The company was firmly loyal to the Nazi regime. Tucek was also imbued with the ideology and was an illegal member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) in Austria. Unknown to Kendrick and Richter, he was a personal friend of top-ranking Nazi SS Führer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, one of the architects of the Holocaust and later chief of the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD – the security service). Kaltenbrunner would stand trial at Nuremberg as one of the leading members of Hitler’s government. Born in Austria, he had studied law at the University of Graz, and by 1929 was practising law in Linz, not far from Hitler’s birthplace of Braunau. During the 1930s, he had friends at the German mission in Vienna and was engaged as the Nazi Party’s legal representative in Austria. In 1933, he was appointed commander of the 37th SS Regiment in Upper Austria and was said to have taken part in the 1934 Nazi putsch in Vienna and the murder of Dollfuss.28 Although arrested several times in Linz for illegal Nazi activities, no evidence could be found against Kaltenbrunner and he was always released. Ignoring the ban on Nazi activities, by 1937 he had become head of the Austrian SS in Upper Austria and had organized an illegal SS formation in the region. He would go on frequent secret trips to Berlin.29 He then became head of the SS in Vienna at a dangerous time for Kendrick, was promoted to chief of the Sicherheitspolizei (security police) and eventually of the RSHA, the umbrella organization that covered the Gestapo, the security police and the SD.30
Tucek already knew where his loyalties lay – and that was not with either SIS or even his homeland of Austria. He believed in Hitler’s vision, and Kendrick could not have crossed swords with a more dangerous man. Tucek was shrewd enough to realize that the real spymaster was not Richter, but the ‘elusive Englishman’. He immediately told Kaltenbrunner about the British offer of espionage. Kaltenbrunner informed the German embassy in Vienna and that led to a devastating chain of events over the next 12 months. For a year, the Abwehr laid a trail to uncover the identity of Kendrick and trap him. Tucek was twice invited to the German mission by the military attaché, known only by his cover name of Karl Mueller. During one of the meetings, Tucek was recruited by Mueller as an agent for the military section of the Abwehr, enabling Hitler’s secret service to begin its penetration of SIS in Vienna. The Abwehr exerted pressure on Tucek to meet Kendrick and establish his identity.
Richter successfully convinced Tucek that Kendrick lived in England and only visited Vienna every two to three weeks. He arranged a number of meetings between Kendrick and Tucek, but Kendrick always cancelled at the last minute, while he waited for clearance from London. At no point did Tucek suspect that Kendrick worked in Vienna. As Tucek waited to meet the elusive Englishman, events were about to take a dramatic turn for Austria with regard to Nazi Germany.
Last waltz in Vienna
The new year of 1938 dawned on arguably the darkest chapter in Austrian history. Hitler was intent on pursuing his vision of creating a united Austria–Germany, as set out in his book Mein Kampf, which had been published in 1925. His gaze was firmly fixed on Austria, which would not escape his maniacal obsession with absolute power and expansion of the Third Reich.
Prudence Hopkinson, daughter of Clara Holmes, commented:
Staff at the British Passport Control Office in Vienna knew that an invasion was imminent. No one was under any illusion of what was about to happen, except perhaps the Jews of Austria themselves. It was not a question of if Germany invaded Austria, but when.31
A measure of how seriously the threat was taken by the Foreign Office is the fact that it asked the British embassy to draw up a list of leading public figures in Austria who would be at risk after a Nazi invasion, and a list of those who could turn Nazi.32 The list of those at risk contained 93 names, including Sigmund Freud, Alfons Rothschild, Louis Rothschild and Dr Otto Bauer (a prominent left-wing social democrat).33
On 4 February 1938, Hitler dismissed his generals and appointed himself supreme commander of the German armed forces. A solution to ‘the Austrian question’ was uppermost in his mind. Less than a week later, Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg was summoned by Hitler to his private mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden to meet Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Dr Guido Schmidt. Back in Vienna, talk within the small expatriate British community centred on the uncertainty over Austria’s future. Knowing that times would soon change, Kendrick, Holmes and SIS secretary Evelyn Stamper held a dinner party and cabaret in Holmes’ apartment on Bernbrunngasse in the Hietzing district. As Prudence Hopkinson recalled:
They knew matters were coming to a head and the party would be one of the last times they could celebrate in a free Austria. In the privacy of the apartment over dinner, the adults discussed the developing crisis. In 1938 they knew about the concentration camps, but not the full extent of the death camps.34
Although the party was overshadowed by a sense of unease for Austria, Kendrick played the piano, accompanying the New Zealand singer Winnie Fraser, who was in the capital for voice training. Together they performed pieces from The Merry Widow. Also present at the party was James Joll, a history don from the University of Oxford. Joll was a cousin of Stamper’s and lodged with her during his sabbatical at the University of Vienna, where he was trying to improve his German. He was an outstanding pianist and played a duet with Kendrick. Joll is known to have been working for British intelligence, possibly already in Vienna. During the Second World War, he served in the German section of the Special Operations Executive, before transferring to the Foreign Office. In 1964, he gave shelter to his old friend Anthony Blunt after Blunt went into hiding immediately before confessing to being one of the famous Cambridge spy ring passing secrets to the Soviets.
Kendrick was immersed in the musical world of Vienna. Among his close friends and acquaintances were the eminent conductors Arturo Toscanini, Hans Knappertsbusch, Otto Klemperer and the British conductor Adrian Boult and the Jewish violinist Yehudi Menuhin, cellist Alexander Rosdol of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and his son Sandy Rosdol (a violinist), and the Czech composer Oskar Morawetz. Morawetz had arrived in Vienna from Prague in 1937 to study piano, and would witness Hitler’s entry into Vienna the following year. He would have to return to Prague because he was Jewish.35 He had to escape a second time, when Czechoslovakia was invaded by the Nazis in March 1939. He later went on to compose the music for the film about Anne Frank. Violinist Sandy Rosdol worked for Kendrick and SIS in Vienna (although he never disclosed the nature of this work) and later served in intelligence in the Second World War.36
Although the concert halls continued to fill their seats during February 1938, and the annual carnival and state ball were attended by the new middle class and diplomats, under the surface there was fear and a quiet realization that the inevitable was about to happen. At the state ball the guests danced to the music of Johann Strauss late into the night; but it was a swansong to a country that was about to bid farewell to its freedom. On 20 February, Bruno Walter conducted the premiere of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 and Egon Wellesz’s Prosperos Beschwörungen in the last concert before Hitler’s annexation of the country.
With Hitler’s plans well advanced, the Abwehr became increasingly impatient to snare the English spy and it instructed the German diplomatic mission in Vienna to bait a trap and break the SIS network. On 28 February 1938, Tucek received a telegram supposedly from Knorr-Bremse about a proposed visit. It had, in fact, been sent by the military attaché at the German embassy. Tucek met Richter and showed him the telegram. This gave Richter the written proof he needed to convince Kendrick to finally meet Tucek.
The Abwehr’s snare
On 6 March 1938, less than a week before Hitler annexed Austria, a man described as ‘over 1.80 metres, broad and heavy, with a heavy walk, hair combed back, thick upper lip and blue eyes’ entered 52 Favoritenstrasse in Vienna. Hitler’s secret service described the Englishman as ‘well dressed, could be an officer and speaks extraordinarily broken German’.37 Tucek had been given very little notice of the face-to-face meeting with Kendrick. He knew a meeting was scheduled with an officer from British intelligence, but not that it was Sinclair’s top spymaster in Europe. This was to be the first and last time that Tucek met Kendrick.
Kendrick shook his hand and immediately put Tucek at ease with a few pleasantries. Then he gave him direct instructions to secure information and plans on Germany’s U-boat and battleship construction, by travelling from Vienna to the German ports of Wilhelmshaven and Elbing. Of particular interest to Kendrick was the speed and power of the U-boats under construction. Kendrick handed Tucek a questionnaire, asking him to learn the questions by heart and then destroy it. He told him: ‘You must carry nothing in writing across the frontier. You should travel via Prague to Germany.’38 Tucek disagreed with Kendrick and insisted that he cross the border at Passau.
Kendrick conceded and responded: ‘Business with Knorr-Bremse should be completed within three or four days. From there you should go on to Elbing, live with your friend if possible and try to get a job with Schichau-Werke.’
Tucek’s tone was still challenging as he replied: ‘When I was once in Stuttgart I discovered that the regulations governing the appointment of workers of foreign nationality in Germany industry takes 10–12 days to go through.’
‘In that case,’ said Kendrick, ‘you must return to Vienna after three weeks and report to us on the pretext of your wife’s illness. We will then see. While you are in Elbing you are to obtain as much material as possible to answer the questionnaire. Under no circumstances should you tell your friend about your true activity.’
Tucek nodded. Kendrick continued:
Any contact with people in Austria during your absence must be minimal and consist only of short postcards to your wife containing harmless private news, from which certain conclusions could be drawn. For instance, you might say that business is going well. You are absolutely forbidden to write to Richter, and neither are you to give a cover address.
The meeting lasted half an hour. Once Kendrick had left the premises, Tucek disobeyed instructions and committed Kendrick’s instructions to paper. Kendrick walked down the street, not realizing that members of the Abwehr were watching him from the shadows of nearby doorways.39 It is not known why they did not follow him to the British passport control office, which would immediately have blown his cover. The whole story raises questions about why Kendrick did not take more precautions. Until then, he had been so careful not to meet agents, except through an intermediary. This one meeting with Tucek was to have far-reaching consequences, not only for Kendrick but for SIS.
On 10 March 1938, just two days before Hitler annexed Austria, Tucek arrived at Knorr-Bremse in Berlin to meet its senior manager, Mr Reinhardt. The German attaché in Vienna had informed Tucek that members of the military branch of the Abwehr would also be present at the meeting. The two Abwehr officers are named in the reports as Major Rohleder and Oberleutnant Brandt.40 The meeting began at 10 o’clock, during which Tucek gave an account of his encounter with ‘the Englishman’ four days earlier. He handed Kendrick’s questionnaire to Rohleder.
Rohleder told Tucek that he would be in touch again with a plan. Just over a week later, on 19 March, Rohleder and Brandt met Tucek in Café Berolina at the Alexanderplatz railway terminus in central Berlin. They discussed their strategy and instructed him to travel to the Schichau company in Elbing, as planned by Kendrick. Once there, he would be provided with one of the Abwehr men as ‘a friend’, in case the British were secretly observing his meetings.
Tucek subsequently arrived in Elbing, looked around the area and noted information which any member of the public could observe: this formed the basis of ‘chickenfeed’ to be passed to Richter for onward transmission to Kendrick. Chickenfeed is espionage language for information passed to an enemy intelligence agency that is sometimes accurate (and sometimes not), but would not be seriously damaging to the originating agency. Tucek remained in Elbing for a few days, then returned to Berlin to report back to Rohleder and Brandt. During the debriefing session, Tucek was told that from now on he was not to be seen anywhere near the German embassy in Vienna. If Kendrick engaged him on other espionage activity, he was to write immediately to the Knorr-Bremse company, which would act as an intermediary and inform the Abwehr.
Tucek left Berlin and arrived back in Vienna on 20 March; but he returned to a very different city. The streets were heaving with stormtroopers and military vehicles. Large swastika flags hung from buildings. Austria had been annexed by the Third Reich.
The Anschluss
In the last weeks of February and in early March 1938, events moved swiftly. On 9 March 1938, Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg announced that there would be a plebiscite the following week, designed to safeguard Austrian independence: Austrians could vote for a free, independent, Christian and united Austria. But Hitler was already calling for Schuschnigg’s resignation. On Friday, 11 March, amid concerns of an imminent German invasion of Austria, the German War Office moved to reassure nervous European leaders. It informed the British military attaché in Vienna and the Foreign Office in London that no troop movements were being made, beyond ordinary spring training.41 British intelligence knew differently, because the reassurances from the German War Office contradicted reports coming from the British consul-general in Munich, who had witnessed the general mobilization in Bavaria and German troop movements on the Austrian frontier. Considerable air activity was also observed over Nuremberg. Mobilization orders applied to ‘all armed mechanised units and SS auxiliaries at Dachau. Reservists had been called up and confined to barracks. Troops were moving along all roads towards Czechoslovak and Austrian frontiers.’42 The Lithuanian military attaché in Berlin reported that the German 3rd Armoured Division was being mobilized. On receiving this information, Kendrick knew it was already too late for Austria.
At 7.45 p.m. that evening, Schuschnigg called off the referendum. Kendrick and his staff stayed late at the office and listened on the wireless to Schuschnigg’s resignation speech to Austrians in which he said he had no desire to see the shedding of Austrian blood. In a move to protect his own people, he urged Austrian forces not to oppose a German invasion. That night Hitler ordered a huge invasion force over the border.
By 5 a.m., three divisions of German infantry and one division of lorries had crossed the Austrian frontier between Passau and Salzburg. Two thousand German troops landed at Aspern airport, near Vienna, in 200 transport planes – which meant landing 50 planes an hour.43 By the early hours of the morning, armoured vehicles and troops were occupying the streets of Vienna. As per Schuschnigg’s appeal to the nation, Austrians offered no resistance. Field Marshal Hermann Goering assured Sir Nevile Henderson (the British ambassador in Berlin) that German troops would be withdrawn from Austria as soon as the situation had stabilized.
This dramatic turn of events led Vienna’s most famous Jew, Sigmund Freud, to scrawl across the page of his diary Finis Austriae – Austria is finished.