Killing Hitler (30 page)

This attitude even extended to the unofficial British spy networks. In the early 1930s the dramatically named Z-Organisation was established by a former SIS operative named Claude Dansey. It was to function as an independent intelligence agency, using Dansey’s network of businessmen, informers, and journalists, and was intended to continue to operate even if the official network was compromised. Dansey himself was a controversial figure. A brilliant organizer, he was also vicious, intolerant, and tyrannical. One of his staff even described him as “an utter shit.”
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As the master of an extensive spy network, Dansey effectively possessed the power of life and death over his agents, and did not hesitate to have his contacts and informers liquidated if he suspected them of duplicity. Yet for all that, he considered sabotage and assassination to be activities that were always counterproductive.
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It was a view that he shared with the vast majority of his superiors.

Thus while German and Soviet agents abroad were as much interested in murdering their enemies as observing them, the British tended to cleave to a more genteel view of the role of the
secret agent. They saw themselves as being in the business of clandestine intelligence-gathering, and considered that that complex task would not be aided by a descent into murder and mayhem. Not only was assassination frowned upon, therefore, but the targeting of a foreign head of state was considered to be completely beyond the pale. Yet as war loomed in 1939, that opinion was increasingly to come under review.

When Britain entered the Second World War in September 1939, she appeared, at first sight at least, to have re-created the successful alliance of the Great War two decades earlier. Once again, she had allies on both German flanks—Poland to the east and France to the west. Once again, she had secured American economic support, though not yet full-blown military assistance.

Any cautious optimism would soon prove illusory, however. In the east, Nazi Germany swiftly defeated Poland and shifted the bulk of its forces west to confront France. There, it was faced by a British Expeditionary Force that was far below strength and beset by shortages, disorganization, and complacency. As Churchill wrote to a colleague:

The squandering of our strength proceeds in every direction…. Our Army is puny as far as the fighting force is concerned; our Air Force is hopelessly inferior to the Germans;…we maintain an attitude of complete passivity dispersing our forces ever more widely…. Do you realise that perhaps we are heading for defeat?
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By the spring of 1940, Churchill’s grim prediction was fast becoming a reality. That April, German forces occupied Denmark and Norway, virtually unopposed save for the naval engagement at Narvik. A month later, they moved west with a feint through Belgium and the Netherlands before the main force swept through the Ardennes and raced for the Channel coast, leaving their opponents in disarray. The British humiliation was completed
with the ignominious but brilliantly improvised evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk. Two weeks after that, Paris fell.

Britain was suddenly alone, with only the English Channel separating her from the Nazi-occupied Continent. Winston Churchill—the Cassandra of appeasement—was raised to prime minister, at the head of a coalition national government and a nation in shock. Though he spoke inspiringly of “blood, sweat, and tears,” the public mood was anxious, even somber. And when Britain herself came under attack that autumn, that mood deteriorated still further. George Orwell, who was writing
The Lion and the Unicorn
at the time, would record:

I began this book to the tune of German bombs, and I begin this second chapter in the added racket of the barrage. The yellow gun-flashes are lighting the sky, the splinters are rattling on the house-tops, and London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. Anyone able to read a map knows that we are in deadly danger. I do not mean that we are beaten or need be beaten…. But at this moment we are in the soup.
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In this perilous situation, Churchill recognized that he had to abandon the accepted norms of warfare. He knew that Britain was fighting for its very existence, awaiting the Nazi invasion and lacking the necessary military hardware to defeat it. If he was to win the war, he concluded, he would have to fight dirty. Thus, after he had vowed to “fight on the beaches…in the fields and in the streets,” he also gave orders to take the fight behind enemy lines. On 16 July, the very day that Hitler ordered the invasion of Britain, Churchill established the Special Operations Executive (SOE), with the brief to “set Europe ablaze.”
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According to its founding statement, the SOE was to act as a “democratic international” to spread revolt in Germany’s conquered territories by sabotage, propaganda, and labor unrest. Crucially, however, its remit also included “terrorist acts against traitors and German leaders.”
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Despite the urgency of the hour, SOE’s birth was not an easy one. First, the new organization was established from scratch and had to combine various offices from other government bodies. It incorporated (among others) D Section from MI6, which specialized in sabotage, as well as MI(R) from the War Office, which planned paramilitary warfare, and EH from the Foreign Office, which dabbled in subversive propaganda. Its personnel were similarly eclectic, combining bankers and lawyers with the most cunning and daring of the British military élite.

The second difficulty that SOE faced was disapproval and even outright hostility from many of its rivals in the military and intelligence communities.
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SOE’s raison d’être was to sow mayhem, confusion, and ultimately revolt, none of which was conducive to the covert gathering of sensitive information. Many in the intelligence establishment were extremely dubious about the wisdom or even the value of SOE operations, which they usually viewed as counterproductive. As a later fictionalized account would put it: “SIS walked in soft shoes, SOE walked in spats.”
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Tension between the two was inevitable. The SIS old guard tended to view SOE as “bungling amateurs.”
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Many within the regular military also disapproved of SOE’s unconventional methods. They considered that special operations exceeded the limits of civilized warfare and, by resorting in effect to state terrorism, set a dangerous and unconscionable precedent. In short, they preferred to continue to fight by the Queensberry Rules, even if their opponents did not, and even if it could spell their own defeat. Sir Charles Portal, chief of the Air Staff, was one of the critics. He was most unimpressed by SOE’s first operational plan, Operation Savanna, which called for agents to be dropped in northwest France to ambush and murder the crews of a German Pathfinder bomber squadron. He wrote to SOE command to complain:

I think that the dropping of men dressed in civilian clothes for the purpose of attempting to kill members of the opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force should be associated…. There is a vast difference, in ethics, between the time-honoured operation of the dropping of a spy from the air and this entirely new scheme for dropping what one can only call assassins.
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SOE clearly faced a battle of hearts and minds at home almost as fierce as the very real battles it hoped to join abroad. Operation Savanna was aborted.

Despite this setback, SOE soon swung into operation. Its primary training camps, at Beaulieu in Hampshire and Arisaig in the Scottish Highlands, were swiftly staffed and supplied. Prospective agents were recruited, mainly from the military and civilian exiles of occupied Europe. They were trained in all manner of ungentlemanly arts, from sabotage to unarmed combat and silent killing. As one trainee would recall:

[Our] training officer was Major Sykes…[who] looked and spoke like a bishop, very quiet and mild. In his lectures he would say the most gruesome things in his soft bishop’s voice…and after describing particularly vicious ways of crippling and disarming an enemy, he would often end with the remark, “and then kick him in the testicles.”
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The Queensberry Rules clearly did not apply.

Agents were also supplied with a plethora of specialized military hardware, or “toys,” all developed by SOE’s brilliant technical department. They could choose from a range of ingenious devices, including exploding rats, barometric fuses, clam mines, and the famed Welrod: a silent, single-shot assassin’s pistol. The usual weapon of choice, however, was the Sten gun, a light, three-piece submachine gun, which (though it had a nasty habit of jamming) was largely impervious to the elements, and accurate to around 200 meters. It would soon become the staple of the European resistance from the Atlantic to the Black Sea.

Once trained and equipped, all that remained for the agent was his or her infiltration into occupied Europe. The vast majority were to be dropped by parachute, so a brief training course was
organized, based at Ringway airport near Manchester. The first SOE agents flew out on 15 February 1941, bound for Warsaw and a successful rendezvous with the Polish Home Army. In time, a further 300 or so would be dropped into occupied Poland, while some 350 would be infiltrated into the Low Countries and 1,350 into occupied France.
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Having landed, they could communicate with London by radio and could find succor with the domestic resistance, but they were essentially on their own.

Once “in theater,” the primary purpose of SOE agents was the fostering and coordination of resistance to occupation. Infiltrated personnel were to provide the backbone of the native underground movements, where they were to train their fellow resisters in all aspects of clandestine activity. Armed with SOE supplies and captured weaponry, their role was to give the resistance teeth: plan sabotage, sow confusion, and tie down as many enemy soldiers as possible.

One part of their remit, of course, was the assassination of German occupation officials and their collaborators. And though they played a comparatively minor role in overall operations, such targeted executions were seen as a powerful demonstration of the continued vitality of the underground. They sent the message that the occupation was not unopposed and that collaboration with the enemy would not be tolerated. In the vast majority of cases, the selection of targets was considered a matter for the local resistance. Though London might be informed, especially with the targeting of high-profile individuals, no specific approval was necessary. SOE provided the training, the skills, and the supplies, while its agents on the ground were free to select their objectives according to local conditions.

The results of this opening phase of SOE-inspired activity were impressive. In Poland, the underground Home Army, which enjoyed especially close ties with SOE, was resisting the Germans with exemplary vigor (see
Chapter 4
). In France, meanwhile, a veritable “epidemic of assassination” was troubling Goebbels.
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One resistance group there even claimed to be killing five hundred Germans every month.
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Yet the policy was still not without its critics. In August 1941,
the French communist underground assassinated a prominent Gestapo informant in Paris, thereby provoking a gruesome wave of reprisals. In response, de Gaulle publicly denounced the policy of assassination, and the Foreign Office in London was forced to canvass the exiled governments of Europe to establish their true attitudes toward SOE’s underhand activities.
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Though few were willing to actively discourage the incitement to violence in their homelands, not one of them came out explicitly in favor of it. It was hardly a ringing endorsement, but in the space between these two positions, SOE could at least continue to function. Its directive for the coming year, however, would dilute its own founding ethos: direct action by civilian forces was now to be discouraged for fear of the reprisals that could be provoked.
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Undeterred by this crisis of conscience, the Czech government in exile devised a plan, in the winter of 1941, to assassinate a high-profile German target. The name of the prospective victim was not initially specified, but weapons, supplementary training, and infiltration were requested. Two agents were then selected: Josef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, one Slovak, one Czech, both of whom had already undergone SOE training. SOE staff knew better than to ask questions. Assassination was well within their purview, and if the Czechs wanted to eliminate a senior Nazi, then so much the better. The two agents underwent additional training, mainly in parachuting and ambush techniques, and by the time they left British shores, their SOE handlers boasted that “they [had] been trained in all methods of assassination known to us.”
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After lengthy logistical delays, Gabc?ík and Kubis were finally dropped into Bohemia on the night of 28–29 December 1941. The code name for their mission was “Anthropoid.” Their target was the “Butcher of Prague,” Himmler’s SS deputy, Reinhard Heydrich.

The son of a provincial music teacher, Heydrich had served in the German navy in World War One and became an early recruit to the SS before advancing swiftly in the Nazi ranks as a gifted though ruthless administrator. With the outbreak of war, he masterminded the creation of the RSHA (Reich Security Head Office), which was intended to bring all German security and police
bodies under one roof. In September 1941, he was then appointed the “protector” of Bohemia and Moravia, where, as head of the occupation regime, he was to realize the territory’s industrial potential to the benefit of Berlin and smash the Czech resistance.