Eighty years ago, a lone idealist fails to kill Hitler while Chamberlain's fantasies on a similar theme lure him into a German trap
The Bürgerbräukeller in Munich was one of the holy places of Nazism. It
gave its name to the “beer hall putsch” of 1923 which gave the movements its
first serious crop or martyrs and Hitler a short prison sentence during which
he wrote Mein Kampf. The event was ceremonially commemorated every year.
An idealistic young carpenter, Georg Elser, took advantage of this to plant a
time bomb set to explode during Hitler’s speech. Sadly Hitler finished his
speech early and left the Bürgerbräukeller with his entourage of senior Nazis
thirteen minutes before the bomb exploded, killing eight more junior Nazis.
Elser had acted entirely alone, but Hitler convinced himself that the British
were behind the attack and propaganda posters described Chamberlain as the true
author of the attack.
By coincidence the British did think that they were involved in a conspiracy
by German generals to remove Hitler. Before the outbreak of war they had
pooh-poohed a number of approaches from disaffected conservatives in Germany
willing to stage a coup, but now that Hitler had upset Chamberlain
sufficiently, he was willing to endorse a positive response. He fantasized
about Hitler being deposed and sent to a lunatic asylum. This time he had
fallen into a trap constructed by Walter Schellenberg, the head of the SS’s
foreign intelligence operation, who persuaded the British secret service in the
Netherlands that they were in touch with Wehrmacht generals plotting against Hitler.
There was no such conspiracy. Two British intelligence officers, Major Richard
Stevens and Captain Sigismond Payne-Best, were lured to Venlo on the frontier
with Germany supposedly to meet a representative of the imaginary generals. The
British were seized by the SS after a shoot-out and taken to Germany for
interrogation. Hitler was keen to establish some link to Elser but it is
unclear whether this was the immediate reason for the capture.
With touching respect for royal protocol, the British replied to the
offer by the monarchs of Belgium and the Netherlands to mediate with Germany
through King George VI. Predictably he disappointed his fellow sovereigns by insisting
that Germany reinstate Poland before any settlement could be contemplated. President
Lebrun of France, to whom the royal offer had also been extended, went further
and added Austria and Czechoslovakia to the shopping list. The Germans refused.
The ongoing calamity of the British Ministry of Information took another
turn when Sir Findlater Stewart, a highly regarded civil servant, stepped down
as its Director General after only two months in the job on the feeble pretext
that developments in India required him to return to the India Office. On paper
he remained Permanent Secretary of the India Office but in reality had no more serious
involvement in with Indian affairs. He simply recognized career suicide when it
stared him the face. The Ministry offered a unique blend of inadequate
contingency planning before the war and a snake-pit of careerism and political
agendas. Sir Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s chief advisor who had been in charge,
had been far more concerned to block the political or bureaucratic ambitions of
anyone involved, probably because he shared Chamberlain’s delusion that war
would never come so the Ministry would never be needed. Stewart was replaced by
Sir Kenneth Lee, a business grandee, who had far less to lose and was paid off
with a baronetcy when his time came.
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