One of Britain’s best known espionage historians – Nigel West, pen name of former Conservative MP Rupert Allason – has made sensational allegations about a British connection to the ‘bomb plot’ of 20th July 1944: the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler and overthrow the Third Reich in a military coup.
This conspiracy has been explored many times by historians, and is best known to a wider public via the Hollywood film Valkyrie in which Tom Cruise played Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a 36-year-old Prussian officer who planted the bomb at the Führer’s Eastern Front military headquarters – the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ (Wolfsschanze).
Stauffenberg heard the bomb explode as he left the vicinity, and reported to his fellow conspirators – who included some of Germany’s leading Generals – that Hitler was dead. But by a stroke of fortune he had in fact survived, albeit with a burst eardrum and superficial injuries. Once the Führer had been able to make telephone contact with Berlin, the coup quickly collapsed and its ringleaders were arrested. One or two of the most senior were given the chance to commit suicide, others were executed or imprisoned.
While there has sometimes been speculation about British intelligence involvement in the plot, no one had claimed to have significant evidence to this effect, until newspaper articles last month, based on Nigel West’s research in the UK National Archives. West was hired by a descendant of one of the coup plotters, an aristocrat seeking return of his family’s ancestral estate in Brandenburg.
West’s research was first reported in the Sunday Times in November 2021, then in more sensationalised form in the tabloid Sunday People in December 2022, and his findings will be published in more detail next month in Hitler’s Trojan Horse, the second volume of his history of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Several senior Abwehr officers were involved in the bomb plot, and its former chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was indirectly implicated, leading to his imprisonment and eventual execution in April 1945, three weeks before Adolf Hitler’s suicide.
West’s main revelation centres on Otto John, a lawyer and Abwehr agent who has long been known to have had connections to the plot. Based on a single file from the archive of MI5 (the British Security Service), West maintains that MI5’s sister organisation MI6 – the Secret Intelligence Service – was aware of the Stauffenberg bomb in advance. He suggests that MI6 even inspired or organised the conspiracy, and by extension he argues that Prime Minister Winston Churchill was himself party to the plot.
Having read this file and assessed other documents relevant to the case, I can reveal that the true story of the 20th July conspiracy is both more complicated and more interesting. British intelligence did have contact with several of those planning the coup, in addition to Otto John – who was not in fact their main source. But the plotters seem to have operated quite independently of any British control. This article will identify some of the extraordinary networks involved in the conspiracy to murder Adolf Hitler.
In another context I have already revealed Jewish banker Robi Mendelssohn as an important British agent inside the Third Reich. Now I can confirm that Mendelssohn was one of three key agents working for the main Abwehr conspirator. And I can identify one of pre-Hitler Germany’s most important Jewish businessmen, Paul Silverberg, as employer of the man who did give MI6 fairly precise advance notice of the July 1944 bomb plot – far more precise than the intelligence supplied by Otto John.
The conspirators failed in their immediate aim of assassinating Adolf Hitler, but some those who avoided execution eventually influenced the development of postwar Germany. Among the architects of today’s Federal Republic (and today’s semi-federal Europe) were the bomb plotters of 1944.
We should start by looking more closely at Otto John, a lawyer who worked for the German airline Lufthansa. This gave him the excuse to travel frequently to and from Spain and Portugal, two neutral countries where both German and British spies operated freely throughout the war. He had an especially valid excuse for regular visits to Madrid, because Lufthansa owned a major shareholding in the Spanish airline Iberia, which led to a good deal of legal work.
But this was merely a plausible cover story for John’s true purpose in visiting the Spanish capital. Soon after joining Lufthansa in 1937, John became close to anti-Hitler conservatives including his fellow lawyer Klaus Bonhöffer (brother of the well-known theologian and anti-Hitler plotter Dietrich Bonhöffer); civil servant Hans von Dohnanyi; and General Hans Oster, deputy chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence.
In 1943 General Oster and some of his fellow anti-Hitler intelligence officers were dismissed after they were caught smuggling currency and jewels on behalf of Jewish exiles. Yet in what seems to have been a recurring pattern with these well-connected ‘anti-nazis’ they were not severely punished, and in several cases remained at liberty or served only short sentences. Moreover, the purge of some senior ranks in the Abwehr led to the promotion of an even more dangerous anti-Hitler conspirator, Colonel Georg Hansen, as the new head of foreign intelligence operations.
Hansen developed an inner core of three trusted agents given ‘special missions’ (Sonderaufträge), travelling to neutral capitals and seeking contact with Germany’s enemies, primarily with British and American intelligence agencies – MI6 and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). They were instructed to reveal the existence of opposition networks within the German Army, and to find out whether Britain and America would be prepared to negotiate with a new military regime, once Hitler and other leading national socialists had been killed.
Otto John – operating in Madrid and Lisbon – was one of these three special agents. Another was his fellow lawyer Dr Eduard Waetjen, based at the German consulate in Zurich, where he liaised with the American lawyer and intelligence officer Allen Dulles (future head of the CIA), who worked in Bern as head of OSS operations in Switzerland. Waetjen’s mother was American; his father had been European representative of a New York bank, Guaranty Trust; and his sister was married to a member of the Rockefeller family. Before the war Eduard Waetjen had been a partner in one of Berlin’s most successful corporate law firms, Sarre & Waetjen, specialising in contracts between German and American film studios. In December 1943, Colonel Hansen arranged for Waetjen to be transferred from Istanbul to Zurich to take the place of another conspirator, Dr Hans Gisevius, who had come under Gestapo suspicion.
The third of Colonel Hansen’s trio of special agents was the half-Jewish banker Robi Mendelssohn, who despite his ancestry had been allowed to remain a director of one of Germany’s leading financial institutions.
As I have previously exposed, Mendelssohn travelled to Stockholm during the summer of 1943 and made contact with Harry Carr, one of the most experienced officers in MI6, whose espionage career dated back to Moscow in the first months after the Bolshevik revolution. Mendelssohn made two further trips to the Swedish capital in late 1943 and another in early 1944. Most of the facts about Mendelssohn’s relationship with British intelligence remain secret even in 2023, and I have had to piece the story together from fragments that appear in various files.
The John, Waetjen and Mendelssohn missions were part of a coordinated effort directed by Colonel Hansen, the main Abwehr officer involved in planning the July 20th plot to murder Hitler and overthrow national socialism. Hansen revealed the identity of his three key agents to Count Josef Ledebur, whom he promoted to a senior position in the Abwehr, responsible for controlling this important trio. After the bomb plot’s failure, Ledebur fled to London via Madrid: comprehensive reports of his subsequent interrogation can now be read in the UK National Archives.
Otto John’s efforts to contact British intelligence in Madrid can be tracked as early as 1942, and seem to have involved homosexual networking among European conservatives and aristocrats. John himself was from a bourgeois background but was very much a social climber, and his friends in the conservative ‘resistance’ led by Carl Goerdeler, former Mayor of Leipzig, aimed to restore the German monarchy at the head of a military government after ousting Hitler.
John persuaded Goerdeler and others that the exiled Kaiser’s son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, would be unacceptable either to German liberals or to the Western Allies, and that the post-Hitler monarch should be the Kaiser’s grandson Prince Louis Ferdinand, the only member of the old imperial family who had an ‘unblemished’ record of opposition to national socialism.
It seems very likely that Prince Louis Ferdinand was (like Otto John) a homosexual or bisexual: further hints of this appear in the newly published, unexpurgated diaries of the Anglo-American socialite and Conservative politician Henry ‘Chips’ Channon.
The Spanish diplomat Juan Terrasa y Pugés was a close homosexual friend of the Prince who became the first intermediary between John and British intelligence. Terrasa had previously served at the Spanish Embassies in Washington and London. In 1937 during the Spanish Civil War he was arrested by Falangist security forces who had evidence of his Republican sympathies, but social connections soon ensured his release, and with the decline in influence of Falangism under Franco’s reactionary Nationalist government, Terrasa was reappointed to the Foreign Ministry. (He remained in the Spanish diplomatic service until the end of 1952.)
On his first journey to Madrid in April 1942, John carried a letter of introduction to Terrasa, written by the Prince. Terrasa then took John to Lisbon, where he had his first meeting with MI6 officer Graham Maingot.
On his second visit to Madrid in November 1942, John again had meetings with Terrasa, and on a return visit to Berlin in July 1943 Terrasa stayed at John’s apartment. During this visit, Terrasa was given vital intelligence about the German rocket research station at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast. He took these secrets back to MI6 in Madrid, and within weeks (combined with other intelligence) this prompted the largest RAF operation of the war – Operation Hydra: during the night of 17th-18th August 1943, almost 600 RAF bombers raided Peenemünde. The ensuing damage delayed the V-weapons project by several months.
During the autumn of 1943 (so as to avoid his being called up for regular military service) Otto John was formally recruited as a secret agent of the Abwehr, having previously had only informal associations with German intelligence. Along with Colonel Hansen’s other two ‘special agents’, he was run by the Abwehr branch in Stettin, the Baltic port which is now the Polish city of Szczecin.
This Stettin branch was reliably loyal to the conspirators. Its head was naval veteran Walther Wiebe. As with several other resistance members, Wiebe was part of a strange semi-religious, semi-political cult founded by Kurt Pählke, who promoted the notion of a ‘United States of Europe’. Pählke wrote occult texts under the pseudonym Weishaar (‘White Hair’) and founded an Ariosophist order, the Bund der Guoten (‘League of the Good’). Wiebe and his deputy, Count von Knyphausen, were both members of Pählke’s Bund. During 1943-44 Wiebe and Knyphausen were the two key Abwehr officers controlling Hansen’s trio of special agents – Otto John, Eduard Waetjen, and Robi Mendelssohn.
During recent decades ‘New Right’ philosophers such as Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin have resurrected interest in some of these mystical ‘conservative revolutionaries’: as we shall see later in this essay, several leading figures in such circles (including the main MI6 informant on the bomb plot) were part of the anti-Hitler conspiracies.
Soon after his formal enrolment as an Abwehr agent, John again travelled to Madrid in December 1943, and again Terrasa took him to Lisbon, where he was introduced to a second MI6 officer, Graham Maingot’s replacement Rita Winsor. (In fact some records indicate that Miss Winsor was a more able intelligence officer than her male colleague.)
By this stage the conspirators were determined to assassinate Hitler. It was now a question of timing, and of hoping that they could obtain some hint from Britain or America that a reasonable peace deal would be offered to a post-Hitler Germany.
Early in 1944 Otto John made several trips between Berlin and Madrid, while Mendelssohn travelled again to Stockholm, and Waetjen continued his contacts with American intelligence in Switzerland.
Terrasa now introduced John to a new Madrid-based intermediary with the British and Americans – a Catholic priest attached to the French Embassy, Mgr Boyen-Maas, who suggested he contact the American diplomat and OSS officer Gregory Thomas. A well-known figure in the European perfume industry, Thomas later became chairman of Chanel Perfume. It’s not clear from existing records whether John pursued this suggested contact, but it’s probably not a coincidence that Coco Chanel herself was part of (so far unexplained) diplomatic missions, involving contacts between the SS and British intelligence.
On 19th July – the eve of the planned coup – Otto John was in Spain, but was summoned back to Berlin. According to his own later account, he spent 20th-21st July isolated in his Berlin apartment, gradually realising that the coup had failed. But other evidence (later quoted in an internal CIA history of the John case but ignored by Nigel West) suggested that Otto John had exaggerated this story and that it was actually his brother Hans John who was present in Berlin during the coup attempt. According to this version, Otto John flew from Madrid to Barcelona on 18th July, but did not leave Barcelona for Berlin until 22nd July.
Whatever the truth of his whereabouts on the day of the bomb, it’s certain that he only stayed in Berlin for a few days before flying back to Madrid, before the Gestapo could get around to suspecting him. His younger brother and fellow lawyer Hans John was arrested and imprisoned until the final weeks of the war, when he was executed.
After staying for about three weeks during late July-August at his usual Madrid base, the Hotel Palace, John was advised by the MI6 representative in Madrid, Jack Ivens, that he should go into hiding, in case the Gestapo attempted to abduct him and return him to Berlin for trial.
It was at this stage that the trail of correspondence began which led to Nigel West’s recent claims. A series of letters between MI5 and MI6 (also involving various other British officials) was provoked by Otto John’s desperate flight following the failure of the coup. MI5 hid him in a series of ‘safe houses’ before smuggling him across the border into Portugal, where again he was left for about two months in an obscure village, inhabited by large numbers of Spanish communist refugees, on the outskirts of Lisbon. At one point black comedy intruded into the drama: John was arrested by PIDE, the Portuguese secret police, during one of their periodic round-ups of communists. Lacking valid papers he found himself imprisoned for ten days until MI6 intervened to secure his freedom and finally brought him to safety in London on 3rd November 1944 – more than three months after the failed bomb plot.
Even then, John didn’t get a hero’s welcome. As with other refugees and escaped prisoners of enemy nationality, he was interned and interrogated on arrival in the UK by MI5 officers. There was a brief period of argument between MI6, MI5 and the Home Office as to which department would take responsibility for John’s board and lodging and for finding him a job, before he was eventually recruited to the British propaganda agency PWE (Political Warfare Executive), where he worked for the German-born journalist Sefton Delmer devising ‘black propaganda’ scripts for radio broadcasts.
During discussions within the British security and intelligence bureaucracy over whether John was reliable, references were made to his longstanding connections with MI6. For example, MI5 officer Herbert Hart – in concluding that there was no need to prolong John’s detention and interrogation after his arrival in London – wrote to his MI5 colleague Herbert Baxter that “there are no prima facie grounds for suspecting John, who has been an SIS agent for two years and whom the Germans are now hotly pursuing on the footing that he was a party to the attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20th.” Hart added that MI6 officer Tim Milne (a lifelong friend of Kim Philby and Philby’s subordinate in the MI6 counterintelligence branch Section V) was handling John’s case. Tim Milne (1912-2010), was the nephew of Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne.
Immediately after the war, John worked with British occupation authorities assisting with interrogation of German prisoners, advising the prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials, and continuing his propaganda work with postwar equivalents of PWE. He then sought (with limited success) to re-establish a legal practice and to obtain posts in the new West German governments, at state and eventually federal level. And (partly as cover for his bisexuality) he married a German-Jewish divorcée and music teacher who had been living in exile in Hampstead, Lucy Mankiewicz. The marriage also enhanced his political connections, since his new father-in-law was an old friend and trusted adviser of Dr Theodor Heuss, a liberal German politician who became the first President of the new West Germany from 1949-59, forming a partnership with the conservative leader Konrad Adenauer who was Chancellor throughout this period. (The Presidency is a largely ceremonial role under the postwar ‘Basic Law’ which continues to be a temporary substitute for a constitution in Germany’s federal republic.)
In November 1950, after prolonged debate between the British, American, and French occupation authorities, Otto John was chosen to head the new West German security service BfV (roughly equivalent to the FBI or MI5). He spent three and a half years in this post before (on the tenth anniversary of the 1944 bomb plot) he dramatically disappeared in the Soviet sector of Berlin, apparently having defected to the communists.
This remains one of the great mysteries of the Cold War: had Otto John been a long-term communist agent as well as a British agent? Had he suffered a mental breakdown linked to his alcoholism and bisexuality? Or had he been tricked and kidnapped by Russian and East German intelligence agencies, so as to sow suspicion and confusion in the West?
John eventually served a prison sentence on his return to the West but was pardoned and partially exonerated towards the end of his life. I shall explore the full facts of John’s communist links (and the similar alleged role of Sefton Delmer as a Soviet double agent) in a chapter of my forthcoming book.
For the purpose of this essay, we should look at the other connections that the anti-Hitler conspirators maintained with British intelligence. Contrary to Nigel West’s implications, Otto John was not necessarily their main liaison.
As noted earlier, the Abwehr’s Colonel Georg Hansen ran three ‘special agents’ connecting the Berlin plotters to the Western Allies – Otto John in Madrid; his fellow lawyer Eduard Waetjen in Switzerland; and the Jewish banker Robi Mendelssohn, travelling between Berlin and Stockholm.
During the last months before July 20th, Hansen attempted to instal Count Josef Ledebur as coordinator of these agents, though without taking Ledebur fully into his confidence about the bomb and coup plot. Ledebur was a Viennese aristocrat with strong international connections, having studied in England and married an American. From 1942 he had been employed by the German authorities in Paris to work with the international tycoon Charles Bedaux (mainly known to today’s historians as a friend of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor – the exiled British king Edward VIII and his American wife, the former Mrs Wallis Simpson – whose wedding he hosted at his French chateau). The Count had first been introduced to Bedaux by his brother Friedrich Ledebur, an explorer turned Hollywood actor, best known for his role as Queequeg in John Huston’s film Moby Dick.
Josef Ledebur went on to liaise with numerous black marketeers and semi-criminal financiers, including Jews, and during the later years of the war smuggled several of these characters across the border into Spain. (His tycoon friend Bedaux played complex games with multiple loyalties, and supposedly committed suicide in an American prison in February 1944.)
For most 21st century writers it has become obligatory to depict such stories as “rescuing Jews from the Holocaust”, but at the time it was more a case of helping Jews and other wheeler-dealers smuggle themselves and their wealth across frontiers. There was a grey area of overlap between smuggling, espionage, and peace overtures to the Allies – and Ledebur’s activities in Madrid became an example of this.
Ledebur’s friends in France included representatives of the Rothschild family’s interests in the international oil industry, notably mining engineer Henri Pagezy; Italian diamond trader Count Mario de Pinci; Pinci’s partner in the diamond trade, Col. Édouard Benedic, a Jew who had been right-hand man to the famous French empire-builder and conqueror of Morocco, Marshal Lyautey; and crooked Viennese banker Egon Alma, whom Ledebur smuggled into Spain.
In his operations for German military intelligence in France and Spain, Ledebur dealt with agents of doubtful loyalty and character, including two icons of the 20th century fashion world, Coco Chanel and Gloria Guinness (a Mexican-born socialite who was then known as Countess Gloria Fürstenberg).
During his missions to Madrid (which began in March 1943), Ledebur’s chief contact was Count Franz von Seefried, a fellow Austrian aristocrat with close family ties to the Spanish royal family. Seefried became part of the Abwehr faction prepared to work with international businessmen of dubious loyalties, and to assist Ledebur’s contacts with Western intelligence agencies. Among the Count’s social acquaintances was another agent of this type, Prince Max zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg – yet another of the well-connected socialites and international businessmen who despite (or perhaps because of) their dubious loyalty and Jewish connections, were employed by the Third Reich in efforts to make diplomatic connections with Britain and America. During the last two years of the war, the delicate balance of such agents’ loyalties shifted from seeking peace to plotting Hitler’s overthrow.
During the summer of 1943 Ledebur first met Colonel Georg Hansen, who was then a few months into his new post as head of the Abwehr’s foreign intelligence branch, and was recruited to Hansen’s team of agents seeking contacts with Germany’s Western enemies. Even at this point, as Ledebur later reported to MI5, Hansen said that “Germany had irrevocably lost the war; ‘there was no time to lose to make an offer of surrender before the whole of Germany went up in smoke, flames, Red revolution and civil war’.” The spy chief told Ledebur he should seek to discover Allied views on Germany’s possible surrender terms.
Ledebur’s first move on Hansen’s behalf was to meet one of the Abwehr plotters from its Istanbul office, Dr Paul Leverkühn; then travel to San Sebastian on Spain’s northern coast near the French border, to meet Prince Max Hohenlohe, who had just returned from discussions with the American intelligence representative Allen Dulles in Switzerland. Quite obviously his purpose was to draw the various threads of the conspiracy together on Hansen’s behalf, though according to Ledebur he didn’t at this stage know the full picture of the plot to assassinate Hitler, and was simply following Hansen’s orders and acting as a messenger.
During his return journey to Paris in early September 1943, Ledebur stayed for a few days with the Rothschild-connected mining executive and engineer Henri Pagezy near Montpelier. Pagezy introduced him to the homosexual Spanish diplomat and friend of Otto John, Juan Terrasa, who handed him a personal letter to take to John in Berlin.
Pagezy described Terrasa as someone who was very useful to the international Rothschild-controlled mining company Peñarroya, since his diplomatic status allowed him to take packages across the Franco-Spanish border without being intercepted. His usefulness to the British intelligence services MI6 and MI9 was enhanced by his role at the Foreign Office in Madrid, where he was in charge of matters concerning the exchange of prisoners of war.
In November 1943 Ledebur again travelled to Madrid, where at Hansen’s request he introduced Count Seefried to a half-Jewish Abwehr officer, Major Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, who would provide him with special radio facilities to send secret messages back to Hansen from his special agent Otto John. Kühlenthal had earlier that year been responsible for transmitting fake intelligence to Berlin, derived from the infamous ‘Operation Mincemeat’, when a corpse was washed up on the Spanish coast, carrying documents that purported to reveal Allied plans to invade Greece and Sardinia, rather than their real target, Sicily. Perhaps Kühlenthal was himself taken in by the deception, but his half-Jewish ancestry and his role just a few months later in support of the anti-Hitler plotters, raise further questions about his loyalty. Yet the Abwehr’s commanders in Berlin favoured Kühlenthal above his nominal superior, making him the effective boss of German military intelligence in Spain.
During this trip, Ledebur was put in contact with Michael Creswell, a 34-year-old diplomat at the British Embassy in Madrid. Creswell worked for MI9, the section of British intelligence that organised escape routes for British prisoners and their collaborators across Europe. He was one of the three MI9 links in the ‘Comet Line’, codenamed Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Creswell was Monday; Donald Darling, a vice-consul in Lisbon, was Sunday; and most famously Airey Neave at MI9 headquarters in London was Saturday – hence the title of his memoir, Saturday at MI9.
Moreover, Creswell was an unusual diplomat long before his MI9 days. At the start of his Foreign Office career, Creswell and his department head Ralph Wigram leaked intelligence to Winston Churchill (events dramatised in a BBC television drama, The Gathering Storm). Wigram was a protégé of Foreign Office chief Sir Robert Vansittart, part of an anti-appeasement faction working against government policy – Creswell had been part of this Vansittart faction since the start of his career. If there were to be any secret group within the Foreign Office carrying out unofficial liaison with a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Michael Creswell was exactly the sort of man one might expect to find at the centre of such a plot.
Ledebur’s contact with Creswell was arranged by Aileen O’Brien, an American Catholic journalist based in Madrid. She was well-known in the 1930s as a leading propagandist for Franco’s nationalists, but by 1943 she was clearly working as an anti-Hitler agent, liaising between the bomb plotters and British and American diplomats. Aileen O’Brien was secretary of Pro Deo, an international Catholic conservative movement based in Switzerland. Eventually she married Baron Felix von Schellenburg, another Catholic conservative who after the war was installed by the British occupiers as Mayor of Weeze, near Düsseldorf.
The Ledebur-O’Brien-Creswell connection seems to have been at least as important as the Otto John connection in informing British intelligence about the bomb plotters and their intentions – with Spanish diplomat Juan Terrasa working with both Ledebur and John.
The most detailed information about the plot came from neither of these sources, but from yet another Abwehr link to the British. This was the conservative journalist Franz Mariaux, who reported to MI6 via one of the most unusual spies of the era – Baron Jona von Ustinov, known as ‘Klop’ to his family and friends, and to MI6 and MI5 as Agent U.35. (Klop’s son was the actor Peter Ustinov.)
Born in Russia, Klop Ustinov was a strange ethnic mix – very unusual in those far less ‘multicultural’ times: his father was a Russian aristocrat who converted to Protestantism and acquired a second, German title; his mother was half-Jewish, one-quarter German, and one quarter African!
Perhaps this made him an ideal spy? Klop worked as a press officer at the German Embassy in London during the 1920s and early ‘30s, but in 1935 was dismissed due to his partly Jewish origins. By this time Klop was already working for MI5, and went on to serve MI6 as well. His main loyalty was (like the diplomat Michael Creswell mentioned above) to the anti-German faction within the British Foreign Office, led by Sir Robert Vansittart and leaking information to Winston Churchill during his years of political exile in the 1930s. Klop was able to use a wide range of German and other European contacts in promoting this anti-Hitler cause.
In February 1944 Klop was sent to Lisbon to explore contacts with anti-Hitler conspirators: his main contact there (kept secret even from the locally-based MI6 officers) was Franz Mariaux, whom Klop described as “a Vertrauensmann [intermediary agent] and representative for the West of the four opposition groups inside Germany which are in touch with each other with a view to removing by force Hitler and his Government.”
With occasional brief visits to London, Klop remained based mainly in Portugal until the end of the war. His secret meetings with Mariaux, sometimes at the latter’s villa in Sao Pedro, a spa resort 200 miles north of Lisbon, provided British intelligence with its most detailed information about the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and overthrow the Third Reich.
He correctly identified the most important of these conspiratorial groups as the one inside the Army, led by General Ludwig Beck, but also drew attention to a separate network around veteran conservative General Franz Ritter von Epp, who at the age of 75 continued to hold a largely ceremonial post in Bavaria, though in touch with anti-Hitler monarchists; and a group of Catholic trade unionists with whom Mariaux (a fellow Catholic) was on good terms. The alliance between these Catholic trade unionists and more conservative figures who had devised the bomb plot, was critical to the proposed coup. The new government would include Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff, an Oxford-educated former diplomat, as foreign minister. Bernstorff was already in prison for anti-government activities: after leaving the diplomatic service he worked for the Jewish bank A.E. Wassermann, which continued to exist as a privately owned Jewish bank based in Bamberg for more than five years under the Third Reich.
Klop told MI6 that Mariaux himself “takes the possibility that July will see Hitler’s death very seriously indeed”. He had for the first time asked “how he can get into immediate telephone contact with me. It was agreed that he should ring up the British Embassy in French, ask to speak to me and give his name as Monsieur Duquesne.”
The big problem in convincing senior German military figures to go ahead with a coup, was that the British government continued to insist on Germany’s “unconditional surrender”, and was unwilling to give any promise that a post-Hitler military government would be given more favourable peace terms. Churchill was unwilling to diverge in any way from the policy of his ally Stalin – in fact the Soviets were at times from 1943 prepared to go further than the British in pretending to allow a form of postwar German sovereignty. This was of course a pretence, but it was an insincere gesture that Stalin was happy to make, while he would condemn any such moves by Britain or America. In the final analysis, Stalin knew that he could simply tear up any agreement and send any new German ‘friends’ to a Siberian prison camp or an early grave.
British politicians and diplomats have often been criticised by historians for failing to give any encouragement to anti-Hitler conspirators – the so-called German ‘Resistance’. Yet there are fragments of evidence that suggest some very discreet hints were dropped, and that these had to be cleared at the highest level of the British Foreign Office. Despite Nigel West’s recent arguments, the clearest such evidence was not the Otto John case, but rather involved three other German intermediaries, all of whom were either Jews or worked for Jews.
On 18th June 1943 the head of the British Diplomatic Service – Sir Alexander Cadogan – wrote to the head of MI6 (Sir Stewart Menzies) and the head of SOE (Sir Charles Hambro), the two leaders of the Empire’s secret war. Cadogan warned these spymasters that recent German ‘peace feelers’ to British diplomats in Madrid were potentially dangerous to the Anglo-Soviet alliance: “there is always the great risk that the Russians may come to hear of them and may suspect that we are negotiating with the enemy behind their back. For political reasons we regard it as of paramount importance not to give the Russians any grounds for such suspicions.”
Cadogan was therefore instructing British diplomats in the five most important neutral countries – Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Switzerland and Sweden – to have no “direct personal contact with any enemy national except with the prior knowledge and approval of the Foreign Office.”
He gave the spymasters of MI6 and SOE a little more leeway, given the nature of their work – but even here Cadogan sought to lay down some basic rules, which are interesting because they seem to match some of what went on in Spain and Portugal in relation to the bomb plotters.
(1) MI6 or SOE connections with “enemy nationals”, which in this case mainly meant Germans, should where possible be handled via some “unofficial” third party. This happened repeatedly when MI6 had contact with Otto John, Josef Ledebur, Franz Mariaux and others. The “unofficial” intermediaries included Spanish diplomat Juan Terrasa, American journalist Aileen O’Brien, and French priest Mgr Boyden-Maas.
(2) Any direct contact between an MI6 or SOE officer and an enemy national should be cleared by Menzies or Hambro personally, and if they were in any doubt about the wisdom of the contact, they should consult Cadogan. This happened with Klop Ustinov’s mission to Portugal, which was first agreed in November 1943 but had to be discussed repeatedly at top level before he set off for Lisbon in February 1944.
(3) Any direct meetings of this kind should be handled with great secrecy and take place well away from British diplomatic premises. This advice was followed when Klop had his meetings with Mariaux, 200 miles away from Lisbon and without the knowledge even of Portuguese-based MI6 officers. Creswell’s meeting with Ledebur, and the meetings between Otto John and MI6 officers Maingot and Winsor were also handled with extreme discretion. The only case that was not handled discreetly was when Ledebur eventually took refuge in the British Embassy in Madrid for several months in late 1944, but by then the rules of the game had changed.
Cadogan suggested that MI6 and SOE officers should avoid any discussions that involved senior officials from enemy countries: an exception was made for MI6 discussions with the Hungarian envoy to Lisbon, Andor Wodianer – who despite being the diplomatic representative of a German ally was part-Jewish and ‘anti-nazi’. Wodianer is yet another Jew or half-Jew whose role in links between the Axis and the Allies – whether as ‘peace overtures’ or as approaches to the Allies by anti-Hitler conspirators – is mainly redacted from published files.
A further exception was made for the Jewish banker Robi Mendelssohn, but again only fragments of the true story are (so far) available in the archives. The MI6 deputy director responsible for Scandinavia – John Cordeaux – wrote to Cadogan on 18th August 1943 to inform him of the contact that had begun in Stockholm between Mendelssohn and an experienced MI6 officer, Harry Carr. We know that these discussions continued early in 1944, and we also know that for some reason Mendelssohn was regarded after the war by the British as especially trustworthy. MI5’s deputy director-general Guy Liddell even took time to attend a Mendelssohn family wedding in Switzerland in October 1950.
Yet another Jew who was a British agent operating within the Abwehr in Spain was Johannes Koessler, codenamed HAMLET. He was an Austrian businessman whose family background was half-Russian Jewish, and he married a Jewess from a wealthy family, but having ostensibly converted to Christianity he was accepted as an Abwehr officer and sent to neutral Portugal, where he soon put himself in touch with British intelligence and became part of the “double-cross” operation, convincing his Abwehr masters that he had informants in England and feeding false information back to Berlin.
The head of the “double-cross” operation, Oxford academic J.C. Masterman, believed that Koessler could act as an intermediary with anti-Hitler military figures, but there is no evidence that this was ever seriously pursued.
Another of Masterman’s agents, Hans Ruser (codenamed JUNIOR), was the son of a famous polar explorer whose family connections helped him escape with a suspended sentence after the Gestapo caught him during a raid on a notorious homosexual club in Hamburg in 1936. Ruser’s father was a friend of the Abwehr chief Admiral Canaris, who arranged for his son to be recruited by military intelligence. He was based during the early war years in Madrid and Lisbon, where he made repeated offers to defect to the British. These offers were eventually taken up in 1943 and Ruser escaped to London, where he told MI6 that during the autumn of 1943, shortly before his escape, he had met with a committee of German generals who wished to depose Hitler in favour of a military-backed regime led by former economics minister Hjalmar Schacht.
During his discussions with Mariaux, Klop came as close as any secret British emissary ever dared to issuing a broad hint to the coup plotters, telling them that while he couldn’t make any promises about future peace negotiations, what he could say was that “as long as Hitler is in power there cannot possibly be anything other than ‘unconditional surrender’.”
On 26th June 1944, just over three weeks before the bomb, Mariaux had another meeting with Klop and conveyed more specific information: he had “received a communication (I believe orally by someone who must have come over quite recently) which makes him think quite seriously that Hitler and the chief Nazis will be removed within a very short time.”
A week later on 3rd July 1944, Mariaux was even more insistent, telling Klop that the plotters were “going ahead with their plans for the assassination of Hitler without any regard for what they might hear from us before the event or after; that they are in no way concerned with peace negotiations or peace conditions; that they are expecting the worst possible conditions, but that notwithstanding everything they aspire, mainly if not solely with the help of the British, at maintaining some sort of order after the breakdown so as to prevent the country sliding into complete anarchy or what they call Bolshevism.”
In passing on Mariaux’s message to MI6, Klop emphasised “the full confidence of this particular group of conspirators that Hitler will die an unnatural death very soon.” Or as Mariaux himself put it to Klop: “Hitler’s death is approaching with rapid steps.”
The way these reports were handled inside the British intelligence bureaucracy seems to make it clear that if there was active MI6 encouragement to the conspirators, it was done very indirectly by a select group of officers and “unofficial” intermediaries, and it is significant that some of those most closely involved, notably Klop Ustinov, had been close allies of Vansittart during the 1930s when a certain circle of anti-German British diplomats plotted with Churchill (who was then in political exile) against the policies of the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments.
It was not until after the 20th July bomb (and the coup’s failure) that senior officials in the Foreign Office acknowledged that (in the words of a letter from the Foreign Office to MI5): “Mariaux must have been in direct contact with those Germans who staged the recent attempt on Hitler’s life with a view to approaching the Allies with peace overtures.”
The concern now was to prevent the Russians from suspecting that Britain had ever considered making a separate peace with these German generals (once they had succeeded in killing Hitler). The Foreign Office therefore wrote to the British Embassies in Moscow and Washington, asking them to stress to the Soviet and US governments that there had never been any question of such a deal. It was important to make this clear, the Foreign Office stressed, because “if we do not do this we fear that we may unwittingly assist Himmler in his task of playing off the Russians against the Anglo-Americans and vice versa.”
Even though only fragments of Klop Ustinov’s reports from Lisbon survive, it is very obvious that Mariaux was his most important agent, transmitting information from the very centre of the anti-Hitler conspiracy. Yet he seems to have been operating separately from Col. Georg Hansen’s group of Abwehr special agents. Mariaux was not even officially an Abwehr officer, simply a journalist acting as an unofficial collaborator with German military intelligence and the Lisbon Embassy.
So what made Franz Mariaux so important?
The truth is that before, during and after the war Mariaux was the trusted operative of one of Germany’s leading Jewish businessmen, Paul Silverberg. During the 1920s Mariaux was a correspondent in Geneva and Paris for the Jewish-owned Ullstein newspaper group, primarily for the Kölnische Zeitung. From as far back as the 1920s, he was the protégé of the powerful coal tycoon Silverberg, who was one of the most influential industrialists and financiers in Cologne and the Ruhr Valley region. Mariaux and Silverberg were political backers of Cologne’s Mayor, Konrad Adenauer (later the main architect of postwar West Germany). Paul Silverberg was one of the leaders of the Ruhrlade, described by historians James and Suzanne Pool as “the most powerful secret organisation of big business that existed during the Weimar period”.
At the start of the 1930s Mariaux was part of an international network of young “conservative revolutionaries” led by the half-Jewish Alexandre Marc in France and Harro Schulze-Boysen in Germany. During the 21st century interest in such characters has been revived by intellectuals of the European “New Right” such as Alain de Benoist, and the odd alliance of “National Bolsheviks” and “Eurasianists” associated with the Russian writer Aleksandr Dugin.
What’s now clear is that while some of those involved in these early 1930s networks, such as the anti-Hitler national socialist Otto Strasser and his “Black Front”, were sincere radicals, others such as Mariaux were the tools of Jewish capitalists (notably Paul Silverberg) who were looking for a way to divide and obstruct Adolf Hitler’s growing movement.
It’s an odd coincidence that Alexandre Marc and his Ordre Nouveau group also developed ties to a strange political-religious cult based in London and led by a Serbian mystic, Dimitrije Mitrinovic. In fact one member of the Mitrinovic cult (then known as the New Britain Movement) was sent by its leader to Paris to liase with Alexandre Marc and ended up marrying him! As I explained a few months ago, another member of the Mitrinovic cult – Niall MacDermot – became a British intelligence officer during the Second World War and was almost certainly responsible for the murder of Heinrich Himmler. Click here to read the strange story of Niall MacDermot, and how he was eventually forced to resign from the British government because of suspicious links to the KGB.
Marc’s main German ally – who for a while was a close friend of Franz Mariaux – also eventually turned to Moscow. Harro Schulze-Boysen became a fully-fledged KGB agent, and in the spring of 1941 gave his Moscow masters advance warning of Germany’s plan to invade the Soviet Union. Though Stalin was never convinced that this was going to happen, and Operation Barbarossa remained to some extent a surprise, the KGB did take the warning sufficiently seriously to step up their organisation of an anti-German espionage network, sometimes known as the Red Orchestra, led by Jewish communist Leopold Trepper. Schulze-Boysen continued working for the KGB until he was arrested by the Gestapo in August 1942 and executed four months later.
The strange thing is that Adolf Hitler’s government was aware of Mariaux’s treachery a lot sooner than Schulze-Boysen’s treason, but as so often with the men who became central to the 1944 bomb plot, Mariaux was treated leniently. In collaboration with Silverberg, he had been part of a series of plots from 1932-34 to build conservative coalitions against national socialism. During the 1920s Silverberg supported the liberal statesman Gustav Stresemann, who was seen by German big business as the man who could juggle competing political factions and make the Weimar Republic work in their interests.
After Stresemann’s death and the decline of his party, Silverberg turned to the Catholic journalist Heinrich Brüning, whom he believed capable of uniting conservative sections of the trade union movement with capitalist interests. When Brüning began to fail, Silverberg looked to the Catholic conservative Franz von Papen and raised funds from his fellow businessmen in an effort to help Papen build a coalition that would exclude Hitler. One reason for Silverberg concentrating his efforts on Catholic politicians was to try to block his greatest fear in the summer of 1932 – a “black-brown coalition”, i.e. an alliance between the National Socialists and the Centre Party (the traditional political voice of German Catholics).
In September 1932 via another inveterate plotter on his payroll, Werner von Alvensleben, Silverberg even made overtures to Adolf Hitler himself to see if he could buy influence over the NSDAP leader. In two letters to Hitler, Alvensleben hinted that Silverberg was actually a loyal German patriot whose only disadvantage was that he happened to have been born Jewish. Hitler wasn’t convinced, and from the end of September 1932 Silverberg knew that he and Hitler would remain enemies.
Silverberg and his fellow capitalists accepted that they couldn’t win enough votes to defeat Hitler completely, but their cash bought enough influence at the November 1932 election to weaken the National Socialists, diverting about a million votes to the NSDAP’s reactionary rivals the DNVP, and to the remnant of Stresemann’s liberal DVP. They hoped that Hitler would lose his nerve and (despite leading what was still the largest single party) accept a subordinate position in a conservative-led government.
When Hitler proved stronger than anticipated, rejecting any such surrender, Silverberg and his fellow conspirators tried to divide the National Socialists by promoting Gregor Strasser as a factional rival. Together with the arch-plotter Gen. Kurt von Schleicher, they sought to manipulate various factions to create an anti-Hitler coalition. Schleicher was installed as Chancellor for a few weeks in December and January.
In addition to Franz Mariaux, other journalists on Silverberg’s payroll included Otto Meynen and Franz Reuter, authors of an influential Berlin political newsletter. Reuter was a close ally of Dr Hjalmar Schacht, who during the first years of the Third Reich tried to influence national socialism in a pro-capitalist direction. It’s significant that several individuals close to Schacht became part of the anti-Hitler conspiracy of 1944.
Even after all the factional juggling failed in January 1933 and Hitler took office as Chancellor, Mariaux continued to act in Silverberg’s interests trying to patch together an agreement between the two bitter rivals for leadership of German authoritarian conservatism – Papen and Schleicher. His main ally in this struggle was his old friend and fellow ‘conservative revolutionary’ journalist Dr Edgar Jung.
In June 1934 Hitler lost patience with the endless plotting. Silverberg had by this time gone into exile in Switzerland, but continued to conspire via his old protégé Mariaux. Propaganda minister Josef Goebbels later identified Mariaux as intermediary between the 1934 plotters and the French government: in other words he was liaising with French intelligence in 1934 in the same way as he did with British intelligence a decade later during the months leading up to the bomb plot.
In both cases, circumstantial evidence suggests that Paul Silverberg was pulling the strings.
Though the events of 1934 were dubbed the “Night of the Long Knives”, in retrospect the surprising thing is how mercifully many of the plotters were treated. Key individuals including Schleicher, Gregor Strasser, Ernst Röhm and Edgar Jung (Papen’s press officer and Mariaux’s close friend) were killed, but many others including Mariaux were arrested but reprieved, later being allowed to hold responsible positions in the German government and even in the military intelligence service.
Once he had securely established himself in power, Adolf Hitler seems to have taken the view that he had little to fear from the conservative opposition. His popularity with the German public and with rank and file soldiers was such that he felt he could afford to tolerate opposition, even outright hostility, from sections of the capitalist and aristocratic elites. He was repaid for this leniency with incessant plotting, and ultimately the 1944 bomb.
After Germany’s cataclysmic defeat in 1945, the surviving bomb plotters took key roles in the emerging Federal Republic. Otto John (as mentioned earlier) became head of the federal security service BfV. Paul Silverberg chose to remain in Switzerland, but channelled money and influence to his old friend from pre-1933 Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, who duly emerged as the most powerful politician in postwar Germany, and first Chancellor of the new Federal Republic from 1949 to 1963.
From the start of Adenauer’s postwar rise to power, when the Western Allies reinstated him as Mayor of Cologne, Franz Mariaux was working as his press spokesman and Paul Silverberg was providing funds for his new political party, the Christian Democrats. The likes of Otto John (not to mention leftwingers) who were known to have worked for Germany’s enemies, continued to be treated with a mixture of suspicion and contempt by most Germans. But Mariaux’s treachery and the role of his financial godfather Paul Silverberg remained in the shadows.
When Adenauer stepped up from Mayor of Cologne to Chancellor of Germany in 1949, Mariaux followed, becoming press officer in the Federal Chancellery, but taking time to compile a flattering biography and collection of Silverberg’s writings for his 75th birthday. Silverberg died aged 83 in 1959, and Mariaux in 1986 aged 84.
Eduard Waetjen – the half-American who had represented the Abwehr plotters in Zurich – returned to the lucrative world of corporate law, and like Silverberg chose to live mainly in Switzerland, where he died aged 86 in 1994.
Waetjen’s fellow agent Robi Mendelssohn (as I have explained in a more detailed article on his case) advised the British occupiers of postwar Germany to hire the banker Hermann Abs to help rebuild the Federal Republic’s finances. Mendelssohn survived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall and the restoration of his pre-war fortune. He was still fathering children in his 70s, and died in the artists’ colony of Worpswede, Lower Saxony, in 1996 aged 94.
The main conspirators in Berlin – who would not have hesitated to butcher Hitler’s supporters had their coup succeeded – paid the ultimate price for their failure, including Colonel Georg Hansen, hanged in September 1944, and his old Abwehr boss Admiral Wihelm Canaris, hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp in April 1945.
Most of the agents who had liaised with British and American intelligence to advance the bomb plotters’ aims escaped justice. One exception was Otto John, whose alcoholism and bisexuality made him increasingly unstable during his three and a half years as head of the federal security service. After his still unexplained defection to the communists, or perhaps kidnapping by the KGB, or perhaps mental breakdown in 1954, John eventually served two years of a four year prison sentence in West Berlin for espionage. He then retired to Austria and spent almost forty years asserting his innocence, before dying in 1997 aged 88.
Klop Ustinov – Agent U.35 – continued to work for MI6 after the war, retiring in 1957. He died a day before his 70th birthday in 1962. By then the British Empire whose secret missions he had served was already passing into history, and several of his old friends from wartime MI6 and MI5 had been exposed as Soviet double agents. Kim Philby, who supervised all counter-intelligence work in Spain and Portugal, had been working for the KGB all along – he fled to the Soviet Union in January 1963, seven weeks after Klop’s death. The “brave new world” that Klop helped to create was a world in which Britain and British values were increasingly irrelevant.
That post-war settlement – the world that the surviving bomb plotters and their financial godfathers such as Paul Silverberg helped to create – a world where Europeans were forced to choose the Moscow Scylla or the Washington Charybdis – is now ending. Almost eighty years after the bombers tried to kill Adolf Hitler, Europeans are again hoping to reclaim their continent, their culture, and their destiny.
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Spanish revisionist scholar and activist Joaquin Bochaca, who died on 16th December 2022, aged 91.
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