The Venlo incident

On the afternoon of 9 November 1939 a car drew up outside the Café Backus on the outskirts of Venlo in the Netherlands, a few metres from the German border. In it were two officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Major Richard Henry Stevens and Captain Sigismund Payne Best, together with a Dutch intelligence officer, Lieutenant Dirk Klop, and their driver, Jan Lemmens. The British were convinced that they were going to meet a German general, the leader of a military conspiracy against Adolf Hitler. Instead, a car full of armed SS men drove across the border from the German side. In the shoot-out that followed Klop was mortally wounded, and Stevens, Best and Lemmens were carried off to Germany. The operation was directed by Walter Schellenberg, an officer of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), who for several weeks had been posing to the British as one of the conspirators, and the abduction was carried out by the squad of Alfred Naujocks, the same man who two and a half months earlier had staged the Gleiwitz incident.

The event is often described as a false flag operation: on the territory of the neutral Netherlands, SD officers abducted two British agents and took them to Germany. The description is apt, with one qualification. The abduction itself required no disguise. The false flag had flown earlier, over the whole intelligence game that the Germans had been playing since September: SD men passed themselves off as Wehrmacht officers from the anti-Hitler opposition, and afterwards, once the abduction had taken place, German propaganda presented the British as the organisers of the attempt on Hitler’s life in Munich the previous evening, with which they had had nothing to do.

A conspiracy that did not exist

In the autumn of 1939 the government of Neville Chamberlain still hoped that the war need not turn into a great slaughter. London knew that many German generals feared a war in the west, and signals from the German opposition were reaching British missions through various intermediaries: through the Vatican, Switzerland, Sweden and the Netherlands. Some of them were genuine. In those very weeks the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, fearing the offensive in the west, was considering a coup, and men in the circle of the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, were seeking contact with the British. The British wanted to know whether, once Hitler had been overthrown, it would be possible to conclude a fair peace with Germany.

In the Netherlands, a neutral country bordering Germany, the paths of intelligence services from all over Europe crossed. In The Hague there was an SIS station headed by Stevens, officially a passport control officer, and a network run by Best, a veteran intelligence officer of the First World War who had lived in the Netherlands for years, did business there and was married to a Dutchwoman. At the beginning of September Best was approached by a German émigré, known to him as Dr Fischer or Dr Franz, who began to act as intermediary in contacts with supposed opposition officers. In reality he was an SD agent. Behind the game stood the head of the SD, Reinhard Heydrich, and above him Heinrich Himmler, while it came to be run by the 29-year-old SS-Sturmbannführer Walter Schellenberg, then head of counter-intelligence in the newly created Reich Security Main Office. The game had two aims: to find out what the British knew about the real opposition in Germany, and to uncover their intelligence networks.

Talks in the Netherlands

The meetings took place at various places near the border. According to Best’s memoirs, the first supposed conspirator, “Major Solms”, demanded proof that he was dealing with a genuine representative of the British government, and Best arranged for an agreed sentence to be broadcast on the BBC German service in October. On 20 or 21 October at Arnhem the British met two more “officers”, and on 30 October they were joined by “Hauptmann Schämmel” – Schellenberg – who claimed to be an officer from the Wehrmacht High Command. He brought with him a “Colonel Martini”, in reality his friend, the Berlin psychiatrist Max de Crinis. It was Klop who drove to the border to collect the Germans. He had been assigned to the affair by the head of Dutch military intelligence, General Johan van Oorschot, who had agreed to help the British although his country was neutral; the British introduced Klop to the Germans as one of their own officers, “Captain Coppens”.

Schellenberg, businesslike and well informed, spoke of the losses in Poland and of how Hitler would not listen to the General Staff. He could not be killed, as that would risk chaos, but he could be imprisoned and forced to hand over power to a group of generals who would open peace negotiations. He asked whether Britain and France would then give Germany a “just and honourable peace”. Stevens passed the question on to London. The affair was known at the highest level: Chamberlain, the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and the head of SIS, Stewart Menzies, were all aware of it. The reply was cautious and non-committal, but the talks were not broken off. The British gave the Germans a short-wave radio set and ciphers so that they could stay in contact.

On 7 November, at the Café Backus in Venlo, Stevens and Best delivered London’s verbal reply to the Germans, who announced that their “chief”, a general, would come the next day. On 8 November Schellenberg came alone. He explained that the general had been summoned to Hitler in connection with the peace appeal issued on 7 November by Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and King Leopold III of the Belgians, and arranged another meeting at the same place on the afternoon of 9 November.

The abduction

During the night of 8–9 November the situation changed. On the evening of 8 November a bomb exploded in the Bürgerbräukeller, a Munich beer hall; it had been planted by the carpenter Georg Elser behind the rostrum from which Hitler had been speaking. Hitler had left the hall some ten minutes earlier. That same night, on the train back to Berlin, he ordered that the British agents in the Netherlands be brought to Germany. Himmler passed the order to Schellenberg by telephone in the early hours of 9 November. The intelligence game, which was meant to go on, was broken off, and its British participants were to serve as proof of Britain’s alleged involvement in the assassination attempt. Naujocks, who had already arrived in Düsseldorf with a dozen or so SD men to support Schellenberg, was given the task of carrying out the abduction.

Schellenberg waited on the terrace of the Café Backus, which stood on the Dutch side, just beyond the border barrier. When Best’s car stopped in the car park, an open car full of armed men drove up at high speed from the German side and smashed through the barrier. Klop jumped out of the car and opened fire, and the SS men fired back. The Dutchman fell, badly wounded in the head. Before Stevens and Best could reach for the weapons they were carrying that day, they were put up against a wall and handcuffed, then bundled into the car together with Lemmens. The wounded Klop was thrown into Best’s car, and both cars drove off across the border. The whole operation lasted a few minutes. Accounts differ on details such as the time, the number of shots and who hit Klop, but they agree on the course of events.

Klop died the same day in hospital in Düsseldorf (according to some accounts, the following day). The Germans buried him under a false name in an unmarked grave and for years did not admit to his death. Stevens and Best were taken to Berlin, to the Gestapo headquarters in Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, where they were interrogated for many weeks. It is not known exactly what they said, but through them the Germans learned many details of the organisation of SIS in Western Europe. For several weeks the Germans also kept up radio traffic with London over the captured transmitter, while London at first was not sure what had happened. Naujocks and his men received Iron Crosses from Hitler, as did Schellenberg.

Propaganda and the Netherlands

The first reports in the British press on 10 November spoke only of a mysterious shooting on the border in which a Dutchman had been killed and several others abducted to Germany. A senior British Foreign Office official, Alexander Cadogan, wrote in his diary that day that “our people” who were to have met the general had been seized at the frontier, and noted numerous reports of an imminent invasion of the Netherlands. The Dutch government demanded explanations from Germany and the return of those abducted, to no avail. The affair compromised Dutch military intelligence, one of whose officers had taken part in secret British–German talks, and van Oorschot soon resigned.

The Germans made propaganda use of it only some two weeks later. Elser, caught at Konstanz while trying to cross the Swiss border, told the Gestapo that he had acted alone, and his interrogators found nothing to contradict this. Hitler and Himmler, however, wanted to see a foreign intelligence service behind the attack. On 21 November the German authorities announced that the perpetrator of the attack was Elser, that those behind him were the British Secret Service and Hitler’s exiled opponent Otto Strasser, and that two leaders of a British agent network had fallen into German hands. The next day German newspapers printed photographs of Elser, “Captain Stevens” and “Mr Best” as accomplices in a single plot. This version was false and was never proved, and Elser, although he was kept alive, was never brought to trial. Klop’s presence at the abduction, in turn, served as proof that Dutch intelligence had been working with British intelligence, and therefore that the Netherlands had itself violated its own neutrality.

Place in the war

The Venlo incident was one of the greatest British intelligence failures of the war. The SIS stations in the Netherlands and a large part of its networks in Western Europe were blown, and a distrust of any German who claimed to be acting on behalf of the opposition to Hitler took root in London for many years. That distrust later hampered contacts with the genuine conspirators, including in 1943–1944. The affair also revealed that Chamberlain’s government, while calling on the nation for an all-out war effort, had at the same time been exploring the possibility of an understanding with Germany. Winston Churchill, who became Prime Minister in May 1940, was later hostile to such soundings. The creation in July 1940 of the Special Operations Executive, a new organisation for subversion and sabotage in occupied Europe, is sometimes linked, among other things, to the loss of confidence in SIS after Venlo.

For Germany the abduction was a successful operation that strengthened the position of the SD in relation to the Abwehr and opened the way for Schellenberg’s career as head of SS foreign intelligence. Like the Gleiwitz incident, it also served as a pretext for aggression: on 10 May 1940, when the Wehrmacht attacked the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, the Germans justified the attack by those countries’ alleged violations of neutrality and their collaboration with the Allies, and the Venlo affair was one of the main arguments used against the Netherlands. Stevens and Best spent the war as special prisoners, in isolation, in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. Elser too was held at Sachsenhausen and Dachau, and was murdered at Dachau on 9 April 1945. At the end of April 1945 the two Britons were among a group of some 140 prominent prisoners taken by the SS to South Tyrol. After a Wehrmacht detachment took them over, they awaited the arrival of American troops in early May at a hotel on the Pragser Wildsee (Lake Braies), near Niederdorf. Best described his experiences in The Venlo Incident, published in 1950.