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"Operation Canned Meat"
On the sultry night of August 10, 1939, hardly a passerby disturbed the nocturnal calm of Berlin's venerable Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse until, shortly before midnight, rapid, heavy-booted steps sent echoes rattling down the famous street. The guard in front of the Air Ministry's big gray edifice saw a tall man pass him by in great hurry, breathing heavily as he went. Since the stranger was wearing the uniform of an SS officer, the young airman saluted him with outstretched carbine and remained stiffly at attention until the man turned into Prinz Albrecht Strasse where the Gestapo-Reinhard Heydrich's secret police-had general headquarters.
In the lobby the man was greeted with a rush of jumping feet, clicking heels and Heil Hitlers . Swinging his right arm loosely in a relaxed version of the Nazi salute, he acknowledged the greetings and climbed the steps, going straight to the big office at the head of the staircase where Heydrich ruled supreme.
This late disturber of the Wilhelm Strasse's deceptive quiet was a Gestapo goon, Alfred Helmuth Naujocks by name. A brainless tool in the hands of a master craftsman, this apoplectic bully resembled Somerset Maugham's "hairless Mexican" even to the point of scenting himself. He was a tall, heavy-set, big-boned, smooth-skinned man with a coarse, florid scarface, blonde hair and big pink freckles on his enormous hands. Naujocks was a star in Heydrich's fraternity of assassins, whose mere shadow struck terror in the soul of Germany. He belonged to a new caste of secret agents whose activities behind the scenes infused the ancient war of espionage with the spirit of gangsterism,
It was ten minutes past midnight when Naujocks entered Heydrich's big, plainly furnished office. Heydrich beckoned him to a chair, got up, circled his subordinate and handed him the mission of his life.
"I need not remind you," he began, "that what I'm about to tell you is a top secret matter of state and must, therefore, be handled with the utmost discretion." Naujocks nodded and Heydrich continued: "The Fuehrer has decided to settle the Danzig question once and for all and smash Poland. Both X-day and Y-hour are set. All is prepared- except a pretext for war .
"What the Fuehrer needs, we will supply, you and I, my dear Naujocks! We are going to create the cause for this war!
"We will begin the Polish campaign without a formal declaration of war, with a counterattack, telling the world that it was the Poles who fired the first shot. But telling it isn't enough. Practical proof is needed, hard clues Goebbels can show to the foreign press."
Heydrich paused melodramatically before coming to the point: "We will simulate a series of frontier incidents and make it appear that the attacking forces were Poles."
He walked to a map on the wall and pointed to marked spots in Eastern Germany. "The incidents are to take place in this general area," he said, "around Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia, and here at Pitschen, near Kreuzburg, at Hochlinden near Ratibor, and in Gleiwitz itself. We'll put a couple of hundred of our men into Polish uniforms and let them shoot up places, burn farmhouses and run amuck for a few hours."
His bony index finger came to rest on a particular spot on the map. "Here at Gleiwitz," he said, "we have a radio station. It will be your job to stage an incident there. Party Comrade Mueller is in personal charge of these operations. He has all the necessary details. You'll find him either at Gleiwitz or in Oppeln. Report to him when you get there. Good luck!"
Naujocks opened his mouth for the first time. "Thank you, Herr Obergruppenfuehrer ," he said, "for your confidence. Heil Hitler!" He stood up, clicked his heels and backed out of the room.
"Mueller" was Heinrich Mueller, chief of the Gestapo under Heydrich. Naujocks found him in Oppeln, stage-managing the impending operations. When Naujocks arrived, Mueller called a conference of his seconds-in-command, and gave each man his instructions. A thug named Mehlhorn was to direct the Pitschen branch of this bloody masquerade party with a hundred Nazis clad in the uniform of Polish regulars. Another, Langhans by name, was to storm the customs house at Hochlinden. To Naujocks, Mueller explained the attack on the Gleiwitz radio station.
"You will pick six trustworthy SD men and dress them in Polish uniforms. At zero hour, you'll attack the radio station and seize it. You need not hold it long, five or ten minutes at the most, just long enough to enable a man who'll accompany you to broadcast an anti-German speech in Polish."
He went on: "I have here in Oppeln, in the Gestapo jail, a dozen inmates of concentration camps. We'll use them to make these incidents look goddam real. We'll put them in Polish uniforms and leave them dead on the ground as if they had been killed during the attack. They'll be given lethal injections and we'll also provide them with gunshot wounds. After the incidents, we'll show them to members of the foreign press Goebbels is going to bring from Berlin."
Mueller told Naujocks he would let him have one of these dead "Poles," complete with the lethal injection and gunshot wounds.
"By the way," he said, "we refer to these fake Pollacks by the code name of 'Canned Meat.'" They laughed. "Operation Canned Meat" was off to a promising start.
On August 25, Naujocks rehearsed the attack with his men, but without the dead Pole. Then he sat tight. At eleven a.m. on August 31, Naujocks was summoned to the phone. It was Heydrich, calling him from Berlin.
"Naujocks," he said, "the die is cast. It will start at five tomorrow morning. Your operation is to take place at 20 o'clock-tonight. You better call Mueller right away and ask him to send you one of his 'canned meats.'"
At 11:10 a.m. Naujocks phoned Mueller in Oppeln and asked for the fake Pole. At 7:00 p.m. he sent his men to their posts near the radio station and at 7:30, a car arrived with the "Pole." He had had his injection and the gunshot wounds, and his face was smeared with blood, but the man was still breathing. At 7:50, Naujocks had the human prop carried to the main entrance of the station and arranged him on the ground.
It was now 8:00 p.m. Naujocks looked at his wrist watch and almost casually gave the order to attack. A moment later, his six "Poles" seized the station and the phony "Polish" agitator stepped up to the live microphone. He shouted that the time had come for war between Germany and Poland and called on all patriotic Poles to kill Germans. The delivery was punctuated by a few staccato shots before the open mike, as Naujocks' men fired into the air and into the "canned meat" on the ground, providing random sound effects.
At 8:07 p.m. the show was over. Naujocks and his "Poles" climbed into their cars and disappeared. They had given Hitler his excuse for war. Left behind on the ground was a man, now indubitably dead. He was the first casualty of the Second World War-truly its Unknown Soldier.
At 5:00 a.m. on September 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht crossed into Poland, all along the frontier, commencing a three-pronged drive. In that same split second, bombers of the Luftwaffe appeared over Gdynia, Cracow and Katowice.
At 5:11 a.m., Hitler issued a proclamation to the Wehrmacht , justifying the attack. "The series of border violations," he said, "which are unbearable to a great power, prove that the Poles no longer are willing to respect the German frontier. In order to put an end to this frantic activity, no other means is left to me now than to meet force with force."
At 8:00 a.m., exactly twelve hours after the incident at Gleiwitz, the Wehrmacht was already deep inside Poland. The "Pole" on the steps of the radio station was no longer alone in death. At 9:10 a.m., an army ambulance drove into Gleiwitz, returning the first three German casualties. Two were wounded. The third man was dead on arrival.
The world was at war again.
For Poland, the war was to last just twenty-seven days. Never before had a major military power been subdued so rapidly and with such finality. How was it possible, military experts asked, for a nation of thirty-two million people to melt away before the German attack? Nobody in his right mind expected the hapless Poles to succeed single-handed in driving back the Nazis, but some did expect that the Polish resistance would be longer and more costly for the Germans.
Within twenty-four hours after Hitler launched his Blitzkrieg, seventy-five per cent of the Polish planes were destroyed-most of them in their hangars. The Nazis forestalled aid from Britain and France by destroying every Polish airfield equipped to receive military craft. In the first few days of the campaign the Germans smashed Polish communication lines and railroad bridges behind the Polish lines. Army transports operating on secret schedules were located by the Luftwaffe planes and bombed at their terminals. Mobilization centers and staging stations, presumably known only to the upper echelons of the Polish High Command, were found by German planes and smashed. Munitions dumps and oil stores, to the last isolated gasoline depot, were blasted. Nothing of military significance escaped.
Among the mysteries, the case of Leczyca was the most enigmatic. Leczyca was a town of only ten thousand people in the district of Lodz, off the beaten path of armies, devoid, it seemed, of anything of interest to an invader. It had a garrison of only one hundred and fifty soldiers and even they had been hastily sent to the front, leaving the town without a single soldier. And yet, squadron after squadron appeared over the small city, until Leczyca had the unhappy distinction of being the most intensely bombed area for its size in the world.
Staff officers asked themselves why the Nazis were dropping tons of bombs on such a singularly wasteful objective. Sixteen air raids failed to solve the puzzle. The seventeenth told the tale. While it was in progress, the countryside suddenly quaked and roared with a cataclysmic explosion. The city was destroyed; hardly a window was left intact within a radius of fifty miles.
The Germans had touched off one of the largest secret munitions dumps in Poland. Its very existence was known only to a few of the highest Polish officers. How did the Germans know about it?
The answer was given by inference a few days after the conclusion of the campaign. A group of foreign newspapermen was taken on a conducted tour to the ruins of Warsaw, and Colonel von Wedel, their guide from the High Command's press section, was asked to explain the secret of this amazing success. The colonel answered with unusual candor: "Victory was due to our superior arms and to our superior intelligence service."
Intelligence and espionage have figured prominently in all of history's great wars, but never before had the debt the warlords owed to their spies been so publicly acknowledged.
The tragedy of Leczyca was an illustration of what von Wedel meant. For several years before the war, a German spy had been stationed in Leczyca to keep an eye on the city's great secret. On the day of reckoning, Leczyca was among the first targets of the Luftwaffe . The dump was skillfully concealed. Despite the beam of the local agent's radio on which the planes flew to their target, it escaped sixteen raids. But so certain were the Germans of their information that they returned for the fatal seventeenth time.
The same accuracy prevailed elsewhere. Military trains, for example, do not operate on timetable schedules, and their destinations are known only to a few. Yet the bombing of Polish rail communications was carried out with uncanny exactness. On September 5, for instance, an army transport left Warsaw's Central Station en route to the front. Its secret routing called for its arrival at Praga station, on the other side of the river, fifteen minutes later. A few minutes before the train was due at Praga, German planes appeared from nowhere and bombed the station out of existence. The transport was marooned, blocking the progress of following trains. A single spy, planted within the stationmaster's office in Warsaw, operating a clandestine transmitter, had alerted the Germans and thus prevented thousands of troops from reaching the front.
Obviously, someone was turning a new page in the annals of war. There was more to Germany's military might than met the eye. The secret mission of Gruppenfuehrer Naujocks that ushered in the greatest war in history somehow became the bizarre symbol of a new kind of war.
This fresh conflict had a mysterious, intriguing new dimension. Deep in its bowels fought a brand new army, organized well in advance to fight in a brand new war.
It was an army of spies.
To be sure, throughout all recorded history spies have played an important part in both diplomacy and warfare, but never before like this.
As World War II was about to break, an American historian of the secret service drew up an estimate of the world's espionage population and found that there was hardly a white spot left on the map. The globe was covered with intelligence officers, secret agents, femmes fatales, confidential informants, troublemakers, and police spies.
This was a remarkable increase, if only because espionage is by no means an activity whose growth should normally keep pace with the growth of mankind and the progress of civilization. The halcyon days of espionage were supposed to be over. In fact, they were just beginning.
The Fox in His Lair
On August 31, 1939, the Wehrmacht , deployed for the campaign in Poland, sizzled with excitement and tension. But in a plain, tastelessly furnished office in Berlin, a small, sallow man with snow-white hair sat back and relaxed. To Wilhelm Canaris, the actual outbreak of war was an anticlimax. He had worked long and hard to pave the way for it; now battles that the Wehrmacht still had to win or lose were far behind him. He and his men had fought their own underground war with enormous determination and rare skill. Though they had lost some skirmishes, they had won most of the battles. Now they felt confident they would win the war.
Who was this man, this great captain and brain of the vast underground army? Certainly the most important spymaster of World War II, Canaris was also one of its most controversial characters. "Seldom," wrote a former high official of the German secret service, "has a figure of historical importance been judged with so many contrasting verdicts as the small, silent, eccentric figure, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the German Military Intelligence Services."
Continues...
Excerpted from BURN AFTER READING by Ladislas Farago Copyright © 1961 by Ladislas Farago Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
