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  After this, the Jewish revisionist Irgun and the Jewish Agency's more moderate military arm, Haganah, hastened the improvisation of underground railroads for refugees. “Évian,” said Ruth Klueger, who later served with Vera, “gave the official signal from the civilized world, telling Hitler to go ahead and kill the Jews.”

  Earlier in 1938, on Friday, March 11, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave a farewell lunch for Ribbentrop, who had finally gotten what he wanted from Hitler: appointment as Nazi Germany's foreign minister. Ribbentrop had spent two years in London as ambassador. The Churchills were uncomfortable guests at the lunch. News was discreetly conveyed to Chamberlain that German troops were moving into Austria to make it part of the Greater German Reich. Chamberlain said nothing. Frau Ribbentrop lectured Churchill for being “so naughty” in opposing Anglo-Germany unity. Joseph P. Kennedy said Chamberlain was “the greatest man after the Pope.”

  Kennedy was U.S. ambassador to London. President Roosevelt had concluded that Kennedy in Washington was “too dangerous to have around here.” Cordell Hull, U.S. secretary of state, and assistant secretary Sumner Welles opposed any British toughening of policy that could reignite world war and approved Ambassador Kennedy's dispatches, in which he portrayed himself as standing at the heart of the decision-making process leading Chamberlain to appease Hitler.1

  Kennedy had spoken to the queen mother about Mrs. Wallis Simpson's wish to become a duchess. “I will never allow my wife to curtsey to a tart,” said Kennedy. The queen mother “roared with approving laughter,” according to Hugh Dalton, who glumly reported to Vera that Kennedy “has another royal supporter.”

  Poland had a larger proportion of Jews than any other European country. The Jewish underground's transport of refugees through Romania and the Black Sea required increasing funds and voluntary help. An Irgun agent described to Vera how he came home from school as a child in Romania to see his mother hanging from a tree and thought she had improvised some kind of swing until he found she was dead. It was a terrible paradox that in Palestine, Arab marauders harassed a modern Jewish community. From London, Edmund de Rothschild was dispatched to look for other places where Jews might be settled, but the choices were miserable: Madagascar, Ecuador, British Guiana.

  Vera thought a sniper should act now, while Hitler continued to appear in public. Assassination was rejected by the Foreign Office as immoral. Did Hitler ever plan to appear outside his borders? Bill Stephenson asked her to revisit the Balkans and form an opinion. Count von der Schulenburg had written to say he was to be in Romania. Would Hitler appear there? In Serbia, Bill owned the Trepca Mine, a source of zinc and lead vital to German industry. From Belgrade, Vera reported that Hitler had commercial agents who would try to gain control of the mines. In Bucharest she learned that the government of Premier Armand Calinescu was under pressure from the British government to stop the migration of Jewish refugees to Palestine. Schulenburg arrived, but the reunion was brief and sad. He said Stalin, influenced by what he knew of Kennedy's defeatist reports, feared Chamberlain wanted peace with Hitler to let Germany gather strength for an eventual attack on the Soviet Union.

  Schulenburg reported to Berlin a British demand that Romania block the borders against Jews from Poland trying to join the exodus to Palestine. He wondered why London wasted time on such issues just when a show of British resolve to stand firm against Hitler would avert war. Colonel Hans Oster, deputy to Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Ab-wehr intelligence section of the military high command, opposed Hitler's plans to seize the German Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, and sought British support. But everyone knew about Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's promise to Kennedy that neither Britain nor France would come to Czechoslovakia's aid. Yet the German armed forces were not capable of overcoming the powerful Czech defenses. Schulenburg wanted Churchill to say publicly that Britain would certainly go to war in support of the Czechs. Vera reminded Schulenburg that Churchill had no power. “Well,” said Old Fritz, “Churchill is the only man who terrifies Hitler. There must be some way to strengthen his hand through our friends in Berlin.”

  Our Mutual Friends were active among such Berlin personalities as the German spy chief Canaris, who said Hitler planned the invasion of Czechoslovakia for the end of September. Canaris had sent a note to a British military attaché: “By firm action abroad, Hitler can be forced at the eleventh hour to renounce his present intentions. If it comes to war, immediate intervention by France and England will bring about the downfall of the regime.” Oster, Canaris's deputy, asked Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, a scion of Prussian nobility and one of the Nazis’ fiercest opponents, to fly to London. He arrived on August 18, 1938, with a simple message: “If England is willing to fight, we shall end this regime.” Cold-shouldered by the Foreign Office, von Kleist-Schmenzin went to Churchill, who gave him the letter that Prime Minister Chamberlain should have written: “The crossing of the frontier of Czechoslovakia by German armies or aviation in force will bring about renewal of the World War. Do not, I pray you, be misled upon this point.”2

  In August the London Times, viewed by Hitler as the voice of Britain, editorialized on the advantages the Czechs would gain by giving up the Sudeten German borderland. On September 10 Hermann Göring publicly condemned “this miserable pygmy race [the Czechs] for oppressing a cultured people [the Germans]. Behind it all is the eternal mask of the Jew devil.”

  Vera thought Hitler would never be caught off home ground, and Bill Stephenson wondered if a German-Jewish patriot might help in an assassination plot. Vera risked drawing the attention of Sir Barry Domville's fascist agency, Link, by appealing to a reconstituted Council for Jewry in London to publicize statistics about Jewish patriotism: “The percentage of German-Jewish soldiers who died in the 1914–18 war is greater than that of German Christians. Twelve percent of the total Jewish population was killed in action. Eighty thousand German Jews fought in the trenches. Twenty-five thousand got field promotions.”

  Before Vera could further explore with Stephenson the ways in which Hitler might be assassinated, the Führer demonstrated just how well guarded he now was. Chamberlain, associated in the public mind with his furled black umbrella, which earned him a derogatory nickname the Umbrella Man as the symbol of appeasement, was invited to the fortified Eagle's Nest to talk with Hitler. Before dawn on September 15, 1938, at the age of sixty-nine, Chamberlain made his first flight in an airplane. He landed seven hours later at Munich, not far from the concentration camp publicly identified by Churchill as Dachau. Deafened by the piston engines and dizzy from an unpressurized cabin, Chamberlain finished his journey by rail. Past him rumbled showcase trains, designedly crammed with armed troops and artillery. The Führer made him climb in pouring rain the many steps to the Berghof and gave his unsteady guest a single message: The territory of three million Germans in Czechoslovakia would be brought into the Reich, even if it meant world war. Britain must be reasonable. Chamberlain returned home to announce: “Hitler is a man who can be relied upon when he has given his word.”

  Vera heard from Mutual Friends in Berlin that Hitler had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown before Chamberlain's arrival. The German military machine was nowhere near ready to pierce the heavily reinforced Czech defenses. When his bluff worked, Hitler did an about-turn and became a loudmouthed bully again. Only the German army could overthrow him.

  Chamberlain went back for more talks at the Hotel Dreesen in the small Rhine town of Bad Godesberg. Hitler had occupied a suite there to direct the barbaric Blood Purge of June 29–30, 1934, when he had party rivals murdered. Now, some four years later, on September 24, Chamberlain sat in the same suite and laid out his “solution.” The Sudetenland could be turned over without a plebiscite; international guarantees would ensure Czech neutrality. Hitler pushed his luck. The problem, he said, would be completely solved only by a full German occupation by October 1—the very same date Schulenburg had predicted to Vera.

  Chamberlain, as if Hitler's puppet, ca
lled on the Czechs to withdraw from the Sudetenland. All military installations in evacuated areas were to be left intact. Rolling stock and vehicles were to be handed over to the Germans undamaged. Hundreds of thousands of Czechs were to leave behind everything: foodstuffs, raw materials, household goods, even the family cow. When the Czechs objected, Chamberlain apologized to Hitler for their obduracy. Hitler screamed, “The Germans are being treated like niggers!” On September 26 he had troops parade through central Berlin to arouse enthusiasm for war. But Berliners scuttled into side streets. “They are dead set against war,” reported the American correspondent William L. Shirer.

  The parade's commanding panzer general was Rudolf Schmidt, the brother of Hans-Thilo Schmidt in the Berlin Cipher Office. Rudolf sympathized with the scuttling Berliners.3

  In London, Vera heard Chamberlain tell Parliament on Wednesday, September 28, 1938: “Hitler invites me to meet him at Munich tomorrow morning.” She recalled, “Members cheered and threw sheets of paper into the air in celebration. Jan Masaryk, the Czech minister, son of the founding father of the Czech Republic, asked Chamberlain if his country was to be invited to the Munich talks. No, said Chamberlain, Hitler would not stand for it. Masaryk said, ‘If you have sacrificed my nation to preserve the peace of the world, I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, then God help your souls!’ ”

  At their final meeting, Chamberlain begged Hitler to sign a joint declaration saying, “We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to assure the peace of Europe.” Hitler jumped to sign. Secretly, he had just entered into an agreement with Italy against Great Britain. Chamberlain appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, flanked by King George VI and his queen, beaming down at the cheering crowds. The Times of London declared: “No conqueror returning from a victory on the battlefield has come adorned with nobler laurels.”

  Vera sat in the public gallery when Churchill protested in Parliament: “We have sustained a total, unmitigated defeat.” The rest was lost in jeers. She stopped at Bill Stephenson's office. “Winston just stood there, head bowed, while the boos shook the rafters,” she said. “The German army will back any leader who gets all these gifts without a fight: Czech coal, textile, iron, steel, electric power, timber. Five years ago, Germany was bankrupt.”

  On October 5 Churchill made a speech warning that the road through Romania to the Black Sea was now open. The speech was deplored by King George VI. Vera lived to see the Sunday Telegraph, owned by a royalist, Lord Black, run a feature on December 8, 1996, with the headline: forget the duke of windsor. a worse example was set by george vi the king of appeasers. The Telegraph quoted the English historian John Charmley, in his book The End of Glory, offering “hitherto suppressed details of how George VI supported Chamberlain.”

  Victor de Rothschild decided it was time to tell the Earl Baldwin Fund for Refugees: “I have interviewed people who have escaped from concentration camps, and I can tell you that their experiences make the many horrors we read about nowadays seem like nursery games…. The slow murder of six hundred thousand people is an act which has rarely happened in history. It is an act you can prevent.”

  In Vera's homeland, Ruth Klueger was the agent for Mossad le Aliyah Bet, the Institute of Illegal Immigration. Ruth Klueger was a twenty-five-year-old redhead when she joined the Mossad, the name that was later given to Israel's central intelligence service. In 1938 she was warned, “If you're caught, you'll be harshly treated. Every government in the world considers you illegal.” She was born in Russia and moved as a child to an Austrian border town, and then to Romania. She was the kind of experienced connection Vera needed. Ruth had tried to make a Greek shipping magnate reduce his exorbitant charges for transporting Jews to Palestine. After many fruitless negotiations with the magnate, she told him this story: A Jew had gone to the U.S. embassy for a visa. He was told to come back in the year 2003. “In the morning,” asked the Jew, “or the afternoon?” The Greek fell off his chair laughing, and cut his price by two-thirds.

  Vera felt that with allies like Ruth, she could manage without official Whitehall endorsement or U.S. aid. In Europe, ordinary civilians organized Ruth's kind of special operations with few tangible assets. Jewish settlers in Palestine could be enlisted when war came. Commando courses for three thousand Jewish youths were provided at an estate owned by Maude Russell, a relative of the Duke of Bedford. Maude's maternal grandfather had been Master of the Mint in Germany. Maude backed Vera's plans for using the young Jews in clandestine warfare, and perhaps even a Jewish Brigade. Vera kept in the background. She still had to dodge the curiosity of Sir Joseph Ball, the former internal security chief who now advised Prime Minister Chamberlain on intelligence matters. Ball's protégé was Guy Burgess, whose love of Nazi youth rallies was colored by his liking for homosexuals. Ball's anti-Soviet obsessions made it easy for Burgess to sell himself as a decent English patriot even while he was being directed by the Soviet KGB to “activate Lord Rothschild of SIS.” Burgess was not sure which Rothschild the Russians were talking about. Victor de Rothschild was the suspect most obvious to British security. He was cleared only after Burgess was exposed in the spy scandals of the 1950s as one of the traitors inside British intelligence run by the Soviets.4

  9

  Poland Breaks the First Enigma

  Vera knew time was short. The danger signs were dismissed by the SIS and its newly appointed ministerial face, the former viceroy of India, Lord Privy Seal, and Lord President of the Council, now foreign secretary, Lord Halifax. The Polish Cipher Bureau had been secretive about its research into German coding machines, but after seven years of frustration it sought help from Alastair Denniston of the British Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS).

  Hugh Dalton had spoken of a Fourth Arm to fight the Nazis, a resistance organization. He told Stephenson that Vera's air of authority, when she cared to use it, would impress Poland's mastermind in code breaking, Maksymilian Ciezki, who worked in the basement of a Poznan army command post with the best of his cryptology students.

  Vera felt the urgency to help any local Jewish underground in an uprising. Poland had persecuted generations of Jews. The old Anglo-Zionist relationship of 1917 had collapsed. Two British army divisions were now fighting a full-blown Arab rebellion against Jewish immigration into Palestine. In February 1939 Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald told Jewish delegates at St. James's Palace that if war broke out, British priority must be lines of communication with the East, the Suez Canal, oil, and the naval base at Alexandria. Britain did not feel under further obligation to help develop a Jewish homeland. Dr. Chaim Weizmann said this was like a surrender to Arab terrorism. MacDonald retorted, “Jews have made many mistakes in the past.”

  “Certainly,” said Weizmann. “Our chief mistake is that we exist at all.”1

  On the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland, forcing Chamberlain to declare war on Germany, a new Military Intelligence Research unit was hastily created in London under the cryptic title of Military Mission No. 4 to Poland. It would attempt to bring back Polish-held Enigma coding machines, and prepare Poles to fight an underground war. The small team included Gubbins and of course Vera, whose knowledge of Romania and fluency in local languages would help the team escape from any sudden world German onslaught.

  The mission was disguised as an Investigation of Guerrilla Activities by the few army officers assembled in secret on August 24, 1939, to discuss what would later be described officially as “a flying visit to Poland, Romania and the Baltic States” and “a second visit to Warsaw and Polish Intelligence” and “some evidence of a secret visit to Belgrade” and mustering of “elements for missions for Poland and Roumania.” The papers were labeled Report No. 8 to give the enterprise the appearance of War Office top-brass approval. It was later described as involving units “interlocked in a confusing way.” The confusion was calculated to bemuse the enemy in Whitehall. The official historian, W. J. M. Mackenzie, played no part in the mission and
remained be-mused after researching official documents after 1945. His Secret History of SOE: Special Operations Executive, 1940–1945 was not declassified until sixty-one years after the mission, and after Vera had died.

  In 1939 Vera could use the role of a translator-secretary for Stephenson's Pressed Steel as cover in a mission forced to follow a tortuous path to Poland. It was impossible to fly by way of the Baltic on RAF aircraft. There were none available that would not require refueling in regions under German observation. Spain was sealed off now that General Franco had won his war against the Left with considerable Nazi German help, and Spain reverted to the old tormenting of Jews. Spain's Civil War death toll gave Vera a glimpse of the carnage to come: ninety thousand Nationalists killed in action, one hundred and ten thousand Republican soldiers dead, 130,000 persons murdered, half a million citizens forced to flee the country. She had hoped for a neutral Spain with no German border guards to block the travels of British-run agents in an occupied Europe, already foreshadowed by Hitler's placement of bits of Romania and Slovakia “under German protection.” Mussolini had sent troops into Albania. “No government has the guts to resist,” Vera agreed with Dalton.

  Stringbag, briefly home from flying duties, gave Vera a frightening glimpse of secrecy employed to hide uncomfortable realities. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Stanhope, had announced that the crew of the aircraft carrier Ark Royal were at action stations. This was kept out of the newspapers by a D Notice, supposedly to protect the state against reports that might imperil the defense of the realm. The Daily Sketch editors saw this as a device to silence the press, and phrased its objections to avoid prosecution by telling readers it was demanding clear explanations, but without actually printing the speech. Other newspapers then reported the Daily Sketch demand. Readers could only scratch their heads in puzzlement. The navy was demoralized.