England under Hitler

Citation preview

SLAVES of Hitler's Master Race! "As soon as we beat England, we shall make an end of Englishmen. Able-bodied men will be exported as slaves to the Continent. The old and the weak will be exterminated. All men remaining in Britain as slaves will be sterilized.

"A million or two women of the Nordic type will be segregated on a number of stud farms where, with the assistance of picked German sires, they will annually produce Nordic infants to be brought up in every way as Germans." Fantastic? These are the actual words of S.S. General Walter Darre, the top "racial expert" of Nazi Germany. Comer Clarke traveled three times to Germany, talked to Hitler's successor. Admiral Doenitz, spoke to the man who would have kidnapped the king, and interviewed the German intelligence officer who drew up the official "Black List" of British leaders. From scores of Nazi leaders, from the official plans already prepared, he has drawn the terrible truth about the fate of every man, woman and child in Britain as slaves of Hitler's Master Race! By Comer Clarke

EICHMANN. THE MAN AND HIS CRIMES

OTHER BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY F390K IN FLANDERS FIELDS (50¢) Leon Wolff

The ghastly butchery of World War I's worst battle 392K THE AMERICAN SLAVE TRADE (35¢, abridged) J. R. Spears

History of the slave ships and the African voyages S416K GALLIPOLI (75¢                 Alan Moorehead

The famous account of a disastrous campaign. Photos 451K THE FLEET THAT HAD TO DIE (35¢) Richard Hough

Russia and Japan in the most decisive sea battle of all time This is an original publication—not a reprint.

ENGLAND UNDER HITLER

BY COMER CLARKE BALLANTINE BOOKS Copyright © 1961 by Comer Clarke

Contents Introduction

Prelude 1   Kidnap the Royal Family

2  Twilight and Slavery

3  The Spy in Our Midst

4  The Laws for Britain

5  The Death's-Head Boss of Britain

6  The British Fight On—Underground

7  Ready—And Waiting

8  When the Nazis Did Come

Introduction Foreseeing the future is one of the divine gifts that all men envy and few men dare claim to possess. But, if we are patient, the mosaic of life, love, tragedy and happiness unfolds and, when it does, it only occasionally seems surprising after all. Yet now and then we look back at the past and ask: "What would have happened... ?" What if the often tiny twists and accidents that change great plans and designs had not occurred; if the decisions, caprices and whims of the leaders of the time had been different? In one instance I have found the answer: the answer to the question, What would have happened to us—every man, woman and child in Britain—if the invasion, planned by Nazi Germany in 1940, had succeeded?

It is an answer which may serve as a chastening reminder now that many senior and well-known former Nazis still holding office in Germany are again raising their demanding voices and when new, though as yet small, sections of youth are daubing on walls in Germany their wretched slogans and evil swastika symbols. My mission was not only an endeavor to track history as it would have been, it was a detective adventure among some of the wickedest men of our time—men who only a few years ago threatened the world with the overwhelming reality of a satanic nightmare. Berlin, Hamburg, Friedrichshafen, Innsbruck, Berchtesgaden, Munich, Salzburg .... Helped by good colleagues and friends, I searched for the facts in big cities and in remote mountain villages in Germany and Austria. For it is only now, that many feel free to speak fully. In Germany I interviewed the man Adolf Hitler appointed his successor, the leading former Nazi alive today, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, second and last Fuehrer of Nazi Germany. I met and learned the secrets of the man entrusted with the greatest single mission of the entire war: the kidnapping, immediately after the invasion started, of the British royal family. I spoke to the man who had already been appointed chief in Britain of the evil Death's-Head emblemed S.S., and unearthed the wicked orders given him to enforce among the British civilian population. I questioned the scholarly looking S.S. officer who spied among us before the war and then drew up the Nazi "Black List" for Britain. I found out the Nazis' diabolical scheme for between one and two million of Britain's loveliest girls. I talked with Hitler's little-known sister, Paula, about her evil brother's plans.

I questioned war criminals with grisly pasts, but with intimate knowledge of what life would have been like for Britons today. For years, until now, these people have kept the secrets only they knew. In addition, I examined Nazi files and documents containing many plans never before revealed. And I acknowledge, with thanks, the help of the Cabinet Office in London in allowing me to examine many important Nazi invasion documents captured after the war. My first investigations were initiated by the Sunday Pictorial. The result appeared as a series in that newspaper and I am most grateful to the Sunday Pictorial for kindly giving me permission to make use of that material. But a newspaper, quite rightly, has to present important facts quickly and must condense them into the confines of its space. So, for the detail and additional material for this book, I went back to Germany and Austria twice more, and interviewed many informants again and questioned many new ones. These, then, are the full facts in detail. It is a report that shows us—I believe for the first time—what life in England might easily have been today. When I found the men who drew up or would have implemented the Nazi plans, I have quoted them at length. In these cases the men who know and who would have actually carried out the plans tell their story in their own words. Chilling, in parts, though this book may be, I have not attempted to draw any political conclusions. I have no wish to reopen any wounds that will hinder the growth of a new, democratic Germany; or to tread useless ground by re-apportioning the blame. Indeed, many Germans helped me in my inquiries, anxious to show that among the majority there is no desire to cover up or excuse the evils of the Nazi regime.

I believe that the majority of Germans are now genuinely sorry that they were mesmerized and mentally twisted by Hitler and his disciples. Many of them agree that the ease with which they succumbed is regrettable, that the way in which those of high intelligence, and indeed, intellect, joined the march behind Adolf Hitler's crooked cross of evil is deplorable and shocking. After months in Germany and Austria, one question remained: What would we have done if the Nazis, with their horror, had succeeded in invading? It would not have been part of the British temperament to have taken it lying down. Just as the Nazis had their plans for us if they had become our conquerors, we had official plans, too, to continue the struggle for freedom. In 1940, a British Resistance movement was carefully formed and recruited in readiness for the worst. Back in Britain, I received official permission to tell for the first time the proud story of the volunteers of the British underground movement which would have risen behind the invading Germans. I talked with their leader, Major General—then Colonel—Sir Colin McVean Gubbins, D.S.O., M.C. And I traveled throughout Britain meeting many of his men. The story of the several thousand members of this dedicated underground movement will come as a surprising explanation to many wives who wondered why their husbands suddenly disappeared from their homes one September night in 1940, when invasion seemed imminent. I am, therefore, glad to have the privilege of making public, for the first time, the role of the very gallant men who knew their intended work would almost certainly have brought them death. The last chapter of this book deals with what did happen when German forces occupied a part of the British Isles—the Channel Islands. Because of their hopeless geographical position, the Islanders were told by the British Government not to resist a German landing. Because of that, what did happen there was not typical of the ferocious struggle which would have

taken place for Britain itself. However, a gallant Resistance movement did develop on the Channel Islands, and the ruthless and brutal Nazi reaction to the limited, independent acts of sabotage was a foretaste of the Nazi plans for the resisting mainland. Finally, I express my thanks to General Sir Colin Gubbins, the commander of the secret, underground army which was ready to save the soul of Britain from the cataclysm of horror which nearly burst upon us. This fine officer, now a busy civilian, gave freely of his time to help me fill in the facts of the hitherto secret mission of his organization. When the immediate danger of invasion was over, he went on to become chief of Special Forces operating throughout the world. Comer Clarke is now a staff writer with the London Daily Sketch.

Prelude All the Nazis who appear in this Prelude are, as in the succeeding chapters, real. Some are still alive today. Real, too, as you have read in the Introduction, is the British Resistance leader, Colonel (later General) Gubbins, who with his underground organization, set up in 1940, was ready to fight them. This dramatic look at Britain as it might have been, carefully based on Nazi plans, crystallizes the ultimate picture which the succeeding chapters of the actual Nazi preparations reveal. Obebsturmbannfuehrer Fritz Knoechlein sat at his desk in his office in Whitehall. A swastika, black in its circle of white on a red background, hung loosely from its standard in the far corner of the room. Beside him Sturmbannfuehrer Heinz Lammerding,, immaculate in the black uniform of the Totenkopf (Death's Head) Division of the Waffen S.S., assumed the tight-lipped expression of his chief. Handsome, 30-year-old Fritz Knoechlein looked at Lammerding and stabbed a finger heavily on the report before him. "This is the reason," he said, "that we have been drafted to England. This is the third attack on a German soldier this week. This time it has happened in

a village called Chalfont St. Giles. The Wehrmacht has questioned all the villagers, but none of them will say who is responsible. "Well, St. Giles won't save them now. This has got to stop and we are empowered by Himmler to act." Obersturmbannfuehrer (Lieutenant Colonel) Knoechlein paused, then looked straight at Sturmbannfuehrer (Major) Lammerding. "Lammerding," he said, "take 250 men to Chalfont St. Giles. I want you to deal with them personally. We will have to teach the British a lesson. . . ." The two men talked for a few minutes, then Knoechlein said: "General von Brauchitsch has been informed of the intended action and fully concurs. Colonel Six has been informed as well and he is hurrying back from leave in Berlin. Heil Hitler!" Lammerding snapped to attention, extended his right hand and blurted "Heil Hitler!" He quickly walked to the table where his high, peaked, black cap of the S.S. lay, the skull emblem gleaming white under the eagle and swastika insignia. Then he turned, his high, shining jackboots squeaking slightly, towards the door. As he reached it, Knoechlein spoke again: "I know I can rely upon you to carry out your duty to the Fuehrer. These people who attack the German occupying forces must learn that they cannot trifle with the Waffen S.S." The door closed. Knoechlein walked to the window and looked out into Whitehall. This was London. German-occupied London. For in September 1940, with the Continent on its knees, Hitler's blitzkrieg had been launched upon Britain. The mighty Luftwaffe had finally tipped the scales against the valiant Royal Air Force which had held Britain's fate in the balance for so many desperate weeks. By sea and air the troops and parachutists of Operation "Sea Lion" which was Hitler's code name for the invasion of Britain, had flooded in. As the British General Staff themselves had known, once the Nazis seized bridgeheads on the coast and held them long enough to build up the iron fists of their Panzer armored divisions, Britain was lost.

The British Army, barely re-formed after the evacuation from France and the loss of immense quantities of equipment, could not withstand the massive punches of fire and steel of General Busch's 16th Army as it smashed forward from the southeast coast to London and west towards Guildford. It took them only six days after the build-up to join with General Strauss's 9th Army, which had landed along the coast from Brighton to the Isle of Wight. In the weeks of ferocity and violence which no Briton thought could happen, London, then the rest of Britain, fell—as in that terrible summer of 1940 the other countries of Europe had fallen to the armed might of Nazi Germany. The miraculous escape for which the free world had hoped had not come about. The terror, the slavery, the rape of Britain which had been so carefully planned were being accomplished, as similar plans had been accomplished in the other nations on the Continent. Through the great swaths cut by the last, massive air raids and the last fighting in the streets, Obersturmbann-fuehrer Knoechlein could see from Whitehall the swastika fluttering high over the Houses of Parliament which, astoundingly, had survived. Yes it had happened. The Nazis had come. Obersturmbannfuehrer Knoechlein had been sent over with the Waffen S.S., the elite fighting formations of the ruthless S.S. police, to help put down the first signs of a serious, organized underground movement in Britain. Speeding back from leave in Berlin was the S.S. chief assigned by Goering and Heydrich to Britain, Standarten-fuehirer (Colonel) Dr. Franz Alfred Six. It was barely eleven o'clock when Obersturmbannfuehrer Knoechlein noticed Lammerding's Mercedes staff car swing into the roadway. At least, he reflected, Germans were safe from attack in these few hundred yards.

No Britons at all were allowed in Whitehall, not even the few members of the British Nazi Party and the uniformed British Nazi Police, mainly composed of many followers of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists movement, who had been freed in a parachute troop attack on the Isle of Man where they had been held in internment camps under the British 18b Defense Regulations. For there was a fear that loyal British agents, despite the strenuous security screening, could even infiltrate that organization. Nevertheless, there were plenty of people on the pavement. Uniformed officers and men of the German armed forces, the ordinary German police, the S.S. and the Gestapo. There were civilians, too, from the economic and political administration, the Race and Settlement Office, and Nazi diplomats from the Wilhelm-strasse in Berlin. Occasionally, there was a voice other than German—a few representatives of Mussolini's Italy and of Vichy France. Even so, machine-gunners squatted vigilantly at a score of vantage points on roofs and balconies on either side of Whitehall. The nearest the conquered Britons were allowed to the hub of administration was Trafalgar Square, where each Sunday the few voluntary listeners were reinforced by truck-loads of men and women rounded up from streets in the suburbs to hear proclamations and speeches by local Nazi leaders and their pro-Nazi British lackeys about the need for Britons to help their German "cousins" build the New Order for the world. Half a mile away a heavy guard of S.S. men stood, rifles and machine guns at the ready, around Buckingham Palace. On the day of the invasion Hauptsturmfuehrer Otto Begus's 500-strong parachute Kommando made their massed parachute drop on Hyde Park and into the grounds of Buckingham Palace itself, after a blanket attack. But the King had been inspecting troops in the Midlands. The surprise attack had overwhelmed the courageously fighting Palace guard, which had comprised one company of the Coldstream Guards and a few men of the 12th Lancers and the Northamptonshire Yeomanry. The troops, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel J. S. Coats of the Coldstream Guards, fought to the last man, but they could not stop the concerted assault

The two Princesses, Princess Margaret, aged nine, and Princess Elizabeth, aged 14, had been taken prisoner with their mother, Queen Elizabeth. Hitler had sent a vainglorious Nazi politician, Count Ludwig Schwerin von Krosigk, a clever Oxford graduate and Rhodes scholar, to try to educate the Royal Princesses to the German point of view. But it was known that he was meeting with conspicuous lack of success. King George, prevented from returning to London by the sudden German attack, had reluctantly left the country with the last evacuating British troops and was now with Winston Churchill in Canada, defiantly girding the Commonwealth's efforts to carry on the fight and urging America to quickly arm. And in a splendid residence just off the Mall, a foxy old face, that of Joachim von Ribbentrop, had returned to the Court of St. James. Before the war, as German ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop had outraged the royal family by once greeting them with the outstretched right hand Nazi salute. Now the one-time wine salesman was Hitler's personal representative in Britain. Lammerding wasted no time as his car sighed to a halt outside Knightsbridge Barracks, the only barracks which had not been badly damaged during the fighting. He jumped out as it stopped, guards clicked salutes, and then he strode over to the main building. Within half an hour three Waffen S.S. units were forming on the square while, at one side, an EngUsh forced-labor squad, supervised by an S.S. N.C.O. with a long rubber truncheon, loaded boxes of ammunition and incendiary bombs into a van. Now, in Whitehall, another figure stood in Knoechlein's room. Knoechlein was standing too, for this visitor was of similar rank. But he was something more. He was Obersturmbannfuehrer Walter zu Christian, the sixth member to join the Security Service of the S.S. and the head of Department VI, the department devoted to Britain and the British Empire, of the Reich Security Main Office.

Walter zu Christian, a bespectacled and unusually quiet-spoken man, had secretly studied Britain, its people., and its structure for years for his Fuehrer. He was well qualified. He had received part of his education at Seeford College, near Brighton, and had spent much time in Britain subsequently. But he was one of the few S.S. officers who, although supporting Hitler because he thought Hitler could shape a greater life for Germany and Europe, was becoming increasingly disquieted by the mounting brutality of Nazi methods. It was Christian who was speaking. "The only way to secure the cooperation of the English is to treat them as equals," he was saying. "I know them and you'll find few traitors among them." "As for the Mosleyites," he said contemptuously, "they are largely riffraff and roughnecks despised by the rest of the people." Knoechlein tightened his lips and ground the heel of his jackboot impatiently into the gray carpet. "Six's orders are clear," he said. " 'Combat effectively all anti-German organizations.' We must do it quite ruthlessly. You know that, my dear Christian. I do not think the English would react even if we treated them as equals, but in any case you must know that that is impossible. Lammerding is carrying out this action, as an example, right now." Christian did not reply. There was no point. Instead he changed the subject. "I hear Adolf Eichmann is personally coming to Britain to oversee the solution of the Jewish question here." "Yes," said Knoechlein, referring to a pile of papers on his desk. "He wants a speed-up in plans. The Jewish question will have to be finally solved here as well as on the Continent. Rudolf Richter is Six's expert on the Jews here. Nearly all of them are in custody, awaiting further measures." He looked at Christian momentarily and turned away. "There is a plan, I believe, for building a center, like the ones at Belsen and Auschwitz, on one

of the Scottish islands, or even the Scilly Isles," he said. "The disposal of waste material into the sea will make the task far easier to deal with." He smiled. "But it is lunchtime.... The English will never learn to make Schweinebraten mit Semmel knodel the way they do in Munich. Let's go." From Knightsbridge a convoy of ten Waffen S.S. trucks sped through Uxbridge, in Middlesex, towards Chalfont St. Giles. It was June 10, and it was a Saturday. But there was no Saturday sport for Britain. For the S.S. noted with satisfaction a curious phenomenon. The few civilians in the streets were mostly either children or elderly people. The explanation was simple. The drastic ordinances of "Militärverwaltung, England" (Military Administration. England) signed by Army Commanderin-Chief General von Brauchitsch on September 9, 1940, before the invasion, had been implemented. This provided that "the able-bodied male population between the ages of 17 and 45 will, unless the local situation calls for an exceptional ruling, be entrained and dispatched to the Continent." As slaves. As the black convoy rolled now into the Buckinghamshire countryside, Kurt, a fair-haired, good-looking 22-year-old in the second truck, nudged his new friend, Werner, who had just been posted from Germany, and said lightly: "After this 'action' I think we should be due for a spot of leave at Cheltenham." Werner looked puzzled. Kurt laughed outright: then Werner smiled too as Kurt explained that leave to Cheltenham, or one of the other of S.S. General Walter Darré's "Race Centers" was a coveted reward for duty well done. It was also considered a service performed for the Fatherland. At Cheltenham, Kurt explained, a start had been made on the scheme of General Darré, an "expert" on Britain and Hitler's leading "race advisor," to provide Britain with a new German-British population. There, in a treelined avenue, rows of houses were set aside to house English girls "of the blonde, Nordic type"—fair hair, pale skin and blue eyes. There they mated with picked S.S. men and produced their babies, to be brought up in Germany and then returned to Britain to settle.

Minimum standards of food, medicine and medical help would discourage procreation by the rest of the population. Sterilization was also being tried, and Darré, who had spent six years at King's College, Wimbledon, explained that "in a generation or two Britain's present population would completely disappear." At 2:15 p.m. the S.S. convoy roared into Chalfont St. Giles. As the trucks stopped the S.S. men leaped down, rifles and machine guns leveled. Lammerding jumped down from his seat beside the driver of the leading truck and walked over to the nearest civilian, a man of about fifty, and struck him heavily in the face. "I want everyone here in the square—men, women and children. Everybody, with their identity cards, here in the square," he shouted. "Shout that through the village at the top of your voice. Everybody here in half an hour." Then he gave the frightened man a shove which sent him reeling. Lammerding pulled his revolver from his holster and fired four bullets at the man's feet. "Get going, start giving the instruction of the Waffen S.S.," he shouted, and the man hoarsely started repeating Lammerding's order. Just over an hour later, slightly more than 600 people, clutching identity cards, stood in an untidy crowd in the square. Around them stood the men of the S.S. units. Lammerding, hands on hips, stepped in front of them and the buzz of puzzled voices dropped to a hush. He stood in front of the chairman of the parish council, and demanded: "A German soldier was attacked in this village during the last 48 hours. From these people you will name 30 hostages who will be shot as a reprisal. Now!" The man in front of him stepped back, looked around him with shock, and finally said: "It cannot be done. These people are innocent. I refuse. I cannot." The Germans moved in and separated the crowd into two groups: women and children in one group, men in another. The men were marched to

nearby barns and the women were marched to the village church. Of the women, Mrs. Marguerite Roufianche, who had stood in the square with her husband, two daughters, a son, and a grandson of seven months, was the only one to escape alive and tell what happened. Days later a special emissary of the Resistance sought her out in a neighboring village where she was still in hiding and to him she told, simply, the horrifying story. She said: "Our party of about 400 women and children were marched to the church. Many mothers carried their babies in their arms and some wheeled perambulators. It was obvious the Germans had a plan. They marched us into the church and we waited there for about two hours. "At about 4 p.m. a number of soldiers, all about twenty years of age, entered the church with a sort of packing case which they carried up the center aisle and placed at the head of the nave, near the choir. From this case hung what looked like lengths of cord. These cords were lit and the soldiers moved away. When the fire reached the packing case it exploded and produced clouds of thick, black, suffocating smoke. "The women and children, gasping for breath and screaming in terror, fled to other parts of the church where it was still possible to breathe. It was then that the door of the vestry was broken open by the sheer weight of the mass of panic-stricken people.... "The Germans, realizing that this part of the church was overrun, brutally mowed down all the others who tried to reach it. My daughter was killed at my side by a shot fired from the outside. I owe my life to the presence of mind to close my eyes and feign death. "A volley rang out in the church. Then straw, faggots and chairs were thrown on top of the bodies which were lying strewn all over the stone floor. I took advantage of the smoke to hide behind the altar.... Then I jumped through the frame of a window to the ground outside.... I got to the vicarage garden and hid in a row of peas until 5 p.m. the following day." The emissary listened in cold horror and wrote down the statement. "The Germans will pay for this," he said, "if it is our last act." Then he sought an 18-year-old youth named Roby who, with four others, survived the terrible

ordeal of the barn to which the men were taken. Roby told what happened there. He said: "Having forced us into the barn, four soldiers posted at the door covered us with their machine guns. They talked and laughed among themselves as they inspected our firearms. All of a sudden, five minutes after we entered the barn, the soldiers, apparently in obedience to a signal from the square, opened fire on us.... I lay flat on my stomach with my head between my arms.... The dust and grit hampered my breathing. Some of the wounded were screaming and others called for their wives and children. "Suddenly the firing stopped and the brutes walked over our bodies finishing off with their revolvers at point-blank range those who still showed signs of life.....The soldiers then covered us with anything they could find which would burn— straw, hay, faggots, ladders and wheel-spokes.... "Then they set fire to the straw, and the flames quickly spread through the barn. I raised myself gently, expecting to receive a bullet, but the murderers had left the barn." Roby said he escaped through a hole which he suddenly noticed in the wall. Although wounded and pressed down by the weight of bodies above, he managed to squeeze through it and hide in an adjoining loft. Eventually, in the fading light, he ran for his fife to a nearby copse and hid throughout the night. It was a starry night on the south coast. A soft breeze blew from under the rim of the sea and wafted up to the little stone-built cottage. Old Mr. Wilson and his wife Alice sat in front of their dwindling fire of logs collected from the nearby copse. It seemed a quiet scene and there was nothing to betray the solitude of the night. But below the old stone floor the picture was different. Around an upturned wooden box in the cellar sat five, grim-faced men.

One was speaking while the leader, a tall, auburn-haired man wearing an old Army khaki scarf., made cryptic notes with his pencil. The five men in the cellar that night were worth a king's ransom. On the head of the leader alone the Germans had placed a reward, dead or alive, of 50,000 Occupation Marks, which at the occupation rate of exchange (9.60 Occupation Marks to £1) was nearly £5,000. Colonel Colin McVean Gubbins, leader of the Auxiliary Units, the underground army, formed in June 1940, before the invasion, remained silent for a while after the speaker finished the story of the Massacre of Chalfont St. Giles. His job, on the instructions of Winston Churchill and the Commander-inChief, Home Forces, given before the invasion, had been to carry out the fight behind the German lines if areas of Britain were overcome. With a handful of experienced Regular Army officers, he had recruited local men with intimate knowledge of their local countryside and who were also old soldiers of the First World War and so had a wide knowledge of weapons. It had been a military assignment. Britain had been split into sectors and each sector had its network of underground cells. The job had been to sabotage bridges, cut telephone lines, blow up arms dumps. Colonel Gubbins was a military man; he had seen in the Germans in action before. He had been a member of the British military mission to Poland when Poland was attacked. He had fought the Germans in Norway as a member of a British brigade sent to stem the German advance. But this was different. The Germans were no longer fighting the British Army. They were killing civilians—innocent men, women and little children. How could the underground defend them? Although, to his knowledge, the attack upon the German soldier—who had not been killed, merely injured— had been a spontaneous act, possibly selfdefense, by an unknown member of the population, Colonel Gubbins knew that the reprisal was meant to deter the underground from activity for fear of bringing similar reprisals on the heads of other innocent civilians.

He had breathed only two words as he had heard the end of the story. Just "the brutes." At last he spoke again. "It is quite clear," he said, "that we must show the Germans that we are capable of making them suffer if they kill civilians." The four unit leaders listened intently. "It is essential," said Colonel Gubbins thoughtfully, quietly, "that we hear within hours, through our network, of every German massacre of this kind. We should also learn the name of the unit responsible and, most definitely, the name of the officer actually in charge of the operation. "That officer," he said, "must then, without fail, be sought out and killed, plus as many of his men as possible. It must be done even at the cost of our own lives. If we can succeed in doing that every time the Germans kill civilians, the Germans will lose their appetite for outrages of this kind." The four men around the wooden box nodded in agreement Then one of the four got up. "What was this man's name again?" he asked. "Lammerding," replied Gubbins, "Sturmbannfuehrer Heinz Lammerding of the Totenkopf Division. A real killer." "Very well," said the man.. As he rose, his four colleagues got up with him and, in silent understandiing of what he was about to do, extended their hands. They would do the same when the time came. They said simply: "For Britain___For freedom." Three taps on the flagstone above, a chink of light as it was raised, and he was gone. Three days later an S.S. man, his jackboots shining, stepped forward in Whitehall as Sturmbannfuehrer Heinz Lammerding walked from his car to the entrance of his office. The S.S. man saluted and said: "A note, sir. It is urgent. You are asked to read it now." As Lammerding opened the envelope the S.S. man fired five bullets quickly into Lammerding's chest and he collapsed, dying, in the street. No, it was not important that Lammerding should read the note, only important that those Germans who ran towards him should find it in his dead hand and read it then.

The two men had been close together and at an angle to the wall so that no one had seen the Resistance leader in the S.S. uniform fire his gun. Therefore they did not know immediately from where the bullets had come. The shooting was inconceivable anyway in Whitehall. "Call for help," shouted the S.S. man in German, and seemed to vanish among the gathering uniformed throng. If he died killing Lammerding he would be happy, but if he could get away to take another Nazi with him ... well, he would. S.S. General Eike took the crumpled paper from the limp, still warm hand. It said: "With effect from this day, every German responsible for the killing of a member of the civilian population will, without fail, be sought out and killed. Take warning that this punishment will be carried out however long it may take—and even in Whitehall—The Official British Resistance Movement." In lofts and cellars in countless homes a far-off, but unmistakable growl was crackling over illegal radios from across the Atlantic. Winston Churchill was saying: "Do not flag in your belief in final delivery. Our noble Bang and I, with our allies of the free world and the members of our Commonwealth, are ceaselessly preparing for the day of the assault upon the prison of Europe and the attainment of the freedom for which we all yearn. Britons will never surrender." And, for a few minutes, in sadness and in hope, Britain fell still. That would have been the pattern and those would have been some of the people who would have been fighting for the soul of Britain if the invasion had succeeded. A terrifyingly real possibility. Terrifyingly real people. Is this picture too hard to believe? You may care to answer that question after you have read the following chapters. Knoechlein and Lammerding, for instance, two of the Nazi Master Race who were to subjugate Britain, were no new apprentices to mass horror.

Obersturmbannfuehrer Knoechlein, of the S.S. Toten-kopf Division, had already started to "deal" with the hated British as early as May 27, 1940, before the capitulation of France. Near a hamlet called le Paradis he shot, in cold blood, 100 British soldiers of the 2nd Royal Norfolk Regiment who had surrendered after holding a bridge against the overwhelming might of the Totenkopf Division. He was hanged in Hamburg in January 1949. And the description of the Massacre of Chalfont St. Giles is, word for word, the official description by survivors Marguerite Rouffanche and Yvon Roby of the massacre carried out by Sturmbannfuehrer Lammerding in the little village of Oradour sur Glane, in France, just across the water. Lammerding is still in hiding. He was condemned to death in absentia by a Boulogne court in 1951 and is still wanted for the Oradour sur Glane massacre. The plans for Britain, Nazi Germany's greatest enemy, were even more severe. Now read the staggering statements of the men, still alive today, who plotted and would have carried out the terror and of the secret plans found in Nazi files.

1 Kidnap the Royal Family It was an hour before dawn. Jut-jawed, stocky, Captain Otto Begus of the Death's-Head emblemed S.S. was ready. He stood hands on hips, behind his large, ornate Renaissance desk in newly occupied Boulogne. The fingers of his right hand sprawled loosely over the shiny, black Luger holster slung from his belt. With clinical amusement he watched the amazed look of the 23 picked, young Nazi parachute officers who filed into his office. They had every reason to look amazed. They stared at their commander, standing in the black tunic, breeches and jackboots of the crack Nazi guard. Then they stared at the cream wall behind him. For there hung two huge flags, the Union Jack and the British Royal Standard, two large photographs of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, pictures of the two Royal Princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, and other members of the British royal family.

They turned their eyes questioningly to their commander. They saw that broad-shouldered Captain Begus was in the stance they knew so well, the alert stance that daring cloak-and-dagger missions had taught him. Body rock-firm and taut on legs placed eighteen inches apart, fingers loosely tapping on his holster, ready to draw. They could have been forgiven for the sudden thought which at that moment flashed into their minds: Is our commander a traitor? But he must be crazy, the war is nearly won. Has he gone mad? Forty-one-year-old Captain Begus snapped, "Shut the door!" The young officers, among the toughest in the German Army and S.S., were used to dawn conferences. But the last young lieutenant to enter the room could not conceal an expression of slight doubt as he snapped to attention and replied "Ja, Herr Hauptsturmfuehrer," and closed the door behind him. The craggy face of Austrian-born Captain Otto Begus, sunburned beneath his cropped hair, betrayed no emotion as he said, "Now bolt it!" The young lieutenant did this, too, and then took his place among his colleagues, sitting on the three rows of chairs in front of the flags and photographs of the enemy. Captain Begus lifted his hands from his hips to the desk before him and leaned forward his heavy shoulders. His voice was low, his words carefully chosen. For Captain Begus and his men this was a moment they would remember all their lives. "I can now tell you why I have picked you from your units to come here," Captain Begus said. "The invasion of England is due to start in 12 days' time. We shall have the honor of being the first German troops to enter London. "We shall parachute directly into the capital. To this unit gathered here, the Fuehrer has entrusted the most important mission of the entire war." A tremble of excitement raced up the spines of the young men before him as Captain Begus went on. "The objective is the capture alive of the British royal family. Every officer here will stop at nothing to achieve his objective. This is a mission, which,

if accomplished— as it must be—will bring the war to a quick end. Soon Britain will be part of the Third Reich. These exhibits"— he turned contemptuously to the British flags and the royal photographs behind him —"are to make you familiar with your mission." Then, allowing himself a tight, confident smile: "But within a fortnight you will have the real things and the real people!" The faces which a few minutes before had betrayed puzzlement and faint traces of doubt were now alive with eagerness. Already in the previous few weeks of that summer of 1940 the triumphant German Army had swept over Western Europe. And, as this special Kommando unit sat in their security-bolted room in Boulogne, 28 miles from the English shore, they could hear roaring overhead the massed waves of bombers and fighters of the all-powerful Luftwaffe—flying to lay their dawn carpet of death in readiness for the final blow against England. Every dedicated face, every pair of fanatical eyes, was now turned towards the square-shouldered man behind the desk. Captain Begus went on: "The Fuehrer believes that, if the British royal family can be kidnapped and held hostage, the British can be forced to surrender." Then, without pause, the Captain began to brief his men for their mission, to tell them how the landing would be effected, of Adolf Hitler's instructions on how the royal family were to be treated, and of his plans for them. It was the Germans' most astonishing and secret war plan, a plan intended as a crucial blow to seal the fate of Britain. The scheme was devised personally by Hitler and only now can it be learned, in full, by the British wartime chiefs of staff and, indeed, by the Royal family itself. For at last it was being told in Austria by Captain, later Major, Otto Begus himself. I stumbled across the first clues to the amazing plot by accident. It began in Munich. ... I had spent the day at the Museum of Contemporary History, on the outskirts of the city, going through the many pages of evidence of a witness at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trial. There were indications that this witness had been, in fact, destined for an important post in Britain after

a successful invasion. When the offices shut I walked back to the Alpen Hotel where I was staying. I had dinner. Then, in a thin drizzle, I strolled along the street. Yes, it was here among the proud, old buildings and, indeed, beauty of Munich that Adolf Hitler first fanned his early followers into the delirium of nationalism and hate that nearly swamped the earth. As I strolled in the quiet sobriety of the gray evening, my mind recalled the awesome picture of how it all started. Hitler, the great actor who straddled the drama, standing in his open Mercedes, his right hand outstretched, as the endless columns of brownshirted followers marched past. . .. Hitler, surely the greatest emotional orator the world has ever known, galvanizing millions to a hysterical frenzy. People who met him talked of his hypnotic eyes, his rasping, impassioned voice. Terror, pageantry and the exploitation of the bitter emotions of Germany's appalling total of eight million unemployed, were his weapons. Already in those early days in Munich, the brown-shirt roughnecks were man-handling Hitler's hecklers and beating up Jews, the international scapegoats of all Germany's troubles. Already the strident, overwhelming voice was threatening his peaceful neighbors. The full, screaming orchestra of tyranny—the chanting, goose-stepping columns, the shrieking dive-bombers, the Gestapo, the concentration camps and the horror—which was nearly to drown the voice of civilization was not yet upon the world. But it was tuning up. The raging appeals to violence . .. the inflaming, insidious beat of drums and blare of trumpets ... the mass, torchlit parades... the dipping of thousands of swastika banners before the dumpy, moustached leader... it was beginning. The trappings were being prepared for the awesome, pagan pageant which was to rain its hurricane of misery on the world and bring death to 20 million souls. Today it all seems too impossible, too outrageous—yes, even too absurd—to have really happened. And yet only a few short years ago it was a terrible reality which might have been with us still.

The drizzle grew heavier, the evening grayer. Along the Schillerstrasse the first trickle of water spindled down my neck. A few feet ahead was an opening and a few steps leading down from the street. Above the opening was the familiar word "Bar." I could not guess that a bizarre encounter was about to take place. It was an ordinary Bavarian bar with wooden panels on the wall and a row of casks of the excellent, golden ale for which Munich is rightly so famous. A plump and friendly middle-aged frau wiped her hands on a cloth. I leaned on the counter. "Ein bier, bitte." As I sipped and idly spun the bib around, I became aware of an interested face two stools away. I looked up. It was a friendly, open, bronzed face. The face of a man in his late fifties. He was quietly dressed, his hair graying. He smiled. "How are you enjoying Munich?" he asked, obviously realizing that I was a visitor. I replied, "Very well. But with this drizzle I might as well be in London!" It was one of those casual conversations that often erupt when two strangers who are alone meet. "You're on holiday?" my new acquaintance asked. "No," I said, "I'm working." This interested him, and after we had swapped a few drinks I told him of my mission. I wanted to see how an ordinary German would feel about this idea. But far from an ordinary German my new friend had been a German staff officer! As the evening passed we discussed "what might have happened if." It was a friendly chat. Then my new acquaintance said, "It was absolutely top secret at the time, but news leaked out afterwards. . . There was, I believe, a plan to capture the royal family as soon as the invasion started and hold them as hostages to force a quick end to the war. ... It was felt that afterwards, too, as hostages they could be used as a threat to ensure the good behavior of the civilian population." Could it be true? My German acquaintance knew nothing more. But I decided to make the finding of details my immediate objective. I gathered that my companion had been a professional soldier and not a great admirer of Hitler. I said, "After all this time there is no reason why the facts should not be told." I asked him if he would make inquiries among his old

colleagues to give me a lead as to where to start. Rather to my surprise, he agreed. He said he kept in touch with many of his old comrades and would let me know what he found out. By now it was eleven o'clock. Warmed and slightly weary with the several steins of beer we had drunk together, we parted. I walked back along the wet pavement of the Schillerstrasse to my hotel, deep in thought. Next morning I made phone calls to friends in London to find out if anything was known in Britain about any attempt to kidnap the royal family. Eventually the answer came : "Nothing at all." I made inquiries in Germany among the contacts with good official connections, but they knew nothing either. Then, a few days later, the telephone rang in my room at the Alphen Hotel. It was my staff officer friend. I don't know where it was a kind of pride in the thoroughness of German preparations which had persuaded him to make inquiries to help me, or whether perhaps he felt he would be doing a fellow-officer a favor by enabling him to have his part in the war recognized. Maybe he just thought that the truth should be told. But what he had to say made me grip the telephone receiver a little tighter. "I have talked to a few of my old friends," he said. "One of them has spoken to the former commander of the special Kommando unit which was formed to make the attempt." I waited. "The commander's name is Otto Begus. He was in the S.S., and later became a major. He is now a commercial agent, and lives just over the German border in Austria. He knows you are interested in his work and might visit him. I would not give you his name without his consent. 2He feels that there is now no reason why the plan should not be told. . ." It was an incredible stroke of luck. I scribbled down Otto Begus's address. Within an hour I was on my way, driving along the gently undulating autobahn from Munich to Salzburg in Austria. On the journey, I stopped at Bernau and phoned a friend in London who possessed a list of S.S. officers

and their histories, compiled from captured Nazi records after the war. I had told him of my visit to Germany. "Can you give me details of an S.S. officer named Otto Begus?" I asked. "I think I am really getting somewhere." Within a few minutes I was writing down the crisp facts he gave me: Begus, Otto. S.S. number 189613. Nazi Party number 3354998. Born September 25, 1899, Bozen (then in Austria, now called Bolzano in Italy). S.S. Untersturm-fuehrer (2nd lieutenant) April 20, 1935, Obersturm-fuehrer (lieutenant) April 20, 1938, Hauptsturmfuehrer (Captain) believed 1940, Sturmbannfuehrer (Major) September 11, 1943. Sentenced to three years' imprisonment after the war for being a prominent Nazi officer. I slowed, as the sun was setting, at the German-Austrian border. The check was brief. A quarter of an hour later I drove into the beautiful old baroque Austrian city of Salzburg, birthplace of Mozart. The narrow, cobbled streets in the old part of town are steeped in history. Next morning I covered the last few miles to the little village in the shadow of Berchtesgaden—Hitler's former mountain eyrie—where I had been told Otto Begus lived. I walked up the short concrete drive and rang the door bell. A few seconds passed, then a short, stubby man opened the door. It was Otto Begus. His hair was still cropped, but graying. The face was still craggy. Now the man briefed to command the most desperate mission of the war wore a rough green sports coat and gray flannels. The face softened slightly as I introduced myself. He said, "Come in." He courteously motioned me to a chair in the neat sitting room. Hesitantly, he said, "I knew someone would be bound to find out about it some day. Then a friend telephoned me and said 'a man from London is getting near.' I thought 'Well, we were enemies once. But what does it matter now? I might as well speak about it.' " We talked about ordinary tilings for a while. As we did so Otto Begus seemed to epitomize the enigma of the German people. Here, in his gray flannels and sports jacket, was a pleasant ordinary person. Then, as the

former S.S. major began to tell his amazing story, we were back again in the dark days of 1940, when the horror of Hitler threw its shadow of death and fear over Europe. Otto Begus was weaning the black uniform of the Schutzstaffeln, the dreaded S.S. The invasion was coming. Major Begus was speaking: "I suppose I was the natural choice to lead the capture of the British royal family," he said. "A few weeks earlier, when the invasion of the Low Countries and France began, on May 10, 1940, I had led a similar attempt to kidnap Queen Wilhelmina of Holland. "It was the first time such an operation had been attempted and the idea came from Hitler himself. He considered that if those heads of state who were much loved by their people could be captured, they could be used as a surety for the good behavior of the population. "So the day the invasion of Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg started, I flew with a flight of planes over the residence of Queen Wilhelmina of Holland at Ruygen-hoek. Instead of bombs, our planes carried men. The first troops were parachuted to the ground. Others deliberately crash-landed in their aircraft at an airfield and in nearby fields. The unit I led crashlanded with them. "The other units were intended as a diversion to draw off enemy fire as we landed. My job was to lead my all-officer unit forward and, in the confusion, rush the Palace. "The landing took place as planned, but Queen Wil-helmina had fled to the coast half an hour before. We pursued her, but she escaped in the British destroyer Hereward to England. We suffered heavy casualties, but most of the special Kommando unit I led escaped, and we were quickly picked up by our advancing land forces." In the sudden explosion of war on the Western Front, the attempt to kidnap Queen Wilhelmina—the forerunner of the plan to kidnap the British royal family—was almost lost in the mounting crescendo of sensational news as the German Army raced forward on the first day of their sudden attack on the three neutral countries.

But there was a brief account that day in May in a Reuters dispatch. "A daring attempt by German airmen to kidnap Queen Wilhelmina of Holland today ended in failure ...," it was stated. "Sixteen Nazi planes landed near the Queen's residence, but were spotted by mobile Dutch sharp-shooting units, who destroyed several of the planes ... "The story was told in a cable received by the Columbia Broadcasting Company in New York from its Amsterdam correspondent. " 'A flight of sixteen large Junkers, and possibly more, landed at the Valkenburg airport near the Queen's summer villa at Ruygenhoek,' he says. " 'Each Junker carried twenty soldiers or more, all equipped with automatic rifles or machine guns. Other contingents of aerial kidnappers landed at Delft, about four miles south of The Hague. " 'The plan there was to cut off The Hague from the rest of Holland and to capture the Government, even if only for a few hours.' " In his work, King George VI, His Life and Reign, the author, Mr. John W. Wheeler-Bennett, also refers briefly to Queen Wilhelrnina. "This intrepid Royal lady ... was herself the object of German attempts to kidnap and hold her as hostage to paralyze Dutch resistance." And there this little-known and abortive kidnapping attempt was buried in the deluge of graver news. Captain Begus returned to Germany. The German armies which had just raced through Denmark and Norway went on to smash through Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and into France. Within weeks, the French, reeling under the murderous, overwhelming onslaught, were forced to surrender. Only the heroism of Dunkirk saved the British Army from being destroyed. Now the whole might of the Nazi war machine was ready to be unleashed on Britain. From the Arctic Circle to the Spanish frontier, a hundred and sixty Nazi divisions and the massed, still triumphant Luftwaffe, were ready for the invasion to begin.

Rallied by the growling defiance of Winston Churchill, the British people girded themselves for the onslaught, which must surely start at any moment and which, in the view of military leaders, would be overwhelming. During the late summer of 1940, The Few of the Royal Air Force fought their immortal battle in the summer sky over Britain. At night the bombs rained down. The Royal Navy waited, vigilant. The Army welded itself together again. Britain was at baiy. The Nazis thought it was nearly over. And, as Otto Begus returned to Germany, it nearly was. Begus himself did not know that the Nazi attempt to kidnap the Dutch Queen was not an isolated intention. A scheme to deal with the sovereigns of all invaded countries had already been drawn up. Records show that a month before the invasion of Denmark and Norway an order of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the German Armed Forces Supreme Command, dated April 2, 1940, declared: "The Fuehrer has directed that the escape of the 'kings of Denmark and Norway from their countries at the time of the occupation must be prevented by all means. ... It will be essential to keep the residences of the sovereigns under surveillance and, if necessary, to prevent the kings from leaving their palaces.... In the manner in which these measures are carried out, due regard will be given to the positions of the sovereigns as far as that is possible." The order ended with a note of warning: "The duration and extent of the measures of surveillance will further depend upon the attitude and conduct of the sovereigns." King Christian of Denmark had no time to escape before the Nazis were upon him. But King Haakon of Norway, like Queen Wilhelmina, managed to flee to Britain. Now, with the victorious German forces resting before their final assault on Britain to end the war, the intended fate of the British royal family was being settled.

Begus went on to recall: "Four weeks after my return to Germany, I received written instructions to report within three days to a unit in Boulogne. When I arrived, I was told by the commanding officer that his instructions were to put a special villa at my disposal for a secret operation. He told me, too, that I was to receive a special security scrambled telephone call from Munster, the secret headquarters of the Abwehr (the Nazi espionage service) the next day. "This was the normal procedure for important missions of urgency. The calls, over military telephone lines, avoided the time involved in gathering men together from different parts of the Continent, and the passing of written instructions which could fall into enemy agents' hands. The news did not surprise me. It had not been my fault Queen Wilhelmina had left her palace half an hour before we landed. I was a trusted Nazi officer from Hitler's early days. When I was chief of the criminal police in Salzburg, in Austria, I had been a Nazi supporter. "In 1939 I joined the Sicherheits Dienst (security police) of the Schutzstaffeln. By 1940, I had risen to the rank of captain. I met Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler and Hitler's right-hand man, S.S. General Reinhart Hey-drich many times. "I took the call in a special security-protected room. 'Captain Begus,' said the voice on the other end of the telephone, 'my orders are to inform you of a special mission for which the Fuehrer instructs you to make immediate arrangements. "'He does not regard the attempts to capture Queen Wilhelmina as a failure. Our intelligence system could not foresee her sudden departure for the coast while you were still airborne. Rather he regards it as an excellent rehearsal for the mission with which you are now entrusted: the capture, the moment the invasion begins, of the British royal family.' "I attempted to interrupt to ask a number of questions which, even then, had sprung to my mind, but the briefing went on: " 'The Fuehrer believes the capture of the British royal family, as soon as the invasion of England begins, can be the most decisive single factor in the

progress of the war. He believes it can save hundreds of thousands of lives and bring the war to a quick conclusion. " "There are four reasons which make the success of the mission a matter of the highest importance: " '1. The safety of the royal family, once captured, can be used as a bargaining factor for a cease-fire by the British Forces; " '2. Their capture will demoralize the British fighting troops and civilian population and also be of diversionary concern to those leading them; " '3. After a cease-fire, they may be induced to exert influence upon the British people to remain calm and to cease resistance; " '4. In a last resort, their safety can be used as a threat over the British.' "I asked; 'How much time have I to make arrangements?' "The reply came: 'The plan for the invasion of England is being drafted at this moment. You will fly among the first waves of carrier planes with a strong fighter and bomber escort to deal with air and land defenses.' " [Author's note: The eventual Nazi plan was for an invasion of the South Coast from roughly Margate to Brighton. But at this time, there were also plans for two other thrusts, partly as diversions, against the Dorset Coast and the Humber estuary.] "My briefing went on: 'As our forces reach the coast by sea, several hundred men will be landed by parachute in the vicinity of the palace. " 'You will then rush the palace, and immediately hold hostage the first member of the royal family who can be secured. Every effort must be made not to harm royal personages. As soon as one royal personage is secured, the capture of others may be more easy, since the defenders may be induced to cease fire for fear of harming the royal prisoner or prisoners.' "For a few moments I was silent. I realized that, unlike the invasion of Holland, there would be no element of surprise. Holland had been neutral

and unprepared; the British were waiting for invasion. "The British press and the B.B.C. constantly reported that the King and Queen were remaining at Buckingham Palace. But landing in the center of London would not be easy! My briefing from Munster went on to say that I was personally to pick my men for the mission and, with detailed plans of the Palace, the surrounding area and known defenses, draw up plans for the attack. "Not even we thought for a moment that the campaign in France and the Low Countries would end as quickly as it did; otherwise, presumably I would have been instructed to keep my previous "royal" Kommando unit together. But already barges and other invasion craft were being commandeered and sailed through the canals of Western Europe to the Channel coasts. "I immediately phoned the S.S. headquarters in Berlin, and asked for the services of the Kommando unit I had led before. Then I picked various S.S. officers with parachute training to supplement it. Eventually, my 23 officers —picked for their fitness and courage—were gathered at Boulogne. "Headquarters forwarded detailed plans and layouts of Buckingham Palace and the surrounding area. After studying them, I decided there was only one way of effecting the capture of the royal family. On the special, securityprotected telephone, I gave my views to headquarters. "I told them: 'First, prepare for an intensive dive-bombing attack on the anti-aircraft and other defenses in the park around Buckingham Palace— Hyde Park, Green Park and St. James's Park—to produce a temporary knockout of local defenses.' "I pictured the Union Jack flying above Buckingham Palace as our men dropped out of the sky above the bomb-paralyzed defenses. " 'About 400 parachute troops, armed with machine guns, mortars and automatic weapons, will, withing minutes, drop from low-flying aircraft into the parks,' I went on. 'Their job will be to hold up defending troops,

which will certainly rush towards the Palace as soon as our parachutes are seen to descend. " 'At the same time, a further 100 parachute troops, my unit among them, will drop directly into Buckingham Palace grounds from low-flying aircraft in close successive waves. It is essential that both drops be completed in the shortest possible time, so that the defenders will have little time to react and so that the greatest number of troops can go into action together. " 'Low-flying aircraft are essential, particularly in the Palace drop, to make sure the men land in the small area. The troops dropping into the Palace will be briefed to rush and attack any defending troops in sight, storming forward the whole time. They should quickly gain access to the Palace. Meanwhile, the troops outside the Palace walls will cover all exits with withering fire to prevent any escape. My special Kommando unit will then rush the royal apartments and secure the members of the royal family present.' "I told headquarters I could see no reason why this capture might not be achieved within ten minutes of the first parachute descent. "Later, headquarters told me that my plan had been mainly approved and that detailed instructions based on it were being prepared. Plans for the initial bombing attack were in the course of being drafted. Orders for the movement of parachute units and aircraft were also being drawn up. "A few days later I received another telephone call from Munster, saying that the invasion was imminent, and our sealed orders were being prepared. The invasion, in fact, needed only ten days' notice to begin. Headquarters forwarded packages of copies of recent photographs of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (now the Queen Mother), Princess Margaret, and Princess Elizabeth (the present Queen), and Queen Mary. They also sent three large Union Jacks and the Royal Standard." Otto Begus went on: "I pulled the curtains of my office and pinned the flags and the photographs on the wall behind my desk. Then I called my unit together. I shall never forget the astonished look on their faces as they

walked in. I shall never forget, either, their excitement as I told them, at last, what their mission was to be. "Afterwards, every officer was issued with a set of the royal photographs and sworn to secrecy. We dared not risk our secret leaking out. So the gates of the villa were locked, and no one was allowed out. We must have been the only unit—we jokingly called ourselves "the royal unit"—in the entire German Army to pin up photographs of the British royal family in our rooms." But that was not all. Soon, said Otto Begus, Munster was on the phone again, this time with an astonishing briefing on how he and his men were to conduct themselves before the royal family, and how they were to treat them. Interestingly, the instructions suggest that, despite the ruthlessness of the attempt, the Nazis regarded the royal family with a certain awe, even deference. Particularly intriguing is the instruction that Their Majesties, on capture, were to be saluted in the manner of the German Armed Forces, "— not the Nazi salute." Before the war, when the German ambassador to Britain, Herr von Rib-bentrop, had greeted the King with the outstretched right hand Nazi salute, the royal family made no attempt to hide their displeasure. However absurd this sounds, the Nazis really did have hopes of winning over the royal family under a German occupation. Otto Begus recalled: "On entering the presence of Their Majesties, we were to salute in the manner of the German Armed Forces. Whoever captured a member of the royal family was to address him as follows: " 'The German High Command presents its respectful compliments. My duty, on the instructions of the Fuehrer, is to inform you that you are under the protection of the German Armed Forces.' "Immediate inquiries were to be made among the servants to determine whether the royal personages carry any poison phials. But members of the royal family were not to be subjected to physical search without the most

pressing reason. At all times, they were to be treated with respect, and with courtesy. "However, no time should be lost in getting the royal family together in one room. They were to be allowed to use the internal telephones of the Palace, if still working, but only after measures had been taken to record their conversations with the necessary apparatus. No outside calls were to be allowed. "Immediately the capture of the royal family is achieved, I would call headquarters by short-wave radio, so that the utmost use could be made of this victory." Begus recalled: "It was reckoned that there would be no counterattack, once the Palace had been captured, for fear of harming Their Majesties. "But the plan depended upon our obtaining air superiority over London and the Straits of Dover. Without that, our airborne attack would have been severely depleted before we ever got to London, and the Royal Navy would have slashed our invasion fleet into ribbons. "These requirements were never achieved. Within three weeks, we were ordered to 'stand down,' and in February 1941 I was ordered to disband my unit and report for service in Greece." That was the testimony of the man who was ordered to kidnap the royal family—and who was to have been their captor if the Nazis had won. We may now ask ourselves: Was this plan as fantastic as it seems? The answer is: No. It could have succeeded. A passage, spine-chilling when read in relation to the now-known Nazi plans, occurs in the recently published war diaries of General Sir Alanbrooke, now Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke, who was the Commander-in-chief of the Home Forces. It reveals that he was very concerned, even at quite a later stage, when our forces had been reorganized, about the possible success of just such a surprise German landing in the London parks. But the Cabinet did not regard the danger as

very great. They, of course, knew nothing about Otto Begus's daring mission. Neither did General Sir Alanbrooke, but he later wrote in his war diary: [The Turn of the Tide by Arthur Bryant, based on the War Diaries of Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke.] "I had been worried by the possibility of the Germans combining an airborne attack on London with their invasion. There was ample room for a series of parachute landings in the large London parks. The more I examined these possibilities the more I realized the chaos which such landings would create. If they occurred at night it would be necessary to rush troops into London, and their arrival would clash with the morning flow of men, women, milk, vegetables, fruit, fish, etc. I therefore prepared an exercise to test out the very complicated arrangements required to minimize the chance of chaos." The Cabinet turned down the exercise because they thought that it was unnecessary and would needlessly alarm the public. How then, would the kidnapping attempt have been met? The royal family was as unprepared for invasion as the rest of Britain. In June, as the first heavy air raids to ease the way for invasion started, their only air-raid shelter was a housemaid's small sitting room in the basement of Buckingham Palace. Wood partitions divided it into small sleeping compartments. No proper shelter was built until 1941. During the entire period of threatened invasion, the King and Queen remained at their London home. If Britain had been invaded, there was no intention that the King and Queen would leave the country. The only real step that had been taken to protect the royal family was the selection of four large houses in various parts of the country to which they could have been evacuated if London had been immediately threatened by invading troops.

But in their campaign in the Low Countries and France the Germans had just sprung the surprise of parachute troops. Although these troops could not operate for long without air superiority, they were ideal for the quick, surprise capture planned by the Nazis. Such an attack would have given the royal family little warning and little time for a getaway. The late Queen Mary was staying at the home of her nephew, the Duke of Beaufort, at Badminton. The two Princesses were evacuated to Windsor Castle, but all three made frequent visits to London to see the King and Queen. Would Captain Begus have taken the Palace by surprise? One day in July, King George VI himself decided to put the security of the royal family to the test. King Haakon of Norway, then living at Buckingham Palace, after his escape from the Nazi kidnapping attempts, asked King George if he was satisfied with the Palace defense arrangements. King George hastened to reassure King Haakon by pressing the alarm bell to alert the guard. For five minutes the two embarrassed sovereigns waited. Nothing happened. King George VI sent an equerry to find out what had gone wrong. He returned with the officer of the guard, who explained that he thought the bell had been pressed "by accident." The police sergeant on duty had assured him there was no attack. If there had been, the police sergeant said, he "would have been informed...." Bombs started to crash on Buckingham Palace as the Germans increased their "softening-up" air attacks. A landmine which fell in St. James's Park blew in nearly all the front windows. Two bombs burst within 30 yards of the King and Queen in the Palace quadrangle; the King was affected by shock for a week. Shortly afterwards, bombs fell close outside a room where Their Majesties were sitting. Fortunately, the windows were open. If they had been closed, the King and Queen would almost certainly have suffered severe injuries from flying, splintered glass. As the air raids became heavier, and the risk of invasion mounted, a company of specially picked men were formed from the Household Cavalry

and the Brigade of Guards to serve as a personal bodyguard. The company was commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel J. S. Coates of the Coldstream Guards. The company maintained a round-the-clock guard duty over Their Majesties. The King and Queen each had a suitcase packed ready for a quick dash to safety. As Hauptsturmfuehrer Otto Begus briefed his picked parachute officers on the other side of the Channel—"You will stop at nothing to achieve your objective"—Lieutenant Colonel Coates ordered his men—"Your duty is to protect Their Majesties at all costs." The unit was known officially as "the Coates Mission." But the King often jokingly referred to it as "My Private Army." If the Germans had carried out their plan of a heavy bombing attack on antiaircraft guns and other defenses in the park immediately before the air-drop, the King and Queen and other members of the royal family would probably have been forced to the small basement shelter. But parachute troops would have found every member of the Coates mission armed with sten guns and rifles. The King himself practiced regularly with a rifle at a shooting-range in the Palace grounds. At Windsor both he and the Queen practiced at a larger range, with pistols and tommyguns. Rifles, sten guns and pistols were also ready for issue to all the Palace staff. So if the worst had happened, and Otto Begus and his men had broken through to the Palace itself trapping the 'King and Queen, there can be very little doubt that the King and Queen would have personally returned their fire and defended themselves. This view is reinforced by a comment from the King to a visitor that if a German invasion was successful he would, in the last resort, offer his services in whatever capacity it was felt he was most suited to the commander of the British Resistance movement. What a humble and fine example. How unlike the example of Adolf Hitler, the man who started it all, who at the end chose a coward's suicide in his underground bunker. But if the Nazis had come, those members of the royal family who survived would today be Nazi prisoners or hostages.

And Captain Begus, the man who would have led the kidnapping attempt— what does he say today, thinking back on it all? He stared out of the window at the mountains and the pines and said: "Things did not turn out as planned, but I think the world was a little mad then." Today his one daughter and three sons are grown up. One is a Jesuit priest.

2 - Twilight and Slavery The man Adolf Hitler appointed to succeed him as Fuehrer during the last days of the Third Reich sat erect before me at a small table at his home near Hamburg. This man, the second and last Fuehrer of Nazi Germany and the highest Nazi still alive, knew some of the Nazis' greatest secrets. And now at last he spoke of the Nazis' plans for ruling Britain. New Nazis and the unrepentant old ones still regard him as the rightful head of the German State today. For what Adolf Hitler ordered could not be undone by mere mortal man. And he appointed thin-faced Doen-itz his successor. "Yes," Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz admitted, "the plans for Britain may sound hard, but they had to be. We realized we were up against a determined enemy." As I looked at this man, I recalled that it was Doenitz who became not only Hitler's most trusted friend, but who was a close associate also of the fiendish Heinrich Himmler, who ordered millions of innocent men, women and children to be shot, tortured or gassed. It was Doenitz who screamed to his submarine commanders, trying to stop supplies crossing the Atlantic to Britain during the war: "Kill and keep killing! No survivors! To have humanity is weakness." And it was Doenitz who, after the war, served ten years' imprisonment in the Allies' grim Spandau jail in West Berlin for war crimes.

Hitler appointed Doenitz his successor as Fuehrer before committing suicide in his beleaguered Berlin underground bunker on April 30, 1945— as his "Reich to last one thousand years" reeled to its blazing, convulsive, nightmare end. Owing to the ambiguous wording of the telegram informing him of his succession, Doenitz, who was at his North German headquarters, did not realize when he received it that Hitler was already dead. He thought it meant he would be the second Fuehrer if Hitler died. His telegram of reply addressed to his no-longer living Fuehrer began: "My loyalty to you will be unconditional. . .” Today, however, although Nazi fanatics still regard him as their rightful leader, Doenitz plays no part in politics and lives on his naval Admiral's pension of $79 a week, paid by the West German Government. When I arrived in Hamburg I was told that Admiral Doenitz hardly ever left his villa at Aumuehle, a village about ten miles outside the city, and that he hardly ever received visitors. That afternoon, however, I caught the branchline train that winds from Germany's greatest seaport into the country beyond. Just before reaching Aumuehle, the train ambles past the giant statue of Bismark, "the Iron Chancellor," a familiar sight to sailors returning to the Fatherland. Aumuehle is on the banks of a lake surrounded by pines, a picture of peace. I asked the local restaurant owner the way to Doenitz's home. He directed me, but added: "We have not seen the Admiral for six months, not since he came here to dinner one evening." Ten minutes later I knocked at the door of his spacious ground-floor flat in a large villa. It was opened by Doenitz himself. He was tall, upright, alert and thin, his eyes ice-blue. I told him my mission. "I am hoping," I said, "that now you have served your sentence, you may, in the interests of history, enable the facts of the plans for Britain to be accurately set out." The gray-haired Grand Admiral did not reply for several seconds. Frankly, I expected a brisk "Nein!" or that he would stall by asking me to make another appointment. To my surprise, he said: "I can guarantee nothing ... but come in."

I followed him into his study. On a side-table was a pile of about 50 letters —the week's post, the Admiral explained, from men formerly under his command. Doenitz, wearing a dark-blue suit and a mottled red-and-black tie, sat on a settee beneath a huge oil painting of himself in the blue-and-gold braid of the chief of the German Navy. I outlined the details of my inquiry. His brief acknowledgments of understanding were wary. How did it happen that people of the clear intelligence of Doenitz, and millions of other Germans, followed a doctrine of such utter evil as the one peddled by the semi-educated rabble-rouser who was Adolf Hitler? Hitler found the Germans' Achilles's heel. He exploited their love for a "strong leader." But Doenitz became more than a passive follower: he became a ruthless right-hand man. And Hitler and his henchmen, driven by a crazy dream of an Aryan Master Race, convinced an otherwise sane people that it was their mission to lead Germany "through the glory of war" to rule the world. No evil, no treachery was too dastardly to achieve that aim, whether it meant the butchering of millions or the ruin of whole countries. Might was right. The weak deserved to die. For the day Adolf Hitler got his stranglehold on Germany was the day one man, with a devil's brew of all the deepest passions of hate, brutality, sadism, lust, pride and fear, transformed a civilized nation into the goosestepping, war-chanting emissaries of Hell. And Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz was among the leaders. I asked Doenitz, "Can you now at last tell Britain of the real Nazi plans if the invasion had succeeded?" The cold blue eyes stared at me for a few seconds. Then he said: "The invasion of Britain in 1940 could have started, at the shortest, with ten days' notice. Whether it would have succeeded—who can tell? The invasion

plans were drawn up to the last detail. Naturally, there were plans, too, for the governing of Britain if the invasion had succeeded. "Our first task would have been to establish order in the occupied areas. Naturally, the labor resources and the economic resources would have been exploited to the fullest. At first the country would have been run completely by the military authorities." I read to Doenitz part of a top-secret Nazi document, "Militärverwaltung, England" (Military Administration, England), the authenticity of which has been completely confirmed by British, other Allied, and German authorities, and which was signed by General von Brauchitsch, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army. The document is now held by the British Foreign Office. "Militärverwaltung, England" ordered, among other measures, the wholesale seizure of civilian and military hostages in areas occupied by the Nazis; decreed the arrest of every male between 17 and 45 for deportation as slave labor to the German-occupied Continent; and laid down "severe retaliatory measures" for even "thoughtless actions" and "passive resistance." I asked Doenitz: "Was this the official master plan for Britain?" Doenitz replied: "Yes, I believe that this was the official document regarding Britain. I knew about it, although I, myself, had no part in drawing it up. "The establishment of law and order would have been, after all, in the interests of the civilian population itself." The hostages? "As far as hostages are concerned," said Doenitz, "I cannot comment except to say that it can be argued that the stopping of fighting by any means is justifiable if it prevents greater bloodshed. And, of course, any conquering army must be expected to exploit the labor and economic resources of an invaded country in its own interests."

Then he said: "The plans for Britain may sound hard, but they had to be. We realized we were up against a determined enemy. Our task was to beat Britain, and war knows few scruples. But I did not know all the plains. . . ." Doenitz had confirmed the intention of the master document: the subjugation of England. And there was no mistaking from the crisp statements of the former Nazi leader, the grim relentlessness with which the plans for our government were laid. Doenitz rose from his settee. The man who had just written a book trying to justify German sea-warfaxe methods felt, presumably, that he had said enough. I, for one, would not disagree. We were, indeed, the enemy who had stood inviolate for centuries but who, in 1940, stood alone as the last bastion of freedom. Within three whirlwind months of overwhelming might, terror and treachery, the fluttering and triumphant swastika banners had swept over most of the continent. The noisy miracle of Dunkirk—the evacuation of 224,-000 British fighting men across the Channel from France —had saved the main British forces from defeat by overwhelming numbers after France's capitulation. But it was, as Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, said at the time, "a colossal military disaster." Numbers were depleted, much equipment lost. The Nazis were certain they could smash the remaining defense if they could land in force. Surveying the mostly half-trained, ill-equipped British forces, there were many British defense chiefs who agreed —providing the Nazis could obtain even temporary air superiority to protect their invasion fleet. In fact, the Chiefs of Staff reported officially to the Cabinet: "Should the Germans succeed in establishing a force with its vehicles in this country, our Army has not got the defense power to drive it out." It was as near as that, it now comes out, even in British estimation. And it was a realistic conclusion; against the mighty Wehrmacht Britain had, for example, only 52 armored cars, 54 two-pounder anti-tank guns, 2,306 Bren guns, 163 medium and heavy guns, and hardly enough ammunition to have kept them going for a full day's fighting.

What, then, would it really have been like if the Nazi invasion had started? Captured documents, some of which are now held by the Foreign Office, and orders I unearthed at last tell the truthful story. The prelude to defeat is set in the bold terms of the German High Command's "Operation Instruction for the Invasion of Britain," issued on August 30, 1940. Army Commander-in-Chief General von Brauchitsch decreed: "The aim of the attack is to eliminate the Mother Country as a base for continuing the war against Germany. . . . The Luftwaffe will destroy the British Air Force and the armament production which supports it.... The Navy will provide mine-free corridors and, supported by the Luftwaffe, will bar the flanks of the crossing sector. .. . "The task of the Army will be to land strong forces in southern England, defeat the British Army, and seize the capital. Other areas of Britain will be occupied as opportunity permits. "Special effect is anticipated from a ruthless air attack on London, if possible on the day preceding the landings, as this would certainly cause countless numbers of people to stream out of the city in all directions, thereby blocking the roads and demoralizing the population." Hitler planned the invasion to start—given favorable weather and the Luftwaffe's success against the R.A.F.— on either September 15, 21 or 24. Imagine the air assault has taken place. Refugees are streaming out of London. Now, after massed air attacks upon defense positions and upon seaside towns, landings have taken place, as planned, along the 70 miles of south coast from Dover to Brighton. The blitzkrieg, the lightning war, the fury of a ruthless, fast, massed attack, is upon England. Black Stuka dive-bombers scream down from the sky laying a sheet of deatli. As they dive, sirens fitted to their wings screiam to strike terror into the minds of those below. Despite heroic resistance, the Germans have smashed back the desperately fighting British troops.

The most powerful landings have taken place in two areas. As planned by General Jodl, Chief of the German Army Operations Staff, ten divisions of the German 16th Army have landed in four days in the Folkestone Area. The complete 7th Parachute Division has landed on the high ground behind Folkestone and Hyth to hold off British reinforcements while the massive build-up continues. Three divisions of the 9th Army have landed in the Brighton area. Already the awesome, armored panzer divisions which brought the Continent to its knees have started to land and are forming. If only they can get time to assemble. Everything depends on that. And if that happens Britain is finished. The major part of the Luftwaffe forms a roaring cloud above. German troops fight desperately, not to advance, but just to hold the inland miles gained for the first vital days. NOW. . . . the giant panzers burst from the two salients and race forward, unstoppable, in two mighty sledgehammer punches of steel and fire to cut off London. Imagine that the great tanks have just rolled through the main street of your town. Maybe it's Tenterden, Etchingham, Uckfield.... Behind them grimy, sweating, grim infantrymen are swarming out of their armored cars, bayonets gleaming and some already bloody. Four men in khaki, three of them ill-equipped but brave Home Guardsmen, lie dead in the street. Three gray-uniformed men loll crazUy out of a burning troop carrier the British have just blown up. Warm blood trickles slowly into the gutter. Now your front door disintegrates inwards and two gray-uniformed men, bayonets leveled, blood smeared across their faces, lips thin, are before you. "Hands up, turn round!" they bark in guttural parrot-taught English. A sharp bayonet nestles into the small of your back. You can feel the hard, cold pointed steel which has pierced your clothes and is now against your soft skin. "Any soldiers, any arms?" No, no.

You hear them stepping back. You know their rifles are still leveled. "Stay there ... arms above head ... don't move ... stay inside.... We'll be back...." A few moments later—was it a split-second or was it an age?—they are gone, temporarily. Shop-window glass smashes, the smoke of burning houses drifts in through the empty doorway. Outside the town the tanks nose up the leafy lanes. Every few seconds the ground erupts, the earth shakes. Their shells? ours? In the wheatfield a scarecrow hangs raggedly and limply. It is a symbol of the future. Now gray uniforms are everywhere. A few hours pass and you see the black uniforms of the dreaded S.S. Nazi-land has come to Britain. Across the road a poster is being roughly nailed to the newly painted door of a house which a few hours ago had been neat and trim but now is half in ruins. It is signed by General von Brauchitsch, German Army Commanderin-Chief. The original draft had been signed in readiness in August: Proclamation to the People of England English territory occupied by German troops will be placed under German Military Government. . . . All thoughtless actions, sabotage of any kind, and any passive or active opposition to the German Armed Forces will incur the most severe retaliatory measures. I warn all civilians that if they undertake active operations against the German forces they will be condemned to death inexorably. Any disobedience will be severely punished. (signed) V. Brauchitsch

General Commander in Chief of the Army. After overcoming bitter resistance, the Nazis have pushed ahead. Now you are miles behind the fighting line. General Staff order No. 3000/40, is being applied. This says: Most Secret

Military Government, England.

September 9, 1940

The task of the Military Government in England is to secure the labor resources of the country for the requirements of the troops and the German war economy. The defense economic staff for England will be employed on the economic exploitation of the country. Their task is to seize, secure and remove raw materials, semi-finished products and machinery of military importance. (signed) Halder

General, Chief of the Army General Staff. Those were two top-secret orders which gave the go-ahead for the pillage and rape of Britain. "Thoughtless actions" . . . "passive resistance" will "incur severe retaliatory measures." "Labor resources"—that is, anyone capable of working—will be "secured." Raw materials (food, coal, etc.) would be seized. Now the Nazis are in full control. There is no doubt as to how the subjugation of Britain is to be carried out. Underneath the military phrases there is only one meaning: terror—bloody terror. The horrors were confirmed in my interview with Doe-nitz when he said: "Our first task would have been to establish law and order in the occupied areas. Naturally, the labor resources and the economic resources would have been exploited to the fullest." To the fullest. Of that there is no doubt. Militärverwaltung, England, goes into detail. Section one emphasizes: "The main task of the Military Administration is to make full use of the country's resources for the needs of the fighting troops and the requirements of the German war economy." Section two declares: "The essential condition for securing the labor of the country is that law and order should prevail. Law and order will, therefore, prevail." It goes on: "Administrative measures will not violate international law unless the enemy has given cause for reprisals."

Section three provides for reprisals, absolutely against International Law, in the event of continued opposition, and also the taking of hostages—people held under threat of death as a pledge for the good behavior of the rest of the population. "When taking hostages," section three states, "these persons should, if possible, be selected from those in whom the active enemy element have an interest." The Continent bore witness to what that meant. Any number between 10 and 100 hostages might be shot for the killing of a single German soldier. And, if resistance continued after that, The Nazis did not hesitate to move in and destroy entire communities—houses, churches, schools and men, women and children. It is section four which condemns the Nazis, in their own hand, for one of the most inhuman measures for Britain. It states: "The able-bodied male population between the ages of 17 and 45 will, unless the local situation calls for an exceptional ruling, be entrained and dispatched to the Continent with the minimum of delay." Section five provides: "Levies and taxes can be raised by the Armed Forces commanders." The last section sums up the full callous attitude to the civilian population: "The welfare of the inhabitants of the country and the interests of the country's national economy will be considered insofar as they contribute directly or indirectly towards the maintenance of law and order and the securing of the country's labor for the requirements of the troops and the German war economy." All food, gasoline and all motor transport in England is ordered to be seized by the Chief Supply Office. The currency exchange rate has been worked out. One English Pound to 9.60 Reich Marks; one shilling to 48 Pfennigs. Other decrees order the population to listen only to the German radio, ban street assemblies and continue the blackout at night.

Offenders? That is easy enough. There are rules about how to deal with those quickly, efficiently and on the spot, contained in the Order Concerning Summary (Police) Jurisdiction of Local Commanders in Occupied English Territory: "Local commanders in occupied English territory may pass summary sentence on persons who are not subject to Military Law if the facts of the case are self-evident and if this procedure is adequate in view of the guilt of the offender." Nothing much there to hamper any zealous Nazi commander in establishing the will of his Fuehrer. Heil Hitler! Thus the population of England were to be deprived of their means of resistance. Subjugation by terror and death was to be total. The British were to be slave creatures of Hitler's Master Race, the Herrenvolk. And transported from Britain, divided up and far away from their homeland in some comer of the Nazi world, they would be far less able to rebel. This was no idle threat. The machinery was being implemented. Reception camps were already being prepared in readiness a few miles inland from the French coast. An order from the Quartermaster General of the High Command written after the drafting of the Military Administration decree makes it clear that, at first, civilians and military prisoners of war would be taken to the Continent together. They would be treated in the same way. The order issued on September 23 to the 9th and 16th Annies, assembled for the invasion of Britain, declares: "All male civilians, aged 17 to 45, will be arrested, insofar as this can be carried out, and dispatched, with the prisoners of war, to the transit camps on the Continent. Later orders will follow about the establishment of internment camps for Englishmen." And certainly the Nazis carried their deportation schemes into effect when they occupied the Channel Islands. All those who had been born or who

normally lived on the British mainland were deported to the Continent. Many were never seen again. Every Jew in the islands was deported. None was ever seen again. The terrifying attitude and pattern of the Nazis' plans were later summed up by Himmler in a speech he made at Posen, in Poland, on October 4, 1943, to S.S. generals. He said: "Whether the other nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only insofar as we need them for slaves of our culture, otherwise it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch or not interests me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished. "When someone comes to me and says: T cannot dig an anti-tank ditch with women and children because it is inhuman and it would kill them,' I have got to say: 'You are a murderer of your own race because, if the anti-tank ditch is not dug, German soldiers will die. They are the sons of German mothers, our own blood.' That is what I want to instill into the S.S., and what I believe I have instilled into them, as one of the most sacred laws of the future. Our concern and our duty is our people and our blood. It is for them that we must provide and plan and work and fight. Nothing else. We can be indifferent to everything else." These appalling plans would hardly be believed had they not been committed to paper and signed as official articles of instruction. Of course, Adolf Hitler, the Fuehrer, the chief author of this vast and ghastly nightmare, declared frequently in his public speeches that Germany had no quarrel with the English people. He merely wanted to live at peace with them. Hitler's views on any except a few subjects are well known to have changed from moment to moment, according to his whim. His promises are equally well known to have been worthless. But, as final proof that his reassurances were lies, it should be added that when he made them the documents from which I have quoted were already prepared.

Who, then, would today be the population of England? For these plans reveal that if you had been between 17 and 45 you would today, if still alive, be a slave in some far corner of the Nazi empire. Pains would have been taken to see that you discovered no trace of your family so that you would feel broken in spirit and passive. Himmler, in his speech of October 4, 1943, to S.S. generals at Posen, clearly outlined the Nazi pattern as far as the younger population were concerned. He added, "What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type we will take. If necessary we will kidnap their children and raise them here with us." A Nazi report of the time expanded upon this idea in its application to nonAryan type children. It suggested that children between 8 and 14 would be sent to Germany as apprentices, so that they would grow up indoctrinated in a Nazi atmosphere and, therefore, be safe to allow to conduct trade useful to Naziland, under supervision. Children below that age could, it was presumably hoped, be brought up "safely" in the New Nazi Britain. Then, with the British still alive dealt with, the Nazis planned the creation of a new German-British race. And of all their terrible schemes for Britain, the plan for Britain's loveliest girls was the most diabolical. It entailed the forcing into stud farms of up to two million selected girls to mate with the most handsome and virile young Nazis. The evidence again comes from records of the Nazis themselves. The girls to be selected by Hitler's race experts were those who qualified for the Nazis' idea of an Aryan and Nordic "Master Race." Girls with corn-blonde hair, blue eyes, pale skin, and whose parents were "pure Nordic" types. Their babies would have been taken away from them a few days after birth, and these would have comprised the "new race." The facts were revealed by the Nazis' top racial expert, S.S. General Walter Barré in. a speech to other Nazi leaders. Darre, founder of the R.U.S.H.A., Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt, the Nazi Race and Resettlement Office, declared that plans were drawn up on the instructions of Adolf Hitler and

had been approved by him. He also referred to the scheme to deport Britain's manhood between the ages of 17 and 45. He ranted: "As soon as we beat England we shall make an end of Englishmen once and for all. Able-bodied men will be exported as slaves to the Continent. The old and weak will be exterminated. All men remaining in Britain as slaves will be sterilized." Darre went on: "A million or two women of the Nordic type will be segregated on a number of stud farms where, with the assistance of picked German sires during a period of 10 to 12 years, they will produce annually, a source of Nordic infants to be brought up in every way as German. "These infants will form the future population of Britain. They will be partly educated in Germany. Only those who fully satisfy the Nazi requirements will be allowed to return to Britain. The rest will be sterilized and sent to slave gangs in Germany. Thus, in a generation or two, the British will disappear." Many of Dane's schemes were formed in Britain itself. For six years he was educated at King's College, Wimbledon. The Nazis' "new British" baby scheme was planned to start one year after the occupation of Britain and after the last of Britain's manhood had been finally deported. A leading Nazi told me: "I know there were plans for 12 farms. Two were to have been in Wales, three in Scotland and seven in England. "It was hoped that Scotland would provide a particularly high percentage of Nordic-type girls. "Large country mansions would have been used as meeting places for the girls and the male Nazis. Girls would have been set up in quarters there and kept until they conceived. "Individual German males would have mated with scores of girls. The mansions would have been furnished congenially and there would have

been no reason to complain that the scheme would not have been made pleasant for both parties." My informant went on: "As soon as it was obvious that a girl was going to have a baby, she would have been moved to specially requisitioned hospitals where she would have had the best medical attention. "If the resulting infant proved to be a satisfactory type, the girl would be sent back to conceive more children. Each child would have been taken away from its mother at the earliest moment so that it could be brought up completely free from undesirable racial influences. The mothers would have been well provided for after their period of usefulness was over." Walter Darré died in 1953, but further confirmation of his plans are contained in a statement by his close lieutenant, Dr. Wilhelm Stapel, in his publication Das Deutsche Volkstum. "It is a primitive principle of all warfare to regard girls as plunder," he wrote. "The intensification of virility in our days naturally leads to the view that girls should be looked upon as booty." Monstrous though this scheme may seem, it had already started in Germany itself, in Munich. Picked S.S. men had already been chosen to give children to selected, willing unmarried Nordic girls. Both men and girls were told they were performing a great service to the Fatherland in producing "the perfect Nazi child." It was only in later years that the horror of this dreaded scheme became fully apparent. These children, plucked from their real mothers after a few days, were brought up in cold, state institutions, and trained as Spartans for their part in conquering and ruling the rest of the world for Hitler. But because they had no real mothers, no one to give them the love and affection they needed, most grew up mentally backward and subnormal. But by then it was too late....

3 - The Spy in Our Midst

In the Nazis' knapsacks were not only detailed maps and photographs, but also names and addresses—of friends as well as enemies. And in the dispatch cases of the unit commanders were up-to-date stylographed handbooks of the running of every important organization in Britain. For the gray-uniformed hordes whose dream was the swastika flying over London were the second wave of attackers. The first were already silently and secretly in our midst. Some had even left, their work done. They had drawn up their reports, forwarded their lists, so that the secret reins to take over much of the running of Britain were already in the Nazis' handbooks and dossiers. Behind it all was a scholarly looking man who was partly educated in Britain and who lived for a while in Britain before the war. This man, bespectacled Walter zu Christian, supervized the building up and operation of a vast information-getting and spy sendee. He became the head of the section of the R.S.H.A., the Reichsicherheitshauptamt, or Reich Security Main Office, dealing with Britain and the British Empire. He was the man the British tried to find after the war, but failed. And at last Walter zu Christian was ready to reveal the secrets of his amazing work in our midst. This man who now lives in a modest home on the outskirts of Innsbruck, in Austria, played a leading part in paving the way for a Nazi Britain. The truth is that the shadow of the swastika lay across Britain long before 1940. Work started in 1931, two years before the Nazis actually achieved power in Germany and eight years before the start of the war. A Nazi spy army was in our midst years before the gray-uniformed divisions started massing along the newly conquered continental coast. The Nazi planned the subjugation of Britain from their first days. The evil schemes which you have just read about in the two preceding chapters were only the "top layer" of what was intended for us. In this and

the next chapter you can read just how detailed and well prepared their plans were, and how they covered every aspect of our lives. The Nazis knew, even before they came to power, that if they followed the policy they planned—the swallowing up, one by one, of the small nations around them —Britain would eventually be forced to fight. They knew that, sooner or later, Britain would be forced to try to stop Naziland's aggressive expansion by guaranteeing the independence of one of those nations. It turned out to be the invasion of Poland which finally brought Britain, the Commonwealth, and France into the war. To Hitler it was purely a question of how many countries he would be allowed to devour before he had to fight. Britain would, he knew, eventually be the main obstacle to his enslavement of Europe. A criminal who wants to raid a house or attack a person has the advantage of surprise. He can "case" the premises and the victim and lay his plans before he strikes. He can even enter the premises on some innocent pretext and talk to his victim to prepare the way. That is what the Nazis did when they realized that, sometime, they would have to attack and plunder Britain. In a top-secret speech to the commanders-in-chief of the German forces on May 23, 1939, four months before the outbreak of war, Hitler said: "Our aim will always be to bring Britain to her knees ... Britain is the main driving force against Germany." If Britain didn't go to war when Poland was attacked, he planned, he said, a surprise invasion later. A large force of submarines and the main units of the German Navy would suddenly surprise and destroy the Royal Navy and cut Britain's fuel and food supplies. Air and land assaults would be launched. Within a few weeks Britain would have to sue for peace. So, with the knowledge that there must be a showdown with Britain, either in Germany's good time or when it was forced upon her, the Nazis started to prepare.

It was mainly due to Walter zu Christian and the men who worked under him that one year before the war started, when the Nazis thought Britain and France miglit go to war over the invasion of Czechoslovakia, that the Nazis were able to prepare to bomb London and other cities. The plan was code named Case Red, A top-secret directive issued on August 25, 1938, by the General Staff of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, to all commanders, read: "Basic target maps of the British ground organization (airfields) are approximately 90 per cent ready. They have been passed on to Air Force Group Two for printing and the adding of sectional excerpts of maps. They have been ordered to be ready by September 15, 1938. As far as essential industrial targets are concerned, work has been carried out on the food and crude-oil supply systems and docks in the London and Hull areas—i.e. basic target maps and section maps. These areas are partly covered also by aerial and ground photographs. These will be reproduced after the ground organization target maps have been printed. They will not be ready before October 20, 1938. Tactical maps of London and Hull will not be issued to Command authorities before the end of September.... "Everything should be prepared to make reprisal raids against London at any time. Considering the strength of the air defenses in and around London, success in these attacks is only likely if strong forces are used. In addition, occasional harassing attacks against targets in south and southeast England may be worthy of consideration, particularly if the weather forces a lull in France. A secondary aim of such attacks would be to pin down strong defense forces in Great Britain. Should still stronger forces—at least three Air Fleets—be available after French targets have been attacked successfully, they might be committed with success in attacks against the food supply of Britain, notably of London." Yes, the maps were ready in 1938. They were built up with the help of an army of agents and informants slipping in and out of Britain. They were also supplying the Nazis with the information to move in and run Britain after the attack.

Details of forces, strengths, military defenses, airfields, dockyards ... the structure of central and local government, the police force, the trades unions, political parties. . . names and addresses of important people in public life, those thought to be dangerous—or friendly—to Germany... layouts of canals, railways, sites of power stations. All the details were being carried back to Nazi-land in an unending stream. They flowed back to Germany on such a scale that, just before the outbreak of war, S.S. Major Walter zu Christian had to move his information-getting and collating offices from Hamburg to a larger building in Berlin. Christian, then in his early thirties, came to Britain on the instructions of Hitler himself to organize his agents and informants into an elaborate, unseen web. He was the industrious spider spinning this intricate web and throwing a lengthening shadow, the deadly web and the dark shadow of the swastika. It took weeks of inquiry to trace Christian to Innsbruck in Austria. It was mid-morning when at last I drove over one of the bridges across the River Inn into the cobbled streets. Hundreds of British skiers jostled through the town. Their red, green and blue knitted berets were everywhere in the main railway station at one side of the main square. The skis they carried on their shoulders clanked as they crowded aboard the ski-lift waiting to take them to the upper slopes of the Hungerburg mountain overlooking the town. It was clear from what I had discovered that Walter zu Christian was no bull-necked, unintelligent recruit to the Nazis' ranks. His work had shown him to be clever and cunning. He had been among the early recruits, and he had joined the S.S. in 1931, before the Nazis came to power. Early in his career he met the fanatical Himmler, the man ordained by Hitler to be guardian of the Nazi creed. And it was Himmler's S.S. who were established as the protectors and living embodiment of that creed. The members had, at this time, to be pure racial German in descent, the elite of the Master Race and inexorable in their allegiance to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi cause of eventual world domination.

And it was in 1931 that Himmler established within the S.S. the S.D.— Sicherheits-Dienst, or Security Service—the very ehte of the ehte. Christian became one of the early members. How could I now find in Innsbruck the man who might, at last, tell the secrets of how Britain's downfall was planned? I called on a friend who lives in the town and we chatted over a cup of coffee. I told him, "I don't expect this man to come forward and say, 'Yes, I am the wicked schemer who plotted to make you the Nazis' slaves.' I would just like him to tell me the truth without putting any political or emotional construction upon it. There can be no danger for him now." My friend thought for a few minutes. "Innsbruck is a fair-sized place," he said, "I must know someone who knows Christian. I will make inquiries for you. Meanwhile, tomorrow, let us go skiing...." "Listen," I said, rather more sharply than I had intended, for it was a kindly thought, "I didn't come here to ski." But as I looked out of the window at the bright sun glittering on the ski slopes, I wished that I hadn't spoken so quickly. My Mend repeated with a smile, "Let's go skiing—that's where we'll meet people." So, next morning I joined him at the ski-lift. Nevertheless, it seemed that I was being swung far away from the grim realities of my mission as we swooped up over the cone-laden firs. We scrambled out of the lift at its stop halfway up the Hungerburg. Before us lay a skiers' paradise—a natural valley of dazzling, white snow, tinted with blue from the cloudless sky. I scrambled into my ski-boots while around me skiers in their gay jerseys scythed and flashed through the whiteness. Here and there, dotted in the snow, were immobile colored patches where languid, bronzed girls in bright bikinis and men in gay trunks lay on inflated rubber mattresses, tanning themselves in the hot sun. With the caution of an enthusiastic amateur, I glided down the slope and within minutes was perspiring with the exertion of working little-used muscles. This valley, scooped in a natural bowl high above Innsbruck, though still well below the mountain top, was a paradise of its own. And

when, a hundred yards away, I saw my smiling friend holding high in invitation a glistening stein of ice-cold lager from the ski-restaurant, I thought that this was surely as near to a man-made heaven as we are likely to get. "Comer," he said, "I have good news for you. I've got Herr Christian's address. ..." That evening I drove over the river to Christian's house and rang the bell. Christian had never married. An elderly lady answered. She was his mother. I explained what I wanted. After a few seconds she returned to the door and invited me in. I could see him, she said, as she directed me to a bedroom, and I could talk to him. But he couldn't talk to me. I entered the bedroom and there was Walter zu Christian, the Master Spy. He could not speak because he had laryngitis. Walter zu Christian grimaced helplessly. I spent the rest of the evening pondering the irony of spending weeks tracing a man with amazing secrets and then, on discovering him, finding that he couldn't tell me them because he had lost his voice. Clearly it was not the sort of interview that could be satisfactorily carried out by Christian writing down the answers to my question. But he signified and hoarsely whispered that he was willing to help me if I would come back when he was well. A few weeks later I traveled back to Innsbruck. . . . Christian, I now knew, was the man who had helped compile the infamous Black List for Britain—the list of people to be arrested immediately after the Nazis invaded. He was the man who sent squads of foreign athletes into Britain as spies just before the war; the man who even knew the plans for Winston Churchill and the Archbishop of Canterbury. To be fair, it must be said that Walter zu Christian, young-looking still, but now in his fifties, was never at any time a party to S.S. ill-treatment and brutalities.

Although, of course, a subscriber to the Nazi cause, he was more a patriot than a Nazi. His work, however, as a spy and intelligence-ring organizer, was vital. He was questioned by the Americans and the French after the war, but never by the British, against whom his activities were mostly directed. And in the odd and often coolly brave world of spies, which every country employs, Walter zu Christian rates among the foremost in terms of organizing capacity, audacity—and success. It was nine o'clock at night when I again rang the bell of Christian's house in the suburb of Innsbruck. A window opened above. It was Christian, in his dressing gown. This time, he had just returned from Switzerland, which he visited for the machine-tool company he represents. As on the previous occasion, he was friendly. A few seconds later he was at the door. Christian had obviously made up his mind to talk fully. "I can't see any reason why I shouldn't tell you what you want to know.," he said. "It's all over now. Perhaps we can all learn from our mistakes. You didn't know I knew Otto Begus (the would-be kidnapper of British Royal Family)," he went on. "You mentioned that you had seen him and so I telephoned him. He said you are a pleasant fellow who only wants to tell the truth." I thanked him for the compliment. We sat down. Christian's mother produced two cups of steaming, black coffee. We talked of his laryngitis and about Innsbruck for a while. Then Christian began to unfold his story. . . . "You may think that ten years is a long time to have been working against Britain," he said, "but Hitler's ideas for the mastery of Europe were born long before he came to power. I was attracted to the Nazis because they promised to create a new, dynamic Germany and lift the country from the misery and poverty of the years after the 1914-18 war. I had heard both Hitler and Himmler speak and I met them. They seemed to offer positive action and not just words. "I decided to join the S.S. and it was soon discovered that I could speak several languages. I had spent a year, as a boy, at Seeford College, near Brighton, to perfect my English. I could also speak Spanish and French.

"When I joined the Nazi Party I was working as a foreign salesman for a German export house-—an excellent, ready-made cover for intelligence work. All this was before the concentration camps and so on. It was only towards the end that I learned of these camps and then it was too late to pull out. I naturally believed in my own country and was prepared to work for what I felt to be the good of Germany. "Within a few months I joined the S.D., the Security Service of the S.S. I was the sixth person to join the S.D. and my membership number was IC/0006. Himmler told me, I remember: 'Always bear in mind that our greatest enemy will be Britain.' "My first mission was in Madrid. Officially, I was a salesman, but my real job was to find out as much as possible about British defenses on the Rock of Gibraltar. I was also to seek anything I could from British officers about British defense plans and strengths in Britain itself and elsewhere in the British Empire. For weeks I used the same bars as British service rankers and then mingled in the same hotels as the officers. They knew I was German and often used to boast: 'You'd have a tougher job fighting us now.' But they had no idea of our intentions and, in support of their arguments, used to tell me the details of the 'strong' British defenses. "As a result of all this I supplied our Intelligence Service with the first authentic, detailed reports on the great arsenals and underground fortifications of Gibraltar. I am sure these were later supplied to the Spanish Government when the Spaniards wanted to annex Gibraltar while we were winning the war. I also obtained photographs of the military defenses from my contacts, and within a few months I was appointed the chief of our spy service in Spain and Portugal. "Then, in 1936, after Hitler had been in power for three years, I was recalled permanently to Berlin. I was assigned to a special new task in the Reich Security Main Office, which was headed by Reinhard Heydrich. I was attached to Department VI, the Foreign Dept, under S.S. Major-General Heinz Jost, which was responsible for investigations abroad and which included a military intelligence service.

"I made several trips to Britain. My job was to study and report back on the structure of the British Government and the general organization of the country so that we could get a complete picture of how the country was run. I made a detailed study of the political parties and the trade unions and indicated their leaders. I also studied the structure of the Police Force. I bore in mind that those prominent in the running of these organizations could also be the potential leaders of a resistance movement if war came and Germany succeeded in invading Britain. "Back in Hamburg I also organized networks of spies and agitators in farflung parts of the British Empire. One of the strangest and most successful efforts was the creation of a cell in India by infiltrating members into the country through religious groups in Afghanistan. I was well regarded as a resourceful and able organizer, and on August 15, 1939, just before the outbreak of war, I was confirmed as the head of a special section of Department VI, devoted to Britain and the British Empire. This section became Germany's main authority and information service on Britain, and the staff and the organization speedily expanded. "For years I had made contacts among continental sportsmen who often visited Britain. I knew that some would continue coming to Britain even after the outbreak of war because they would be neutrals. When the war did come, these men traveled back and forth bringing back ration books and identity cards, which were then copied and forged for issue to other agents. They also reported on locations of AA. defenses, movements of troops, new uniforms, security regulations, and so on. "This information was invaluable in continuing to send spies into Britain. One man, a Dutchman, moved to Portugal after the invasion of Holland, and this enabled him to fly to Britain frequently, officially representing a Portuguese firm. I also compiled information at the outbreak of war by questioning German businessmen who had been in Britain. "I also questioned repatriated Germans who returned from Britain and the Commonwealth, and German journalists who had been in Britain representing German newspapers and magazines. Every day we went through British newspapers, brought in through neutral countries, for information.

"Then, after the fall of France and at the start of the plan to invade Britain, I was commanded, on the orders of Hitler himself, to draw up a long, detailed report embodying all our knowledge of Britain. I was also to detail those groups, organizations and prominent people hostile to Germany. My report ran into 600 pages. "I recommended that all Jews and Freemasons should be arrested immediately. I felt that the Jewish people could not now be other than hostile to Germany, and I had reached definite conclusions about the Freemason organization. To find out about it I got an Austrian into the Freemason movement, and he eventually went all over Europe lecturing lodges and at the same time picking up information. "I felt that because this organization is secret and members are usually known to each other, the movement could form the nucleus of a secret resistance organization. We compiled a list of secret signs., handshakes and the rest. "Jews were to be immediately removed from their jobs. Hitler ordered me to prepare a Black List of Britons who would have been arrested immediately for questioning. They ranged from people like Winston Churchill, Lord Rothemere and Lord Beaverbrook, to people in the entertainment world like Noel Coward. Altogether there were about 2,700 names on the list, mostly influential people, such as M.P.'s and so on. "Important people on the list would have been taken to Germany for interrogation. I was also asked to compile a list of those who might cooperate with us." Christian paused, and then said with emphasis: "My knowledge of the British people, though, told me that we weren't likely to find many traitors in Britain. But very conveniently you had lodged all your political prisoners, or those you thought dangerous, all together on the Isle of Man. These, under the 18b Regulations, included known Fascists and many supporters of Sir Oswald Mosley. "We, therefore organized special 'Einsatzgruppen' (Commando groups) to land with the first military units, or even ahead of them, to seize key points.

They would have seized the 18b internment camps and would have tried to occupy important places like Scotland Yard and Whitehall governmental offices before important records could be destroyed. No detailed plans had been worked out for the 18b internees, but those who were willing would have been put in responsible positions to help run the country under us." The hours passed; Christian was fascinating. He went on to reveal an amazing plan which he had recommended in his report to Hitler and which Hitler had ordered to be put into operation immediately after the Nazis landed. It was a plan to win over key people, including the Archbishop of Canterbury. Christian said: "We realized that we had to find some people and some groups among the population who would cooperate. Although there were to be mass arrests, plans were made to persuade as many people as possible to recognize that the real enemy in Europe was not Germany, but Communist Russia. The propaganda line was that we should all unite—under Germany, of course—to fight Russia. "We had bought time with the so-called 'Friendship Pact' with Russia, but Hitler knew the showdown had to come—as it later did, but with Britain still in the war against us. It was a matter of necessity to get some degree of cooperation, or at least acceptance, in one form or another. We decided to favor people who we felt could exert influence over the population. "For that reason the London Press Club was to have been left alone and key journalists and editors would have been given a chance to carry on without interference, providing, of course, that they printed nothing hostile to Germany. "We felt that since the Church of England exerted such a big influence, the Archbishop of Canterbury could help us. I realized that a direct approach would have been useless. I therefore prepared a list of his known friends and associates. "I hoped that I would be able to find at least one among them, perhaps a pacifist or a conscientious objector, who would agree that it would be a good thing if the British people remained calm under the German

occupation and so prevented bloodshed. I thought that such a person or persons could be carefully persuaded to make the Archbishop issue an appeal not to resist." Christian believes that it was the cunning and ruthless Heydiich who, on Hitler's instructions, first prepared the plans (as told in chapter one) to kidnap the royal family. "Heydrich was very concerned at the time about rumored plans for the evacuation of the royal family to Canada," Christian said. "He ordered that it must be prevented at all costs. He also wanted Churchill as his personal prisoner. Definite orders were given to an Einsatzgruppe Kommando unit that Churchill should be arrested and brought immediately to Berlin. "To these lists, plans, and suggestions which I submitted in my report were attached maps and photographs and the locations of important offices in Britain. "The entire report was then sent by Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Main Office, to Hitler, A few days later Heydrich telephoned me, sounding very pleased. 'The Fuehrer is most gratified with your work,' he said, 'and has asked that his congratulations be passed on to you.' I later learned that Hitler had read the dossier and said: 'With this we probably know more about Britain than the British do!' For me it was the crowning moment of ten years effort." The Nazi chiefs and the German High Command made quick use of Walter zu Christian's work. As the Luftwaffe began its invasion attack plans were rushed ahead. The Master Plan was code-named Operation Sea Lion. Christian's dossier, supplemented with other information, was drawn on for the handbooks prepared for the German forces and the S.S. and political and administration executives who would have followed the invading Army. The first, Informationsheft G.B., contained the black list Christian helped to draw up with various additions and deletions. Full names were given, dates of birth, addresses, occupations, then the department and sub-section of the Reich Main Security Office which would deal with them.

For example, number 29 under the list of those whose surnames began with C: 29. Catlin, George Edward Gordon, 29.7.96, Politiker, London S.W.3, 19 Glebe Place, RSHA VI G 1. Christian's reports on the structure of the police, political parties, Jewish and other religious organizations were included in officer-dossiers. Few bodies would have been left untouched, however innocent they might have appeared. The final compiler described the Church of England as "a powerful tool of British Empire politics," and thus even the Church Lads Brigade was an organization regarded with suspicion! The compiler also reiterated the Nazis' often-repeated accusation that the Boy Scout movement was actually a tool of the British Secret Service, for which the Nazis had a very high regard. Several Boy Scout leaders were included in the black list. Also contained in the handbook were descriptions of oil stores, dockyards, power installations and the location, with maps, of important buildings like Scotland Yard, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, embassies, universities and industrial concerns, so that important documents and files could be quickly seized. Even public schools were not neglected. "Vital anti-German propaganda and papers of political and historical importance will be found there," it was stated. At the back were printed pictures of 30 people wanted for individual arrest. A further handbook, printed in hundreds of thousands for issue to all German troops, contained maps showing the layouts of canals, roads and railways. There were also street plans of nearly every large town and city. There were nearly 200 aerial and ground photographs of harbors, buildings, dock installations and airfields. Also included were a number of English phrases with the phonetic pronunciations, to enable German soldiers to ask questions. There were even a number of phrases in Welsh and Gaelic. The contents of the British Museum, art galleries, ancient buildings and churches were referred to with special interest, for the web of Nazi informants had lost no opportunity to point out the value of this treasure awaiting plunder.

A 1940 directive addressed to the R.S.H.A.'s Section III, oddly called the German Sphere of Life Office, then headed by Otto Ohlendorf, gives a list of exhibits from the British Museum and the National Gallery which according to the handbook author, it was necessary to "secure"; that is, remove to Germany. Particularly referred to were paintings by Rembrandt. The Nazi excused their intended looting by saying that the treasures were in British hands having "been stolen from all over the world." Sacred Church valuables were among the articles Usted. Size would, apparently, have been no object as far as national treasures were concerned. Eloquent testimony of the completeness of the Nazis' greed, arrogance and determination to crush Britain is contained in the records of a conference held at the end of August 1940 in Munich, attended by a large number of representative of the S.D. Point Six of the minutes records: "Trafalgar Column (Nelson's Column) : A symbol of British victory in World War I, similar to the French monument at Compiegne, does not exist. But Nelson's Column represents, since the Battle of Trafalgar, the symbol of British naval and world power. It would be an effective underlining of a German victory if the Trafalgar monument could be transported to Berlin. It's up to Goering to decide." Yes, the shadow of the swastika had lain over Britain for many years. Walter zu Christian had done his work diligently. The outbreak of war did, however, cut down the flow of secrets. Accordingly, Heydrich, Christian's boss as chief of the R.S.H.A., hit on a more subtle method to get information. At that time there were in Berlin hundreds of neutral diplomats, many of whom represented countries who were friendly towards Britain. They were occasionally taken into the confidence of the British. These diplomats could not, of course, be openly quizzed, and most were much too astute to fall for any questioning under the guise of polite embassy party conversation. Heydrich, therefore, devised another way—and red-light "Salon Kitty" came into being. He ordered the setting up in Berlin of an ultra-high-class

house of prostitution where diplomats could enjoy the company of beautiful and witty girls. A rich business man who would arouse no suspicion in buying a large, secluded house in a fashionable district of Berlin was found to purchase the house, and it would seem to anyone who might have been interested merely that he frequently gave lavish parties with many high-ranking diplomats and beautiful girls present. Inside, however, it was a different picture. "Kitty," an experienced and educated madame, possibly the foremost at that time in Germany, had been picked to run the house. She chose 20 or 30 young ladies from all over Europe to "entertain" the guests. She had no lack of recruits. But "Kitty's" girls—blonde, red-head, brunette, tall or tiny, according to taste—were not only stunningly beautiful and expensively dressed, they were witty and were fluent linguists. And they were intelligent. Very. Heydrich ordered the finest food, wines and liqueurs to be supplied to the house. And, after a gay evening's conversation and wining and dining, there were few diplomats who resisted the lure of the discreet, sumptuously furnished boudoirs. What they did not know was that all the bedrooms had double walls in which microphones had been fixed. Every word dropped under the seductive and careful enticement of Madame Kitty's young ladies was heard — and recorded on six tape machines manned by engineers in a secret basement room. Heydrich reveled in this trap as a brilliant stroke of ingenuity. "Salon Kitty" yielded a vast number of secrets. But Salon Kitty also yielded its red herrings, and one of these was to lead the Nazis on a bizarre tangent involving the Duke of Windsor. Gossip that the Duke of Windsor was dissatisfied with the comparatively minor role assigned to him during the early part of the war led to the weird opinion expressed by one diplomat that he might be persuaded to have a friendly

feeling towards Germany if he was offered an important post in the running of Nazi Britain. Needless to say, this view was completely inaccurate, and although the Duke—and the Duchess--of Windsor may have wished to have played a fuller part in Britain's war effort than the duties assigned to them permitted, there was no question about their complete loyalty to the British Crown. In fact it was that very restlessness to play a full, vital part in the prosecution of the war, that the Nazis wishfully thought indicated dissatisfaction with the British cause. This Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister who enthusiastically peddled the idea, and Hitler, who showed a hopeful anxiety to believe it, eventually had to accept. But, in the meanwhile, Hitler expressed the view, according to information which has just come to light, that if King George VI would not cooperate after the occupation, he might be replaced as King by the "popular" Duke of Windsor. Von Ribbentrop, a former ambassador to Britain, would, said Hitler, be created (by the Duke of Windsor, when King) "an English duke," and be his personal representative in Great Britain. "Ribbentrop," said Hitler, "knows the British and the British royal family." Walter Schellenberg, who later became chief of the German secret services, describes in his book, The Schellenberg Memoirs, how in July 1940 he was sent for by Ribbentrop. Ribbentrop asked Schellenberg if he had met the Duke of Windsor on his last peacetime visit to Germany. Schellenberg said that he had not. Ribbentrop then propounded the extraordinary theory that the Duke of Windsor had always been a friend of Germany. This, he went on, had displeased "the governing clique" when he became King, and they had used the issue of his wish to marry a divorced commoner, Mrs. Simpson, to force his abdication. The Duke was, expanded Ribbentrop, still sympathetic towards Germany and he was irritated by the strict surveillance exercised over him by the

British Secret Service. He was now in Portugal. And, said Ribbentrop, Hitler felt that "given the right circumstances" he might wish to "escape." Ribbentrop, according to Schellenberg, went on: "If the British Secret Service should try to frustrate the Duke in some such arrangement, then the Fuehrer orders that you are to circumvent the British plans, even at the risk of your life, and, if need be, by the use of force. "Whatever happens, the Duke must be brought to the country of his choice. Hitler attaches the greatest importance to this operation and he has come to the conclusion, after serious consideration, that, should the Duke prove hesitant, he himself would have no objection to your helping the Duke to reach the right decision by coercion—even threats or force, if the circumstances make it advisable. "But it will also be your responsibility to make sure at the same time that the Duke and his wife are not exposed to any personal danger... . Herewith, in the name of the Fuehrer, I give you the order to carry out this assignment at once." Schellenberg writes that at no time did he accept Ribbentrop's twisted conception of the Duke's position. He expressed his doubts at the time and, after spending several weeks in Lisbon, managed to convince Ribbentrop and Hitler that the Duke, although not particularly liking his latest appointment as Governor of Bermuda, was nevertheless an utterly loyal British subject and had no sympathies towards Germany whatever. Walter Schellenberg returned to Berlin and the Nazis dropped their bizarre scheme. Walter zu Christian carried on with his work to prepare to run Britain. And in Germany the "laws" and orders which were to rule the lives of those allowed to remain in Britain were being printed in minute and deadly detail.

4 - The Laws for Britain Even fishing and game-shooting rights for German officers were provided for in the detailed Nazi laws drawn up and printed in German and English, ready for use.

The clear purpose of these laws was to grind the British people to a state of permanent and total subservience. And, behind their cynical façade, the iron cross of Nazi-land was to be thrown in the face of real justice. The Nazis always imposed their will under the façade of "law." But they made the laws to suit themselves, and "right" was whatever the Fuehrer said it was. Even as early as 1933 Hermann Goering, Hitler's right-hand man, roared, " 'Right' is that which serves the German people." By which he meant the Nazis. Although the laws for Britain seemed, technically, to give an accused person a chance, this would, in fact, have turned out to be an illusion, as evidenced in the occupied countries of the Continent and, indeed, in Germany itself. The bias of the court, the usual near-inability to persuade anyone to represent the accused legally or come forward with supporting evidence for fear of incurring the Nazis' displeasure, and the frequent obtaining, under torture, in advance, of alleged confessions, made the Nazi "laws" a shallow mockery. And, although the laws for Britain sometimes indicated maximum sentences which might be passed, this in itself was meaningless. Few people sent to Nazi jails and concentration camps were ever released at the end of their sentences, or at all. They were either given further terms for alleged camp offenses or died from exhaustion, disease, overwork, illtreatment or starvation. Since rule was to be military and not civil, the laws, drawn up in the manner of decrees, were entitled "Ordinances of the Military Authorities," and bundles were delivered to the commands of the invading forces. One of the difficulties of such advanced preparations was, of course, security. This was particularly important in the period immediately prior to the invasion when Hitler, true to form, was trying to lull his prospective victims into a state of lessened readiness with pious protestations of his wish to live in peace and friendship with Britain.

So, in case any copies of the booklet containing these laws went astray and fell into British hands, a special preface appeared in early editions. This explained, rather unconvincingly, that this was really just a booklet on administrative English, culled from archives in the high interests of the "understanding and the spiritual exchange of peoples." They were "specimen translations and exercises." We must presume that the high-minded and spirtually aspiring gentlemen who wrote this must then have paused for a deathly chuckle. Churchill might have commented: "Some specimens! Some exercises!" When the war ended, people possessing these booklets did not exactly flaunt them. Most were destroyed, but a few survived and one came into my hands. It is a 96-page document, printed in Leipzig. It begins by placing responsibility for the enforcement of many of the Nazis' measures on locally appointed people—with the threat of punishment if they were not enforced. Each article is printedjirst in German and then in English. The title grandly proclaims: Verordnung des Deutschen Militarbefehlshabers

betreffend Gesetzgebung und Verwaltungsbefugnis in den besetzten Gebieten. Ordinance of the German Military Commander

Regarding the Legislative and Administrative Power in The Occupied Territories. It starts with this preamble: Article 1.

The Ordinance of the Military Commander shall have the force of law and on publication shall be recognized as such by the German and by the Authorities of the occupied country.

Article 2.

The Ordinance shall be published in an official gazette and shall come into effect on the day of its publication, unless it is otherwise expressly provided. The Military Commander and the competent Authorities of the occupied country shall be responsible, insofar as they are concerned, for the execution of such Ordinances. Article 3.

Any Authority of the occupied country disobeying any Ordinance may, in addition to being liable to the penalties provided for an offense against an Ordinance, be suspended or deprived of his office or expelled by decision of the Military Commander. Article 4.

It is the duty of all Authorities and of all persons within the occupied territories to obey all orders including orders of requisition given by or on behalf of the Military Authorities of the said territories, in pursuance of their lawful power. Article 5.

Imperial and State laws or General Regulations not already actually in force throughout the occupied territories shall, previously to the coming into force, be transmitted by the competent authorities to the Military Commander, who will examine them in order to ensure that no provision is contained therein of a nature likely to prejudice the maintenance, safety or requirements of the troops of occupation. The orders go on: The Authorities of the occupied country shall on demand of any duly authorized military officer of the occupying forces, arrest and hand over to the nearest Commander of the German troops any person charged with an offense to the military jurisdiction of the German troops: A monthly return shall be made by the judicial Authorities of the occupied country, to the Military Commander, showing the stages which all current cases have reached. The ordinance then outlines the set-up of the courts enforcing the Nazi laws. Two members of the bench were to be German, the third British. It

may be presumed that the third member of the bench, the lone Briton, would have been a stooge, or a willing or unwilling cooperator. In any case he could be overruled 2-1. But the façade, however thin, of appearing to be "fair" by having a member of an occupied country assisting the judgment of cases, would be presented to the outside world. The Ordinance decrees: There shall be set up in each zone of occupation one or more Civil Courts which shall be entitled "High Court." Each such Court shall be composed of three members; two shall be German nationals, one of whom shall be President of the Court. The Third shall be a citizen of the occupied country. All shall be learned in the law. Any person who is party to a civil proceeding in a court of the occupied country may, if he considers he has suffered injury from a miscarriage of justice on the part of such a court, appeal from it to the "High Court." The "High Court" may either confirm the judgment which has been referred to it or remit the case for rehearing or pass final judgment itself. If the Court considers that the circumstances of the case justify it in so doing, it may inflict a fine not exceeding RM 5.000 (£480 at the laiddown rate of exchange) upon any party who has frivolously or improperly appealed against the decision of the court of the occupied country. When final judgment has been given by Court of the occupied country and execution has been issued against the German party, a certified duplicate copy of the judgment shall be transmitted for execution to the Military Commander for the members of his staff, or to the appropriate Army Commander for members of the German Forces, officials or the families of either. The laws and decrees are then outlined. I have selected the most interesting: Offenses relating to the occupation Any person who:

a)  does violence to or assaults or wilfully obstructs in the execution of his duty any of the personnel of the German Armies; b)   wilfully damages in a manner likely to prejudice the security of the troops of occupation any building, road, railway, canal, bridge, telegraph or telephone line, waterworks shall, on conviction be liable to the same penalties as are provided for such offenses by the German Military Court, for purpose of suppressing such offenses [death]. No person shall by word, act, or gesture conduct himself in a manner insulting to the troops of occupation or to the military colors or insignia. Persons of the occupied country, wearing uniform and belonging to the police, fire brigade, customs and forestry service shall salute the German colors and officers. Any person who commits or abets the commission of any act calculated to promote bad feeling, dissatisfaction, bad discipline or mutiny amongst the troops of occupation shall, on conviction, be liable to imprisonment for not more than five years.... Ordinance regarding espionage. If any person for any purpose prejudicial to the safety of the Army of Occupation a)   approaches, inspects, passes over or enters any place the access to which shall, by order duly published, be specially prohibited, with a view to the security of the Army of Occupation, by the Military Commander; b)    makes any photograph, sketch, plan, model, map, or note or other document; c)   obtains, collects, records, has in his possession, publishes or communicates to any other person any photograph sketch, plan, model, map or note, or other document of information; d)  engages in a conspiracy or holds communication with powers other than those participating in the occupation: he shall be fiable to

imprisonment for life or for such term as the court may determine. It is essential that the German Forces should know the resources which they may be called on to requisition for military purposes in the occupied territories. In the occupied territories there shall be instituted a census and classification in connection with means of transport such as carriages, motor-cars, motorcycles, horses, etc., as well as all stores of this kind which can be used for military purposes, factories or public or private undertakings which can be applied to the manufacture and repair of military stores, the personnel necessary for working any of the means which are liable to be requisitioned should occasion arise. The taking of the census shall be carried out by the civil authorities of the occupied country and on their own responsibility. Requisitions General 1.   The right to requisition in kind and services shall be exercised by the German Army for its needs. Requisition orders shall be sent either to the National Treasury Department or in case of urgency or necessity, either to the local authorities or by direct application to private individuals. 2.  These requisitions shall be made in accordance with the regulations which now are or hereafter shall be in force, and with such regulations as may from time to time be issued by the Military Commander. There shall be established in each zone as many local commissions as the Military Commander determines. They are to fix the charges for requisitions effected in the zone and estimate the damage caused by the troops of occupation therein. The payment for requisition shall be made by the authorities of the occupied country. If payment shall not have been made by the authorities within two months of the date of notification, the authorities of occupation concerned shall have the power to requisition public

funds wherewith to make such payments themselves, and this requisition shall be without prejudice to any administrative measures the Military Commander may see fit to take against the officials concerned. 3.   There shall be constituted a body whose duty shall be to collect, tabulate and distribute information which may be helpful to the local commissions in the performance of their duties. Requisitioning of motor-cars: The requisitioning of motor-cars in the occupied territory will be carried out only by the Military Commander. A requisition order will be given to the owner of the car. All cars taken will be marked with the letters M.B. followed by the number of the car registered in the office of the Military Commanders. The requisition order covers: a the driving, b the working, c the maintenance of the car. Every car requisitioned must be delivered at the place appointed complete with a driver. The driver must remain with the car and may have to stay away from the place to which he belongs for an indefinite period. The driver will get no pay from the German Authorities. The owner or owners of the car, or, in the case of motor-cabs the firm or municipality is responsible for paying him, and must make their own arrangements for forwarding pay to him, wherever he may be. For any neglect of his duty as driver he will be punished by a German Summary Court. Petrol, oil, and tires will be supplied for requisitioned cars by the German Authorities, but the cost of these is a charge against the government of the occupied country. Requisitioned cars will be sent for repair, when necessary, to the most convenient workshop, and such repairs must be promptly carried out and at the expense of the government of the occupied country. Obligations of the occupier and billet owner 1.  The billet owner is required to put the premises in repair and so maintain them during the occupation. He is not permitted to alter or

deplete the furnishing of the premises without the written sanction of the local German Authority. 2.  It is forbidden for any occupier to cause repairs or alterations to be done in the billet of which he has the use without the previous sanction of the local German Authority or in any way to make any change which would affect the number or disposition of the rooms. 3. Damage due to fair wear and tear shall be charged to the billet owners. Damage in excess of fair wear and tear shall be settled privately between billet owner and occupier. In the event of their being unable to agree, reference will be made by the billet owner to the local military office who will arrange the matter with the local German Authority. 4.  Where the billet owner or his servants are resident in the house, all costs of furnishing, emptying of refuse, cess-pool, thorough weekly cleaning of premises, sweeping of chimneys, heating, lighting, provision of fuel for cooking and for all hot water required, insurance rates and all other charges which arise from the use of the buildings are chargeable to him. The ultimate settlement is a matter for arrangement between the billet owner and the authorities of the occupied country. Where the house is empty the authorities will provide for these services and pay the charges themselves, or cause the proprietor to do so. 5.  The term "furnished" includes the provision to the occupier of the following, suitable to his rank: glass-ware, crockery, cutlery, kitchen and household utensils, table, bed and house linen to be provided clean at least once a week, the sole use of the bathroom with hot and cold water if there is more than one, or the daily use of the bathroom if there is only one in the house. The sole use of the kitchen cellar, scullery, store-cupboard, pantry, if there is more than one, or the joint use of same if there is only one in the house. All ranks are entitled to make use of the civil telephone existing in their billets. Damage to and loss of any articles referred to in this article are covered by paragraph 3.

6.   The billet owner, his family and servants are required to treat the occupier, his family and servants, with civility at all times and to grant them the necessary facilities for the comfortable occupation of the quarters alloted to them. All complaints of billet owners are to be forwarded in writing to the local military authority. All complaints of occupiers are to be forwarded in writing through their commanding officer to the local German Authority. 7.   Damage due to fair wear and tear shall be charged to the billet owner. Damage in excess of fair wear and tear will be charged against the occupier after the claim has been settled as laid down hereafter. The householder will make out a list or inventory of articles which an officer or other rank takes over in rooms he will have for his sole use, on occupying a billet. The Ust or inventory will be prepared in duplicate, and when the occupier is satisfied as to the accuracy, both copies will be signed by the billet owner and occupier and each will receive one copy. This procedure will be adopted for all billets at present occupied under the orders of the German Authority. The householder will show separately those articles supplied by the Town Authorities by order of the local German Authorities. Whenever articles are afterwards supplied to billet will be added to the lists and the additions signed by both parties. When a billet is about to be vacated these lists will be produced for inspection by the German Authorities. Any damage in excess of fair wear and tear will be noted on the Ust and the authorities of the occupied country will immediately forward to the local German Authorities particulars of the damage. The case will then be investigated and the amount of compensation, if any, decided upon. If the matter is settled, or, there is no claim, the occupier will be given a clearance certificate by the local German Authority. When the claim has been settled, or in a case where there is no claim, the Town Authorities will forward to the local German Authority within seven days of the billet being vacated, a certificate to the effect

that all claims for damage in excess of fair wear and tear have been settled up to the date of the certificate. In cases where the biUet owner had failed to carry out the above instructions, and a claim is made by him, such claim will not be considered. Whenever a vacated billet containing articles provided by the town is not likely to be re-occupied within a short space of time the local German Authority will instruct the authorities of the occupied town to remove these articles to their furniture store. Civil postal service in the occupied country 1.  All postcards, letters and other postal packages will be subject to censorship by the German Military Authorities. No responsibility will be accepted for safe or quick delivery. 2.  No language other than German, Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch or English may be used in communications by post. Dialects are not permitted. The writing must be legible and in Latin characters when possible. The use of ambiguous phrases, code or cipher, shorthand or secret ink is strictly forbidden. 3.  Letter post is permitted to all parts. Registration is permitted, but such mail for unoccupied territories and all other countries must not contain: platinum, gold, silver, coin, bullion or foreign securities. Parcel post 4.  Within the occupied zones parcels up to 25 kilos are allowed. Parcels to or from the occupied country must not exceed 25 kilos and to or from other countries 5 kilos in weight. Parcels imported must not contain: arms, munitions, or articles prepared for war. Those exported must not contain: Dyestuffs, chemical drugs, or precious metals. No written communication may be enclosed in a parcel. Hunting rights in the occupied territory

An officer shall be appointed by the Command for the zone of each army Corps to deal with questions regarding the shooting of game. Members of the armies of occupation, and citizens of the occupied country, attached to or employed by the armies, who wish to shoot and avail themselves of the special privileges as defined in the present instructions, shall fulfill the following conditions: a) They shall be provided with an authorization in writing issued to them by the Military Command, the possession of such authorization dispensing with the need of any similar document (gun licence, ammunition card, etc.). b) They shall be formed into clubs consisting of at least ten members under a president to represent them. Each such military club shall notify the Command of its requirements (position, extent of preserves, etc.) as regard State preserves, State preserves leased to private individuals and communal preserves. Fishery rights For the zone of each Army Corps, a Fishery Officer shall be nominated by the Commanders, to negotiate with the authorities of the occupied country on fishing matters. For each of the zones the authorities shall appoint an expert representative who shah be accredited to the Commander concerned, shall furnish him with all necessary information, and shall be competent to discuss and settle fishing questions in his zone. 1. Members of the armies of occupation shall have the right to fish, on condition that they shall have obtained from the Military Commander the authorization to apply for a fishing permit and from the owner or tenant of the fishery rights the fishing permit specified below. The fishing permit shall show: 1.  Name and address of the holder. 2.  The limits of the waters for which the permit is valid.

3.  The duration of validity. 4.  The number and kind of fishing tackle authorized. 5.  The price agreed upon for the whole period of validity. Any owner or tenant to whom a member of the armies of occupation presents the prescribed authorization is bound, in all cases, to issue a fishing permit, either by amicable agreement, or, failing such, by way of requisition, except in the case of closed waters, that is to say, artificial breeding ponds, fish-breeding establishments, portions of watercourses of which the connection with other watercourses, lakes or ponds is barred by grating, nets or weirs to keep the fish which have reached the size demanded by the law. But he shall not be bound to issue to such persons more than one fishing permit per two kilometers of stream or bank. Should it prove impossible to effect an amicable agreement, or should too long a delay be involved, the requisitioning of the fishing permit may be ordered by the military authorities on the recommendation of the Fishery Officer, but only for fishing with various kinds of line and within the fishing conditions laid down in paragraph five. The price of the requisition shall be fixed by the Local Commission for the Assessment of Requisitions and paid directly to the person concerned. The duration of validity of the permit shall be fixed according to the wish of the applicant at one day, two weeks, or one month, six months or one year. All members of the armies of occupation and their families are forbidden: a) to fish by any means whatever unless in possession of an authorization and a fishing permit. Industrial disputes Article 1. The provisions contained in this Ordinance shall apply only to lock-outs or strikes of persons employed in or about any railway, railway workshop, tramway, road, coal mine, in any telegraph,

telephone or postal service, in navigation or in any waterway, or any gas, electric or waterworks, or employed, either directly by the armies or by contractors working under the supervision of the armies, in works of constructions or maintenance or barracks or other buildings or in the production, handling or distribution of food or stores for the use of the Armies of Occupation, but the Military Commander may at any time by any order, apply this Ordinance to any other undertaking which may appear necessary for the maintenance, safety or requirements of the armies of occupation. In case of doubt whether any undertaking comes within the scope of the above-mentioned, decision of the Military Commander shall be conclusive. Article 2. In any undertaking to which article 1 shall apply, no person shall take part in a lock-out or strike until the following procedure will have been observed. a)  All disputes shall be submitted to the authorities or persons prescribed by the law of the occupied country or by any agreement between the parties not inconsistent with the law of the occupied country. The decisions of all such authorities or persons shall be given within the period of 8 days from the submission of the matter in dispute unless the law or existing agreements between the parties provide a different time limit. b)  When an award has been given by the authorities of the occupied countries or by persons having final jurisdiction over the matter any party objecting thereto may within 8 days from the day of such award appeal by written notice. If the award appealed from be given in the unoccupied territory the notice of appeal shall be delivered within 16 days of such award. Every such appeal will be heard by a Board of Conciliation appointed by the Military Commander. Publications, performances, etc. All newspapers, pamphlets, publications, printed matter, reproductions obtained by mechanical or chemical methods, writings, pictures with or without words, music with words or explanations and cinematographic films, which are intended for public distribution and are of a nature to prejudice public order or endanger the security or the dignity of the

troops of occupation, are forbidden, and may be seized by order of the Military Commander or by the representative of the county. In the case of a daily publication, the representative of the county may order its exclusion from his area for a period of three days. If such publication is published in that area, he may order its suspension for the same period. The action taken will be reported immediately to the Military Commander who will give a final decision thereon. The Military Commander may order that any periodical publication which shall offend against this article shall be suspended or excluded from the occupied territory for a period not exceeding 3 months. Every publication which shall have more than once been the subject of suspension or exclusion on the part of the Military Commander may, in the event of a subsequent offense, be suspended or excluded for a period exceeding 3 months or for an indefinite period. All theatrical or cinematographic performances, pantomimes, readings, recitations, concerts, lectures, or similar public manifestations of a nature to prejudice public order or affect the security or dignity of the troops of occupation are likewise forbidden. In case of urgency the county delegate of the Military Commander shall be entitled to prohibit performances and other manifestations of the above-mentioned nature. Any action taken by such delegate shall be subject of immediate report to the Military Commander for a final decision. The Military Commander may also order the closing for a period not exceeding three months of any establishment in which any newspaper or other publication, reproduction or film mentioned in section 1 above shall have been exhibited, sold or distributed. The Military Commander may similarly order the closing of any establishment in which any manifestation mentioned in section 3 above may have taken place. Carrier pigeons The rearing and the transport of carrier pigeons are authorized in occupied territories under the conditions contained in the following articles: Breeders of carrier pigeons are required to forward by the first of each month to the local representative of the Military Commander, in the locality in which the pigeon loft is situated a list

containing a description of the birds, their old pigeons and their young flying pigeons. This list shall show also the flight direction of each pigeon in training. The birds must be counter-marked by means of a special stamp for the purpose of facilitating supervision. Every person who receives carrier pigeons either pemanently or temporarily or who sets up a pigeon loft must report the same within four days to the local delegate giving the place of origin of the pigeons. The German Authorities may at any time they consider advisable take steps to inspect carrier pigeons belonging to any private pigeon loft and seize any pigeons which have not been reported according to the regulations, without prejudice to any proceedings taken against owners of pigeon lofts for infringements of the present ordinance. The release of carrier pigeons not belonging to a pigeon loft in occupied territories or in Germany is forbidden in all parts of the occupied territories. The military plans had been approved, the laws for a conquered Britain had been drawn up, passed and printed. Hitler prepared to give the word to begin the invasion which would bring their full reality to Britain. And across the Channel waited a sinister, cold-eyed figure clothed in black....

5 - The Death's-Head Boss of Britain General Professor Franz Alfred Six, S.S. That was the full title of the man whose name would, I believe, today be mouthed in Britain with hate and fear if the Nazis had won. For Six would have had over Britain the power of life or death. I have talked with him, fully probed his evil past, and found the detailed plans for his reign as the Master of the Death's-Head emblemed, black-uniformed killers who were to have moved into Britain with the all-conquering German Army. Today Herr Six lives in a pleasant house near a lake in south Germany with roses growing in the trim front garden. But things might have been different.... Cold-eyed, thin-lipped Franz Alfred Six was the man appointed by Reinhardt Heydrich to oversee the terror, the horror, the mass arrests and

the total subjugation of the British. At the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials in 1947 Six was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for belonging to a Nazi death squad which, in 1941, mass-murdered 2,601 men, women and little children in Russia. That was a year after his appointment as the S.S. boss of Britain, an appointment which lapsed when the invasion failed to take place. Six's sentence was commuted to ten years and he was released after serving five years' imprisonment, on September 30, 1952. He is now a free man living with his wife and two children in his nice detached villa in southern Germany. Six was no unintelligent, unwilling recruit to the ranks of the jackbooted Nazis. This perverted, opportunistic university professor joined them in the early days when they were bullying and beating their way to power. He was a willing recruit to the S.D., the nerve-center of the S.S., the ruthless arm of oppression. And he willingly allowed himself to be trained as a top leader of the Nazi hordes which subjugated most of Europe. So that there shall be no doubt about Six's job in Britain and its terms, I quote in full the letter appointing him to the post. He was then an S.S. Colonel. He had not yet been promoted General for his faithful service. The letter from S.S. General Heydrich is as follows: To: S.S. Colonel (Standartenfuehrer) Professor Dr. Six, Berlin. Reich Marshal Minister-President Goering decided on 1.8.40 that the Reichsfuehrer S.S.'s Security Police will commence their activities simultaneously with the military invasion in order to seize and combat effectively the numerous important organizations and societies in England which are hostile to Germany. By virtue of Reich Marshal Goering's authority I appoint you Representative of the Chief of the Security Police and S.D. in Great Britain. Your task is to combat, with all requisite means, all antiGerman organizations, institutions, opposition and opposition groups

which can be seized in England; to prevent the removal of all available material, and to centralize and safeguard it for future exploitation. I designate the capital, London, as the location of your headquarters as Representative of the Chief of the Security Police and S.D.; and I authorize you to set up small action groups (Einsatzgruppen) in other parts of Great Britain as the situation dictates and the necessity arises. I think there can be little doubt about the meaning of those instructions. Six was, perhaps not surprisingly, one of the most elusive men I sought during my inquiries in Germany, Austria and, at one time, in Italy. My first vague address for Dr. Six was Hamburg. I searched civil records and registers for days in that bustling city for a trace of him. I questioned scores of Germans who might know him. They could tell me nothing. Similar searches in Berlin and Munich produced no result. I went on with other aspects of my investigation, but wherever I went I kept asking about Six. I even followed a report that he was holidaying at Reva, on Lake Garda (to the Germans, Gardasee) in Northern Italy, and a favorite German holiday spot. But it was all in vain. It was in Innsbruck, in Austria, that the first lead came. I was having a quick lunch of Ungarischer Gou-lashsuppe mit nudeln (Hungarian goulash soup with dumplings) between making telephone calls, when the hotel receptionist came to tell me, "There is a call for you." I went to the telephone. It was a German, an ardent anti-Nazi whom I had met several weeks previously. "You were asking me about a Dr. Six," he said. "I have been making inquiries for you and I have at last found where he lives," he said. "He is living near Friedrichshafen, in southwest Germany. His telephone number is Tettnang 602. But you must phone now. There is no time to get there. My inquiries were bound to have alerted various people, that could not be helped. News travels fast. I think he may soon learn you want to see him and he may not want to see you." I hurriedly thanked my caller and put the receiver down. Suddenly a peaceful evening was transformed into drama. I was torn between two choices. I knew I stood a better chance of getting questions answered if I

met him face to face. So should I take a chance and make the long dash from Innsbruck to Friedrichshafen and risk missing him? Or should I make sure of speaking to him by telephoning and run the risk of him putting the telephone down as soon as I started to ask vital questions. My friend had said: "Phone now! there is no time to get there." I hesitated for a few minutes and then decided to follow his advice. I put in a call. A clipped voice answered: "Tettnang 602." Is that Dr. Six?—yes, it is. I detected that, as yet, Six had no clue as to my mission. I explained I was interested in certain historical aspects of the war. Could I come to see him? The answer was a very definite "Nein." It was clear that Six had made up his mind previously that he would try to put his past behind him. He was clearly going to hang up at any moment and seconds were valuable. There was only one way. I came straight to the point. Taken, by surprise, Six started to answer my questions. I first asked— will you confirm that you would have been the chief of the Security Police and the S.D. in Britain if the invasion of 1940 had succeeded? Yes, that was my appointment. I was officer and carried out orders. It is suggested that all Britons would have been eventually interrogated about their beliefs and background and treated accordingly—is that true? Yes, that is true. It would have been normal practice. ... How would this have been done? There would have been internment camps and interrogation camps outside every city and big town. What were the details of your job? My job would have been to see that the orders of the German Government were carried out quickly and efficiently.

What sort of orders? Would you have carried them out if you had personally disagreed with them because they might cause suffering and injustice? It was not my job to question orders. Then Dr. Six asked: "What is this all about? Who did you say you are?" I explained that I was a journalist trying to find out what life would have been like in Britain under a Nazi occupation. Six answered, "I will say no more.... I won't see you. . . . You must not bother me. . . . Definitely not. . . . Nein!" The phone was slammed down. I phoned again. "No, I will not speak to you about the plans for Britain," snapped Six. "What is it to do with you? I want to forget." Then Six's wife came on the line, seemingly on an extension. "All we want is to be left alone, to live quietly in peace. All my husband wants is to forget." Then the phone clicked down again. Of course that was all the victims of Dr. Six's colleagues wanted—to be left alone, to live in peace. Forget? I remembered the charges of which Six was found guilty at Nuremburg. Perhaps S.S. Colonel Professor Franz Alfred Six will be able to forget, though I trust not. But there are millions of starved and tortured victims of the evil and bestial S.S. of which Six was a senior officer, who will never be able to forget and who died with a curse on its name. I returned to my soup. It was cold. But I was hot with unwitting anger. Yet, as I thought, I wondered if, even then, I could persuade Six to say more about his appointment. So later I drove to Friedrichshafen. Five miles away I found the lovely little village of Kressgrunn on the banks of Lake Constance. Across the lake was Switzerland. I swung my car into a narrow, side road. On each side there stood half a dozen select, detached, newly built villas, with spacious, neat gardens back and front.

Beside one of the front doors was the name in the press-bell frame: Prof. Dr. F. A. Six, I pressed. There was no answer. The curtains were drawn. The garage was empty. Neighbors said, "The Six's were here yesterday; they must have left during the night." A few minutes later a gray-haired old lady walked up the path. She said she was the Six's house help. "I didn't know Dr. Six had left," she said as she unlocked the door and went inside. A minute later she returned with a note he had left for her. She showed it to me. It said, "Have gone away for a while. Do not answer the telephone. Do not let anyone into the house." I phoned Dr. Six's office at the giant Porsche car works at Friedrichshafen, where Dr. Six is employed as a senior advisor. A woman who described herself as Dr. Six's secretary said, "Dr. Six has gone to Spain for a month's holiday. We have no forwarding address for him." So I drove to the Porsche works, where Dr. Porsche designed his first People's car for Hitler. The gates were barred but, after telephone calls, I was allowed to go to the main office. I asked for Dr. Six's secretary. There a bland-faced porter stood at the door and stated he had instructions to tell me, "Dr. Six's secretary is on holiday." "All right," I said. "I'll see his deputy or someone else in his office." The porter said, "All the people in his office are away." The blank wall surrounding so many former Nazis now in high employment in West Germany today had gone up. But Six had been traced to his present position and he had confirmed his appointment. I now had only to go back along the trail to discover the truth about his intended mission. I did not have to rely upon his cooperation to discover the appalling views he expressed when the Nazi banners were fluttering high, of his work, of his grooming as a knowing instrument of Hitler's will and of his unrepentant explanations afterwards for later crimes. Here was a man who had the education and intelligence to make a choice between following what was right or transparently wrong. He chose—the

side of evil. From Nazi files and captured documents I pieced together the career of the calculating, cool-brained man assigned to establish the New Order of the Nazi Master Race in Britain. The Nazis realized by 1935 the need to attract intellectuals and welleducated men into the S.D., the inner circle of the S.S. These men, opportunistic egg-heads, their brains dedicated to the Fuehrer, were to be trained to implant the terrible terrors of Naziland first throughout Europe and then in the far corners of the world. They would be, said Hitler, pure in Aryan blood. And they would be found in the universities, the high schools and the civil service. They would still devote themselves to their civilian jobs. Pay would be good. The dashing black uniforms and the glittering insignia were head-turning, and quick attainment of the rank of captain or major made entry for the selected iintelligentsia a social must. Six did not have to be tailored to qualify for the new elite. He was readymade. For him, his scholarly career and Nazism went hand in hand. And then he rode away. Franz Alfred Six, born in Mannheim in 1909, joined Hitler's early party, the NSDAP, the National Socialist and Workers' Party, in 1930, when he graduated from the University, aged 21. Already Hitler was ranting his threats to Europe. Six became Party member 245679. Then, while he studied political and social science at Heidelburg University from 1930 to 1934, he became a student-leader of the brutal brown shirted S.A. By this time the pattern of terror and aggression of the Nazis was clear even to the most stupid. In 1935, the year he became a Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor Six joined the S.D. of the S.S. His number was 107480. Promotion came fast. Rewards were heaped upon his head.

In 1936 Six became a lecturer at Königsberg University. In 1939, when only 28, he became Professor, then Dean, of the Faculty for Foreign Countries at Berlin University. There he lectured his students on the Nazis' favorite wish-think mumbojumbo: that Fascist, dictator-states were destined to rule the world, that the democratic states where the majority called the tune were decadent and doomd to die. All over Germany crowds in public parks and squares heard the same words rasping from massed loudspeakers. There was no escape. So it was that the holocaust burst upon Europe; Poland overrun, the great western offensive of 1940. And with the prospect of glory before him, Six joined the Waffen S.S., the S.S. formations fighting at the front. In two cataclysmic sweeps Denmark and Norway were overrun and Holland, Belgium, little Luxembourg and mighty France sent reeling. The world was aghast; Germany hysterical. Surely nothing could stop the Nazis now. Only one obstinate nation, Britain, refused to acknowledge the victory. With characteristic stubbornness the natives refused to accept the facts. Hitler was enraged. But at last the plans he had nurtured so long to vanquish his most constant enemy could be put into action. The English must be beaten, so that they might never rise again. The Nazi orders and plans you have read in the preceding chapters are the script of the tragidrama which the Nazis planned to enact. Who would have played the parts to bring it to its ferocious reality? The joint authors of the plot are known. The Commanders of the Armed Forces had been assigned their parts and they had deployed their hordes of jackbooted, gray-uniformed extras, machine guns in hands. But who would have been the leading actors of the second act? When the invasion was over, who were the men assigned to crush the soul of Britain and, with terror as their ally, hold the British in unending thrall? That, perhaps, was the most terrifying part of the macabre performance designed to become real life.

It was a task which could be entrusted only to the most devout and ruthless knights of the black creed, and the order went out: "Send for Six." To him was to be entrusted the high task of bringing the Nazi kind of law and order to Britain. And so it was that in August 1940, as the Wehrmacht crouched ready to spring across the narrow channel, that Six, now Stanaartenfuehrer (Colonel), aged 31, was sent his letter of appointment by the ruthless Heydrich. His orders were explicit in their broad scope: "... seize and combat effectively the numerous important organizations and societies in England which are hostile to Germany. .. ." "Your task is to combat, with the requisite means, all anti-German organizations, institutions, opposition and opposition groups which can be seized in England. . .." The reference to "opposition and opposition groups" is clearly a reference not to things, as the clinical coldness of this order might at first seem to suggest, but to people. And since the opposition to the Nazis in Britain would not have involved a handful of people, but millions, the range and the scope of Colonel Professor Six's powers can be gathered. Documents which survived the war show that Six would have established regional headquarters for his all-powerful arrest-and-terror battalions in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh and, if the Forth Bridge was blown up, Glasgow. Six and his men would have had the main task of arresting those people named on the Nazis' Black List and attached to each arrest-squad would have been "experts" from the particular department wishing to question the unfortunate offender. As far as the rest of the population were concerned, S.S. General Heydrich ordered that as soon as German troops were in control, internment camps would be set up outside every city and practically every town. Every man and woman would have been sent to the internment camps and methodically screened as to their background, job, sympathies, and so on. Later experience was to show that the make-up and organization of the arrest-squads, or action groups, assigned to Six were same as the

Einsatzgruppen, one of which Six later became a member, and which carried out wholesale massacres in Russia. A once high Nazi confessed to me when I questioned him: "The plan was to develop a reign of terror by the arrest of possible leaders and selected persons." Nearly every nation in Europe has borne witness to what that would have meant—sudden arrest, terror, torture, killings, the disappearance of thousands of human beings. ... Dr. Six had already been assigned his lieutenants of horror and persecution to deal with the principle enemies: Freemasons (to be immediately arrested) were to be dealt with by Dr. Rudolf Levein; Jews (also to be arrested immediately) were to be rounded up by "Jewish expert" Rudolf Richter; Churches and all church ministers were to be "investigated" by Kurt Stiller; "Liberal Organizations"—political parties, etc.—were to be examined by Horst Kunzer and Helmut Jonas; Communists and Marxists would be dealt with separately by Dr. Horst Mahnke and immediately arrested. Card indexes of prominent people and long lists of members and people in sympathy with examples in these categories had already been prepared. Beside the name of each unfortunate was marked "Immediate arrest," "house detention," "house search," or "protective custody." As Dr. Six's men waited, the presses, already rolling out the Military Ordinances for Britain and the Armed Forces Orders for the civilian population, were also printing hundreds of ominous cardboard notices in German and English. Ready, too, was Himmler's dreaded Gestapo, the

Secret Police, ready with the notices to be pinned to the doors of commandeered offices. One of these came into my possession. It reads: DIESES HAUS DARF NUR MIT GENERMIGUNG DES

BEFEHLSHABERS DER SICHERHEITPOLIZEI FUR

GROSSBRITANNIEN BETRETEN NERDEN NO ENTRANCE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE

CHIEF-IN-COMMAND OF THE GERMAN SECRET

POLICE FOR GREAT BRITAIN The setting-up of Gestapo prisons was to be organized without delay. Although Britain's S.S. boss-to-be, when later brought to trial for belonging to an extermination squad in Russia, and other crimes, maintained that he had in the past protected Jewish colleagues and employees in his office, Six was as virulent in his racial hate and other Hitler mumbo-jumbo as other leading Nazis. I am indebted to the splendid Weiner Library of Devonshire Street, London, W.I., for this translation of a summary taken from the confidential minutes of an adThe Death's-Head of Britain             93 dress by Dr. Six at a rally held at Krummhubel on April 3 and 4, 1944. The occasion was a conference of German embassy attachés from all over Europe. Each attache was a "specialist" in Jewish affairs. The summary states: Dr. Six then addressed the delegates. After welcoming them he spoke of the political structure of world Jewry. He said that, the figures for 1933 showed that there was about 17 million Jews in the world—by religion. Most of them lived in Eastern Europe—the starting place for the migration to America. They were, he said, gradually moving from east to west.

In Europe the Jews were finished both biologically and politically. In the countries of the enemy powers Jewry was holding a leading position in the campaign against Nazism and the German people. In Russia the Jewish question hadn't been presented conspicuously. But it was known from practical warfare that the Jew continued to play a decisive part in the government of Bolshevism. The second country important in this connection where Jewry was playing a traditional part was England. Because of the plutocratic system in Britain, British Jewry had managed to find its way into the leading circles. This was noticeable by the intermarriage of Jews and British aristocrats. The cooperation of Britain and American Jewry had been a decisive factor at the outbreak of the war. In America the Jews have a strong economic position. Democracy had proved a fertile soil for the progressive influence of the Jews. The high percentage of the Jews among the leaders of the three powers fighting Germany was a factor of the greatest importance. Six concluded by saying: Not only in Germany, but also on an taternational level, must the Jewish question be brought to a solution. The expression "The Jewish question must be brought to a solution" was the well-known Nazi euphemism for the complete annhilation of the Jewish people. Those, then, were the views of Six on one section of the population he would have bossed in Britain. There is no reason to think that his views on Germany's other "enemies" in Britain—the Freemasons, the "liberal organizations," and churchmen, let alone the Marxists and Communists— were any less dogmatic and brutally drastic. A few months after addressing the rally at Krummhu-bel, as thousands of innocent men, women and children were each day being herded into gas chambers or flung into incinerators, Dr. Six was busily organizing a great all-European anti-Jewish congress. Six would have taken no ideological exception to the arrival in Britain of the representatives of that sinister and highly professional Department IVA 4b, the department of Karl Adolf Eichmann, mass-murderer of six million.

In fact, Six and Eichmann, who in 1961 at last faced the world for his crimes, were well acquainted with each other. And it was the practice of Eichmann's Jewish extermination department to move into each newly occupied country with streamlined arrangements for death. Britain's Jews—men, women and children—like other Jews of Western Europe, were destined to be sent to the gas chambers and incinerators of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Birkenau. As Eichmann once said: "I don't regard them as Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Belgians, Norwegians, Britons, Italians or Americans. To me they're all Jewish pigs." And in 1940 Eichmann was already the chief of Department IVA 4b. By this time the first ghettoes had been sealed off—in Poland—ready for the mass slaughter to begin. Eichmann at his four-story head office at no. 116, Kurfuerstenstrasse, Berlin, was already planning holocausts of death in Britain as well as other counties. His lieutenants had already moved into the newly occupied capitals— Captain Dannecker in Paris, Captain Zoepff at The Hague, men in Brussels, Oslo, Copenhagen, as well as other capitals in occupied Europe. And already attached to Six's office was the Jewish expert for Britain— Captain Rudolf Richter. Few stories sum up more completely the cold, passionless horror of what would have been in store for scores of thousands of British subjects who were Jews than the description of what happened to 13,000 people in France a few miles across the Channel. On July 16, 1942, with France firmly in their grip, the S.S. and the S.D. swooped in the biggest mass roundup until that time. More than 13,000 Jews were herded, kicked and beaten into the S.S. trucks. Of these, 3,000 were men, 4,000 were children, and 6,000 were women. The majority of the men and the women without children were immediately segregated for Auschwitz. Children and mothers, many of them pregnant,

were crushed into Velodrome d'Hiver sports stadium just outside Paris. The children ranged from babies a few days old to boys and girls of 13 and 14. Then a further segregation began. Mothers were torn, screaming, from their new-born. Babies were born without any medical attention, without even water, for there was only one water tap for the penned-in thousands and only ten lavatories. There was no food whatsoever. Children, lost, hungry, screaming and crying, crawled bewildered on the ground and were trampled underfoot. S.S. officials were without direct orders whether to send the mothers with the children to the concentration camps and gas chambers or whether they should be sent separately. Meanwhile the anguished sobs of the dying, of the lost, helpless and hungry children could be heard outside the stadium. On the fifth day the local S.S. commander decided to drag the mothers away from the children for transportation to Drancy concentration camp and then Auschwitz. Eichmann was well aware, in his Berlin office, of the horror of Velodrome d'Hiver. But these were only Jews. Later on the fifth day, he ordered, "Exterminate the children, too." What happened at Velodrome d'Hiver could also have happened at Wembley. Six, of course, might have undergone a complete transformation when he sniffed the fresh air of England. He might have behaved like a kindly German professor with a class of third-year students. Eichmann, too. It would, one feels, however, have been a thin prospect. With Dr. Six's S.S. there was due to come, of course, all their accoutrement of streamlined terror: the mass arrests and disappearances by day and night. The established policy of Nacht und Nebel, night and fog, the invariable beating and torture of arrested persons under interrogation, slave-labor, mass-shootings, reprisals, and the establishment of concentration camps. The halt, the lame, the mentally ill, T.B. patients, gipsies and the aged all would have got the same treatment as vagrants, alcoholics, criminals, thieves and homosexuals: quick death as parasites with nothing to offer the Nazi state.

There is no need to indulge in a horror-bath of the terrible and inhuman methods with which the S.S. and the Secret Police treated millions of prisoners in Europe in satisfaction of their own sadistic whims or to make them talk. It will suffice to say that slave-labor, with horse-whips, jackboots, clubs and ferocious police dogs, were unsparingly used to crush their prisoners' spirits. In the Nazi prisons which Dr. Six was ordered to establish in Britain a recognized drill of the most appalling and vile tortures, ranging from burning, slow severance of limbs, and electric shock, to iron bands and wires concentrated around the head and the mangling of wrists and ankles, were used from the Arctic Circle to the shores of the Mediterranean. They were standard routine, as much as applying for a driving license if you want to drive a car is standard routine in Britain today. Official forms were issued to record the tortures used. Apart from the general brutality, lack of food and sanitation, prisoners in concentration camps were chosen by the S.S. for the most senseless and mostly useless medical and scientific experiments. Deliberate injection with typhus and malaria germs, and tetanus and other bacilli were common. Often splinters of glass and wood were applied to wounds to produce festering. Exposure to the point of death in compression chambers, immersion in boiling or freezing water, sterilization, bone-transplanting— all were tried. Most victims died in agony, and those who did not were killed by lethal injection. Yet records of these experiments which went on right to the very end of the war, long after Britain was to have been subdued, show that they produced nothing of significant medical or scientific value. Notes of a conference at the end of August in Munich show that ("Miscellaneous, Point 1") the S.S. regarded the British schools and universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harrow, and Eton, as particularly suitable for the accommodation of S.S. units. It was pointed out that the universities had large sports grounds, bedrooms, communal rooms and "advantageous situations." Files of Section Three, the German Sphere of Life Office of the Reich Security Main Office, disclose that the Nazis intended, in any event, to "Close the British universities, to do away with the scientific societies and

clubs, to take the scientific research institutes into our own hands with 25 of the higher educational establishments in Britain." Many experts have been intrigued that Six was appointed to his post in Britain on the authority of Goering. But, as Reichmarschall, Goering had authority over Heydrich and he was one of the early police chiefs in the Nazi parity. He obviously thought Six was the right man for the right job. He was the man who roared at Frankfort when the Nazis were fighting for power in 1933: "I don't have to worry about justice, my mission is only to destroy and exterminate; nothing more....." At Essen: "Even if we make many mistakes, at least we shall be acting. I may shoot a bit wildly, one way or the other. But at least I shoot." And later: "Every bullet which leaves the barrel of a pistol is my bullet. If one calls this murder, then I have murdered; I ordered it all, I back it." And Reichmarschall Herman Goering, a shrewd chooser of men, chose Colonel Professor Franz Alfred Six to be the ruling chief of Britain. British churches, already marked for special investigation by Six's men, were regarded as particularly suitable for either plunder or desecration by the Nazis' own religious mumbo-jumbo with the symbols of "blood, soil and the sword." For the Third Reich had evolved its own mystic cult; under the crooked cross of the pagan swastika, the full, erotic hocus-pocus was to have come to Britain. In Nazi Europe church worship was already condemned as not being compatible with the true Nazi spirit. Instead, churches and cathedrals became the scene of the Nazis' own "sacred" consecrations, in the light of a thousand blazing torches held aloft by the Hitler Youth flanked by hundreds of Nazi banners. The pulpit resounded to perorations about Germany's "sacred mission" to establish the dominance of the Aryan race. Bare swords glittered in ceremonial pageant as if they were the swords of the Crusaders; youth choirs sang Nazi hymns; high priests of the new religion intoned sermons about the sacred trust which God had bestowed upon his living embodiment, the Fuehrer, while an organ played low and Mein Kampf was reverently hailed as the Godinspired bible of the New Age.

In the same manner, tens of millions of Germans had been called, after Hitler rose to power, to stand at attention, wherever they were, as broadcasts over public loudspeakers in every community in Germany called upon them to take their oath of allegiance to the Fuehrer. "By this oath we again bind our lives to a man, through whom—and this is our belief—Superior Forces act in fulfilment of Destiny." Such was the hypnotism, the perversity, the monstrous-ness of it all. Such was the Nazi religion which was planned to come to Britain. Mercifully, Dr. Six and the black-uniformed killers and torturers waited on the Continent, those few miles from our coast, in vain. The invasion, so perilously near to launching and success, was thwarted by the bravery of the few of the R.A.F. who prevented Nazi mastery of the air, and by the everpresent might of the Royal Navy, ready to intervene if the invasion armada put to sea, while the Army re-formed and re-armed. Instead, Six and his black crows found themselves on the icy road to Russia. By now he had been promoted from Standartenfuehrer (Colonel) to Oberfuehrer (Brigadier-General). Again, the appointment was made by butcher Heydrich and, officially, his job was to move into Moscow with the victorious German Army and grab the Kremlin files for study in Berlin. But, again, on the brink of success, the onslaught faltered—this time at the gates of Moscow. Behind the German lines, however, Six's S.S. colleagues were establishing the New Order with an explosion of fury and terror. Hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers were gassed or shot, and it was here that gaswagons were first used to exterminate the population. Batches of 60 or 70 men, women and children were herded into these air-tight vans. Then the engines were started, and the exhaust fumes diverted into the sealed vans killing the trapped victims by carbon-monoxide poisoning. Batches of thousands at a time dug their own mass-graves, were then driven into them and mown down by S.S. men, cigarettes dangling from their mouths,

spraying death into them with tommyguns, until the barrels were red-hot. Bulldozers filled in the graces of the often half-alive victims. Six, now freed from his task in Britain, occupied his time in Smolensk interrogating and identifying captured commissars for execution. And after a while he was called to still higher things, this time by von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister. He was promoted Oberfuehrer (Brigadier-General) and attained the Foreign Office rank of Ambassador, First Class. There he stayed until the nightmare half-world of Nazi-land disintegrated under the outraged forces of Russia and the democracies which Six had written off as decadent and doomed to perish. Justice did not catch up with him immediately. But knowing that if it did, the prospects for him would not be bright, Six, like the commander, Erich Naumann, of his group in Russia, threw off his black uniform of terror and put on the ragged working clothes of a laborer. Now himself a fugitive, he dodged and scuttled about shattered Germany. A year later, in the summer of 1946, the proud wouldbe S..S boss of Britain was caught dirty, disheveled and hungry. Within a few months charges were preferred against him at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials. The charges alleged that Six, as a member of Einsatzgruppe B, was responsible for or participated in crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was further charged with membership in the S.S. and S.D., organizations declared to be criminal. The charges, in detail, were: Count I: During the period 22nd June 1941 to 14th Nov. 1941 in its operational areas, the group staff of Einsatzgruppe B and the Vorkommando Moscow murdered 2,457 persons. Count II: During the period 22nd June to 20th August 1941 in the vicinity of Smolensk, the group staff of Einsatzgruppe B and the Vorkommando Moscow murdered 144 persons. Count III: By being in the S.S. and S.D. after September 1939 the defendant is alleged to be guilty of membership in an organization

declared to be criminal as laid down in Control Council law No. 10, Article 2, para 1 (d). The defense rejected the charges. At the trial—and this is of immense significance in relation to his assignment in Britain—Six's "defense" made it quite plain that he was prepared to see no wrong in the execution of any order, however dreadful, if the order emanated from the Fuehrer. Answering questions, he said he thought the burning down of Jewish places of worship in 1939 was "a shame and a scandal." But when he was asked if the Fuehrer's decree ordering the extermination of the Jews was a shame and a scandal, he said, "No." What was the difference? Six replied that the synagogues were destroyed without orders. The decree ordering the destruction of the Jews was issued by the Head of State, the Fuehrer. It was, therefore, lawful. Six, like millions of others, had taken the easy path. He had climbed on the Nazi bandwagon because he thought it would roll to victory. Although he must soon have realized that Nazism was evil through and through, this highly intelligent university professor embraced the second part of the Oath of Allegiance to the Fuehrer, an oath as outrageous an insult to reason as could be devised: "Do not seek Adolf Hitler with your brains. All of you will find him with the strength of your hearts. Adolf Hitler is Germany and Germany is Adolf Hitler." He elected to throw his conscience out of the window and replace it with an excuse. On the ninth of April, 1948, Judge Speight summed up at length. He concluded, and I quote from the official report, "There was nothing wrong; even mass killings, so long as the order therefore originated with the Fuehrer. ... The tribunal, however, cannot conclude with scientific certitude that Six took an active part in the murder program of that organization [Einsatzgruppe B]. It is evident, however, that Six formed part of an organization engaged in atrocities, offences and inhuman acts against civilian populations. The tribunal finds him guilty under counts I and II. He

was also a member of the criminal organizations S.S. and S.D., and is therefore guilty under count III." The following day, on April 10, 1948, at 10:30 A.M., Dr. Six heard his sentence from Judge Dixon. Guilty on all three counts. Jailed for 20 years. One mystery remains. A man born in Britain is also widely believed in Nazi —and British—circles to have been earmarked for another of the highest posts in Britain. He is Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, who was born in Bradford in 1903. He spent some years in South Africa and returned to Germany in 1914. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933. He became an S.S. General and also head of the Ausland Organization, the section of the Nazi Party concerned with German nationals abroad. In 1940, when he was 35, this set-jawed, handsome Nazi, who spoke fluent English, was an UnderSecretary of State at the German Foreign Ministery. It was because of this background that he was tipped for the near-top diplomatic post in conquered Britain of Reichskommissar. Bohle has denied in a private interview since the war that he knew of any such prospective appointment. When last heard of in the 1960's, he was working as a freelance interpreter and translator in Hamburg. But since then he has vanished from his usual haunts. And what now of Dr. Six? Today he tends his roses in front of his nice house. He wants to forget. He has to run and hide when the probing finger of truth comes near. Perhaps this doctor will always have to run and hide. Perhaps that is the penalty he will always have to pay.

6 - The British Fight On — Underground It was the night the church bells rang in Britain. And those who heard them knew that they meant only one thing: the Nazi invasion had started. In London, on that night of September 7, 1940, the Cabinet decided there were only hours left before it must start. Every sign seemed ominous.

And at seven minutes past eight the grim codeword "Cromwell," which meant that the invasion was in the process of being launched, was flashed to the southern and eastern British defense commanders. It was passed to members of the Home Guard, the newly formed civilian army. And as the bells suddenly crashed out their long-awaited warning to the population from the month's silent steeples, the uniformed civilian army took up their posts. And, quietly and without excitement, the ordinary, un-uniformed men of the secret army, the men destined to be the nucleus of Britain's underground resistance movement, moved into their hiding places. They kissed their wives goodbye and disappeared into the night. They were prepared for many long nights separated from their families—and the possibility, perhaps, that they might never see them again. For these were the men chosen to keep the soul of Britain alive if the Nazi invasion succeeded. It was they whose task it was to steadily organize an underground resistance movement among the civilian population if the Nazis came. A relative, a close friend, may have been among those early members. But, until now, they have been forbidden to tell of their secret mission. Until now official security, which remained after the war, has blanketed the work of these humble and heroic men. Now, with the aid of their commander, then Colonel, but now General (ret.), Sir Colin Gubbins, D.S.O., M.C., the part the secret army was destined to play if the Nazis had come can at last be told. It is the brave story of ordinary men who had no illusion about what their fate, if caught, would have been. Col. Gubbins had seen the Nazis in action at close hand. A year previously, when the war started, he had been in Poland as chief of staff to General Carpenter, head of the British military mission, when the Germans had invaded.

It was an invasion smashed forward with the utmost ruthlessness and brutality. He watched the German Army crash through the Polish defenses and learned of the looting and sacking of towns, the murder of civilians, as the troops moved in. Col Gubbins and the rest of the mission just managed to escape. A few months later he was sent, with a brigade, to Norway, the latest victim of unexpected Nazi aggression. It was a brave but losing battle as the Germans, with all the elements of surprise and planning, hammered north. Colonel Gubbins and his brigade were evacuated to Britain as the Germans swept through the Low Countries and France. A few days later the telephone in his ofiice shrilled. It was the P.C.I.G.S. with an instruction to report to the War Office for a special briefing. In his London office General Sir Colin Gubbins leaned forward in a chair opposite me these years later and, with War Office permission, recalled the event. "The briefing was brisk and to the point," he reflected. "I was told: 'We must expect the German invasion at any time. The enemy will be attacked from the air and at sea as they cross the Channel. Their supply lines will be hammered all the time. " 'As soon as they land, our main force, held at strategic points a few miles inland, will be flung into the battle. But they may achieve some success before the main pairt of our forces can get to grips with them. There may also be parachute drops which could put areas behind the lines in German hands for a while. "'For that reason you are instructed to form an organization to fight the Germans behind their lines. You will report progress directly to the Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, General Ironside [and later to his successor, the then General Alanbrooke] and to the Prime Minister himself.' " General Sir Colin Gubbins went on to recall: "As I left the room I realized that it wasn't going to be a particularly easy task. There were precious few arms and the main priority was going to the Regular armed forces.

"Conferences were held and it was decided to call this secret army 'Auxiliary Units'—a name which seemed harmless and meaningless—in order to keep secret the true nature of our intended work. The idea of organizing guerrilla warfare in Britain in the event of invasion was first put forward by my good friend, the late Major 'Joe' Holland. "He had made a detailed study of underground and guerrilla warfare during the Spanish Civil War and the Chinese Civil War. He had made several long reports to the War Office and his opinions were most valuable, though, obviously, a densely populated country like Britain, with few large areas of really wild country, presented special problems. "What had forcibly struck the War Office about the whirlwind Nazi assault on the Low Countries and France was that the Germans were able to keep their main force close on the tail of the retreating enemy while their supplies rolled up behind them unhindered. "We felt that, if the German Army invaded Britain, their ability to surge forward could be considerably slowed down if pockets of saboteurs could be organized to rise behind the lines and blow up bridges, create road blockades and so on. "They would delay vital supplies and, particularly, divert considerable numbers of troops to guard convoys and supply lines at a time when every man who could run the gauntlet of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force crossing the Channel would be desperately needed on the main fighting front. The number of troops who could thus be held down would have been many times more than our numbers. "Afterwards, if the invasion penetrated deeply, these men would have formed the nucleus of a resistance movement, galvanizing and organizing the civilian population in harrying the Germans. "The idea was first put into practice in Sussex and Kent and part of Surrey, the area most likely to be attacked. There, countrymen who knew the area well were selected from the newly formed Local Defense Volunteers and formed into small units.

"Their job at that early stage—before underground bunkers could be constructed in woods and elsewhere— was to hide wherever they could and pounce wherever and whenever they thought most useful. But, as the weeks went by, it was decided to extend the plan to the entire country. "I divided the country into 20 sectors and established an underground H.Q. of two officers and about ten regular soldiers in each. Then I set out to establish around the sectors cells of suitable civilians who knew the country well. The cells were loosely organized under sector H.Q. "I was told I could not draw upon any more men from our desperately small Regular and Territorial Army. But that did not worry me. Fortunately, I had studied guerilla warfare, too. I did not want any more members of the regular forces. "My secret army had to be composed of men who knew the areas in which they would operate as well as their own homes. Men who could move about from coppice to coppice in darkness and daylight, making use of every bush and every ditch. Men who could appear from 'nowhere,' hit hard and then vanish as mysteriously as they came. "With two or three colleagues, I went personally, to each sector to find my men. The men I was looking for had to have, in addition to local knowledge, some basic knowledge of weapons. Most fit young men were in the Forces. So I mostly sought the men who, like myself, had served in the first World War. They knew the Germans! They were under no illusions that they were tough fighters. "I found them delighted to help and eager for a chance to play a vital role. They had not forgotten their Army training and within a few weeks these veterans were fighting fit. "In Lincolnshire I sought out the fenmen who knew every foot of their marshes and tricky fens. They could be trained to strike inland with lightning speed and then return to their muddy hideouts where any following soldiers would have been quickly lost, drowned or trapped in the mud. In Scotland I found the ghillies who were familiar with every boulder,

gorse clump and hiding place on the wild moors. Here, among the bracken, explosives could be stored unseen. "In the New Forest and Hampshire I sought out the Forest Rangers, men who could appear and vanish in the forest as silently and swiftly as their own red deer. Again, in the tangle of bushes and branches deep in the forest it would take a major operation to track them down. And around the Wash and the south coast I recruited the lobstermen and local fishermen. From boyhood days they knew every creek and nook from which fishing boats might be able to glide silently out and lob explosives at landing enemy units. "In the west country, Kent, Suffolk and other counties, I sought farmers and gamekeepers for my army. They, too, knew every twist and turn of their land. One of the gamekeepers in my army was, in fact, King George's gamekeeper at Sandringham, Mr. W. Clark. "And in South Wales and Cornwall I found the coal and tin miners, men of World War I experience, who could cover miles underground among the web of shafts and tunnels which only they knew. The Germans would have been reluctant to blow up mines even if some men were traced to them because they were most anxious to exploit the economic wealth of the country. "I got those men who were not already in it into the Local Defense Volunteers to give them some official standing so that they could be issued with the necessary arms and so on. It was vital that no one knew, also, that these men had a job different from others, so that, under torture, they would not be given away. '"As an additional precaution, every man had to solemnly swear not to tell even his own wife what his real job was. Everyone thought they were ordinary members of the L.D.V. and later the Home Guard. But they knew that as soon as the Cromwell warning came, as soon as the church bells sounded, they were to disappear into their hiding places. Within a few months thousands of men were members of the secret army.

"After initial training each man received a course in specialized sabotage and guerrilla work. The training was from Friday to Tuesday—over the weekend—so that the men's ordinary work, mostly essential war work, would not be interrupted too much. The H.Q. where this training was given was Coleshill House at Coleshill, in Wiltshire. Each weekend about 40 men arrived there from all over the country. "They were nearly all good shots. One of the South Wales miners was also the First World War's champion grenade thrower. And he could still throw a grenade further than anyone I knew! "Instructors trained the men in how to move silently and unseen over the ground. I suspected that some of the men had done a little poaching in their time because there seemed few tricks they didn't know! They were taught new techniques of how to make sticky bombs, set explosives for the destruction of bridges, and so on. "In each sector Royal Engineers helped where needed to construct our underground bunkers. They were mostly deep dugouts in forests and woods. Some were also in the cellars of old, ruined country houses. One hideout was actually built in a badgers' set. The interlocking tunnels were enlarged and it eventually became quite comfortable. Pipes just above the ground in clumps of bushes provided the ventilation. One hideout was dug into the side of a gravel pit. "At first it was left to the leader of each cell to decide what the targets should be, but as time went on each unit was equipped with a shortwave radio so that activity could be coordinated where needed. "Records and paper work were kept to a minimum so that if a cell—or worse, a sector hideout—was discovered, no useful information could have been found which would have led to the next one. Only the officer leading each group knew where the next was located. This meant that if a man was captured he couldn't, under pressure, give his colleagues away. But the Germans had already warned that members of the Local Defense Volunteers and the Home Guard would be shot as 'illegal combatants.' The secret army, was, therefore, trained in uniform, but in action would have mainly worn civilian clothes to avoid recognition."

It was the grim belief that the invasion had at last come that set the church bells ringing in the bomb-scarred towns and over the rolling countryside of Sussex and the west country on September 7. At first it was thought that August 15 would be The Day—"Der Tag" as Hitler called it. By that date, he promised the German people, he would "bring England to her knees." And many thought that it might be on that day that Hitler, with his sense and love of the melodramatic, would launch the onslaught. But August 15 came and went. And as the R.A.F. battled the seemingly endless Luftwaffe formations trying to clear the sky over Britain, a newspaper seller in the Strand caught the defiant spirit of the day. He scrawled on his placard: " 'Der Tag', Aug. 15—and he's only in Madame Tussaud's." Half a million men had by this time responded to the call to the L.D.V. and the Home Guard, the uniformed civilian army from which Colonel Gubbins chose his men. At first they lacked equipment. In many places shotguns, air rifles, and even the famous, music hall-joke pikes, were their arms. But they and the men of the secret army cheerfully took up the defiant call of Winston Churchill: "You can strike a pebble at Goliath," and "You can take one with you. . . " They were desperate, brave words in desperate days. Silently, as slots were sunk in roads for anti-tank blocks, as minefields were laid and thousands of miles of barbed wire cocooned the coast, the secret army prepared and trained. It was then that four enemy radio stations, purporting to be sited in Britain, burst into full activiy. Each pretended to be representative of a movement in Britain and the intention was to demoralize and confuse. The first was called The New British Broadcasting Station, which, between talks pointing out the uselessness of trying to fight mighty Germany, passed series of messages and coded instructions to alleged agents working for the Germans in Britain.

The second station was called Workers' Challenge, and sought to persuade workers that their homes were being destroyed and they were being asked to fight only because their capitalist employers wished to continue the war to make fat profits. The third station was called Caledonia, and with considerable lack of understanding of the true relationship of the English and the Scots, urged the Scots to make a separate peace with the Nazis. The last of this bizarre setup was called the Christian Peace Movement Station, which based its appeal for a cease-fire on pacifist grounds. There is little evidence that these efforts to sew discontent had any effect. But Mr. Duff Cooper, the Minister of Information, was sufficiently aware of the need to keep up morale to provide penalties for people found guilty of "spreading rumors" and of "alarmist talk." The massive air assault went on by day and by night—the bombs rained down. In the Midlands and in Scotland German parachutes were found lying in fields. It was only discovered later that no one had dropped with them. The intention, as with the radio messages to alleged agents, was to indicate that the blow would come in the northeast, whereas it was planned for the southeast. Close to the parachutes were found midget radio transmitters and marked maps intended to convince the finders that local communications were to be sabotaged. But members of the secret army were not fooled. Preparations went on with the greatest urgency in southeast England. Adolf Hitler stood at Calais, the nearest point of his subjugated Continent to England, and peered through a telescope at the tiny figures of the island defenders on the cliffs of Dover. Nazi long-range guns at Calais let loose a crescendo of shells on Dover to celebrate the event. And as the R.A.F. hit back and pounded the growing concentrations of hundreds of invasion barges, launches and other craft along the Atlantic coastline, and the

Germans tested underwater tanks, Mr. Churchill wrote this note to the War Minister: I have been following with much interest the growth and steady development of the new guerrilla formations. From what I hear, these formations are being organized with thoroughness and imagination and should, in the event of an invasion, prove a useful addition to the regular forces. The secret army dug their hideouts deeper, perfected their fieldcraft—and their explosives. On September 3, four German spies, who had landed by dinghy a few hours earlier, were captured on the Kent coast. They all said they were the vanguard of the invasion. Their job, they confessed, was to radio back news of troop movements and defense positions to the Invading forces which were expected to sail "at any moment now." Reports flooded in on September 4 that Nazi troops were preparing to embark and had actually started to sail from far-off Norway. That night Hitler roared to his madly cheering, hysterical mass audience at the Sportpalast in Berlin: "When people are very curious in Britain and ask: 'Yes, but why doesn't he come?' we reply: 'Calm yourselves. He is corning! He is coming! You have not long to wait' " And so it seemed indeed. The very next day, September 5, came an announcement from the German High Command that all leave throughout the German Army was stopped. R.A.F. reconnaissance planes reported that the number of invasion craft between Flushing and Le Havre had mounted from 70 on September 2 to 205. Hundreds more were photographed moving down the canals and rivers to the coast. Squadrons of the ominous, black Stuka close-support divebombers were spotted on airfields near the coast. From dawn on September 6 immense Luftwaffe formations crossed the south and southeast coast like a menacing thundercloud. The German radio warned civilians to flee London.

"London," bawled the German radio, "is about to be destroyed. If you want to save yourselves leave now." This, surely, was the prelude to the land assault—the warning and then the start of a massive air attack upon London in the hope of forcing tens of thousands of civilians to jam the roads out of London, thus hampering the movement of troops to the invasion areas. That had been the pattern on the Continent. And that was, indeed, as we have read, the official German plan. The highest level of readiness—Alert 1 "Invasion imminent and probably within 12 hours"—was flashed to the R.A.F. The Admiralty signaled the units of the Royal Navy which would try to destroy the invasion fleet to prepare to steam into action. The Army was poised at "maximum readiness." In the late afternoon, as Chiefs of Forces converged on Whitehall, to direct, under Prime Minister Churchill, the defense of Britain, nearly 1,000 aircraft of Luftflotten (air fleets) 2 and 3 of the Luftwaffe roared over the coast towards London. The R.A.F. could shoot down only a few this time of the massive air fleet, the heavy black bombers inside a weaving, heavily armed fighter ring. It was the first time the Luftwaffe had got through, in force, to London. Desperate anti-aircraft gun defense and the relentlessly attacking British fighters turned the sky into a death-flecked inferno. But below an inferno was starting too. At 5:40 the bomb doors opened. Churchill and his defense commanders looked at the black waves of planes overhead and the fires starting below. "I think," said Winston Churchill, "that we should set our plans in motion without delay." By 8 p.m. huge fires were burning in East London and the docks. And as the German bombers turned for home, more waves, guided by the great red seas of flames of the target, were flying up the Thames to keep the attack going throughout the night. This, it seemed, was the hour of testing, the hour of decision. And, at seven minutes past eight, General Alan-brooke, Commander of the Home Forces,

gave the order for Cromwell to be flashed to the eastern and southern dsfense commands. And the church bells rang. In those commands the men of the secret army quietly got up from their firesides and their supper tables, if they were at home, or packed their tools if they were at work. Then they picked up their belongings and quickly, without panic and with a reassuring word to wives if they were near, made their way to their prearranged meeting points. All over Britain road blocks went up. Some motorists who failed to stop were shot dead. Roads were mined and some soldiers, not knowing this, were killed while taking up their positions. General Gubbins continued the story. "The most important hideouts lay a few miles back from the coast. By this time most of them had assumed a 'lived-in' look. Explosives were stocked nearby. Iron rations were checked. Cooking stoves fueled. Elaborate precautions were taken not to use the same approach too often when going to a hideout for fear of making a track which could be followed. "Sticky bombs, fire bombs and booby-traps were primed. Secret-army messengers moved stealthily across the fields to establish contact with other units. Those units which had radios flashed their first operational signals." On Lake Windermere members roared their motor launches into open activity for the last time and then pushed them among the shoreside foliage, ready to strike across the water when the call came. This was Britain at the ready in what looked like the hours before the final onslaught.

7 - Ready-And Waiting Eighteen-year-old farm worker Clifford Riches bade his father and mother a cheery goodnight at Boatwright's Farm, Mendham, Suffolk, and opened the door.

"Have you got your sandwiches?" the sandwiches she bad so hurriedly made, he heard his mother ask. "Yes, thanks," said Clifford. "Will you be long, d'you think?" she asked again. He turned and looked back into the warm room. "I don't know, mother," he said. "But don't worry...." And Clifford Riches, whom his parents thought to be an ordinary Home Guard private, disappeared into the night to join the Secret Army. Clifford Riches was exempted from regular military service because he was a highly skilled farm worker producing valuable food upon which the country depended. But now, a rifle over his shoulder, he quickly cut across the fields, skirted the hedge at the top of Ten-Acre, and then vanished into the woods. Cutting through the fern and the bushes already laden with blackberries, he arrived at a clump of brambles. "Private Riches, 202," he said. A guard appeared from the foliage of the brushes. "Enter!" he said. Then, "No darts at the 'local' tonight, Cliff." "Doesn't look like it," Clifford Riches replied, and bent to lift a trapdoor beneath a layer of leaves and twigs. Then he disappeared. The bunker was warm and airy and seven men already waited by the light of an oil lamp. Each was busy with his various task. There were bunks to sleep eight men and they had already experimented at remaining completely underground for 48 hours. There seemed no reason why there should be any limit to how long they could stay. There were several weeks' supply of iron rations, an oil cooking stove and a toilet. Operations would be carried out in the dead of night. They would lay low during the day. Eighteen feet low, in fact. Clifford Riches, secret army, was the unit's high-explosives expert. Carefully he checked his charges.

"Why was I picked? Well, I suppose they thought I had a fair amount of 'nerve,' that's all," Clifford Riches recalls. "I knew the countryside and I and the rest of the boys reckoned we could have given the Jerries a rough time. We learned how to shoot accurately with a rifle, tommygun, Sten gun and revolver up to 100 yards at night. "My explosives were to be used on enemy tanks, lorries and other vehicles, as well as on bridges. "Every man had a fighting knife with which to kill quickly and silently. Our patrol of eight men consisted of six privates, one corporal and one sergeant, all officially members of the Home Guard. There was an entrance and an exit. We were particularly careful to take long strides and place our feet very gently on the ground when entering and leaving the bunker for fear of making tracks in the woods." Glyn Jones, of the Rumney Valley, South Wales, was also an ordinarylooking man, doing an ordinary mining job, and seemed another ordinary member of the Home Guard. He was another member of the secret army. "Even if the Germans had taken over and forced men to work in the mines, we felt it would have been comparatively easy to store TNT for sabotage amid the charges used in the mine," he said. "I and my patrol of miners knew pretty well every foot of the shafts. I at least, had been working in them since a boy, apart from the time of the First World War when I was in the Army." Glyn Jones spent two weekends at training courses at Coleshill House. "It was hard work, but by the time we were organized—and that was quickly— the Germans would have had a tough time." At Weymouth the secret army recruited an old sailor, Bill Wright, a veteran also of the 1914-18 war. "There are very few people who know the water and currents around here better than I do," he said. "My job was to row the boys quietly at night towards any German harbor installations and wait while they fixed charges. No, I wasn't in the Home Guard. I had no uniform except my oil-skins and my sou'wester...."

The secret army was ready. The Germans, as well as the British, envisioned that the invading forces would get a foothold in Britain before the deciding battle started, before the main British forces could be rushed to the main invasion area. What were the precise invasion plans which Britain would have been called upon to combat? Where would the secret army and men like Clifford Riches have first gone into action? The German military invasion plan, drawn up by General von Brauchitsch, Army Commander-in-Chief reveals this exactly. It shows the first areas intended for occupation, the areas expected to be won in the initial assault. Once again, I quote from German plans. The instructions, signed by von Brauchitsch, are detailed and meticulous. They leave no doubt that the assault, once launched, was to be in earnest, and was to be smashed home with ruthless, relentless determination and with the skill and experience that had already shaken the world: The Commander-in-Chief of the Army H.Q.OKH,

30 August 1940

General Staff/Operations Branch (Ia)

No. 480/40g.Kdos. Instruction for the Preparation of Operation Sea Lion 1.  Task The Supreme Commander has ordered the Services to make preparations for a landing in force in England. The aim of this attack is to eliminate the mother country as a base for continuing the war against Germany. The order for execution devolves on the political situation. Preparations are to be made in such a way that the operation can be carried out from 15 September.

While continuing with its occupation duties in France and maintaining the security of the other fronts, the task of the Army will be to land strong forces in Southern England, defeat the British Army, and seize the capital. Other areas of Britain will be occupied as opportunity is presented. 2.  Code word The operation will bear the code name 'Sea Lion'. 3. The course which the operation will take depends on a number of unpredictable circumstances. Therefore preparations for embarkation, crossing, and initial landing must be flexibly made, so that the High Command can meet unforeseen alterations in the situation without loss of time. Commanders and troops must realize that the peculiar conditions of sea transport render the disintegration of formations unavoidable and that unusual situations will crop up which can only be overcome by very great initiative on the part of all commanders. 4.  Proposed method of execution (a)   The Luftwaffe will eliminate the British Air Force and the armament production which supports it, and it will achieve air superiority. The Navy will provide mine-free corridors and, supported by the Luftwaffe, will bar the flanks of the crossing-sector. (b)  The Army's landing forces will first win local bridgeheads with the specially equipped forward echelons of the first-wave divisions. Immediately afterwards, they will widen these bridgeheads into a connected landing zone, the possession of which will cover the disembarkation of the following troops and ensure early uniform control on the English shore. As soon as sufficient forces are available, an offensive will be launched towards the first operational objective, i.e., Thames estuary heights south of London-Portsmouth. As the British will make counterattacks against the German Troops who have landed first, and as they will resist with every means further German gains in terrain, bitter fighting is to be expected. Command and organization of troops must be equal to the vital significance of these initial actions.

(c)  After gaining the first operational objective, the further task of the Army will be as follows: to defeat the enemy forces still holding out in southern England, to occupy London, to mop up the enemy in southern England, and to win the general line Maiden (northeast of London)— Severn estuary. Orders concerning further tasks will be issued at the proper time. (d)  The current enemy situation, as before, will be periodically forwarded to army groups and armies. 5.  Command and organization of forces At first, Army Group A (with 16th and 9th Armies) will be entrusted with the execution of the tasks allocated to the Army. Whether elements of Army Group B will also be employed as operations proceed depends on the development of the situation. 6.  Tasks of army groups and armies (a)  Army Group A's task. Beginning on orders from OKH, the Army Group will force a landing on the English coast between Folkestone and Worthing; and it will first take possession of a beachhead, where the landing of further forces, aided by artillery fire in the direction of the sea, can be ensured, and where it will be possible to create the preliminary condition for continuing the attack. Early utilization of dock installations on the enemy coast is desirable for the rapid disembarkation of following forces. After the arrival of sufficient forces on the English soil, the Army Group will attack and secure possession of the line Thames estuaryheights south of London-Portsmouth. As soon as the situation permits, mobile formations will be pushed forward to the area west of London in order to isolate it from the south and west and to capture crossings over the Thames for an advance in the direction of Watford-Swindon. (b)  Initial tasks of armies. 16th Army will embark in the invasion ports situated between Rotterdam (incl.) and Calais (incl.). Landing on a

broad front on the Hastings-Folkestone (incl.) section of coast, the Army will occupy an area at least as far as the line: heights halfway between Canterbury and Folkestone-Ashford-heights 20km. north of Hastings. Speedy capture of the dock installations at Dover is important. The Ramsgate-Deal section of the coast, which, for naval reasons, can only be approached when the coastal defense is eliminated, must be taken from the landward side as soon as possible. Arrangements will be made to use paratroops for the speedy capture of the high ground north of Dover: this operation will take place at the same time as the landing. 9th Army, landing simultaneously with 16th Army between Bexhill and Worthing, will occupy a beachhead at least up to the line: heights 20km. north of Bexhill to heights 10 km. north of Worthing. It must be realized that only the first echelons of the three first-wave divisions can be shipped across the Channel for the Army direct from Le Havre; the fourth division and the later echelons and waves, starting from Boulogne, must cross under the screen cover of 16th Army better protected crossing-sectors, and must be disembarked east or west of Eastbourne as the situation dictates. The use of paratroop units for the capture of Brighton will be arranged. Boundary line between 16th and 9th Armies: Boulogne(9) Hastings(9)Reigate(16). Separate orders will be issued regarding the time of landing on the English coast. The intention is to land at daybreak. Dependence on weather and tides, however, may necessitate a landing in broad daylight. In this case, extensive use of smoke is ordered (with the aid of aircraft, vessels, and artillery). (c) Army Group B's task. Army Group B will not participate in the initial phase of the operation. If the naval situation develops favorably, the Army Group, starting from Cherbourg, may be employed later to force an air and sea landing in Lyme Bay, and to occupy, first

Weymouth and the high ground 20km. north of Weymouth—15km. north of Lyme Regis. From here, an advance would on instructions from OKH, be made in the direction of Bristol. Later, elements of Army Group B may receive the task of occupying the counties of Devonshire and Cornwall. Army Group B will, in conjunction with the naval authorities, decide on embarkation ports and determine their capacity. Its landing troops will be assembled in readiness, so that, on orders from OKH, they can be brought up for embarkation within five days. The following instructions for assembly and organization of forces, which primarily concern Army Group A, are also valid, where applicable, for Army Group B. Von Brauchitsch's Instructions went on to emphasize the need for speed in establishing as powerful a bridgehead as possible—before the Royal Navy could get into main action and before the main defense forces could be rushed to the threatened area. Men and weapons should be ferried across as rapidly and in as large numbers as possible without paying scrupulous attention to organic cohesion. The essential point is to form battle groups in accordance with the task to be carried out.. .. Units of panzer and mobile formations, especially U-tanks (underwater tanks which had been tested for months on the Continent) will be included early in the landing echelons. Arrangements must be made to send on troops of medium artillery for use as coastal artillery on the far shore, so that the stretches Calais-Deal and Boulogne-Hastings are covered as early as possible by artillery on both coasts (Artillery Commander 106's Group and, later, 1st battery 84th Regiment).... Special measures to provide a curtain of fire against land targets during the landing will be vigorously improvised by all commands.... Each landing unit in the foremost echelons must be so organized that, after the landing has taken place, it is suited for independent combat

tasks even on the smallest scale. The commanders of all units will accompany the front-line troops. Von Brauchitsch detailed the assembly points on the Continent for his divisions and outlined the bombing tasks of the Luftwaffe. He added: Preparations for the landing require special secrecy. The fact a landing in England is being prepared cannot be concealed. It is therefore all the more important to keep the time of the proposed landing and the location of the crossing sectors secret. Measures have been taken to give the appearance of a projected landing on the east coast of England and in Ireland. Details have been passed to the commands concerned. General von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group A, the first Army to land, then made his forecast, dated September 14, of how the fighting would go. This is his report: The leading assault troops of the advanced units and the first echelons of the first wave will land at dawn in the face of more or less stiff enemy defense. Where it appears necessary, artificial smoke will be requested by the troops who land as it becomes light. Some days before S-Day, known coastal batteries and fortifications will be neutralized, or at least reduced in effectiveness, by the Luftwaffe. When local bridgeheads have been won, energetic junior commanders will coordinate the mixed units and will win important features inland. Gradually, weak but coherent fronts will form. These will be increasingly extended by the continual arrival of reinforcements, and will also gradually gain depth. Heavy counterattacks by the enemy, equipped with artillery and heavy weapons, are to be expected very soon. In comparison, our troops will still be weak in numbers and equipment. Stiff fighting will develop. Everything depends on courageous and determined junior commanders, who, exercising strict control over the forces disembarked, must not yield a foot of ground.

Corps and army staffs remaining on the Continent must do their utmost to supply reinforcements to these troops, who will frequently be fighting hard under difficult circumstances. This applies above all to artillery and tanks, as well as ammunition. Senior commanders with small staffs will cross only when the fighting power of the forces landed has been sufficiently reinforced from the rear. They will leave behind their chiefs of staff or operations officers. Extensive staffs (Corps and Army H.Q.) may only be sent over after forces required for the fighting have crossed and progress has been made inland. Thus the higher staffs will gradually transfer control to the island after some days and the supply of further forces will be carried out by the Continental Command H.Q. (Heimatstabe). Premature crossing of complete higher staffs has no value during the small-scale fighting on the coast, and it endangers the uninterrupted flow of further forces, as of further artillery, heavy weapons, and single tank units. At first, therefore, the initial actions on the coast will be directed largely by batal-ion, regimental, and divisional commanders: senior commanders will take over later. Also, the restricted area cannot at this time accommodate vehicles, supply columns and staff of all kinds. After daylight on S-Day, but not before, the Luftwaffe will support the main effort of the leading forces, compensating for the lack of artillery. Other units will hinder the movement of enemy reinforcements in southern England. Important railway lines in central or northern England will not be interrupted until later. Small but complete units of the armored divisions will be incorporated at an early stage in the first wave, in order to support the infantry. The landing of complete armored divisions will take place only when a sufficient area of the island has been won for the use of this arm, which depends for its effect on mass employment. Since landing must

necessarily take place on wide fronts, it will be possible to concentrate these divisions only as penetration is effected into the interior. When the connected bridgehead 20-30 km. deep has been won, days will elapse before a consolidated attack can be launched against the first operational objective. This gradual development of operations, landing, penetration inland, and establishment of the bridgehead, is the probable picture of events. If favorable circumstances allow the operation to be speeded up, our very mobile and flexible Command will be able to adapt itself to this favorable situation as quickly as in former operations. But the days of peril passed. Hitler hesitated—and was lost. As the weeks went by and the regular forces and the Home Guard became stronger, Hitler was forced to look around for other means of winning the war than by conquering Britain. But it was not until November 18, 1944, that the men of the secret army were given the order to "stand down." Even then their existence remained a secret, as the order shows, and these brave men who knew they were doomed if caught could not share public recognition with other fighting branches. Now they can. Here is the order, signed by General H. E. Franklyn, their Commander-in-Chief, recording official appreciation of their services. I am honored to be allowed to make public for the first time this official letter in recognition of the men of the Secret Army. The Commander, CHQ, Auxiliary Units. In view of the improved war situation, it has been decided by the War Office that the Operational Branch of Auxiliary Units shall stand down, and the time has now come to put an end to an organization which would have been of inestimable value to this country in the event of invasion.

All ranks under your command are aware of the secret nature of their duties. For that reason it has not been possible for them to receive publicity, nor will it be possible even now. So far from considering this to be a misfortune, I should like all members of Auxiliary Units to regard it as a matter of special pride. I have been much impressed by the devotion to duty and high standard of training shown by all ranks. The careful preparations, the hard work undertaken on their own time, their readiness to face the inevitable dangers of their role, are all matters which reflect the greatest credit on the body of picked men who form the Auxiliary Units. I should be glad, therefore, if my congratulations and best wishes could be conveyed to all ranks. (signed) H. E. Franklyn

General,

Commander in Chief.

GHQ Home Forces.

18th November, 1944. There followed a further letter from Colonel F. W. R. Douglas, the Commander of the Auxiliary Units. He wrote to all members: The War Office has ordered that the operational side of Auxiliary Units shall stand down. This is due to the greatly improved war situation and the strategic requirements of the moment. I realize what joining Auxiliary Units has meant to you; so do the officers under my command. You were invited to do a job which would require more skill and coolness, more hard work and greater danger than was demanded of any other voluntary organization. In the event of "Action Stations" being ordered you knew well the kind of life you were in for. But that was in order; you were picked men, and others, including myself, knew that you would continue to fight whatever the conditions, with, or if necessary without, orders.

It now falls to me to tell you that your work has been appreciated and well carried out, and that your contract, for the moment, is at an end. I am grateful to you for the way you have trained in the last four years. So is the Regular Army.... It was due to your reputation for skill and determination that extra risk was taken—successfully, as it turned out —in the defense arrangements of this country during that vital period. I congratulate you on this reputation and thank you for this voluntary effort. In view of the fact that your lives depended on secrecy no public recognition will be possible. But those in the most responsible positions at General Headquarters, Home Forces, know what was done, and what would have been done if you had been called upon. They know it well. It will not be forgotten. (signed) Frank W. R. Douglas,

Colonel, Commander,

Auxiliary Units."

30 NOV 44, c/o G. P. O. HIGHWORTH,

Nr. Swindon (Wilts)

8 - When the Nazis Did Come For five long years the Nazis did, in fact, occupy a part of the British Isles and scores of thousands of British subjects became subject to the Third Reich. These Britons were the people of the Channel Islands, the people of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, Sark and Herrn. The normal image of hundreds of thousands of happy holiday-makers basking in the sun of those islands and the many sadly inaccurate stories told in the days immediately following the occupation have combined to build a conflicting picture. Except, that is, in the minds of those who endured those black years.

There are few who do not carry the scars of those years in their minds. There are many who paid for them with their lives. It was on June 16, 1940, that the British Chiefs of Staff decided that the islands, only a few miles from the coast of France, were untenable in the face of the French collapse. Winston Churchill tenaciously argued that not one square foot of British soil should be given up without a fight. But even he had to bow to hard military facts. Every soldier, every rifle, was needed to defend the mainland. The holding of the Channel Islands would have meant an immense diversion of our defensive power while the islands themselves were of no strategic value. Ships were sent to evacuate everyone who wanted to leave. Those adults who wished to stay to look after their homes and their farms or who were in essential services could send their children to Britain where they would find good homes for the rest of the war. Of the 90,000 population of the Channel Islands, about half the population of Guernsey and about one-fifth of the population of Jersey decided to leave. Alderney was completely evacuated. Only a few people remained on Herrn, but Sark remained almost static in its numbers. Those who elected to remain and risk the worst were told: The Channel Islands have little strategic importance. Acts of sabotage can have little effect on the outcome of the war. There is, therefore, no point in risking your lives and those of your family by organizing a resistance movement. Give the Nazis no more assistance than you are forced to do—and wait. It was, therefore, to the Channel Islands, ordered not to resist, that the Nazis came. In this way the Nazis faced a different problem from that which would have met them on the mainland where all were girded to resist. But although acts of large-scale sabotage were few because of the ease with which reprisals could be carried out upon the population, the machinery of the Nazi terror with its apparatus of inhumanity, fear and sudden death came to the Channel Islands, as it had come to the Continent, and as it was planned, in greater severity, for the British mainland. Perhaps it was a little

less obvious, perhaps ivith a wary eye that the unbowed British mainland could strike to retaliate. A concentration camp, with its unspeakable horror, was set up on Alderney. Every man and woman who had been born in Britain was deported to the Continent and imprisoned. Jews were arrested and consigned to the extermination camps of the Continent. Freemasons were arrested. Food rationing was clamped on the population and rations were progressively reduced to a point permitting only bare survival, except for a lucky few who ran farms or were black-market organizers. Any derogatory mention of Germany meant retribution. Radio sets were confiscated and many who kept them received brutal punishment. Hundreds of households were forced to billet German troops and hundreds of households were wrecked in orgies of violence. Brothels were opened for the Nazi forces. The Military Secret Police were always waiting to pounce. Silverside, the headquarters in St. Helier of the Geheimefeldpolizei, the military Secret Field Police, came to be regarded with fear, and jackboots thudded suddenly against front doors during the night. By the war's end scores of Channel Islanders had paid with their lives in Belsen and Auschwitz for the slightest infringements of German orders, or were released, when victory came, wasted, near-dying wrecks. The Channel Islanders do not talk easily about their ordeal. For many, the five years under the swastika were years of degradation, pain and death. They are memories most try to forget. After the war they could not point to acres of ruined homes or to tragically long air-raid deathrolls. They had been spared the combat of man-toman violence. But there had been other battles which they felt that few would understand. Like a family who has suffered bereavement and tragedy, they do not care to publicly proclaim the anguish of those years nor do they easily talk about them. I am, therefore, grateful to many quiet and brave men who have enabled me to write this last chapter. It was on June 24, as the Nazi Army flooded to the French coast, that King George VI sent this message to the Channel Islands:

For strategic reasons it has been found necessary to withdraw the armed forces from the Channel Islands. I deeply regret this necessity and I wish to assure my people in the Islands that, in taking this decision, my Government have not been unmindful of their position. It is in their interests that this step should be taken in the present circumstances. The long association of the Islands with the Crown and the loyal services the people of the Islands have rendered to my ancestors and myself are guarantees that the link between us will remain unbroken, and I know that my people in the Islands will look forward with the same confidence as I do to the day when the resolute fortitude with which we face our present difficulties will reap the reward of victory. George R.I. It was a pity that this royal message was not given the widest publicity in the Islands by the civic heads to whom it was addressed. There were many thousands who did not know of the receipt of this sad but confident and inspiring royal declaration and who felt left in the lurch without explanation. No newspaper was supplied with it for publication and no official steps were taken to see that the B.B.C. or any other medium made known the fact that the Islands were undefended and unarmed until the first act of Nazi ruthlessness had occurred. There were tearful scenes on the quays as, sadly, parents watched their children walk up the gangplanks of the evacuating boats. The last British troops from a machine-gun school on Guernsey had gone, the last units withdrawing from reeling France had passed through. And now a quiet expectancy settled upon the islands. They were quite alone. On the two main islands, Jersey and Guernsey, the civic heads decided that essential services should continue and that an attitude of formal correctness should be shown when the Germans arrived.

Mr. Victor Carey, the quiet and studious Lieutenant-Governor and Bailiff of the island of Guernsey, drafted this communication in readiness for the enemy: Guernsey,

27th June, 1940.

The Officer Commanding,

German Forces,

Guernsey. This Island has been declared an Open Island by His Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom. There are in it no armed forces of any description. The bearer has been directed to hand this communication to you. He does not understand the German language. {signed) Victor Carey The note was written in English and French and handed to Inspector W. R. Sculpher, the chief of the Guernsey Constabulary, who had agreed to meet the Germans wherever they landed. Major Ambrose Sherwill, M.C., the Island Procureur, or Attorney-General, a man of shrewd intelligence and courtesy, was elected President of the newly formed "Controlling Committee" of eight who were to try to run the island under the occupation. In Jersey, Alexander Coutanche, the Island's bailiff, and C. W. Duret Aubin, the Attorney-General, prepared to formally hand over the island. The banks and shops remained open. Life had to go on. Then, on Friday, June 28, it happened. It was evening and Major Sherwill was making a speech of reassurance in Guernsey's main street in St. Peter Port. Suddenly, at 6:45, six German planes wheeled from the sky and swept down in a murderous storm of bombs and bullets upon the peaceful, defenseless population. Blasts of pink light flashed as the bombs fell. Men, women and children were thrown against walls. Explosions crashed as flying debris and black smoke mushroomed upwards. Machine-gun bullets whined amidst the screams.

Again and again the Nazi planes soared and dived to deliver their cargoes of death. The main attack was concentrated on the harbor. It lasted fifty long minutes and then, almost as suddenly as the noisy terror, came silence. Slowly, unbelievingly men crawled from their hiding places. Twenty-seven men and four women lay dead, 39 others lay groaning in the rabble and the dust. Blood mingled with the juice from tomatoes in tracks at the harbor— the Nazi airmen's main target: tomatoes for England! At St. Helier it was the same. The peaceful evening was suddenly filled with the shriek of falling bombs aind the screams of the wounded among the bodies which lay silent and quite still. The pilots returned to machinegun the dead, the dying and the injured where they lay. In Jersey eleven were dead and ten were seriously injured. Then on both islands, the pilots flew off to machine-gun hay-makers in the fields, families in the gardens, and an ambulance on a road. Farcically, on that Friday night the B.B.C. 9 p.m. news announced that the islands had been demilitarized—two hours after the death-dealing air raids on a defenseless people. Saturday passed with eerie expectancy. Then, at about 1:30 on June 30th, Sunday afternoon, three German machines landed at La Villiaze Airport, four miles outside St. Peter Port, Guernsey. A minute later the first airman jumped to the ground and stood on British soil as a conqueror. But three British fighters appeared overhead and the fliers hastily took off again. Just after six o'clock the planes came back and shortly after 7 p.m. the first Nazi barked his orders on occupied British soil. Inspector Sculpher and three policemen were racing by police car to the airport when they spotted three German Air Force officers, one holding a machine gun, coming towards them in a commandeered car. The Germans pulled to a halt in front of them, blocking the road. The senior officer got out of the car and with the machine gun trained on the police ordered: "Get out!" They were ordered into the car again, this time with two Germans by their side, and told to drive to the airport. There they were told to stand with their backs to a wall of sandbags while more airmen, armed with pistols and rifles, surrounded them.

Asked the senior German officer of Sculpher, "Are you the chief man of this island? Do you give this island to me?" Sculpher merely handed over the Lieutenant-Governor's letter. The officer read it and snapped, briskly: "Take me to Carey and Sherwill." A police sergeant took the officer to Mr. Carey's home and there the officer told him to go immediately to the "German headquarters" which had been set up at the Royal Hotel on the seafront; then he called on Mr. Sherwill. At the Royal Hotel another officer questioned them about the island. Just before midnight, the first already-drafted German order for the island was read and copies were handed over with the instructions that they should be printed "in large type" on the front page of the next morning's Guernsey Star. This is what islanders read the next morning, their first of German occupation: ORDERS OF THE COMMANDANT OF THE

GERMAN FORCES IN OCCUPATION OF

THE ISLAND OF GUERNSEY (1)  All inhabitants must be indoors by 11 P.M., and must not leave their homes before 6 a.m. (2)  We will respect the population in Guernsey, but should anyone attempt to cause the least trouble serious measures will be taken and the town will be bombed. (3)  All orders given by the Military Authority are to be strictly obeyed. (4)   All spirits must be locked up immediately, and no spirits may be supplied, obtained or consumed henceforth. This prohibition does not apply to stocks in private houses. (5)  No person shall enter the aerodrome at La Vil-liaze.

(6)   All rifles, airguns, pistols, revolvers, daggers, sporting guns and all other weapons whatsoever, except souvenirs, must, together with all ammunition, be delivered at the Royal Hotel by 12 noon today, July 1. (7)   All British sailors, airmen and soldiers on leave in this island must report at the police station at 9 a.m. today and then must report at the Royal Hotel. (8)  No boat or vessel of any description, including any fishing boat, shall leave the harbors or any other place where the same is moored, without an order from the Military Authority to be obtained at the Royal Hotel___ (9)  The sale of motor-spirit is prohibited, except for use on essential services, such as doctor's vehicles, the delivery of foodstuffs, and sanitary services where such vehicles are in possession of a permit from the military authority to obtain supplies. These vehicles must be brought to the Royal Hotel by 12 noon today to receive the necessary permission. The use of cars for private purposes is forbidden. (10)  The blackout regulations already in force must be observed as before. (11)   All banks and shops will open as usual. THE GERMAN COMMANDANT of the

ISLAND OF GUERNSEY

July 1, 1940. Major Albrecht Lanz arrived to take command, accompanied by Dr. Maass, his Chief of Staff. Meanwhile, as the Germans confronted the island representatives with their orders, a formation of giant Junkers troop-carrying planes brought in the first German troops and representatives of the German Navy. And a swastika flag flew above the Royal Hotel.

Next day, as the islanders read the German orders and at last grasped the reality that they were under the heel of the enemy, no less than 178 of the immense black Junkers planes roared low over the island and brought in more troops. That day also, July 1, a German plane droned over Jersey and dropped three copies of an ultimatum, signed by General Richthofen, Commander of the Luftwaffe in Normandy. It announced that the island would be occupied on the next day and made these demands: A white flag of surrender to be flown from all houses and buildings, all radio messages to cease, representatives of the authorities of the island to be at the airport to surrender the island. If this was not done, warned General Richthofen, a heavy bombardment of the island would follow. That day the first German planes landed at the airport. Mr. Alexander Coutanche, the Jersey Bailiff, and Duret Aubin, the Attorney-General, drove to the airport. They were met by armed Germans and driven to the post office where the last cable links with England were cut. A stiff and upright officer, wearing a monocle, introduced himself: "I am Captain Cussek," he said. "I am the Commandant of Jersey." Alderney was occupied on the next day, July 2; Sark on July 3; both by German forces from Guernsey. A few days later parties landed on the islands of Herrn and Jethou. Berlin radio made the most of the victory. The Channel Islands were always referred to as "the British Channel Islands" to emphasize that British soil was being occupied. At first the behavior of the German troops was "correct." There were no wholesale shootings, looting or mass arrests. There was no need. The population had been told by the British authorities not to resist.

For the moment, while Britain held out, the Nazis were happy to make great propaganda out of their behavior in the Channel Islands as an inducement to Britain that it would be foolish to resist a German invasion and the "inevitable" victory of the Third Reich. The Germans said that if the population behaved, they would regard them as "Normans," as neutrals, not as the hated English. But soon the mask began to slip. The population were told they were to pay for the entire, crushing cost of the occupation. Soon families were to be thrown out of their houses to billet the ever-growing number of Nazi troops. The evil English, people born in Britain, and Jews and Freemasons were to be deported. Death, terror, slave-labor and the setting up of a concentration camp with all its horror were to come. The pattern planned for Britain began to show in its brutal reality. It is fortunate for the people of Guernsey that among them they had a trusted and trained observer to record the memory of those black days. He is Frank W. Falla, a highly respected and responsible journalist. He was then assistant editor of the Guernsey Star, and is now an industrious freelancer. His recollection of the early days of the occupation is factual and coldly frightening. He is able to recall the first four of the five years of the occupation to me, because Frank Falla, a quietly spoken, unassuming and resolutely courageous man, paid the penalty so many Britons on the mainland would have paid for resisting the Nazis and came within a fortnight of death in a German prison. He describes it in this way: "Guernsey was a glorified concentration camp. We were bound utterly by the sea with the Germans solidly entrenched in and around the civilian population. At one time the Nazis soldiery numbered 3,000 more than the civilian population of 23,000. "Sabotage in Guernsey was quite impossible and useless. The best people could do was to remain silent, passively resisting the presence of a detested enemy.

"The Germans were insidiously cruel, arrogant and showed no respect for persons, property, age or sentiment. They were the upperdogs and we were the conquered. "Rationing started immediately and was progressively reduced to starvation level. At one period rations for one person per week cost only 2.5 d. It was composed of two ounces of macaroni and two ounces of oat flour. Listening to the B.B.C was banned and all radio sets were ordered to be surrendered. Many hotels were turned into utter ruins. "Householders were being perpetually evicted to make way for troops, sometimes at a moment's notice. Some were ordered to leave all their belongings for the comfort of the Nazi soldiery. At best they could expect only 12 hours' warning. "During these operations the Germans commandeered the furniture of people here and those who had evacuated to the United Kingdom. Much of it was shipped back to the Fatherland as booty from 'conquered British soil.' Such things as were bought were paid for either with useless German marks or with 'indemnity chits.' "Even over the most passive person was the threat of terror and death. Hundreds of English people, including First World War veterans, were deported and imprisoned in Germany. Men and women—they all went. Young men of military age were constantly under threat of deportation for forced labor work in Germany or the occupied continent. Away, too, were taken the Jews and Freemasons. Guernsey was turned into a fortress and we were its slaves. Cattle thefts and killing were prevalent; foodstuffs were stolen by the Germans as they grew hungrier. One old couple was cold-bloodedly murdered for a Red Cross food parcel but, as usual, the Germans said it was not their troops who had committed the crime, but some of their slave workers, Georgians. "The dreadful level of starvation and privation to which the Nazis reduced the civilian population can be imagined by the market price at which goods could sometimes be bought on the black market: 1 lb. of butter, £2- 10s; 1

lb. of flour, 12s; German loaf of bread, £ l-4s; bar of soap, 10-8d; 1 lb. of English tea (normal retail price 2s-8d) £28; one egg, 7s-6d; one hundredweight of potatoes, £6; a bottle of H.P. sauce, £2-6s; a tin of Ronuk floor-polish £2-3s; one nutmeg, 10s; a second-hand bicycle, £24. "We made tea from parsnips, carrots and vegetable and fruit leaves; tobacco from precious dried potato peelings, bramble leaves, rose petals and even grass. "For us there were only three inspirations: the sound of Big Ben, the defiant voice of Winston Churchill on our illegal radios, and the sight of a Royal Air Force plane...." Shops and stores in the Channel Islands were, in effect, looted under the guise of legality with worthless German occupation marks which had been heaped upon the occupation forces. Soon windows and counters were bare. Jewelery, clothes, curtains, food, all were soon on their way to the Fatherland after being as good as stolen. Luxury drinks like brandy and champagne were commandeered for the Nazi officers. Trades union and other meetings were banned and a picture of Adolf Hitler appeared over the entrance to the Caumont Palace Cinema at St. Peter Port. Only German propaganda films could be shown. And as a strange and ghastly establishment, a concentration camp, began to rise upon Alderney, merciless punishment was meted out to those who opposed the New Order in Europe. Life under the jackboot was an experience best understood in terms of individuals. Marcel Brossier, a quiet man, committed one impulsive act in defiance of the Germans. He cut a telephone line. There was no trial. He was shot. Louis Bernier released a carrier pigeon with a loyal message for England. He was shot. Francois Scornet committed the monstrous crime of "supporting England in the war against Germany." What he did was not specified in the public warning which was issued. It merely stated that he, too, had been shot.

It is irrelevant in considering the experience of Nazi rule that, in the rather exceptional case of the Channel Islands, officially ordered to submit to German occupation because of the hopelessness of their position, officers and men behaved in the main "correctly" and at times performed acts of kindness providing persons did not offend against their laws and rules. It was the relationship of a strict master with a dog. If the master's every whim was obeyed, punishment was avoided. If not, punishment was meted out. Subservience—or apparent subservience—was the only behavior tolerated. And even if any German felt otherwise, he was as much in the grips of the Nazi machine of repression as anyone else. If he was the master of the Channel Islands he was also the servant of the ruthless Nazi State. Orders were orders, and the Nazi ideals were that "might is right," and the belief in the Master Race. It matters little whether the Germans, for example, who shot Marcel Brossier, Louis Bernier and Francois Scornet were individually pleasant men or unpleasant men; whether they were correct in their manner, allowed the doomed men to kneel in prayer before executing them or gave them last meals of their choice. They were still shot for "cutting a telephone line," "releasing a carrier pigeon with a patriotic message." "supporting the war against Germany," just as others died in concentration camps for giving food to starving Russian prisoners or possessing an "illegal" radio. That individual men also tried to date local girls and sometimes offered cigarettes to the conquered is a matter of trivial consequence viewed beside the whole. Mr. Alexander Farham was an ordinary citizen who ran a garage at the Promenade in Jersey. After the Germans came he continued repairing the few cars permitted to be used by civilians for essential services. "Then," said Alexander Farnham, "the Germans started bringing in cars that they had commandeered for their own use for repair. At first I carried out this work. Then, one day the Germans started driving in trucks to be fitted with a special mounting for machine guns.

"I realized that these trucks might be used against our own people or to fight a possible British landing. I decided that not only was it wrong that I should do this work, I decided that it was wrong that I should do any work for the Germans. "On the next day a Luftwaffe officer brought in a car for repair. I told him: 'I have made my decision. I do not work for the Germans.' The officer ordered me to carry out the repairs. I still refused. His face reddened with anger and he shouted: 'You'll pay for this.' "The next day a party of officers called and delivered an ultimatum: 'Work for us or get out.' I said I would rather lose my garage than work for them. "My garage was taken over and German engineers moved in to do the work. But I had managed to hide about 200 tires in various parts of the island. They should have been surrendered to help the German war machine. But they were discovered. The Germans had, by this time, established the headquarters of their Geheimefeldpolizei, Secret Field Police, at Silverside, in St. Helier. One Saturday night two members called and said: 'You are to report to the headquarters of the Secret Field Police on Monday morning at ten o'clock for interrogation.' "I knew what it might mean. I thought of my wife, my family. The only way was to deny everything. I felt they could not prove that I had hidden the tires or that they had belonged to me. When I arrived they kept me waiting. It was the standard procedure so that the victim would get more and more nervous. I was questioned over and over for hours. I stuck to my story. Then I was told: 'You can go home for the present. . . .' But when I got home my wife had vanished. A neighbor said, 'The Secret Police came and took her away.' " Mrs. Violet Farnham takes up the story: "At the Secret Police headquarters the Germans said: 'You realize your husband can be shot. But if you tell us the truth and we will try to see he is not punished too severely. After all, you have children. . .' It was a terrible predicament. Yet I was sure that my husband would have stuck to Ms story. I said I knew my husband was not responsible. The Germans got angrier: 'Mrs. Farnham,' one shouted, 'If you

do not tell the truth we will take away your children and bring them up in Germany.' Perhaps only a mother can realize the full horror of such a threat. But all I could do was to stick to my story. Finally, they let me go. When I got home I fell into my husband's arms and wept." No one was safe from the intrusion of the growing number of police spies. People were roughly pushed aside as they spoke, arbitrarily arrested and threatened. One day, for example, a gray-haired old lady sat in a hotel talking to her husband, a retired judge. Her son was in the Royal Air Force and a plain-clothes policeman noticed that she was wearing a small brooch fashioned in the form of the R.A.F. wings and emblem. He ordered her to take it off. She protested, and the Nazi shouted that if she did not take it off he would tear it oft. Her husband said that if that was done he would defend his wife from attack. Immediately the Nazi drew a revolver, tore the brooch from the aging mother, arrested the judge, and with another policeman, forced him to the police headquarters. He was deported to the Continent and his wife died a few months later from shock and grief. Ruddy-faced William Cotillard, a Jersey woodsman, was 38 when the occupation began. "Violence was accompanied by moral decay," he recalls. "The Nazi rule had no room for rights or decency. Within weeks of the occupation hordes of French, and Italian prostitutes were imported. Families were evicted from their houses so that they could be turned into brothels. The Nazis set out to corrupt the local women, too, though they had very little success." Within a year the first orders for Jews were published, the first steps of the path that ended in the furnaces of Auschwitz for most. For even if individual Germans' intentions were sometimes good, they could not resist for long the overwhelming monolithic bureaucracy of repression, death and terror. The common order decided in Berlin spread out and engulfed everyone, whether fitted to local circumstances or not. The New Order could not have exceptions. And, so, as everywhere else under the Nazi heel, the first orders for Jews followed the same pattern as those on

the Continent and which for them led to the extermination of six million of their people. Following the now-established practice of Adolf Eich-mann's Department IVA 4b, the first decreas instructed the Jews to, in effect, seal their own death warrants by registering with the German authorities. The order read: 1.  Persons of Jewish religion, or who have more than two Jewish grandparents, are deemed to be Jews. 2.  Jews who have fled from occupied zones may not return there. 3.  Every Jew must present himself for registration with his family. 4.  Every business conducted by a Jew is to be designated a "Jewish Undertaking," in English, French and German. 5.  Heads of Jewish communities must furnish all necessary documentary evidence. 6.  Contravention of this order is punishable by imprisonment, fine and confiscation of goods. Jews were also ordered to declare all their holdings in shares, estate and business, and forbidden to continue working in 18 named professions and activities. An administrator was appointed to take over Jewish interests without compensation, and they were ordered to be indoors of eight o'clock each night. Eventually, they were rounded up and deported to the death and horror camps of eastern Europe. As planned for Britain, too, all able-bodied "Englishmen" were deported to the Continent—in the case of the Channel Islands, to Germany. On September 15, 1942, this order was published by the Germans: By order of higher authorities the following British subjects will be evacuated and transferred to Germany:

(a)   Persons who have their permanent residence not on the Channel Islands; for instance, those who have been caught here by the outbreak of war. (b)  All those men not born on the Channel Islands and 16 to 70 years of age who belong to the English people, together with their families. Detailed instructions will be given by the Feldkommandatur 515. Der Feldkommant,

Knackfuss, Colonel On September 27 and 28 all those, except the sick, the pregnant and a few specially exempt, were escorted to ships and transported to Germany. Again, as planned for Britain, those found to be Freemasons were deported. As was also intended in Britain, large educational establishments, hospitals and churches were taken over as being "excellent quarters for German troops." German became a compulsory subject in schools. In 1941 the first of thousands of slave-laborers arrived. Most were Russians captured while fighting on the Eastern Front. They were dressed in rags and many had not been fed for weeks. Occasionally, on their journey across Europe, they were let out of the sealed cattle trucks which transported them and allowed to eat grass beside the railway lines. But they were not meant to live. They were to be worked to death building German defenses and were treated in an inhumanly brutal manner. It was they who put the finishing touches to the concentration camp on Alderney with its criminal "trustee" block-leaders and S.S. guards. There, many were shot when they became too weak to work. Stories persist that many were also pushed into the still-liquid concrete of the fortifications when they became too weak to work. These immense fortifications which they were forced to build may well be the tombs of many, but I could find no witnesses. Streets and even houses were gradually renamed by the occupying Nazis as the steady "Germanizing" of the islands went on. The local newspapers,

reduced to single-page size, continued to function, but under the strictest censorship. By 1941 all listening to B.B.C. programs was banned and all wireless sets ordered to be given up. The nawspapers' front pages carried only the wildly exaggerated German war communiqués and versions of the fighting. The reverse side carried local news. For their own troops, the Germans published their own Deutsche Insel Zeitung. It was in these circumstances that amateurs built their own, crude radio sets to hear the B.B.C. news. And it was Frank Falla, of the Guernsey Star, and four others who helped keep hope high by bringing out a daily underground news sheet called "G.U.N.S."—standing for Guernsey's Underground News Service. This was started in 1941 and was distributed in Guernsey and Sark. Some precious copies were also smuggled into Jersey and carefully passed from hand to hand. It was an offense even to possess a copy, let alone produce it. But for twoand-a-half years Frank Falla and his four friends listened to the 9 p.m. and 8 A.M B.B.C. news bulletins from London and then typed a stencil with the precious information and produced an average of 780 words per issue, or 5,400 words a week. Never less than 36 copies were produced each day. From those copies the news was eagerly passed on verbally to many hundreds of people. It was a brave service, for, once involved in the prison system of Nazi Germany, there was rarely any escape except in death. Charles Machon, a linotype operator on the Star, thought of the idea; Frank Falla thought of the title, "G.U.N.S.," with "V's" for Victory at the head of the sheets, and gave the paper his editorial knowledge. Cyril Duquemin, a market gardener, Ernest Legg and Joseph Gillingham, both carpenters by trade, helped in taking listening watches and taking down the radio news. The five brave men, aided by a trusted network of distributors, kept up the work for two-and-a-half years. Then, early in February 1944, it happened. The Germans pounced, tipped off by an anti-British, Irish informer. The five were arrested during February and March 1944, and thrown into jail. There, the Nazis brutally punched and beat Machon and Duquemin

and, a few days later, picked up Falla, Legg and Gillingham, put them on trial and sentenced them to a total of eight years' imprisonment in Germany. Another man, Hubert Lanyon, was sentenced to four months' jail in Guernsey for distributing the news sheet in Sark. Machon, who had four brothers in the British Army, and Gillingham died of ill-treatment and illness, caused by prison conditions. Frank Falla recalls what happened to himself and the people whose only crime it was to tell the truth: "We were transported in the hold of a hell ship to France 36 hours before Dday and warned that if we tried to mount the stairs in the event of an air raid we would be shot on the spot. "We traveled through France where German soldiers turned even the aged and children out of the Metro underground system during air raids, allowing only military personnel to shelter. Eventually we arrived at our first prison at Frankfort-on-Main. "There we were made to get up at six o'clock every morning and work 12 hours each day. Nazi bullies kept us working at full pressure and if prisoners were not quick enough they were kicked, beaten or punched. "Ernest Legg was nearly killed in the prison at Naumburg when he was pushed down a flight of steps by a bad-tempered German guard. One of his legs was injured and he limps badly today and is receiving constant treatment. "A Frenchman was beaten insensible. Buckets of water were thrown over him, then he was flung into his cell and left, day and night, for his clothes to dry on him in the bitter cold. The guards were sadistic just for the sake of it. He died later. "At night in Frankfort we could hear the screams of illtreated prisoners from their cells and the rattle of their chains, sounds which come back as nightmares even to this day. There was no medical attention and the usual food was just an occasional crust of black bread and watery soup. Requests

for medical treatment meant a blow on the head or, at best, an aspirin. After two months alone we had each lost about 40 pounds in weight. The Germans treated their dogs better than they treated us, and one prisoner was beaten mercilessly for trying to steal a meaty-looking bone from one of the ferocious Alsatian dogs. "We met up with other Britons until our party totaled eleven in all, but only three of us survived, although liberation came on April 14, 1945, little more than a year later. A fellow Guernseyman, the late Percy Miller, a C.I.D. officer jailed for possessing a radio set, found the number of deaths and executions in the prison at Frankfurt averaged 35 each week. "Duquemin, Legg and I were moved to Naumburg Prison and there at nearby Krumpa we were given the dangerous job of baring unexploded bombs dropped by the Royal Air Force. It was thought that if the job killed us it would serve us right. But we survived. It was there at Naumburg that we met Canon Cohu, of St. Saviour's Church, Jersey. "He had been a figure of cheerfulness as well as faith in Jersey. He had kept a radio in his organ loft and often loudly, though foolhardily, shouted out the latest news in the streets to his parishioners, or passed it on from the pulpit. "He had been seized and, with two of his parishioners, Nicolle and Tierney, sentenced to prison in Germany. But the Germans would not even let him carry out the last rites over the graves of the English who died. All three men died in German prisons or concentration camps before they could be liberated." These men were only a few of those who died. Two were father and son. One night the Nazis unexpectedly raided the house of Mr. Peter Painter. They found there and old pistol—and a wireless set. Mr. Painter and his son, who bore the same Christian name, were marched out of the house despite the pleas of Mrs. Painter, and thrown into St. Helier jail. A short time later they were sent to Germany. They managed to stay together. But soon son Peter developed acute pneumonia. Dressed in rags, without medical treatment and still forced to

work in the freezing cold, the father took his son into his bunk to try to keep him warm with the heat of his own body. He died in his arms. A few months later the father also died of cold and starvation after three days traveling across Germany in an open cattle truck. A French prisoner wrote to Mrs. Painter telling her that Mr. Painter, senior, had told him before he died that her son had passed away with her name and those of his brother and sisters on his Ups. He said he had hoped that the Air Force would avenge those who had died in the German concentration camps. The story of tragedy and courage which is the story of so many Channel Islands families under the Nazi heel is, perhaps, epitomized by what happened to the Le Druillenec family, of Jersey. Harold Le Druillenec was a school teacher. Steadily, day after day, he carried on the teaching of the children in his care and, conscious of the moral decay and the brutishness which marched hand in hand with the occupying Nazis, he constantly stressed the qualities of honor and integrity. His sister, Louise, was married. Mrs. Louisa Gould, mother of two sons, was a good, kindly woman, but her Christian compassion was to earn the wrath of the Nazis and she paid with her life. She made the mistake of taking pity upon a young, Russian prisoner of war who had escaped and who had begged her help. "He was a gentle, well-mannered young man," neighbors recall. "Mrs. Gould gave him shelter and soon he spoke English so well that he walked about openly, posing as a Jerseyman." But the German Secret Police eventually found out. A squad pounced on Mrs. Gould's home. The Russian was, fortunately, not there, but a Russian book was found. So was a forbidden wireless set. They raided the home of brother Harold Le Druillenec, too, and a wireless was also found there. Both were hauled before a court-martial. Mrs. Gould was sentenced to two years and Mr. Harold le Druillenec to five years' imprisonment, both to be served in Germany.

They were deported to France, where they were parted from each other. Harold le Druillenec arrived at a concentration camp called Neuengamme. Guards with whips and truncheons lined up the prisoners. They were addressed by a cruel-faced prison chief. "You will never get out of here alive," he shouted. "You are here for good. Forget your past now. It has gone. Here there is only one thing you must think about—work! Work for the Reich," Here was the real meaning of Nazism in all its horror, in all its demoniac inhumanity. Old men. . . young boys . . . Frenchmen . . . Dutchmen . . . Englishmen . . . Germans. . . . In that camp, as in dozens of others, men were clubbed to death, children driven mad by sadistic tortures. Brutal guards mercilessly beat the prisoners for not working fast enough, for the slightest mistake, or for no reason at all. Some guards had killed hundreds of men for the pleasure of it. They had only one message to convey: that there was no hope, no future except in craven existence and submission. Frequently prisoners were paraded to see their fellow prisoners beaten or tortured. Some times men were suspended by their hands until they died, or hanged downwards by their feet. Sometimes they would be cut down at the door of merciful death and revived so that new sadism could be tried upon them. Eventually, Harold le Druillenec was transferred to Belsen. The journey took five days, without anything to eat or drink, in crowded cattle trucks with the tiniest air vents. As men died others stacked their bodies at one end. At Belsen hundreds of dead lay around—dead from brutalities, illness or starvation. When liberation came, Harold le Druillenec was helped on to some scales and found that he weighed half his usual 210 pounds. And when he looked in a mirror he turned around to see who was standing behind him. He did not recognize himself. And his sister, Mrs. Gould? She died in the gas chambers at Ravensbruck.

But in the manner which is the spirit of freedom, other members of the le Druillenec family prepared themselves for the day to strike. Risking a similar fate, brother Frank Le Druillenec stole German rifles and ammunition and handed them over to Richard le Druillenec, his nephew, who was a member of a cell of fighters, 25 strong, ready with others to rise against the Nazis. The Germans' elaborate military defenses were charted. The charts were photographed and then smuggled out, through France, to Britain. The photographer, Stanley Green, was caught. He, too, was sent to Belsen concentration camp, but he survived and is now the chief projectionist at a St. Helier cinema. Mr. P. G. Warder, an engineer, constructed a radio transmitter and stood by ready to transmit details of German troop movements to Britain if the islands had to be recaptured by force. Railway lines for transporting ammunition to the defending guns were sabotaged, telephone lines were cut. There are many who say that the explosion of a German ammunition dump at the Palace Hotel, Jersey, was an act of sabotage. Then, in May 1945, liberation came to the Channel Islands. The German garrisons surrendered and British troops returned and reoccupied the only British soil encompassed by the terrible and tawdry empire of the Third Reich. The heroes who defied the Germans returned to be nursed back to health and strength. Some did not return. Yet the uncomfortable fact had to be faced that about three per cent of those in the islands, a few of them British subjects, but mostly foreign-born, had not only cooperated with the Germans, but had denounced many brave men and women. For that was how Frank Falla, Harold le Druillenec and Alexander Farnham had been caught, why Louisa Gould, Charles Machon, Percy Miller, Joseph Tierney, Joseph Gillingham and several others had died.

Some of these informers quickly left the island and never returned. It can only be said that in every community there are people who, driven by spite and hampered by lack of intelligence and honor, will be found wanting in any test. But the story of the Channel Islands' occupation is, overwhelmingly, one of honor and bravery in the face of terror and fear. The only extraordinary part was that those who were imprisoned and terribly treated in their fight against the Germans were not in any way compensated or rewarded by the Island authorities; or were the families of those who died. This seems to be a sad omission. But those for whom they risked and gave their fives will always, be in their debt. Perhaps it is due to the unspoken acceptance of Nelson's tenet that "England expects every man will do his duty." Nothing less is expected; anything less beneath contempt. The evidence of the Channel Islands and the terrible experiences of the nations of Europe who came under the black rule of Nazi Germany amply bear out the intention and the horror awaiting Britain and, in time, the rest of the world if the Nazis had won. However terrifying the advance of nuclear science has made the prospect of any future war, one thing is certain: the end for most, at least, would be quick. It will hardly be disputed that the victory of Hitler's hell on earth, permanent in its systematic organization of death, abject slavery and horror, which could have been holding us in thrall today, would have been infinitely, terribly worse.

BALLANTINE WAR BOOKS F307K AIR SPY 50¢ Constance Babington-Smith

The exciting and vital role of air reconnaissance photography in World War II. F313K WHO DARES, WINS 50¢ V. Cowles (original title: The Phantom Major)

The exploits of commando David Stirling in North Africa. 317K KAMIKAZE 35¢ Yasuo Kuwahara & Cordon T. Allred

The powerful story of a suicide pilot who escaped death by an ironic miracle. F318K THE COAST WATCHERS 50¢ Commander Erie D. Feld»

How a handful of men lived for months on Jap-held islands and radioed warning of attack. F323K THUNDERBOLT 50¢ Robert S. Johnson with Martin Caidin

The history of the 56th Fighter Group as told by the leading American Ace. 395K UNDER TEN FLAGS 35¢ (Formerly German Raider Atlantis) Frank & Rogge

The book that is the basis for the big Paramount movie about a fantastically successful German raider. F404K SAMURAI 50¢ Saburo Sakai with Martin Caidin & Fred Saito

The extraordinary account of the Japanese survivor of over 200 air battles. F409K THE RISE AND FALL OF HERMANN GOERING 50¢ Willi Frischauer

The fantastic life and dishonored death of Hermann Goering. 401K THE HURRICANE 35¢ Terence Robertson

A heroic wartime destroyer battling the seas. S4I2K DAYS AND NIGHTS 75¢ Konstantine Simonov

The great Russian war novel. S4I6K GALLIPOLI 75¢ Alan Moorehead

A history of one of World War I's worst blunders. 418K THE PASSWORD IS COURAGE 35¢ John Castle

The British soldier who helped hundreds of Jews to freedom while he was a prisoner-of-war.

F4I9K THE FIRST AND THE LAST 50¢ Adolf Galland

A history of the Luftwaffe. F425K A TORCH TO THE ENEMY 50¢ Martin Caidin

The War's most spectacular fire-raid that destroyed Tokyo. Illustrated. F433K THE DANISH RESISTANCE 50¢ David Lampe

How a small country outfoxed and outfought Nazi Germany. S467K ZERO 75¢ Martin Caidin

The inside story of Japan's air war in the Pacific. BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC., Depr. 512

101 Fifth Avenue, New York 3, N. Y. Send check or money order—No stamps, please.