Strix

A BONFIRE ON THE BALCONY

AT this,' some character in G. A. Henty's books was almost certain to exclaim as he handed to the intrepid courier a pregnant missive, `rather than let it fall into the enemy's hands!' It was a sensible injunction. Nowadays, however, secret documents tend, if they are of any real conse- quence, to be lengthy affairs, incapable of being ingested unobtrusively (or indeed at all) in a moment of crisis. During the last war the problem of how to dispose of them in an emergency led to many strange incidents; and although in the story which follows that problem was not really solved, a fresh though glancing sidelight is thrown on the character of Hitler and the tale seems worth telling. heard it lately in Germany from the principal actor, Kapitiin zur See B.

The winter of 1939-40 was an exceptionally hard one. The Nazi attack on France and the Low Countries, originally timed for November, 1939, was postponed again and again. On Janpary 10, 1940 (as some readers may remember), a German aircraft landed by mistake at Mechelen in Belgium. In it were two staff officers who had disobeyed orders that they were on no account to make this particular journey by air; and those orders had been given because the officers carried with them the latest set of orders for Fall Gelb (Operation Yellow), as the Western offensive was code-named.

Admiral Canaris was away when the news reached the Abwehr in Berlin. Even if he had not been away, the im- mediate responsibility lay upon B's branch of the Abwehr, and he worked throughout the night. Clearly the most im- portant thing to do was to discover whether Fall Gelb had been compromised—whether, that is to say, the orders for the violation (then immediately impending) of their frontiers were in the hands of the Belgian General Staff. It was not yet cer- tain that this was the case. If it was not, there were (anyhow on paper) various hopeful possibilities. German agents might intercept or purloin the documents before they reached a level at which their significance could be appreciated; or the two officers might be rescued and smuggled back across the frontier. These were in hard fact chimerical contingencies; but much was expected of the Abwehr. • B, in Berlin, did his best. No results, no news. When dawn came, the only safe assumption was that plans which were intended to—and which temporarily did—change the history of Europe had become known in detail to Hitler's prospective victims. B, very sensibly, shaved.

The lather was hardly off his chin when a message came saying that Hitler wished to see Canaris immediately. B was not only departmentally responsible for attempts to destroy or recover the plans for Fall Gelb; he was also, in Canaris's absence, the senior officer serving with the Abwehr. He got into a car and went off to answer for his chief.

He did not have to wait when he arrived at the Chancellery. Putkammer, Hitler's naval aide-de-camp, was in the ante- rodn. Putkammer had time to utter only one word of adVice or warning before he ushered B into the Presence. `Answer!' he whispered.

`Answer!' It was not, B discovered,. at all easy to do so. He was a man of character and was not intimidated by mere contact with the gros legumes. He knew, besides, more than anybody else did about the matter in hand—the dangers and the possibilities, the pros and the cons of despair. But Hitler was in a fury. 'I felt,' said B, `as if I had been hypnotised. My brain would not work, my will-power had ceased to exist, I was a jelly' The Fiihrer ranted on, dwelling (as well, to .be quite fair, he might) on the gravity of the situation, execrating the culprits, rehearsing the far-fetched remedial measures open to the Abwehr. B stood rather shakily to attention. At last Hitler, having perhaps let off enough steam, got down to brass tacks. 'How long would it take the two officers to get out of the aircraft?' he asked.

B had in fact no very exact idea; but he remembered Put- kammer's injunction. 'Three minutes, my Fiihrer,' he replied as crisply as he could.

'And how bulky were the orders for Fall Gelb?'

B did not knoW. They might have been comparatively short, consisting mainly of amendments to documents already held by the headquarters concerned; or they might have been a completely new set of orders, immensely detailed and swollen by appendices. B compromised.

`They were of approximately this size, my Fiihrer.' he said, indicating with his hands the dimensions of a fair-sized packet. `And how long, then, would they take to burn?'

' B gulped, then plunged. `Six minutes,' he said firmly.

Hitler summoned Putkammer, collected from his desk the requisite volume of foolscap, took it out on to the balcony and. with Putkammer's help, set fire to it. All three men looked at their watches, none more intently than B.

The little bonfire, poked when occasion demandOci by the tyrant's toe, burned itself out in five and a half minutes. When Hitler came back into the room, his whole appearance (B said) had changed. He looked gentle, almost happy.

`You are a remarkably efficient officer,' he told B, and went on, flatteringly, to question him about the details of his past service. The storm had blown over.

The incident appeals to me as a study in the anodyne power of illusion. It was a complete illusion to suppose, as Hitler did, that B knew what he was talking about. Even if B's data had been accurate, and not pure guesswork, it was art illusion to imagine that the time it takes to burn a bundle of foolscap on a balcony is a reliable guide to the time it takes to burn a comparable bundle on a wind-swept airfield, fumbling under flying kit for the matches and anxiously watching as hostile figures close in on you across the snow. And the biggest illusion of all was Hitler's illusion that, by personally carrying out this test, he had somehow reasserted his control over a critical situation.

The documents did in fact fall into the hands of the Belgians and, after a brief interlude during which they were suspected of being a ruse de guerre, their true significance was, I believe, correctly assessed by the Belgian General Staff; certainly their contents were communicated to the British, French and Netherlands Governments. `If the enemy is in possession of all the files,' Jodl noted at the time, `the situation is catastro- phic.' But this, too, turned out to be an illusion, and when, exactly four months later, the German armies surged forward tpwards the Channel, the Allies would seem to have benefited negligibly, if at all, from a preview of their intentions. Indeed, the only person who emergeS from this curious episode with credit of a kind is Kapitiin zur See B. I was not surprised to hear that he ended up as an Admiral.