The Venlo incident was a covert operation carried out by the German Nazi Party's (SD) on 9 November 1939, which resulted in the capture of two British Secret Intelligence Service agents from the German border, on the outskirts of the Dutch city of Venlo.

The incident was later used by the German government to link Britain to Georg Elser's failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, on 8 November 1939, and to help justify Germany's invasion of the Netherlands (then a neutral country) on 10 May 1940.

Background

thumb|left|Map of the city of Venlo, on the river [[Meuse, in 1850]]

After the British declaration of war on Nazi Germany on 3 September 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was still interested in seeking a compromise peace with Germany before too much blood had been spilt. The British Government was well aware of the existence of widespread opposition among the leaders of the German Army.

During the autumn of 1939, the German opposition was extending feelers to the British government. In October, Munich lawyer Josef Müller contacted the British through the Vatican with the connivance of Colonel Hans Oster. Theodor Kordt, the younger brother of Erich, pursued similar objectives in Bern.

The Swedish industrialist Birger Dahlerus tried to establish peace through an early form of shuttle diplomacy, partly performed on Dutch soil. And in early October the Dutch ambassador in Ankara, Philips Christiaan Visser, was communicating peace proposals on the line of the Dahlerus proposals, made by Hitler's former deputy chancellor and then ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen, to the British ambassador Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen.

All diplomatic efforts to avoid a Second World War in Europe during the days preceding the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 had come to nothing. So when a German refugee named Fischer succeeded in winning the confidence of the exiled German Catholic leader, Karl Spiecker, a British intelligence informant in the Netherlands, the British SIS became interested in the information Fischer was offering.

Covert meetings

thumb|upright|[[Walter Schellenberg]]

In early September 1939, a meeting was arranged between Fischer and the British SIS agent Captain Sigismund Payne Best. Best was an experienced intelligence officer who worked under the cover of a businessman residing in The Hague with his Dutch wife.

Subsequent meetings included Major Richard Henry Stevens, a less-experienced intelligence operative who was working covertly for the British SIS as the passport control officer in The Hague.

At the last meeting between the British SIS agents and the German SD officers on 8 November, Schellenberg promised to bring a general to the meeting on the following day. Instead, the Germans brought the talks to an abrupt end with the kidnapping of Best and Stevens.

While the British press were unaware that two British SIS agents were involved in the border incident, Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, was aware, as he recorded in his diary:

  • November 10. Our men, who met, or were to have met, Gen[eral] yesterday, bumped off on Dutch-German frontier. Discussed matter with H. [Lord Halifax] and Menzies [Stewart Menzies]. ... Numerous reports of imminent invasion of Holland.

Chronology

thumb|Reconstruction of the incident in 1948

thumb|Cafe Backus with the German border in the background

The covert meetings leading up to the kidnapping, as remembered by Captain S. Payne Best in his book The Venlo Incident, are summarised below.

  • Major Schämmel was the alias of Walter Schellenberg, as stated above.
  • Major Solms was the alias of Johannes Travaglio, a German major in Division 1 (Air Reconnaissance) of the Abwehr in Munich, the head of which was a close collaborator and friend of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.
  • Colonel Martini was the alias of Dr. Max de Crinis, an SS officer involved in the euthanasia program "mercy killing", in the Central Tiergartenstraße 4, in 1939–1941.
  • Captain von Seidlitz was the alias of SS-Sturmbannführer von Salish, a long-serving SD officer trusted by Walter Schellenberg
  • Lieutenant Grosch was the alias of SS-Hauptsturmführer Christian, a long-serving SD officer trusted by Walter Schellenberg. Best drove his car into the car park at the Cafe Backus for the meeting planned for 16:00 with Schellenberg. Stevens was sitting beside him while Dirk Klop and Klop's driver, Jan Lemmens, sat in the back seat.

Before Best had time to get out of the car, Naujocks' SD men arrived. In a brief shootout, Klop was mortally wounded. After being handcuffed and stood against a wall, Best and Stevens, together with Jan Lemmens, were bundled into the SD car. Klop was put into Best's car and both cars were driven off over the border into Germany. On 29 December 1939 Klop was embalmed under the false name of Thomas Kremp, a communist; his remains were cremated and buried under a false name in the Düsseldorf cemetery in an unknown grave.

Georg Elser connection

Prior to the assassination attempt at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich on 8 November, Naujocks and his squad had been sent to Düsseldorf to support Schellenberg. Even before his private train had returned from Munich to Berlin, Hitler ordered the British SIS officers in the Netherlands be brought to Berlin for questioning. Himmler issued the order to Schellenberg early in the morning on 9 November.

Though Georg Elser, a suspect being interrogated in Munich by the Gestapo, insisted he had acted alone, Hitler recognized the propaganda value of the assassination attempt as a means to incite German public resentment against Britain. On 21 November, Hitler declared he had incontrovertible proof that the British Secret Service was behind the Munich bombing and that two British agents had been arrested near the Dutch border. The next day, German newspapers carried the story. The front page of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung had pictures of the conspirators named as Georg Elser, 'Kaptain Stevens' and 'Mr Best'.

Aftermath

thumb|upright|[[Sigismund P. Best, 1939]]

The Nazi press reported that the Gestapo had tricked the British Secret Service into carrying on radio contact for 21 days after Best and Stevens were abducted using the radio transmitter given to them. Himmler is accredited to quipping, 'After a while it became boring to converse with such arrogant and foolish people'.

The British Foreign Office believed that Himmler was involved in the secret Anglo-German contact of autumn 1939, and that the discussions, involving prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, were bona fide peace negotiations.

The damage inflicted on Britain's espionage network in Europe caused the new prime minister, Winston Churchill, to start his own spy and sabotage agency, the Special Operations Executive in 1940. The incident exposed the fact that the Chamberlain government was still seeking a deal with Germany while it was exhorting the nation to a supreme war effort. That outraged Churchill to the extent that he was against providing support to German opposition to Hitler for the rest of the war.

Hitler used the incident to claim that the Netherlands had violated its own neutrality. The presence of Klop, a Dutch agent, whose signature on his personal papers was gratefully misused by the Germans, provided sufficient "proof of cooperation between British and Dutch secret services, and justify an invasion of The Netherlands by Germany in May, 1940".

Naujocks was awarded the Iron Cross by Hitler the day after the kidnapping. He died in 1952, at age 42.

Fate of British agents

After interrogation at the Gestapo Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse headquarters in Berlin, Best and Stevens were sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Both were held in isolation in the T-shaped building reserved for protected prisoners of the Gestapo.