The Man Who Started the War

By Günter Peis

The True Story of THE MAN WHO STARTED THE WAR

As a key member of Hitler’s sinister secret police, he lied, forged, kidnapped, seduced, murdered… On August 1939 he became the man who started World War II…

“Adolf Hitler, his devastating war machine primed and ready to roll, needed an excuse to touch off World War II.

“The Führer presented the problem to Heydrich, notorious chief of the SD. Heydrich called up Naujocks. Together they worked out plans for a Polish “invasion” of German soil.

“At dusk, August 31, 1939, Naujocks and six chosen men set out for the little border town of Gleiwitz.

“They were in Polish uniforms…

“At dawn, September 1, 1939, the Panzers were rolling across the border.”
“I am me man who started me war…
I lit the fuse in-Europe in 1939—”
—Major Alfred Helmut Naujocks, SD, Berlin
At 26, Alfred Naujocks was the key man in Hitler’s sinister SD organization, the man who:

Sent 35,000 Red Army officers to their deaths
Forged millions of British five pound notes
Set up the world’s most exclusive brothel in Berlin
Staged the fantastic murder plot that touched off the holocaust of World War II
Was himself marked for extermination by his Nazi masters because he knew too much

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lucknow Books
• Release date: Jan 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781786258113

Günter Peis

Austrian-born Günter Peis spent his 18th birthday in a U.S. prisoner-of-war camp. Soon after his release he became the youngest reporter at the Nurnberg Trials. He then became a leading continental journalist, and was the author of They Spied on England.

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Text originally published in 1960 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE MAN WHO STARTED THE WAR

BY

GUNTER PEIS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

SD (SICHERHEITSDIENST) 6

FOREWORD 7

CHAPTER 1—Capture 9

CHAPTER 2—Boyhood 16

CHAPTER 3—The Major 27

CHAPTER 4—Edith 33

CHAPTER 5—Plot Against Stalin 51

CHAPTER 6—Devil’s Workshop 70

CHAPTER 7—Gleiwitz 78

CHAPTER 8—Venlo 91

CHAPTER 9—Kitty 102

CHAPTER 10—Disaster 115

CHAPTER 11—Alfred Buys a Business 119

CHAPTER 12—Sepp Dietrich Again 130

CHAPTER 13—An End to Active Warfare 135

CHAPTER 14—Brussels 140

POSTSCRIPT 151

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 153

DEDICATION

To my friend APOLLO GRANFORTE

Then there was Helmut Naujocks of the SD, a plain clothes expert, who only killed for a useful purpose...his modest contribution to history was the faking of the frontier incident which started the world war.—Edward Crankshaw—Gestapo

SD (SICHERHEITSDIENST)

The most sinister of Hitler’s many Secret Service organizations, the Sicherheitsdienst—literally, chief security officer—was born soon after the formation of the Nazi Party. Its earliest task was to file individual members records. To this was added background information, then spies were employed to fill in the gaps. Nothing, and no one, was sacred to them. Every high-ranking Party man had his own small Intelligence service, and the ludicrous situation could arise that the SD spies would be watching spies who were watching spies. Such was the empire of hate and suspicion; this was the divide by which Hitler ruled.

SD men were, in the ranks, tough, commando-style SS men with a liberal sprinkling of talented burglars, forgers, bouncers and con-men. The officers were chemists, doctors, lawyers, economists, writers.

Naujocks was an adventurer who took the theories from the desks of the executive and put them into practice with the daring, the cunning and the thuggery that he found in the ranks. To the SD, an indispensable man...until he got to know too much.

He and his men were universally hated by all departments of the Party. Their powers were mysterious, their actions unknown. The SD’s creator, Reinhard Heydrich, was one of the most brilliant and ambitious men around Hitler, and, until his death by a British agent’s bomb, he kept tight hold on the department, a hold that assured him of an almost impregnable position. Everybody was afraid of him; his spies were everywhere: the customs official at Lisbon, the barman in the Hotel Adlon, the university lecturer at Leipzig, the black marketeer in Paris, the priest in the Vatican. These were the SD’s own informants; they had nothing to do with the Gestapo or Admiral Canaris’ military Intelligence section, the Abwehr. Many attempts were made to merge the unwieldy espionage networks which operated as rivals, but Heydrich was reluctant to open up his Pandora’s box and let others peer inside; to be a Nazi Party leader, you needed all the fear you could command. Secrets were as deadly as bullets, and your friend today might be your executioner tomorrow.

Walter Schellenberg inherited the SD, and, eventually and too late, the other security services. He, like his predecessor, was vain, pompous and an intellectual, but he was efficient and ruthless, and strengthened the SD considerably, especially outside Germany. As the end came desperately near, however, the whole structure cracked, and trusted officials later fell over themselves to denounce each other to the Allies. Schellenberg himself escaped hanging by talking, though there is good reason to believe that there was much he did not tell and many names he did not mention. He retired to live on a Swiss lakeside, his bitterness alleviated by the moderate comfort of a mysterious pension he received. He died happy in the mistaken belief that his house was being watched and his every movements noted.

Today SD men are scattered throughout Germany and South America, some back in their old civilian jobs, others living on their wits and some, undoubtedly, on loot. Their old power still touches all of them. Said one of his new job—private detective in Vienna—I’m keeping my hand in, you know, for when I’m needed again.

FOREWORD

I am the man who started the war. An incredible claim? Be cynical if you like. It is true. I was the trigger man who lit the fuse to Europe in 1939. The events of that year and those that followed are now so confused, their history so complex, that it is difficult to see things in their right perspective and context. But however hazy their knowledge, people who are uncertain of all but the biggest milestones of that era will say emphatically today that there was no Sarajevo the second, no assassin to start Hitler’s war.

Well, they are wrong. There was a specific incident which began the chain-reaction of violence and bloodshed, and, of course, there had to be one man to engineer the incident—to pull the trigger, so to say. I was that man; but the title I claim gives me no false pride or sense of achievement. This is not a hero’s story. Neither does it depress me with feelings of enormous guilt.

Had I been able to avoid taking charge of the Gleiwitz radio plot it would still have taken place. I think. Anyway, my uppermost feeling today is one of surprise and even astonishment.

Reading the manuscript of this book I felt curiously detached from the tales of murder and intrigue. Was it really me, Alfred Naujocks, who was involved in all this?

I have never been a man for second thoughts or long reflections on my past, and this is the first time that I have seen such a picture of myself painted. It is not a pretty one, I know. Gerald Reitlinger, chronicler of the SS, once wrote that my memoirs would be a gift to history, and hazarded the opinion that they would be written in Buenos Aires. Others have stated categorically that I am dead, and probably hoped I was. I can, at least, understand this last feeling, for my name has probably appeared on more search warrants than that of any other man alive today.

I made millions—literally. The forgery of the British five-pound notes—which is one of the most famous exploits of the German Secret Service—was placed in my hands. Today, I live from hand to mouth. It does not surprise me. Nothing can, now. For twenty years I had to burgle, steal, kidnap and lie. I suppose that is part of Secret Service work everywhere.

All that counts with me in 1960 is that I know no other life well enough to live it, and that in peace I am a failure. I cannot turn myself into a criminal now. I did what my Government told me to do and was decorated for it.

So this is my story. After fifteen years, I am safe to reveal it, or as safe as I ever shall be. It took me two years to tell it to Gunter Peis, the journalist whom I first met at the Nuremberg trials. Until it was finished we shared some terrible secrets, for the world and the history books knew only the consequences of my actions, not what lay behind them.

I am not asking for judgment, or sympathy, or fame. Just read, and draw your own conclusions.

Alfred Helmut Naujocks

Hamburg

CHAPTER 1—Capture

Two American soldiers stumbled across a field in the Ardennes, weary from lack of sleep, numbed by the continuous shock of explosions all around. Dodging from tree to shell-hole, hedge to ditch, they were making their way to the dubious shelter of a farmhouse which an hour ago had been the company rendezvous. Not that that meant anything. An hour ago they had been a patrol of ten men. Now they were the only survivors.

Amid the general cacophony of sound their sixth sense divined the approaching shell; both men flung themselves into a crater. Their crouching bodies were shaken like leaves in an autumn breeze as the earth heaved and shuddered from the shock of the explosion; waves of sound roared over them in a paralysing torrent as they hugged the black mud. Then it was over, and they were still alive.

Opening their eyes, instinct told them they had company. Twisting round, snatching their rifles, they pointed them at a figure lying in the gloom of the crater bottom; a figure in the grey-green uniform of the German Army, though not that branch of it—the Panzers—they were fighting now. The German made no move to reach the carbine at his feet. He made no move at all. Turning his eyes from one to the other he said quietly in English: Would you be good enough to take me prisoner?

There was silence for a moment, then they scrambled to their feet. The war, for the man who started it, was over.

Captain Al Graziano pulled a signal pad towards him and began toying with his pencil. He had set up his field Intelligence office in the cellar of the farmhouse, making a postage-stamp sized area of order in a sea of chaos. Sitting behind a trestle table on a canvas chair, he was surrounded by a confusion of ropes, fencing, empty barrels of wine, rusting farm implements and mildewed sacks of animal fodder.

Three ancient pressure lamps, which finally had yielded to the ingenuity of the American engineers, hissed and spluttered protestingly from the low beams above and behind, leaving the captain’s face in shadow and throwing all their uncertain light on to the prisoner standing before him. Prisoners were rare at this stage of the battle, and could be valuable—if they talked. He didn’t think this one would, somehow. The eyes were a bit too hard, the attitude too self-confident. Still, you never knew your luck.

O.K. what’s your story?

The German folded his arms across his chest. I am permitted, he said slowly, to give only my name, rank and number. You have those already from my papers there. However, I might as well say now that I am not Gunner Alfred Gerber, but Major Alfred Helmut Naujocks, Sicherheitsdienst, Berlin.

Graziano said nothing, but stared hard into the man’s face, groping with his right hand for a cigarette. He fished one out of his tunic pocket and lit it, still not shifting his gaze.

Think you’ll get fancy treatment?

Naujocks shrugged.

I am merely stating the fact; your opinion is your affair.

Again the American considered. Deserters frequently claimed to be someone special, to ensure that they were sent back as quickly as possible. Understandably, they did not want to be recaptured by their own side, if they could help it. But there was a traffic in false papers for scuttling Nazis able to pull enough strings, Graziano knew that well enough. And this might be one of them.

He pulled out from under a pile of files a hard-backed black folder, flipped through the pages and stopped at the one indexed S. Looking up, he said, Ever in France?

Many times.

Lille?

Naujocks thought. Yes.

The name Knoechlein mean anything to you?

Yes.

Remember the Paradis affair?

I was not there.

I didn’t ask that. You weren’t there; no one was. A hundred British prisoners were shot down in cold blood by the fairies. Graziano’s voice had hardened.

Knoechlein a friend of yours?

Captain Fritz Knoechlein, the German replied calmly, was in the 2nd Infantry Regiment of the SS Death’s Head Division. That is my knowledge of him.

Graziano snapped the folder shut, wrote a brief note on the pad and slipped it into Naujocks’ army pay-book. Staring at the name Gerber, A on the tattered cover, he said: You’ve got a lot of talking to do, brother. I’d start thinking fast.

To the guard, who had stood silently at Naujocks’ back during the brief exchange, he said Hand him over to Sergeant Tracy; arrange transport to Caen.

As the two men left, tramping up the stone stairs into the daylight above, he picked up a field telephone, turned the handle and spoke, asking for Combined Intelligence HQ.

Major Richards, please. He introduced himself. I’m sending you a guy who calls himself Naujocks—he spelt the name—picked up with false papers, or he says they are...SD apparently...yes, no he doesn’t...worked out everything already, I’d say...I think you’ll like to have him, anyway...yes sir, priority, I’ll do that.

He put the phone down, stubbed out his cigarette and placed all Naujocks’ scraps of paper in a new folder, carefully marking it Paradis.

Paradis. They certainly wanted to hang every SD man who was ever within a hundred miles of that business....

As Naujocks bumped and swayed around in the truck, crammed with soldiers and their equipment, he thought grimly that a twist of fate like this was to have been expected. Life was being consistently inconsistent, as usual. Paradis...who in the SD did not know of that day in May, 1940, when Fritz had rounded up those prisoners in a bam and shot them while the final attack on Dunkirk was going on? It was one of the few times that the SS secrecy oath had been invoked, he remembered. There had been a hell of a panic in Berlin when the report was made and Fritz had been given a reprimand, but it had been a verbal one; they didn’t want anything on paper.

Now they thought he was mixed up in it; they must have got the idea that the SD had organized it, or something. God, there had better be a cast-iron alibi for this one. Just where had he been then...not Berlin, nor Paris...ah, yes, the Hague, that was it...that character in the docks, the souvenir-seller who was planting time-bombs on the ships in harbour, he was fixing him up then, while Dunkirk was on...that’ll take some proving; still, perhaps somewhere in the records if there were any records, now...his thoughts were interrupted by the movement of the soldiers in the darkness of the truck and the noise of the brakes grinding the vehicle to a halt. When it stopped a sergeant motioned him to get out, and he jumped down from the tailboard into an asphalt courtyard surrounded by low, badly damaged buildings with big, boarded-up windows. A school.

I his was the playground, but now it was jammed with British, American and French military trucks, while all around men in various uniforms stood in waiting groups or hurried in and out of the two main entrances, marked boldly in letters carved into the scarred stonework-Garçons and Filles.

The last light was fading rapidly, and he was escorted immediately to a military police hut in a corner of the yard, where one of the Americans signed a book, spoke for a moment to the British sergeant and returned to say: This is home for you tonight, bud. He turned away, to be followed by the small party into a mess-hall converted from a gymnasium. The long wooden tables were crowded with prisoners eating from shiny, new British Army mess-tins. For so many men, the place was oddly quiet. Naujocks felt a little embarrassed by his uniform and hoped that no genuine members of the army unit he had conveniently joined would see him and want to talk about old comrades. No one took any notice, however, and he tacked himself on to a queue for sausages and stew.

Sitting down to eat, he viewed the future uncomfortably. Unanswered questions chased themselves around his mind, faster and faster. How could he play for the time he desperately needed to think clearly? Would he stand a better chance by revealing his whole history right at the start, or should he only confirm what they found out, bit by bit? What should he, or could he, deny entirely? He fervently hoped that the final questioning would be in London, or better still, in Germany after the inevitable surrender. That would give him a week or two, at least. But it was only half an hour before Naujocks found himself again standing in an interrogation room. Appropriately, it had once been the headmaster’s study. This time there were three officers, one British, one Canadian and an American.

This time it was no hurried affair, with the sounds of battle outside to speed things up; they seemed to have all the time in the world, particularly on the subject of Paradis. His alibi was ignored; the questioning was based on the assumption that he had been at the shooting, and Naujocks found an irritation growing inside him which he tried hard to stifle. Irritation led to anger, anger to unguarded remarks, he knew the sequence, and the consequences. Once, the British major, a short, stocky, round-faced man with carefully-clipped black hair and a neat, black moustache, abruptly changed the line of questioning.

Just what exactly did you do in the SD?

I was in charge of the technical section.

And what does that mean?

I collected documents, arranged observation of suspected aliens, provided the scientific and technical assistance necessary for counter-espionage work. Pretty truthful, he thought, if you substitute forged for collected and kidnapping for observation.

The major was thinking, too.

Would your department, perhaps, have been called upon to assist in the forging of British currency—five pound notes?

He had to be careful here; was that just a long shot? They could not possibly know that he was in charge of that operation; that it was even his own idea. The major was waiting. We were instructed to assist, yes.

Did you work on it yourself?

A slow smile spread across Naujocks’ gaunt features.

Why, Major, would you like to know how it was done? Would you like to be able to print a few roubles? He laughed. We can probably do a deal, you know.

The major did not smile. He nodded to the guard, and the interrogation ended abruptly. Naujocks left the room in lighter mood, reflecting as he walked along the corridors to his cell for the first time that things are seldom as bad as they seem.

This mood vanished, however, after he had been held for three days. There had been no further questioning, no visits from anyone other than his surly French-Canadian guard, who brought him food three’ times a day. Naujocks found that the time that he had prayed for was now his worst enemy. Alone with his thoughts, able for the first time for years to review his past, he became depressed. He had for twelve years lived for today and tomorrow; yesterday was forgotten, last week was history. Now he needed every minuscule of memory to drag up from the depths of time countless incidents of which his recollection would decide his fate. He was appalled. As if this was not bad enough, many of these memories would have to be reshaped—and this done in such a way that he would not forget the new version, for he knew the methods of psychological interrogation....Now you told us yesterday...

Mentally he was at his lowest ebb when they sent for him again. It was the same room, and there were the same officers. But the atmosphere was different. They offered him cigarettes, they gave him a chair. Occasionally an officer would leave his seat and walk about the room, talking as he strolled around. It was almost a discussion.

Even though he sensed danger, Naujocks talked more freely than at their first meeting. He had made up his mind. His department in the SD was run on the cell system, he would tell them. He had performed certain tasks on specific instructions without having any knowledge of the complete scheme; often without hearing any more of his contributions, most of which were semi-scientific, anyway.

He told them of his superiors, Jost, Heydrich and Himmler. He described the laboratories; he talked of the manufacture of invisible inks, cigarette-lighter cameras, tiny radio transmitters; of the monitoring stations at Hamburg and Hilversum; of the training schools for espionage agents; of the rivalry and jealousy between the Abwehr, military Intelligence, and the SD. It was all man-to-man stuff, and the Allied officers were suitably impressed.

Naujocks was not deceived by their apparent bonhomie, but he also knew he was gaining a little ground. They would respect him for his knowledge, perhaps even value him. He was