Sigismund Payne Best

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Captain Sigismund Payne Best (1939)

Sigismund Payne Best (born April 14, 1885 in Cheltenham , † September 21, 1978 in Calne ) was a captain with the British Secret Intelligence Service . His name is closely linked to the Venlo incident in 1939.

Education

Best was born in Cheltenham , Gloucestershire, the son of a doctor who was the grandson of an Indian maharajah . After studying science in London , Best initially worked as a businessman. In 1908 he went to study violin at the Lausanne Music Academy . He then studied economics at the University of Munich and at the same time musicology at the conservatory. In 1913 he graduated from both.

British secret service officer

Back in England he volunteered in the army. He married Dorothy Hallwood Adams, who died in 1918. During the First World War he was an officer with MI6 , the British Secret Intelligence Service , in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In 1919 Captain Best was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE).

Businessman in the Netherlands

After the war, he lived in the Netherlands, where he worked as a businessman in The Hague (including importing automobiles, trading hops for British breweries). In 1920 Best married the Dutch painter Margaretha Payne Best-Van Rees ("May", * 1892 † 1980). At the beginning of the 1930s he founded the companies "Continental Trade Service" and "Pharmisan" together with the Dutchman Pieter Nicolaas van der Willik.

Undercover spy in the Netherlands

In the 1920s it was still connected to the SIS, but in a way that can no longer be precisely reconstructed today. At the beginning of the 1930s he became a full-time employee of the SIS with a tax-free fee of 20,000 guilders per year.

From the mid-1930s, he was appointed head of Organization Z in the Netherlands. This was a strictly conspiratorial section of the SIS founded by Lieutenant-Colonel Claude Dansey (1876-1947) , which in contrast to the secret agents in the Passport Control Offices (PCO) worked undercover. The main Z branches were in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Paris.

Best lived in The Hague at Lange Voorhout 90 and was known as a serious British businessman. He belonged to the "higher society", had been a member of the Haag'schen Golf Club since 1938 and had good relationships up to the royal family. He met regularly with Prince Hendrik († 1934), Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and husband of Queen Wilhelmina , to make music together.

Venlo incident and imprisonment in the concentration camp

In autumn 1939 he came into contact with alleged officers of the Wehrmacht who pretended to want to get rid of Adolf Hitler . In reality it was SS-Sturmbannführer Walter Schellenberg from Reinhard Heydrichs SD and his friend Max de Crinis . These negotiations, to which British Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain attached the greatest importance, ended with the Venlo incident , in which Best and his partner Major Richard Henry Stevens , head of the Dutch PCO, were told by an SS detachment on the Dutch-German border near Venlo were kidnapped to Germany. The Dutch secret service officer Luitenant Dirk Klop was shot dead. This action made the entire espionage network of the British secret service in Western and Central Europe almost worthless. The German Nazi propaganda presented Best and Stevens as alleged masterminds of Georg Elser's citizen brew attack.

After divulging key secrets about the British secret service, Best and Stevens spent more than five years in isolation from one another as special inmates in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps with relatively good treatment. The resistance fighter Georg Elser was also housed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . In his memoirs Best published reports allegedly originating from Elser, which, however, are in complete contradiction with the facts known today and were apparently freely invented by Best.

Freedom again

Towards the end of the war, Best was relocated from Sachsenhausen to Dachau. From there he became prisoners of the families of Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg , Carl Friedrich Goerdeler , Ulrich von Hassell and Kurt von Hammerstein from there at the end of April 1945, including Hjalmar Schacht , Kurt Schuschnigg and his family, Best partner Stevens. Equord evacuated to the Alps, where the group of prisoners was freed by an action by Wehrmacht officer Wichard von Alvensleben (see Liberation of the SS hostages in South Tyrol ).

After the war, Best, who was blamed for the Venlo disaster, was released from the SIS. At that time he was already 60 years old. He lived in Chagford in Devon with his wife May . In 1950, Best published his memoir under the title The Venlo Incident , which made it a bestseller. After separating from his wife May in 1963, Best married his third wife Bridget Payne Best and moved to Calne, Wiltshire.

Best died in 1978 at the age of 93. The Archives of the Imperial War Museum in London keep the Best Papers , a collection of letters and notes from the former intelligence officer. The official British government files on the Venlo incident were originally blocked until 2015 on the basis of the Official Secrets Act , but were already released in 2009.

The claim originally made by the National Socialists that Best and thus the British secret service were behind the civil brew attack by Georg Elser in 1939 has long been refuted, but was republished after more than 70 years.

Individual evidence

  1. Peter Koblank: The Liberation of Special Prisoners and Kinship Prisoners in South Tyrol , online edition Mythos Elser 2006
  2. ^ Peter Koblank: "Venlo Incident" secret files , online edition Mythos Elser 2009
  3. Peter Koblank: Were Secret Service and Otto Strasser the sponsors of Georg Elser? , Online edition Myth Elser 2005

literature

  • Christopher Andrew: Secret Service. London 1985.
  • Sigismund Payne Best: The Venlo Incident ; London 1950.
  • Anthony Cave Brown: Bodyguard of Lies. New York 1975 (German: The invisible front ; Munich 1976).
  • Anthony Cave Brown: The Secret Servant. London 1987.
  • Henri A. Bulhof: Sigismund Payne Best - Hoofdrolspeler in het Venlo-Incident ; Venlo 2010.
  • Wil Deac: The Venlo Sting. In: World War II Magazine 1/1997, New York 1997.
  • Richard Deacon; Nigel West: Spy! London 1980.
  • Enquêtecommissie Regeringsbeleid 1940–1945. 8 parts 1949–1956, part 2 a, b, c. The Hague 1949.
  • Bob de Graaff: The Venlo Incident. ; World War Investigator 13/1990; London 1990.
  • Leo Kessler: Betrayal at Venlo. London 1991.
  • HC Posthumus Meyjes: De Enquêtecommissie is van oordeel - een samenvatting van het parlementaire onderzoek naar het regeringsbeleid in de oorloogsjaren. Arnhem, Amsterdam 1958.
  • Johan P. Nater: Het Venlo incident. Rotterdam 1984.
  • Günter Peis : The Man Who Started The War. London 1960.
  • Anthony Read, David Fisher: Colonel Z. New York 1985.
  • Walter Schellenberg: The Schellenberg Memoirs. London 1956 (German: Aufzüge , München 1979).

Web links

Commons : Sigismund Payne Best  - collection of images, videos and audio files