Venlo incident

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Café Backus, the border in the background

The Venlo Incident ( English Venlo incident ) was the kidnapping of two British intelligence officers by the German SS that on the Dutch-German border between Venlo and Straelen took place on 9 November 1939, a few weeks after the start of the Second World War . The location of the incident was the "Café Backus aan de Grens", just a few meters behind the barrier on the Dutch side.

procedure

Major Richard Henry Stevens and Captain Sigismund Payne Best were officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service who were in contact with alleged German opponents of Hitler from circles of the Wehrmacht in the Netherlands in autumn 1939 . But behind these were actually German secret service agents under the direction of Walter Schellenberg . The negotiations received high-level attention in London. Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain and Foreign Minister Lord Halifax saw the chance that Adolf Hitler could be removed from the Wehrmacht leadership and that the war could be ended again after a few months. One day after the rgerbr assassination of George Elser they ran in the Dutch border town of Venlo a German Sonderkommando into a trap and were abducted to Germany. The Dutch secret service officer Luitenant Dirk Klop was shot dead. The special command that crossed the border to the Netherlands was under the direction of SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks . Reinhard Heydrich , the head of the Reich Security Main Office , was the mastermind in Berlin .

The two kidnapped British officers Stevens and Best were imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps and only regained their freedom on April 30, 1945 when the SS hostages were liberated in South Tyrol .

consequences

The Venlo incident made large parts of the British espionage network in Western and Central Europe almost worthless. It led to the resignation of the Dutch secret service chief Johan W. van Oorschot and in May 1940 provided Hitler with an excuse for the invasion of the Netherlands . The Nazi propaganda presented Best and Stevens the German press as backers of the attack by Georg Elser. In 2009, a British Foreign Office dossier on the Venlo incident with archive no. FO 371/23107, which was originally blocked until 2015 and documents the role of the British government in the negotiations with the supposed opponents of Hitler.

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.
  • John Colville: The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955. New York 1985.
  • Wil Deac: The Venlo Sting. In: World War II Magazine. 1/1997, New York 1997.
  • Richard Deacon, Nigel West: Spy! London 1980.
  • David Dilks (Ed.): The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan 1938–1945. London 1971.
  • Enquêtecommissie Regeringsbeleid 1940–1945. 8 parts 1949–1956, part 2 a, b, c, The Hague 1949.
  • Bob de Graaff: The Venlo Incident. In: World War Investigator. 13/1990, London 1990.
  • Heinz Höhne: Canaris. Patriot in the twilight. Munich 1976.
  • Leo Kessler: Betrayal at Venlo. London 1991.
  • HC 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 : Take off your clothes, Georg Elser! 8-part series in "Bild am Sonntag" November 8 - December 27, 1959, Hamburg 1959.
  • 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

  • Detailed documentation: [1]
  • Presentation by Sigismund Payne Best: [2]
  • Representation by Walter Schellenberg: [3]
  • Assassination attempt by Georg Elser: [4]

Individual evidence

  1. ^ German press on 22./23. November 1939
  2. ^ Peter Koblank: "Venlo Incident" secret files , online edition Mythos Elser 2009

Coordinates: 51 ° 22 ′ 55 ″  N , 6 ° 13 ′ 1 ″  E