Q...I have been requested to ask you about something pertaining to the 20th of July business and certain purported actions of the British in its aftermath. There is a report that shortly after the failure of the attempt, the British somehow supplied you, or the Germans at any rate, information about members of the conspiracy. Gave you their names in short. Can you speak to this at all?
M That was a nasty business. Quite correct. Broadcasts coming directly from the British side via Soldatensender Calais and another station named many actual conspirators, quite in public. Naturally, of course, I found this information incredible and at first did not believe it but of course checked it carefully and all of it turned out to be true. God knows how many people I managed to arrest from that source and I should say that my people in Bern received direct from a known British intelligence officer, lists of names, positions and addresses of plotters who had been in touch with their government since prior to the war. I must say that nearly all of this material was accurate and when I questioned the prisoners, they admitted their British contacts. Trott was one of these.
Q Can you...or rather did you know then why the British would do this? Weren’t they betraying these people to certain death?
M Of course they were. The only reason I can give you is one I heard from a neutral diplomat of high rank who was in England at the time and a man who had excellent connections with the British leadership at the highest level. That is to say Churchill. It was his order...a specific and not a general order...to give us this information. I think you could say that Churchill was a creature that has certain problems. Someone like Freud would have liked to tinker with him. Churchill is probably more vicious than anyone I ever knew in Germany. He hated Germans to the bottom of his soul and to him, all Germans were evil and should be killed, even those who fought against Hitler. They even turned over to us the names of some German traitors living in Switzerland. Of course there was a problem dealing with these individuals because they were resident in a neutral country. Still, eventually, a number of them passed on to a better life or accidentally crossed the border to Germany. Do I understand this behavior? From a rational standpoint, I do not, but then much of what Churchill did does not stand up to reason. An alienist might understand him; I do not.
World History
