Klop: Britain's Most Ingenious Secret Agent by Peter Day

Author:Peter Day [Day, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781849547642
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2014-06-24T04:00:00+00:00

Initially the German exiles were encouraged by the Labour minister Hugh Dalton, who was head of the Special Operations Executive and responsible for propaganda, and by Sefton Delmer, who had worked in Germany for years. Events quickly changed Delmer’s priorities. The pact with Stalin meant that promoting democracy was not the priority; propaganda was to be crude and demoralising, holding out no hope to the German population of anything other than crushing defeat.201 Despite that, Delmer succeeded in recruiting a team of émigrés to help prepare the material.

Some of them, including John and Putlitz, eventually returned to play a part in the rebuilding of their country but it was not always the role they wished for, or that those who had protected them expected. A significant number, including John and Putlitz, ended up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. It cast a shadow over the Intelligence services who sought to manipulate them during the Cold War. It may well have contributed to Klop eventually retiring from the service in circumstances of mutual suspicion and recrimination.

While Klop’s involvement with Otto John remains unconfirmed by official sources, his links to another anti-Nazi German were recorded by Guy Liddell in his diary in March 1944: ‘U35 has succeeded in making contact with Mariaux, a German journalist whom he knew formerly in Brussels. This ought to make a very profitable beginning.’

Franz Mariaux was a conservative-minded journalist, a critic of the Weimar Republic but also opposed to Hitler. In the early 1930s he worked closely with Edgar Jung, publicity adviser to Chancellor Franz von Papen who had tried to prevent Hitler replacing him. Under the circumstances, Mariaux was lucky to be alive. Towards the end of June 1934 he had been arrested by the Gestapo. He was suspected of being an intermediary to General Kurt von Schleicher, the army officer who had been behind the Black Reichswehr – the secret army constructed in defiance of the Versailles Treaty – and who briefly became the last Chancellor of Germany before Hitler. On 30 June, within days of Mariaux’s arrest, Hitler had launched the Night of the Long Knives in which he purged the Brownshirts – the thuggish paramilitary force that had helped bring him to power. Its leader, Ernst Röhm, and his henchmen were murdered as were many more of Hitler’s opponents, among them Schleicher and Edgar Jung. Goebbels accused Schleicher of treason for seeking the support of the French government against the Nazi regime and claimed that Mariaux had been his go-between. The outraged protests of the French ambassador may have saved Mariaux from execution and in due course he moved to Paris, where he worked for most of the war. He was correspondent of the Kölnischen Zeitung, the daily newspaper of Cologne until it was suppressed for failing to toe the Nazi line, and an informant for the Abwehr. Simultaneously he worked for the Johannssen Service, a news outlet controlled by the German Foreign Office as a competitor to the Propaganda Ministry run by Joseph Goebbels.

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