Spy at Work
by JON B. JANSEN and STEFAN WEYL
1
UNDERGROUND work is a contest between the police and the revolutionaries; the smartest side wins.”
That is the way a veteran of the Russian underground movement put it and he was right. The first essential of political activity under a dictatorship is not to be caught, not to be arrested. That may sound easy, but more than average intelligence, superior tenacity, and a high standard of self-discipline are required, only to fulfill this first prerequisite of not being caught.
We had a man in our organization in Berlin, a student at the university and still very young, who was the son of a well-to-do and respectable businessman. There were groups of young people at his house two or three times a week. They danced and chattered; often there was a bottle of wine. When he was at home the telephone rang constantly, mostly girls and young men of his own age calling up to make appointments or ask about mutual friends, all perfectly natural and innocent. In short, this student was one of our most valuable contact men.
In 1935 the film, The Scarlet Pimpernel, was playing in Berlin, the famous story of an aristocrat and dandy, whose chief concern in life seemed to be his personal appearance, but who, on the side, was the leader of a secret organization to save French aristocrats who had been condemned to death.
It happened that it was the birthday of one of the servants who had been with our friend’s family for twenty years. To celebrate the occasion, he took her to see The Scarlet Pimpernel. After the picture she said: “These movies are so fantastic and incredible. I’d as soon believe that you are involved in some dark conspiracy.”
The fact was that he was involved in a “conspiracy” but he was a good conspirator. A person who had known him for years, who lived in the same house, had no idea what was behind the activities in which he was openly engaged under her very nose.
In fact, the term “underground” is completely misleading. It belongs to a time long past, if it is not completely a figment of the imagination of writers of fiction. Hidden vaults, the faint glimmer of candlelight, trap doors, sinister plotters with false beards, are all very well in the movies. In the sober reality of the Third Reich one would not get very far with such trappings. A prosaic office in a large office building is much safer than a romantic dungeon.
You can’t hide from the scientific surveillance of a modern police state, but you can mislead the police. And the best way to mislead them is to live as conventionally and as openly as possible. The more you resemble a normal everyday citizen in every respect, the less likely you are to be suspected. And as long as you do not arouse suspicion and scrupulously observe a long series of rules of caution, you may be able to carry on underground work for years on end. Once you are suspected, even catacombs will not help.
Thus, the first law of underground work is: Lead a normal life. Maintain in all circumstances the appearance that you are the same as other people, that you have an ordinary job, the usual family ties, friends, interest, habits. Be one among many.
2
But an underground worker is not “the same as other people” and he doesn’t lead a “normal life.” That is only on the surface. Every move that he makes must be thought out in advance. The innumerable little acts of everyday life that for others are a matter of course, he must consider and plan carefully. It is only on rare occasions that conspiratorial activity involves unusual daring or exciting deeds — but it always requires iron self-control, keeping little things constantly in mind, a continual war against the natural inclination to do the usual and the most convenient thing.
For example, you get up early in the morning to go to the subway station during the rush hour in order to make a short telephone call without attracting attention, although it would have been infinitely easier to make that phone call from home. Or you spend two hours traveling from one end of Berlin to the other, in order to give a friend a short message in person, although it would have taken only a minute to tell him over the telephone. Or you always keep the illegal material on which you are working in a safer house than yours and never give in to the temptation to keep it at home overnight, to save a long streetcar ride in the cold. To do these things day in and day out, year after year, never allowing yourself to think,” Nothing will happen this once” — that is the reality of conspiratorial work.
You must make a habit of punctuality. If the man you are to meet has to wait on the street corner for five minutes, he may arouse suspicion. If you miss him because you are late, it may be days before you can reach him by way of intermediaries — the homes of important underground functionaries must be kept strictly secret. Such a delay can have dire results.
Whenever you are engaged in work connected with the underground — an errand, a meeting with a friend — you must have a plausible explanation ready in case you are questioned. We had strict agenda for every meeting of two or more people. The first five minutes were spent deciding what the persons present would say if questioned about their reasons for being together and the nature of their contacts with each other. Birthdays and similar occasions were used when, contrary to usual practice, we wanted to bring a rather large group of people together. Once one of our members postponed his wedding for four weeks so that it could be held on a day when two of our important contact people from another city could come to Berlin. No journey could be made without providing a convincing “legal” excuse.
Our most important members had to devote all their energies to underground work, and did not have time for regular jobs on the side. However, you can’t appear a normal citizen without a regular occupation. One of our leading men was an agent for an insurance company. That gave him an excuse to travel around the city, and if he was caught in a tight place he could always explain that he was selling a policy. Another member was a taxi driver and for a long time he was one of our best couriers. Another hung out his shingle as a genealogist. Genealogy is a respectable profession much in demand in the Third Reich, where everyone has to prove his Aryan ancestry. A genealogist or his assistant might easily have to make journeys into the provinces.
One of our underground “offices” was the home of a girl who happened to live near a large public swimming pool. Her chief associate went swimming every day, all summer long, so that after her swim she could have a cup of coffee with her friend. She carried the illegal papers needed for their business in the hem of her bathing robe. They were on “silk” paper and so she was relatively safe in case she was searched on the streets or in the subway.
The hobbies of our members also served organizational purposes. Underground workers joined philatelist societies and amateur photography clubs so that they could meet with other members without arousing suspicion.
Even if he is ill, a member of an underground group cannot allow himself the privileges of the ordinary citizen. One evening a message came from one of our friends, who had been sick for some time, that he must see one of our leading members immediately. The trouble was that his illness had been diagnosed as acute appendicitis and he had to be operated on the same night. As an important official of the underground movement, he knew many names and addresses by heart; he had just remembered that once before under an anesthetic he had told wild stories for hours on end. He was terrified that this time he would give away important secrets, and didn’t dare to go to one of the big hospitals for the operation as his physician had arranged. It was not simple, on a couple of hours’ notice, to find a reliable physician who would agree to perform the operation safely in his private clinic.
But the most painstaking observance of the rules of conspiracy and the greatest conceivable foresight do not in themselves make an underground worker. He must at the same time be willing to let any rule go by the board, to attempt anything if the circumstances demand and the end to be achieved seems worth the risk. He must be able to make the decision himself whether to undertake the action in question. In making a decision, he cannot forget for an instant that not only his life, but even the very existence of the organization, may be the price if he makes a mistake. An underground functionary has often to make crucial decisions without any opportunity to consult his friends.
For example, he may have to decide at a moment’s notice whether he should enter a house, about which he isn’t sure, to warn an important man that the Gestapo is looking for him, knowing the while that the Gestapo may be waiting behind the door. He may have been sent from Berlin to Cologne on a special mission for the underground organization. Arrived in Cologne, he may learn that a potentially important contact can be made for the organization if he travels to Essen before returning to Berlin. His orders were to go to Cologne only; he alone can decide. If he goes to Essen, he is acting on his own and not in accordance with his orders; he may be running into some unforeseeable complication that will have grave consequences; on the other hand, if he does not go, he may be passing up an opportunity which he will not have again. All too frequently, a responsible underground representative has to decide on the spot whether or not a given person is to be trusted. Often one has no choice but to be guided by a hunch and to hope for luck.
Many of us really did have good luck. There is the story of the time the Gestapo knocked on the wrong door in an apartment house. For hours they searched the home of a completely innocent man while our friend, whom they were really after, heard the disturbance next door, realized what was up, and was able to llee. One of the girls in our organization was searched twice on the streets by Storm Troopers looking for illegal documents. The first time, she had the documents hidden under half a dozen eggs in a paper sack of groceries. The Storm Trooper was so afraid of breaking the eggs that he didn’t find the papers. The second time, the Storm Troopers were satisfied with a careful search of her briefcase, with nothing in it but books from the Public Library. In her coat pocket they would have found quite different things.
In underground work accidents are numerous and unpredictable. A courier is hurt in an automobile accident; illegal material is found on him. A man feels so safe that he doesn’t learn an address by heart, but writes it on a piece of paper and is arrested with it. In a dangerous situation a man loses his head and puts a suitcase full of incriminating material in a lake without weighting it down sufficiently; later the papers are washed up on the shore and given to the Gestapo. Or a man is burning incriminating documents in his fireplace, and a half-burned piece goes up the chimney and falls on the street.
3
It would be a bad conspirator, indeed, who did not rely on his luck. But, in principle, the rule must be to exclude chance as much as possible; not to depend on your guardian angel, but to develop methods of work which will enable you to prove smartest in the contest with the police. That is largely a technical problem. The same rules apply in the underground fight against the police of a totalitarian regime as apply in war. Just as it is absurd to try to fight tanks and dive bombers with shotguns, it is absurd to try to combat the power machine of a modern state, equipped with the best scientific techniques, with the obsolete arsenal of the conspirator of fiction.
Such methods of communication as invisible ink belong in a museum, not because all chemical combinations are known — at t lie beginning of our activity one of our members, a chemist, worked out an especially good formula which is still not known to the Gestapo — but what good are such things? When examined before a quartz lamp — a matter of course in every modern police laboratory — any paper will yield its secrets. Every secret ink falls down when tested with iodine vapor in a vacuum. The careful use of secret inks was some protection during the early days of the Nazis, but as the Gestapo perfected their technical facilities and enlarged their experience we had to abandon these methods.
Our solution of the problem of communications was microphotography. Several of our members became enthusiastic amateur photographers, and it was possible to rig up a private studio and darkroom in one of their homes. Eventually we were able to reproduce on a piece of film, measuring one-half inch by one inch, four, six, even eight typewritten pages. In this way long letters and reports of all kinds found their way over the frontiers, rolled up, sewed up, or soldered, in an amazing variety of objects. Because of the information we were able to get out of Germany in this way, our office abroad was able to supply the material published in Inside Germany Reports in the United States and in similar publications in various democratic countries of Europe. Organizational problems between the groups inside and outside the country could be dealt with adequately, and at the same time precious information was being transmitted in the same way to the isolated groups inside Germany.
One has to be ingenious and constantly discover new places to hide the material. Once the films were packed in a Teddy bear which was sent as a Christmas present to a little girl in Prague, but she, thrilled with the new toy, cried bitterly when the grownups eager for the news inside tore her Teddy bear’s head off. One time we had to hold up for twenty-four hours the trip our secretary abroad was making to Berlin, because at the last moment, while she was packing, it was discovered that in bathing she had inadvertently used the sponge in which the report she was to take with her had been buried. Nothing was left of the film but a sticky mess. The photographer swore because he had to do his work over again, but “the packer” was justly proud. If even his fellow conspirators couldn’t recognize the suspicious object, he was doing all right.
To avoid any device that could arouse suspicion was the fundamental principle that guided us in the use of codes. There arc innumerable books about code systems, and there are codes without number that would have been adequate for our purposes — that is, codes that to all intents and purposes were proof against solution by the uninitiated. But our problem was to find a code which could not be recognized as such. The Gestapo would leave no means untried to find the key to a coded list of names and addresses. We know how many means are at their disposal — nothing could be worse than to have them find the key to such a crucial document.
After months of experiment we developed a system by which we could reduce our information to the form of tables of scientific data, such as a natural scientist might use. One of the girls in the organization was assigned solely to the task of keeping these tables up to date. Day after day she made complicated numerical computations, and in decimals and fractions we had an undecipherable record of names and addresses in Germany and outside, times and places of appointments, and other indispensable information.
A few weeks before the war started , friends in the underground in Germany succeeded in sending a pamphlet nearly a hundred pages long to their friends abroad. They had taken endless pains to assemble the material for this pamphlet, because they hoped it would give a real insight into the nature of National Socialism. Once the pamphlet was written, it had to be copied carefully on the kind of paper required for a good reproduction, with attention to margins, the absence of erasures, and other details. Then it had to be photographed in miniature with a homemade apparatus and the precious film concealed and sent abroad by a reliable courier. That was during the time of the Polish crisis. In order to warn the world of the enemy they knew so intimately from their own experience, these men and women of the underground worked for weeks in constant danger of their lives.
One day the police came to the apartment where one of our secret photographic studios was located, because they suspected that counterfeit currency was being manufactured there. The man whose apartment it was — in private life a division chief in a large firm — had sent his secretary to the bank to deposit money and some of the bills were found to be counterfeit.
4
Of course, that was pure chance. But our lives and our work depended on chance. We endeavored to plan exactly and to take advantage of the best scientific techniques. But almost all our efforts to achieve the maximum in technical perfection failed for one reason, lack of money.
We knew just how we should go about setting up photographic studios and offices. We knew the kind of storage places that would be safest for illegal papers. But we didn’t have the money to do what we wanted. We used to envy the spies in novels. They always had the finest technical equipment; money miraculously seemed no object when the transmission of even the smallest military secret or the most insignificant court intrigue was involved. On the other hand, we who were fighting against a real enemy, whom we already knew to be the enemy of all, couldn’t even approximate the technical facilities available to an ordinary money smuggler.
Professional smugglers, most of whom were working purely for financial gain, were in a better position than we. For example, every time a smuggler had a job to do he could employ skilled workmen to insert secret pockets in new suitcases. He could purchase any kind of special aid he wanted for his work. Of course, even the most skillfully contrived secret pocket is not 100 per cent safe, but such methods would be protection enough if one was not already under suspicion. And during the first years after 1933 it was those foreign exchange smugglers who drove the Gestapo to greater watchfulness and thoroughness and thus forced us to find more and more complicated tricks for our own conspiratorial work. But we didn’t have the great sums of money that many of these people had. Month after month, we had to use the same toilet accessories bag till it began to look suspicious because of the many times it had been opened and sewed up again. A new one would have cost five dollars and that was a lot of money for us.
Most of the members of the underground organizations were workers. It is well known that the wages paid in the Third Reich are small. Moreover, during the first years of the Nazi regime there was still much unemployment. Our people contributed what they could, but it wasn’t much. Intellectuals and professional men with larger incomes who were in sympathy with our work, especially those who were Jewish, left the country in the first months and years of the Hitler regime. Moreover, it should be remembered that anyone found guilty of contributing money to underground work was seriously punished. In the early years of general uncertainty and anxiety it required real courage to have anything at all to do with a person whom one suspected of membership in the underground movement.
To give him money seemed much too dangerous for most people. No one was willing to go to a well-to-do friend and say: “I am a member of an underground organization. Will you give me some money for our work?” Ordinary methods of raising money were eliminated, first on grounds of secrecy, and second, because people able to give considerable amounts would have nothing to do with the underground movement. Only for support of the families of arrested men did we find it relatively easy to collect money. It was impossible ever to make a proper budget or to count on having specific funds in hand. For this reason alone, time and again, carefully prepared plans had to be discarded.
No underground organization can maintain itself on its own strength alone, nor ever could. It must depend on financial help from outside. The underground movement in Germany was supported from abroad. But there were substantial differences in this respect between the various groups.
5
The greatest danger to the underground groups came from those who broke down after arrest and turned state’s evidence. Sometimes the police forced such people to do jobs for them — perhaps take a trip, visit certain people, or write a letter. Such people are not spies. They are usually decent average people who simply are not strong enough to resist the threats and torture of the Gestapo. Anyone who has ever fallen into Gestapo hands knows that it is impossible to say in advance with certainty how one will hold up under torture. You cannot vouch tor yourself beforehand, and it is even less possible to vouch for your friends. The real and the only test will come in the Gestapo’s chamber. If a member of an underground organization does not stand this test, it is usually too late for his colleagues to defend themselves. Only too frequently, through their merciless torture, the secret police were able to destroy whole groups.
It was a case like this that came within a hair’s breadth of wiping out all the most important people in our Munich group. A courier had gone from Munich to Cologne. As customary, it was agreed that word of his arrival would be sent back immediately. Several days passed with no news, and the Munich group had to assume that Neumann — the courier — had been arrested. The usual precautions for such an emergency were taken by the group: all the people whose names were known to him retired from active work, were “isolated.” No one could be sure how Neumann would stand up under questioning, and certainly no one could know what the Gestapo would do. Several of our Munich members had to go into hiding. One man had to give up his job.
About a week after his disappearance Neumann turned up in Munich again at the home of one of his friends, a man who had only a distant connection with the organization but knew a number of the active members personally.
Neumann told this story. Just before the train arrived at Cologne, he had been arrested with others in a Gestapo raid. However, in the crowd at the Cologne railroad station he had been able to get away from his captors. He had gone into hiding for several days and now had to flee from Germany. He asked the man to put him in touch with one of our local functionaries — we shall call him Wiener — who would give him money and tell him how to get over the border.
The message was sent on to Wiener and he discussed the matter with the other members of the Munich committee. They were suspicious of Neumann’s story. It was decided that Wiener should not see Neumann, but that money and the necessary information should be given him in a roundabout and safer way. An appointment was made, but Neumann did not show up.
The next day one of our people happened to see him on the street. He was with two men, unmistakably agents of the Gestapo. The committee members had been quite right in their caution. It was apparent that Neumann had “broken down.”
The situation was very disagreeable and, to make it worse, that same evening Neumann came again to his friend and told a fantastic story about why he had not been able to keep the appointment to get his money. Again he asked to be put in touch with Wiener.
The leading committee of the group had a difficult decision to make. Apparently Neumann had not yet given in entirely to the Gestapo; he appeared to be trying to gain time. If the group refused to have anything to do with Neumann, and did not help him to escape, then he would have to continue down the path on which he had already started. In that case the fate of the entire Munich group was sealed; little as Neumann knew about the leading personalities in the group and their present addresses, he knew too much. But if someone went to meet Neumann, he was risking immediate arrest.
The final decision was to take the risk. The plan, after careful preparations, was to get Neumann to come to a certain place, ostensibly to meet important people of the group, and when he got there to take him across the border, whether he liked it or not.
This kidnaping scheme worked. We cannot tell the details, but one of the reasons it was successful was the professional jealousy that existed between the Cologne Gestapo and the Munich Gestapo. They had entirely different sets of plans for Neumann. One group wanted to make a series of immediate arrests with his help, and the other wanted first to observe the organization over a period of time so that they could find out about as many members as possible. Our friends profited by this conflict. Luck like that was unusual. As a rule, a “Neumann case” led to the destruction of an entire group.
To repeat: our real danger was not from spies and not from renegades. The chief enemy of underground work is the inadequacy of the human being, the very banal fact that one is dealing with people and not with perfect material. That is why it is so tremendously important that underground leaders have a knowledge and understanding of people. The rules of conspiracy have to be maintained, but at the same time the confidence of the members must be won and kept by a reciprocal show of trust in them. Iron discipline is required, but the initiative of the individual must not be destroyed.
Sometimes it is necessary to tell a new member more than might seem proper according to pure conspiratorial principles, just to demonstrate that you trust him. If you know that a friend or colleague has come under Gestapo suspicion, you cannot simply drop him, although the safety of the group may seem to demand that contacts be discontinued. You must use tact and consideration, not just suddenly isolate him completely from the organization which probably was the most important thing in his life, or he will become bitter and depressed and will be lost to you forever.
What about safety first? Of course. But the surest way of avoiding trouble and arrest is to do nothing. The maximum observance of the rules of conspiracy is often identical with complete passivity. Everything that you do in underground work, sooner or later, leads to danger. You cannot escape from this circle.
You can conceive of a perfect underground organization, but you cannot achieve one. Time and again, reality will destroy your best plans, and stubborn dogmatic adherence to a perfect organizational scheme will lead to ruin just as certainly as will negligence in observing rules.
The underground organizations had to learn how to survive the blows of a much stronger enemy, to carry on after the heaviest losses. No one was spared the terrible fate of seeing his friends go to prison or to their deaths because of his own mistakes. There is not one underground group that can boast that it never had an “accident” in the course of its work. Many groups were completely destroyed by the Gestapo. Yet others, in spite of arrests in their ranks, succeeded in reorganizing and maintaining the continuity of their work.
Through bitter experience, the underground workers had to learn that there was no absolute safety for them. As a German revolutionary once said before a military tribunal, they are “dead men on leave.” Anyone who works underground in Germany — not one who simply reads an occasional leaflet and passes it on, but anyone who pits his entire strength in the fight against the Nazi regime — knows that his space of life is limited. Two years, three years — perhaps, in an exceptional case, five years. The underground workers in Nazi Germany know that most of them will not be able to escape their fate. Nevertheless, there have always been men and women who were ready to take up the unequal fight and carry on.