Paddy Ashdown - Nein!

Lahousen decided that it would be too dangerous to take Madeleine with him to Berlin – and too dangerous to leave her in Vienna without his protection. She would have to return to France and await events.

On the day of the invasion, Lahousen asked her to take a message to the French military attaché, Colonel Roger Salland, whom he had warned the previous night of the forthcoming German assault. She was to tell her countryman that Lahousen would have to ‘break off all contact with his French friend’. Salland was surprised to receive this message, and on questioning Madeleine he was even more surprised – and interested – to hear of her relationship with the chief of the Austrian Abwehr, who was now to take up a senior post in the German Abwehr in Berlin.

The weather over the three days of the Anschluss seemed to mock the tumult and terror of the times. A high-pressure zone centred near Vienna brought frosty champagne mornings, sparkling blue skies, balmy days and evenings that made the blood sing. The cherry trees in the city’s Hainburger Weg and Stadtpark hung heavy with blossom, as Jews were rounded up and gangs of uniformed paramilitaries hunted down their prey.

With Vienna reeling under the chaos of the German invasion, the two lovers prepared for their enforced separation. Lahousen, tall, athletic and, at forty, four years older than Madeleine, warned her that all those trying to flee were being robbed by the SS gangs roaming Austria; she should leave her valuables in his safekeeping, save for the few Austrian schillings she would need for the journey. The couple also agreed a plain-language code system they could use to keep in touch by telephone, letter and postcard. Finally he bought her a ticket to Switzerland, and they waited for the trains to start running again.

On the morning before her departure, making her way to the French embassy on a last visit, Madeleine was caught up in a vast crowd gathered in Heldenplatz and heard Hitler announce the end of Austria with the triumphant words, ‘The oldest eastern province of the German people shall be, from this point on, the newest bastion of the German Reich.’ Two hundred thousand voices hurled repeated Heil Hitler s back at the diminutive figure standing above them, alone on the balcony of the Hofburg Palace. Madeleine noted that among the women in the crowd were ‘several vulgar uneducated harridans wearing luxurious furs which a few days previously would have been the property of Jews’. She was glad she was leaving, even if it meant leaving her lover behind.

As Lahousen had predicted, the journey from Vienna’s Südbahnhof station to Switzerland was neither quick nor easy. At two in the morning Madeleine’s train, overcrowded well beyond its normal capacity, clanked to a stop at Salzburg station, where armed SS soldiers lined the platform. By the light of torches, the luggage in the baggage wagon was pillaged. Two young men with SS armbands and pistols entered Madeleine’s carriage, demanding papers. A Jew sitting opposite her had the contents of his wallet minutely examined before being left in peace; an Italian singer, mistaken for a Jew because of his olive skin, was badly man-handled, and an old man reduced to a state of quivering panic by the threats and insults.

Their indignities over, the passengers were allowed to continue their journey to the German­–Swiss border crossing at Feldkirch, where they arrived at eight in the morning to find their train once again surrounded by a cordon of armed SS guards. Ordered onto the platform with their hand baggage, they were subjected to another, even more violent and intrusive, search.

‘Where is your money?’ an SS man demanded of Madeleine after rifling energetically through every item in her suitcase.

‘I knew you would steal everything,’ she replied coolly, ‘so I left my money in safe hands.’ For her cheek, she was forced to stand naked while her clothes were inspected. Many passengers, especially Jews, were arrested and taken away.

Finally the train was allowed to cross over the Rhine into Switzerland. In due course it reached Basel, whose cavernous, high-arched station hall, lit by blue stained-glass windows, was about to become the first refuge of freedom and safety for thousands fleeing their homelands in terror.

Madeleine arrived in Paris ten days later. The peace and order of the city seemed somehow unreal after the turbulence and violence of Vienna.

Four months later, on a July holiday in La Rochelle, Madeleine received an unexpected message from a certain Colonel Louis Rivet, who, though she did not know it at the time, was the head of French military intelligence. Would she be prepared to meet one of his representatives at a place of her choosing in the near future? A rendezvous was fixed at a hotel in Angoulême, where, sitting on the terrace in the summer sunshine, Madeleine Bihet-Richou was formally recruited to spy for her country. Her job was to pass on the information she received from her lover to her French intelligence ‘handling officer’, Captain Henri Navarre.

A few days before meeting Navarre, Madeleine had received a postcard from Lahousen. It was postmarked Madrid: ‘The time is coming. When can I write to you again? May God protect you and yours.’

And so it was that a line of communication which would over time develop into one of the most valuable spy channels of World War II was opened up between Erwin Lahousen, now a senior officer at Abwehr headquarters in the Tirpitzufer, and Hitler’s enemies. What would follow over the next two years was a stream of information which would prove extremely useful to the Allies and harmful to Hitler’s cause. It was information of a very specific and precise nature, including dates, names, plans and places, all passed in a professional manner from Erwin to Madeleine, not as part of their love affair, but under its cover. Speaking after the war, Madeleine said: ‘He knew nothing explicitly about the true nature of my secret mission [as a French spy]. I thought it preferable to say nothing which might trouble his conscience; we both understood that there were some things which were better left unsaid.’ Lahousen, however, knew well enough that she was working for French intelligence, and that the information he gave her would be passed on to the West, as he admitted in the full report on his activities which he provided to the Allies after the war.

So, if Lahousen knew the true destination of the information he was giving Madeleine, did Wilhelm Canaris know it too? That Lahousen sent Madeleine to the French attaché with her ‘non-message’ immediately after spending a whole day with Canaris, and accepting his invitation to go to Berlin, seems unlikely to be just a coincidence. To this should be added the fact that Canaris and Lahousen were very close, and also very professional. Each was to depend for his very life on the integrity and judgement of the other in the years to come. Given these factors, it seems safe to presume that Canaris knew perfectly well what his subordinate was doing – and that he approved of it.

Erwin Lahousen and the Austrian Abwehr were not the only people to know of the German invasion of Austria before it happened.

Two hundred and fifty kilometres north-west of Vienna, Czech intelligence in Prague were also aware of what was about to happen, thanks to German codes which had been passed to them by an Abwehr officer four months previously.

It had all begun on 8 February 1936, when a man of medium height in his mid-thirties, with a Prussian haircut, prominent eyes surrounded by smile lines, brown hair and slightly bowed legs, boarded the night train from Dresden to the Czechoslovak town of Brück, fifteen kilometres south of the Czech–German border. The following morning he breakfasted in the station buffet, posted a letter in a local postbox, and returned to Dresden on the next train.