Paddy Ashdown - Nein!

Kleist-Schmenzin, Ewald von – German emissary of the opposition to Hitler; saw Churchill in London in August 1938

Kluge, Field Marshal Günther von – Commander of Army Group Centre. Reluctant plotter

Kordt, Erich – Head of Ribbentrop’s office in Berlin

Kordt, Theo – Brother of Erich. Official at the German embassy in London

Kubiš, Jan – Operation Anthropoid Czech agent

Lahousen, Major General Erwin von – Head of the Austrian Abwehr and then senior officer in the German Abwehr. Close to Canaris and a key plotter. Lover of Madeleine Bihet-Richou

Manstein, Field Marshal Erich von – Commander of Army Group South and mastermind of the Kursk offensive

March, Juan – Mallorcan businessman and prime mover in Spain – contact of Canaris and MI6

Masson, Roger – Head of Swiss intelligence

Mayr von Baldegg, Captain Bernhard – Staff member of Swiss army intelligence; Waibel’s deputy head

Menzies, Sir Stewart – Head of MI6

Mertz von Quirnheim, Colonel Albrecht – Friend of Stauffenberg; involved in the 20 July 1944 plot

Moltke, Count Helmuth von – Founder of the ‘Kreisau Circle’

Morávec, Colonel František – Head of the Czech intelligence service

Morávek, Václav – Resistance leader in Prague

Mueller, Josef – Canaris’s spy in the Vatican

Navarre, Henri – Madeleine Bihet-Richou’s French intelligence ‘handler’

Niemöller, Martin – Anti-Hitler Lutheran pastor

Olbricht, General Friedrich – Key plotter. Involved in the 20 July coup

Oster, Colonel Hans – ‘Managing director’ of the attempted 1938 coup. Head of Z Section in the Tirpitzufer

Pannwitz, Heinz – SD officer in charge of finding the ‘Dora Ring’

Payne Best, Captain Sigismund – MI6 officer captured at Venlo

Puenter, Dr Otto – ‘Dora’ agent – also in touch with MI6

Radó, Sándor – Head of the ‘Dora’ spy network

Ribbentrop, Joachim von – German ambassador to London and later Hitler’s foreign minister

Rivet, Colonel Louis – Head of French military intelligence (SR)

Roessler, Rudolf – Codename ‘Lucy’. Private purveyor of intelligence in Switzerland

Sas, Gijsbertus Jacobus – Dutch military attaché in Berlin; contact of Oster and Waibel

Schacht, Hjalmar – German minister of economics and president of the Reichsbank

Schellenberg, Walter – Heydrich’s protégé and mastermind of Venlo

Schlabrendorff, Fabian von – German lawyer. Liaison between Tresckow in Russia and Beck in Berlin

Schneider, Christian – Alias ‘Taylor’. Swiss businessman. Cut-out supplying information from Roessler to the Dora Ring

Schulenburg, Friedrich-Werner von der – Pre-war ambassador to Moscow and senior resistant

Schulte, Edouard – German businessman and one of Chojnacki’s agents

Sedláček, Karel – Alias ‘Charles Simpson’. Czech intelligence officer in Bern

Stauffenberg, Colonel Claus Schenk, Graf von – Architect and perpetrator of the 20 July 1944 bomb plot

Stevens, Major Richard – MI6 officer captured at Venlo

Suñer, Serrano – Spanish foreign minister

Szymańska, Halina – Wife of the Polish military attaché in Berlin before the war. Channel for Canaris to pass information to Menzies

Thümmel, Paul – Many aliases. MI6 agent A54. Important spy in the early part of the war

Timoshenko, Marshal Semyon – Commander of Soviet forces at Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk

Tresckow, Henning von – Chief of staff of Army Group Centre; a key plotter

Trott zu Solz, Adam von – German lawyer, diplomat and active resister

Vanden Heuvel, Count Frederick – Head of MI6 in Bern after 1941

Vansittart, Sir Robert – Head of the pre-war British Foreign Office

Waibel, Captain Max – Swiss intelligence officer

Weizsäcker, Ernst von – Head of the German Foreign Office and key plotter

Wilson, Sir Horace – Personal adviser to Chamberlain. Appeasement supporter

Witzleben, General Erwin von – Commander of the Berlin garrison and de facto leader of the September 1938 coup

Young, A.P. – One of Vansittart’s ‘spies’ in contact with Goerdeler

Zaharoff, Basil – Director of Vickers and notorious arms dealer

To the millions whose votes helped make Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany, he was the hero who would rescue them from the humiliations of the Versailles Treaty and the shaming chaos that followed.

John Maynard Keynes, who attended the 1919 peace conference, condemned Versailles afterwards in unforgiving and uncannily prophetic terms: ‘If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation.’

Keynes was not the only person to understand that in the punitive conditions imposed by Versailles lay the seeds of another explosion of German militarism. Others referred to it as ‘the peace built on quicksand’.

Under Clause 231 of the Treaty, the ‘War Guilt’ clause, Germany was deprived of all her colonies, 80 per cent of her pre-war fleet, almost half her iron production, 16 per cent of coal output, 13 per cent of her territory (including the great German-speaking port of Danzig) and more than a tenth of her population. To add to these humiliations, the victorious Allies also planted a deadly economic time bomb beneath what was left of the German economy. This took the form of war reparations amounting to some $US32 billion, to be paid largely in shipments of coal and steel.

In 1922, when Germany inevitably defaulted, French and Belgian troops occupied the centre of German coal and steel production in the Ruhr valley. Faced with the collapse of the domestic economy, the German government sought refuge in printing money, with the inevitable consequence of explosive runaway inflation. In 1921 a US dollar was worth 75 German marks. Two years later, each dollar was valued at 4.2 trillion marks. By November 1923, a life’s savings of 100,000 marks would barely buy a loaf of bread.

In the months immediately following the Armistice, an armed uprising inspired by Lenin and the Russian Revolution ended in 1919 with the removal of the kaiser and elections for Germany’s first democratic government, christened the Weimar Republic after the city in which its first Assembly took place. It all began in a blaze of hope, but soon descended into squabbling and dysfunctionality. Unstable, riven with shifting coalitions, burdened with war reparations, incapable of meeting the challenges of the global depression, the new government, along with politicians of every stripe and hue, soon became objects of derision and even hatred. Compromise was seen as failure, easy slogans replaced rational policies, the elite were regarded with suspicion, and the establishment was deluged with accusations of corruption and profiteering.

A new myth – that of the ‘stab in the back’ – began to be promulgated by the German right. This blamed ‘the politicians’ for the defeat of 1918 and the Versailles humiliations that followed. It was claimed that the German army was undefeated, but had been betrayed by the politicians in Berlin who signed the Armistice. It was not long before the Jews were added into the mix, which swiftly mutated into an international conspiracy aimed at the destruction of Germany and its people. The ‘stab in the back’ legend became so deeply imbedded in the German pre-war psyche that it would restrain Hitler’s domestic opponents, and influence the Allies’ terms for peace, right up until the end of the coming war.