- 09 Nov 2023 12:31
#15294811
November 9, Thursday
Gestapo arrests British bomb suspects
Two British agents in Holland who believed that they were in contact with army officers plotting to overthrow Hitler are today kidnapped and carried off into Germany. For the past month Captain S. Payne Best and Major Richard Stevens had been meeting a Major Schaemmle at Venlo, five miles (eight km) from the German border.
To prove his bona fides Captain Best arranged for a special news item to be broadcast on the BBC German Service. Major Schaemmle then promised to produce the general who was leading the plotters. When Best and Stevens turn up at Venlo this afternoon, they are told the Germans are afraid of venturing too far inside Holland. The British agree to rendezvous at a café a few yards from the German border. There they notice that the German barrier hasd been lifted. The next moment their car is hit by machine-gun fire and they are seized by a posse of Germans.
“Major Schaemmle,” it turns out, is in fact a Gestapo officer, Walther Schellenberg. Immediately after the Munich bomb, Himmler had ordered Schellenberg to kidnap the Britons.
Gestapo arrests British bomb suspects
Two British agents in Holland who believed that they were in contact with army officers plotting to overthrow Hitler are today kidnapped and carried off into Germany. For the past month Captain S. Payne Best and Major Richard Stevens had been meeting a Major Schaemmle at Venlo, five miles (eight km) from the German border.
To prove his bona fides Captain Best arranged for a special news item to be broadcast on the BBC German Service. Major Schaemmle then promised to produce the general who was leading the plotters. When Best and Stevens turn up at Venlo this afternoon, they are told the Germans are afraid of venturing too far inside Holland. The British agree to rendezvous at a café a few yards from the German border. There they notice that the German barrier hasd been lifted. The next moment their car is hit by machine-gun fire and they are seized by a posse of Germans.
“Major Schaemmle,” it turns out, is in fact a Gestapo officer, Walther Schellenberg. Immediately after the Munich bomb, Himmler had ordered Schellenberg to kidnap the Britons.
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
—Edmund Burke
—Edmund Burke