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It did not take long for London to understand the opportunities that had been lost at Munich by its failure to act on the warnings it had received of Hitler’s intentions towards Czechoslovakia.

A late-1938 MI6 analysis concluded that the German generals ‘strove unremittingly and courageously to restrain Hitler’. Even the strongly pro-appeasement British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, found himself unable to gloss what had happened in his customary diplomatic language. ‘By keeping the peace, we have saved Hitler and his regime,’ he wrote to foreign secretary Halifax a week after Munich was signed. In December 1938 the British chargé d’affaires in Berlin noted that ‘authoritative circles’ in London now hoped that a revolt would remove Hitler, the man Chamberlain’s flight to Munich had rescued from removal just two months previously.

But the damage was done.

The West’s surrender to Hitler’s demands at Munich caused a catastrophic decline of morale and will amongst the September plotters. Carl Goerdeler, who had spent the week of the Czech crisis in Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Constance, waiting for the call to take up his post as the new chancellor of Germany, wrote to a friend predicting that war was now inevitable. The majority of those closely involved in the plot considered that they had risked their lives to rid the world of a war-obsessed tyrant, only to be abandoned by those they had most trusted among the Western powers. The word ‘betrayal’ was on many lips.

The truth was that there had been a shameful failure of communication between the Berlin plotters and the governments of France and, perhaps especially, of Britain. There were several factors which produced this ‘dialogue of the deaf’ in which the last, best chance of avoiding the coming war was lost.

Chief among these was Chamberlain’s conviction that Hitler would be amenable to reason, and that appeasement (in the 1930s the word meant putting peace first, and did not carry the pejorative overtones it does today) was the way to persuade him to back away from war. This, added to the sense of personal responsibility Chamberlain felt for ensuring the peace of his age, created a deadly cocktail in which hubris and sense of mission combined to distort the British prime minister’s judgement and reduce his capacity to take measured, thought-through actions.

Chamberlain’s appeasement, however, was not based only on a naïvely utopian view of Hitler’s true nature. It was also firmly founded on what had been, with the terrible exception of the Great War, British foreign policy for the past hundred years. It is important to remember that Chamberlain’s analysis was shared by the majority of British political and public opinion of the day – especially among the generals: ‘Of our top military and air people whom I questioned on the subject, I don’t think I found one who did not think that appeasement was right,’ wrote Sir Alexander Cadogan, who succeeded Sir Robert Vansittart as head of the Foreign Office in 1938.

It was Churchill and those closest to him, along with the Labour Party and the Liberals, who were regarded as being out of step with reality and with history, not Chamberlain.

Since the post-Napoleonic settlement, Britain’s strategy had been to stay out of military engagements on the European mainland. Successive British governments were, in the main, sniffily indifferent to what the Europeans did on their continent, so long as they did not threaten the wider peace or interfere in the process of building and maintaining the British Empire. The Europeans could have the Continent, was London’s unspoken motto, provided Britain could have the sea. Chamberlain’s ‘betrayal’ of Czechoslovakia was thus fully consistent with Britain’s traditional policy of managing the European peace not through armies, but through constantly-shifting diplomatic alliances designed to preserve the balance of power established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. What matter if this policy earned Britain the French insult ‘Albion perfide’ – so long as it kept her powerful, prosperous, peaceful, and out of the wars that convulsed Europe in the nineteenth century. In the view of the appeasers in 1938, it was the abandonment of this policy in 1914 that had caused such ghastly consequences for the generation that had fought in the First World War, and who now governed Britain. It was to this traditional policy that the country should now return, they insisted, so that the terrible blood sacrifice which was the inevitable consequence of modern total war should never again be allowed to happen. When Hitler hinted, in a ‘peace speech’ to the Reichstag on 21 May 1935, that he favoured a broad settlement based on ‘leaving Europe to the Europeans and letting Britain have the sea’, he was skilfully playing both to Britain’s traditional foreign policy and to popular and official British sentiment.

It was for this reason that when Goerdeler and his plotters started appearing in Whitehall in 1937 and 1938 with their warnings of an approaching apocalypse, they were seen not as good men seeking to save the world from tyranny, but as meddlers and interferers in a policy which everyone believed in, and which had proved its worth over the previous hundred years. If it is the case, as seems likely, that Chamberlain’s hurried first flight to Bad Godesberg on 15 September 1938 was intended, at least in part to forestall the plot Goerdeler and his friends had been hatching, then in all probability what would have been on his mind was ‘Better the devil you know, than the conspirators you don’t.’

Herein also lay the last major ingredient of the tragically missed opportunity of September 1938. Goerdeler and his fellow plotters knew and understood the exceptional nature of the demonic power they were seeking to remove. Chamberlain and the British, on the other hand, saw Hitler as just the latest in the long line of Continental tyrants behaving badly, as Continental tyrants always had, from Napoleon to Bismarck to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Worse still, the 1938 plotters were, in the British government’s eyes, yet another bunch of conservative Prussian landowners, monarchists and militarists with no attachment to democracy. Their primary aim, like that of Hitler, was to recover the lands Germany had lost under the Versailles settlement. What Chamberlain, Halifax and Henderson did not see was that, whatever the democratic deficiencies of the September plotters, they were nevertheless motivated by conventional religious and European values of morality, which were totally absent from the character and actions of Adolf Hitler. The plotters understood the unique moral bankruptcy of the Hitler phenomenon. Chamberlain and his government, it seems, did not.

Behind the September plotters’ complaints about the moral failures of Britain and France during the Czech crisis lay a crucial failure of their own – one which was fatally to hobble them right through to 1944. They wanted to be rid of Hitler, but they were never prepared to take the initiative to do so. They shied away from triggering events themselves, and depended on others to do this for them (in the case of the Czech crisis, the trigger was Hitler’s order to mobilise). They were actors in the wings, always waiting for a cue to come onto the stage which never came. Eventually, as successive ‘ripe moments’ for their ‘lovely plans’ came and went, waiting became a kind of strategy in itself – until finally an impetuous, headstrong young man strode into their midst in 1944 and shook them from their torpor.

In the immediate aftermath of Munich, most of the plotters slunk away into the shadows to wait and watch for the next propitious moment to strike. Goerdeler spent the end of September and the first week of October writing a series of long, impatient and rather self-righteous memos to London and Washington – including his first proposition for a united Europe as a solution to the rising threat of European nationalism. In the middle of October he called Vansittart’s ‘agent’ A.P. Young to a meeting at a private address in Zürich. There he passed on some useful intelligence, including the information that Hitler had sent Canaris to persuade Franco into an alliance aimed at capturing Gibraltar and sealing off the Mediterranean from the British.

A further meeting between Young and Goerdeler took place on 4 December, this time in a hotel room in Zürich. On this occasion Goerdeler, using two fingers and a typewriter borrowed from the hotel, laboriously typed out ten paragraphs of a suggested ‘Heads of Agreement between Great Britain and Germany’. Despite the fact that nearly all his recommendations had already been incorporated in Foreign Office forward papers, his proposals were roundly rejected by the mandarins of King Charles’s Street, who, having been proved wrong about Goerdeler’s warnings about the Sudetenland, were now finding his preachy style irksome and patronising.

It was not just the British who were put off by Goerdeler’s didacticism. Hans Bernd Gisevius wrote at this time that Goerdeler’s ‘finest virtue was also his gravest weakness. The passion for justice burned so fiercely in him that he forgot all moderation. He preached and preached and preached, until … people … lost all patience with him.’

On 10 December 1938, Sir Alexander Cadogan reflected the same weariness with the German emissary in his diary: ‘had a message from G [Goerdeler] outlining a plan of [an army] revolution in Germany to take place before the end of the month. G wants a message from us … He had already sent us a “programme” which we couldn’t subscribe to – too much like Mein Kampf – and that rather put me off him. But he may want something merely to show his fellow conspirators that we shan’t fall upon a divided Germany and would want to work with any decent regime that may come out of this mess … I don’t believe much in this,’ he concluded, but added a wary codicil: ‘but if there is anything in it, it’s the biggest thing for centuries’.

Along with his recommendations for British policy, Goerdeler also included a report predicting, among other things, that Hitler would soon turn his attention to Holland, Belgium and Switzerland. Over the next year, Goerdeler’s use to the British changed from being an occasional (and by now mostly unwanted) diplomatic adviser on Germany, to a primary source of intelligence on Hitler’s plans and intentions.

Madeleine Bihet-Richou was not able to enjoy autumn in Paris for long after her narrow escape from Vienna. In the last days of September her French intelligence handler, Henri Navarre, asked her to return to Berlin, where a job had been arranged for her at the French Institute. She was now able to continue her affair with Lahousen, who was by this time installed as one of Canaris’s closest advisers in the Tirpitzufer. At the end of October the two lovers were taking advantage of a brilliant late-autumn day to pay a visit to the Berlin Zoo. Admiring the giraffes, Lahousen said in a quiet voice that Hitler had just ordered plans to be drawn up for the takeover of the remains of Czechoslovakia in the middle of March the following year.

‘This time,’ he added, ‘if France and Britain react, it will be war.’

Madeleine rushed, first to the French embassy to send a brief coded telegram to Navarre in Paris, and then to the Anhalter station in Potsdamer Platz, where she caught a train to the French capital to report personally on what she had learned. She met Navarre and Louis Rivet, the chief of French military intelligence, at a restaurant on the Rond-point des Champs-Élysées and gave them the whole story. A report was sent to French foreign minister Georges Bonnet, who responded that if Hitler went ahead with his plan, France could only react if Britain did – and Britain showed no signs of wanting to.

Rivet, conscious that he now had a very high-level source in Madeleine, instructed his new spy that she was never again to visit the French embassy in Berlin. In future she should pass her information by telephone to the French military attaché in the city, using a secret number which she should dial only from public phoneboxes.

On the evening of 8 November, not long after Madeleine’s return to the German capital, she was strolling with Lahousen down Kleiststrasse when he mentioned the assassination the previous day of a German diplomat in Paris by a Polish Jew. ‘The government,’ he told her, ‘has secretly ordered a “spontaneous wave” of reprisals to be launched by paramilitaries against the Jews, under cover of which their private wealth will be pillaged and Jewish synagogues will be burnt. Fire engines will be pre-positioned around the synagogues – not to stop them burning, but to save neighbouring buildings.’

The following night, Germany was convulsed and the world shocked by yet another outrage against the Jews. Kristallnacht was so named because of the carpets of broken glass which littered German streets after violent nationwide attacks on Jews and their property. Over a thousand synagogues were set on fire, many of them being totally destroyed; more than 7,500 Jewish businesses were demolished; at least ninety-one Jews were killed, and 30,000 arrested and incarcerated in Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. For Carl Goerdeler, himself not immune to a degree of anti-Semitism, this was a turning point. ‘The shame and bitterness of the most patriotic went so far as to make them be ashamed before the world of the name German which we loved and of which we were so proud … For many who hesitated there was now no possibility of reconciliation with this regime of violence,’ wrote one witness after the war.

Some of the September plotters went further, actively helping the Jews to escape the mobs and the Gestapo. Canaris was later thanked by Jewish leaders for what he did that night to save members of their community. Hans Oster offered to smuggle his Jewish neighbours out of harm’s way:

In the afternoon of 9th November 1938 our neighbour, the wife of Colonel, later General Hans Oster, called on us to offer the shelter of their home to my father, who was a lawyer aged 58. The news of the arrest of Jewish men had spread to both our families. The Osters and our family lived on the same floor of a Berlin apartment block. There were two staircases, one for tradesmen and one for us. Mrs Oster proposed that if the Gestapo called at the front door, my father could easily slip across to their flat by the back door.

Afterwards, Canaris, Oster and the Abwehr lawyer Hans von Dohnányi set up a secret organisation to smuggle Jews out of Germany, often by recruiting them into the Abwehr and then sending them abroad as Abwehr ‘agents’. The son of Canaris’s pastor recalled one among many recorded examples of Canaris and the Abwehr helping Jews to escape:

Thirteen Jewish men who had married non-Jewish women … were deported to different camps … all of them were released thanks to the combined efforts of Canaris and his staff … the Admiral succeeded in organising their transport in a closed train compartment to Madrid, where they came under Franco’s protection. Canaris used his connections to put thirteen of them up in private homes in Madrid before some of them were flown to England. Most … joined the British military.

On New Year’s Day 1939, with international tension rising again over Czechoslovakia, Canaris appointed Erwin Lahousen as the head of Section II of the Abwehr (sabotage and disruption), and gave him two sets of orders. One was designed for official consumption; the other was ‘unofficial’, and described Lahousen’s real task, which Canaris ordered should be to form ‘a secret organisation within Abwehr II and the Brandenburg Regiment, with the purpose of bringing together all anti-Nazi forces and preparing them for illegal acts … against the system … With the successful incorporation of Czechoslovakia into … the Third Reich … the way to war with Poland has been opened for Hitler and his clique of criminals. I am convinced that the other great Powers will not be caught this time by the political … tricks of this pathological liar. War will result in a catastrophe … [not just] for Germany [but also] for all mankind … if there were victory for the Nazi system.’

With her lover busy out of Berlin taking over his new organisation, Madeleine Bihet-Richou used the opportunity for a swift visit to Paris. There she received training in the use of secret ink, and underwent a deep-level interrogation about her relationship with Lahousen and his possible motives in talking to her so openly.

The early months of 1939 were full of intense diplomatic manoeuvring as everyone waited for Hitler’s next play. On 20 February, Spain, under substantial German and Italian pressure, agreed ‘in principle’ to join Hitler’s Anti-Comintern pact, insisting, however, that it should do so secretly. Five days later, to even up the balance and keep everyone on their toes, Franco signed an agreement with France that Madrid would stay neutral. Most small states in Europe, inferring from the Czech crisis that the Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century was now a dead letter, began negotiating bilateral non-aggression pacts with Hitler. The British government for its part resolved that, since it was no longer able to honour guarantees, it should avoid giving any. Meanwhile, after a government study into how France could defend itself against air attack had concluded that it couldn’t, French foreign minister Bonnet decided that the best protection for his country lay not in anti-aircraft batteries, but in a piece of paper declaring lasting friendship between Paris and Berlin. In all this scurry of diplomatic to-ings and fro-ings, one assumption was commonly held by all: that, given Hitler’s high-octane, high-volume and high-frequency warnings of the communist threat to Europe (accompanied by insults to match), the one pact that was out of the question was an alliance between Hitler and Stalin. In February, however, both Canaris and Churchill simultaneously picked up tremors that all was not as it seemed, and that there were signs of a growing rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow. Unaware of this, the Bank of England, at the government’s behest, offered the German Reichsbank a huge loan designed to encourage Hitler to make his next move for ‘Lebensraum’ east towards the Ukraine and Russia, rather than west.

In the spring of 1939, the shadow-boxing suddenly turned into the real thing.

In early March Lahousen told Paris, through Madeleine, that German armour and troops were concentrating near the Bohemia–Moravia border, where they would be within swift striking distance of Prague. A little later he followed this up by providing Madeleine with the complete German plan for the invasion of what remained of Czechoslovakia. What Hans Bernd Gisevius was to call ‘the March madness’ had begun.

At 7 a.m. on 11 March, at Paul Thümmel’s request the Abwehr spy met his Czech handler in the station buffet of the Czech market town of Turnov. ‘The final decision has been taken in Berlin,’ Thümmel reported. ‘On 15 March Czechoslovakia will no longer exist.’ Thümmel was swiftly bundled into a car and driven to Prague, where in a Czech intelligence safe house he outlined in detail, complete with supporting documents, the German plan of attack on Czechoslovakia. He also handed over an original Gestapo document which contained orders for all Czech intelligence officers to be rounded up after the invasion and submitted to ‘interrogation with great severity’. Thümmel’s information was rushed to Colonel František Morávec, the head of the Czech intelligence service, who instructed that the German spy should be given six emergency ‘accommodation’ addresses through which he could keep in contact if the Czech government was forced to go into exile. Two of these were in The Hague, two in London, one in Sweden and one in Zürich. As he left to return to Germany, Thümmel turned to Morávec: ‘Good luck, Colonel. This is not goodbye, but auf Wiedersehen.’

The Czech spy chief passed Thümmel’s information to the pro-German Czech foreign minister, who dismissed it as alarmist: ‘If such events were in store, I, as Foreign Minister, would be the first to know … In future do not bring such upsetting reports which could spread alarm and disturb the peace.’

This view was shared by the British ambassador in Berlin, Nevile Henderson, who sent a telegram to London anticipating ‘in the immediate future, a period of relative calm’. He backed this up with a report a week later, on 9 March, predicting that if the remains of Czechoslovakia were to be ‘absorbed’ into the German Reich, it would not happen for ‘a year or two’. The following day, the MP Sir Samuel Hoare, one of Chamberlain’s close supporters, made a speech to his constituents in Chelsea confidently predicting that Europe could now look forward to a ‘Golden Age’ of peace, prosperity and stability.

František Morávec did not share this Panglossian view. He arranged a swift meeting with Colonel Harold ‘Gibby’ Gibson, the head of the MI6 station in Prague, and asked for help. As a result, at around one o’clock on the afternoon of 14 March, a DC Douglas aircraft belonging to KLM made an unscheduled stop at Ruzyně airfield, twelve kilometres east of the Czech capital. There it was loaded with eleven men of the Czech intelligence service and numerous boxes of files. At 5.15 p.m. the plane took off for Rotterdam, where after dropping off one of its passengers, Aloïs Franck, who had orders to establish himself in The Hague, it continued its journey to Croydon Aerodrome outside London.

At dawn the following day, German armoured units stormed over the Sudetenland frontier and occupied Prague. By this time Thümmel’s files, codes and contacts were safely in London. From now on, the ultimate destination of his priceless intelligence would be the British government, and in due course its great wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill.