Venlo incident

Venlo incident, German counter-intelligence operation in the Netherlands which resulted in the kidnapping of two British MI6 officers on the Dutch–German border in November 1939.

By the beginning of the war the MI6 network in the Netherlands had been penetrated by a V-man of the Nazi security service, the Sicherheitsdienst or SD (see RSHA). This enabled the SD to dupe one of the network's officers, Captain Sigismund Payne Best, into believing that a group of conspirators against Hitler wished to negotiate peace. Best reported his meeting to London and Chamberlain, the prime minister, was among those who believed the contacts were genuine. At a subsequent meeting the head of the SD's counter-espionage section, Walter Schellenberg, posing as a conspirator called ‘Major Schaemmel’, requested British peace terms. When, on 31 October 1939, the British cabinet learned about these negotiations, some—especially Churchill—objected strongly, which delayed an agreed reply until 6 November. Schellenberg then chose a café between the Dutch and German customs barriers near Venlo to receive the reply, and during a third meeting there, on 9 November, Best and another MI6 officer, Major Richard Stevens, were kidnapped and a Dutch intelligence officer was killed.

Until Himmler chose to reveal what had happened, on 22 November, the British remained mystified as the ‘conspirators’ continued to communicate with MI6 in The Hague. The Germans then scored a propaganda success by accusing Best and Stevens of plotting Hitler's demise; and one of the reasons they gave for invading the Netherlands in May 1940 was the collusion of Dutch military intelligence with the British.

Stevens and Best were sent to concentration camps. They survived the war but the information one of them revealed under interrogation severely compromised other European MI6 networks. The only grain of comfort the British subsequently gained from the incident was that Schellenberg missed a valuable opportunity to establish the kind of double-cross system later employed in Englandspiel and by the XX-committee.

Bibliography

Kessler, L. , Betrayal at Venlo (London, 1991).