Free Bombing Hitler by Hellmut G. Haasis Page B

conventional explosive did not fit in with this theory. Himmler and Heydrich, who was head of SS security services and Nebe’s immediate superior, at first pursued a suspicion that had been discussed that night on Hitler’s private train: a group of Bavarian monarchists (also known as legitimists) was responsible. Heydrich, who was also considering the possibility of embittered Alte Kämpfer, is said to have initially ordered monarchists to be shot, apparently after the example of the Rohm bloodbath of 1934, but Hitler was not so inclined. He wanted exact information.
    The Bavarian minister of the interior was allowed to pursue the monarchist angle. He berated the Gestapo command post for not including Catholic clergy on their list of monarchists. To appease him, they were added immediately, as was the former mayor of Nürnberg. On another occasion the minister also wished to see on the list “personal acquaintances of the former crown prince.”
    The SS constantly got in the way of the investigation. On the afternoon of November 9, their secret service group led by the head of SD interior defense, Walter Schellenberg, met with Sigismund Payne Best and R. H. Stevens of the British Intelligence Service just across the German-Dutch border in Venlo. The SD people identified themselves as representatives of a resistance group of German generals and tried to coax the names of resistance generals out of the Englishmen.
    At a time when British secret agents could have known about the Bürgerbräu attack from newspapers and radio, Best and Stevens were lured into a café thirty yards from the German border. Without any cover from their own people or Dutch security forces, they quickly fell prey to an armed SD riot squad. They were at first kept in custody in the prison at Moabit, then at the headquarters for Reich security, and afterward in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, in the same cell block that later housed Georg Elser. After a lengthy and terrifying term of imprisonment, they got out alive. The memoirs Best wrote while imprisoned were later used against Elser.
    The SS and Hitler seized upon the opportunity to cast the two Englishmen as Elser’s backers, even though Hitler surely understood the crassness of this lie. Swiss newspapers recognized this as rank nonsense—if the two agents had actually had anything to do with the attempt, would they have gone to the German border on the day after “their” attack? After years of manipulation by the Nazi propaganda machine, readers of German newspapers were no longer capable of recognizing the lies surrounding the Venlo story.
    The truth regarding the attack soon became apparent. In the piles of debris, brass plates from the two clocks were found, still bearing parts of their patent numbers. The mystery of the clocks in the explo-sive device was quickly resolved. According to the opinion issued by the patent office, one of the clocks was manufactured between 1925 and 1929 by the firm Haller Benzing AG in Schwenningen. With this evidence, searching for clues abroad seemed pointless. Nonetheless, Himmler released a statement to the Saturday papers that “the com-position of individual metal parts” pointed to “foreign origins.” Elser had either received the clocks in Meersburg as compensation for back pay or had ordered them and had them sent to him in Konigsbronn. In any event, he used clockworks from the Black Forest.
    Things were in a state of turmoil at the Munich Gestapo headquarters located at Brienner Strasse 50; the mass arrests were creating a hectic situation. The Catholic priest Rupert Mayer, who was imprisoned in the cellar (and later on, while imprisoned in Sachsenhausen, proved a brave witness of his faith) noted on the evening of November 9 “an unidentifiable agitation and unrest” that continued the whole night. The next morning there was “enormous unrest in the courtyard of the Gestapo