The German Fifth Column in the Second World War

Louis De Jong, C. M. Geyl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000008098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

Originally published in English in 1956, this book is divided into 3 parts: the first outlines how, after 1933, those outside Germany began to become increasingly afraid of sinister operations on the part of German agents and the partisans of National Socialism. The second part examines the role of the German Fifth column during the war and the third part analyses the role of the groups which were living outside Germany at the time Hitler started his assault.

Part One

FEAR

INTRODUCTION

The approach of disaster

BY the end of September, 1936, the Civil War in Spain had been going on for two months. The generals who in mid-July had given the signal for revolt against the government had gained important victories. With Spanish Morocco as their base they had occupied large parts of Southern Spain. Along the Portuguese frontier they had gained a firm foothold too, as well as in Northern Spain. The improvised government armies suffered one defeat after another. The rebels were approaching Madrid and the Spanish capital was threatened with encirclement. On September 28 the rebels, who had defended themselves in the Alcazar of Toledo for seventy days on end, were relieved; once more a road to the heart of Spain seemed to lie open. From the south, the south-west, the west and the north-west General Franco launched his troops upon Madrid—four columns in all.

It was in those days, perhaps immediately after the relief of Toledo, perhaps on October 1 or 2, that one of the most prominent generals of the rebels, Emilio Mola, threateningly pointed to the operations of the four columns in a broadcast talk he gave, adding that the attack on the government centre would be opened by the fifth column which was already in Madrid. ‘He will launch four columns against Madrid, says the traitor Mola, but it will be the fifth that shall start the offensive.’ Thus the communist paper Mundo Obrero of October 3, 1936.¹

¹ I have not been able to trace the exact date nor the precise text of General Mola’s words. An examination of all the works by him and about him remained without result. From Spain I have received information that no positive indications could be found in the nationalist press of those days either. Spanish experts, however, believe that there is little reason to doubt that General Mola—who died on June 3, 1937—uttered words of the above mentioned purport.

In August and September Madrid had already been buzzing with the rumour that the country was being betrayed. Real or supposed supporters of General Franco had been arrested by the thousand. Communists, socialists and anarchists systematically worked through their lists of suspect persons. Every morning there were found in the streets the bodies of dozens of victims who had been killed in the night. But it seemed as if the danger from within could never be wholly warded off. In the hot month of August no one would enjoy the cool of the evening, it was too dangerous out in the streets, ‘because especially in certain well-to-do quarters shots would suddenly ring out of the roof-tops; because ghost cars would suddenly appear round corners and fire a few rounds from sub-machine guns and disappear again’.¹ Rumours that the cause of the republic was in a bad way were general. It was as if they were systematically being circulated. Consequently General Mola’s chance saying only brought the confirmation of uneasy conjectures: Franco then had his obviously organised support in Madrid itself—a ‘fifth column’.

‘His feline movements can be felt…. It is the enemy who must be destroyed forthwith,’ cried La Pasionaria.² Whole series of house-to-house searches followed. From October 8 both active military officers and those on retirement pay were arrested in large numbers in any case where they were not fully trusted. People were continually urged to be on the alert against ‘spies, scare-mongers, defeatists—those who, concealed in their hiding-places, are awaiting the order to rush out into the streets … the quinta columna facciosa’.³

In the last half of October the ‘fifth column’ had become a term in Spain that was continually being used by the republican press, particularly by the left-wing papers. Its origin had already been half forgotten; not quite a fortnight after General Mola’s broadcast its paternity was attributed to General Queipo de Llano by a Madrid newspaper, and to General Franco by the correspondent of the London Times. The vagueness that continued to surround the term was an impetus to its employment rather than a hindrance. Did it not point to an intangible enemy? So great was the fear for this opponent that General Mola’s carelessly uttered, business-like words—a numeral plus a military term—had immediately become charged with emotional force. The accidental combination ‘fifth column’ was raised to the conception ‘Fifth Column’. It was as if people had been waiting for it.⁴

¹ John Langdon Davies: Fifth Column (London, 1940), pp. 6-7.

² Mundo Obrero (Madrid), Oct.-3, 1936.

³ Ibid., Oct. 15, 1936.

⁴ In this same way four years previously two words from the peroration of a speech of Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, with which he accepted the democratic candidateship for the presidency (‘I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people’) had developed into ‘New Deal’ without the author or the speaker wishing or so much as suspecting it. Samuel I. Rosenman: Working with Roosevelt (New York, 1952), pp. 71–2, 78–9.

If one should wish to write the history of the use of that conception, one would have to follow it in its tortuous, often hidden course, turning up now here, now there, alone or in combination with other similar terms—the ‘Trojan horse’, the ‘Nazintern’. It seemed to smoulder on like a heath-fire. But in the year 1940, when the whole of the Western world was in a blaze, it suddenly flared up high and clear.

That it had smouldered on had been no accident.

The term ‘Fifth Column’ met a need which existed not only in republican Spain but also outside it. This need was felt among all those people who had felt themselves threatened, for almost four years, by the powers that supported Franco: national socialist Germany and fascist Italy.

Even before the term had come into being, the actions of people who would later be stamped with that highly unpleasant connotation had given rise to great uneasiness in many countries. In the states surrounding Germany it happened once or twice that German agents who had violated the frontiers did away with their enemies. The murder of Theodor Lessing, the distinguished scholar, at Marienbad in Czechoslovakia in August, 1933, had received particular attention. It was at that same time that people in Austria and outside it, at least in many chancelleries, were becoming gravely concerned about the acts of aggression committed by the Austrian national socialists against the Austrian state. There one outrage followed another, and week in and week out the fugitive Austrian party leaders of the illegal NSDAP made use of German broadcasting stations to call upon their people to rebel against the Dollfuss government. On July 25, 1934, not quite a month after the world had beheld with abhorrence how Hitler had disposed of a number of his supporters and a few of his hated adversaries, a Putsch was carried out. in Vienna. It came to nothing, but the insurgents let the Austrian chancellor Dollfuss bleed to death, without granting him any medical aid or spiritual ministrations.

What was happening in the very heart of Europe?

What jungle manifested itself there?

Beyond the German frontiers people didn’t worry about whether the Vienna rebels, such as Planetta and Holzweber, had acted on direct orders from Berlin and Munich. The complicity of the German Reich was evident. In the German capital, just before the rising, foreign correspondents had heard that something was brewing in Austria; a few days later they showed each other copies of the Deutsche Presseklischeedienst (German Press Matrix Service) which, dated July 22, 1934—three days before the fighting in Vienna—had circulated pictures of the ‘people’s revolt in Austria’. ‘Chancellor Dollfuss’ it was printed, ‘received serious injuries during the fights at the chancellery, which led to his death.’

Thorough German organization! The revolvers were not yet loaded—but the text for the picture of the victim had already been printed.

The Austrian rebellion was perhaps the most obvious, but certainly not the only symptom of the degree to which German national socialism had called into being in other countries organisations permeated by its aggressive spirit. There was hardly a country where the Germans, after 1933, did not unite under the sign of the swastika. That applies in the first place to the Reichsdeutschen, German nationals living abroad. These formed national socialist associations which were obviously in regular contact with a central agency in Germany, a body whose only function was to lead their activities, and which in 1934 assumed the name Auslands-Organisation der NSDAP (Foreign Organization of the NSDAP).

The nature of this contact was not made public—but nevertheless the newspapers frequently were able to publish items about the deportation by wakeful and suspicious governments of members of the Auslands- Organisation, usually on the grounds of having exercised unlawful pressure on some compatriots. National socialism apparently had introduced a new principle, demanding unconditional obedience from every German, wherever he be.

That was not the only danger threatening.

In all parts of the world there were millions of people of German origin, who, despite being nationals of the country they were living in, spoke German and still shared in German culture in many ways. Berlin called them Volksdeutsche (Minority Germans). National socialism proved able to get a hold on them quickly. Outside Germany more than one thousand five hundred newspapers using the German language appeared; very many of them commented with marked sympathy on Hitler’s ‘successes’ in the field of foreign affairs. It was also reported that at an increasing number of German schools abroad—in 1936 there were about five thousand of them—the staff were instilling the pupils with a respectful devotion towards the Führer.

In the frontier regions which Germany had been forced to cede by the Treaty of Versailles, national socialism developed in strength. In 1935, in the Saar, a united front under the leadership of national socialists gained an overwhelming majority for going heim ins Reich, to the painful surprise of many people outside Germany. But even before then the French in Alsace, the Belgians in Eupen-Malmédy, the Danes in North Schleswig, the Poles in the Free State of Danzig, and the Lithuanians in Memel had been observing the growth of the national socialist organisations distrustfully. The Czechs in October, 1933, had banned the Deutsche National-Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (German National Socialist Workers’ Party), the DNSAP, which only differed from the party in Germany in the sequence of its initials; but soon they saw their three-and-a-half million Sudeten-Germans falling under the spell of a leader—Konrad Henlein—who, though protesting against being called a national socialist, had started a movement exactly resembling that self-same NSDAP, both in spirit and in organisation. The governments of Hungary, Rumania and Yugoslavia were not unaware of the increasing influence of the national socialist movement on the large German minorities in their countries. In 1933 such a movement in Rumania had already surpassed the old parties within the group of Volksdeutsche in that country.

Outside of Europe the same development could be observed.

Everywhere the swastika was b...