As defeat loomed, fanatical Nazis drew up a series of brutal post-war plans including distribution of poisoned chocolate and Nescafe, bacterial warfare and an underground organisation to build the Fourth Reich from the ruins of the Third.
The latest files released by MI5 reveal the ingenuity of Nazi scientists in their effort to strike back at the victorious Allies by deploying so-called “Werewolf” units after the fall of Germany.
German spies, arrested and interrogated as Hitler’s regime crumbled, revealed that “assassination attempts are likely to be made against important Allied individuals and there is evidence that a policy of general terrorism may be adopted against occupying troops.” The plans included poisoning food, cigarettes, water and sugar, and a powdered poison that could be “hidden in a two-sided mirror carried in handbags to be used by female agents against highly placed persons in Allied-occupied territory”. Powdered glass coated with poison could be spread on door handles, books and desks.
Another assassination technique involved a poisoned pill placed in an ashtray. “The heat of the cigarette or cigar ash or a cigarette being stubbed out in the ashtray would cause the pellet to volatilize and the vapour would kill anyone nearby.”
In October 1944, Nazi scientists held a conference in Berlin where they discussed poisoning alcoholic drinks, lacing cakes with arsenic and injecting sausages with poison using a hypodermic syringe. The poison should be delayed action, one of the delegates, Feldwebel Lehnert, was reported as saying. “It is important that the bandits should not drop dead in the house to which they have been invited, but only afterwards.”
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The Allied authorities were sufficiently alarmed by the reports to issue a warning to troops: “The eating of German food or the smoking of German cigarettes should be completely prohibited, under pain of severe penalties.”
One of the most bizarre secret weapons was a pistol made to resemble a belt buckle with a swastika emblem, described in a report from the XX US Corps. “The buckle is about 1” by 2 ½”. The cover drops down and by pushing a button a two-barreled, .32 pistol flips out, pointing directly to the front. By means of pressing two more buttons the weapon can fire two shots. If a person stood directly in front of the buckle, he would be shot. This weapon is an actuality and has been examined in this headquarters.”
A captured French collaborator, Olivier Mordrelle, described attending a conference near Munich held by the Nazi Party intelligence service in the last stages of the war at which plans were laid for a resistance organisation across Europe “to promote post-war unrest culminating in civil war”.
“The purpose was to make the Allies’ post-war task as hard as possible so that the Nazi Party could, in time, reappear in suitable disguise and build up the Fourth Reich,” the MI5 report said. “Ample funds” had already been secreted by the SS in South America for this purpose, the conference was told.
Mordrelle was dubious, describing the “strange air of unreality” as these diehard fanatics imagined creating a new Nazi movement. “He had the feeling that last-minute plans were being made in words and on paper when most of the persons present were secretly preoccupied with the idea of how they could best save their skins.”