The Venlo incident was a covert operation carried out by the German Nazi Party's Sicherheitsdienst (SD) on 9 November 1939, which resulted in the capture of two British Secret Intelligence Service agents five metres (16 ft) from the German border, on the outskirts of the Dutch city of Venlo.
The incident was later used by the German government to link Britain to Georg Elser's failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, on 8 November 1939, and to help justify Germany's invasion of the Netherlands (then a neutral country) on 10 May 1940.
After the British declaration of war on Nazi Germany on 3 September 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was still interested in seeking a compromise peace with Germany before too much blood had been spilt. The British Government was well aware of the existence of widespread opposition among the leaders of the German Army.
During the autumn of 1939, the German opposition was extending feelers to the British government. In October, Munich lawyer Josef Müller contacted the British through the Vatican with the connivance of Colonel Hans Oster. Theodor Kordt, the younger brother of Erich, pursued similar objectives in Bern.
The Swedish industrialist Birger Dahlerus tried to establish peace through an early form of shuttle diplomacy, partly performed on Dutch soil. And in early October the Dutch ambassador in Ankara, Philips Christiaan Visser, was communicating peace proposals on the line of the Dahlerus proposals, made by Hitler's former deputy chancellor and then ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen, to the British ambassador Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen.
All diplomatic efforts to avoid a Second World War in Europe during the days preceding the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 had come to nothing. So when a German refugee named Fischer succeeded in winning the confidence of the exiled German Catholic leader, Karl Spiecker, a British intelligence informant in the Netherlands, the British SIS became interested in the information Fischer was offering.
In early September 1939, a meeting was arranged between Fischer and the British SIS agent Captain Sigismund Payne Best. Best was an experienced intelligence officer who worked under the cover of a businessman residing in The Hague with his Dutch wife.
Subsequent meetings included Major Richard Henry Stevens, a less-experienced intelligence operative who was working covertly for the British SIS as the passport control officer in The Hague. To assist Best and Stevens in passing through the Dutch mobilised zones near the border with Germany, a young Dutch Army officer, Lieutenant Dirk Klop, was recruited by Chief of the Dutch Military Intelligence, Major General Johan van Oorschot. Klop was permitted by Van Oorschot to sit in on covert meetings but could not take part because of his country's neutrality.
At the early meetings Fischer brought participants who were posing as German officers who supported a plot against Hitler, and who were interested in establishing Allied peace terms if Hitler was deposed. When Fischer's success in setting up the meetings with the British agents became known, Sturmbannführer Walter Schellenberg of the Foreign Intelligence section of the Sicherheitsdienst began to attend these meetings. Masquerading as a "Hauptmann Schämmel", Schellenberg was at the time a trusted operative of Heinrich Himmler and was in close contact with Reinhard Heydrich during the Venlo operation.
At the last meeting between the British SIS agents and the German SD officers on 8 November, Schellenberg promised to bring a general to the meeting on the following day. Instead, the Germans brought the talks to an abrupt end with the kidnapping of Best and Stevens.
The Venlo Incident was first reported in the British Press on 10 November 1939, as follows:
ONE DUTCHMAN KILLED AND SEVERAL WOUNDED
Shooting Affray Follows Clash With German Officials.
Amsterdam, Thursday---One man was shot dead and a number of Dutchmen were kidnapped and taken into Germany after an amazing incident at Venlo, on the Dutch-German frontier this evening, following an armed clash between German Officials and Dutchmen.
A German motor car crossed the frontier when a Dutch car was approaching the Dutch barrier, ten yards from the German customs House. It is presumed that the Germans wanted to continue their journey into Holland [sic] in the Dutch car.
German officials and Customs officers, partly uniformed and all armed, ran across the Dutch frontier menacing Dutch onlookers, and ordered customers at the nearby café to move inside from the windows.
A wild shooting affray followed, and one man, believed to be a Dutchman in the Dutch car, was killed, the body being dragged back into Germany. Several other Dutchmen who were in the car were likewise kidnapped, and, with their car, hauled into German territory.
The Dutch authorities have ordered an immediate Inquiry.