Churchill, British Intelligence, and the German Opposition Question

Abstract

In a previous article, ‘British Intelligence and the July Bomb Plot of 1944: A Reappraisal’, it was recorded that in 1949 Winston Churchill had stated to a surviving member of the German opposition that ‘during the war he had been misled by his assistants about the considerable strength and size of the German anti-Hitler resistance’. It also highlighted the fact that historians have argued consistently that the July bomb plot and its antecedents represented ‘an embarrassing failure by British intelligence’ due to an alleged inability to warn its political ‘consumers’ of a developing anti-Hitler conspiracy within the Third Reich. New evidence has now surfaced proving categorically that British intelligence informed Churchill not only of the potential strength of the German army opposition, but also of its determination to overthrow Hitler and his Nazi cohorts by means of a coup d’état. The present article argues that this fresh evidence, in the shape of PREM 7/7, consigns, once and for all, these accusations against British intelligence to the dustbin of history.