Nazis plotted poison campaign in post-war sabotage terror

German spies were equipped with everything from poisoned pills disguised as aspirin to cigarette lighters that gave off lethal fumes.

Female agents were supplied with weapons hidden in handbag mirrors, which were to be used against top-ranking officials.

British commanders were so worried about the danger of everyday items being poisoned that they recommended banning their troops from eating German food and smoking German cigarettes as they advanced in 1945.

MI5 even arranged for a bar of chocolate and a tin of Nescafé coffee seized from a captured saboteur to be tested for poison, documents released by the National Archives in Kew, west London, show.

The Nazi leadership also planned to plant sleeper agents around the world after the war, with the aim of later provoking global unrest and creating a “Fourth Reich”, the newly declassified files disclose.

The MI5 files show that German agents arrested in northern France in March 1945 after a bungled parachute drop revealed the range of deadly poisons developed by Nazi scientists, including special cigarettes which would give the smoker a headache. At this point the spy should offer an “aspirin” tablet that was in fact poison and would kill within 10 minutes.

Other revelations in the files include MI5’s scathing response to American coastguards’ failure to attack a Nazi U-boat involved in a bungled Second World War sabotage operation against the US.

The German submarine ran aground on a sandbar as it dropped off four agents on the coast of New York, on a top-secret mission to destroy targets across America.

A coastguard interrupted the would-be saboteurs as they buried supplies on the beach – but the leader of the spies, George Dasch, persuaded him to walk away and leave them by giving him 300 dollars.

Lord Rothschild, head of MI5’s counter-espionage section, was sent to the US to prepare a report about the botched Nazi operation.

He wrote: “It was only owing to the laziness or stupidity of the American coastguards that this submarine was not attacked by USA forces.”

The June 1942 Nazi sabotage mission, named Operation Pastorius, was a disaster and was foiled when Dasch betrayed his fellow agents.

In the newly-released files, Lord Rothschild noted that Operation Pastorius was well planned.

“This sabotage expedition was better equipped with sabotage apparatus and better trained than any other expeditions of which the Security Service has heard,” he wrote in his January 1943 report.

The records also reveal that a Jewish extremist hanged for murdering Lord Moyne, the UK’s Minister resident in the Middle East during the Second World War, also proposed assassinating Winston Churchill.

Eliyahu Bet-Zuri suggested sending agents of the Stern Gang, a Zionist paramilitary group, to London to kill the then-Prime Minister.