the attack plan fall into the hands of the enemy. He decided to commit suicide and tried to grab Rodrique's revolver. When the infuriated captain knocked him down, Reinberger burst into tears, shouting 'I wanted your revolver to kill myself'. Hoenmanns supported Reinberger saying: 'You can't blame him. He's a regular officer. He's finished now.' Two hours later officers from the Belgian intelligence service arrived, and brought the papers to the attention of their superiors in the late afternoon. Initial German reaction Late in the evening of 10 January news of the incident reached Berlin via press reports about a crashed German plane. In the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the German armed forces high command, it caused a general consternation, as it was soon deduced that Reinberger must have had papers revealing parts of the attack plan with him. On 11 January an enraged Hitler fired both the commander of Luftflotte 2, General Hellmuth Felmy, and Felmy's chief of staff Colonel Josef Kammhuber. It was nevertheless decided to proceed with the attack as originally planned, while the Luftwaffe attaché in The Hague, Lieutenant-General Ralph Wenninger, and the military attaché in Brussels, Colonel Friedrich-Carl Rabe von Pappenheim, would investigate whether the plan had been fatally compromised or not. On the 12th, the day of the attachés' first meeting with Reinberger and Hoenmanns, General Alfred Jodl, the Wehrmacht's (armed forces) Chief of Operations, gave Hitler a worrying assessment of what the Belgians might have learned from it. A note in Jodl's diary on 12 January summed up what he had said to Hitler: 'If the enemy is in possession of all the files, situation catastrophic!' However, the Germans were initially falsely reassured by Belgian deception measures. Deception The Belgians decided to try tricking Reinberger into believing that the papers had been destroyed and give him the opportunity to pass this information on to the German authorities. There were two parts to the deception: in the first the Belgian investigators asked Reinberger what was in the plans and told him that he would be treated as a spy if he did not tell them. Later Reinberger testified saying: "From the way this question was asked, I realised he [the interrogator] could not have understood anything from the fragments of the documents he had seen." The second part of the plan was to let Reinberger and Hoenmanns meet the German Air and Army Attachés, Wenninger