Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)

by Ian Kershaw

  Göring – residing at the time in his castle at Veldenstein near Nuremberg – was telephoned straight away. Hitler was in no mood for small-talk. ‘Göing, get here immediately,’ he barked into the telephone. ‘Something dreadful has happened.’ Ribbentrop was also summoned.183 Hitler, meanwhile, had ordered Pintsch, the hapless bearer of ill tidings, and Heß’s other adjutant, Alfred Leitgen, arrested, and spent his time marching up and down the hall in a rage.184 The mood in the Berghof was one of high tension and speculation.185 Amid the turmoil, Hitler was clear-sighted enough to act quickly to rule out any possible power-vacuum in the Party leadership arising from Heß’s defection. That very day, he issued a terse edict stipulating that the former office of the Deputy Leader would now be termed the Party Chancellery, and be subordinated to him personally. It would be led, as before, by Party Comrade Martin Bormann.186 It was reminiscent of the way Hitler had dealt with the Gregor Strasser crisis of 1932 by – at least nominally – taking the reins into his own hands.187 In practice, making Bormann the chief of the Party’s central office would provide from now on a level of interventionist zeal by the Party, increasingly imposing its ideologically driven activism on the regime’s administration, on a scale which had never been witnessed under Heß.188

  Accompanied by General Ernst Udet, Göring arrived during the evening. Hitler repeated the hope that Heß had crashed. He asked Göring and Udet whether it was probable that Heß would manage to reach his flight-target near Glasgow. They thought it could be ruled out. In their view, Heß did not have sufficient mastery of the technical equipment. Hitler disagreed. At that, Ribbentrop was dispatched to Rome to prevent any potential rift in the Axis. The news from London could break at any time. It was vital to obviate any presumption by Mussolini that Germany was attempting to arrange a separate peace with Britain.189

  Hitler was furious to learn that Heß, despite being banned from flying, had prepared his plans in minute detail. He persuaded himself – taking his lead from what Heß himself in his letter had suggested – that the Deputy Führer was indeed suffering from mental delusion, and insisted on making his ‘madness’ the centre-point of the extremely awkward communiqué which had to be put out to the German people.190 Since there was still nothing from Britain, but some sort of official announcement from Berlin was thought to be unavoidable, it was suggested that the Deputy Führer had probably crashed en route. There was still no word of Heß’s whereabouts when the communiqué was broadcast at 8p.m. that evening. The communiqué mentioned the letter which had been left behind, showing ‘in its confusion unfortunately the traces of a mental derangement’, giving rise to fears that he had been the ‘victim of hallucinations’. ‘Under these circumstances,’ the communiqué ended, it had to be presumed that ‘Party Comrade Heß had somewhere on his journey crashed, that is, met with an accident’.191

  Goebbels, overlooked in the first round of Hitler’s consultations, had by then also been summoned to the Obersalzberg. ‘The Führer is completely crushed,’ the Propaganda Minister noted in his diary. ‘What a spectacle for the world: a mentally-deranged second man after the Führer.’192 The following day, on reaching the Berghof, he was shown the letters left by Heß. ‘A muddle-headed shambles, schoolboy dilettantism,’ was his verdict on Heß’s intention to work through the Duke of Hamilton to bring down Churchill and attain peace-terms. ‘That Churchill would immediately have him arrested hadn’t, unfortunately, occurred to him.’ The letters, he claimed, were full of ‘half-baked occultism’. He pointed to Heß’s belief in horoscopes. ‘A thoroughly pathological business,’ he concluded.193 Meanwhile, early on 13 May, the BBC in London had brought the official announcement that Heß indeed found himself in British captivity.

  The first German communiqué composed by Hitler the previous day would plainly no longer suffice. The new communiqué of 13 May acknowledged Heß’s flight to Scotland, and capture. It emphasized his physical illness – he had suffered from a gall-bladder complaint – stretching back years, which had put him in the hands of mesmerists, astrologists, and the like, bringing about ‘a mental confusion’ that had led to the present action. It also held open the possibility that he had been entrapped by the British Secret Service. Affected by delusions, he had undertaken the action of an idealist without any notion of the consequences. His action, the communiqué ended, would alter nothing in the struggle against Britain.194

  The two communiqués, forced ultimately to concede that the Deputy Führer had flown to the enemy, and attributing the action to his mental state, bore all the hallmarks of a hasty and ill-judged attempt to play down the enormity of the scandal. Remarkably, Goebbels had not been informed of what had happened until the evening of 12 May.195 Hitler had not turned to him for propaganda advice on how to present the débâcle, but had relied instead at first on Otto Dietrich, the Press Chief. Goebbels was highly critical from the outset about the ‘mental illness’ explanation. None of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter who inundated him with telephone calls about the position, he wrote, believed the ‘madness’ story. ‘It sounds so absurd that it could be taken for a mystification,’ he frankly admitted.196 His own preference would have been to say nothing until forced to do so, then to suggest that Heß, as had been claimed of Gregor Strasser in 1932, had ‘evidently lost his nerve’ at the last minute.197 This way, weakness rather than insanity could have been blamed. It would have been an easier interpretation to defend.198 As it was, a real difficulty had to be faced: how to explain that a man recognized for many years as mentally unbalanced had been left in such an important position in the running of the Reich. ‘It’s rightly asked how such an idiot could be the second man after the Führer,’ Goebbels remarked.199

  SD reports and other soundings of popular reactions told Goebbels of the damaging impact on the morale of the people.200 For the Nazi Party’s standing, the fall-out from the Heß affair was disastrous. Hefty and sustained criticism of the Party and its representatives had been widespread even during the victorious summer of 1940. Alongside the adulation for the Führer and the eulogies for the Wehrmacht went feelings that the Party and its representatives had perhaps once served some purpose, but were by now superfluous. Many thought the Party functionaries were corrupt, interfering, and self-serving – feathering their own nest at home, shirking, and draft-dodging while the indomitable Führer and his brave soldiers were at the front, facing the enemy. As before the war, the corruption, high-handedness, loose living, and other personal failings of the jumped-up ‘tin-pot gods (Nebengötter) were the subject of extensive condemnation. The popular distaste was much in evidence in the months before the Heß scandal. It was, then, scarcely surprising that, alongside the deep shock and dismay felt by Party members and loyal supporters, Heß’s defection now evoked a wave of massive criticism cascading down on the heads of the Party hacks.201

  A sense of the popular feeling could be grasped from the innumerable wild rumours that sprouted overnight in all parts of the Reich in what one government official dubbed ‘the month of rumours’.202 It was, for instance, rumoured that Himmler and Ley had fled abroad, that the Gauleiter of Upper Bavaria, Adolf Wagner, had been caught on the border trying to export into Switzerland 22 million Reich Marks robbed from monasteries, and that Alfred Rosenberg, Julius Streicher, Count Helldorf (the Police Chief of Berlin), and Walther Darre (the Blut und Boden guru) had been shot for their involvement in Heß’s ‘treason’.203 Of course, none of the rumours was true. But their existence – and negative rumour was an important mode of criticism in the police state – graphically highlights the low popular esteem of leading Party representatives. Goebbels felt the blow to prestige so deeply that he wanted to avoid being seen in public. ‘It’s like an awful dream,’ he remarked. ‘The Party will have to chew on it for a long time.’204 The only solution from his point of view was to batten down the hatches and let the hurricane blow itself out. Soon he was commenting that the issue was losing its dramatic effect.205 It was turning into a nine-days’ wonder.
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br />   Hitler himself was occasionally caught in the line of fire of criticism. One popular joke doing the rounds at the time had Heß summoned before Churchill. The British Prime Minister, bulldog expression on his face, cigar in his mouth, was supposed to have said: ‘So you’re the madman are you?’ ‘Oh, no,’ Heß replied, ‘only his Deputy.’206 But, generally, the contrast between the scarcely diluted contempt for the Party functionaries and the massive popularity of Hitler himself, embodying all that was seen to be positive in National Socialism, was stark. Much sympathy was voiced for the Führer who now had this, on top of all his other worries, to contend with. As ever, it was presumed that, while he was working tirelessly on behalf of the nation, he was kept in the dark, let down, or betrayed by some of his most trusted chieftains.207

  This key element of the ‘Führer myth’ was one that Hitler himself played to when, on 13 May, he addressed a rapidly arranged meeting of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter at the Berghof. There was an air of tension when Göring and Bormann, both grim-faced, entered the hall before Hitler made his appearance. Bormann read out Heß’s final letter to Hitler. The feeling of shock and anger among those listening was palpable. Then Hitler came into the room. Much as in the last great crisis within the Party leadership, in December 1932, he played masterfully on the theme of loyalty and betrayal.208 Heß had betrayed him, he stated. He appealed to the loyalty of his most trusted ‘old fighters’. He declared that Heß had acted without his knowledge, was mentally ill, and had put the Reich in an impossible position with regard to its Axis partners. He had sent Ribbentrop to Rome to placate the Duce. He stressed once more Heß’s long-standing odd behaviour (his dealings with astrologists and the like). He castigated the former Deputy Führer’s opposition to his own orders in continuing to practise flying. Heß, he said, had arranged for a specially adapted Messerschmitt to be fitted out, and had had regular weather charts for the North Sea sent to him for months. A few days before Heß’s defection, he went on, the Deputy Führer had come to see him and asked him pointedly whether he still stood to the programme of cooperation with England that he had laid out in Mein Kampf. Hitler said he had, of course, reaffirmed this position.

  When he had finished speaking, Hitler leaned against the big table near the window. According to one account, he was ‘in tears and looked ten years older’.209 ‘I have never seen the Führer so deeply shocked,’ Hans Frank told a gathering of his subordinates in the General Government a few days later.210 As he stood near the window, gradually all the sixty or seventy persons present rose from their chairs and gathered round him in a semicircle. No one spoke a word.211 Then Göring provided an effusive statement of the devotion of all present. The intense anger was reserved only for Heß.212 The ‘core’ following had once more rallied around their Leader, as in the ‘time of struggle’, at a moment of crisis. The regime had suffered a massive jolt; but the Party leadership, its backbone, was still holding together.

  At least one of those present, Gauleiter Ernst Wilhelm Bohle of the Auslandsorganisation (Foreign Countries’ Organization), thought – or so he asserted after the war – that Heß had acted with Hitler’s full knowledge and encouragement.213 Some other contemporaries, notably General Karl Heinrich Bodenschatz, Göring’s adjutant, who was present at the Berghof when the news was broken to Hitler, also remained convinced of his involvement. Their voices have sometimes carried weight down the ages. However, there is not a shred of compelling and sustainable evidence to support the case.214

  All who saw Hitler in the days after the news of Heß’s defection broke registered his profound shock, dismay, and anger at what he saw as betrayal. This has sometimes been interpreted, as it was also by a number of contemporaries, as clever acting on Hitler’s part, concealing a plot which only he and Heß knew about.215 Hitler was indeed capable, as we have noted on more than one occasion, of putting on a theatrical performance. But if this was acting, it was of Hollywood-Oscar calibre.

  That the Deputy Führer had been captured in Britain was something that shook the regime to its foundations. As Goebbels sarcastically pointed out, it never appears to have occurred to Heß that this could be the outcome of his ‘mission’. It is hard to imagine that it would not have crossed Hitler’s mind, had he been engaged in a plot. But it would have been entirely out of character for Hitler to have involved himself in such a hare-brained scheme. His own acute sensitivity towards any potential threat to his own prestige, towards being made to look foolish in the eyes of his people and the outside world, would itself have been sufficient to have ruled out the notion of sending Heß on a one-man peace-mission to Britain. But, in any case, there was every reason, from his own point of view, not to have become involved and to have most categorically prohibited what Heß had in mind.

  Certainly, Hitler was a gambler. But he invariably weighed the odds and took what seemed to him calculable risks. He was always highly nervous, even hesitant, before any attempted coup. In this instance, his behaviour was unremarkable in the days building up to the Heß drama. The chances of the Heß flight succeeding – even if, for which there is no evidence, there had been enticement from the British Secret Service – were so remote that Hitler would not conceivably have entertained the prospect.216 And had he done so, it is hard to believe that he would have settled on Heß as his emissary. Heß had not been party to the planning of ‘Barbarossa’. He had been little in Hitler’s presence over the previous months. His competence was confined strictly to Party matters. He had no experience in foreign affairs. And he had never been entrusted previously with any delicate diplomatic negotiations.217

  In any case, Hitler’s motive for contemplating a secret mission such as Heß attempted to carry out would be difficult to grasp. For months Hitler had been single-mindedly preparing to attack and destroy the Soviet Union precisely in order to force Britain out of the war. He and his generals were confident that the Soviet Union would be comprehensively defeated by the autumn. The timetable for the attack left no room for manoeuvre. The last thing Hitler wanted was any hold-up through diplomatic complications arising from the intercession by Heß a few weeks before the invasion was to be launched. Had ‘Barbarossa’ not taken place before the end of June, it would have had to be postponed to the following year. For Hitler, this would have been unthinkable. He was well aware that there were those in the British establishment who would still prefer to sue for peace. He expected them to do so after, not before, ‘Barbarossa’.

  Rudolf Heß at no time, whether during his interrogations after landing in Scotland, in discussions with his fellow-captives while awaiting trial in Nuremberg, or during his long internment in Spandau, implicated Hitler. His story never wavered from the one he gave to Ivone Kirkpatrick at his first interrogation on 13 May 1941. ‘He had come here,’ so Kirkpatrick summed up in his report, ‘without the knowledge of Hitler in order to convince responsible persons that since England could not win the war, the wisest course was to make peace now. From a long and intimate knowledge of the Führer, which had begun eighteen years ago in the fortress of Landsberg, he could give his word of honour that the Führer had never entertained any designs against the British Empire. Nor had he ever aspired to world domination. He believed that Germany’s sphere of interest was in Europe and that any dissipation of Germany’s strength beyond Europe’s frontiers would be a weakness and would carry with it the seeds of Germany’s destruction.’ He admitted, when pressed by Kirkpatrick on whether Russia was to be seen as part of Europe or Asia, that Germany had some demands on Russia, but denied that Hitler was planning to attack the Soviet Union.218

  Heß’s British interlocutors rapidly reached the conclusion that he had nothing to offer which went beyond Hitler’s public statements, notably his ‘peace appeal’ before the Reichstag on 19 July 1940. Kirkpatrick concluded his report: ‘Heß does not seem… to be in the near counsels of the German government as regards operations; and he is not likely to possess more secret information than he could glean in the course of conver
sations with Hitler and others.’219 If, in the light of this, Heß was following out orders from Hitler himself, he would have had to be as supreme an actor – and to have continued to be so for the next four decades – as was, reputedly, the Leader he so revered. But, then, to what end? He said nothing that Hitler had not publicly on a number of occasions stated himself.220 He brought no new negotiating position. It was as if he presumed that the mere fact of the Deputy Führer voluntarily – through an act involving personal courage – putting himself in the hands of the enemy was enough to have made the British government see the good will of the Führer, the earnest intentions behind his aim of cooperation with Britain against Bolshevism, and the need to overthrow the Churchill ‘war-faction’ and settle amicably.221 The naivety of such thinking points heavily in the direction of an attempt inspired by no one but the idealistic, other-worldly, and muddle-headed Heß.

  His own motives were not more mysterious or profound than they appeared. Heß had seen over a number of years, but especially since the war had begun, his access to Hitler strongly reduced. His nominal subordinate, Martin Bormann, had in effect been usurping his position, always in the Führer’s company, always able to put in a word here or there, always able to translate his wishes into action. A spectacular action to accomplish what the Führer had been striving for over many years would transform his status overnight, turning ‘Fräulein Anna’, as he was disparagingly dubbed by some in the Party, into a national hero.222

  Heß had remained highly influenced by Karl Haushofer – his former teacher and the leading exponent of geopolitical theories which had influenced the formation of Hitler’s ideas of Lebensraum – and his son Albrecht (who later became closely involved with resistance groups). Their views had reinforced his belief that everything must be done to prevent the undermining of the ‘mission’ that Hitler had laid out almost two decades earlier: the attack on Bolshevism together with, not in opposition to, Great Britain. Albrecht Haushofer had made several attempts to contact the Duke of Hamilton – whom he had met in Berlin in 1936 – before the Heß escapade, but had received no replies to his letters. Hamilton himself strenuously denied, with justification it seems, receiving the letters, and also denied Heß’s claim to have met him at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.223