Four months hence a red planet will appear on the eastern horizon and will indicate that a dangerous evil-doer, who has drenched the world in blood, will pass away … This means that an uncrowned emperor will be killed, and that man is Hitler.
Harford Montgomery Hyde, who served on the staff of British Security Coordination in New York, confirms that steps were taken to ensure the story was picked up by American correspondents in Egypt. At the same time, correspondents in Nigeria filed a story based on a report from a remote district, which told of a vision seen by a priest called Ulokoigbe. In the priest’s own words:
In the light, I saw a group of five men on a rock. One was short, with long hair; the second was fat and shaped like the breadfruit; the third monkey-faced and crippled; the fourth had glass in his eyes like the District Officer; the fifth was leopard-faced. After a quarrel the fifth vanished. The cripple stabbed the breadfruit man in the back. The long-haired one cursed the glass-eyed one and pushed him from the rock. Then the cripple jumped from the rock leaving Long Hair alone. Long Hair seized the crown from the rock, but it did not fit his head and fell off. In a wild rage, Long Hair slipped from the rock and fell shrieking like a madman. The crown was left in its proper place in the middle of the rock.
This droll fable, which lampoons Hitler together with Göring, Goebbels, Himmler and Hess, was also reproduced in the United States. Elsewhere de Wohl predicted Germany would use Brazil as a stepping stone for hostilities against the USA, and attacked pro-German figures such as Henry Haye and Charles Lindbergh. Throughout the tour he was accompanied by a senior SOE secretary, and paid in cash each week by a BSC minion who was obliged to climb the fire escape of his modest Manhattan hotel. After returning to London in February 1942 de Wohl purchased the uniform of an army captain, and was observed ‘walking down Piccadilly looking just like an unmade bed’. The masquerade proved short lived, and by the end of 1943 de Wohl had outlived his usefulness. By the end of the war he had returned to writing pulp fiction, delivering a derivative supernatural thriller titled Strange Daughter, revolving around black magic and attempts to birth a daughter of the devil. Even in his highly unreliable BSC history A Man Called Intrepid, William Stevenson was correct in describing de Wohl as a quack.
Allegations that Hitler and the Nazis were devotees of even darker arts were not common during the war years, a book from 1943 called The Occult Causes of the Present War proving the exception rather than the rule. According to author Lewis Spence, the marked ‘Satanic element in Nazism’ was the work of a ‘mysterious and well-concealed body of Satanist or Luciferian origin’ which had manifested itself in ‘practically every European revolt since the beginning of the Christian era’. In relation to Hitler himself, the plainly conspiratorial Spence offered little beyond enigmatic statements that the Führer was a ‘mystical mulatto’ and ‘the creature of shadowy people’. Despite claims to the contrary by later authors, it is most unlikely that the Allies considered the Nazi hierarchy to consist of a cabal of sinister pagan adepts, or that at Nuremberg evidence of ritualistic and occult practices was excluded for fear it would lead to acquittals on grounds of ‘diminished responsibility’ or insanity. This last allegation was made by Michael Bentine, supposedly on the word of Airey Neave, an IMT prosecutor, although Neave made no mention of the issue in his own memoir published in 1978. Why such an important disclosure should have been entrusted to Bentine, a former RAF intelligence officer turned comedian and parapsychologist, is obscure. In truth Bentine probably adapted it from a highly unreliable book called The Spear of Destiny, discussed below.
Today readers can choose from a whole raft of books which purport to establish intimate links between the Third Reich and the occult, including Satan and Swastika, The Occult Reich, Hitler and the Occult and Hitler – Black Magician. Among the themes customarily churned out are the Thule Society, the Ordo Templi Orientis, Wotanism, the influence of George Gurdjieff and Karl Haushofer, secret polar bases, and quests for ancient relics such as the Holy Grail, which in turn have informed Hollywood blockbusters such as the Indiana Jones series and Seven Years in Tibet. A detailed exploration lies beyond the scope of this study, and the curious are instead advised to begin their researches with The Occult Roots of Nazism by Dr Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, who wrote cogently in 1985:
Books written about Nazi occultism between 1960 and 1975 were typically sensational and under-researched. A complete ignorance of the primary sources are common to most authors, and inaccuracies and wild claims were repeated by each newcomer to the genre until an abundant literature existed, based on spurious ‘facts’ concerning the powerful Thule Society, the Nazi links with the East, and Hitler’s supposed occult initiation … The modern mythology of Nazi occultism is scurrilous and absurd.
One of the best known, and most absurd, of these books is The Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft, which first appeared in 1973. During the war, Ravenscroft was commissioned in the Royal Fusiliers, then served in a commando unit and took part in the abortive Keyes raid on Rommel’s headquarters at Beda Littoria in Libya in November 1941. Ravenscroft was captured during this operation, and was held as a prisoner until 1945. After the war he became a journalist on the Beaverbrook press, and developed an interest in the occult and the supernatural, which in turn led to contact with an Austrian historian named Walter Johannes Stein. Stein was an expert on Grail Romances, as well as the so-called Spear of Destiny or Holy Lance, with which a Roman centurion named Longinus was said to have pierced Christ’s side as he hung on the cross at Golgotha. According to Stein, the Spear was thus invested with great supernatural power, which enabled its owner to control the destiny of the world.
A shared interest in the Spear led Stein to a passing acquaintance with Adolf Hitler in Vienna between 1909 and 1913. According to Ravenscroft, Stein ‘himself witnessed at this time how Hitler attained higher levels of consciousness by means of drugs and made a penetrating study of medieval occultism and ritual magic’, and as a result ‘knew more about the personal life of Adolf Hitler than any man alive’. A staunch opponent of Nazism, Stein fled to Britain in 1933, and during the war acted as ‘a confidential advisor to Churchill regarding the minds and motivation of Adolf Hitler and the leading members of the Nazi Party’. Incredibly, Stein claimed to be able to capture lost moments in history through transcendental meditation or ‘mind expansion’, and in turn taught Ravenscroft this highly original research methodology after the pair met in 1948. In 1957 Stein was taken ill suddenly and died. According to Ravenscroft:
Very considerable pressure was brought to bear to dissuade Dr Stein from revealing what is now presented as the content of this book … Sir Winston Churchill himself was insistent that the occultism of the Nazi Party should not under any circumstances be revealed to the general public. The failure of the Nuremberg Trials to identify the nature of the evil at work behind the outer facade of National Socialism convinced him that another three decades must pass before a large enough readership would be present to comprehend the initiation rites and black magic practices of the inner core of the Nazi leadership.
Ravenscroft eventually published The Spear of Destiny in 1973, and presented a novel case. The magical Spear was seized by Hitler as a ‘talisman of power’ following the Anschluss in 1938, having passed through the hands of Hereward the Wake, King Athelstan, Charlemagne and the Hohenstauffen dynasty. After standing in Nuremberg throughout the Blitzkrieg victories in Poland and the West, it was finally recovered by US forces in April 1945, whereupon General Patton became fascinated with the relic. Stein – or more probably Ravenscroft – appears to have recovered no end of lost moments. Having had his ‘occult sight’ opened by one Dietrich Eckhart, Hitler mastered the mysteries of Atlantis and The Secret Doctrine with the help of the Thule Society and Karl Haushofer. Meanwhile select members of the SS ‘took oaths of irreversible allegiance to satanic powers’ while Himmler was identified as a ‘Planetary Doppelgänger’ and an ‘anti-human in a human body’.
&
nbsp; Without exception, these claims are complete nonsense. Walter Johannes Stein certainly existed, but is not mentioned in any substantial biography of Hitler or Churchill, nor in Churchill’s own war memoirs. The spear on display in the Hofburg Museum in Vienna is a medieval relic, and thus nowhere near as ancient as Ravenscroft would have readers believe. His method of ‘mind expansion’ was simply a device by which spurious history could be fabricated, rather than researched, while the circumstances of his supposed disclosures to Ravenscroft are highly dubious. Perhaps conveniently, Stein died long before Ravenscroft put pen to paper, and was thus unable to confirm any of the fantastical claims made on his behalf. Equally convenient was the fact that, during his long years of study with the sage Austrian doctor, Ravenscroft ‘took no verbatim notes or tape recordings of Dr Stein’s actual words’. The Spear of Destiny is nothing more than well-written mystical, neo-classical clap-trap, and seems only to have been taken seriously by virtue of the author’s brief military career. A telling insight into Ravenscroft’s bizarre state of mind came in 1979, when with scant moral justification he sued writer James Herbert for alleged plagiarism in his novel The Spear. As Herbert later recalled:
One day we were in court and my QC said to Ravenscroft, ‘You are saying terrible things about Mr Herbert, but you don’t know him, you’ve never spoken to him.’ And Ravenscroft turned round and said, ‘I do know him’ – and he thumped the witness stand in front of him – and said, ‘I have met Herbert, I was there and he was there.’ And the QC said, ‘I’m sorry, where? Where were you both?’ He was kind of bemused. Ravenscroft said: ‘At the Crucifixion! I was on the right-hand side of Christ and Herbert was on the other side.’
We showed in court that Ravenscroft himself had copied paragraph after paragraph from other historians like Hugh Trevor-Roper … Then we asked for Ravenscroft’s notes, and would you believe they were all on a little sailing boat that he had, which got shipwrecked, and everything was so waterlogged it had to be thrown away. He didn’t have one scrap.
Indeed, certain aspects of The Spear of Destiny are simply odious. In a chapter dealing with ‘astrological pest control’, Ravenscroft claims that in 1924 the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner was able to rid a Silesian estate of rabbits by means of homeopathic ‘potentisation’ of traces of spleen, testes and skin. Two days after the ashes were cast to the wind, so it was said, the entire rabbit population panicked and fled north, their survival instinct fatally undermined. According to Ravenscroft:
There was to be a sinister sequel to this astonishing demonstration … The Nazis repeated the experiment with the ‘potentised’ ashes of the testicles, spleens and portions of the skin of virile young Jews in an attempt to drive the remnant of the Jewish population out of Germany for ever … The order to carry out this diabolical plan came from Hitler himself … Many rumours, later the subject of a number of black books, circulated in post-war Germany that the SS had scattered the ashes from the gas ovens in the concentration camps across the length and breadth of the Reich.
Once again, no historical foundation exists for this disturbing claim, and it is to be regretted that Ravenscroft chose to present these various myths and legends as fact, rather than the fictive fantasy they undoubtedly are. Ravenscroft returned to the fray with The Cup of Destiny: The Quest for the Grail in 1980, and died in 1989, the same year in which a sequel of sorts appeared in the form of Secrets of the Holy Lance. Written by ‘Colonel Howard Buechner and Captain Wilhelm Bernhart’, this claimed that the Spear was secretly taken to a base in Antarctica, and a replica placed in the Hofburg Museum. Secret Nazi treasure and U-boats ferrying wanted Nazis to South America also figure prominently in this account, about which readers will no doubt draw their own conclusions.
8
Hess and the Royals
The bizarre arrival of Rudolf Hess by parachute near Glasgow on the night of 10 May 1941 has given rise to more outlandish myths and legends than any other single event during the Second World War. Since 1946, more than twenty books dealing with the Deputy Führer’s mysterious ‘peace mission’ have appeared in print, spawning a thriving worldwide Hess conspiracy industry to rival those surrounding Jack the Ripper and the Kennedy assassination. Among the many contentious issues are whether Hitler approved of the ill-starred plan, whether Hess was expected by a well-connected peace lobby in Britain, or else lured to Britain as part of an elaborate intelligence sting, whether the Allies replaced Hess with a double, and whether he was murdered at Spandau Prison in 1987, or died by his own hand. Although few if any of these questions are likely to be resolved to the satisfaction of every Hess investigator, some of the more outlandish theories can today be safely dismissed.
The established facts of the Hess affair run as follows. At 5.45 pm on Saturday 10 May Hess, a pilot for more than twenty years, took off from the Messerschmitt works airfield at Augsburg, Bavaria, in a twin-engined Bf 110 fighter-bomber. After a journey of almost 1,000 miles lasting four hours, Hess crossed the British coast over Alnwick in Northumberland, then flew on towards his objective, Dungavel House, eventually baling out at 11 pm to land near the village of Eaglesham. Detained by the local Home Guard, Hess gave his name as ‘Alfred Horn’ and asked to see the Duke of Hamilton, then a serving RAF officer. After being transferred into army custody Hess was unmasked, and explained to various interrogators that the purpose of his flying visit was to seek peace between Britain and Germany. In this he failed magnificently: Hitler quickly issued a statement which alleged that Hess was mentally disordered and ‘a victim of hallucinations’, while Hess was detained in Britain as a prisoner of state until his conviction for conspiracy and crimes against peace at Nuremberg in 1946. Thereafter Hess was held as a Prisoner No. 7 at Spandau Prison in Berlin, always denied parole, and died on 17 August 1987 at the age of ninety-three.
Myth and falsehood surround his epic flight even before Hess set foot on British soil. In his controversial account The Murder of Rudolf Hess (1979), Dr Hugh Thomas reproduced a series of photographs said to record Hess departing from Augsburg on 10 May. The Bf 110 shown was not equipped with long range drop-tanks, leading Thomas (and others) to surmise that the aircraft lacked sufficient fuel to reach Glasgow, and would therefore have had to land to refuel en route, or that two aircraft were involved. According to Thomas, Hess was shot down by the Luftwaffe, and replaced by a double for the flight to Scotland. However these various suppositions are based on careless research. Hess flew to Scotland in a Bf 110E, which with drop-tanks boasted a more than adequate range of 1,560 miles, and which bore the works number 3869 and the radio code VJ+OQ. The machine shown in the photographs carries the works number 3526, while Thomas managed to misquote the radio code as NJ+OQ. Although reports that a drop-tank was later recovered from the Clyde have never been verified, the simple fact is that the photographs were taken on one of the twenty-odd training flights Hess made from Augsburg before 10 May, using a completely different machine.
Some accounts offer that Hess must have landed and refuelled at an intermediate airfield such as Schiphol or Aalborg, but this would not have been necessary. Nor is it true that Hess flew from Calais, as reported from Sweden in 1943, or that for part of his flight Hess was escorted by no less a dignitary than the future SS Reichsprotektor of Bohemia, Reinhard Heydrich, in a Bf 109 fighter. A postwar claim by the Luftwaffe fighter ace Adolf Galland should also be treated with caution. In his memoir The First and the Last (1955), Galland claimed that ‘early in the evening’ of 10 May he received an agitated call from Göring, ordering his entire group into the air to bring down the Deputy Führer. A dubious Galland responded by sending up a token force. However, the claim is only credible if Göring and others had advance knowledge of the Hess flight, and opposed it, which raises the question of why Hess was allowed to take off from Augsburg in the first place. In the same vein, some have claimed that it would not have been possible for Hess to have flown over German territory without prior authorisation, but this is convincingly countered by
Roy Nesbit and Georges Van Acker in their book The Flight of Rudolf Hess (1999). Suggestions by Richard Deacon that the Bf 110 flown by Hess was fitted with American parts are plainly nonsensical.
The account given by Hess of his route to Scotland is also suspect. Hess was said to have been very proud of his achievement in flying from Augsburg to Eaglesham, a distance of almost 1,000 miles, the last 400 over water and enemy territory. On a map drawn by Hess on 8 August 1941, while a prisoner, he claimed to have flown north-west from Augsburg to Den Helder in Holland, then north-east for 70 miles, and then north-west again to a point above the middle of the North Sea. Here, at 8.52 pm, he made another 90 degree turn to port in order to approach the British coastline from the east. Hess claimed he then realised he had an hour to kill, since at this more northerly latitude the sun set later than in southern Germany, whereas he wished to fly overland at dusk, and as a result executed several complicated zig-zag manoeuvres to kill time. But as Picknett, Prince and Prior argued in their highly detailed study Double Standards (2001), there is good reason to doubt this account. When Hess left Augsburg he was observed heading north, not north-west, while a part of his later zig-zag manoeuvres were carried out within range of British Chain Home radar, who instead recorded Hess (designated Raid 42J) as flying straight in from the east. Hess, at bottom an amateur pilot, claimed to have been navigating alone, which makes it highly unlikely that he could have followed such a complicated course over open water, yet still managed to land just eleven miles from his intended destination, Dungavel House. Given that Hess had been considering his mission since at least September 1940, and may have made several previous abortive attempts, it is unlikely he would have overlooked the fact that dusk fell later in the north. Instead, the authors of Double Standards guess that Hess made use of a then-secret German radio-navigational system, broadcast from the station at Kalundborg on the west coast of Zeeland in Denmark. Kalundborg lies precisely due north of Augsburg, and due east of Alnwick and Dungavel House, thus making Hess’s journey far more simple, but 250 miles – and one tell-tale hour – longer.
Myths & Legends of the Second World War Page 17