Myths & Legends of the Second World War

by James Hayward

  Another persistent Hess legend is that the RAF did little or nothing to intercept Raid 42J, which in turn is offered as proof that Hess was expected and protected. Here the evidence is confusing. Three Spitfires from 72 Squadron based at Acklington attempted to intercept the Bf 110 as it crossed the Northumberland coast, and as it approached Glasgow an airborne Defiant night fighter from 141 Squadron at Ayr was alerted, although not scrambled as some accounts suggest. In Ten Days That Saved the West (1991), John Costello claimed that the Duke of Hamilton refused to allow fighters to attack Hess, and that anti-aircraft defences in the areas he overflew were ordered not to open fire. Both statements are incorrect. The sectors over which Hess passed were Ouston and Ayr, rather than Turnhouse, and both tried to shoot down the intruder. Moreover, for obvious reasons it was common practice for AA batteries to refrain from firing on enemy targets which were being pursued by the RAF, since this carried the risk of bringing down friendly aircraft. In 1999 it was claimed that two Czech Hurricane pilots from 245 Squadron, Vaclav Bauman and Leopold Srom, had been closing on Hess when their attack was inexplicably called off. Soon after returning to their base at Aldergrove in Northern Ireland, the two men were subjected to an intensive interrogation by several senior RAF officers who arrived in an Avro Anson. Their story possibly tallies with an article published in the American Mercury in May 1943, which stated that ‘two Hurricanes took off to trail the mystery plane with orders to force it down but under no conditions to shoot at it’. However, there is no record of Srom having flown that day in the Operations Record Book for 245 Squadron, while the convoy patrol undertaken by Bauman between 9.35 and 10.40 pm would not have taken him anywhere near Hess. In all likelihood the various other RAF pilots who claimed to have been scrambled to intercept Hess on 10 May were simply mistaken.

  Several sources have claimed that Hess was the target of an assassination attempt while at Mytchett Place. According to a former army intelligence officer named John McCowen, the three would-be killers were German and arrived by parachute near Luton Hoo on the night of 28 May 1941. After being captured and interrogated, the trio revealed that they had expected to find Hess at the London Cage at Cockfosters, and to obtain help from Abwehr agents already in Britain. They were later executed without trial at the Tower of London. Predictably there is no record of any such agents being captured in 1941, or executed, and the facts seem highly unlikely. In June 1942 Hess was moved from Mytchett to Maindiff Court near Abergavenny, apparently because it was feared that a group of Poles were planning to break into the camp, kidnap Hess, and beat or kill him by way of revenge for Nazi atrocities in Poland. Indeed in an MI5 file released by the PRO in 1999 there is an odd reference to a reported gun battle between Polish soldiers and guards at Mytchett, although no precise details are given. However, as with so many aspects of the Hess affair, the whole truth is never likely to emerge.

  More imaginative even than the occult explanation of the Hess mission is the theory that the real Rudolf Hess was replaced with a double, and that the man who died at Spandau in 1987 was not the Deputy Führer at all. The most celebrated proponent of the so-called doppelgänger theory is Dr Hugh Thomas, a former army surgeon who examined Hess in September 1973 while attached to the British Military Hospital in Berlin. The publication of his book The Murder of Rudolf Hess in 1979 prompted questions in the House of Commons and the Bundestag, and generated further controversy in 1988 when it appeared in revised form under the title Hess: A Tale of Two Murders. Thomas relied on his own medical expertise. During the First World War Hess was known to have been wounded twice: once by shrapnel in June 1916, followed by a more serious chest wound caused by a rifle bullet on the Romanian front in July 1917. According to Thomas, the ‘major scars on his chest and back’ caused by both wounds should have been highly visible even after 60 years, yet were not recorded by any one of the 58 doctors who examined Hess after 1941. Thomas was unable to locate any detailed contemporary medical notes, but made a number of assumptions which hypothesised extensive tissue damage and a large exit wound on the back. Thomas also accepted muddled assertions that Hess had been treated by the renowned chest surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, whose technique for treating gunshot wounds usually entailed the partial removal of a rib. The fact that Hess refused to see his wife and son until 1969 was also cited as further evidence.

  After concluding that the man he had examined in Spandau in 1973 was not the real Hess, Thomas suggested a plot far stranger than fiction. By this version, Hess took off from Augsburg in a Bf 110 intending to fly to Sweden, but was shot down on the orders of rival Nazi leaders who opposed the peace plan. A second Bf 110 coded NJ+OQ with an imposter at the controls was then dispatched from Aalborg in Denmark, although quite what the substitution was meant to achieve remains obscure. A no less convoluted version was offered by Professor Peter Waddell in 1999, in which Hess was kidnapped from Sweden by SOE agents. In order to prevent reprisals against British prisoners of war, an SOE agent impersonating Hess was made to bale out of an aircraft over Scotland. The real Hess was later executed in Scotland in 1942 on the direct orders of Churchill.

  All of which is quite simply fantastic. It is abundantly clear from contemporary photographs, as well as from the wreckage on public display at the Imperial War Museum, that Hess’s aircraft was coded VJ+OQ, and that the Bf 110 in which he flew from Augsburg to Scotland had the necessary range. The most damaging evidence against the doppelgänger theory was unearthed in 1989, when a BBC journalist named Roy McHardy located a copy of the original Hess medical file in the Bavarian State Archives. The file included several reports on the bullet wound sustained in 1917, including the following description from December of the same year:

  Three fingers above the left armpit, a pea-sized, bluish-coloured, non-reactive scar from an entry wound. On the back, at the height of the fourth dorsal [thoracic] vertebra, two fingers from the spine, a non-reactive exit gunshot wound the size of a cherry stone.

  No operation had been necessary. The wound had been a clean through-shot from a small-calibre rifle which left minor scarring, in a different location to that suggested by Thomas. No amount of minor quibbling about ancillary details can hide the fact that Thomas had based his entire hypothesis on incorrect information. Furthermore his claim that he possesses a copy of a letter from Lord Willingdon to William Mackenzie, the Canadian Prime Minister, discussing Hess and ‘the problem we have with the double’ cannot be verified since Thomas claims that the Official Secrets Act precludes him from publishing it. It should be clear to anyone that the two photographs of Hess which appear in this book are of the same individual. His wife Ilse described the double allegation as ‘ridiculous’, while fellow prisoner Albert Speer dismissed it as ‘utter nonsense.’ And why on earth would Hess’s double accept an uncomfortable term of life imprisonment without disclosing his true identity? The notion is simply preposterous.

  Yet another fanciful story emerged from Germany in 1987. According to the German historian Werner Maser, Hess was temporarily released from his cell on the night of 17/18 March 1952, during a Russian tour of duty at Spandau. Without the knowledge of the western powers, Hess was taken to a secret location where he met senior officials from the German Democratic Republic. On the instructions of Stalin he was offered his freedom and a leading position in East Germany, on condition he declared himself to be a socialist. Hess, however, is said to have remained loyal to Hitler and turned down the proposal. The Russians in turn warned Hess to reveal nothing of his outing, and that he would remain in Spandau until his death. The story seems somewhat far-fetched.

  In the second version of his book, Hess: A Tale of Two Murders, Dr Hugh Thomas put forward the proposition that the double who died in Spandau on the afternoon of 17 August 1987 was murdered. The official version holds that Hess hanged himself in a garden shed in the grounds of the prison, by looping the electrical cord of a reading lamp around his neck and suspending this from a window latch. After attempts were made to revive him in sit
u he was rushed to the British Military Hospital, where, after further unsuccessful attempts at resuscitation, he was pronounced dead at 4.10 pm. A suicide note addressed to his family was found in his jacket pocket, and the initial autopsy performed on 19 August found that death had resulted from asphyxia, caused by compression of the neck due to suspension. It is worth recording here that Hess had attempted to take his own life on several previous occasions. In June 1941 he threw himself over a balcony at Mytchett Place near Aldershot, breaking his left leg, and stabbed his own chest with a breadknife in February 1945. Even as late as 1977, at the age of eighty-three, Hess tried to cut his wrists with a table knife.

  Thomas argues that the neck injuries were consistent with throttling, that the suicide note was forged, and that the Hess double was murdered by SAS personnel on the orders of the British government, to whom Hess and/or his double had been an embarrassment since 1941. His son Wolf Hess also believes that his father was murdered, but dismisses the doppelgänger theory. Quite why the authorities waited until 1987 to murder Hess is not explained, while some of the additional evidence cited by Thomas is flawed. He notes that neither of the autopsies carried out in August 1987 noted the ‘massive’ gunshot wounds dating from 1917, although as we have already seen this theory would be comprehensively demolished in 1989 when his complete medical file was unearthed in Munich. Thomas also found it suspicious that the corpse measured a height of 5 feet 9 inches (1.75 metres), whereas Hess was said to have been a tall man who stood about 6 feet 1 inch (1.85 metres). Again, his original medical file reveals the truth, which is that Hess was 5 feet 10 inches tall (1.77 metres), and that a reduction of 2 cm in height as a result of stooping in old age is quite normal.

  In 1989 the murder theory gained some support from the testimony of a Tunisian medical orderly, Abdallah Melaouhi, who had acted as Hess’s nurse since 1982. Melaouhi claimed that on the day in question he was delayed by guards, and that when he finally arrived at the garden summerhouse (in fact an elderly Portakabin) there were two unfamiliar men present dressed in American uniforms. He also stated that furniture had been thrown about, as if during a struggle, and that there was no cord around Hess’s neck, the electrical flex still being attached to the lamp and plugged in. Melaouhi was also of the opinion that Hess was so debilitated and arthritic that he was unable even to tie his own shoelaces, let alone knot a cord around his neck. He even suggested that at the British Military Hospital the British, French and American directors later toasted the passing of Hess with champagne.

  This evidence was largely contradicted by Lieutenant-Colonel Tony Le Tissier, the British Governor at Spandau. In his book Farewell to Spandau, Le Tissier pointed out that the only delay in Melaouhi’s arrival was caused by difficulty in locating him, eventually in the mess, and that even then the log at the main gate showed there was little delay before he arrived at the summerhouse. There were four reading lamps in the Portakabin, and therefore more than one cord. The two men in American uniform were medics who had been called to assist with the resuscitation, and in fact continued in these attempts with the help of Melaouhi. The furniture had been pushed aside in the course of their previous efforts to revive Hess. As for his medical condition, Hess wore a truss and probably found bending to tie his shoelaces problematic, but he could write legibly and thus tie a knot.

  Probably the last great Hess conspiracy theory emerged in 2001, again in Double Standards by Picknett, Prince and Prior. As well as postulating that the reception committee at Dungavel included the Duke of Kent, brother of King George VI, the authors also surmise that the Duke’s death in a flying accident in August 1942 was an assassination, in which the real Rudolf Hess also perished. For reasons of space it is not possible to explore this theory fully here, but in summary it runs as follows. The Duke of Kent remained in favour of a negotiated peace, and with others continued to work toward this end after Hess arrived in May 1941. Although Hess was officially held first at Mytchett Place, and then Maindiff Court in Wales, he was also confined at several locations in Scotland, including Braemore Lodge near Loch More. Beyond doubt is the fact that on 25 August 1942 the Duke took off from Invergordon in a Short Sunderland flying boat. Officially he was on a morale-boosting visit to RAF personnel stationed in Iceland, although the memorial erected by his widow indicated that the Duke was engaged in an unspecified ‘special mission’. About 60 miles after take-off the Sunderland crashed into a remote hilltop near Caithness, some ten miles off course, killing everyone on board bar the rear gunner. Various explanations have been offered through the years, including pilot error, drunkenness, magnetic rocks, faked German radio messages, and a cover-up to hide the fact that the Duke himself was at the controls.

  The authors of Double Standards present a convincing case that there were sixteen men on board the Sunderland, rather than the fifteen listed in official reports. However, the rest of their hypothesis is harder to credit. This suggests that the extra man was Hess, picked up by the Duke’s flying boat from Loch More, and en route to Sweden. Rather than meeting with an accident, the aircraft was sabotaged in the same fashion as the B24 Liberator in which the Polish leader General Sikorski would perish in July 1943. Beyond the fact that the evidence presented in support of this theory is circumstantial in the extreme, there are at least two major flaws in the assassination plot. First, it scarcely seems credible that Hess could have been collected or snatched by the Duke without the aid of a small private army. Second, if Hess was indeed on board the doomed aircraft, then it raises the spectre of the fantastical doppelgänger theory, and the almost total suspension of disbelief which that entails. Instead, the likely explanation is that the crash was simply a tragic accident caused by poor or impaired navigation, whoever may have been at the controls.

  Today few would disagree that Rudolf Hess was kept far too long in captivity, a hapless pawn in a prolonged game of chess between former Allies turned Cold War adversaries. However, it is important to remember that the underlying purpose of the Hess peace mission, the last serious attempt to reach an Anglo–German détente, was in no way humanitarian. Hess was a staunch Nazi, and like Hitler desired a peace which would allow Germany to continue the war in the east, leaving the Reich free to initiate the Holocaust unhindered. Against this background it matters little that the original point of the war, the liberation of Poland from foreign occupation, was never achieved. Therefore it would be quite wrong to conclude that Hess should be admired for his efforts, or that Churchill should be criticised for rejecting his proposals out of hand, rather than putting them before his Cabinet or the Commons.

  9

  The Man Who Never Was

  On 26 January 1943 a 34-year-old Welsh labourer named Glyndwr Michael swallowed a quantity of phosphorous rat poison, intending to take his own life. Discovered in a London warehouse, Michael was taken to St Pancras Hospital where he died two days later. The deceased, who had been suffering from mental illness, left no will, and an inquest held on 4 February went unreported by local papers. The mortuary register recorded simply: ‘Michael, Glyndwr; 34; phosphorous poisoning; suicide; lunatic; cost of proceedings £1.’

  Following the publication of The Man Who Never Was by Ewen Montagu in 1953, the story of how Glyndwr Michael came to be buried in a grave in a hilltop cemetery above the Spanish town of Huelva, beneath the headstone of one Major William Martin, has become one of the most celebrated legends of the Second World War. As the centrepiece of a deception codenamed Operation Mincemeat, Michael’s body was released from a submarine into the sea north-west of Gibraltar, chained to a briefcase in which forged letters suggested that Allied intentions in southern Europe hinged on the invasion of Greece and Sardinia. As predicted by the planners in British intelligence, Charles Cholmondeley and Ewen Montagu, the papers were seen by the Abwehr and accepted as genuine, with the result that the Allies landed in Sicily on 10 July almost unopposed. Brilliant though this scheme was, the refusal of the authorities to reveal the true identity of the erstwhile Man Who
Never Was until 1995 only served to ensure that the story assumed a wholly unwarranted mystique. For in truth the mechanics of Operation Mincemeat were hardly novel, and its true military value overstated. Moreover, the questionable postwar manoeuvrings of its supposed architect, Ewen Montagu, would result in an unnecessary posthumous manhunt second only to the quest to name Jack the Ripper.

  Mincemeat would certainly have remained a closely guarded secret but for the literary aspirations of Alfred Duff Cooper, a capable Conservative politician who served as Churchill’s Minister of Information between 1940 and 1942, and subsequently as British Ambassador to France. In November 1950 Cooper published a novel, Operation Heartbreak, which was clearly based on detailed inside information about Mincemeat. Within its pages an ageing officer named ‘Willie Maryngton’ dies of despair and pneumonia, after observing his fiancée Felicity leaving what he takes to be a brothel. Felicity happens to be a secretary in military intelligence, and her employers decide to utilise Maryngton’s corpse for ‘a military operation of immense magnitude’ in which ‘success must depend largely upon the enemy’s ignorance of when and where it will be launched’. The body is dropped from a submarine off the coast of an unspecified Axis-friendly neutral country, clutching a package containing false documents from the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, as well as letters from his fiancée, which are duly photographed by the enemy. This macabre but ingenious deception is appraised as having ‘powerfully contributed to the success of one of the greatest surprises ever achieved in military history’.