by Jan Needle
‘Yes. Chief Superintendent Howard Jones, I know. Like you said just now. Lucky for some.’
Jane flared at him.
‘Bill, for Christ’s sake! You know they’ll never finger you! That’s why you left! They protect their killers! But the truth should be tracked down, at least the bones of it!’
Bill picked up a small stone and tossed it at the stream. It splashed and clunked, as it hit the rocky bottom.
‘Oh Christ,’ she said. ‘What does it matter?’
‘That’s it.’ He threw another stone. ‘What does it matter? Who’d care if someone told the truth, now? All this lying about a crime of fifty years ago, even if it was a crime. Even the poor old man of ninety-three, it’s all too late. At least Churchill won the war. Or America did. Or Russia did. Leastways, Hitler lost. Edward’s right about one thing, we’ll never know the truth of it, the rights or wrongs. Churchill held the simple view: good must beat evil, and we were good. Anything else is much too complicated for history to sort out. History’s junk.’
She laughed up at him.
‘Or bunk, was it? Or bunkum, or the bunkum or the bunk? Edward would be proud of you. How’s Johnnie, by the way?’
She watched the pain slide across his mouth, and stood.
‘He’s gone. He lives in Canada with his Mum. They went last year. He doesn’t write.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry, Bill.’
‘Yeah. Me too. I told him, when I thought he was old enough. When he was about thirteen. He didn’t understand. He didn’t believe me. Then, I guess he did. Something changed, anyway. Puberty, maybe. Anyway, he’s gone.’
He sighed, a long, shuddering breath.
‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘I’d better go and fix a few computers.’
He began to climb the slope.
‘Hey!’ said Jane. ‘Don’t abandon me, you bastard. I’ve got high heels on!’
He turned and waited. She stretched out her hand, and he pulled her up the hill towards him. He could see down the front of her white shirt, he could see her breasts and bra, and the memory almost overpowered him. When she was beside him, she read it in his eyes.
‘You could stay over for a night or two,’ she said. ‘I think Aunt Erica would like that.’
He stopped. He stared at her.
‘You tried with Liz,’ she said. ‘At least you tried.’
Author’s Note
The mysterious flight of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Deputy, is one of the last great conundrums of the Second World War. Almost from the moment that the ME110 crashed into a field not far from Glasgow, riddle was piled on riddle. The dazed airman, confronted by a farm worker with a pitchfork, insisted that his name was Alfred Horn. After spending a Saturday night nursing an injured ankle, guarded by drunken soldiers in Maryhill Barracks, he claimed that he was in fact Rudolf Hess, Stellvertreter to Adolf Hitler. On the orders of Winston Churchill he was sent to the Tower of London.
The British put his interrogation in the hands of Major Frank Foley, now recognised as Britain’s greatest wartime spymaster. Foley was the first of many espionage and medical experts to doubt the true identity of The Prisoner, codenamed at this time ‘Jonathan’. Foley was overheard to say in private ‘This man is not Rudolf Hess.’
The flier played a game of mystery and obfuscation with consummate skill – or a genuine inability to distinguish fact from fiction. After the Tower of London he went to a variety of prisons and hospitals, and was interrogated almost constantly. In one place of incarceration he threw himself downstairs to end it all, only to have the authorities claim he slipped. When the war was over he was tried at Nuremberg, and sent to Spandau Jail, Berlin, to serve a life sentence for crimes against peace. His wife and family wrote to him as Prisoner Number Seven, but he refused point blank to meet them, for more than twenty years. Why? He would not say. Throughout the long, drab years he refused ever to be seen without a vest on, even by doctors. Why? He would not tell.
Eventually, by chance, he was examined by an expert on bullet wounds, a man whose surgery had saved the lives of wounded soldiers and terrorists in Northern Ireland. Major Hugh Thomas discovered from First World War records that as a young soldier Hess had been shot through the lung on the Romanian front in 1917. Looking for the scars of major surgery on the chest of the naked prisoner Thomas and his assistant could find neither an entrance nor an exit scar. This was a medical impossibility.
After 1966, the sick old man became the last prisoner alive and ‘the loneliest man in the world’. My own cousin served time as one of the guards.
Then, in 1987, after 41 years in Spandau, the prisoner was found dying in deeply mysterious circumstances, strangled in a prison garden hut. There was electrical cable lying near the body but the window frame from which he was said to have hanged himself seemed far too low. The British authorities burned the garden hut, then the prison was demolished.
Wartime papers are usually closed to the public for thirty years. The state archives on Hess are officially closed until 2017, although 10 years ago the ban was claimed, amid fanfare, to have been lifted. But key papers were missing and documents connecting the Hess Affair to the British Royal Family were not there. In July 2011, the bones of the prisoner were exhumed and cremated. The ashes were scattered at sea.
There are many incidents in this story which may appear to be unlikely. A German bomber landing at night, by appointment, at an English wartime airfield. Two parachutists coming to earth during a mock air raid near Windsor Castle (where Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were in residence) to be immediately spirited away. The parts played by Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and other spies who later became notorious. Unlikely, but as far as history can be believed, these things all happened.
Something else did not – or if it did, it has become a State secret. The DNA of the pilot was never compared with a member of the Hess family. That, possibly, is the single most alarming fact.
‘A Terrible Lot of Lies’
THE HESS AFFAIR is one of those wartime mysteries that refuses to lie down. Historians and conspiracy theorists are still working doggedly to turn up new leads, in the hope that one day the definitive truth may be told. Distinguished investigative journalist Andrew Rosthorn (Sunday Times, Independent, Guardian, Daily Mail, etc) who knows more about the flight than any other Englishman alive, recently reported that Professor Scott Newton of Cardiff University had been hunting in Leeds for ‘Ernie Bevin’s Big Secret’. This is a reprint of his latest article:
It was 10:00 p.m, but still daylight, when the second most powerful man in Britain hurried into the Queens Hotel, Leeds.
Britain’s wartime clocks had been set to double summer time when his driver raced by car from Sheffield ‘on two wheels’ to beat the imminent blackout on May 9, 1941. The fast driver was Albert James Heal, Yorkshire secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union. His passenger was Ernest Bevin, 60, the minister of Labour and National Service in Winston Churchill’s wartime government.
This former Bristol lorry driver, co-founder of the mighty TGWU transport union, was in 1941 using the Emergency Powers [Defence] Act to direct the labour of every single man and woman in Britain.
Three years later, as Britain’s foreign secretary at the Potsdam Conference, he would negotiate in the ruins of Berlin with President Truman and Marshal Stalin.
According to Churchill, Ernie Bevin was by ‘far the most distinguished man that the Labour Party have thrown up in my time.’
Professor Scott Newton of Cardiff University has now uncovered evidence in Yorkshire to suggest that on the evening of May 9, 1941, Ernest Bevin and Albert Heal decoded an unusual message from a spy in Nazi Germany, just six weeks before Hitler’s surprise attack on Russia in the greatest invasion in history.
Talking to a Yorkshire Post reporter long after the war, Albert Heal described overhearing at the Queens Hotel that night a dramatic telephone conversation between Bevin and Churchill.
He recounted events in Leeds during a c
rucial long weekend in power politics described by the espionage historian John Costello in his 1991 book Ten Days That Saved The West.
Heal, at the age of 80 in 1969, told the Yorkshire Post that he was writing a book. Professor Newton thinks the discovery of the missing manuscript might help us answer a question that tantalised Stalin and Khrushchev before the Battle of Stalingrad and is still unresolved.
Did Winston Churchill have advance knowledge that Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, was about to make an amazing solo flight from Germany to Scotland in search of a separate peace deal with Britain, six weeks before the German invasion of Russia that cost the lives of 23 million Soviet citizens?
Some historians are sure Churchill was lying when he denied British fore-knowledge of the Hess flight.
Both Churchill and Adolf Hitler said they new nothing about the six months Hess spent testing fighter-bombers in Bavaria for a 900-mile flight from Augsburg to Glasgow, achieved with great skill on the night of the biggest German air raid on London.
On May 1, 1941, Hess addressed a mass meeting of 8,000 Messerchmitt aircraft workers at the Augsburg-Haunstetten works, from where he took off for Scotland nine days later.
Among the thousands of technicians and transport workers living in emergency housing near the company airfield where Hess carried out all his test flights there existed a small number of anti-Nazi socialists operating secret and dangerous communication links with neutral Sweden and even London.
Many spies and many diplomats had warned Stalin of a German invasion. Stalin’s double agent at MI6 in London, Harold ‘Kim’ Philby told a Russian contact that ‘the time for peace negotiations has not arrived but that later in the course of the war Hess could become the centre of intrigues for a compromise peace.’ The May 22 telegram from Philby’s NKVD contact in London to Moscow Centre turned up in the Kremlin files marked for special attention.
‘Tragically’ said Professor Gabriel Gorodetsky in his 1999 book Grand Delusion, ‘It had distracted Stalin’s vigilance on the eve of war and diverted him from the real danger lurking round the corner.’
The post-war Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev remembered telling Stalin: ‘The Germans are hiding something. I don’t think Hess’s flight to England is really an escape from Germany at all. I think he must actually be on a secret mission from Hitler to negotiate with the English about cutting short the war in the West to free Hitler’s hands for the push East.’
‘Stalin heard me out and then said, “Yes, that’s it. You understand correctly.” He didn’t develop his thoughts on the subject further. He just agreed. We had long since become accustomed to the practice that if you weren’t told something, you didn’t ask.’
Winston Churchill described a grand dinner with Stalin in Moscow in 1944: ‘Stalin rather unexpectedly proposed a toast to the health of the British Intelligence Service which had inveigled Hess into coming to England. He could not have landed without being given signals. The Intelligence Service must have been behind it.’
Churchill took this remark as provocation and declared: ‘When I make a statement of facts within my knowledge I expect it to be accepted.’
Stalin grinned and said to Churchill, ‘There are lots of things that happen, even here in Russia, which our secret service does not necessarily tell me about.’
Seventy years later, Professor Newton has verified some of the events that Albert Heal recounted in 1969 as happening after he had partially decoded the message that Bevin handed it to him in Sheffield on May 9.
After driving Bevin to Leeds ‘on two wheels’ to the Queens Hotel late on May 9, Heal said he overheard in a bedroom part of Bevin’s telephone conversation with the prime minister about Hess. It was not until 5:42 p.m. on the following day, May 10, that Hess took off for Britain.
The original 1969 newspaper cutting appears to have disappeared from the Yorkshire Post archives.
But a duplicate cutting was discovered in the Daily Mirror newspaper library in Manchester and shown in 1990 after the collapse of the Soviet Union to Professor Oleg Rzheshevsky, president of the Russian Association of Second World War Historians.
The Yorkshire Post reporter was Malcolm Pithers, later Northern Editor of The Independent newspaper and today living in retirement in Wakefield and writing political thrillers.
Under the headline: ‘The man who broke the secret news that Hess was coming’, Pithers reported that Heal had contacted the newspaper when Rudolf Hess’s long post-war captivity in Spandau Prison, Berlin, was in the news.
Interviewed at home, the retired union secretary said he was working on a book that would reveal what had happened after Bevin telephoned him at noon on May 9.
‘Bevin asked me if I would be at a meeting organised by the regional office of the Ministry of Labour at the Civic Hall, Sheffield, that night. I told him that I had not been invited.
‘He asked me to meet him there just the same at 6:30 p.m., as he wanted to talk to me urgently.
‘When I got there, Bevin met me in a private room and showed me the coded message he had received from his contact, a girl that I knew.
‘The code she had used was invented by me when – and I think it’s safe to admit this now – I was secretary of the South Wales No More War Movement. The code had been passed on to her by me some time before.
‘I had used the code to keep in contact with the people we helped to get out of the country. We got 18 to Ireland and 17 to America.
‘I thought at the time, from the conversation, that the Prime Minister thought it was all a joke, especially when Bevin told him that Hess would try and contact the Duke of Hamilton. After the call we sat down and had some refreshments. No other message came from the Prime Minister. Bevin told me to go home and meet him at 9:30 the next morning.’
Heal told Pithers his contact in Germany had been ‘a London girl, who died after the war’.
Professor Newton points out that Ernest Bevin was a key member of ITF, the International Transport-workers’ Federation, founded in 1896.
Despite working in the heart of a police state, ITF managed to get messages in and out of Nazi Germany through a network of railwaymen, dockers and sailors.
Three ITF organisers worked in London during the war, in close touch with Bevin. They were Hans Guttfrucht, Hans Jahn and Walter Auerbach, chief of a clandestine British-based German language radio station known as SER.
The astonishing Hess flight to Scotland remained secret in Britain until May 13. But late on May 12, German radio reported that he had taken off without Hitler’s knowledge and disappeared.
After being taken into captivity by a Scottish ploughman, Hess asked to see the Duke of Hamilton who was the commanding officer at nearby RAF Turnhouse.
Soon after that meeting, the Duke climbed into a Hurricane fighter and flew south to report to Churchill in Oxfordshire.
On May 15, four days after the Duke had reported to Churchill, Ernest Bevin told a War Weapons lunch in London that he was convinced Hitler had known Hess was planning the peace mission.
‘From my point of view Hess is a murderer. You can understand my feeling about him when I tell you that he was the man who collected every index card of every trade union leader in Germany and every social democrat, and when the time came they were either in a concentration camp or murdered.
‘My own views on this adventure I will not express at this gathering, further than to say that I do not believe that Hitler did not know that Hess was coming to England.’
On May 16, Hans Jahn, post-war chairman of the German railwaymen, wrote to Bevin from the London office of the ITF using the code-name Kramer and specifying just how much money had been stolen by the Nazis from the German trade unions.
Bevin’s close contact with these German Social Democrats led to post-war West Germany re-organised on lines suggested by the British Labour government and to Bevin’s successful campaign to get West Germany included in the NATO alliance against Soviet Russia.
Professor Newton,
author of Profits of Peace: the political economy of Anglo-German appeasement, has now discovered wartime news reports in the Hull Daily Mail that support Albert Heal’s account of Bevin’s movements before the Hess flight to Scotland.
Back on April 21, 1941, the Hull paper had reported an announcement from the North-Eastern Regional Officer of the Ministry of Information: ‘Mr Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour, will address public meetings to be held under the auspices of the local information committees at Sheffield, Leeds, and Hull on May 9, 10, and 11.’
The all-ticket meeting at the City Hall in Sheffield was to start at 6:30 p.m. on May 9, exactly as recounted by Albert Heal in 1969.
On May 10, the morning after Heal drove Bevin to Leeds and before Hess took off from Germany, the Hull Daily Mail ran a headline ‘Mr Bevin’s Hull Meeting’ to announce that ‘owing to unforeseen circumstances, the meeting to be addressed by Mr Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour, in Hull on Sunday, has been cancelled.’
Professor Newton said, ‘These events concern the most critical moments of the Second World War. Albert Heal’s papers appear to have disappeared and it seems an attempt was made to suppress the Yorkshire Post report. Yet the Hull Daily Mail announcement of Bevin’s cancelled meeting and the schedule of his speaking tour exactly match the account given by Albert Heal in 1969.
‘The public meeting in Hull was cancelled before the first announcement of the Hess flight on German radio on the evening of May 12. In Britain the flight was kept secret until 6:00 a.m. on May 13. It is possible that this old newspaper story may yet lead us to a discovery of worldwide importance. Mr Heal’s documents might have survived somewhere in Yorkshire. Is there anyone alive in Yorkshire today who knew Albert Heal?’