Hess’s motives are clear. He sincerely wanted peace with Britain. He had not the shadow of doubt that Germany would win the war and destroy the United Kingdom unless peace were concluded at once. There were, to be sure, other motives. The war had brought his personal eclipse. Running the Nazi Party as Hitler’s deputy during the war was dull business and no longer very important. What mattered in Germany now was running the war and foreign affairs. These were the things which engaged the attention of the Fuehrer to the exclusion of almost all else, and which put the limelight on Goering, Ribbentrop, Himmler, Goebbels and the generals. Hess felt frustrated and jealous. How better restore his old position with his beloved Leader and in the country than by pulling off a brilliant and daring stroke of statesmanship such as singlehandedly arranging peace between Germany and Britain?
Finally, the beetle-browed deputy leader, like some of the other Nazi bigwigs—Hitler himself and Himmler—had come to have an abiding belief in astrology. At Nuremberg he confided to the American prison psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, that late in 1940 one of his astrologers had read in the stars that he was ordained to bring about peace. He also related how his old mentor, Professor Haushofer, the Munich Geopolitiker, had seen him in a dream striding through the tapestried halls of English castles, bringing peace between the two great “Nordic” nations.90 For a man who had never escaped from mental adolescence, this was heady stuff and no doubt helped impel Hess to undertake his weird mission to England.
At Nuremberg one of the British prosecutors suggested still another reason: that Hess flew to England to try to arrange a peace settlement so that Germany would have only a one-front war to fight when she attacked the Soviet Union. The Russian prosecutor told the tribunal that he was sure of it. And so was Joseph Stalin, whose mighty suspicions at this critical time seem to have been concentrated not on Germany, as they should have been, but on Great Britain. The arrival of Hess in Scotland convinced him that there was some deep plot being hatched between Churchill and Hitler which would give Germany the same freedom to strike the Soviet Union which the Russian dictator had given her to assault Poland and the West. When three years later the British Prime Minister, then on his second visit to Moscow, tried to convince Stalin of the truth, he simply did not believe it. It is fairly clear from the interrogations conducted by Kirkpatrick, who tried to draw the Nazi leader out on Hitler’s intentions regarding Russia, that either Hess did not know of Barbarossa or, if he did, did not know that it was imminent.
The days following Hess’s sudden departure were among the most embarrassing of Hitler’s life. He realized that the prestige of his regime had been severely damaged by the flight of his closest collaborator. How was it to be explained to the German people and the outside world? The questioning of the arrested members of Hess’s entourage convinced the Fuehrer that there had been no disloyalty toward him and certainly no plot, and that his trusted lieutenant had simply cracked up. It was decided at the Berghof, after the British had confirmed Hess’s arrival, to offer this explanation to the public. Soon the German press was dutifully publishing brief accounts that this once great star of National Socialism had become “a deluded, deranged and muddled idealist, ridden with hallucinations traceable to World War [I] injuries.”
It seemed [said the official press communiqué] that Party Comrade Hess lived in a state of hallucination, as a result of which he felt he could bring about an understanding between England and Germany … This, however, will have no effect on the continuance of the war, which has been forced on the German people.
Privately, Hitler gave orders to have Hess shot at once if he returned,* and publicly he stripped his old comrade of all his offices, replacing him as deputy leader of the party by Martin Bormann, a more sinister and conniving character. The Fuehrer hoped that the bizarre episode would be forgotten as soon as possible; his own thoughts quickly turned again to the attack on Russia, which was not far off.
THE PLIGHT OF THE KREMLIN
Despite all the evidence of Hitler’s intentions—the build-up of German forces in eastern Poland, the presence of a million Nazi troops in the nearby Balkans, the Wehrmacht’s conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece and its occupation of Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary—the men in the Kremlin, Stalin above all, stark realists though they were reputed to be and had been, blindly hoped that Russia somehow would still escape the Nazi tyrant’s wrath. Their natural suspicions, of course, could not help but feed on the bare facts, nor could their growing resentment at Hitler’s moves in southeastern Europe be suppressed. There is, however, something unreal, almost unbelievable, quite grotesque, in the diplomatic exchanges between Moscow and Berlin in these spring weeks (exhaustively recorded in the captured Nazi documents), in which the Germans tried clumsily to deceive the Kremlin to the last and the Soviet leaders seemed unable to fully grasp reality and act on it in time.
Though they several times protested the entry of German troops into Rumania and Bulgaria and then the attack on Yugoslavia and Greece as a violation of the Nazi–Soviet Pact and a threat to Russian “security interests,” the Soviets went out of their way to appease Berlin as the date for the German attack approached. Stalin personally took the lead in this. On April 13, 1941, Ambassador von der Schulenburg telegraphed an interesting dispatch to Berlin recounting how on the departure of the Japanese Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, that evening from Moscow, Stalin had shown “a remarkably friendly manner” not only to the Japanese but to the Germans. At the railroad station
Stalin publicly asked for me [Schulenburg wired] … and threw his arm around my shoulders: “We must remain friends and you must now do everything to that end!” Somewhat later Stalin turned to the acting German Military Attaché, Colonel Krebs, first made sure that he was a German, and then said to him: “We will remain friends with you—through thick and thin!”91
Three days later the German chargé in Moscow, Tippelskirch, wired Berlin stressing that the demonstration at the station showed Stalin’s friendliness toward Germany and that this was especially important “in view of the persistently circulating rumors of an imminent conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union.”92 The day before, Tippelskirch had informed Berlin that the Kremlin had accepted “unconditionally,” after months of wrangling, the German proposals for the settlement of the border between the two countries from the Igorka River to the Baltic Sea. “The compliant attitude of the Soviet Government,” he said, “seems very remarkable.”93 In view of what was brewing in Berlin, it surely was.
In supplying blockaded Germany with important raw materials, the Soviet government continued to be equally compliant. On April 5, 1941, Schnurre, in charge of trade negotiations with Moscow, reported jubilantly to his Nazi masters that after the slowdown in Russian deliveries in January and February 1941, due to the “cooling off of political relations,” they had risen “by leaps and bounds in March, especially in grains, petroleum, manganese ore and the nonferrous and precious metals.”
Transit traffic through Siberia [he added] is proceeding favorably as usual. At our request the Soviet Government even put a special freight train for rubber at our disposal at the Manchurian border.94
Six weeks later, on May 15, Schnurre was reporting that the obliging Russians had put on several special freight trains so that 4,000 tons of badly needed raw rubber could be delivered to Germany over the Siberian railway.
The quantities of raw materials contracted for are being delivered punctually by the Russians, despite the heavy burden this imposes on them … I am under the impression that we could make economic demands on Moscow which would even go beyond the scope of the treaty of January 10, demands designed to secure German food and raw-material requirements beyond the extent now contracted for.95
German deliveries of machinery to Russia were falling behind, Schnurre observed, but he did not seem to mind, if the Russians didn’t. However, he was disturbed on May 15 by another factor. “Great difficulties are created,” he complained, “by the countless rumors
of an imminent German–Russian conflict,” for which he blamed German official sources. Amazingly, the “difficulties,” Schnurre explained in a lengthy memorandum to the Foreign Office, did not come from Russia but from German industrial firms, which, he said, were trying “to withdraw” from their contracts with the Russians.
Hitler, it must be noted here, was doing his best to contradict the rumors, but at the same time he was busy trying to convince his generals and top officials that Germany was in growing danger of being attacked by Russia. Though the generals, from their own military intelligence, knew better, so hypnotic was Hitler’s spell over them that even after the war Halder, Brauchitsch, Manstein and others (though not Paulus, who seems to have been more honest) contended that a Soviet military build-up on the Polish frontier had become very threatening by the beginning of the summer.
Count von der Schulenburg, who had come home from Moscow on a brief leave, saw Hitler in Berlin on April 28 and tried to convince him of Russia’s peaceful intentions. “Russia,” he attempted to explain, “is very apprehensive at the rumors predicting a German attack on Russia. I cannot believe,” he added, “that Russia will ever attack Germany … If Stalin was unable to go with England and France in 1939 when both were still strong, he will certainly not make such a decision today, when France is destroyed and England badly battered. On the contrary, I am convinced that Stalin is prepared to make even further concessions to us.”
The Fuehrer feigned skepticism. He had been “forewarned,” he said, “by events in Serbia … What devil had possessed the Russians,” he asked, “to conclude the friendship pact with Yugoslavia?”* He did not believe, it was true, he said, that “Russia could be brought to attack Germany.” Nevertheless, he concluded, he was obliged “to be careful.” Hitler did not tell his ambassador to the Soviet Union what plans he had in store for that country, and Schulenburg, an honest, decent German of the old school, remained ignorant of them to the last.
Stalin, too, but not of the signs, or of the warnings, of what Hitler was up to. On April 22 the Soviet government formally protested eighty instances of border violations by Nazi planes which it said had taken place between March 27 and April 18, providing detailed accounts of each. In one case, it said, in a German reconnaissance plane which landed near Rovno on April 15 there was found a camera, rolls of exposed film and a torn topographical map of the western districts of the U.S.S.R., “all of which give evidence of the purpose of the crew of this airplane.” Even in protesting the Russians were conciliatory. They had given the border troops, the note said, “the order not to fire on German planes flying over Soviet territory so long as such flights do not occur frequently.”97
Stalin made further conciliatory moves early in May. To please Hitler he expelled the diplomatic representatives in Moscow of Belgium, Norway, Greece and even Yugoslavia and closed their legations. He recognized the pro-Nazi government of Rashid Ali in Iraq. He kept the Soviet press under the strictest restraint in order to avoid provoking Germany.
These manifestations [Schulenburg wired Berlin on May 12] of the intention of the Stalin Government are calculated … to relieve the tension between the Soviet Union and Germany and to create a better atmosphere for the future. We must bear in mind that Stalin personally has always advocated a friendly relationship between Germany and the Soviet Union.98
Though Stalin had long been the absolute dictator of the Soviet Union this was the first mention by Schulenburg in his dispatches of the term “Stalin Government.” There was good reason. On May 6 Stalin had personally taken over as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, or Prime Minister, replacing Molotov, who remained as Foreign Commissar. This was the first time the all-powerful secretary of the Communist Party had taken government office and the general world reaction was that it meant the situation had become so serious for the Soviet Union, especially in its relations with Nazi Germany, that only Stalin could deal with it as the nominal as well as the actual head of government. This interpretation was obvious, but there was another which was not so clear but which the astute German ambassador in Moscow promptly pointed out to Berlin.
Stalin, he reported, was displeased with the deterioration of German–Soviet relations and blamed Molotov’s clumsy diplomacy for much of it.
In my opinion [Schulenburg said] it may be assumed with certainty that Stalin has set himself a foreign-policy goal of overwhelming importance … which he hopes to attain by his personal efforts. I firmly believe that in an international situation which he considers serious, Stalin has set himself the goal of preserving the Soviet Union from a conflict with Germany.99
Did the crafty Soviet dictator not realize by now—the middle of May 1941—that this was an impossible goal, that there was nothing, short of an abject surrender to Hitler, that he could do to attain it? He surely knew the significance of Hitler’s conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece, of the presence of large masses of German troops in Rumania and Hungary on his southwest borders, of the Wehrmacht build-up on his western frontier in Poland. The persistent rumors in Moscow itself surely reached him. By the beginning of May what Schulenburg called in a dispatch on the second day of that month “rumors of an imminent German–Russian military showdown” were so rife in the Soviet capital that he and his officials in the German Embassy were having difficulty in combating them.
Please bear in mind [he advised Berlin] that attempts to counteract these rumors here in Moscow must necessarily remain ineffectual if such rumors incessantly reach here from Germany, and if every traveler who comes to Moscow, or travels through Moscow, not only brings these rumors along, but can even confirm them by citing facts.100
The veteran ambassador was getting suspicious himself. He was instructed by Berlin to continue to deny the rumors, and to spread it about that not only was there no concentration of German troops on Russia’s frontiers but that actually considerable forces (eight divisions, he was told for his “personal information”) were being transferred from “east to west.”101 Perhaps these instructions only confirmed the ambassador’s uneasiness, since by this time the press throughout the world was beginning to trumpet the German military build-up along the Soviet borders.
But long before this, Stalin had received specific warnings of Hitler’s plans, and apparently paid no attention to them. The most serious one came from the government of the United States.
Early in January 1941, the U.S. commercial attaché in Berlin, Sam E. Woods, had sent a confidential report to the State Department stating that he had learned from trustworthy German sources that Hitler was making plans to attack Russia in the spring. It was a long and detailed message, outlining the General Staff plan of attack (which proved to be quite accurate) and the preparations being made for the economic exploitation of the Soviet Union, once it was conquered.*
Secretary of State Cordell Hull thought at first that Woods had been victim of a German “plant.” He called in J. Edgar Hoover. The F.B.I, head read the report and judged it authentic. Woods had named some of his sources, both in various ministries in Berlin and in the German General Staff, and on being checked they were adjudged in Washington to be men who ought to know what was up and anti-Nazi enough to tattle. Despite the strained relations then existing between the American and Soviet governments Hull decided to inform the Russians, requesting Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to communicate the substance of the report to Ambassador Constantine Oumansky. This was done on March 20.
Mr. Oumansky turned very white [Welles later wrote]. He was silent for a moment and then merely said: “I fully realize the gravity of the message you have given me. My government will be grateful for your confidence and I will inform it immediately of our conversation.”102
If it was grateful, indeed if it ever believed this timely intelligence, it never communicated any inkling to the American government. In fact, as Secretary Hull has related in his memoirs, Moscow grew more hostile and truculent because America’s support of Britain made it impossible to supply Russia w
ith all the materials it demanded. Nevertheless, according to Hull, the State Department, having received dispatches from its legations in Bucharest and Stockholm the first week in June stating that Germany would invade Russia within a fortnight, forwarded copies of them to Ambassador Steinhardt in Moscow, who turned them over to Molotov.
Churchill too sought to warn Stalin. On April 3 he asked his ambassador in Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, to deliver a personal note to the dictator pointing out the significance to Russia of German troop movements in southern Poland which he had learned of through a British agent. Cripps’ delay in delivering the message still vexed Churchill when he wrote about the incident years later in his memoirs.103
Before the end of April, Cripps knew the date set for the German attack, and the Germans knew he knew it. On April 24, the German naval attaché in Moscow sent a curt message to the Navy High Command in Berlin:
The British Ambassador predicts June 22 as the day of the outbreak of the war.104*
This message, which is among the captured Nazi papers, was recorded in the German Naval Diary on the same day, with an exclamation point added at the end.105 The admirals were surprised at the accuracy of the British envoy’s prediction. The poor naval attaché, who, like the ambassador in Moscow, had not been let in on the secret, added in his dispatch that it was “manifestly absurd.”
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Page 133