The intelligence specialist, Richard Aldrich, has pointed out that historians who explore the state work under unique conditions: in no other discipline is the researcher ‘confronted with evidence precisely managed by their subject’1 – for the processing of official records for preservation in The National Archives, declassification or destruction offers government departments the means to massage, even to excise the narrative of their more secret activities. In Hess’s case the open files have been extensively ‘weeded’; this is apparent from documents such as the several inventories of Hess’s possessions when he arrived in Scotland, which are now missing from the reports to which they were originally attached; the MI5 report missing its final page or pages; documents described in the initial pages of that report which are nowhere in any files open to the public; the letter from the chief of MI6 with the bottom half neatly removed; and many more. We can only guess at the number of complete files that remain closed to the public or that have actually been destroyed.
The absence of these vital documents provides every opportunity for conjecture, and Hess’s extraordinary flight has been the subject of much speculation, ranging from the silly and sensational to the plausible but unproven. Historians reject conclusions derived from the absence of evidence as a resort to the argumentum ex silentio. However, in this case there is documentary evidence that papers which were once in the files have been removed, and that others – most notably the documents Hess brought with him, for the existence of which there is incontrovertible evidence – are missing from any files.2 This is proof of official concealment, although not, of course, of what is being concealed or why.
In these circumstances the only way to the truth is to use the evidence in the open files and the letters and diaries of participants, and credible witness statements to build a picture of Hess’s peace mission and its hinterground which fits the provable facts, and most importantly fits Hess’s character and absolute devotion to his Führer.
Interpretation of the resulting picture is difficult: important accounts are contradictory, particularly on the German side, and after the event both sides spread deliberately misleading stories. Above all, in the opaque world of clandestine negotiations, that which was said or reported at the time was not necessarily the truth.
Hitler, then master of Europe, could not afford to have it known that he had weakened and sent an emissary to Britain with peace proposals; and many of the highest in British society did not wish it known they had been in favour of negotiating peace with him. It was these people Hess flew over to meet. Much evidence suggests that he was invited. The question is, by those who genuinely desired a compromise peace, or by British intelligence masquerading in their colours?
The facts and deductions presented in this book constitute a significant challenge to the received explanation of what happened in May 1941. Readers may form their own conclusions on these facts and deductions, but without such a challenge, acceptance of the official version continues, and with it misrepresentation of this critical moment when history failed to turn in the way Hess and Hitler and so many in the highest circles of British life wished. It is high time the official story is confronted, for consideration of the path Churchill did not take in 1941 casts a more brilliant light on the morality of the path he did take, the history we know. Hence the sub-title of this book: The Real Turning Point of the Second World War.
Apart from that, the story of Hess’s mission remains an absorbing mystery.
CHAPTER THREE
Hess
HESS LOVED HITLER. This is the essential key, without which his life story becomes incomprehensible. He adored Hitler. Whatever faults he may have discerned in him and however the more sensitive side of his nature may have recoiled from the abominations later associated with his idol, like a woman who knows her man is guilty yet loves him despite all, so Hess loved Hitler.
Both were veterans of the first war. Both had responded fervently to the call to arms in the first days. Hess had enrolled as a private in the Bavarian Field Artillery, transferring within weeks to the elite 1st Bavarian Foot and receiving his baptism of fire in Flanders before Ypres. He proved a brave infantryman, gaining the Iron Cross, 2nd Class, and earning rapid promotion to Vizefeldwebel (literally ‘vice-sergeant’).1 As such in 1916 he served in the murderous campaign for the French strongpoint at Verdun. He conveyed something of the horrors experienced here in a poem he wrote later as a memorial to fallen comrades: ‘… Along the whole front a savage fire … howled like a supernatural hurricane in which individual blows were scarcely heard.’2 Today the outlines of trenches in cratered earth can still be seen outside Verdun, and rank upon rank of crosses marking the unidentified dead, mute reminders of the industrialised slaughter which claimed thousands on both sides.
He survived, so severely wounded by shrapnel he was sent back to hospital, thence on convalescent leave, after which he was transferred to the eastern front. Here he was wounded again, twice, on the second occasion by a rifle bullet that passed through his chest almost grazing his heart and his spine.3 While hospitalised, he was commissioned a lieutenant in the Reserve, but in the meantime he had applied to join the rapidly expanding Flying Corps. He was accepted and in early 1918 began training as a pilot, qualifying in October. By then it was clear the war was lost. Posted to a fighter squadron, he took part in the final battles in the air.
The terms of the armistice dictated by the Western powers came as a deep humiliation. As with thousands of his fellows, Hess was left with a hurt, vengeful sense that the blood and pain and loss of young lives should not have been in vain.4 Hitler was not yet even a name to him, but he was ripe for the message he would proclaim.
HAUSHOFER
The victorious Western Allies punished Germany by demanding she disarm and pay reparations for the war she had undoubtedly begun, but they did not advance across her borders or stage a martial triumph in Berlin. This permitted German Army chiefs to manufacture a myth that the armed forces had not been defeated in the field, only stabbed in the back by politicians at home. The deception answered Hess’s emotional needs, and he found confirmation in Munich, where he went after demobilisation. The Bavarian state government in the city had been toppled before the Armistice, and a republic proclaimed by a Jewish socialist, Kurt Eisner, who had demanded peace.
Conservative and nationalist opposition in the city found extreme expression in the secret Thule Society. The name derived from Ultima Thule, supposed birthplace of the Germanic race; the society’s motto was ‘Remember that you are German! Keep your blood pure!’ The generally professional, wealthy business-class and aristocratic members had to prove racial purity for at least three generations. The society was rabidly anti-Semitic and anti-Communist and its ultimate aim was to unify Europe under the leadership of a greater Germanic Reich. Its symbol was the swastika.5
In February 1919, the month Hess arrived in Munich, a young Jew excluded from the Thule and wanting to prove his nationalist credentials assassinated Eisner. Anarchy followed until in April three emissaries from the Russian Bolsheviks seized power and established a Soviet republic in the city, curbing opposition with terror. All three were Jews.
Hess had joined the Thule Society, and in May he enrolled in the Freikorps Epp, one of many ex-servicemen’s paramilitary formations throughout the country assisting regular central government forces to put down Communist uprisings. Whatever Hess had thought of Jews before, it was during this period of active fighting to liberate Munich from the ‘Red’ terror that Jews and Bolshevism became indissolubly linked in his mind. So it was for Hitler, Himmler, Röhm and other future Nazi leaders in the city. There is some truth in the assertion that Bolshevism, in its ruthlessness and contempt for ethical restraint, evoked its natural counter force and mirror image in the Nazi Party.
An equally formative and fateful influence on Hess at this time was Karl Haushofer, an army general of intellectual bent, who had been appointed pr
ofessor to found a department of ‘geopolitics’ at Munich University. Hess had applied to the university to study political economy, but his introduction to Haushofer was arranged by a friend from his flying training days who had served under the general, and revered him.
Professor Haushofer was a cultivated man of extraordinary charm. As described by one of Hess’s later adjutants, he had ‘a bewitching way of handling people and an outstanding, fingertip feeling for human relationships’.6 By contrast Hess was reserved and deeply earnest. ‘He laughed seldom,’ his future wife, Ilse Pröhl, was to recall of this period, ‘did not smoke, despised alcohol and simply could not understand how after a lost war young people could enjoy dancing and social life.’7 In Haushofer he found a mentor with a very positive message about Germany’s future which met his deepest needs, and he fell under his spell, attending his lectures on geopolitics and working as his unpaid assistant. For his part, Haushofer was attracted by the quiet, ardent young man with a first-class war record who so obviously idolised him, and he brought him into his family circle and became like a father to him.
‘He is a capital fellow [famoser Mensch],’ Hess wrote to his mother in June 1920, describing how in fine weather Haushofer always collected him from work before lunch or dinner for a walk together. He had been to dinner with him and his wife – ‘who is also very nice’ – and their two sons, Heinz and Albrecht, the latter with ‘a good English accent. I sometimes take a stroll and speak English with him.’8
Twenty-five years later, after a second lost war, Haushofer was questioned about Hess in his university days. ‘He was a very attentive student,’ Haushofer replied, ‘but you see, his strong side was not intelligence but heart and character, I should say. He was not very intelligent.’ Asked whether the young man had evinced great interest in the subject matter that he taught, Haushofer responded, ‘He had great interest, and he worked very hard, but you see at that time there were all those students’ and officers’ associations and so the young men were always drawn away from their work.’9
Two other older men who influenced Hess during that early post-war period were Dietrich Eckhart and Captain Ernst Röhm. The former was a rabidly anti-Semitic writer, racialist (völkisch) poet and wit who held forth at a regular table at the Brennessel beerhouse in Schwabing, the intellectual and artistic quarter of Munich where Hess was lodging; the latter was a regular army officer serving on the staff of the district Army Commander. Each was to play a crucial role in projecting an obscure national-socialist working men’s party, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – the NSDAP, or Nazis – into national politics: Eckart by recognising the potential of its star orator, Adolf Hitler, and nurturing his gift for inspiring nationalist and anti-Bolshevist sentiment in language ordinary people understood; Röhm by diverting secret army funds and arms into a paramilitary wing of the party to serve as street fighters against their socialist and Communist enemies.
It was probably from one or both of these men that Hess first heard of Hitler. And it was Hitler, rather more than officers’ or students’ associations, who drew Hess away from his studies.
HITLER
Hess first heard Hitler speak in spring 1920. He had persuaded ‘the General’, as he called Professor Haushofer, to accompany him to a meeting of the NSDAP at their headquarters in the back room of a beerhouse in a working men’s district of Munich. Few if any of those sitting in upright wooden chairs about a bare table were from the social milieu of the General or his favourite student, and Hitler, when he rose to speak seemed no exception: a man of the people with a pale face and sloping shoulders, dark brown hair, small moustache and strange, slightly protruding blue eyes. But when he spoke of German honour and the ‘November criminals’ who had signed it away at Versailles, his voice rising to a hoarse shriek, he was transformed by the intensity of his feelings. Hess was captivated.
Ilse Pröhl saw him afterwards, ‘a new man, lively, radiant, no longer gloomy.’ He told her she must come with him to the next meeting of the party: ‘I have just been there with the General. An unknown man spoke. I don’t remember his name, but if anyone will free us from Versailles, this is the man.’10
Haushofer was not impressed. The tirade he heard would undoubtedly have been built around an indictment of the German representatives who had signed the Versailles Treaty at the end of the war as instruments of international Jewry. This would not have troubled Haushofer unduly. His charming wife, Martha, was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman, but he himself was an extreme nationalist, and the Jew as the racial enemy was inherent in German nationalism. It was not so much the message as the crude delivery that offended him; probably he saw Hitler as merely a street agitator.
Hess had no doubts. From that time on he attached himself to Hitler, took a muscular role in protecting his meetings from assaults by socialist and Communist groups, raised a student battalion for the party paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) and became his most loyal young aide. As such in November 1923 he was given a prominent role in Hitler’s attempt to stage a ‘national revolution’ from the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. The ‘Beerhall Putsch’ collapsed in utter failure and some loss of life, but while Hitler and others were arrested and tried, Hess found shelter in Haushofer’s apartment then escaped to Austria. The Bavarian authorities had been heavily implicated in the coup; when in consequence the Munich court sentenced Hitler to ‘fortress detention’ with the possibility of parole after six months, a preposterously short term for high treason, Hess returned to Munich and surrendered himself, reasoning that if caught and sent for trial elsewhere in Germany the length of his sentence would more accurately reflect the severity of the crime. To his mother he wrote that if he went to Landsberg Prison, where Hitler was confined, he would have ‘peace to study, interesting company, good fare, a common living-room, individual bedroom, garden, lovely view, so! vvvv’11 – which was the Hess family laugh sign in correspondence.
So it proved. It is impossible to read his letters from Landsberg without concluding that this must have been the happiest period of his life. Seldom is the subject anything but Hitler, referred to as ‘the Tribune’ – the tribune of the people. Even those to Ilse Pröhl express fulfilment in devotion to his idol:
The Tribune looks radiant. His face is no longer so thin. The forced rest is doing him good. He does gymnastics vvvv, bathes, does not smoke, drinks scarcely any alcohol apart from a little beer; here indeed he must be healthy without the former stress, with plentiful sleep, fresh air a[nd] a moral state that is far from depressed.12
In the fine spring mornings of 1924 he and Hitler ‘wandered between the blossoming fruit bushes in the garden’ discussing everything under the sun. He was enthralled by Hitler’s power of anecdote, continually surprised by the range of his ‘knowledge and understanding of subjects not really his own’, amused or moved by his extraordinary talent for mimicry. From his letters one would scarcely know that others were in detention with them. Sitting writing at his desk in his bedroom one day, he described hearing Hitler from the adjacent communal living room performing a wartime experience, simulating exploding grenades and machine-gun fire, ‘springing ferociously around the room, quite carried away by his imagination.’13
A visitor to Landsberg who testified to Hitler’s talent for mimicry was the Munich art publisher ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, one of his earliest followers from the educated classes. He described the repertoire of sounds Hitler deployed when reminiscing about the war, from the single crack of a howitzer or mortar to the whole battlefield din with ‘the hammering tack-tack of machine guns’.14 As a rival for Hitler’s favour, Hanfstaengl was made aware of Hess’s jealousy: on one occasion when he came to speak to Hitler, Hess, who was sitting beside him, rose with bad grace, seized another chair nearby and started performing gym exercises with it to claim attention.
For his part, Hess received regular visits from ‘the General’, who brought him books and advised him o
n issues that came up in discussion with Hitler. Most of these concerned the memoirs Hitler had begun to write, or more accurately dictate, first to his chauffeur, also locked up in Landsberg, then to Hess. These grew into Mein Kampf, published in two volumes after his release, an autobiographical polemic shaped by the political and racial dogmas he had absorbed from the nationalist milieu in Munich. The extent of Hess’s input is impossible to know. Haushofer was questioned on the point at the end of the Second World War. ‘As far as I know,’ he replied, ‘Hess actually dictated many chapters of that book.’15
Haushofer was asked about Hitler’s concept of Lebensraum – literally ‘living space’ – which appeared to have been derived from his own geopolitical teaching. The term had originated with the German geographer, Friedrich Ratzel; Haushofer had combined it with the doctrine of the British geopolitician, Sir Halford Mackinder, to propose that world mastery would pass to whoever controlled ‘the heartland’ of Eurasia, and to suggest that Germany expand eastward at the expense of Soviet Russia. Asked whether Hitler had received his ideas on Lebensraum from Hess, Haushofer replied, ‘Those ideas came to Hitler from Hess, but he (Hitler) never really understood them, and he never really read about them from the original books. He never read those books.’16
Haushofer’s disdain for Hitler was not a product of hindsight: in Landsberg Hess wrote beseeching him to re-examine his estimate of the ‘Tribune’, who held him (Haushofer) in extraordinarily high regard: ‘Your calm and intellectual way of speaking have made a great impression on him.’ In the same letter Hess tried to reassure Haushofer on the Jewish question: the Tribune had not reached his present standpoint on this matter without ‘hard inner struggle,’ he wrote. He had been beset by doubts about whether he was not doing the Jews an injustice.17
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