On the 9th Hitler went by train to Munich, where he was met by Göring, not Hess.8 After spending the day there, he moved up to his Alpine retreat, the Berghof. He and Hess were never to meet again.
That day, a Friday, Hess was making final preparations. He had already written a long letter to Hitler explaining his scheme and his reasons, which his adjutant, Karl-Heinz Pintsch, was to deliver personally after he had taken off. This was either a genuine explanation – if it is assumed that Hitler did not know already – or more probably a necessary measure to ensure that his peace mission could not be attributed to the Führer. He had also written letters he would leave for Ilse, for his parents and brother Alfred, for Karl and Albrecht Haushofer, and one for Himmler stating that none of his staff knew what he intended and requesting that no action be taken against them.
Before he set off, he had to see Alfred Rosenberg. His reasons have yet to be explained. Rosenberg was in Berlin. Hess summoned him to Munich. Impossible, Rosenberg replied, but Hess insisted, and told him he would lay on a plane to get him to Munich the next morning.9 He also called a legal officer on Martin Bormann’s staff to ask the position of the King of England,10 an odd request at this late stage. At the time of his alleged first attempt in January he had told his adjutant that when he arrived in Scotland he expected the Duke of Hamilton to arrange an audience for him with the King;11 probably he now wanted to know the extent of the King’s power to remove Churchill. The lawyer did not know the answer and said he would call back.
Hess also tried to phone the Minister of Agriculture to postpone a conference that month. Failing to reach him, he wrote a note instead, saying that he was making a long trip and didn’t know when he would be back; he would be in touch again on his return.12
* * *
Saturday morning, 10 May, dawned fine and sunny. Hess phoned his adjutant, Pintsch, who lived a short distance away, and told him to report at 2.30 that afternoon. It was perfect flying weather; he was sure this was the day. The weather reports from Potsdam confirmed it. He intended taking off at about six that evening.13
After breakfast he took Buz and the family’s four German Shepherd dogs for a last walk along the river path. Ilse was feeling ill and stayed in bed.
At noon Rosenberg arrived in a car Hess had sent to collect him from the airport. He showed him into the dining room, where a light lunch of cold meats, German sausage and salad had been laid out on the sideboard. The staff had been told they were not to be disturbed, and they ate alone. No record was made of their discussion, and after the war both men were careful to reveal nothing. Nor were they probed. Apparently the only thing that struck Rosenberg as odd was that after they finished their lunch young Buz was taken up to bed, but Hess went up and fetched him down again.14
Rosenberg stayed a while after lunch, talking, and left at some time between one and two o’clock. According to his adjutant who had accompanied him to Munich, they then drove straight to the Berghof.15 The distance from Munich to Berchtesgaden is little over 150 kilometres (110 miles), much of it along a fast autobahn, so it is probable that Rosenberg arrived at Hitler’s mountain eyrie before Hess took off on his flight.
Hess, meanwhile, had a short rest until about 2.30 when he changed into a Luftwaffe blue shirt, blue tie and breeches and high flying boots and went into Ilse’s bedroom to take tea with her. Ilse always maintained that she knew nothing of her husband’s purpose or destination when he left her that day, and this seems to be borne out by one of Hess’s letters from captivity recalling how he had gone ‘hot and cold’ when he thought she had divined his real intention at this last leave-taking.16 He never discussed official business with her, and on this occasion especially it can be imagined he would have wanted to spare her anxiety.
On the other hand she had seen the chart on his bedroom wall, and on this day she was, according to her own account, reading The Pilot’s Book of Everest by the Marquis of Clydesdale – as the Duke of Hamilton had been – and his co-pilot, Group Captain D.F. McIntyre. The book had been given to them by English friends two years before the war and was inscribed on the flyleaf, ‘With all good wishes and the hope that out of personal friendships a real and lasting understanding may grow between our two countries.’17 Hess had looked at this inscription that morning after asking her what she was reading. He had then turned to a picture of Hamilton, remarking as he handed the book back open at this page, ‘He’s very good-looking.’ Ilse agreed, puzzled.18
If this occurred and she really had no idea of where he was going it was a truly remarkable coincidence. As for his recollection of going ‘hot and cold’ when he thought she had guessed his destination, that was written in a letter from Nuremberg when he was still maintaining – as he continued to do for the rest of his life – that no one else had known his purpose. Probably it was to tell her to maintain the pretence. Nothing in Nazi Germany can be taken at face value.
Ilse asked him when he would be back.
‘I don’t know exactly, perhaps tomorrow, but I’ll certainly be home by Monday evening.’19
She did not believe him.
He left quickly to take leave of his sleeping son. Afterwards he pulled on a trench coat and went out to where his adjutant, Pintsch, his security officer and the driver waited by his Mercedes. A small suitcase containing little but a flat box of homoeopathic medicines, Ilse’s Leica camera, his letter to the Duke of Hamilton, charts of his route, flying calculations and a wallet containing family photographs and Karl and Albrecht Haushofer’s visiting cards had already been stowed in the boot. He climbed into the front seat beside the driver, the other two in the back, and they drove off to the autobahn towards Augsburg.20
They were ahead of schedule, and coming to a wooded stretch shortly before the exit to Augsburg Hess told the driver to pull in to the side. He climbed out, followed by Pintsch, and they walked in sunlight through crocuses and spring shoots into the trees. Focused on the flight ahead, he asked Pintsch for the weather reports. He was handed two flimsy sheets on which his adjutant had typed the details received from the Potsdam Weather Service that morning, and tried to memorise them as they walked on before returning to the car.21
At the Messerschmitt works all was prepared. Hess’s personal twin-engined Me 110 was standing, fuelled and ready on the apron before the hangar as they arrived, pale blue-grey on the underside, mottled grey-green camouflage above, the black Luftwaffe cross on the side of the fuselage flanked by the code letters ‘VJ + OQ’. Hess entered the administration building where he put on a Luftwaffe captain’s uniform jacket made for him by a Munich tailor, and over it a fur-lined flying suit. Pintsch, who had followed him in with the suitcase, helped transfer the contents of the case to his pockets. He strapped the charts to his thighs and slung Ilse’s camera around his neck.
Pintsch escorted him out to the runway, where he shook hands with the works group assembled around his plane before climbing up into the cockpit and beginning the starting rituals. Shortly, one after the other, the engines roared into life, clouds of whitish smoke billowing from their exhausts. It was some time before six – a quarter to six according to a chart he annotated later – when he gave the thumbs-up sign for the chocks to be pulled from under the wheels, and taxied away up-wind.22
Among the works party watching his plane rise into the bright evening sky and swing away northerly was his friend and collaborator, Professor Willi Messerschmitt. This has come to light almost by chance in the recent memoirs of Lord Colyton,23 formerly Henry Hopkinson, ‘C’s liaison at the Foreign Office. He was told it by Messerschmitt himself when lunching with him in Marbella years after the war. If this was so it is significant that neither Pintsch nor any other witness at the Messerschmitt airfield that evening ever revealed it, suggesting a conspiracy of silence about the extent of the circle with pre-knowledge of Hess’s mission.
FLIGHT
Hess’s flight from southern Germany to Scotland at the hei
ght of the war was an exploit in which he took huge pride, with every reason. Later, in captivity, he described it in some detail in a letter to his son.24 By then he had accepted that his mission had failed, and he planned suicide, in which circumstances the account carries all the weight of a last testament of a man who believed he was close to death. It is generally accepted by historians.
Nonetheless, there are doubts. Hess’s flying instructor at the Messerschmitt works, the late Helmut Kaden, suggested that Hess invented the route he described to his son in order to avoid revealing to his British captors the way he had been able to avoid German air defences.25 There are many other reasons for questioning his account – as will appear.
Leaving these aside for the time being, the route he described took him from Augsburg north-westerly (320°) to Bonn, thence north-north-westerly (335°) over the heavily defended industrial region of the Ruhr to the Zuider Zee and the Texel, where he made a 90° turn to the right towards Heligoland Bight for 23 minutes before resuming his north-north-westerly course up the eastern side of the North Sea beyond detection by British radar.
Reaching what he termed the ‘North Point’ of his flight shortly before 9.00 p.m., he turned left to a west-south-westerly (245°) course towards a ‘Point B’ he had marked on his chart near Bamburgh on the coast of Northumberland, just south of the Farne Islands; but finding it still too light to enter British airspace, he turned back after 20 minutes to the reciprocal course (65°) and flew back and forth between 245° and 65° for ‘a long time’ before making his approach to the English coast.
In letters to Ilse after the war, he recalled overwhelming feelings of loneliness and awe at the ‘fabulous beauty’ of the evening light over the North Sea. ‘The many small clouds far below me looked like pieces of ice on the sea, crystal clear, all tinged with red’,26 but as he flew on they disappeared, and instead of the ‘dense cloud at 500 metres [height]’ forecast by Potsdam he was left without cover in a completely clear sky. He considered turning back, but the consequences did not bear thinking about. ‘Hold on!’ he told himself, ‘come what may!’
In another letter, written on the eve of the seventh anniversary of his flight, he described sighting England at sunset on his final approach.27 He had planned to make for Mount Cheviot as the most easily recognisable landmark, but from the distance he was unable to distinguish it from several hills rising above a low haze over the land; all he could do was steer for the one that looked most likely. It proved the right choice for he soon made out Holy Island and the chain of Farne Islands to seaward of the distinctive outline of that part of the Northumbrian coast he had studied on the map a hundred times at home. A convoy escorted by three warships in line abreast was steering between the islands and the shore. He held his course for the Cheviot to avoid them.
From this point on his track can be followed from British radar and, over the land, Royal Observer Corps records. They corroborate his description of diving from 3,000 metres (c. 10,000 feet) practically to sea level as he crossed the coast in order to attain maximum speed in case of pursuit. At 10.24 p.m. he roared in over the little town of Bamburgh scarcely above the roofs at a speed of 750 kilometres per hour (c. 470mph), both engines at full throttle. He continued towards the Cheviot, skimming trees and houses, cattle and men in the fields and, as he recalled it later for Ilse, ‘literally climbed the slope a few metres above the ground’.28 At the top he altered course a few degrees right to 280° and scorched onwards, still so low that by his own account he waved at people in the fields, towards his next point of aim, a small lake in the hills by the peak of Broad Law; here he made another slight alteration to take him over the Duke of Hamilton’s seat, Dungavel House.
By the time he passed over the estate it was too dark to make out the house. He had planned for this contingency and flew on to the west coast, crossing at West Kilbride. The Firth of Clyde was like a mirror under the moon; ahead a hill rose sheer from the water glowing red with the last of the light – ‘a fabulous picture,’ he recalled29 – it was no doubt Little Cumbrae Island. Turning south, he swung in over the land again at Ardrossan and picked up the pattern of railway lines he had memorised, following the silver threads to a bend near Dungavel. He made out a small lake he had noted on his map to the south of the estate, but not the house itself.
His fuel was now very low. He had released two wing drop tanks that had provided the extra fuel needed to reach this distance; no doubt white warning lights for both main fuel tanks were glowing on his instrument panel. He pulled the control column back and climbed until at 2,000 metres (over 6,000 feet) he felt he had sufficient height for a parachute jump.30 Switching off the engines, he swung the cockpit roof back and tried to climb from his seat, but the plane was still moving at speed and he was unable to force himself out against the wind pressure.31 He suddenly remembered being told that the way to escape from a modern aircraft was to turn it on its back and let gravity do the rest. He turned the plane over, but he had never practised bailing out and instinctively pulled back on the control column as though performing the second half of a loop. With the machine upside down the nose headed for the ground. The centrifugal force generated caused the blood to drain from his head and he blacked out, consequently releasing his backward pressure on the stick. Fortunately the plane had now completed the bottom arc of the loop and was heading vertically upwards, the speed falling away rapidly. He came to again with the machine standing on its tail, stalled, the speed dial registering zero. He pushed out with both legs, propelling himself from the cockpit and falling, striking his right foot hard on a part of the tail as he plunged past.32 At the same instant the aircraft itself began to fall. He pulled on the ripcord of his parachute. ‘The harness tightened, I hung – an indescribably glorious and triumphant feeling in this situation!’33
He floated down on to a grassy field, white under the moon, stumbling and falling as he hit the ground, and once again blacked out.
* * *
There are questions about what Hess omitted from his accounts of his flight for Buz and Ilse. They concern his radio navigation instruments, the operation of which he was determined to conceal from his British captors. There is also a question over whether he really intended a night landing at Dungavel. It would have been an extremely hazardous undertaking. In the letter telling Ilse how he considered turning back when he saw there was no cloud cover over England, he described his thoughts: ‘Night landing with the plane – that cannot go well. And even if nothing should happen to me the Me[sserschmitt] would be smashed up, possibly irreparably.’34 And years later, coming up to the ninth anniversary of his flight, he wrote to her about a compass he had worn on his wrist, ‘intended to guide me after my jump, when I stepped out of the parachute to make my way to Dungavel. However … in the struggle to get free of my plane … I landed a couple of hours’ march from Dungavel.’35
These excerpts surely suggest he had intended from the beginning to bail out over Dungavel, not to attempt a landing on Hamilton’s grass strip. This is lent support by a note in the navigation calculations found on Hess and held for a time at the RAF navigators’ school. Against ‘Du’, presumably Dungavel, since his starting point is designated ‘Au’ for Augsburg, is the note ‘Kabine auf’, meaning ‘Cockpit open’.36 For what purpose would he open the cockpit at ‘Du’ other than to bail out? Yet this was as inherently dangerous as a night landing, and hardly the way for such a high-ranking peace envoy to arrive. It is a great puzzle.
A far larger question is whether he made the flight on his own initiative, as he maintained to the end of his life, or whether he was sent on an unattributable mission for the Führer. If the latter, it is difficult to believe that Hitler would not have insisted on fighter cover for his deputy on the potentially hazardous daylight leg over the North Sea.
There are small clues that this might have been the case: Heydrich’s widow, Lina, wrote a memoir after the war in which she claimed that her husband
learned of Hess’s flight ‘while he was “residing” on the Channel [coast] and likewise piloting Me 109s [fighter aircraft] towards England’.37 It is hard to imagine why Himmler’s chief of security should be flying fighter missions to Britain at this period shortly before the great offensive against Russia in which his Einsatz groups were to play a key role exterminating Bolsheviks and Jews behind the lines unless he was involved in an equally vital task, such as protecting the Deputy Führer.
A further indication comes from Hans-Bernd Gisevius, the Abwehr representative in Zürich and informer for the German opposition through MI6’s agent, Halina Szymañska. He was close to Heydrich’s chief of criminal police, Arthur Nebe, who told him that Heydrich was flying over the North Sea on the day of Hess’s flight. On his return to head office Nebe asked him whether he could by chance have shot down the Deputy Führer. Unusually Heydrich was lost for words; then he replied curtly that if he had done so it would have been a historic coincidence – so Gisevius told Heydrich’s biographer after the war.38
Another mystery concerns Göring. It is difficult to imagine Hess flying through the heavily defended airspace over the Ruhr without Göring’s knowledge or consent. The air ace Adolf Galland was commanding a fighter group on the Channel coast at this period and in his post-war memoirs recalled in the evening of 10 May receiving a very agitated telephone call from Göring ordering him to take off with his whole group. ‘The Deputy Führer has gone mad and is flying to England in an Me 110,’ Göring told him. ‘He must be brought down.’39
Hess, Hitler and Churchill Page 21