At about this time, it will be recalled, Albrecht Haushofer’s former pupil, Herbert Stahmer, was in covert touch with Hoare through an official at the Swedish Embassy,6 and after the war both he and Karl Haushofer were quite clear that a meeting between Hess, Hoare and Haushofer had been arranged for February or March. It will also be recalled that MI6’s agents had been spreading stories of powerful British circles who desired an end to the war, and the Assistant Chief of MI6, Claude Dansey, had sent Tancred Borenius to Switzerland to reinforce this message.7 Meanwhile Hitler had made public offers of peace, and numerous German feelers had given clear indications of the terms available. It would surely have been irresponsible and probably out of character for Hoare not to have considered playing on Hitler’s desire for peace in the west to stave off the crisis he feared in Spain: he had begun his career in MI6 and was known for deviousness.
Eden was a committed disciple of Churchill. If he and Hoare devised secret plans evidently concerning Hess’s mission, in which Churchill took great interest, the assumption must be that they involved bogus negotiations to play for time. Hoare’s pre-war reputation as an ‘appeaser’ fitted him perfectly for the role. It might explain how he was able to tell Eden that he could imagine what Hess was saying in England, and why, after Hess’s flight, Ribbentrop’s agent was trying to contact him about British attitudes to peace.
Hoare’s actions following his 15 February meeting with Eden support the supposition: thus, on 5 March he met Ribbentrop’s envoy, Prince Hohenlohe, against Churchill’s explicit instruction for ‘absolute silence’ to enemy peace feelers.8 Hohenlohe’s report of their conversation is missing, but both the Italian and German Ambassadors in Madrid reported Hoare suggesting that Churchill’s government could not last, and that he himself would soon be recalled to London to form a new government with the object of concluding a compromise peace; he would have to remove Eden as Foreign Secretary and replace him with R.A. Butler.9
Early in April he had again disobeyed instructions by leaving Madrid for Seville and Gibraltar. This had earned him another reproof at the Foreign Office: ‘It should be on record that the Ambassador went to Gibraltar in spite of categorical instructions that he was not to do so … nor has he given any explanation why it was necessary for him to spend a week in Gibraltar …’10 Later that month he had been asked about reports that Hess had flown to Spain. He had wired back that all his information inclined him to discredit the story, but added that the German Ambassador had been in Barcelona since the 22nd – the date of Hess’s alleged flight – and sent a note by diplomatic bag to say it could not be confirmed that Hess had met the German Ambassador in Barcelona.11
Whatever irritation Hoare caused by unauthorised excursions and windy and repetitive messages to the Foreign Office, he had retained Churchill’s full confidence. During a Commons debate on 22 April on the proposed loan to the Spanish government, Churchill had answered an inspired question with a tribute to his ambassador in Madrid: it was, he said, largely due to the brilliant discharge of his duties that relations with Spain had tended to improve and not deteriorate at a crucial time.12
MYTCHETT PLACE
After Kirkpatrick’s return to London Churchill had sent Cadogan a memo asking him to ‘make now a fairly full digest of the conversational parts of Hess’s three interviews’, which he could then send to Roosevelt.13 His strategy was based on bringing America into the war and he needed to end any suspicion of peace talks arising from Hess’s visit; but why stipulate ‘the conversational parts’ of the interviews? Churchill used language precisely. The implication is surely that Hess had brought documents with him – as described by the informant14 – which Kirkpatrick or Hamilton had carried down to London.
Churchill still wanted to give Parliament an explanation of Hess’s motives, but at cabinet on 19 May he was finally dissuaded from making what Cadogan referred to in his diary as ‘his stupid statement’.15 Afterwards, with Eden and Cadogan, Churchill agreed to Kirkpatrick’s original suggestion of bringing in someone to conduct bogus negotiations with Hess; Cadogan noted: ‘I.K. [Kirkpatrick] came in to report. P.M. agreed we ought to draw Hess by pretending to negotiate & he came out with my idea of J. Simon for the part. We’ll wait and see what “C”[’s] men report.’16 Like Hoare, Lord Simon had been a noted ‘appeaser’ before the war. He was now Lord Chancellor in Churchill’s government, not a member of the War Cabinet.
‘C’s men were MI6 Germany specialists posted as ‘personal companions’ to Hess to try to draw information from him about Hitler, his ministers, war plans and the German war machine. They were led by Major Frank Foley, MI6 head of station in Berlin for fifteen years before the war. As passport control officer he had concerned himself with the plight of Jews and assisted many thousands in escaping, often at personal risk to himself. Today he is remembered in Israel by a grove of trees planted in Kibbutz Harel.17 After returning to England in the early part of the war he had been posted to MI6 Section V – counter-espionage – and because of his unrivalled knowledge of Gestapo and Abwehr methods, co-opted as senior adviser on the Double-Cross Committee. Early that year, it will be recalled, he had been sent to Lisbon, either in response to Albrecht Haushofer’s letter to Hamilton18 or to check on Lonsdale Bryans’ actions there.
The other two ‘companions’ went under false names: ‘Colonel Wallace’ was actually Thomas Kendrick, before the war MI6 head of station and passport control officer in Vienna, who, like Foley, had been overwhelmed by the numbers of Jews desperate to escape the country;19 while ‘Captain Barnes’ had been born Werner Gaunt von Blumenthal in Berlin, elder son of a Pomeranian aristocrat and an English mother; educated in England, he had changed his name on the approach of war to Richard Arnold-Baker. The surname was that of his mother’s second husband, an Englishman.20
The three companions were introduced to Hess on 20 May shortly after his arrival at the home chosen and adapted for him near Aldershot. A substantial house called Mytchett Place, it had served previously as a residence for senior army officers. To accommodate Hess, code-named ‘Z’, it had been converted into a fortified site named ‘Camp Z’ surrounded by inner and outer lines of barbed wire and machine gun pits, overlooked by spotlights, hung with alarm bells and patrolled by sentries. These were necessary precautions, not least as Poles serving in the British Army were found to be plotting to seize Hess and murder him in retaliation for the German occupation of their country.21
In the house, on the first floor a suite of bedroom, sitting room and bathroom had been prepared for him, furnished as any country house guest would expect but secured by a metal grille like a prison cage on the landing outside the entrance via the bedroom, and with the windows barred. These rooms, and the dining and drawing rooms below, had been fitted with concealed microphones to catch every word he might utter, with hidden wires leading to a sound room where the companions could listen in on headphones.
The camp was run by picked Guards officers under Lieutenant Colonel Malcolm Scott of the Scots Guards. Besides the security of the camp, Scott’s orders held him responsible for the health and comfort of his solitary prisoner:
Food, books, writing materials, and recreation are to be provided for him. He is not to have newspapers nor wireless … He is not to have any contacts with the outside world whatsoever … He is not to have any visitors except those prescribed by the Foreign Office …22
By the time he arrived at Mytchett Place Hess’s expectations on his move to London had given way to fearful perceptions. Requests to see Hamilton and Kirkpatrick had been refused and he was convinced he was being hidden away by the Secret Service on behalf of Churchill’s warmongers, who intended to liquidate him.23 In an attempt to pre-empt their plans, he had written to Hamilton on the 19th stating that in the letter he had left behind for the Führer he had told him it was possible that his death would be announced from England, and that it might be ascribed to suicide. But even if his death were to occur
in peculiar circumstances it would be right to make peace with those in England who wanted peace. This was his last wish: ‘Moreover, I have given the Führer my word that I will not on any account commit suicide. He knows that I would keep my word.’24 Hamilton never received the letter: Cadogan and Eden decided it was not right for Hess to communicate with the Duke, to his ‘possible embarrassment’.25
The sight of the armed sentries at Camp Z and the grille before the entrance to his room did nothing to remove Hess’s apprehensions or relieve the deep depression he felt at the failure of his mission. No sooner had he been escorted in than he changed into pyjamas laid out for him, hung his uniform in the wardrobe and went to bed. Sitting up against the pillows he was introduced by the Director of Prisoners of War to Colonel Scott and his future ‘companions’, Wallace, Foley and Barnes. He was told that any requests he had would be passed on by Colonel Scott, at which he asked to see Hamilton and Kirkpatrick.26
He ate dinner in his room that evening, but when the following morning breakfast was brought up for him, he barely touched it, explaining that the duty officer, Lieutenant William Malone of the Scots Guards, was a member of the secret police and might be trying to poison him.27 The one man whom he appeared to trust was the doctor, Colonel Gibson Graham, who had treated him in Scotland and accompanied him since. He had a long talk with him that morning, the 20th, repeating what he had originally told Kirkpatrick about the certainty of Germany winning the war and the mission on which he had embarked – without the Führer’s knowledge – to stop the senseless slaughter, but doubting his prospects of success now that he was in the hands of the warmongers’ clique who were preventing his access to the King. He could only gain access through the Duke of Hamilton, and they were keeping him away.28
Nothing could assuage his suspicions. He was told that Gestapo practices were not employed in Britain, but his mistrust seemed only to deepen. At meals taken in the mess over the following days with the Guards officers and ‘companions’ he would swap his plate for another in order to avoid being poisoned or drugged; when passed a dish from which to help himself he would take a portion from the far side; and apparently fearing that a member of the Secret Service would creep into his room at night and cut an artery to fake his suicide, he told Dr Graham – as he had tried to inform Hamilton – that he had given the Führer his word that he would not take his own life.29
His moods swung from cheerfulness to extreme depression, and he made no attempt to disguise either. The Guards officers, brought up in a stiff school to shun displays of emotion as unbefitting an officer and gentleman, were unimpressed. Malone kept a diary in which he recorded finding it difficult to imagine how ‘this rather broken man who slouches into his chair careless as to his dress’ could have been the Deputy Führer. ‘He is such a second-rater, with none of the dignity, the bearing of a great man.’30 Dr Graham remarked on his daily decrease in stature (character), and took to rating him in terms of the wage he might command in Britain: by Saturday 24 May, he estimated his worth at no more than £2 a week;31 by the 28th Colonel Wallace judged this had fallen to 35 shillings.32
It is not at all apparent whether the fears Hess expressed were real or play-acting of a type he was to indulge later with great success, intended perhaps to bear out the Führer when it became necessary for Hitler to distance himself from the mission by declaring his deputy insane. It is more likely, perhaps, that he suspected his companions of using drugs in their efforts to elicit information. Six weeks later he wrote a long deposition claiming that after arrival at Mytchett Place he had been ‘given in food and medicines a substance which has a strong effect on brain and nerves’; he described the sensations produced as similar to headache, but not the same, followed by many hours when he experienced feelings of extraordinary well-being, mental energy and optimism, giving way after some time to ‘pessimism bordering on a nervous breakdown without any cause and … extraordinary fatigue of the brain’.33
The description fitted the effects of amphetamines. These drugs had been in medical use since 1938, and while Hess did not take drugs, Hitler almost certainly boosted himself with amphetamines during the day; it is likely that Hess would have observed the effects. He was certainly aware of the effects of drugs on the victims of Stalin’s show trials of 1936–38; they had made a deep impression on him because of his visceral aversion to Bolshevism. In any case, the major powers were all experimenting with ‘truth drugs’ at this period, and it is likely that Hess, with his interest in alternative medicines, took an informed interest in developments. No doubt he knew that Himmler’s doctors used mescalin on concentration camp inmates, and he may have known that the Abwehr employed sodium thiopental when they wanted to break a man’s will and force him to confess or reveal secrets.34
It is possible, therefore, that when he realised he was in the hands of the Secret Service – as he was – he assumed that they would use drugs to break his will and make him reveal what he knew; and knowing the effects of such drugs, he imagined suffering them, as it were, psychosomatically. Or he may have pretended to feel the effects, as later he would pretend to lose his memory, in a struggle to combat efforts to break his will. It is also possible, or even likely, that he was indeed being fed drugs to Menzies’ orders.35 Or he may simply have been describing the ups and downs of his own nervously unstable character, exaggerated by his sense of impotence at the apparent failure of the mission on which he had set such hopes.
Years afterwards, in another prison, when he set down his recollections of Mytchett Place for Ilse, he made no mention of drugs in his food; what he recalled were the fragrant glycineas and rhododendrons in the garden where he walked with his ‘companions’, and evenings in his room when he heard Mozart played on the gramophone in the music room below by Colonel Scott, ‘in peacetime a professional artist, with a true artist’s nature; outside were warm summer nights, and my heart was aching so.’36
On the night of 28/29 May his frustrations overwhelmed him. Lieutenant Malone was on guard duty. He had managed to break through Hess’s reserve the day before by raising the subject of skiing; and when he came on duty that night Hess had shown him pictures of young Buz, which he had admired. At 2.45 in the morning Hess came out to where he was sitting reading inside the grille by the bedroom door and said he couldn’t sleep, then in a stage whisper he began running through the reasons he had come to Britain, just as he had explained them exhaustively to Hamilton, Kirkpatrick and others before. Malone reported to Scott:
He then asked me to get in touch with the Duke of Hamilton to request that he arrange an audience for him with the King, saying that if I did this I would in due course receive the thanks of the Monarch for a great service to humanity. I told him that this was impossible and this sort of thing put the Duke of Hamilton in a most unfortunate position. He then went on to say that he believed that the secret service at the behest of a clique of warmongers had hidden him here so that the Duke could not find him, and were trying to drive him to insanity or suicide …37
Malone told him this was nonsense, at which Hess described a ‘devilish scheme’ in operation over the past few days to prevent him sleeping at night or resting during the day: doors slammed, people running up and down uncarpeted stairs, motorbikes nearby with engines running, aeroplanes sent overhead to break his nerves. Malone explained that there was a large military training camp nearby and such noises were normal, but Hess only shook his head and flapped his arms about before going back to bed. Minutes later he was out again to apologise, saying he was in a very nervous condition and perhaps did not mean all he had said.38
Nonetheless, when he came down to breakfast the next morning he was obstinately silent, and remained so during the day. His ‘companions’ were unable to draw a word from him, and that afternoon Dr Graham told Scott he believed that ‘Z’ had definitely passed over the border between mental instability and insanity.39 It is not clear how he came to this conclusion. Hess had been subjec
t to mood swings and sulks since his first arrival in Scotland, and particularly at Camp Z. No one who had reported on him had suggested he was insane. Moreover, Gibson Graham’s own report after first meeting him at the Drymen Military Hospital on the 13th, scarcely over a fortnight before, stated specifically, ‘he did not strike me as being of unsound mind. Such information as he gave me … with regard to his health was given in a rational and coherent manner.’40 After accompanying him to the Tower of London and Mytchett Place, he summed up:
one gets the impression, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, of an intelligent man of no great character or driving force who has been dominated and hypnotised by his master [the Führer] … He is conceited, introspective, neurotic. In addition there is evidence of delusions and lack of judgement. He reasons at times logically on obviously unsound premises. One has the impression at times of a certain amount of posturing in his gait and manner …41
No hint there of madness. The answer may be that a diagnosis of insanity was ordered from the top. Long after the war Lord Beaverbrook told the author James Leasor that he suggested the idea to Churchill during a walk in St James’s Park while discussing how to prevent the spread of rumours that Hess had come to Britain with a genuine peace plan. Beaverbrook, a Canadian, said he believed that anyone in Britain who came under the care of a psychiatrist was written off as mad, and this might provide a quick way to discredit Hess.42
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