The authors of Double Standards allege that the Duke of Kent was indeed waiting with others, including Poles, in the cottage known as the Kennels adjacent to the airstrip at Dungavel.15 Their informant wished to remain anonymous. It is significant, however, that the Duke’s whereabouts on that weekend cannot be traced.
Equally significant is the testimony of retired squadron leader Frank Day, who as a young pilot stood guard duty on 13 May at what from his description and from post-war legend attached to the house seems likely to have been Craigiehall, outside a room where Hess was brought for a meeting with a high-ranking RAF officer with a gold-braided cap.16 Day was told the officer was ‘the Duke’; he assumed the Duke of Hamilton, yet Hamilton as a wing commander had no gold braid on his cap. On that evidence alone it was more likely to have been the Duke of Kent, an RAF group captain with the honorary rank of air commodore.
The official account has Hess at the Drymen Military Hospital on 13 May, yet Ivone Kirkpatrick, who had visited him in the early hours of that morning after flying up from London with Hamilton, and who had been ordered to stay in Scotland specifically to probe Hess on his proposals, did not visit him again until the next day, the 14th. Of course, it would have been difficult for him to have done so any sooner if Hess was brought to Craigiehall House on the 13th.
The only other trace of ‘peace party’ members in Scotland comes from the recollections of a former Royal Navy and British Airways pilot named Ronald Williams, who has not thus far appeared in the story. As a youngster in May 1941, he vividly recalls an unexpected and unusual journey with his parents by train to Glasgow. His father went off somewhere after arrival, while his mother took him for a cruise on the Loch Lomond steamer, and the following day down the Clyde to Rothesay, where electric motor boats were for hire. There the question arose as to whether, at seven, he was old enough to navigate a boat on his own. He caused laughter by asserting he was actually seven and a half, and was allowed to take one out. Judging by what happened next, it must have been Saturday 10 May:
The next thing was that Dad returned in a stew. Although it was late at night we had to pack up to go to the station to try to get a sleeper back to Liverpool. I was warned not to open my smart alecky mouth about us using a false name for the cabin.17
His father, G.E. Williams, had been interned in a camp on the Isle of Man the previous year under the emergency Defence Regulation 18b on account of an association with the British Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley.18 Williams was an economist with an enthusiasm for ‘social credit’ as a remedy for the ills of society, and Mosley had shown an interest in applying the idea.19 Williams had been released after six months, but banned from all war-related work. He also had an association with the Duke of Bedford – formerly Marquis of Tavistock – the most outspoken aristocratic member of the peace movement, and it was this link which had probably drawn him up to Glasgow and subsequently been the cause of his hurried departure by the night train under an assumed name; for when, much later in life, Ronald Williams asked his mother about that night she told him that his father had been among the group waiting for Hess. He assumed they were waiting at Dungavel and the panic was the result of Hess landing some distance away and being taken into custody by the Home Guard. Ron Williams’ sister remembers their mother telling her later that their ‘dad went to the peace meeting to hear what Hess had to say’ – an extraordinarily suggestive phrasing.
It is interesting that Bedford wrote to the Labour MP and peace campaigner Dick Stokes on that 10 May proposing that Lloyd George, ‘so obviously the one man who could save the country!’, should make a public statement setting out possible peace terms to which Germany could respond.20
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Had Hess flown into enemy territory in wartime without prior negotiation or arrangement simply on the off chance of finding the Duke of Hamilton at home he would have been certifiable. Yet he could not have made such a difficult and dangerous flight with such precision if he had been mad; no one he spoke to after landing in Scotland gained that impression, and doctors who examined him specifically reported him as being of sound mind.21
Besides this obvious reason for doubting the official line that his flight was a lone endeavour and his arrival in Scotland a complete surprise, there were those who knew he was coming: Ernest Bevin, a member of Churchill’s War Cabinet, received a coded message to that effect from a contact inside Germany; he apprised Churchill,22 who the following morning, Sunday 11 May, asked his hostess at Ditchley Park for a room to be prepared for the Duke of Hamilton that night.23 James Douglas, on duty on the evening of 10 May at the BBC’s Mayfair Information Bureau, received intercepted reports that Hess had taken off on a flight from which he had not returned, and alerted the Air Ministry and Fighter Command.24 Squadron Leader W. Geoffrey Moore, Deputy Commandant of the Royal Observer Corps, Scottish Command, told his daughter, Nancy Mary Goodall, in the strictest confidence after she came off duty from the Operations Room at Turnhouse that night that the German airman who had asked to speak to Hamilton was Rudolf Hess.25 Sergeant Daniel McBride, one of the first servicemen to speak to Hess after he landed – to whom Hess for some unexplained reason confided his Iron Cross – stated ‘with confidence’ after the war that high-ranking government officials were aware that Hess was coming.26
Apart from this positive evidence, there is Hamilton’s refusal to allow anti-aircraft batteries to open fire on an enemy aircraft approaching Glasgow or air-raid warnings to be sounded,27 his baffling inaction later when told the German pilot had an urgent message for him,28 and the equally puzzling inaction of the intelligence officer at RAF Ayr close to the site of Hess’s landing.29 And in London the next day Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville, omitted any mention of the arrival of the Deputy Führer from his first diary entry for the 11th, only adding a demonstrably bogus account of this sensational event in an entry for the same day written at a much later date with borrowings from the leader column of The Times.30
The possibility that Hess may have been enticed to Britain by false promises was mooted in a German broadcast as early as 13 May – ‘It is also conceivable that Hess was deliberately lured into a trap by a British party’ – and this was echoed that evening in a broadcast by Goebbels’ deputy, Hans Fritsche: ‘unless he [Hess] has been consciously trapped by England …’31
On 31 May Eduard Taborsky, personal secretary to the President of the Czech government in exile in London, wrote in his diary on the basis of a top-secret report he had been shown that ‘it is clear the Nazi No. 3 was enticed into an English trap’.32 In September a Soviet agent in Vichy France reported that Hess had been lured to England by MI6 in retaliation for their humiliation at Venlo.33 And in October 1942 Colonel Moravetz, head of Czech military intelligence, reported to Moscow in the same vein: Hess had been lured to Britain through correspondence purportedly with Hamilton, but actually written by the Intelligence Service. He had personally seen the letters.34
In May 1943 the American Mercury magazine published a fuller account of the alleged sting: the Secret Service (MI6) had intercepted a peace feeler from Germany and responded, using the names of Hamilton and others to suggest Britain was seeking a way out of its military difficulties. The anonymous author’s knowledge of figures like Ernst Bohle and Ivone Kirkpatrick who were unknown to the general public is proof of insider briefing, although whether genuine or disinformation is unknowable. The latter is more likely: for it will be recalled that an MI6 officer serving at the time of the Hess mission confirmed that his service was in the affair ‘up to their necks’, but that contrary to the story put out later for public consumption, ‘there was never any conspiracy to lure Hess to Great Britain.’35
All that seems clear is that Stalin believed it, and when Churchill visited Moscow, proposed a toast ‘to the British Intelligence Service which had inveigled Hess to Britain’.36
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The indications are that Hess was entrapp
ed. He seems never to have admitted this, perhaps not even to himself, and the details of the entrapment – directed by whom, when and where – are for the most part hidden. Only the background is clear: British ambassadors, particularly in Berne and Madrid, but also in Stockholm, Sir William Wiseman in San Francisco and double agents such as ‘Dusko’ Popov controlled by Menzies, ‘Tar’ Robertson and the Double-Cross Committee, consistently fed the Germans an exaggerated picture of British demoralisation under bombing, opposition to Churchill and the strength of the ‘peace party’, even names of potential quislings.
Beyond that there are flashes of suggestive detail. In January 1941 the art historian Tancred Borenius travelled to Geneva on the commission, by his son’s account, of Claude Dansey, Assistant Chief of the Secret Service (MI6).37 There he met Carl Burckhardt of the International Red Cross and, as is known from Ulrich von Hassell’s diary, delivered a message supposedly from influential English circles that a reasonable peace could still be concluded, and there was a mood for compromise in Churchill’s cabinet. Questioned by Burckhardt, Borenius stated the terms that might be acceptable to Britain. He had carried out with him a book, believed to have been a code book for Dansey’s Swiss network of agents, and an oversize poison pill. Afterwards he travelled to Italy.
This establishes a link between MI6 and Burckhardt, who subsequently got word to Albrecht Haushofer that he had a message for him from his ‘old English circle of friends’; so Albrecht stated in his subsequent report for Hitler. Albrecht visited Burckhardt in Geneva towards the end of April ‘with a double face’ – for Hess and for von Hassell’s opposition circle. From this meeting, at which Burckhardt passed on Borenius’s message that England was still prepared to conclude a reasonable peace, Albrecht travelled to Arosa and met Ilse von Hassell. He told her, according to von Hassell’s diary entry, that Burckhardt had agreed to make further contact with the British and would meet him again in a few weeks’ time.38
Compare this with Karl Haushofer’s post-war testimony:
Hess initiated peace feelers … and the responsible man in dealing with these peace feelers was my murdered son [Albrecht]. He was in Switzerland and talked with Burckhardt and Burckhardt told him to come back again to Switzerland and then he would be flown to Madrid and would there have a conference with Lord Templewood [as Sam Hoare had become]. When my son returned from Switzerland Hess spoke to him again, and it was after that that he flew to England.39
In another interrogation a few days earlier Karl Haushofer had said:
In 1941 Germany put out peace feelers to Great Britain through Switzerland. Albrecht was sent to Switzerland. There he met a British confidential agent – a Lord Templewood, I believe. In this peace proposal we offered to relinquish Norway, Denmark and France. A larger meeting was to be held in Madrid. When my son returned, he was immediately called to Augsburg by Hess. A few days later Hess flew to England.40
It is unlikely that Hoare flew to Switzerland for a meeting with Albrecht, or that Albrecht himself met Hoare in Madrid,41 although there were credible reports, denied in Berlin, that Hess had flown to Madrid in April. Either Karl Haushofer had never been privy to the details of the negotiation, or his memory had slipped. Nonetheless, the sequence of documented events shows a clear link between Claude Dansey and his Swiss network, Carl Burckhardt in Geneva, Albrecht Haushofer on behalf of Hess, and Sam Hoare in Madrid.
In the meantime, in early February 1941, Albrecht had visited Sweden.42 On 19 February Menzies wrote to Henry Hopkinson, his liaison with Cadogan, to say that the King of Sweden did not think the time opportune for mediating a peace move. Menzies probably wrote something by hand below the typed text as the bottom half of the letter from just above the green ‘C’ with which he signed all documents was torn off neatly before the file was opened to the public.43
Also in February preparations were made at Lympne aerodrome in Kent for Hitler’s pilot, Hans Baur, to fly in with the Führer on board,44 while in Madrid Herbert Stahmer contacted Sam Hoare on behalf of Albrecht Haushofer and the von Hassell circle of oppositionists to arrange a meeting to discuss terms which might satisfy Britain if both Hitler and Churchill were removed.45 According to Stahmer’s post-war testimony such a meeting was arranged. There is no evidence that it took place.
However, in early March Hoare, contrary to his instructions to meet all approaches from the enemy with ‘absolute silence’, granted an interview to Ribbentrop’s envoy, Prince Hohenlohe. The Prince’s report of their conversation is missing from the Foreign Ministry files, but both the German and Italian ambassadors in Madrid reported Hoare saying that Churchill would soon have to resign and he, Hoare, would be called back to form a government with the specific task of concluding peace.46
Either Hoare was indulging treasonable speculation or he was party to the specific deception initiated by Claude Dansey that influential British circles were prepared to remove Churchill and conclude peace. There are compelling grounds for believing the latter. On 4 May, a week before Hess’s flight, Jock Colville recorded in his diary that Alan Hillgarth, one of Churchill’s guests that weekend, was ‘a fervent disciple of Sam Hoare’.47 Hillgarth was attached to the Madrid Embassy with special responsibility for counter-intelligence and had a direct line to Menzies at MI6; he of all people must have known what Hoare was up to. He was a friend of Churchill and surely loyal to him. Less than a fortnight before that Churchill himself had expressed full confidence in Hoare with a fulsome tribute in the House of Commons.48 And after Hess’s flight Hoare wrote to Eden about a personal note he had sent Churchill ‘in view of the fact that he [Churchill] took so much interest last year in agreeing our secret plans’. That note to Churchill is missing from the files.49
From what Hess said after his arrival in Scotland there is no doubt he was convinced there was a powerful British peace party waiting to topple Churchill.
Besides these channels of disinformation through Switzerland, Spain and Sweden in particular, there are numerous other possible intermediaries: Kurt Jahnke, who worked more or less independently in Hess’s intelligence department and often travelled to Switzerland, had many British contacts; the MI5 index shows that he was in touch with MI6 from February 1940 and again in early May 1941, although the papers recording these contacts have been removed from the file.50
A later head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, proffered the suggestion that Hess’s flight might have been assisted by the head of his (Hess’s) intelligence service, who was a KGB agent.51 It is known that Jahnke, who was violently opposed to Hitler and National Socialism, had worked for Soviet Military Intelligence between the wars.
Walter Schellenberg, who headed Himmler’s Security Service investigation into the flight, concluded that Hess had been influenced by British Secret Service agents and their German collaborators, in particular Hess’s friend, the gland specialist, Dr Gerl, whose clients before the war had included many influential Englishmen.52 Schellenberg’s final report has not been found, but in his memoirs he recorded receiving ‘a shattering secret report’ in 1942 proving with detailed evidence that Jahnke was a top-level British agent. He failed to obtain confirmation from Jahnke.53
Others who might be considered as go-betweens include Air Vice Marshal Trafford Leigh Mallory who passed on warnings, apparently from Willi Messerschmitt, about parachutists landing to assassinate Hess at the Air Intelligence Interrogation Centre.54 And since it was Leigh Mallory who oversaw the preparations for receiving Baur’s aircraft with Hitler aboard at Lympne aerodrome it is possible he might also have been the channel through which Baur, or whoever was assuming Baur’s identity, notified the Air Ministry of an alteration to the agreed arrival and landing signals.55 That is speculation. Leigh Mallory died in an air crash before the end of the war.
Other possible go-betweens are the Duke of Kent and his cousin, Prince Philip of Hesse, with whom Kent took part in 1939 in fruitless attempts to prevent the outbreak of war between
their two countries. Philip of Hesse was one of Lonsdale Bryans’ contacts when he sought peace negotiations with the von Hassell group on behalf of Lord Halifax.56 He was, moreover, an art historian and married to the daughter of King Emmanuel III of Italy, thus a possible contact for Tancred Borenius when, after seeing Burckhardt in Geneva, he travelled on to Italy. Again, that is speculation.
Carl Eduard, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, cannot be omitted from a long list of possible go-betweens. He was a grandson of the British Queen Victoria. Born in England, he attended Eton College before being sent at the age of sixteen to preside over the German Duchies from which his grandfather, Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, had come. After the First World War he had been stripped of all his English titles, and of his German titles after the 1918–19 revolution, and he had become an early convert to Nazism. Appointed president of the Anglo-German Fellowship in 1936, he had attempted to foster permanent ties between the two countries. He was also president of the German Red Cross, and although this became a Nazi association disaffiliated from the International Red Cross, there were necessary contacts during the war with that organisation in Geneva.
Another Swiss forum whose international members, including British and German, met regularly during the war was the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. Speculation is endless but, without evidence, pointless.
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Hess, Hitler and Churchill Page 40