There need be no speculation about whether Hess carried a letter or other documents to Hamilton. MI5 files released recently show that on 14 May Censorship intercepted photostat copies of a letter Hess had brought with him, and sent a copy to Air Intelligence. MI5 investigated and documents were ‘recovered from a ditch in the field where Hess had landed’,57 or as the farmer’s wife, Margaret Baird, put it in a letter to a friend, ‘the police was ordered to search for a valuable document which was missing, he found it over near the wee burn in the park.’58
In Spandau prison Hess himself told Pastor Gabel that closed files held in London were ‘without doubt the peace proposals’ he took with him to Britain.59 He also gave Abdallah Melaouhi to believe that if the British only published the closed documents he would be a free man; and conversely that the British would never allow his release until they were published.60 Neither these documents, nor any mention of them have appeared in the files on his mission, and two inventories of his belongings when he landed are missing from the reports to which they were originally attached – clear proof of continuing official concealment.
The question of what is being concealed has been answered by the anonymous informant: an official proposal of peace in numbered clauses, typed on Chancellery paper, and a separate translation into English. Since the translation was somewhat stilted the informant was co-opted by Kirkpatrick into a small group to render the text into clear and comprehensible English.61
There are several reasons for accepting this account: Ernst Bohle translated Hess’s letter or letters to Hamilton, but Bohle called on his half-brother, a translator in the language service of the Foreign Ministry, to help him.62 Since Ernst Bohle was a fluent English-speaker, born in Bradford and educated in South Africa, it is difficult to see why he should have needed assistance from the Foreign Ministry unless it concerned the technical language and style of a proposed treaty.
From the English side there is Churchill’s request to Cadogan after Kirkpatrick had returned from interviewing Hess in Scotland to ‘make now a fairly full digest of the conversational parts of Hess’s three interviews’.63 The clear implication of the words ‘conversational parts’ is that Kirkpatrick had received documents as well. Churchill used English precisely.
The anonymous informant recalled that the first two pages of the proposed treaty detailed Hitler’s plans for the conquest of Russia and destruction of Bolshevism. Britain would show her benevolent neutrality during this process and keep out of Continental affairs; in return she would retain her Empire and armed forces intact. German forces would leave France.
Kenneth de Courcy, briefed on Hess’s peace proposals by Lieutenant Loftus, wrote after the war that in return for peace with England, Germany would evacuate France, Belgium, Holland, Norway and Denmark – and Jews would be deported to Palestine.64
Hess’s brief memorandum written before his interview with Lord Simon – given the pseudonym ‘Dr Guthrie’ – refers to British scepticism, ‘but position alters if E[ngland] learns authentic conditions’.65 And during that interview he said, ‘I don’t know if Dr. Guthrie has been informed of these conditions.’66
The American Mercury article of 1943 stated that Hess brought Hitler’s offer of a total cessation of the war in the west, and the evacuation of all western occupied countries – with the exception of Alsace, Lorraine and Luxembourg – in return for which Britain would agree to adopt a position of ‘benevolent neutrality’ towards Germany while she unfolded her plans in eastern Europe to ‘save humanity from Bolshevism’.67 This is lent credence by the fact that these were the terms Dr Weissauer had spelled out to Dr Ekeberg in Stockholm in September 1940.
None of these terms is to be found in any of the open files on Hess, nor in the report on his mission sent to the British Embassy in Moscow for transmission to Stalin,68 nor in Eden’s 1943 statement on Hess to the House of Commons.69 The clinching proof that Hess did bring such proposals – which have since been comprehensively excised from the official record – appears in the despatch wired to the Foreign Office by the British Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, in October 1942:
If these [Hess’s] alleged proposals were indeed (as was suggested to me at the time) that in exchange for the evacuation of certain of the occupied countries we should withdraw from the war and leave Germany a free hand in the East, our declared rejection of them should be enough to satisfy the most difficult and suspicious of the Russians …70
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It is not difficult to see why these proposals had to be buried. If they had leaked to the governments of the occupied western countries in exile in London, and to the dedicated advocates of compromise peace in Parliament and the City of London and among the country’s great landowners, or to isolationists in the United States, then arming Britain to continue the struggle, Churchill would have been in dire trouble. The plan Hess brought with him showed diabolical ingenuity: the proposals could hardly be refused, yet they came from a man, Hitler, who had broken every treaty and solemn undertaking he had made, and could not be trusted.
Accepting that Churchill, Menzies and Cadogan had to conceal Hess’s peace plan, even from Foreign Office ministers such as R.A. Butler, the question is why the veil is yet to be lifted decades after the affair passed into history. There are several possibilities: official inertia, reluctance on the part of MI6 to reveal operational secrets, or the involvement in negotiations of members of the Royal family such as the Duke of Windsor and the Duke of Kent and their German relatives – in which connection it is believed that when Anthony Blunt, one of the Cambridge ring of five Russian agents and Guy Liddell’s personal assistant in MI5, finally admitted his traitorous activities, he gained immunity from prosecution because of a mission he had undertaken for King George VI in the immediate aftermath of the war to recover sensitive royal correspondence with Hitler and other leading Nazis from Schloss Friedrichshof, seat of the Princes of Hesse near Frankfurt am Main.71
There is another possible reason for the continuing secrecy over Hess’s mission: that is, if he brought a warning about the impending fate of European Jewry.
Hess knew of Hitler’s plans for Operation ‘Barbarossa’ and it appears he revealed them when he came to Britain; the informant claimed this, as did Kenneth de Courcy with his inside information from Loftus; so did the 1943 American Mercury article; and Alan Clark, once a minister at the War Office with access to the files, stated in his book Barbarossa that Hess revealed the German order of battle for Russia.72 Hess also knew of the preparations for the Endlösung, the ‘final solution’ to the Jewish problem in Europe. If he revealed that too, Churchill’s failure either to denounce or act to stop the coming slaughter could so damage perceptions of his and Britain’s wartime record as to justify hiding the fact for ever.
There was, of course, nothing Churchill could have done. Had he accepted the peace plan it would only have made the assault on Russia more certain, and Hitler could not have been relied on to keep any promise to deport rather than physically annihilate the Jews. As for making an announcement, when towards the end of August 1941 Churchill had proof from intercepts that Jews were being massacred, he denounced the historic scale of the atrocity but did not specify its anti-Jewish character, referring to the victims as Russian peasants, as many were.73
There are indications that Hess may indeed have revealed Hitler’s plans for the Jews: on one typed copy of the statement to Parliament Churchill never delivered regarding Hess’s arrival in Britain, he wrote a comment in the margin: ‘He [Hess] has also made other statements which it would not be in the public interest to disclose.’74 Churchill’s intended statement includes everything contained in the open records of Kirkpatrick’s talks with Hess. Of course Hitler’s coming attack on Russia is not disclosed, so if Hess did reveal it – as the informant and Kenneth de Courcy asserted – Churchill might have been referring to ‘Barbarossa’. But the Jewish question is not mentioned eit
her, and another curiously ambiguous statement Churchill made at about this time could refer to the fate of the Jews: ‘This man, like other Nazi leaders, is potentially a war criminal, and he and his confederates may well be declared outlaws at the end of the war. In this case his repentance would stand him in good stead.’75 Neither Kirkpatrick’s nor Hamilton’s reports on their interviews with Hess in the open files mention him expressing repentance of any kind; on the contrary, they recorded him blaming Britain for the war and threatening her with destruction and starvation by U-boat blockade. So, when and for what did Hess express remorse?
There is also Hess’s comment to Lieutenant Robert Shaw, one of the officers guarding him at the Drymen Military Hospital – admittedly recalled long after the war – that the atrocities they were beginning to hear about were not typical of the German people.76 Later at Mytchett Place Foley reported to Menzies on a conversation with Hess, ‘We have been asking ourselves whether his [Hess’s] expose [sic] was a pose which he had assumed for our benefit. We are inclined to think it was not and that he had been shocked by what he had seen in Poland and the West.’77 There is no indication of what Hess had ‘exposed’, suggesting the file was ‘weeded’ before it was opened to the public, but evidently his comments concerned the brutalities of German occupation.
While whatever has been concealed cannot be known, there is no doubt about its extreme sensitivity. When, immediately after the war, Hamilton was due to travel to America for an airline operators’ conference he asked Churchill for a reference. Fearful of what avid US reporters might extract from him, Churchill would not hear of him attending the conference: ‘I desire therefore that the Duke should not, repeat not, undertake this task.’78 That ‘repeat not’ is surely an indication of the gravity of the secrets Hamilton might inadvertently disclose.
Later, the treatment of Colonel Eugene Bird by the US authorities when they learned of his collaboration with Hess on a book seeking to set out the truth of his mission appears so disproportionate to the offence79 – besides being so long after the end of the war – that it leaves the same impression of a secret so monstrous it could never be released to the world. Pastor Gabel’s subsequent account of conversations with Prisoner Number 7 allows no doubt that the systematic massacre of European Jewry weighed heavily on Hess’s mind; he repeatedly expressed remorse for that which could never be expunged from history,80 yet Bird’s book made no mention of the Endlösung or Hess’s contrition, leading to the suspicion that, despite co-author Desmond Zwar’s denial, Bird was warned off referring to the fate of the Jews.
In any event, the anxiety shown by the US authorities over Bird’s book suggests that the feared potential revelations were unlikely to have concerned the British Royal family: the reputation of the House of Windsor hardly touched American interests. On the other hand, if Hess gave advance warning of German preparations for genocide in the east Churchill would certainly have communicated this explosive information to Roosevelt, and both would have borne equal responsibility for the subsequent silence and inaction.
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The question arises as to whether the need to conceal pre-knowledge of the coming ‘holocaust’ – if Hess did indeed reveal it – could have been a sufficient motive for murder. Indications were that the Soviets intended to sanction Hess’s release. He might then have been expected to tell the world all he knew. He had, of course, had opportunity to do so from his prison cell, yet outside he would have more credibility. He would certainly have faced persistent questioning.
However, the recent release of the British Military Police Reports into his death, and more importantly the witness statements taken during the investigation, show that no unauthorised persons were in the grounds that day; there were no SAS assassins acting on the commission of the British Home Office, as alleged by the late Wolf Rüdiger Hess,81 supported by Abdallah Melaouhi.
Doubts were certainly raised by the German forensic pathologists, Professors Eisenmenger and Spann, who carried out a second post-mortem and concluded that strangulation should not have been ruled out as a possible cause of death.82 They were supported by an eminent British pathologist, Professor Bowen, who suggested in particular that the bruising to Hess’s deeper neck tissues was unlikely to have occurred in a suicidal hanging, but was a feature of strangulation.83 Yet Jordan, the only person in the right place at the right time to have strangled Hess, was shown by the testimony of the US guards to have been sitting calmly immediately after his brief opportunity, and subsequently running in circles in complete panic. Such a dramatic reversal would have been hard for the most accomplished actor to have staged.
The obviously bogus ‘suicide note’84 remains the chief obstacle to believing the official verdict of suicide; this is removed if the note was written by Hess himself in a deliberately outdated form to suggest a forgery and so get back at the authorities who had kept him incarcerated for so long. Bizarre as this might appear, it would be in character – very much in the hysterical character he had displayed since his early days in captivity. Making out his weekly requisition, including three rolls of toilet paper, and sending Melaouhi to the shops to buy a new ceramic pot were, in that case, integral to the scheme to show he had no intention of taking his life that day – so must have been murdered.
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Until the relevant documents are released the major questions surrounding Hess’s mission can never be definitively resolved. Both Churchill and Hitler had, for very different reasons, to conceal the fundamental aim of the undertaking, and both constructed very similar official narratives of a crazed fanatic flying on a lone, unauthorised bid to regain the position he felt he had lost at the Führer’s court. This explains a good deal of the mystification. It is difficult, nevertheless, to understand why Hess appears to have said nothing in any of his interviews in Britain with Kirkpatrick, Lords Simon and Beaverbrook or with his ‘companions’ or the young Guards officers at Mytchett Place of the official peace proposals he had brought with him. In part this may be explained by his refusal to negotiate with representatives of Churchill’s ‘clique of warmongers’ or the Secret Service agents he believed were preventing him from seeing the King and members of the opposition to Churchill. In part it may be due to deliberate omissions from Kirkpatrick’s and others’ written reports, or to subsequent ‘weeding’ of the files to ensure no trace remained of any reference to his documents.
He may have told Hamilton, who was certainly made to rewrite his original, now missing report on his first interview with Hess,85 and who was refused permission by Churchill to visit the United States at the end of the war.86 What had Churchill feared he might give away? Only many years later in Spandau jail did Hess reveal to Pastor Gabel and Abdallah Melaouhi that he had taken documentary peace proposals to Britain, and that, if published, these could secure his freedom.87 This suggests they must have been serious proposals.
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Apart from the official cover-up of events so long ago, the most lamentable aspect of the Hess affair is the failure of the academic historical establishment to probe the unbelievable story they have been fed. Thus Ian Kershaw, Hitler’s biographer, writes that news of Hess’s flight struck the Berghof ‘like a thunderbolt’.88 In common with Rainer Schmidt, author of the most perceptive German account of the mission, he ascribes Hess’s motive to a desire to restore his lost position at the Führer’s court.89 Both Kershaw and Schmidt accept the story that Hess told until the end of his life, that he acted without Hitler’s knowledge, ‘but in the belief he was carrying out Hitler’s wishes’.90 Kershaw states there is no evidence that Hess was enticed by the British Secret Service, basing this on an academic study of the records of MI5,91 not the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, whose records have not been released, and whose recent authorised historian has revealed nothing of the Service’s involvement. On the other hand Schmidt does believe that British intelligence entrapped Hess by corresponding with him in Hamilton’s name: ‘I
t appears that the British hoaxed the Nazis and that they finally brought Hess to England on the presumption that the ground for peace negotiations was prepared and that he could really meet the Duke of Hamilton.’92
A British author, the late Alfred Smith, not a member of the academic establishment, viewed MI6’s role in Hess’s mission differently. Smith saw the head of MI6, Sir Stewart Menzies, as ‘perhaps the most prominent member of the British peace party’, whose allegiance was to the sovereign rather than to the government of the day, and who believed in rapprochement with Germany to defeat Britain’s real enemy, Soviet Russia.93 In short, Smith suggested that Menzies and at least parts of MI6 encouraged Hess’s peace mission because they believed in it and wanted it to succeed.94 Their plans went awry because Hess missed Dungavel and was taken prisoner by the Home Guard.
Smith provided a theoretical rationale for his thesis, but no evidence at all. While it does fit what are known of the facts it is difficult to accept since it implies the overthrow of Churchill and the installation in his place of a figure like Lloyd George – who was undoubtedly waiting for the call – or Sam Hoare, or even Halifax. Only the King could have brought this about, but it would have been a high-risk, virtually unprecedented use of the royal prerogative in the era of constitutional monarchy. Who could say if the Commons would have accepted it? Of course, if true, this theory could provide grounds for the continuing cover-up since it implies the participation of King George VI and his formidable wife, Elizabeth. Yet it is unsupported by evidence.
While there is no conclusive evidence for the part MI6 played in Hess’s flight to Britain, there is no doubting the documents in the German Foreign Ministry from 1942 that reveal British intelligence using Hess’s presence in Britain to keep open German hopes of a compromise peace, and implying in this context that bombing London was counter-productive since it provoked hatred of Germany that did not otherwise exist.95 It is a fact that London was spared further serious raids until 1943, leading Stalin to believe that Churchill was holding Hess in reserve if it became necessary to make peace with Germany. Apart from the work at Bletchley Park, this must be the most important, yet unknown achievement of British intelligence during the war.
Hess, Hitler and Churchill Page 41