by Martin Allen
With the end of war, Germany had been plunged into political turmoil. On one side was the far left, predominantly led by militant workers and educated men well-versed in the works of Marx; on the other was the right wing, made up virtually without exception of the middle classes and war veterans determined that these Bolshevik troublemakers should be crushed completely before Germany descended into chaos. The country teetered on the very edge of an abyss that had the potential to mirror what was taking place in Russia.
Intent on taking his part in the struggle, Rudolf Hess quickly joined a right-wing band of veterans called the Thule Gesellschaft – the Thule Society – set up to counter the organised thuggery of the Spartakusbund. Over the course of the next five months, much bitter street-fighting ensued in the struggle to prevent the Spartakists consolidating their grip on power in Bavaria. The Thule Gesellschaft may be considered a forerunner of the Nazi Party, created before National Socialism became a concept; indeed, created even before Adolf Hitler became prominent. It was a nationalist anti-Bolshevik society, used the swastika as its emblem, and loudly proclaimed the motto ‘Remember you are German. Keep your blood pure.’ It was not as large an organisation as the Spartakists, and its struggle was hard, but events were about to turn in its favour.
In late April 1919, the Spartakists captured seven Thule Society members and an innocent bystander called Professor Berger, a Jewish academic who had the incredible bad luck to be swept up as a member of the anti-Semitic society. His luck was about to get worse, as all eight men were summarily executed. The Spartakists then made the fatal error of accepting three Bolshevik emissaries sent from Moscow by Lenin. These three Russian agitators promptly took over the Spartakusbund, and began to consolidate their power-base in Bavaria’s new Räterepublik by instigating a Soviet-style purge.
This was all too much for the new German government. From Weimar in Thuringia they watched events in Bavaria and blanched, for the Spartakusbund had nailed its colours to the mast by declaring that its ultimate aim was to topple the legitimate government and set up a Soviet Germany. Prompted by a sense of self-preservation, the government sent troops in to restore order, gladly accepting help from the Freikorp Epp (a right-wing paramilitary organisation affiliated to the Thule Society), and succeeded in toppling the Spartakists. With the collapse of the Räterepublik most people in southern Germany breathed an enormous sigh of relief, and hoped that the natural order of predominantly conservative Bavaria would re-assert itself, and that they could now get on with their lives.
It was at this time, mid-1919, that Rudolf Hess first made the acquaintance of Professor General Karl Haushofer, the man who would instil in him the political awareness and the understanding of world affairs that he would apply to his as-yet unplanned career in politics. Twenty-five years later, in October 1944, an investigation by the FBI would take a statement that revealed: ‘According to [Name Censored] Rudolf Hess … brought Hitler and Haushofer together [and this] combination of Hess and Haushofer was, in the opinion of [Censored] the root of the Nazi Party.’2 But this statement missed the crucial fact that Karl Haushofer and his son Albrecht became confidential advisers to Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess on their most important foreign policy matters – in effect an unofficial Führer’s private office on foreign affairs.
On a balmy summer’s evening in 1919 a man called Beck invited his friend and fellow member of Thule Gesellschaft Rudolf Hess to dine with him at the home of Professor Karl Haushofer, ‘an old-time pan-Germanist’3 who had commanded the Thirteenth Bavarian Infantry Division during the First World War. This first meeting between Haushofer and Hess, a purely social affair, was an immediate success. Long into the night, an enthralled Hess sat and listened intently to everything the eminent Professor had to say about the wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles, and his views on foreign affairs defined under the all-encompassing banner of Welt-Politik (world politics), as determined by his new theories of ‘geopolitics’. For Hess it was the opening of an intellectual door, and he suddenly came to believe that there was a bigger picture to consider – that of the new age to come – which through science would redefine the world. Haushofer had himself undergone this intellectual revolution in the late 1890s.
Basically, geopolitics was the theory, as promulgated by Haushofer, that in the future the world would be restructured into an age of great land-empires, dominated by ‘the Heartland’, an area ‘invulnerable to sea-power in Central Europe and Asia’.4 This, Haushofer asserted, would revolutionise the world’s balance of power, ushering in a ‘new age’ of stability, peace and prosperity for all.
In 1904, the eminent British geographer H.J. Mackinder had written a paper titled ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’,5 which Haushofer had read avidly, particularly the paragraph that declared: ‘The spaces within the Russian Empire and Mongolia are so vast, and their potentialities in population, wheat, cotton, fuel and metals so incalculably great, that it is inevitable that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will there develop inaccessible to oceanic commerce.’ Mackinder went on to expound his theory that
sea power alone, it if is not based on great industry, and has a great industry behind it, is too weak for offence to really maintain itself in the world struggle … both the sea and the railway are going in the future … to be supplemented by the air as a means of locomotion, and when we come to that … the successful powers will be those who have the greatest industrial base . .. [and] those people who have the greatest industrial base … [will] have the . . . power of invention and science to defeat all others.6 [Author’s italics]
Hess listened to all this and more, as Haushofer explained his theory that ethnicity should be added to this geopolitical formula. All Europe’s current borders, he maintained, resulted from old-world wars and conflict dating back to the Dark Ages, the time of strife and confusion following the collapse of Rome. European peace would only truly come about when Europe was redefined according to ethnic background. And that meant, by happy coincidence, that Germany and the Germanic peoples would become the largest single bloc, dominating central Europe.
Hess quickly became a total convert to Haushofer’s theories, and for his part the elderly Professor took a keen interest in the intriguing young man, who showed signs of considerable ability. A ready friendship soon developed between the two, Hess finding the genteel Haushofer a stark contrast to the authoritarian figure his own father had been. ‘He is a wonderful man,’7 wrote Hess, and within a few days of their first meeting the two would meet after Hess finished work to stroll in the park, often on their way to dinner at Haushofer’s home. Here Hess found himself readily absorbed into the Haushofer family, developing a close affection for Haushofer’s ‘very nice’ half-Jewish wife, Martha, and becoming firm friends with the Professor’s sons, Albrecht and Heinz.
Hess got on particularly well with Haushofer’s elder son, Albrecht, an intelligent young man of seventeen. A friendship swiftly developed that would last the rest of their lives. In a foretaste of events to come, Hess would comment: ‘I sometimes go for a walk with [Albrecht], and we speak English together.’8 At the time, however, Hess could have had no concept of how entwined his and Albrecht’s lives would become.
Had Hess not fallen under Adolf Hitler’s spell in 1920, he would almost certainly have accompanied Albrecht into a life of academia. After five months of congenial friendship with Karl Haushofer – the relationship having quickly developed into one of devoted protégé and mentor – Hess quit his job at a Munich textile importers to enrol at Munich University as a student of geographical politics under Haushofer.
Who then, was this eminent Professor Karl Haushofer, the behind-the-scenes man of Nazi foreign policy, the sage figure consulted by the whole Nazi elite from Hess, Himmler, Göring and Ribbentrop, to Adolf Hitler himself ?
In 1946 Life Magazine published an article, dramatically titled ‘The Mystery of Haushofer’, that declared:
For something more than twenty years the voluminous writi
ngs and manifold activities of this German General, who later in life became a geographer on the faculty of the University of Munich, had engaged attention. He was discounted by many and dismissed by some as simply another obscure writer from Germany who exemplified the Teutonic passion for obscuring the obvious with unintelligible terminology. But by others he was considered a subtle and dangerous influence in the evolving challenge of National Socialism, a close collaborator with Rudolf Hess, Deputy-Führer, and the master genius of an organised movement designed to justify, by scientific argument, the Nazi gamble for total power.
The article went on to reveal that:
Through Haushofer’s pupil, Rudolf Hess, a vengeful philosophy of power and a technique for achieving it were communicated to Hitler, who avidly seized on the windfall and capitalised ruthlessly on the half-truths popularised in the name of objective science. [This] venerable scholar thus became not only an elder statesman in the field of geographical strategy but developed into a companion and political Nestor of the ruling clique … He testified under oath that he had been consulted on Japanese affairs by von Ribbentrop and was frequently summoned to the Foreign Office in Berlin. His residence on Kolbergerstrasse in Munich was the rendezvous for conferences between Nazi leaders and Japanese statesmen during the courtship of Nippon by Nazi Germany.9
Karl Ernst Haushofer was born in 1869, at the time of the creation of Germany as a state, and thus during his early years he grew to see Germany develop, gain colonies, prosper, and become a major power on the world stage. After a brief period of military service with the First Bavarian Artillery Regiment in the late 1880s, he secured a position with the Auslandskommando (the Foreign Service), and was posted to Germany’s distant Embassy in Japan.
The experience was a revelation to the young German, and after two tours of duty in Tokyo, during which he set himself the task of learning to speak fluent Japanese, and learned all he could about Japanese society, Haushofer returned to Germany in the early 1890s, taking up a post with the General Staff to teach at the Military Academy. He did, however, continue to conduct regular tours of the Far East, during which he almost certainly carried out some form of intelligence-gathering. Indeed, in 1942 British Intelligence would assert that Haushofer spent two years on attachment to the Imperial Japanese Army, and that during this time he also ‘conducted several extensive tours Greater Asia – India, Japan, China, Korea, and Asiatic Russia’.10 This was a region of great sensitivity to Britain at the turn of the century, a source of much wealth and power to the British Empire, and she would not readily accept German attempts to usurp her position here. Haushofer’s trips were noted and logged away, but they were not forgotten.
In 1896 Haushofer courted and wed a certain Fräulein Martha Mayer-Doss, the half-Jewish daughter of a high-ranking Bavarian civil servant. The new Frau Haushofer’s ethnic background raised few eyebrows in Germany at the time, for the country had one of the better records in Europe with regard to the treatment of its Jewish citizens. In the 1940s, however, British Intelligence would speculate that it ‘accounted for the fact that Haushofer does not hold any official positions in the leadership of the National Socialist State’.11 This was a misreading of Haushofer’s situation in Nazi Germany. Haushofer’s importance to the top Nazis protected him and his family from the fate that daily befell other Germans with Jewish connections. Indeed, Haushofer’s eminence would cause Hitler to welcome his elderly adviser and his wife as visitors to Berchtesgaden, where, unknown to Germany’s populace, the Führer always kissed Martha’s hand on meeting her, and treated her with the greatest courtesy and respect. It was a feature of Nazi Germany that what took place behind the scenes was frequently at odds with public appearance and policy.
After his marriage, Haushofer abandoned his military career, determining to carve out a new niche for himself in academia as a geographer. In 1898 the Haushofers visited Britain, where Karl was to conduct a series of lectures on ‘Internationalism’. It was during this tour that he first learnt of a theory that he would one day develop into geopolitics. During this trip, he also made several important contacts that would stand him in good stead in the coming years. In London he met the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain (father of Neville Chamberlain), considered at the time to be very much the coming man of British politics. After this the Haushofers had planned to travel on to Cambridge, where Karl was due to give a lecture. However, they first went to Oxford, where Karl made the acquaintance of a young Scot by the name of Halford Mackinder, a geography don who was developing an exciting new theory concerning the Eurasian ‘heartland’ (Eastern Europe and interior Asia) which, he claimed, would by ‘natural ascendancy eventually gain superiority’ over the ‘maritime lands’.
Mackinder was taking his first tentative steps in the new science of what Haushofer would one day adopt as his own and name geographical politics. It was from this meeting at the end of the nineteenth century between two men steeped in the application of Empire that Karl Haushofer went on to develop his theories of a dominant Eurasia. It was a concept, he immediately realised, that could become the basis for a land-based German empire to mirror the British, which was based on maritime supremacy.
It was a very quiet and thoughtful Haushofer who left Oxford a few days later, for he knew that what Mackinder had told him was important. By the late 1890s, Germany was in an arms race with Britain, pouring millions of marks into building ever more sophisticated and powerful battleships to keep the sea routes to her colonies open in time of war. But what if Germany changed the rules? What if she threw away her overseas colonies in exchange for a land-based empire? In this way she could circumvent Britain’s naval supremacy, rendering the British fleet largely impotent. It would take a great deal of theorising over the coming twenty years before Karl Haushofer’s concepts on geographical politics would be completely formulated, but by then Germany had suffered defeat in the First World War, and as a result had already lost her colonies and an empire. Thus Haushofer’s theories gained a disproportionate importance.
Following their visit to Oxford, Karl and Martha Haushofer travelled on to Cambridge. Here the Professor was due to complete his British tour with a lecture to the Cambridge Foreign Science Students Committee. The Secretary of this society was a Cambridge lecturer by the name of Herbert Roberts, and the Haushofers soon became firm friends with him, his wife Violet and their son Patrick, a brilliant young student at Eton.
Over the next forty years the two families would maintain their friendship, the Roberts visiting Germany to stay with the Haushofers at their Bavarian country home, Hartshimmelhof, and the Haushofers making return visits to Cambridge. Herbert Roberts and Karl Haushofer’s friendship was to be mirrored by their sons, Patrick and Albrecht.
By 1919, following a brief wartime career as an artillery general in the service of the Kaiser, Karl Haushofer, now titled Professor General, had become a member of Munich University’s Department of Geography. Here he lectured on his new science of geopolitics, defined as ‘a science concerned with the dependence of the domestic and foreign politics of peoples upon their physical environment’.12 He was already redefining his theories, adjusting them to explain why Germany’s turn-of-the-century imperial and foreign policies had proven unworkable. His theories, which he was to postulate to the eager Rudolf Hess, had evolved in the following way: Imperial Germany’s attempts at empire had been fatally flawed. Her colonies lay far overseas, and thus were not safe so long as Britain ruled the waves. Therefore, Haushofer declared, Germany should recognise that these colonies were of no practical use, and should be given up in exchange for the right to expand Germany’s land-based European frontiers to re-absorb all Europe’s ethnic Germanic peoples in western Poland, the Sudetenland, Austria, the north-western extremity of Yugoslavia, Switzerland, northern Italy and Alsace-Lorraine, together with sufficient territory to meet her new needs (Lebensraum). Germany’s future prosperity lay in obtaining a land-based empire of connected territory (safe from the dangers of
the sea) to the east, a vast ‘Eurasian Empire’ that might one day stretch from the Baltic to the Pacific. Haushofer quietly ignored the small but significant fact that this territory currently belonged to someone else – Russia.
Whilst Hess was becoming ever more involved with Professor Haushofer, taken in like a long-lost member of his family and enormously enjoying his new role of university student, another force began to enter his life. Late in the spring of 1921, Hess persuaded Professor Haushofer to accompany him one evening to a working-class district of Munich to hear a man – Hess did not know his name – speak.
With some misgivings, Haushofer accompanied Hess to a roughneck beerhouse called the Sterneckerbrau. Once inside, they took a seat at the rear of a dingy, smoke-filled back room, the air heavy with the scent of tobacco, beer and sweat. Soon a man stood up on a low platform at the front and began to talk. Haushofer would later recall how he noticed that once Adolf Hitler’s harsh-toned voice began haranguing his audience, rising in tempo and ferocity against the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles, venting his spleen against the evils of Communism and gesticulating wildly, Hess became mesmerised.
Karl Haushofer was not as immediately impressed with Hitler as Hess was. He thought Hitler’s rantings crude and without form, basically echoing and amplifying the cry of the Nationalists who could be heard on any street corner in Munich, angry men decrying the way Germany had been defeated, denouncing the injustices of 1919, and condemning those villainous Communists who would see their beloved fatherland ruined. However, despite his first impression that Hitler’s style was overly dramatic and noisy, the Professor of Geopolitics did pay attention to the evident way Hitler’s oratory instilled enthusiasm in the crowd by sheer force of will. Here was a man of potential, a man who with guidance and support could become an important force. All he needed was a political education; tutoring in the use of protocol, political finesse and style.