by Martin Allen
Not unnaturally, Hess was somewhat taken aback by Albrecht’s forthright comments about his Führer. Yet he realised that what was being said was very important. He did not become angry, nor did he attempt to defend Hitler’s actions. Instead, he asked his old friend why Hitler was held in such disdain and distrust by the British.
Albrecht counted off Germany’s ten-year treaty with Poland, the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact with Denmark, and, most importantly of all, the Munich Agreement. Hitler had reneged on every single one of these treaties. Endeavouring to make Hess understand the extent of Britain’s distrust of Germany, Albrecht declared: ‘What guarantee [does] England have that a new treaty would not be broken again once it suited us? It must be realised that … in the Anglo-Saxon world, the Führer is regarded as Satan’s representative on earth, and has to be fought. If the worst came to the worst, the English would rather transfer their whole Empire bit by bit to the Americans than sign a peace that left to National Socialist Germany the mastery of Europe.’11
Above all, Albrecht explained, it came down to feelings of self-preservation and national security. Just as Germans feared having ‘no security as long as provision is not made that the Atlantic gateway of Europe from Gibraltar to Narvik [in Norway] are free of any possible blockade i.e. that there must be no English fleet … [so the British] under the same condition, argue [they] have no security as long as anywhere within a radius of 2,000 kilometres from London there is a plane that [they] do not control. i.e. there must be no German air force’.12 Enthusiastically, if perhaps with a degree of utopian idealism, Albrecht went on to declare: ‘There is only one way out of this dilemma: friendship intensified to fusion, with a joint fleet, a joint air force, and joint defence of possessions in the world – just what the English are now about to conclude with the United States.’
At this point Hess, trying to be level-headed and to keep up with all his brilliant friend was telling him, asked why the British were prepared to seek a relationship with America, rather than with Germany.
Albrecht considered Hess’s question for a moment, realising he would have to express his answer in a very strong fashion to impress upon Hess the seriousness of his argument. Finally he replied:
Roosevelt is a man, and [he] represents a Weltanschauung [a philosophy and ideology] and a way of life that the Englishman thinks he understands, to which he can become accustomed, even where it does not seem to be to his liking. Perhaps he fools himself, but at any rate, that is what he believes. A man like Churchill – himself half American – is convinced of it. Hitler, however, seems to the Englishmen the incarnation of all he hates, what he has fought against for centuries – this feeling grips the worker no less than the plutocrats. In fact, I am of the opinion that those Englishmen who have property to lose – that is, precisely those portions of the plutocracy that count – are those who would be readiest to talk peace. But even they regard a peace only as an armistice.13
Hess now asked Albrecht whether he was of the opinion that the prior peace approaches might have failed because the right language had not been used.
Albrecht saw that Hess was beginning to understand what he was saying – that merely emphasising the high-level origin of peace offers, or making those offers extraordinarily attractive, was not enough. The whole endeavour required very careful consideration and planning, and, most important of all, needed to be conducted through the best intermediaries that could be found. He replied: ‘To be sure – if certain persons [primarily meaning Ribbentrop], whom we both know well, were meant by this statement – then certainly the wrong language had been used.’
Hess then asked bluntly why the English distrusted Ribbentrop.
‘In the eyes of the English,’ Albrecht explained, ‘Herr R[ibbentrop], like some other personages, played … the same role as Duff Cooper, Eden, and Churchill in the eyes of the Germans. In the case of R[ibbentrop] there was also the conviction … that – from completely biased motives – he had informed the Führer wrongly about England and that he personally bore an unusually large share of the responsibility for the outbreak of the war.’ However, Albrecht stressed ‘the fact that the rejection of peace feelers by England was today due not so much to persons as to the fundamental outlook’.14
Who on the British side, Hess asked, did Albrecht think might be amenable to negotiations, might still have a relatively open mind, and might listen to a reasonable offer?
After considering his answer, Albrecht eventually replied that he believed the initial contact should be a diplomat, amongst whose ranks several of his acquaintances sprang to mind. Firstly, he suggested his old friend Owen St Clair O’Malley, Britain’s Ambassador in Budapest, ‘the former Head of the South-Eastern Department of the Foreign Office, a clever person in the higher echelons of officialdom, but perhaps without influence precisely because of his former friendliness to Germany’.
Another, whom Albrecht suggested was ‘most promising’, was Britain’s Ambassador to Washington, Lord Lothian, ‘with whom I have had a close personal connection for years, who as a member of the highest aristocracy and at the same time as a person of independent mind, is perhaps best in a position to undertake a bold step – provided that he could be convinced that even a bad and uncertain peace would be better than the continuance of the war’.
Yet the person Hess and Albrecht eventually selected was not perhaps the most obviously suitable. He was, however, easily accessible, was situated in a neutral European country, and his credentials would immediately be understood by those top British politicians capable of reading between the lines. Albrecht suggested Sir Samuel Hoare, ‘who is half-shelved and half on watch in Madrid, whom I do not know well personally, but to whom I can at any time open a personal path’.15
Finally, Albrecht suggested one more possibly useful person, his own best contact in the British hierarchy, but a man who had little interest in pandering to Nazi peaceable approaches. Unable to resist using the most eminent of his connections, Albrecht proposed ‘the closest of my English friends: the young Duke of Hamilton, who has access at all times to all important persons in London, even to Churchill and the King’.16
At the end of their two-hour discussion, Albrecht recorded: ‘The upshot of the conversation was H[ess]’s statement that he would consider the whole matter thoroughly once more and send me word in case I was to take steps. For this extremely ticklish case, and in the event that I might possibly have to make a trip alone – I asked for very precise directives from the highest authority.’17
For Albrecht Haushofer to have asked Germany’s Deputy-Führer for ‘precise directives from the highest authority’ was an unusual request. Albrecht’s notes are very clear, and not prone to inaccuracy. They are therefore a reliable record of some of the most confidential discussions ever to take place in Germany on the subject of foreign affairs and diplomacy. If he had requested a directive from Hess, he would have said so. Therefore he must have asked for ‘precise directives’ from Adolf Hitler himself.
This is supported by Albrecht’s final comment that ‘from the whole conversation I had the strong impression that it was not conducted without prior knowledge of the Führer, and that I probably would not hear any more about the matter unless a new understanding had been reached between him and his Deputy’.18
However, Albrecht was to hear more about Hess and Hitler’s desire for peace very quickly. When his father had written to him the previous week to reveal his recent meeting with Hess, and to summon Albrecht back to Germany, he had also imparted an extraordinary piece of news. By some miraculous means in time of war, Karl Haushofer had just heard from a very old acquaintance living in Britain:
it seems to me a stroke of fate that our friend, Misses [sic] V. R[oberts], evidently, though after long delay, finally found a way of sending a note with cordial and gracious words of good wishes not only for your mother, but also for Heinz and me, and added the address. Address your reply to: Miss V. Roberts, c/o Postbox 506, Lisbon, Portugal …
Even as Albrecht was travelling home from his meeting with Hess, the Deputy-Führer was writing his account of it to his old Professor. The matter of Mrs Roberts had undoubtedly also been discussed, for Hess wrote: ‘Under no condition must we disregard the contact or allow it to die aborning. I consider it best for you or Albrecht to write to the old lady, who is a friend of your family, suggesting that she try to ask Albrecht’s friend whether he would be prepared if necessary to come to the neutral country in which she resides, or at any rate has an address through which she can be reached, just to talk to Albrecht.’
Finally, the Deputy-Führer added hopefully: ‘Meanwhile, let’s both keep our fingers crossed. Should success be the fate of the enterprise, then the oracle given to you with regard to the month of August would yet be fulfilled, since the name of the young friend and the old lady friend of your family occurred to you during our quiet walk on the last day of that month. With best regards to you and Martha.’20
Despite this optimism, Hess and Haushofer’s peaceable aspirations were already undermined, for Mrs Violet Roberts’ apparently innocuous and well-meaning letter was nothing of the sort, and her reply address – ‘Postbox 506, Lisbon’ – although officially registered to Thomas Cook’s travel, was in fact a drop address used by British Intelligence operating out of the British Embassy in Portugal. Added to this, Thomas Cook ran British Intelligence’s Lisbon agency during the war, and its secretarial staff serviced SO1.21
It is widely acknowledged that British Intelligence’s contribution to the war effort from September 1939 until the autumn of 1940 was largely ineffectual, and in several key areas its presence virtually non-existent. This resulted partly from the British government’s complacency and a chronic underfunding of intelligence since the end of the First World War, partly from the appointment of various directors who were out of tune with the demands of modern intelligence, and partly from the virtual destruction of the SIS’s presence in western Europe after the Venlo Incident in November 1939.
During the First World War Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service had fulfilled an important role, reflected by its very substantial budget, which in 1918 amounted to nearly £250,000 per annum. However, after the Armistice the British government rewarded SIS’s considerable contribution to the war effort by slashing its budget to the bare bone. In 1920 the SIS received £125,000, yet the Foreign Office proposed to reduce this further, to a mere £65,000.22 In 1922, after much acrimonious wrangling, the annual budget was eventually set at £90,000. Throughout the 1920s and thirties SIS repeatedly petitioned to have its budget increased, but their pleas for realistic funding largely fell on deaf ears. As a result the Passport Control Officer and Z Network system, first devised in the 1900s, had by 1939 become virtually obsolete. This antiquated system had been quite sufficient against the Kaiser’s men in those far-off days of the belle époque, but it was totally inadequate against the modernised Abwehr and Sicherheitsdienst, granted vast yearly budgets by the Nazis, who recognised the importance of intelligence.
By the latter 1930s SIS realised that a thorough overhaul of its entire intelligence-gathering system was vital – but that would cost money. In the end, and symptomatic of the malaise that dogged Britain at the time, the money was eventually found, but from a most unorthodox source. SIS, in a manner more akin to the twenty-first century than the 1930s, looked to the private sector to make up its funding shortfall.
In 1938, an SIS officer named Major Lawrence Grand was ordered to set up a new department that would not only supersede the old Passport Control Officer and Z Network, but would have the capability to undertake sabotage against an enemy. To create such an organisation required money that SIS did not possess; the problem was solved when an acquaintance of Grand’s, an American entrepreneur named Chester Beatty, offered financial assistance. Beatty’s company, the Selection Trust Group, owned vast mining interests worldwide, and had just acquired a mine in Serbia called Trepca, one of the richest mineral deposits in Europe.
In exchange for ‘technical assistance’ (which included intelligence on the political situation in Yugoslavia, for the Balkans was as ever a boiling-pot of discontent), Beatty began to make substantial investments in Lawrence Grand’s new project.23 Grand was delighted, for he now had the means to fund his new organisation, the remit of which was officially designated as intelligence and sabotage in enemy territory. Its name was Section D – ‘D’ for destruction.
However, Grand’s unusual source of finance was soon to fall foul of the British government officials responsible for intelligence, for the mine at Trepca had only one real customer, a mystery buyer who took over 70 per cent of all its production. In the late autumn of 1939, as a result of enquiries by the British Embassy in Belgrade and an investigation by the Ministry of Economic Warfare, it was discovered that virtually Trepca’s entire production of zinc and lead – munitions minerals – was, after shipment via Thessalonika to Antwerp, ending up in the Ruhr. Trepca’s output was effectively supporting the German war effort.24
In the resultant outcry, Section D was stripped from SIS in the spring of 1940 and attached to Britain’s newest secret service organisation, the Special Operations Executive – SOE. Lawrence Grand, despite his innocence, paid a high penalty. With a complete disregard for his good intentions under the constraints of inadequate funding, his loyalty was questioned, and he was soon dispatched to distant India, where he was stationed at a radio listening post near the Himalayas for the duration of the war.
Despite its curious and unconventional origins, Section D was to become a key component of SOE, being closely identified with SOE’s sabotage role. SIS, for its part, was extremely angry to have lost this new and very useful tool, and the situation would breed much enmity between the two organisations throughout the war years.
SOE was a very remarkable organisation, and from its inception was destined to become controversial. Created by the War Cabinet in July 1940, and known ever since as being charged by Churchill with the task of ‘setting Europe ablaze’, it was, for the first year of its existence, really two organisations, each having a very different role.
One side, designated Special Operations 2, or SO2 for short, was the cloak-and-dagger unit charged with sabotage and fomenting revolt, perilously parachuting undercover agents into occupied Europe to set up resistance and sabotage cells. It was created out of an amalgamation of Lawrence Grand’s Section D and the MI(R), the Military Intelligence directorate of the War Office.
The other side, operating out of offices in Electra House, on London’s Embankment, was altogether more sinister, and was so secret that few people ever got to know about it. This unit, initially known as Department EH, was soon designated Special Operations 1, or SO1. It was steeped in the art of psychological warfare, involving enemy subversion through covert or ‘black’ propaganda, and had a brief to conduct ‘political warfare’ by whatever means available. SO1 became so important to Britain’s war effort that it was soon removed from the dangers of the blitz to Woburn Abbey, the country seat of the Duke of Bedford, deep in the Bedfordshire countryside.
It is important to know a little about SOE’s creation, for within the political infighting at its birth lay the seeds of much political animosity, which was to increase as its deception operation against Hitler progressed.
Many Labour members of Britain’s wartime coalition government were extremely suspicious of MI5 and SIS, and the creation and control of any new intelligence service appeared to them a new cause for distrust. Labour’s suspicion of British Intelligence dated back to the Zinoviev affair of 1924, when a forged letter purporting to be signed by Soviet Politburo member Grigori Zinoviev contributed to the general election defeat of Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government. The mistrust had been strengthened by the surveillance of trade unions and left-wing politicians carried out by the security services in the 1930s. In
deed, a former head of MI5, Sir Vernon Kell, had even threatened to destroy all MI5’s files rather than let them fall into the hands of a Labour government. In 1940 many Labour politicians believed that MI5 and SIS had to some extent been compromised by their acceptance of a strong Germany as a bulwark against Soviet Russia, and their dealings with Nazi Party officials. Add to this the fact that in the summer of 1940 MI5 came under the remit of the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, and SIS under that of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, both Conservatives, and it is understandable that the Labour Party wanted SOE be placed under a Labour Minister. This led to an impasse, for Churchill wanted to place his own man, Lord Swinton, a long-time colleague and fellow-thinker who had supported him during his ‘wilderness years’ and over the call for rearmament in the 1930s, in charge of SOE. Swinton was another Conservative.
The situation was further complicated by the fact that one of the Labour candidates to take charge of SOE was Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare and a close colleague of the party leader, Clement Attlee. Dalton, an outstanding economist once described as ‘tall and broad … [whose] head rose in a mighty bald dome’,25 was convinced that SOE would complement his Ministry very nicely, and that it could become a very effective tool in the war against Germany. He forcefully petitioned Attlee to oppose Churchill’s plan to place SOE under Swinton. After much disagreement, and against Churchill’s wishes, Dalton eventually won the post of Minister for SOE.
However, Dalton’s initial enthusiasm for SOE would turn to unease when he discovered exactly what the organisation’s objectives were. Within a year of obtaining his brand-new Ministry, Dalton would fall from power with shocking speed, stripped of both SOE and Economic Warfare, and relegated to a minor role in the conduct of the war at the Board of Trade.