The Hitler–Hess Deception

by Martin Allen

  The end objective of Messrs HHHH was probably formulated quite quickly. What Britain needed if it was to survive was Allies – and the bigger the better. On Saturday, 10 May 1941 a meeting took place at SO1 HQ, Woburn, attended by the key protagonists of the operation. In attendance were the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, the Minister for SOE and MEW, Hugh Dalton, Rex Leeper and eighteen others. It was the last time minutes would be kept for such a meeting. The object of SO1’s endeavours in 1941 was to ‘encourage the Germans to attack Russia by misleading Hitler and by hinting that the large sections both in Britain and the United States who preferred to see the overthrow of the Russian rather than the German regime might be prepared to force through a compromise peace between Britain and Germany and combine to destroy the common enemy, Communism’.33

  This simple but devastating statement of intent is one of the very few records remaining in the SO1 papers that details what was secretly taking place. It is also worthy of note that the meeting took place on the very day Rudolf Hess arrived in Britain.

  Within just a few weeks of the Haushofers’ becoming embroiled in Hitler’s latest peaceable attempt, a new Mr H was to appear on the scene. After sitting in dusty Madrid through the long, hot Spanish summer of 1940, Sir Samuel Hoare, Ambassador Extraordinary, was ready to add a new range of secret activities to his already busy schedule. Success would mean Britain’s survival and eventual victory over Germany. Failure might well result in the German leadership gaining an understanding of Britain’s true intentions; and that would mean war without end until Britain fell. For fall she would, unless the war could be widened to give Britain a desperately-needed ally.

  CHAPTER 4

  Negotiation

  During the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the events of 1940–41 would return to haunt the protagonists of the Messrs HHHH operation, for documents had begun to surface in Germany that had not been tracked down by British Intelligence during the final German collapse in 1945. This led to considerable concern that the defendants – particularly Hess and perhaps Alfred Rosenberg, who as head of the Aussenpolitisches Amt and a close confederate of Hitler and Hess had been privy to much – might produce evidence in their defence which would suggest that the peaceable discussions of 1940–41 had been for real. Secondly, Whitehall was extremely worried that the unweeded German evidence, much of which lay in the hands of the Americans, might implicate prominent Britons. Worse yet, it might reveal potentially sensitive details behind the events leading to Hess’s arrival in Scotland in 1941. This would almost certainly result in certain Britons being called to testify, and necessarily having to reveal the truth in order to defend themselves against mistaken charges of disloyalty, perhaps even of treason.

  Such evidence did indeed soon appear, sending a flurry of concern sweeping through the British Foreign Office. However, it appeared from an unexpected quarter: it was a British file.

  Keeping a very close eye on proceedings at Nuremberg was a certain Mr Con O’Neill from the Foreign Office. O’Neill was no mere Foreign Office minion; he was a former member of the recently disbanded SOE. He was also known to have been present at the Woburn meeting on 10 May 1941 which had specifically discussed the plot to make Hitler feel confident enough to turn his military attention eastward. O’Neill was therefore one of that very select band who knew what had really taken place. He was thus the ideal man to have on the spot to head off any problems before they became too damaging.

  Such a problem occurred in the second week of January 1946, when O’Neill discovered that the prosecution in Hess’s case was about to introduce evidence concerning ‘the Duke of Hamilton’s first interview with Hess on the 11th May 1941’. As O’Neill commented back to London with some urgency:

  Unfortunately, in this report the Duke refers to the fact that he had received a letter from Haushofer dated 23 September 1940. This, if it becomes known, will appear to confirm in a measure the contents of the Haushofer documents about [the] peace feelers. [It is] suggested that the British Prosecutor be authorised to say something on the following lines:-

  ‘When the Duke of Hamilton received this letter from Haushofer dated the 23rd September 1940, he handed it forthwith to the authorities and, in view of the publicity which has recently been received by another document by Haushofer, perhaps I might be permitted to say … (here insert any demente that we may care to make).’1

  This statement is intriguing, for without exception the matter of Albrecht Haushofer’s letter to the Duke of Hamilton has been dealt with ever since the war by a claim that the correspondence was intercepted by the ‘British Censorship Headquarters’ on 2 November 1940. However, it would subsequently be claimed that the Duke of Hamilton was not even aware of the letter’s existence until February 1941, when he was invited to the Air Ministry and questioned about the Haushofer matter.

  But that dilemma lay five years in the future. In the autumn of 1940, Albrecht Haushofer was thoroughly engrossed with Rudolf Hess in deciding the text of this very letter to the Duke of Hamilton.

  Following Albrecht’s meeting with Hess on Sunday, 8 September, at which the decision had been taken to write to Hamilton in an attempt to open a line of communication to the British hierarchy, the actual content of this letter had been the subject of considerable debate throughout the remainder of that month.

  On 19 September, Albrecht wrote to his father enclosing ‘the draft of a letter to D[ouglo (the Duke of Hamilton’s nickname)], which I will keep to myself and not show anyone else’. Nazi Germany was a dangerous place, and Albrecht knew that keeping copies of the correspondence safely hidden away might well protect him in the future. At the same time, he wrote to Hess concerning the technical complexities of this new peace initiative via Violet Roberts to Hamilton:

  I have … been thinking of the technical route by which this message from me must travel before it can reach the Duke of H[amilton]. With your help, delivery to Lisbon can of course be assured without difficulty … In view of my close personal relations and intimate acquaintance with Douglas H[amilton] I can write a few lines to him (which should be enclosed with the letter to Mrs R. without any indication of place and without a full name – an A. would suffice for the signature) in such a way that he alone will recognise that behind my wish to see him in Lisbon there is something more serious than a personal whim.2

  However, Albrecht was not about to raise false hopes for this avenue to peace. It was after all his idea, and he was mindful that because failure in the Reich was a risky if not punishable offence, it was advisable to qualify one’s suggestions to start with. This was particularly relevant in Albrecht’s case, for by mid-September he knew that Hess was acting on the Führer’s behalf in this most sensitive of matters. He therefore went on to declare to Hess:

  I have already tried to explain to you not long ago that, for the reasons I gave, the possibilities of successful efforts at a settlement between the Führer and the British upper classes seem to me – to my extreme regret – infinitesimally small. Nevertheless I should not want to close this letter without pointing out once more that I still think there would be a somewhat greater chance of success in going through Ambassador Lothian in Washington or Sir Samuel Hoare in Madrid rather than through my friend H[amilton].

  Albrecht closed the letter by asking: ‘Would you send me a line or give me a telephone call with some final instructions? … With cordial greetings and best wishes for your health, yours, etc. A[lbrecht].’3

  Within a few days, Albrecht’s letter to the Duke of Hamilton was on its way to the Iberian Peninsula, couriered by a German agent of the SD aboard a Junkers 52 of the Transport Flight. Its destination was PO Box 506, Lisbon.

  The letter read:

  My Dear Douglo,

  Even if this letter has only a slight chance of reaching you – there is a chance and I want to make use of it.

  First of all to give you a sign of unaltered and unalterable personal attachment. I do hope you have been spared in all this ordeal, and I hop
e the same is true of your brothers. I heard of your father’s deliverance from long suffering;* and I heard that your brother-in-law Northumberland lost his life near Dunkirk.† I need hardly tell you how I feel about that …

  Now there is one thing more. If you remember some of my last communications before the war started you will realise that there is a certain significance in the fact that I am, at present, able to ask you whether there is the slightest chance of our meeting and having a talk somewhere on the outskirts of Europe, perhaps in Portugal. There are some things I could tell you, that might make it worth while for you to try a short trip to Lisbon – if you could make your authorities understand so much that they would give you leave. As to myself – I could reach Lisbon any time (without any kind of difficulty) within a few days after receiving news from you. If there is an answer to this letter, please address it to …4

  It has never been officially admitted whether there was a reply to Albrecht Haushofer’s letter, and too many wartime documents have been captured, destroyed or withheld, in both Britain and Germany, for it to be possible to explore this question satisfactorily. However, there is another, rather surprising, source that reveals a great deal about what took place next.

  On Saturday, 24 October 1942, Lavrenti Beria, head of the Soviet Union’s security force the NKVD, forerunner of the KGB, wrote a letter to Stalin in which he asserted that not only Albrecht Haushofer had written to the Duke of Hamilton, but Rudolf Hess had as well.

  In the months following the Deputy-Führer’s bizarre arrival on British soil, the extremely suspicious Russians began their own secret in-depth investigation into the affair. During this investigation an extremely eminent source, Frantisek Moravetz, the Chief of the Czech Military Intelligence Service, informed the NKVD resident in London: ‘All Hess’s letters to Hamilton did not reach him but were intercepted by the Intelligence service where the answers to Hess in the name of Hamilton were manufactured.’5 This was bad enough, but Russian alarm was compounded when they managed to obtain similar evidence from French Intelligence too.

  In the summer of 1941, the French too were highly perturbed by Hess’s arrival in Scotland in such strange circumstance. Concerned that the British and German governments might be up to something they should know about, they too had conducted their own discreet investigation. In a report written for the French General Staff, titled ‘ANGLETERRE AFFAIRE HESS, number 398/B’, dated 5 September 1941, the Russians were shocked to read:

  They [British Intelligence], wishing to make up for the Best and Stevens affair [i.e. the Venlo Incident], had succeeded through an exchange of correspondence between imaginary Scottish conspirators (directed in the name of Lord Hamilton) and German agents … the exchanges assumed the form of a serious conspiracy whose participants asked for and arranged for the arrival [in Scotland] of an important German representative to galvanise the conspirators. It was a source of great amazement to all concerned that this person turned out to be Rudolf Hess.6

  The two reports were not entirely accurate. Moravetz somehow managed to transpose Hess’s name for that of Haushofer as the writer of the letters, although it may be that he was trying to impart that the originator of the communications behind Haushofer had been Hess. The answer to this may never be known, but the revelations were close enough to the truth to cause Britain’s allies – the Czechs, French and Russians – to regard the British government and Intelligence services with some suspicion.

  However, it may be significant that the head of the Czech Bureau in London, and therefore the British government’s liaison to the Czech government in exile, was Robert Bruce Lockhart, working for Rex Leeper’s SO1 out at Woburn Abbey. He had also, incidentally, been a close friend of Frantisek Moravetz since the early 1930s.

  While Hess and the Haushofers had been busy drafting and dispatching their letter to the Duke of Hamilton, Britain’s Ambassador to Spain, Sir Samuel Hoare, had not been idle. He too was about to make his presence felt on the peace stage, causing the German protagonists in the affair considerable satisfaction. Hoare’s involvement confirmed to Albrecht Haushofer much of what he had told Hess at the beginning of September, and it would send the German line of peaceable intent in a new and extremely complex direction.

  On 25 September the German Ambassador in Madrid, Eberhard von Stohrer, transmitted a memorandum to Berlin concerning a conversation he had had that morning with the Spanish Minister of the Interior, Ramón Serrano Suñer. The diminutive Suñer was an extremely strange man, who Sam Hoare disliked intensely – he once described him as ‘deliberately ill-mannered, spitefully feminine, small-minded, fanatical, impetuous, and not yet forty with snow-white hair’. However, Suñer was also very important and well-connected, his place within Spain’s government secured by virtue of his being Generalissimo Franco’s brother-in-law.

  Suñer had been a key personality in the German government’s machinations of the previous June and July, when they had attempted to persuade the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to reject the pressure exerted on them by the British government to abandon Europe for the duration of the war in favour of Bermuda. That plot had failed, along with the Duke of Windsor’s own efforts to maintain an even-handed stance between the two warring parties. However, Suñer was extremely anti-British, primarily because of the ever-contentious issue of Gibraltar, and he never missed an opportunity to aid the German cause by passing on titbits of information that came his way. Thus, on the morning of Wednesday, 25 September 1940, Suñer showed the German Ambassador a letter he had received from his brother-in-law, the Generalissimo. The same day an excited Stohrer reported back to Berlin:

  In a private letter that arrived today with a special courier … Franco has informed his brother-in-law that … a Spanish Minister (not the Foreign Minister) … recently spoke with the English Ambassador, Sir Samuel Hoare, and told him that England had lost the war and was only making her situation worse by resisting further. The English Ambassador replied that he judged the situation similarly …

  The Spanish Minister of Interior [Suñer] considers both English statements to indicate visible weakness on the part of England and possibly even the beginning of an inclination toward peace.7

  Any such report was bound to be eagerly lapped up by the top Nazis. It was just the sort of intelligence that might indicate a weakening of resolve by certain British political factions to drag the war on to a bitter and protracted end. Taken in conjunction with a report from the German Ambassador in Lisbon, Hoyningen-Huene, who had heard that there was growing political opposition to Churchill, this information might prove to be the chink in fortress Britain’s defences.

  British opposition to continuing the war did not constitute a serious movement yet, although Hoyningen-Huene commented that it was interesting that ‘the most united [in opposing the war are] among the Conservatives themselves’. Expanding upon this, he noted that the seriousness of the situation was revealed by the fact that the British government were putting provisions in place to spirit the Cabinet across the Atlantic in case of impending defeat, where, it was suggested, Churchill would assume the role of adviser to President Roosevelt. This was in addition to the fact that ‘preparations are [already] far advanced for the transfer of the Royal Family to Canada’.8

  Despite the devastating nature of such information, its value to the German government was not so much that it was indicative of a British belief in impending defeat, but rather that the thought had occurred to Britain’s leaders at all, and that measures were being put in place in case Britain’s resistance reached a point of total collapse.

  A little over a week later the Nazi leadership were further heartened to receive another report from Hoyningen-Huene which if anything was even more encouraging, stating optimistically that ‘the organisation of London [is] completely destroyed by the air raids, looting, sabotage, and social tension’. However, the most important information Huene’s political analysis and intelligence revealed was that: ‘Anxious capitalists fear internal disor
ders. Growth of opposition against [the] Cabinet is plain. Churchill [and] Halifax are blamed for sacrificing England to destruction instead of seeking a compromise with Germany, for which it is still not too late.’9

  From the German leadership’s point of view it appeared that, with sufficient pressure, political opposition in Britain to a compromise peace might collapse, and some diplomatic progress might be made. The main problem, however, was that Churchill was an extremely strong leader who would have no truck with dissent, and would not stand by whilst those about him undermined his resolve to continue the war to its conclusion. Churchill was not a vacillating Neville Chamberlain, pushed in various directions by his advisers. He absolutely believed in leading from the front, and deep down he knew that if Britain could hold out long enough, sooner or later America would inevitably be sucked into the conflict, and then it would just be a matter of time until the Allies were victorious.

  During those desperately gloomy days following the fall of France, a tense exchange had occurred between Churchill and Lord Halifax during a Cabinet meeting. Halifax had the temerity to suggest that perhaps Britain would after all have to negotiate with the German government. There seemed to be little choice. France’s collapse had shocked Britain into the realisation that Hitler had forged the German war machine into a very formidable tool indeed. Churchill declared before the entire Cabinet that Halifax’s mere mention of peace talks was tantamount to high treason. In the embarrassed silence that followed, an indignant Halifax had slipped a note to Churchill stating: ‘You are really very unjust to my imprudent ideas. They might be silly, or courting danger but are not high treason. I dislike always quarrelling with you! but most of all on misunderstood grounds.’