by Martin Allen
The reason for Sir Samuel Hoare’s sudden urgent need to meet Mason-MacFarlane has never been revealed. It may have been in connection with the delicate situation in Madrid, but that is unlikely, as far more sensitive diplomatic matters were routinely communicated by ciphered telegram, nor would it have been necessary for Hoare to remain in Gibraltar for nearly a week. If, however, Hoare’s need to meet Mason-MacFarlane was connected to the Governor’s trip to London, where he had privately met Churchill, it makes a great deal more sense – particularly if Hoare was becoming nervous at the demands now being made by the German leadership. Mason-MacFarlane may even have been bearing an off-the-record communiqué from Churchill for Sir Samuel Hoare’s ears alone. Whatever the reason for Hoare’s trip to Gibraltar, the result was that he had only just returned to Madrid by the weekend of 19–20 April. He was not, therefore, free to fly at short notice to Switzerland.
The question remains: if Hoare was not in Switzerland, and Hess was not ready to fly to Britain, why was the Deputy-Führer sitting in his aircraft at Augsburg on the morning of Saturday, 19 April? Could it be that he had demanded a meeting, and was awaiting telephone confirmation from Berlin that Hoare had arrived at the designated place in Switzerland? Did Hess urgently require to see Hoare in order to press forcefully for the desired meeting with a ‘close representative of the man of influence’? It may be that the political warfare experts at Woburn Abbey had decided that the next stage in their psychological campaign was to back off for a while – to stall.
How would the German leadership react to being impeded in this way? Would, for instance, Hoare be covertly summoned to Beigbeder’s house for another meeting with Albrecht Haushofer? Or were matters now becoming so critical that the German leadership might do something unexpected? Whatever possibilities had occurred to the astute minds at Woburn Abbey and in Whitehall, it is unlikely that they were prepared for what was to happen next.
Within seventy-two hours, on Tuesday, 22 April, a civil servant at the Foreign Office drafted an urgent memo to his superior querying an alarming rumour that had just reached the corridors of Whitehall, and that had caused many eyebrows to be raised. At the War Office, a certain Major Bright of Military Intelligence wrote to the Foreign Office to ask if they would ‘secure Sir S. Hoare’s comments on the reported visit of Hess to Madrid’.
The civil servant at the Foreign Office immediately checked with his superior at the Central Department, Frank Roberts, working under Assistant Under-Secretary William Strang, asking whether it was possible to telegraph Hoare.
‘I see no objection,’ Roberts, replied, ‘although Sir S. Hoare will presumably report automatically.’6
Within three hours, at 9.30 p.m., a ciphered telegram marked ‘IMPORTANT’ was flying through the ether to the British Embassy in Madrid. It stated: ‘The press carry reports from Vichy that Hess has flown to Madrid with a personal letter from Hitler to Franco. There are also rumours from Vichy of a German demand for the right of passage through Spain to Gibraltar. Have you any confirmation?’7
One of the facts known about the late spring of 1941 is that while Germany was very keen to persuade Franco to throw in his lot with the Axis, there were minimal German forces available at this time for a campaign in yet another corner of Europe. Hitler may well have lusted after Gibraltar, but that was a far cry from the considerable effort it would have taken to realise his ambition of taking it. There had been German hopes in January and February that action might be taken to invade Gibraltar with the objective of closing the Mediterranean to Britain, but as Hitler stated to the Spanish Ambassador in Berlin when they met on 28 April, such action had not been possible.8
The spring of 1941 saw Germany already heavily committed in North Africa and the Balkans, and preparing to amass vast military dispositions in the east – in Prussia, Poland, Hungary and Romania – to attack Russia. Gibraltar was an irritating complication that would have to wait. It was also undoubtedly the case that if Hitler believed he was on the verge of attaining peace with Britain by the summer of 1941, taking Gibraltar would have been unnecessary anyway.
Within a few days of the Foreign Office’s enquiry regarding Hess, Sam Hoare dispatched a reply, steeped in the art of diplomatic double-speak, which non-committally declared: ‘If Hess has come here his arrival has been kept remarkably secret and his presence in town is not even rumoured yet.’9
The following day Frank Roberts minuted: ‘The scare of last weekend has turned out to be at least premature.’ To which Roger Makins responded, ‘Yes. It is the first of many scares of the same kind.’10
To be fair, there are no papers open to public scrutiny that indicate Hoare met Hess during his mysterious visit to Spain. However, as there are many Madrid Embassy files from the spring of 1941 classed ‘Unavailable’, all significantly closed until the year 2017, it is currently impossible to determine whether such a meeting took place or not. But Hess is unlikely to have flown to Spain as a mere messenger-boy for Hitler carrying a demand to Franco. If Hess really travelled to Madrid – and there is a plethora of evidence to suggest he did – he would have had his own very important reasons for doing so.
There is an interesting footnote to this matter. In 1959 Heinrich Stahmers, an old friend of Albrecht Haushofer’s who was based in Germany’s Madrid Embassy during the war, revealed that he had been Albrecht’s go-between to Sam Hoare. He claimed that a meeting in Spain had been proposed in the spring of 1941 between Hoare and Lord Halifax on one side, and Hess and Haushofer on the other. Although such a meeting could not have taken place for the good reason that Halifax was in Washington throughout this period, Stahmer’s testimony is important inasmuch as it indicates what the German leadership believed at the time. It may therefore indicate that a Hoare-Hess meeting did indeed take place.
Three days after Sam Hoare’s message to London concerning Hess’s presence in Madrid, William Strang wrote a confidential memorandum to Sir Alexander Cadogan, Anthony Eden’s second-in-command at the Foreign Office.
Strang was a forty-eight-year-old career diplomat, and a member of the trusted inner circle involved in the Messrs HHHH operation. In the years to come, his abilities would see him rise to become Political Adviser to the Commander-in-Chief of British Forces in post-war Germany, attain the post of Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in 1949, and end his career with a baronetcy as Lord Strang. He was one of the bright lights of the Foreign Office, a high flyer who had become head of the Central Department in 1937. He was also incidentally an old and close friend of both Rex Leeper and Robert Bruce Lockhart, as well as most of the men who had banded together in the 1930s to form the anti-appeasement faction headed by Churchill. In 1939 Strang had been a leading member of the delegation dispatched to Moscow by the Foreign Office during the final calamitous months before the outbreak of war, when it had been hoped Russia might be persuaded to stand with Britain and France against German expansionism.
Unfortunately, the unwise men running the Foreign Office during the terrible rush to war made two devastating errors. Firstly, Strang was subordinated to an inept old warhorse named Admiral the Hon. Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle Drax (which the Russians stood no chance of pronouncing), a man completely out of touch with the political dangers facing Europe. Secondly, Whitehall dispatched its delegation to Moscow completely unaware that Ribbentrop had got there first, and had for months been busily negotiating the Russo-German non-aggression pact with the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov. The result was the total failure of the British mission. It was a painful if educative experience, and if anything it hardened Strang’s resolve to see Britain victorious, whatever the price. By the spring of 1941 Strang was recognised as a determined and effective personality within the Foreign Office, and was one of those entrusted with leading Britain back from the brink of disaster.
Strang had been involved in the Messrs HHHH operation almost from its inception, and his expertise was put to good use following Sam Hoare’s report that the German leadersh
ip, through Albrecht Haushofer, had demanded that Ernst Bohle be granted access to a major British politico-constitutional VIP. Sir Alexander Cadogan duly charged Strang with bringing this important and complicated strand of the operation together.
On Monday, 28 April 1941, Strang wrote to Cadogan: ‘Further to our discussion concerning the H matter last week … I attended a meeting with HRH the Duke of Kent last Friday. After I explained a little of the situation he seemed most willing to assist in this most delicate affair.’11 However, as Strang noted, Prince George, Duke of Kent – the younger brother of the King – had immediately realised the extreme sensitivity and potential political hazards of the task he had been asked to perform, and the jeopardy he would place himself in if he did not obtain corroboration of Strang’s request from a higher authority.
The Duke of Kent did not know William Strang, and he was not prepared to risk taking part in some devious British Intelligence/ Foreign Office plot only to discover subsequently that his participation could be used against him. It was, after all, still fresh in everyone’s memory that his eldest brother Edward, now Duke of Windsor, had dabbled in politics, and look what had happened to him – he was currently banished to the Bahamas. Rather than suffer a similar humiliation, the Duke of Kent demanded confirmation of political support, and a prominent witness. As Strang wrote to Cadogan: ‘before placing himself at our disposal he [Kent] has requested that either you or the Foreign Secretary clarify one or two details of his task. Also, he wishes his acquaintance, [the Duke of] Buccleugh [sic], to be present, as he [Buccleuch] has met the visiting gentleman concerned, whilst he has not.’ Strang recognised that Kent’s request for clarification by a top authority was a polite way of saying he was not about to put himself in jeopardy without an official endorsement that he really was undertaking a mission for Anthony Eden – and by implication for Churchill.
Strang’s letter to Cadogan is interesting on several levels, not least for revealing that the Duke of Kent was considerably more astute than history subsequently judged him. He was perfectly aware of the risks of becoming involved in a British Intelligence operation. Many a political career had been destroyed through well-meaning, though naïve, involvement.
Prince George, Duke of Kent, was no novice in the world of political subterfuge and international affairs. The youngest and most politically astute of King George V’s sons, he had covertly met with officials of the Nazi Party during the 1930s, first on behalf of his father, and then for his eldest brother during his brief reign as Edward VIII. In January 1935 Kent had gone to Munich to secretly meet a representative of the Aussenpolitisches Amt, who reported back to Berlin that the Duke had ‘declared Britain was reconciled to Hitler’s determination to rearm Germany’, and ‘was deeply interested, too, to know what made Hitler tick, and Hess, Göring, and Goebbels as well’.12 The fact that this meeting took place does not indicate that the Duke of Kent had Nazi sympathies; rather that he was acting as a confidential adviser to his father, King George V.
Several months later, Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg, head of the Aussenpolitsches Amt, submitted a report to Hitler, informing him that: ‘At the end of last year we were notified that the King of England had pronounced himself dissatisfied with the official press reports.’13 This indicated that George V was finding it difficult to obtain accurate information on the powerful, radical and possibly dangerous new government in Germany. Rosenberg went on: ‘The Duke of Kent’s visit to Munich had. only worsened the English King’s opinion regarding official news reporting, and … [thus] we received the request from London to explain National Socialism down to the last detail to the Duke of Kent for the purpose of informing the King of England.’ As a consequence of this request, Rosenberg dispatched a confidential agent to London, where he had a discreet three-hour conversation with the Duke of Kent, who then reported to the King. The confidential agent acting for Rosenberg’s APA was Baron ‘Bill’ de Ropp, the old friend of Captain Freddy Winterbotham, head of Britain’s Air Intelligence Group.
It has long been suspected that de Ropp was a double-agent. In fact he was a double-double-agent: a British agent pretending to the Germans that he really worked for them, while in actuality he was Winterbotham’s man through and through. It may therefore be deduced that de Ropp was a very guileful man indeed.
The Duke of Kent’s participation in this event, as both go-between and confidential adviser to the King, would not be forgotten by British Intelligence or the Germans; nor indeed would de Ropp’s involvement.
Kent’s role as a politico-diplomatic adviser did not end with the death of George V. His elder brothers Edward VIII (for ten months) and George VI were also occasionally reliant on him for the same purpose. This was not lost on the British government, nor indeed on Hitler, Hess and Haushofer. Both parties were fully aware of the important, if extremely discreet, role the youngest of the Windsor brothers played.
With the coming of war, the Duke of Kent had continued to be discreetly called upon to perform delicate politico-diplomatic missions for the British monarch and government. In June 1940 he had journeyed to Lisbon by flying boat as part of the British delegation to Portugal’s three-hundredth-anniversary celebrations. That, at least, had been the public reason for the visit. Behind the scenes, Kent played a significant role in the British government’s negotiations with the Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar to persuade him to keep Portugal neutral in the war that was sweeping across Europe.14
The important role that Kent had played in the past indicated to SO1 and the Foreign Office – and Strang and Cadogan in particular – that he was capable of understanding the complexities of a subtle political situation, and that if well briefed and supported he would more than fulfil Albrecht Haushofer’s requirement of a ‘close representative’ of King George VI to meet an official of the AO.
There was really no one else. George V’s third son Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was widely recognised as a fellow of simple tastes, and an even simpler intellect. The Duke of Windsor – who in any case had little remaining influence in Britain – was sitting in the Bahamas, intentionally placed far from the dangers of war and of political intrigue. The Duke of Kent, on the other hand, had a good track record for mediation and in acting as the monarch’s representative. He would eminently satisfy the demands of the German leadership, who were perhaps becoming suspicious at the length of time it was taking Hoare and Halifax to act.
There were, however, two problems with the latest developments, and they would later return to haunt the Foreign Office and SO1 protagonists.
The first was Haushofer’s request that the meeting with the Auslandsorganisation official should take place on neutral territory. This the British swiftly rejected as too hazardous. What would happen if the Germans, playing for very high stakes indeed, became suspicious enough to attempt the kidnapping of the unfortunate eminent person, with the intention of interrogating him for information? The Venlo Incident was still a fresh and raw memory to British Intelligence, as was the Duke of Windsor’s ill-conceived sojourn in Spain and Portugal less than twelve months before. The Nazis had a history of unreliability, and the only way an intermediary’s security could be guaranteed would be for the meeting to take place in territory controlled by Britain.
The second problem was a little more delicate. After hearing William Strang out, the Duke of Kent had requested that he be accompanied by his old friend the Duke of Buccleuch. The difficulty was that the Foreign Office had dealt with Buccleuch in the past. Outwardly he was an eminent aristocrat, related to the highest in the land. However, scrape a little of his gilt off, and the men of Whitehall were perturbed by what showed through.
The Duke of Buccleuch had, since the mid-1930s, held the post of Lord Steward of the Royal Household, an important position that not only made him one of the King’s advisers, but carried with it an automatic appointment as Privy Councillor, placing him close to the heart of constitutional government. As George VI’s intermediary to the House of
Lords, all official communications from the House of Lords to the monarch passed through Buccleuch. Yet his bonds to the royal family went further than that. His daughter Alice was married to the Duke of Gloucester, and Buccleuch was therefore connected right into the heart of Buckingham Palace, where he retained an office and staff.
However, there was one aspect of the Duke of Buccleuch’s character that had made him unpopular with Winston Churchill and the anti-appeasement clique in the latter 1930s, and had cost him his post as Lord Steward of the Royal Household as soon as Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940. During the thirties he had adopted an increasingly pro-German stance. He, like many others, became enamoured of the strength of the Nazis and their clear-cut objective to restore Germany to prominence in Europe, and their potential to become a bastion against the Bolshevik menace lurking in the east. Buccleuch had been horrified by the devastating conflict that swept across Europe in 1939, and unwisely stated publicly that the war would ‘play into the hands of Soviet Russia, [the] Jews and Americans’.15 He was nothing if not tenacious, and despite the unpopularity of his views he had stuck to his guns even after many months of war. His pro-German and anti-war stance not unnaturally resulted in his being placed under surveillance by MI5.
There were, however, many facets to the Duke of Buccleuch’s personality, and though he was known to favour cutting a deal with the Nazis to end the war, his stance was not based simply on his personal right-wing beliefs. The Duke belonged to a select band of top Britons who espoused ‘imperial isolationism’.16 He therefore had agendas on several levels, and his inclination to appease Nazism accorded with his conviction that it would aid the overall well-being of Britain and her empire. This did not make him any less dangerous in the eyes of many in the British government.
On 15 February 1941, the Duke of Buccleuch had laboriously handwritten a six-page letter to ‘Rab’ Butler (at that time an Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) querying the situation with regard to a peace proposal that had recently emanated from a German diplomat named Ulrich von Hassell (yet another acquaintance of Albrecht Haushofer) and a Briton at loose in continental Europe, Lonsdale Bryans. Bryans had been causing considerable embarrassment to the Foreign Office, busily making all sorts of peace overtures in Europe’s neutral states for months, and falsely purporting to represent Lord Halifax. The Foreign Office, intimating that Bryans was a nuisance who might well require psychiatric help, had instructed the Embassy in Lisbon to pressure him into returning to Britain.