by Martin Allen
There was, Karl Haushofer reported, a complication. Albrecht had been in Zürich for twenty-four hours awaiting Sam Hoare,35 but Hoare had yet to arrive. After mulling this over, Hess decided to leave for Berlin anyway, but he ordered his assistant, Günther Sorof, to remain in Munich with Karl Haushofer, and to report any information to him as soon as Albrecht had telephoned his father.
After many hours of waiting at the Professor’s central Munich flat, a call eventually came through in the early evening. Albrecht’s message was guarded and brief, yet also self-explanatory. Sorof promptly telephoned Hess in Berlin, and repeated it verbatim. ‘On a scale of one to six,’ he told the Deputy-Führer, ‘things stand at around three or four and more needs doing.’36
At the Reich Chancellery, Hess’s personal security officer, Detective Superintendent Franz Lutz, observed the Deputy-Führer’s reaction with interest. On receiving the message, Hess immediately took it directly through to Hitler.37
The following day, Sunday, 4 May 1941, was to be a significant date in the National Socialist calendar. On that day Hitler would give his first major speech since the fall of France. For several weeks he had been composing this important oration. However, Franz Lutz noted that on receipt of Haushofer’s message, Hitler immediately sat down with Hess, and together the two began drafting changes to the speech.
Once they had finally agreed the text, another strange incident occurred. Hess summoned Ernst Bohle, who had been waiting patiently all evening in the Chancellery’s great gallery, and handed him Hitler’s speech, ordering him first to carefully translate it into English, and then to have several copies typed up for him. Not in German, but in English.38
The next morning, with his altered speech in hand, Hitler stood before the glittering panoply of the Reich’s political elite gathered together in the Kroll Opera House, substituting for the Reichstag’s main chamber, and delivered one of his most powerful orations. However, as many of those seated before him noted with curiosity, the Führer’s speech had a very similar theme to that he had given at the Reichstag in July 1940, repeatedly stressing the disasters of conflict, and how he had never wanted war with England. The present situation, he claimed, had come about largely as a result of Chamberlain’s intransigence over the Polish situation, and the war was being continued only because of Churchill’s absolute refusal to consider any form of negotiation that might lead to peace. Hitler went so far as to declare: ‘All my endeavours to come to an understanding with Britain were wrecked by the determination of a small clique which, whether from motives of hate or for the sake of material gain, rejected every German proposal for an understanding due to their resolve, which they never concealed, to resort to war, whatever happened.’39
In distant Britain, Winston Churchill sat in his study at Chequers before a radio tuned to the German wavelength, and listened to Germany’s Führer talking to the Reich. Amongst the words of peaceable intent – tempered of course with typical Hitlerite declarations about German might – Churchill heard himself characterised as ‘a man who is as miserable a politician as soldier, and as wretched a soldier as politician40 … If ever any other politician had met such defeats, or if a soldier had met such catastrophes, he would not have kept his job six months.’41
Churchill was not dismayed by such rhetoric; he knew these were mere words spouted for public consumption. Despite Britain’s desperate situation in May 1941, the Prime Minister was not pessimistic. Regardless of his many worries concerning Britain’s strategic position, he had many a trick up his sleeve yet. An insight into his state of mind at this time can be gained from his conversation after a private lunch at Downing Street the previous week. Amongst Churchill’s guests was the Swedish Ambassador, Bjorn Prytz. Through a neutral’s eyes, the Swede had seen the death and destruction being visited nightly upon London, and he tentatively asked Churchill how Britain could continue against such an onslaught.
While others at the table fidgeted uncomfortably, Churchill had been completely unperturbed by this rather direct question. He had swirled his brandy in his glass for a few moments, a smile slowly spreading across his face. Then, looking Prytz in the eye, he surprised everyone by responding to his question in a manner more suited to a child’s bedtime story.
‘Once upon a time there were two frogs,’ the Prime Minister began. ‘Mr Optimist Frog and Mr Pessimist Frog. One evening the two frogs hippety-hopped across the meadow enchanted by the smell of fresh milk from a dairy. They hopped through the dairy window and plopped right into a pail of milk.’
Churchill, enjoying the attention his fable was attracting, paused to take a sip of his brandy and to apply a fresh match to his cigar. ‘The pail’s sides were too steep,’ he continued. ‘Mr Pessimist Frog soon gave up and sank to the bottom. But Mr Optimist Frog took courage and began thrashing around, hoping to get out somehow. He didn’t known how, but he wasn’t going to give up without a fight. He churned around all night, and by morning – oh joy! –he was floating on a pat of butter!’
As his small audience sat smiling silently, the Prime Minister drew heavily on his cigar and concluded: ‘I’m Mr Optimist Frog!’42
Over the next week, Rudolf Hess’s activities back in Germany began to increase in tempo. On the morning of Monday, 5 May, he again visited Hitler at the Reich Chancellery. Reclining in easy chairs in the privacy of the Führer’s vast office, a room sixty feet long with walls of gleaming pink and grey marble, Hitler and Hess held an extremely confidential conversation that lasted four hours. It would be the last time the two men ever met.
Despite the subsequent impression that Hess was about to undertake a lunatic expedition against his Führer’s wishes, the evidence indicates nothing could be further from the truth.
Another of Hess’s assistants, his Adjutant Alfred Leitgen, who was in attendance outside the office, later recalled that of the snippets of Hitler’s conversation he overheard, only the phrases ‘Albrecht Haushofer’ and ‘Hamilton’ were discernible. In conversation the Führer’s voice was deep (his higher pitch when addressing large audiences was a trick he had learned to make his voice carry), and thus would have been hard to understand through a solid oak door. Hess’s voice, on the other hand, was higher than Hitler’s, and he had clearer diction. Leitgen asserted that at one point in the conversation he clearly heard Hess say ‘… no problems at all with the aeroplane’. A few minutes later he heard Hess saying ‘… have me simply declared insane’.43 If this really is what Leitgen heard, it may indicate that Hitler asked Hess what he should do if anything went wrong with Hess’s mission – if he was captured by the British and used for propaganda purposes, or if the secret of his flight leaked out. The Deputy-Führer gave the simplest answer, little realising that the phrase would become synonymous with him and his flight for the rest of his life.
At the end of their meeting, the Führer and his loyal Deputy emerged in good humour, and Hitler astonished those waiting outside by placing a paternal arm around Hess’s shoulders. ‘Hess,’ he joked, ‘you are and always were thoroughly pig-headed.’
This casual behaviour was very unusual for Hitler, who was never so informal in front of his staff. He normally reserved such intimacy for the Berghof and the privacy of his inner circle. It would, however, be understandable as a rare public expression of comradeship between two old friends embarking upon a great but perilous undertaking, for which they had great hopes.
Following his meeting with Hitler, Hess travelled back to Munich on Tuesday, 6 May, to continue making preparations for his mission. He met Albrecht Haushofer, newly returned from Zürich and staying at his parents’ flat on Kolbergstrasse, but did not reveal to his old friend that he intended travelling to Britain in Bohle’s place. No one really knows when this decision was taken. The why is a little clearer. It is certainly the case that Hitler by now wanted to see some progress in finalising the deal with the powerful British peace faction poised to oust Churchill, which was much more likely to succeed under Hess than Bohle, but still
Albrecht remained completely unaware that Bohle had never even received a briefing about his supposed trip to meet a British VIP. The meeting was a tricky one for him, as its purpose was specifically for Albrecht to report on his talks the previous Saturday with Sam Hoare. Karl Haushofer would tell officers of American Intelligence in 1945: ‘Albrecht was sent to Switzerland. There he met a British confidential agent – a Lord Templewood [i.e. Samuel Hoare] … When my son returned, he was immediately called to Augsburg to see Hess. A few days later Hess flew to England.’44
Albrecht Haushofer and Sam Hoare’s covert meeting in Switzerland on Saturday, 3 May is confirmed by Karl Haushofer, Günther Sorof and Franz Lutz’s evidence. Indeed, on the night of his return to Germany his mother, Martha, had noted in her diary:‘Albrecht’s conversations have been fruitful.’45 This secret conversation was almost certainly to finalise the last details concerning the meeting of the German emissary and the ‘close representative of the man of influence’.
The details of what Sam Hoare and Haushofer discussed on 3 May 1941 have never been revealed, but given SO1’s involvement and Captain Hillgarth’s role as a SOE’s man in the Iberian Peninsula, it is almost certain that prior to his departure for Switzerland, Hoare had been briefed about the British arrangements for the German emissary’s visit. That Hess would adopt a holding pattern over the North Sea for a full and precise hour on the evening of 10 May suggests that an arrival time had been specified, and there may have been other details to impart as well, such as a flight-plan and call-signs.
One other piece of the puzzle may also have been a subject of the Hoare-Haushofer discussion. During the Second World War, the Duke of Hamilton did not reside at Dungavel House, and part of the building was given over to provide offices for the International Red Cross. Carl Burckhardt’s involvement in the Messrs HHHH affair may have been connected to this fact, which could explain documents captured by the Americans after the war which revealed that Albrecht Haushofer had ‘used a prominent Swiss official of the International Red Cross as intermediary’.46 The participants in the affair – both British and German – may well have agreed that the Red Cross’s offices at Dungavel House would be considered neutral territory, and thus an appropriate venue for the meeting.47
Finally, it is known that on 10 May Rudolf Hess told his wife to expect him back on Monday, 12 May. This suggests that arrangements were made between Hoare and Haushofer for the German emissary to arrive at Dungavel House on the night of Saturday, 10 May, and to depart on the evening of Sunday, 11 May, arriving back at Augsburg in the early hours of Monday, 12 May.
One thing, however, is certain. The top men at SO1 and in Whitehall all believed, as did Karl and Albrecht Haushofer, that it was Ernst Bohle who would meet the Duke of Kent that weekend. Even at this late stage Rudolf Hess, focused on the coup that was to be the high point of his career, still kept his plans to take Bohle’s place completely secret. Albrecht Haushofer remained unaware of the spectacular disaster his friend was about to cause.
Following his meeting with Albrecht, Hess had a busy schedule to complete on Tuesday, 6 May. That afternoon he was driven out to the Messerschmitt works at Augsburg, where for an hour he put his plane through its paces, diving and rolling, checking all its systems at altitude, practising all the skills necessary to ensure the success of his flight.
In a London described by Chips Channon as looking ‘like a battered old war horse’48 after constant heavy air raids, Winston Churchill too was very active in the days preceding SO1’s extravaganza at Dungavel House. At the same time Churchill was treadling warily through a minefield of political turmoil.
In recent weeks Britain’s Prime Minister had received a fresh Intelligence assessment that gave him little cause for comfort. While the War Office was suggesting that Hitler might indeed be about to turn on Russia (this was supported by Enigma decrypts indicating ‘major concentrations of German troops and air support converging … on Oderberg, near Cracow’49), this latest paper, on ‘Axis Strategy’ threw an unwieldy spanner in the works, for it declared: ‘It seems … that a German invasion of Russia is out of the question until the result of the Battle for the Atlantic is more or less certain. I believe the present rumours of such an attack being imminent are propagated by Germany as a warning to Russia to keep clear of German activities in South-East Europe.’50
There were two points in this report which indicated how important a German campaign against Russia would be to Britain’s survival. The first noted: ‘If, on the other hand, Germany gets involved in Russia and increases her commitments as far as an occupation of Moscow, it would have a militarily weakening effect quite apart from the temporary loss of oil and raw material deliveries.’
More heartening by far was the second point, dealing with the situation in Iraq, which had in recent weeks undergone a chaotic coup d’état orchestrated by the anti-British Rashid Ali with the support of German money. Despite dire concerns about the stability of the region, it appeared that Britain’s source of oil might remain safe:
The recent coup has been successful in that it has produced a certain dispersion of our forces. But unless Germany can really raise Iraq and Persia against us she cannot menace our position in Abadeh [strategically important for maintaining the security of the oil pipeline] unless she can send her own troops there, and for this the co-operation of Turkey and/or Russia is necessary. Therefore Germany must for the moment regard Iraq as a sideshow.
On reading this appreciation, only the most ardent pessimist would not have heaved a sigh of relief. Yes, Britain had major problems with Arab nationalists in the region, but despite the heavy demands made on British military resources by the war in Europe, she still had sufficient forces in the Gulf to maintain the security of her vital sources of oil. Iraq, it seemed, was safe from German attack in 1941.
Despite this upturn in the Middle East, on the home front things were far from easy for Churchill. There were growing rumbles of discontent in Westminster at the conduct of the war, and Germany’s spring air offensive was reaching a vicious climax. The statistics for air raids on Britain during the first five months of 1941 told a grim story. Week on week, month on month, they had been increasing in severity, and many in the British government were beginning to wonder how much more the nation could take.
The previous summer Hitler had changed the priorities of Germany’s air offensive from a strategic campaign to psychological warfare, to coincide with the Weissauer initiative. It is possible that the new onslaught in the spring of 1941 may have been intended to weaken Britain’s resolve to continue the war. Indeed, the severity of the raids was causing mounting discontent in the House of Commons by May 1941. Politicians of the stature of Lloyd George were asking where the war was leading, and what Britain’s objectives were.
News of Churchill’s political difficulties would have been welcomed by Haushofer, Hess and Hitler, who must have believed that the Halifax faction was making ground, if not actually poised to act. In reality, however, this was not the case.
The Blitz would reach its climax of death and destruction on the night of 10 May 1941, with the heaviest raid of the war on London. Then, from 11 May, it suddenly petered away to almost nothing. This was in part due to the Luftwaffe’s new commitments to Barbarossa, but that campaign was still six weeks away. Many British politicians harboured the uncomfortable suspicion that there was a psychological motivation behind the fluctuations of the German air campaign.
With hindsight it is possible to discern that there was indeed a diabolical intelligence at work behind the scenes. Adolf Hitler, repeating his agenda of August 1940, was using a colossal carrot and stick in his conduct of the war with Britain. Death and destruction on one hand, offset against the prospect of peace, tranquillity and a negotiated armistice on the other.
Winston Churchill was later to record: ‘Nearly three years were to pass before … London had to deal with [such an] onslaught [again] … In the twelve months from June 1940 to June 1941 our civil
ian casualties were 43,381 killed and 50,556 seriously injured, a total of 94,237.’51 These were not military casualties, but civilians – men, women and a terrible number of children – killed in bed, hiding under tables or stairwells, or in air-raid shelters. It is very hard today to comprehend the horror of this period, or even the logistical nightmare of disposing of so many dead, and caring for so many injured.
Partially as a consequence of these losses, allied to Britain’s grim strategic position, on Tuesday, 6 May, while Rudolf Hess was meeting Albrecht Haushofer in Augsburg, a great debate began in the House of Commons. It was a highly politicised deliberation that questioned both the strategic decisions recently taken and the government’s whole war policy. For Churchill it was a precarious road to a vote of confidence in him and his administration. To lose the vote would mean the end of his premiership, and perhaps of Britain’s participation in the war, for there were many politicians who by 1941 were advocating negotiation rather than continued conflict. The debate was, according to Chips Channon, ‘acrimonious and rude’.52 For once Churchill looked vulnerable and ‘uncomfortable’, and Channon ‘despaired of England and of democracy all day’.
Anthony Eden made considerable efforts to fend off the government’s critics, but when the debate continued the following day the venerable Lloyd George took up the reins of attack, venting his spleen against the government for a full hour: ‘he was weak at times, at others sly and shrewd, and often vindictive as he attacked the government’, wrote Channon, who was seated immediately behind the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. He later recalled that he had watched ‘Anthony [Eden] chew his nails as he whispered to Winston who was obviously shaken, for he [Churchill] shook, twitched, and his hands were never still … [However] soon after 4 o’clock Winston rose, and never have I heard him in such brilliant form: he was pungent, amusing, cruel, hard-hitting and he lashed out at Lloyd George … with all his inimitable wit and venom. [Churchill] tore his opponents to shreds and captivated the House.’53 When the division of the House was called, Churchill won by 447 votes to three. His power as an orator had, despite the swingeing criticism, resoundingly won the House over.