by Martin Allen
However, this victory was cold comfort, for as Channon noted, although it was ‘a triumph on paper … in reality the government has been shaken and both Anthony and Winston know it’. The lack of resolve among Britain’s MPs could be a dangerous taste of things to come, particularly if Churchill did not soon serve up some desperately needed military victories. Channon wrote ominously: ‘these two days are the thunder before the real storm which I predict will break in July’.54
The House of Commons debate, together with the confidence vote in Churchill’s leadership and his government, would have been noted in Germany, as would another political event that occurred in Britain at this time. Churchill, at this most crucial moment, suddenly decided upon a Cabinet reshuffle, one element of which in particular would have been perceived as important by Haushofer, Hess and Hitler. During the first days of May, Churchill took the decision to create a new post within his Cabinet, that of Minister of State without Portfolio. Into this position he shuffled a confederate of old, Lord Beaverbrook. It was a post the American press instantly dubbed Deputy Prime Minister, such was its importance.
Despite his credentials as a loyal Churchill stalwart, Lord Beaverbrook, nicknamed ‘the Beaver’, was a man any genuine peace faction in England would have to woo, for he was not only Fleet Street’s most dynamic press baron, but a potent parliamentarian in his own right, and one credited with strong peaceable inclinations. Beaverbrook had also been a close friend of Sam Hoare’s since the 1920s, and had helped to promote Hoare’s career, even once writing: ‘I think he will be Prime Minister one day.’55 Add to this complicated political brew the fact that Beaverbrook had also met Hitler and Hess, and had been a frequent visitor to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and his potential importance becomes considerable.
On Friday, 9 May, Robert Bruce Lockhart, in London from Woburn Abbey for a meeting with Frank Roberts, had a rather curious conversation with the Foreign Office’s Deputy Under-Secretary, Orme Sargent. Bruce Lockhart had known Sargent for many years, but was considerably taken aback when he pointedly asked him if he thought that ‘the Beaver had been appointed Deputy P.M. in order for Winston to stand down and let [the] Beaver make a compromise peace’.56
Bruce Lockhart had been quick to respond that he thought this idea ‘nonsense’. But if an eminent member of the Foreign Office like Orme Sargent could be so mistaken about the true political situation – about the security of Churchill’s premiership – what were the signals being picked up in Berlin? Would it not be likely that Hitler, Hess and Haushofer – working to a large degree blind, reliant on foreign press reports, and subverted by a deep deception campaign orchestrated by SO1 – would come to the same conclusion? That they would believe that Churchill and his defiantly pro-war/anti-Nazi faction were vulnerable to a coup orchestrated by members of the British government led by the man who had almost become Prime Minister in Churchill’s stead twelve months before – Lord Halifax?
Intriguingly, in the weeks and months ahead, Lord Beaverbrook would be one of the very few men in Britain granted access to Rudolf Hess.
Back in Germany events were now taking on their own momentum. Not all of these events were to Hitler’s liking.
Several weeks before, the Führer had met with the OKW Chiefs of Staff to discuss Operation Barbarossa. His speech to the Reichstag on 4 May had, as well as raising the problems of continued conflict with Britain, also included a triumphant report on Germany’s success in the Balkans: the Reich now controlled an unbroken swathe of Europe from the Atlantic to the Aegean.
No European power had achieved such dominance since ancient Rome, a fact that was not lost on Hitler, who saw the Third Reich as recreating that vast and stable empire. Indeed, within six weeks he would say over dinner one evening: ‘The Roman Empire, under Germanic influence, would have developed in the direction of world-domination, and humanity would not have extinguished fifteen centuries of civilisation at a single stroke.’57 In Hitler’s mind, the twentieth century would see the restoration of European empire, and the Reich would one day surpass ancient Rome. In the meantime, the unforeseen necessity of conquering and occupying the Balkans to prevent Britain having easy access to the soft underbelly of Hitler’s empire, Romania – and with it the Reich’s primary source of oil in Bessarabia – had created a major problem.
In ‘Directive 21: OPERATION BARBAROSSA’, issued on 18 December 1940, Hitler had instructed that preparations for the invasion of Russia be completed by 15 May 1941;58 only five days after Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain to seal his pact with the anti-Churchill forces waiting to pounce. However, having fought hard to take the Balkans from the Allies, Germany’s military forces were now severely behind schedule in their preparations to attack Russia. Furthermore, they would need to be regrouped and reinforced, and that would take time. Yet Hitler knew he did not have time to spare. If Russia was to be conquered, an invasion had to begin within the next six weeks, so that the campaign was concluded before the Russian winter descended, blowing the OKW’s strategic plans completely asunder.
At the end of the war, with Berlin lying in ruins about him and the Russians banging on the Reich Chancellery door, Hitler would comment bitterly, ‘If we had attacked Russia from 15 May onwards … we would have been in a position to conclude the eastern campaign before the onset of winter.’59
As a result of complications including the Hess initiative, the Balkans and, not least, the fact that the enormous Pripet Marshes of eastern Poland were still largely impassable after unusually heavy snow falls the previous winter, Hitler was forced to postpone the offensive against Russia until 22 June 1941. He was painfully aware that there absolutely could not be any more delays. If the campaign was not under way by the end of June, he would have to put it off to the late spring of 1942 – by which time Stalin would have brought the Red Army up to strength and created new defences along his western frontiers. The Reich had to move against Russia, for its Ukrainian wheat and Caucasian oil, in June 1941.
This made the events of the next few days all the more critical, and Hitler most of all must have been aware of the enormous consequences of failure. On Thursday, 8 May, two days before Rudolf Hess’s flight, Hitler departed from Berlin and withdrew to the Berghof.
On the afternoon of Friday, 9 May, Alfred Rosenberg, the forty-eight-year-old head of the Aussenpolitisches Amt, was surprised to received a telephone call from Hess. The Deputy-Führer wanted a meeting with him to discuss certain urgent matters. The subject of their telephone conversation is not known, but as head of the Nazi Party’s own foreign affairs office and a close confidant of Hitler’s, Rosenberg had been party to the peaceable attempts of 1940. During the early 1930s he had been invited to Britain where he had been introduced to many eminent Britons, including Lord Hailsham and Lord Lloyd, Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England, and Sir Henry Deterding, one of Britain’s wealthiest men and a prodigious businessman. After meeting the persuasive Rosenberg, Deterding would loan Hitler the enormous sum of £55 million.60 The British press had reported:
In light of the present European situation, this purely private talk between Hitler’s Foreign Adviser (Rosenberg) and the dominant figure in European oil politics [Deterding] is of profound interest. It supports suggestions current in well-informed political circles that the big oil interests had been closely in touch with the Nazi Party in Germany.61
Of deeper interest is the fact that Rosenberg’s trip to Britain in the early 1930s had been sponsored and accompanied by two men working for British Intelligence, Freddy Winterbotham and his good friend Baron ‘Bill’ de Ropp. Both Rosenberg and de Ropp were expatriate Balts with strong ties to Estonia and Lithuania, and thus shared a strong desire to see their homeland rescued from Soviet Russian domination. One of them would be at Dungavel House on the night of 10 May – and it was not Rosenberg.
On that Friday afternoon Hess pressed Rosenberg to travel to Munich for an urgent meeting. Hess presumably had some important questions to ask which Rosenbe
rg, with his experience of dealing with the British, was well-suited to answer. But Rosenberg, busy with his Aussenpolitisches Amt empire, was not keen. After a considerable amount of wrangling he was persuaded to travel to Munich the following morning, but only after Hess offered to lay on a special plane for him.62
As the sun began to set on the evening of Friday, 9 May 1941, many rather important people in Britain were becoming very busy indeed. There were going to be three different gatherings of men that weekend, and who went where reveals much.
The most important of these men was Winston Churchill himself, travelling out to Ditchley Park near Oxford, which had been loaned to him in 1940 by the MP Ronald Tree as the Prime Minister’s wartime country residence in preference to Chequers, which was more vulnerable to Luftwaffe attack. Churchill was to spend the whole weekend there with a select band of confederates, amongst whom would be some who were knowledgeable about the Messrs HHHH operation: Brendan Bracken and Sir Archibald Sinclair, an old friend of Churchill’s and currently the Secretary of State for Air. Churchill would also, interestingly, have a house guest that weekend – President Roosevelt’s special envoy, Harry Hopkins.
Others who were key to the Messrs HHHH operation were also on the move that Friday evening, gravitating towards Ditchley Park, SO1 headquarters at Woburn Abbey, or Dungavel House. They all undoubtedly knew it was to be an extraordinary weekend ahead, but it was about to become more extraordinary than any of them could have expected.
Whilst all this was taking place in Britain, in Germany Rudolf Hess was spending a quiet evening at Harlaching with his wife Ilse and four-year-old son Wolf Rüdiger, nicknamed ‘Buzz’. It would be the last such evening; his life as a free man, as Deputy-Führer of the German Reich, had less than twenty-four hours left to run.
CHAPTER 7
An Emissary Comes
Saturday, 10 May 1941 dawned bright and clear over western Europe. Two areas of high pressure sat over the North Sea and the Atlantic, and Britain, midway between them, enjoyed a warm spring morning.
Seated in the rear of his chauffeured Wolsley, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden travelled north-west out of London along the A5 into the Bedfordshire countryside, his car crossing the Chiltern hills before descending towards Leighton Buzzard. Ahead lay a special meeting at SO1 HQ Woburn Abbey. Behind him, had he turned his head to look through the car’s rear window, he would have seen a pall of grey-white smoke drifting lazily into the clear morning sky above London, the aftermath of the heaviest overnight blitz of the war. Eden would not be returning to London that evening, as he had after all previous meetings at Woburn Abbey. He would be staying the night, together with a select band of men awaiting news of SO1’s best-kept secret, the arrival of Hitler’s emissary to a representative of Britain’s ‘man of influence’.
The minutes of the meeting of SO1 held that Saturday lunchtime, dramatically overstamped with the words ‘MOST SECRET’ in inch-high letters, is a fascinating and revealing document. Its frontpage list of those present numbers twenty-nine important members of SO1, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Economic Warfare, among them Hugh Dalton, Anthony Eden, Sir Robert Vansittart, Rex Leeper, Hugh Gaitskell, Robert Bruce Lockhart, Brigadier Brooks, Thomas Barman, Valentine Williams, Professor Seton-Watson, Leonard St Clair Ingrams and Richard Crossman (the two men charged ten months before with the task of undermining a Hitler deemed ‘ripe for exploitation’), and Con O’Neill. 1
Just prior to the meeting, Bruce Lockhart and Eden had a brief private chat about the Czechoslovak government in exile, to whom Lockhart was liaison officer. Bruce Lockhart later recalled that Eden ‘asked about [the Czech leader in exile Eduard] Beneš. I said – always buoyant – taken knocks better than anyone I know. Eden agreed and said: “He’s had enough too.”’2 Bruce Lockhart undoubtedly kept his diary without a thought that it might one day be opened to public scrutiny, for he also noted: ‘I went on to say I was sorry meeting postponed, coz [sic] I considered matter urgent lest Germans forestall. [Eden] told me he would have meeting earliest possible day next week.’ This curious statement was, given the time and place, almost certainly connected to the Messrs HHHH operation in some way. Perhaps Bruce Lockhart felt the meeting should have occurred earlier in the week, thereby giving more time in case something untoward about the planning for the German emissary’s arrival was discovered.
The participants took their seats around the large central table in one of Woburn Abbey’s staterooms, converted into a conference room for the duration, and the meeting began with a briefing from Brigadier Brooks. He gave a brief review of Britain’s current strategic situation, detailing the position in the Western Desert and Abyssinia, before going on to describe the precarious state of affairs in Malta, Crete and Cyprus – which, he added, ‘we intend to defend … to the last man and the last round’.3 He concluded with a short assessment of the current air situation with regard to the recent heavy raids on Britain, and the RAF’s response of bombing the French Atlantic ports in the hope of closing them to German warships.4
The tone of the meeting became a great deal darker when Hugh Dalton, who was in the chair, invited Leonard St Clair Ingrams – technically attending the meeting on behalf of the Ministry of Economic Warfare, but in reality closely tied to the whole Messrs H deception operation – to speak. Ingrams began by outlining the current state of ‘Russo–German relations’. Firstly, he announced, ‘the extent to which Hitler could exploit his Balkan successes … depended upon the extent to which Russia intended to send supplies to Germany. [The Allied loss of Greece was very serious, for] Russian oil could now be sent via the Black Sea and Greece.’ However, he commented, it should be noted that ‘Russia had released to Germany very little oil during the last month or so.’5
At this point the minutes reveal that the meeting became more animated.
The two trump cards Russia holds against the Germans are the threat of war on two fronts and the trans-Siberian railway, which was Germany’s last one outlet to the outside world but the importance of which was daily diminishing as the United States came more and more into the war. The less Hitler could obtain from the outside world, the more important it became for him to draw upon the Russian reservoir [of natural resources and industrial production]. Hitler might therefore become bolder in his demands upon the Kremlin, supporting them with threats of force. Much would depend upon Russian resistance to these demands.
Hitler would have to attack quickly, if he intended to attack … since if he left it too long he would be faced with the bogey of war on two fronts but he would also have to wait until the Russian harvests had been brought in. Meanwhile Germany’s supplies were lessening and her labour shortage was increasing. If Hitler could gain a quick success over Russia the sixty to eighty divisions on her Eastern Frontiers could be released to supply the labour which her war machine demanded. We should therefore 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.6 [Emphasis added.]
This last statement almost exactly mirrored what Rudolf Hess believed, and proposals to bring about which he was planning to bring with him to Scotland later that very day. There was, however, a crucial, devastating difference. Whereas Hess was genuine in his wish for peace with Britain, believing that men like Sam Hoare and Lord Halifax would be prepared to give Nazi Germany free rein in eastern Europe for the sake of peace, in truth the last thing these top Britons were aiming for was a conciliatory armistice with Nazi Germany. No one in the British government was about to agree to a treaty that would see Hitler free to invade Russia, then to possibly turn back on western Europe the moment it suited him.
Finally, at the invitation of Hugh Dalton, Anthony Eden asked a number of pertinent question arising
out of what had been said, and after a little more debate the meeting adjourned and everyone went to lunch.
By May 1941 Hugh Dalton was having serious problems with many of those attending that meeting. His relationship with Rex Leeper had deteriorated over the past months to the point of pure animosity, and he was also out of favour not only with Eden, Vansittart and many of Rex Leeper’s minions, but most of all with Winston Churchill. His position was becoming untenable.
Dalton had never been popular with Churchill, particularly after the way he’d crowbarred his way in to take over SOE, but following his letter of 28 February indicating his concerns over the true purpose of Messrs HHHH, his standing had deteriorated severely. Churchill had by now let Brendan Bracken off the leash to undermine the Minister for Economic Warfare, and with responsibility for SOE, bringing to mind Vansittart’s comment that ‘BB has been given the go ahead to reduce him once the operation has reached its conclusion’.7 The strain of Bracken’s bitter and acrimonious campaign, covertly sanctioned by Churchill, to destroy Dalton both politically and psychologically was beginning to tell.
On one occasion, Dalton discovered that Bracken had been loudly and publicly abusing him in the Carlton Grill.8 Furious, Dalton went to the lengths of obtaining statements and signatures of witnesses to the incident, and presented this strange document to his party leader Clement Attlee, who in turn was forced to take the matter up with Churchill. The Prime Minister expressed outward anger at the incident and, for Attlee’s benefit, gave Bracken ‘a ticking off’. However, Robert Bruce Lockhart – ever an insider – soon learned the truth, which Bracken proceeded to dine out on for many months, to Dalton’s acute embarrassment. Churchill had privately asked Bracken: ‘Is it true that at dinner the other night, you attacked SO2 ssand Dalton’s work?’