by Martin Allen
From the very moment that Hess (undoubtedly in a panic, for it was certainly no part of his plan to kill himself trying to land his plane in the dark while lost) bailed out of his Me-110, the whole of SO1’s carefully choreographed Messrs HHHH operation suddenly took off at a tangent. All subsequent events from 11.09 p.m. on Saturday, 10 May 1941 – the instant Hess parachuted from his plane – have to be viewed in the light of the fact that what took place from then on was completely unplanned. From that moment, Britain’s reaction to Hess’s arrival was almost entirely a damage-limitation exercise, aimed primarily at preventing the Messrs HHHH operation from collapsing before Hitler took the fatal decision to proceed with his attack on Russia; but also to hide the fact that top men of the British government, Secret Service, aristocracy and diplomatic corps had participated in a Machiavellian plot to enter into bogus peace negotiations with the German leadership.
Despite Britain’s dire strategic position in early 1941, the unscrupulous use of peace negotiations – particularly undertaken by diplomats on neutral territory – to further British war objectives was anathema, and would have been viewed with acute alarm by Britain’s allies and Churchill’s political rivals. The revelation that important Britons had been secretly negotiating with Hitler had the potential to cause a catastrophic rift within the alliance, and might have led Russia to decide not to assist the Allied cause. Churchill and SO1’s sole objective may have been to assure Britain’s survival, but if the means of this survival became public, the nation would pay a terrible price. Her politico-diplomatic integrity would be in shreds, and her many would-be detractors on the international stage would have an excuse to regard Britain’s diplomats and politicians as pariahs. Revealing the truth behind Rudolf Hess’s arrival in Britain was not an option.
‘RUDOLF HESS IN GLASGOW – OFFICIAL’ blared the headlines of the Daily Record on 18 May, before going on to declare: ‘Herr Hess, Hitler’s right-hand man, has run away from Germany and is in Glasgow suffering from a broken ankle.’32 The article went on to dramatically report that Hess, having bailed out of his aircraft in the dark, had the good fortune not only to survive his first-ever parachute jump, but to come to earth within yards of a farm-worker’s cottage. No doubt the local ploughman who found him, David McLean, would have been highly offended to discover that Germany’s Deputy-Führer believed his home to be ‘a goat-herder’s hut’, but McLean was a keen interviewee, and the Daily Record quoted him as saying:
I was in the house and everyone was in bed late at night when I heard the ’plane roaring overhead. As I ran out … I heard a crash, and saw the plane burst into flames in the field about 200 yards away.
I was amazed and a bit frightened when I saw a parachute dropping slowly earthwards though the gathering darkness. Peering upwards I could see a man swinging from the harness …
Such was the public report of Rudolf Hess’s arrival in Scotland. Yet the very fact that the event was so promptly reported is cause for suspicion. Britain at this time operated under the strictest censorship regulations in its history. However, Mr McLean was free to talk, and the Daily Record was free to report. Thus the men of the Ministry, be it censorship or intelligence, must have wanted the report released, otherwise it would not have been. There was already a hidden agenda taking place behind the scenes.
Germany’s Deputy-Führer had, it was reported, suffered a mental aberration and decided to take himself off to enemy territory in time of deepest war. Between the moment that Hess left his plunging aircraft to glide softly to earth, and the appearance of the Daily Record’s report, a sea-change had taken place in British Intelligence’s attitude to him. In the very act of coming, and so losing his position in Germany, Rudolf Hess had to a great degree lost his usefulness.
Ever since Hess’s arrival late on the night of Saturday, 10 May 1941, it has been recorded that he was first held by a local Home Guard unit, who duly (as per their standing orders) telephoned the nearest army unit to come and take charge of the captured enemy airman. In this instance, the Home Guard telephoned the 14th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders’ headquarters at Paisley; but curiously, Sub-Area Command ordered that the Argylls were not to be dispatched. Instead, a unit of Cameronian Highlanders was sent from Glasgow to take the downed German pilot directly to Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow.33 Furthermore, instead of being bundled unceremoniously into the back of an army lorry, as was the usual fate of captured Luftwaffe air-crew, this prisoner travelled by private car ‘as [an] extra measure of courtesy’.34 Thus it was already known that this was no run-of-the-mill PoW.
Despite the officially sanctioned reports of the Daily Record, there were two other men on the scene at David McLean’s farm when Rudolf Hess arrived, but any mention of them was strictly censored from inclusion in the Daily Record’s report.
In 1947, one of these two men, Daniel McBride, wrote an article which appeared in the Hong Kong Telegraph. This threw considerable new light on what had actually taken place after Hess bailed out of his plane. McBride, a sergeant in the Royal Signals, was based at Eaglesham House, a few miles north of Dungavel House, from where anti-enemy-signals work was undertaken. This work was so secret that no local ever knew what was being done at Eaglesham. In layman’s terms ‘anti-enemy-signals’ work means meaconing, or beam-bending.
A year prior to Hess’s flight, No. 80 (Signals) Wing, based at Radlett, just a few miles south of St Albans, discovered that the Germans had set up a powerful Knickebein which was broadcasting on 30 Mc/s (thirty megacycles) from precisely 54°39’N 08°57’E.35 This positioned the broadcast station at Stollberg, on the west coast of Denmark. By the late spring of 1941 the Stollberg Knickebein had been directed at Glasgow to guide German bombers to their target, and Hess had undoubtedly followed this beam across the Scottish countryside during the last leg of his journey, for it passed extremely close to Dungavel House. Thus the reason he came to earth midway between Eaglesham (also broadcasting on thirty megacycles so as to bend the Stollberg beam away from Glasgow) and Dungavel House is because his Lorenz receiver told him he was near Dungavel.
After the war, Daniel McBride revealed:
Now that I am under no further obligation to HM Forces and Rudolf Hess has been sentenced at the Nuremberg Trials, the true story of Hess’s apprehension after he landed at Eaglesham, Scotland, can be told for the first time.
The purpose of the former Deputy-Führer’s visit to Britain is still a mystery to the general public, but I say, and with confidence too, that high-ranking government officials were aware of his coming. No air-raid warning was given that night … nor was the plane plotted at the anti-aircraft control room for the west of Scotland …36
McBride disclosed that on Saturday, 10 May he had been eagerly awaiting his relief at 6 p.m. from an afternoon stint in the Signals Operations Room at Eaglesham House, when he was annoyed to hear from a colleague that all weekend leave had suddenly been cancelled. He went on:
Later that night, I was lying in bed … when I heard the unmistakable drone of a low flying aircraft increasing rapidly to a nerve-racking roar … The sleepers [all] woke, jumped out of bed and were outside in no time. We were standing in various stages of undress as the plane zoomed low overhead. We saw it plainly, but owing to the fading daylight we could not make out its markings. From the noise of the engines and the design of the plane, we guessed it was not one of ours … Scarcely had the last man climbed into bed again when the plane was heard returning. Out we dashed and the machine was clearly to be seen. Twice the pilot circled HQ.
As the young men stood on the terrace staring at the night sky they spotted the plane, which suddenly appeared to climb steeply before its engines cut out. The plane rolled on its back and began to dive, and a lone figure was thrown clear. His parachute opened, and the man drifted gently to earth. McBride commented: ‘I thought it must be one of our own boys come to grief while trying out a German machine, more especially as there had been no anti-aircraft fire directed at him and no sirens sounded.
’
From here onward, Daniel McBride’s evidence clashes with the official story of a lone farmer who stumbled from his cottage one dark night to find a German airman coming to earth mere yards from his back door. McBride was to assert that he had been the first to reach the prone figure, it had been he who helped the pilot indoors, and during a brief conversation the German airman stated that his name was Alfred Horn.
Hess’s use of this name for his first eighteen hours in Britain suggests that it must have been agreed back in Germany that if something went wrong, if the Deputy-Führer fell into the wrong hands, he would use the name ‘Alfred Horn’ in the first instance. That the name was pre-arranged, and not made up off the cuff, is evident because the following day Hess asked if he could let his family know he was safe by sending a telegram to ‘Rothacker, Herzog Str. 17, Zürich, stating that Alfred Horn was in good health’.37 Frau Emma Rothacker, of Herzog Strasse 17, Zürich, was one of Rudolf Hess’s aunts. A prior arrangement must have been made that in the event of her receiving a message concerning ‘Alfred Horn’ she was to notify the appropriate authorities in Berlin.
The name Alfred Horn was not picked at random either. While Alfred was the name of Rudolf Hess’s younger brother, Ernst Bohle’s assistant at the Auslandsorganisation, Horn was a name few people, except a few very close friends and relations, would associate with Hess. His wife Ilse’s maiden name was Pröhl; however, what was not widely known, unless one was close to the Hess family, was that Ilse’s widowed mother had remarried – a Munich businessman by the name of Carl Horn. Thus Rudolf Hess’s mother-in-law was now called Frau Horn.
The Deputy-Führer would persist in the charade of maintaining that his name was Alfred Horn until the middle of Sunday, 11 May. In the meantime people like Daniel McBride had no cause to doubt that this was the lone pilot’s real name. It was not part of Hess’s plan to reveal his true identity to the wrong people too soon, for he undoubtedly hoped he would still be delivered to the safety of the important Britons awaiting him at Dungavel House.
Following the briefest of introductions between the lone Luftwaffe pilot named Alfred Horn and Daniel McBride, the young British sergeant asked: ‘Did you come to bomb us?’
‘My plane was not fitted to carry bombs,’ the German retorted indignantly. ‘I came to see the Duke of Hamilton.’
Hess, according to McBride, then asked him ‘to take him to the Duke [of Hamilton]’s home, which, he said, was not far away. To this I could only reply that I had no power to do so but my superiors would probably do so later on.’
Shortly afterwards there was a commotion outside. The door was flung open and a Home Guard officer rushed in, followed by a number of men. The German pilot said to the officer: ‘I wish to see the Duke of Hamilton. Will you take me to him?’
‘You can save all that for the people concerned,’ said the officer. ‘At present you are coming with me.’38
During his time in Home Guard custody and his journey to Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow, Germany’s Deputy-Führer persisted in his demand to see the Duke of Hamilton. However, to his undoubted concern, rather than being taken to Dungavel House, where he must have hoped the matter of his arrival might yet have been kept out of the public domain, Hess found himself among unfriendly natives, being carried off towards Glasgow – the opposite direction to that which he wished to be taken.
Just nine hours before, Rudolf Hess had been a cosseted, high-ranking German politician, attended by servants, adjutants and even his own personal detective. Now he was being bundled into the local Home Guard headquarters, a damp and dusty Scout hut in the scruffy Glaswegian suburb of Giffnock, where indignity was heaped on indignity. He was stripped of all his personal possessions and thoroughly searched, then subjected to a gruelling two-hour interrogation by an unfriendly and uncompromising Pole named Roman Battaglia, who worked at the Polish Consulate in Glasgow.
Battaglia’s presence that night at the Scout hut in Giffnock is as curious as it was alarming to MI5, considering their undoubted knowledge of the true circumstances behind the German emissary’s arrival, and they immediately launched an investigation into the Battaglia incident. Within a few days the head of MI5 in Edinburgh reported with some consternation to his superior in Oxford: ‘How on earth he [Battaglia] got to know of Hess’s arrival, and, furthermore, went out and interrogated him for over two hours, I simply cannot conceive.’39
Roman Battaglia was duly interrogated by MI5 at Glasgow’s Police Headquarters. Yet despite MI5’s suspicion that he had been tipped off that something strange was afoot that Saturday night, the interrogating officer, John Mair, was forced to concede in his report that Battaglia denied knowing the true identity of the strange airman. However, Mair noted that Battaglia had declared, ‘the circumstances [of his arrival] were so fantastic, that the prisoner must have come on some special mission’.40
Regardless of MI5’s concern that others had attempted to intervene in the events surrounding the German’s arrival, Rudolf Hess had been allowed to remain in the hands of the local Home Guard until 2 a.m. There was evidently much to worry Whitehall. What had he said? And to whom had he said it? The only reassuring certainty British Intelligence possessed was that from 2 a.m. onwards, the mysterious Alfred Horn had been in the custody of professional soldiers. Men who obeyed orders and did as they were told – first taking Hess to a local hospital to check the ankle he had hurt on landing, then whisking him off to Maryhill Barracks in the north of Glasgow; taking Hess ever further from his intended destination, Dungavel House, and his desire to meet the Duke of Hamilton.
Despite repeated assertions since the war that the Duke of Hamilton’s first meeting with Hess occurred on the morning of Sunday, 11 May, remarkable new evidence emerged in the 1990s which indicated that the Duke almost certainly undertook a secret car journey in the middle of the night of Saturday, 10 May, to meet the captured German emissary.
Ever since 10 May 1941, the Duke of Hamilton asserted that he came off duty at RAF Turnhouse at 11.15 p.m., as soon as he heard that the mysterious lone raider – ‘42J’ – had crashed. He then took the very short journey to the house he and his wife had rented near the air base for the duration of his posting. Then, he maintained, he had gone to bed.
Yet within six days of the Hess landing a report was to appear in the Glasgow Herald which appeared to indicate that something very different had occurred during that Saturday night. It suggested that the Duke of Hamilton had not been as lax about raid 42J as might at first have appeared, and reported that late on Saturday night a ‘meeting between the Duke and Hess took place at a point on the road to the hospital [en route to Maryhill Barracks] to which Hess was removed, and it is understood that representatives of the Intelligence Service and Foreign Office were present’.41
If this article was accurate – and there is no reason to assume that so precise a report did not have a basis in fact – it would indicate that a great deal more activity went on in the hours immediately after Hess landed than has ever been admitted. It is known that members of the Intelligence Service, certainly, as will appear, Mr Voigt of SO1, and quite probably Bill de Ropp, were present at Dungavel House on 10 May, awaiting the visiting emissary. Who the reported representative of the Foreign Office was is a little less clear, but it may have been that one of the men in the know at the Foreign Office, such as William Strang or Frank Roberts, was at Dungavel that night. It was Strang, after all, who had enlisted the Duke of Kent to meet the visiting German emissary, and it is therefore likely that a Foreign Office adviser would have been made available to support the Duke during the meeting itself.
Other evidence concerning the Duke of Hamilton’s movements that night emerged many years later, and the nature of its source suggests that there can be little doubt that the Duke did indeed, contrary to every subsequent denial made by him, drive the forty-five miles from RAF Turnhouse to Glasgow. In 1991 the Duke’s widow, the present-day Dowager Duchess of Hamilton, was to reveal that after her husband
returned from RAF Turnhouse at 11.15 on the night of Saturday, 10 May, he received two telephone calls.42 At that time the Duke was not aware that the lone Messerschmitt 110 had carried anyone other than the expected emissary, a Nazi Party functionary named Ernst Bohle.
At 2 a.m., Major Graham Donald of the Royal Observation Corps (who had arrived at the Giffnock Home Guard’s Scout hut after viewing the crash site) put an urgent telephone call through to the Duke of Hamilton. He told the Duke that he had just met an extremely strange German pilot, a man who insisted his name was Alfred Horn, but who bore a remarkable resemblance to Rudolf Hess. Furthermore, Donald reported, Horn only had one topic of conversation: to repeatedly insist that he had a message for the Duke of Hamilton, which was of ‘the highest interest to the British Air Force’.43
The Duke’s immediate reaction was to remain aloof, and it may well be that, given what is known of SO1’s orchestration of the whole event, he had been instructed not to become directly involved. However, not long after Donald’s call, the telephone rang again. It is not known who was on the other end of the line, but it may have been someone at either Dungavel House or Woburn Abbey, and it appears that Hamilton was instructed he was needed to meet the mysterious pilot, who evidently was not the expected Mr Bohle. Whatever was said, it must have been of major importance, for the Duke immediately roused himself. ‘I’ll have to go,’ he told his wife. ‘It’s something to do with the crashed plane.’44 The Duchess had no recollection of her husband returning that night, or indeed the next morning, and was to remark that ‘the next time she saw him was the following afternoon’.