The Hitler–Hess Deception

by Martin Allen

  There are two other lines of evidence to support the fact that things were far from what they seemed on that night of Saturday, 10 May 1941. They reveal that the Duke of Hamilton’s participation was not that of a man uninformed about what was taking place.

  In 1991 a former Squadron Leader named Hector MacLean, who was the Duty Section Controller at RAF Ayr in 1941, revealed that he too had telephoned the Duke that Saturday night concerning the German pilot’s request to meet him. He recalled that Hamilton had seemed taken aback, apparently unnerved by this request. ‘What do you think I should do?’ he had asked tentatively.

  ‘I think,’ MacLean responded, ‘you should go and see him.’

  There was a pause, the ducal brain obviously clicking though his options. Eventually the response came: ‘Yes, I think I will …’ With that the Duke rang off, leaving MacLean to order that the Glasgow police be notified that the Duke of Hamilton was coming.45

  The second piece of evidence concerning the Duke of Hamilton’s reaction to the unfolding events on that night is perhaps the most telling of all. Perhaps, too, it reflected the reaction of those waiting at Dungavel House, Woburn Abbey and Ditchley Park.

  A WAAF named Nancy Moore, who had been on duty at RAF Turnhouse on the night of Hess’s arrival, was to recall that at 11.45 p.m. the Duke of Hamilton, having gone off duty at 11.15, following the reported crash of raider 42J, suddenly returned to the Operations Room to take a telephone call. The call concerned the arrival of a German pilot named Horn, and Nancy Moore noticed with curiosity that the Duke appeared to be wearing his pyjamas under his uniform.

  What was to happen next so piqued Miss Moore’s interest that she retained ever after the image of her pyjama-clad commanding officer, the Duke of Hamilton, ‘standing, hunched over the phone, holding it to his shoulder, looking extremely horrified’.46 She could not hear what was said, but one of the other WAAFs on duty that night, who had initially taken the call for the Duke, told her that ‘the CO had been called to speak to the pilot of the crashed plane’.47 If the Duke of Hamilton had indeed suddenly found himself talking on the telephone to no mere German pilot or diplomat, but rather a very prominent German politician, he had every right to look ‘extremely horrified’.

  This was as clear an indication as possible that SO1’s carefully choreographed plan for high political deception had been thrown completely off its tracks. It was a disaster that had the potential to blow all SO1’s hard work of the previous ten months to smithereens at the very last moment, unless some quick thinking was undertaken to shore up the operation.

  In the days and weeks ahead, great efforts would be undertaken to ensure that Rex Leeper’s carefully organised Messrs HHHH operation attained its full potential. There was however a problem that occurred within just a few hours of Hess’s arrival that needed immediate attention.

  Early on the morning of Sunday, 11 May, the Duke of Kent, with the Duke of Buccleuch as a passenger, was driving along the Douglas to Lanark road, away from the entrance to Dungavel House. The Duke of Kent, tired after a night’s wakefulness, or perhaps distracted in the process of lighting a cigarette, suffered a lapse of concentration that resulted in his car having a collision. Within a few hours, Leonard Ingrams at SO1 HQ Woburn passed on an enquiry to Mr Voigt at Dungavel ‘concerning the accident … on the Douglas to Lanark road between a car driven by HRH the Duke of Kent, and a coal lorry’.48

  On Monday, 12 May, thirty-six hours after Hess had landed on British soil, Voigt dispatched a memorandum, headed ‘MOST SECRET’, directly to Rex Leeper, reporting: ‘I can confirm that neither the Duke, or his passenger, Buccleuch, were injured, and in view of Lanark’s close proximity to the events of last weekend, steps have been taken to ensure the accident remains unreported by the press …’49

  Over the following weeks SO1 would redouble its efforts to ensure that Hitler made the right decision – as far as British interests were concerned – and opened up a second front, turning the German war machine on Soviet Russia. The main problem in the immediate future was what to do with Hess.

  CHAPTER 8

  A Fatal Decision

  At Hitler’s Berghof on the morning of Sunday, 11 May 1941, all was peace, alpine tranquillity and, according to Walter Hewel, the Führer’s liaison to the Auswärtiges Amt, ‘great excitement’.1

  Ever since that eventful weekend it has been believed that on learning of his Deputy’s precipitate departure for Britain, Hitler went berserk, ranting and raving up and down the corridors of the Berghof, screaming for his closest confederates, ordering arrests and terrible retribution on anyone who had assisted Hess in his heinous betrayal of trust. However, that was not the case.

  On that May morning at the Berghof, Adolf Hitler was full of optimism for the future, undoubtedly expecting that his and Hess’s efforts to negotiate an armistice with Sir Samuel Hoare and Lord Halifax would be successful. His Deputy’s flight to meet a British VIP had been undertaken as part of the inexorable progress towards that deal – a deal that was about to see Winston Churchill suddenly and rudely unseated from his premiership. When Hess’s Adjutant, Karl-Heinz Pintsch, arrived at the Berghof at 9 a.m. to officially hand Hitler a letter that notified him of his Deputy’s flight to Britain, the Führer already knew that Hess’s take-off from Augsburg the previous evening had gone ahead without a hitch.

  After the war, Pintsch would reveal that following Hess’s departure he had taken the night train from Munich to Berchtesgaden to deliver Hess’s letter. However, his journey had been delayed while he had been forced to wait for Hess’s private carriage to be hitched to the overnight Salzburg express. He had therefore only arrived at Berchtesgaden at 7.30 a.m., and had then had to wait a further hour while a car was sent down from the Berghof to collect him. His journey had therefore taken nearly fifteen hours. Rosenberg, travelling the previous afternoon by car, had managed the same journey in just three hours.

  The letter Pintsch handed to Hitler undoubtedly echoed the discussion between Hess and Hitler in the privacy of the Führer’s office at the Chancellery the previous week. It ended: ‘and if, my Führer, my plan … should fail, if fate should decide against me, it can have no evil consequences for you or Germany. You can drop me at any time – say that I am mad …’2

  There is, however, clear evidence that Hitler was already aware by the evening of Saturday, 10 May that Hess had successfully taken off from Augsburg. This evidence also clearly reveals Hitler’s fear of the reaction of his fellow Nazi leaders if it were discovered he had been secretly negotiating with the British. To make an announcement after an agreement had been reached was an entirely different matter. Thus Hitler’s actions over the forty-eight hours from Saturday evening were undertaken with the specific intention of protecting his reputation.

  The first piece of evidence concerns a telephone call made at 10 p.m. on Saturday evening by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring to fighter-ace Adolf Galland, the commanding officer of the Luftwaffe’s Fighter Command over the English Channel. In some amazement, Galland had listened as Göring proclaimed that the Reich’s Deputy-Führer, Rudolf Hess, had gone mad, and had flown off from Augsburg with the objective of flying to Britain. Galland was therefore ordered to shoot him down. Galland recalled that when he received Göring’s call it was ‘about ten minutes to darkness’.3 Although Galland did not know it, by then Hess was far from the reach of any Luftwaffe fighters, having just crossed over the coast of northern Britain more than four hundred miles away.

  The second piece of evidence which proves that Hitler was aware of Hess’s flight concerns Hess’s personal detective Franz Lutz and chauffeur Rudolf Lippert. Following Hess’s departure from Augsburg, Lippert was ordered first to return the Deputy-Führer’s Mercedes to Munich, take a Kübelwagen from the NSDAP’s motor-pool and drive with Lutz to the small Austrian village of Gallsprach. There they were to remain with an old friend of Hess’s until the heat of his departure had died down.4 Having driven most of the night to reach Gallsprach,
Lippert and Lutz had not even had a chance to unpack when, at 5.30 a.m. (over three and a half hours before Hitler received Hess’s letter from Pintsch), they were arrested and taken into custody for questioning regarding the sudden departure of their boss.5 Pintsch was later to claim it was he who had ordered Lippert and Lutz to stay out of sight in Gallsprach, probably on the instructions of Hess, who feared widespread arrests would be made to preserve the illusion that Hitler had not known about his flight beforehand.6

  The inference is clear. Pintsch’s delivery of Hess’s letter to Hitler at 9 a.m. on Sunday, 11 May was a performance put on for the benefit of the leadership of the Reich, with the sole objective of protecting Hitler’s reputation should the Hess–Haushofer–Hoare–Halifax peace negotiations collapse. Given Hitler’s close involvement throughout the whole affair, it is improbable that he would have been kept in ignorance overnight about whether his Deputy’s take-off had been successful and on schedule.

  It has frequently been suggested since the war that Hess’s Senior Adjutant, Alfred Leitgen, travelled to see Hitler at the Berghof immediately after Hess’s take-off at 5.45 p.m. on the evening of 10 May, to unofficially report Hess’s successful departure. This would have given him an arrival time at Berchtesgaden of about 9 p.m., leaving Hess’s Junior Adjutant, Karl-Heinz Pintsch, to deliver the official notification the following morning, in front of witnesses.7 After the war, Leitgen and Pintsch kept to the story that Hitler had not known about Hess’s flight. To have revealed the truth could have prejudiced the former Deputy-Führer’s chances of release from Spandau prison, as any involvement in the plan to invade Russia would have been very damaging to him in Soviet eyes.8

  If Hitler really had found himself presented on the morning of Sunday, 11 May with a devastating political crisis – that his Deputy had flown off to make peace with the enemy – one might expect that he would have given his full attention to the problem, cancelling everything that day in an attempt to counter a looming political disaster. In fact, far from ranting and raving, ordering arrests and retribution for anyone who had betrayed his trust, the Fiihrer did not alter his schedule by one iota.

  Following a brief vegetarian lunch, Hitler spent the afternoon in conversation with Admiral Darlan, the Vice President and Foreign Minister of Vichy France, and the designated successor to the aged Marshal Pétain. In the comfort of the Berghof’s vast main reception room, seated on sofas scattered with cushions decorated with tiny swastikas, and overlooked by a vast tapestry of the Emperor Charlemagne, these two former enemies – now suspicious confederates – discussed the progress of the war.

  Jean-François Darlan had no love for the British. He had, Churchill noted in a memorandum the previous November, been ‘mortally envenomed by the injury … [Britain had] done to his fleet’,9 which was sunk at Mers-el Kebir on Churchill’s orders in July 1940, with great loss of French life. Had he expected a typically virulent Hitler tirade against the perfidiousness of the British, and outrageous proclamations about the great Reich that would soon swamp all Allied resistance, he was to be very surprised. Rather than being in a belligerent mood, Hitler pragmatically confided to Darlan that

  he [still] did not understand why France and England had declared war on Germany … The tremendous disaster involved in a war such as the present one was out of all proportion to the colonial revision for which Germany was striving.

  Moreover, Germany had never presented these colonial demands in an urgent form or in a manner that would in any way have threatened the honour or the existence of France or England.

  As late as September 1, 1939 [Hitler informed Darlan,] he (the Führer) had implored [French] Ambassador Coulondre … that France should not make the mad decision to go to war. The Polish conflict could easily have been localised. The German demands on Poland had been very moderate. The German city of Danzig was to have been returned to Germany, and as for the rest a vote had been planned under international supervision …10

  These were placatory words indeed. The all-conquering master of occupied Europe went on to insist that

  he did not have the ambition to be a great military leader but was interested rather, as the leader of his nation, in assuring the cultural and social advance of the German nation. Others had forced him to be a military leader. He would have been happy if the war had ended in June or July of last year [i.e. 1940], just as he had striven for peace after the Polish campaign. All nations would have benefited by such a peace …

  If the English had not fanatically insisted on continuing the war, there would have been peace long since and all European countries could devote themselves to repairing the misfortunes of war and to reconstruction …

  Hitler continued: ‘It was not Germany’s fault, at any rate, that this [restitution of peace] could not be done. The question now was whether, in the greater European interest of ending the war, one should not jointly oppose the incendiaries who constantly wished to feed the flames of war in Europe with new objects.’ He then referred to the prospect of American involvement in the war if it continued much longer, dourly commenting: ‘If little England had developed such a big appetite as to incorporate a quarter of the territories of the world into her Empire, how big would be the land hunger of the much larger United States!’11

  The conversation eventually turned to Franco-German matters, the purpose of Darlan’s visit. But the Admiral must have been disconcerted by the general tone of the meeting. It was almost as if Hitler were preparing the rabidly anti-British Darlan for some sudden and astonishing change in the war’s direction.

  Despite Hitler’s outwardly calm demeanour, put on for Admiral Darlan’s benefit, he must have been deeply concerned that there was still no news of Hess. There had been no notification from the International Red Cross in Geneva that he had arrived safely at Dungavel House. Nor had there been a telegram from Hess’s aunt Emma Rothacker in Zürich that the British authorities had notified her of ‘Alfred Horn’s’ capture. Something must have gone badly wrong. Either Hess was lying dead at the bottom of the North Sea, or – infinitely worse – he had been captured.

  In March 1945, as the Reich fell in ruins about him, Hitler would be approached by one of the top SS men in Italy, Karl Wolff (who by coincidence was yet another old friend of Albrecht Haushofer’s), who revealed that he had managed to open a line of communication to President Roosevelt. Hitler told Wolff to proceed with his attempt to open a peace dialogue, but added, ‘Should you fail, I shall have to drop you exactly like Hess.’12

  Now, on the evening of 11 May 1941, as the sun began to sink over the mountains behind the Berghof, Hitler visibly grew more and more concerned. What had gone wrong? More importantly, where was Hess? Hitler knew he had to act to protect his political integrity. He ordered Karl-Heinz Pintsch (whom he’d happily invited for lunch six hours previously) to be arrested. In mounting panic, and possibly real rage that all the months of hard peaceable negotiations may have been for nothing, Hitler summoned his Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Hermann Göring to the Berghof, and ordered that Albrecht Haushofer come the following day, to write a report for him on the peace avenues in Britain. (This report, it should be noted, would make no reference to the Hoare–Halifax situation, or to the peace offer passed by the Papal Nuncio to Hoare in Madrid the previous November.)

  Interestingly, Hitler did not call for the two men in Germany with the real power to control the developing situation: Josef Goebbels, the Nazis’ high priest of propaganda, controlling press, radio and public relations; and Heinrich Himmler, who as master of the SS could quell any dissent or political unrest through sheer terror.

  Instead, the Führer placed his reliance on two men who had been party to earlier peace initiatives. Göring undoubtedly knew of the Hess–Haushofer–Hoare attempt. He had after all been connected to Hitler’s previous secret peaceable attempts in 1940, via Dahlerus, and it was he who had telephoned Adolf Galland the evening before, almost certainly at Hitler’s suggestion, concerning Hess’s
flight. He and, to a lesser degree, Ribbentrop would understand the Führer’s dilemma more clearly than Goebbels or Himmler, and would at the same time be unlikely to use the situation to further their own ambitions to supplant him. The same could not necessarily be said of Himmler.

  Walter Hewel was later to record that there was much anxiety that evening at the Berghof, and a very heated and protracted discussion between Hitler, Ribbentrop, Göring and Martin Bormann in the Berghof’s main hallways, with ‘a lot of speculation’.13

  In distant Berlin, Albrecht Haushofer received his summons to report to Hitler at the Berghof the following morning, and heard for the first time the astonishing news that Ernst Bohle had not been the emissary dispatched to Britain to meet the eminent representative of King George VI. In his stead had gone his old friend Rudi Hess. It must have been a very bitter blow to Haushofer that Hess had not trusted him enough to tell him his real plans. Had he known, Haushofer would undoubtedly have tried to deter Hess from making such a trip. Showy acts of that type were not the way to peace. Diplomacy proceeded in a sequence of careful moves of great complexity, carried out in a slow and methodical manner. Haushofer must have realised that all his work to negotiate a peace with a political faction in Britain had been squandered. ‘With fools such as this,’ he was heard to remark bitterly, ‘what can you expect?’14

  Albrecht Haushofer must also have understood that he had been kept in the dark on Hitler’s instructions, and probably suspected that Hess had always intended to travel to Britain himself. He would also have known, unlike the more naïve Hess and Hitler, that the last thing one should do when engaged in deep and critical negotiations with an enemy is to spring a dramatic surprise. In such circumstances anything at all can happen, usually something counter-productive.