The Hitler–Hess Deception

by Martin Allen

  Thus, despite the unmitigated catastrophe Rudolf Hess had brought upon himself and upon Hitler’s desire for peace before embarking upon his eastern war of conflict, Hitler and the other leaders of the Reich clearly regarded Albrecht Haushofer as blameless. To a degree they were correct: Haushofer personally was blameless – but he had unintentionally been the key to unleashing a multitude of disasters upon Germany’s war strategy. Had Hitler ever realised Haushofer’s true role in British Intelligence’s plot to undermine Germany – to reap the rewards of a Führer ‘ripe for exploitation’ – had he suspected that the H negotiations were anything but real, Albrecht Haushofer would have found himself stood against a wall and shot faster than he could have comprehended what was happening. This therefore means that no one in Germany suspected SO1’s involvement in Messrs HHHH.

  Many things had changed in Germany during the latter half of 1941 – since the loss of Hess to the British. The stunning early successes of Barbarossa in the summer had given way to the clinging Russian mud in the late autumn, and now, in the last days before Christmas, even as the Führer awaited Frau Schnuhr’s arrival in his Chancellery office, he knew his troops were facing the appalling severity of a Russian winter. In the act of delaying Barbarossa for five weeks had lain the seeds of disaster, and the army in the east had failed to reach its primary objective. Moscow was in sight on the horizon, was being pummelled by howitzers, but still the German troops could not get into the city. Allied to that failure was the significant fact that Stalin was still in the Kremlin issuing orders. Had he been forced to flee (and at one crucial point his train was ready and waiting to whisk him away to the Urals), there was every chance that the Soviet government would have wobbled, and with its loss of face Russian armed resistance may well have collapsed. As it was, the ill-equipped German troops were now exposed to the Russian winter. Just three weeks later Hitler would comment bitterly over dinner: ‘The supplying of the front creates enormous problems … Amongst the unforeseen matters in which we’ve had to improvise was the catastrophe of the temperature’s falling, in two days, from 2° below zero to 38° below. That paralysed everything, for nobody expected it … On the front at Leningrad, with a temperature of 42° below zero, not a rifle, a machine-gun or a field-gun was working, on our side.’70

  There was, however, an even more worrying situation which had developed in the first week of December 1941. Churchill’s long-term strategy of seeing Germany pitted against Russia, Britain and the United States had finally come to pass. On 7 December the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, and in support of her Japanese Axis partner, Germany found herself at war with America four days later.

  Now, on Tuesday, 16 December, after a weekend contemplating this new and potentially catastrophic situation, Adolf Hitler determined to act. He would sound out Albrecht Haushofer’s assistant before committing himself to a conversation with the man he had known for twenty years.

  Ushered into the daunting surroundings of Hitler’s enormous office, Irmegard Schnuhr was shown briskly across to a sofa and seated before the Führer. Frau Schnuhr found Hitler businesslike and polite, yet at the same time at pains to impress upon her that this was an absolutely confidential conversation. He told her that he had a ‘special interest’ in Albrecht Haushofer, and ‘was interested to know whether he [Albrecht] thought there was [still] a possibility of making peace with Britain’.71

  It seemed that, despite the complete failure of Hitler’s 1940–41 peaceable attempt, which had seen him lose Rudolf Hess, he had not entirely given up the idea of a negotiated conclusion to the war, particularly now that it was taking a new and very dangerous direction. A war with the democratic western Europe states and Britain had been bad enough – and had warranted many covert attempts to negotiate a peace – but the involvement of America was a different matter altogether.

  Six weeks later, in early February 1942, Frau Schnuhr once again found herself invited to meet the Führer in the formal yet confidential surroundings of his Reich Chancellery office. Having evidently spoken at length about the matter to Albrecht, she reported that he believed that ‘to the best of his knowledge neither Britain nor Germany had any intention of being the first to put out a peace feeler’. However, she commented, Albrecht had also said that ‘if Hitler did desire to negotiate with Britain, the very fact that the German Foreign Minister was Ribbentrop would make it impossible for any negotiations to get off the ground’.72

  It appears that Albrecht was determined to convey that he would only assist Hitler on the condition that a signal was given to the British that Germany was prepared to make deep changes in foreign policy. Hitler responded in a manner that indicated he was not about to change his objectives merely on Albrecht’s insistence. He did not, after all, want to change his expansionist policies; he just wanted peace with the British – and now the Americans too – before all his plans were thrown completely out of kilter.

  Hitler, his patience evidently wearing thin, testily told Frau Schnuhr that Albrecht Haushofer ‘was not as clever as he thought he was, and that it would be easy to sack Ribbentrop if the British first sacked their Foreign Minister, Anthony Eden’. Frau Schnuhr then asked Hitler whether he desired a face-to-face meeting with Albrecht. No, Hitler responded, ‘he would not dream of it’. His temper now up, he openly called Albrecht a ‘Mischling’ – a half-breed – and declared that the outcome of the war would be settled on the battlefield. However, Hitler was never a man to completely close a door, and Frau Schnuhr would later comment that despite his belligerent stance, she had the distinct impression that he still wanted to keep an avenue open to Albrecht Haushofer, ‘should peace negotiations with Britain ever become a possibility’.

  In the end Hitler never did summon Haushofer into his presence again. As the disasters of war, such as Stalingrad, El Alamein, the Allied invasion of Italy and D-Day, made a compromise peace ever more unlikely, so Hitler’s intransigence and increasing isolation made the prospect of total defeat for Germany ever more certain.

  From the winter of 1941 onward, many in Germany secretly began to harbour the belief that defeat was certain. Over the next two and half years, Albrecht Haushofer increasingly found himself in the company of those who believed that the war was turning into the greatest disaster that had ever befallen their country, and that the only way to stop it before Germany lost everything would be to oust Hitler and his fellow Nazis. Through the auspices of the diplomat and leading member of the anti-Nazi resistance Ulrich von Hassell, Albrecht found himself sucked into the company of such eminent Germans as General Beck, Admiral Canaris, General Oster, Johannes Popitz, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, General Stuelpnagel and Field Marshal Witzleben. Haushofer’s role, had they succeeded, would have been to become Germany’s post-war Foreign Minister.

  The plot to remove Hitler from the political equation culminated at the Führer’s military headquarters at Rastenburg, east Prussia, on 20 July 1944, when Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb that blew up Hitler’s conference room while a meeting was in progress. Four men were killed, and most of those present were severely injured, several being blown clear through the building’s wooden walls. Hitler survived, although the blast set his hair alight, partially paralysed his right arm, burnt his right leg and damaged his eardrums. His injuries were kept from the German people.

  Hitler’s vengeance was terrible. Some of the conspirators were summarily shot on the very first day, and all the others were tracked down and handed over to the Gestapo for thorough interrogation before swift National Socialist justice was dispensed by the Volksgericht, the dreaded people’s court. It is estimated that between 180 and two hundred people were killed as a direct result of the July Plot. There was, however, one exception.

  As soon as he heard of the plot’s failure, Albrecht Haushofer fled to Bavaria, believing his intimate knowledge of the region’s forests, hills and lakes would be his best protection against the endeavours of the Gestapo to find him. He managed to evade capture
throughout the summer and autumn of 1944, hoping that the swiftly moving Allied advance might soon result in the removal of Bavaria from Hitler’s sphere of influence, at which time he would give himself up to the Allies. However, on 7 December, disaster struck, when the Gestapo discovered Albrecht hiding in a hayloft on a friend’s country retreat. It was the cold weather that betrayed him – his breath had caused a cloud of mist that was noticed.

  Albrecht may have expected imminent execution at the hands of the Gestapo or the SS, but instead he was whisked away to Berlin, where he was incarcerated in Moabit prison, a grim redbrick edifice on Lehrterstrasse. There he was extensively question by the Gestapo. They were not brutal – their prisoner was after all an important man – but they were extremely insistent. They wanted to know the names of the plotters behind the Stauffenberg bombing, who their associates were, and whether there were any other plots still in the offing. Albrecht revealed as little as he could get away with.

  Within a few weeks of his arrival at Moabit, Albrecht found himself contacted by the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, who had not forgotten Albrecht’s previous assistance in his endeavours to contact American Intelligence, conducted through the auspices of SS-General Wolff. Himmler wanted advice on how to conduct a peaceable approach to the Allies, and after considering Albrecht’s comments, asked whether he would be willing to mediate between him and the Americans sweeping northwards through Italy.

  To begin with, this potentially dangerous relationship protected Albrecht, as Himmler wished to keep his foreign affairs expert alive, in case an opportunity arose to cut a deal with the Americans. However, just at the point when Albrecht’s expertise might have prompted Himmler to order his release so that he could contact the Americans, the fickle Reichsführer-SS met the Swedish representative of the Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte. Bernadotte was suave, urbane and, most importantly, an eminent neutral – which made him a more acceptable peace emissary than Albrecht Haushofer. In absolute secrecy from Hitler, Himmler asked Bernadotte to contact the Americans in the second week of April 1945, offering to capitulate to the Western Allies, but not to the Russians.

  On the evening of Monday, 23 April 1945, as Russian troops battered their way into the outskirts of Berlin, Albrecht Haushofer and fifteen other political prisoners, many of whom had been involved in the Stauffenberg plot, were led away from Moabit. The purpose of their journey, they were told, was for them to be evacuated from Berlin by train. In fact, they had an appointment with an executioner’s bullet in the ruins of the Ulap Exhibition Centre.

  Two days later, on Wednesday, 25 April, word came through to Himmler from Count Bernadotte. Churchill and the new US President, Harry S. Truman, had rejected his peace offer.

  Later that same week, on the night of Saturday, 29 April, as Russian T34 tanks prowled the Tiergarten, and Soviet troops began ransacking and firing Germany’s offices of government, reducing the capital of the thousand-year Reich to rubble and scratching their names upon the very walls of the Reichstag, Adolf Hitler, ensconced in a bunker beneath the ruins of the Reich Chancellery, put a gun to his head, pulled the trigger, and Nazi Germany effectively ceased to exist.

  Epilogue

  Despite the vast scale of the Second World War, on a political level it was essentially a conflict between two gigantic personalities: Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler.

  Throughout the 1930s, Churchill had been Britain’s prophetic voice of doom, decrying the folly of appeasement, proclaiming the evils of Nazism and the threat to European democracy posed by an expansionist Germany led by Adolf Hitler. With his attainment of the premiership in May 1940, Churchill’s condemnations of Hitler became even more forthright; he compared the German Führer to Satan incarnate. Hitler, in return, likened Churchill to a drunken ogre, a stooge of world Jewry and capitalism, a man willing to drag his people down to satisfy his own ambitions.

  In the end, Hitler’s doomed secret peaceable appeals only revealed a deep flaw to certain top men within the British government, Foreign Office and Intelligence Services, and presented them with a devastating weapon against which the might of the Reich was powerless to protect him. Hitler had entered into a devious political battle which he hoped would see Churchill rudely ousted from the British premiership; but in the event he was devastatingly outwitted by his arch-enemy’s experts in political warfare.

  As a result of SOl’s secret endeavours, Hitler saw his dream of peace in the west – and with it a free hand to conquer in the east – shattered. Yet it was a failure he had to keep to himself, for he could trust no one. The loss of face could have been fatal, even for the Führer himself, and he increasingly withdrew from the public stage to the Wolf’s Lair in the years ahead. As the signs began to multiply that Germany would lose the war, so too did cracks begin to appear in the Reich. Hitler had been safe from internal dissent while Germany had been winning the war, but by mid-1944 his promises of victory to the German people were beginning to sound hollow, and for the first time he was beginning to appear vulnerable. Who could he trust? Who had been party to the plot to kill him? The Wehrmacht? The party itself? Perhaps even elements within the SS? There was a reason for the Führer’s fury and terrible vengeance on all those who had plotted against him: anything less would have shown weakness, and that would court disaster.

  Before losing the Second World War itself, Adolf Hitler lost the war of wits against Winston Churchill, and with it his peace of mind. He then made the mistakes that cost him everything else as well. His failure was total, for he not only failed to achieve peace in the west before embarking on his great eastern adventure, but in the very act of being outwitted by SO1 he was tricked into the one thing he had sworn he would never be so foolhardy as to do – undertake a two-front war which he knew Germany could not win.

  Thus the seeds of Nazi Germany’s destruction were planted in 1941 by Winston Churchill, Sir Robert Vansittart, Sir Samuel Hoare, Rex Leeper and the men of SO1. All the vast domains Hitler had gained by conquest – from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara, and from the Atlantic to the Black Sea – were pushed back, until his glorious thousand-year Reich extended only to a few wrecked and smoking blocks of central Berlin, defended by old men and children.

  In the end, Hitler’s defeat was absolute.

  Given the extremely important contribution to the war effort that SO1 (renamed the Political Warfare Executive and placed under Brendan Bracken within just a few weeks of concluding the successful operation against Hitler) performed, it may be wondered why the decision was taken to keep the facts about Messrs HHHH forever secret. The repercussions were terrible indeed. Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union would cost over twenty million Russian lives. It may well be that Hitler would ultimately have attacked Russia anyway, but British Intelligence certainly helped give him the mindset to take that decision in 1941. The disclosure of that fact would have given Britain’s enemies an opportunity to decry British perfidy, tainting her post-war standing in the world of foreign affairs.

  The manner in which the Second World War concluded created a new and extremely dangerous situation, with Soviet forces occupying half of Europe and showing every sign that they intended to stay. Britain, meanwhile, was in almost as bad a condition as Germany. With the uncertainties and fears of the Cold War came the very real concern that any form of disclosure would give Stalin an excuse to accuse the Western powers of treachery, scoring a very strong propaganda point and racking up the tension even more.

  The first ominous signs that Stalin knew something about SO1’s secret operation became evident in the autumn of 1944, while Churchill was on a visit to Moscow. As Churchill sat down to supper in the Kremlin, Stalin raised his glass and proposed a toast to the British Intelligence Services, which he said had ‘inveigled Hess into coming to England’. Eyeing Churchill closely, he went on: ‘He could not have landed without being given signals. The intelligence service must have been behind it all.’1

  An unsettled Churchill immediately protested that
the British government had known nothing about Hess’s arrival beforehand. Stalin responded with a broad and knowing smile, and said that Russian Intelligence often did not inform the Soviet government of its intentions either, until an operation came to fruition.

  The implication was clear. Stalin was letting Churchill know that he did not believe the yarn about the mad Deputy-Führer who had suddenly taken it upon himself to fly to Scotland in an attempt to make peace with the British. It is known that Stalin had already been briefed by the NKVD head Lavrenti Beria on the more secret aspects of British Intelligence’s operation, which had been gleaned from the Czechs and the French in the months following Hess’s arrival in Britain; but the Russians also possessed more accurate information from a source deep in the heart of British Intelligence. A British operative working in Spain and Portugal, a man well known to Sir Samuel Hoare and Captain Hillgarth, had long ago sold his soul to the Soviets. His name was Kim Philby.

  With the end of the war came much apprehension and uneasiness in Britain at what might be revealed at the Nuremberg Trials. The main concern was about what Alfred Rosenberg and, more particularly, Rudolf Hess might say. Both men were on trial for their lives, and had nothing to lose by spilling the beans to an international tribunal, complete with an audience of the world’s press. That they did not declare exactly what had taken place emanated from their political pedigree, their understanding of the new balance of power and the expediency of maintaining secrecy.

  In the end, what could Hess have said anyway? He could hardly admit that he had not been negotiating for peace with the British government, but rather with a political faction that had intimated its willingness to topple Churchill, so that Germany would be free to attack Russia. Despite his acts of apparent lunacy, Hess was an intelligent man, and he had a politician’s instinct for survival. To have revealed the truth in open court before four Allied judges, one of whom was Russian and another British, would not have aided his cause in the slightest. Better to stick to the official British and German proclamations of 1941. Better to feign madness in the hope that he would be judged less culpable, than to be found guilty of the intent to wage an eastern war of conquest that had cost twenty million lives. That would have guaranteed a death sentence, as would befall Rosenberg, Ribbentrop, Göring and nine other defendants. Hess may have hoped to receive a lesser custodial sentence, like Albert Speer, Admiral Doenitz, Neurath and von Schirach, who were jailed for terms ranging from ten to twenty years.