by Martin Allen
Hess’s bizarre behaviour at Nuremberg did not make the British authorities any less paranoid that evidence might come to light which would reflect a different version of events from that promulgated by the British government ever since 1941.
One such cause for disquiet occurred during the very first days of Hess’s trial. On 5 January 1946 Britain’s Ambassador in Paris, Duff Cooper, an old friend of Churchill’s who had been Minister of Information during 1940–41, sent an urgent telegram to London stating that a release of documents at Nuremberg had resulted in a French newspaper article which ‘alleges that British officials were preparing to negotiate with Hitler in 1941. The first paragraph of the … story reads “A high Foreign Office official, several Conservative M.P.s, Five Lords, Three under-Secretaries of State and an English Ambassador were ready to negotiate with Hitler in 1941.”’2
Anyone in the know about what had really taken place would have realised immediately that this was too close for comfort, and the matter was immediately passed to an eminently appropriate Whitehall official to respond. Sir Alexander Cadogan, still serving as Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, first sought the counsel of Con O’Neill (formerly of SO1), who commented: ‘I think we must issue some form of brief statement to the Press to-day. This should be done here, not in Paris … There is some advantage in not having the text [of the article] at the moment. Our preliminary statement can be more non-committal …’3
Accordingly, Cadogan promptly drafted a statement for immediate dispatch to Duff Cooper, with copies to Washington, Berlin and Moscow, that declared: ‘His Majesty’s Government have not yet received or examined the text of the document in question. But it may be stated at once that no person in a responsible position in this country ever took any initiatives for the opening of negotiations with Germany in 1941 or at any other time during the war …’4 The extreme sensitivity of the British officials, their absolute refusal to concede that the slightest contact with the German government had taken place during the war, was emphasised by the heading at the top of the document. It stated: ‘This telegram is of particular secrecy and should be retained by the authorised recipient and not passed on.’
It would be a mistake to assume that the desire for secrecy of these British officials was motivated solely by concern for their nation’s standing on the world stage. There was also a substantial degree of personal fear behind their actions – fear that the trial of Nazi Germany’s leaders at Nuremberg could suddenly become refocused on the conduct of certain top Britons, and their conduct during the war.
Such a fear definitely existed in Whitehall on the morning of 10 January 1946, when an official at the Foreign Office recorded a memorandum to his superior that disclosed:
Colonel Phillimore [British representative at Nuremberg] telephoned at 7.15 last night to say that the Americans had put in and released to the Press another somewhat embarrassing document. It was a Memo by Rosenberg entitled ‘A short report on the activities of the Foreign Policy Office (Aussenpolitisches amt) of the NSDAP’…
Despite the obvious stupidity of the article, it is for consideration whether we should not draw attention of the American prosecution (or possibly the [US] State Department) to the fact that the Americans are not living up to the Agreement by which they are bound to notify us in advance of any material which they put in which may lead to counter-charges which we shall he called to answer …5 [Emphasis added.]
In the event the British government had little to fear, for despite certain mildly embarrassing documents coming to light during the trial, Rudolf Hess did not blurt out the truth behind why he had really flown to Britain, or any details about the secret Anglo-German peace negotiations conducted during the nine months preceding his flight.
At the end of the trial, on the day the sentences were handed out by the Nuremberg judges on the former leaders of the Third Reich, Hess maintained his feigned diminished responsibility to the very last, standing in the dock, swaying aimlessly, with his eyes fixed on the ceiling. Despite this act, however, he undoubtedly clearly heard Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, the British judge on the panel of the International Military Tribunal, proclaim: ‘The tribunal sentences you to imprisonment for life
In the forty-one years of Rudolf Hess’s incarceration that followed the Nuremberg Trials, many theories have been explored in an attempt to uncover the truth behind his flight to Britain. Many of those who were connected to the events of 1941 at some time made their own pronouncements about what had taken place. Some were true, but most were not. By a strange quirk of fate the man at the very apex of this intrigue, Rudolf Hess, almost the only one who (as far as we know) never talked, was to outlive virtually every other participant, in some cases by many years.
In the latter 1960s, after twenty years’ imprisonment, Hess began to hope that the Four Powers might relent and release him along with the last of the other political prisoners still remaining in Spandau prison. He was to be bitterly disappointed. In Rudolf Hess’s case, life meant life, and there he remained into extreme old age, a stoic reminder of Germany’s darker past.
By the 1980s, many people began to regard it as an outrage that such a frail old man should remain a lone prisoner in the vast confines of Spandau. However, it should not be thought that, with the passing of the years, Britain’s political secrets became any less important or dangerous. Behind closed doors, it was not in the British government’s interests ever to see Rudolf Hess released. A free Hess, at liberty to give press conferences and, perhaps, to write his memoirs, would have much locked away within his mind that could cause Britain extreme embarrassment.
Furthermore, it is almost certainly the case that Hess never realised that he had been totally deceived by SO1, and that he spent more than four decades of incarceration believing that his actions alone – his decision to replace Ernst Bohle as the emissary – had caused such disaster to Germany. Had a freed Hess ever talked, and, as a consequence of his disclosures, had he been confronted by the evidence that no British peace party had ever existed, he might in a blinding flash of revelation have realised that he, Hitler and Albrecht Haushofer had all been tricked by the machinations of British Intelligence.
Hess’s pedigree should be remembered here. He had been the Deputy-Führer of a National Socialist totalitarian state. If he discovered that Hitler’s fatal blunder – the invasion of Russia before concluding the war in the west – had been engineered by the British, out once again would come the terrible cry of ‘betrayal’, of ‘Dolschtoss’ – the stab in the back – that had fertilised latent German nationalism following the First World War.
Despite Hess’s frailties in extreme old age, he was still a man whose knowledge of the true events in 1941 was incredibly dangerous, not only to the prestige of the British government, but to the future of Europe. His revelations could have caused much bitterness in Germany, and much distrust throughout Europe of the British government, resulting in political repercussions that would echo into the twenty-first century. Hess’s knowledge was a secret best banished to the past. He was never to be released. He was never to talk freely about the tumultuous events of 1941, when the outcome of the war hung so delicately in the balance.
Thus the ninety-three-year-old Rudolf Hess took his terrible secret to his grave in August 1987. Whether intentionally or not, his forty-year silence has prevented much bitterness, discord and danger for Europe in the future.
Postscript
Having devoted two years of my life to researching the machinations of the British Foreign Office, Winston Churchill and his closest confederates to save Britain in her darkest hours of 1940–41, I was left with several unanswered questions when I eventually completed my investigations into the circumstances of Rudolf Hess’s arrival on a lonely Scottish hillside in 1941. A nagging little voice at the back of my mind persisted in asking: Did Hess ever realise in the subsequent years that he, Adolf Hitler and his old friend Albrecht Haushofer had not been negotiating with a real peace faction? Did h
e ever suspect that he had been tricked by British Intelligence? Did he go to his grave believing that his deep yearning for a peace agreement with Britain, for which he would receive the credit, had ultimately caused the collapse of any possibility of peace, and with it Germany’s strategy for the conduct of the war? In an effort to answer these questions, I determined to engage in one last piece of research, one last investigation, that I would conduct on my own account.
On a quiet Sunday morning in late September 2001, I sat down on the sofa in my drawing room in Dorset, the sound of distant church bells in the air, picked up the telephone on the coffee table before me, and proceeded to dial a long number, one that would connect me with an unremarkable detached house in the quiet suburbs of Hindelang, a town a few miles south of Munich.
My intention was to hold one last conversation with perhaps the only man alive who might know whether Rudolf Hess ever realised that his peaceable endeavours had ended in disaster because he had unwittingly been negotiating with British Intelligence, rather than with a political faction intent on unseating Churchill. The man I telephoned was the godson of both Albrecht Haushofer and Adolf Hitler: Rudolf Hess’s son, Wolf Rüdiger.
After some brief introductory conversation – we had corresponded in the past, and shared several acquaintances – I began to edge towards the real object of my call, without revealing the nature of what I had discovered. Finally I asked Wolf Rüdiger Hess whether his father had ever mentioned any suspicion that British Intelligence had interfered with his and Albrecht Haushofer’s correspondence with the Duke of Hamilton, or ever disclosed a feeling that his peace mission to Britain in 1941 had failed because of the machinations of the Churchill government?
There was a resigned sigh. Had I, I wondered, asked the wrong sort of question, that would result in a swiftly concluded conversation? But no, there was an answer forthcoming, and it confirmed some of my own conclusions about what had occurred in the post-war years.
‘You have to remember,’ Hess’s son began, ‘that I didn’t meet my father, as an adult, until the late 1960s. Until he was left alone at Spandau when the others were released, he had kept us all at a distance. The other prisoners had received their monthly visits, but my father kept himself hidden away.’
There was a long pause, then he continued. ‘In the years since I first started to visit him, I only ever met him – oh, some 250 times. He was only allowed monthly visits. At those times, our discussions were strictly monitored. We sat either side of a large table, and present within the room were two representatives of the Governing Powers. We had no private conversation. We were only really free to discuss family matters. We were not allowed to talk about the war. We were not allowed to talk about National Socialism. We were not allowed to talk about the events that led to his flight.’
That was it. Even had Hess senior known the whole truth, he had not been allowed to talk about it. What harm could there have been in allowing a frail, nonagenarian prisoner to talk freely to his son – unless he held secrets that were so dangerous they had to be kept out of the public domain forever.
Thus the continuing secrecy had been inspired by post-war fears of what had been done in 1941. It was not just about a secret British Intelligence operation, but a political secret that still had the potential to cause much unrest if taken up by neo-Nazis who wished to make political mileage out of the fact that Germany had in part lost the war because of British subterfuge. To condemn Germany’s Nazi government of 1933–45 as monstrous and inept is an easy way of writing off an unsavoury regime; if, however, they had failed largely through British trickery, that presents an infinitely more complex situation.
Just four weeks later, I was staying in a substantial and imposing hotel in the Schorfheide, the extremely pretty forested and lake-dotted countryside thirty miles north of Berlin. I was there to deliver a lecture on the events of 1939 to a group of German historians, academics and retired military.
The hotel had once been one of the Third Reich’s official guest-houses, set in the vast grounds of Karinhall, Hermann Göring’s magnificent country estate. In the 1930s, Lord Halifax, Mussolini and Russia’s Foreign Minister Molotov had all stayed here, and in the years following the fall of the Reich, when the Schorfheide had been in East Germany, it had become DDR leader Erich Honecker’s country retreat.
It was there, after dinner on my last evening at the hotel, that I heard the news that Wolf Rüdiger Hess had died. I knew he had been ill for a long time, but still it was a shock. Yet another link to the past gone.
Later that evening I slipped discreetly from the hubbub in the lounge, letting myself out through the french doors to walk across the terrace and then down through the heavily wooded gardens towards the lake. Soon I was standing in the darkness by myself on a jetty at the lake’s edge. The broad wooden jetty had once been part of Göring’s boating house. On the far side of the lake rose a heavily wooded ridge where Göring’s mansion, Karinhall, had stood before it was blown up by Göring himself and then bulldozed into oblivion by the conquering Russians at the war’s end. The call of ducks echoed across the still water, and in the mist made luminescent by the full moon, half a dozen greylag geese flapped in frantic unison before taking off to fly across to the deep reed-beds at the far end of the lake.
As I leant on the rail at the end of Göring’s jetty, I pondered the many complexities of German political life in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They had been powerful men all – Göring, Hitler, and Hess too – but in the end their abilities had proven inadequate when put to the test by men like Churchill’s, Cadogan, Vansittart, Halifax and Hoare; men trained to run the vast British Empire at the height of its power. When it came down to it, the top Nazis had simply not been good enough politicians. If they had been, I wondered, would Karinhall still have stood on the far side of the lake? Would the trees still have twinkled with light from brightly-illuminated windows? Or would it all have gone by now anyway, imploded just like that other totalitarian state, Soviet Russia?
A mist was thickening on the lake, and a cloudbank high in the star-filled sky suddenly chose that moment to drift across the bright full moon, plunging Göring’s ridge – his former home – into darkness. Blotted out, just like the past. Behind me, in the Third Reich’s former guest-house for visiting foreign dignitaries, someone was playing the grand piano in the lounge. As its haunting strains drifted towards me through the hotel grounds they became faint and disjointed, the trees and distance masking the tune, just as the passage of time masks the tune of past events, the machinations of leaders, and the hopes and fears of a nation.
I turned and walked very quietly away from Hermann Göring’s lake, the only sound that of a tinkling piano and my feet on dead leaves. I knew I would never return. There are some things one must eventually leave to the past.
Martin A. Allen
Autumn 2001
Source Notes
PROLOGUE
1 David Irving, Hess (London, 1989)
2 Doc. No. RG226 XL22853 – National Archives, Washington DC.
3 Ibid.
4 Doc. No. 840.414/11-2745 – Confidential File, State Department Archive, Washington DC.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Doc. No. FO 371/60508 – Public Records Office, Kew.
CHAPTER ONE – AN UNLIKELY TRIUMVIRATE
1 Ilse Hess, Gefangener des Friedens (Druffel Verlag, 1955), p. 17.
2 Doc No. 100–45499, Report of 12 February 1944. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington DC.
3 Ibid.
4 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Mind of Adolf Hitler’, Introduction to Hugh Trevor-Roper (ed.), Hitler’s Table Talk: Hitler’s Conversations Recorded by Martin Bormann (Oxford, 1953), p.xix.
5 H.J. Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’ in Geographical Journal, XXIII (April 1904).
6 Ibid.
7 Wolf Rüdiger Hess, My Father Rudolf Hess (London, 1986), p.33.
8 Ibid.
9 Article by E
.A. Walsh, Life Magazine, 16 September 1946.
10 Doc. No. WO 208/4467 – Public Records Office, Kew.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ilse Hess, op. cit., p.24.
14 Wolf Rüdiger Hess, Rudolf Hess: Briefe 1908–1933 (Langen Muller, 1987), p.310.
15 Ibid, p.311.
16 The Times, 12 December 1923.
17 Doc. No. RG226 T253, Roll 59, Notes 21 June 1939 – National Archives, Washington DC.
18 Doc. No. FO 645 Box 157 – 5.10.45 – Imperial War Museum, London.
19 Hitler’s Table Talk, op. cit., pp.5, 16, 42.
20 Ibid.
21 N-S Jahrbuch, pp.188–9.
22 Wulf Schwarzwäller, Rudolf Hess (London, 1988), p.76.
23 Doc No FO 371/55672 – Public Records Office, Kew.
24 Doc. No. RG226 T253, Roll 59, Fm 1500069 – National Archives, Washington DC.
25 Schwarzwäller, op. cit., p. 120.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 James Douglas-Hamilton, The Truth about Rudolf Hess (Mainstream, 1988), p.46.