Myths & Legends of the Second World War

by James Hayward

  It is abundantly clear from the timing of his flight that the Hess mission was closely linked to the impending German invasion of the Soviet Union, which was launched just six weeks later, on 22 June 1941. This much was confirmed by Lord Beaverbrook on several occasions after the war. The conquest of Russia by Germany, never viable under any circumstances, would certainly be made harder by fighting a war on two fronts. The Russian factor would also explain why Hitler might deny all knowledge of the mission if it failed, assuming he was privy to the plan from the outset. Had Stalin discovered that Germany wished to make peace with Britain, he would have deduced immediately that an attack on Russia was close at hand. Instead, Germany sought to lull her notional Soviet ally into a false sense of security by continuing to threaten Operation Sealion, the seaborne invasion of Britain. Furthermore Hitler might not have wanted his Axis partners, chiefly Mussolini, to think that he was negotiating behind their backs. While this hypothesis does nothing to prove Hitler knew and approved of the Hess peace mission, it does show that he would hardly have admitted so even if he did.

  On being informed of the Hess flight, Hitler is reported by some (including Albert Speer) to have flown into a paroxysm of rage, although other accounts (Hess adjutant Karl-Heinz Pintsch) relate that he received the news calmly. Some are of the opinion that what followed was part of a German strategy of plausible denial. Surprisingly, the first public announcement about the affair came not from London but Berlin, in the form of a radio bulletin broadcast on 12 May at 8 pm:

  A letter which he left behind unfortunately shows by its distractedness traces of a mental disorder, and it is feared he was a victim of hallucinations. The Führer at once ordered the arrest of the adjutants of party member Hess, who alone had any cognizance of these flights, and did not, contrary to the Führer’s orders, of which they were fully aware, either prevent or report the flight. In these circumstances, it must be considered that party member Hess either jumped out of his plane or has met with an accident.

  While it is true that his driver, bodyguard and two adjutants were arrested, little punitive action was taken against others close to Hess. Karl and Albrecht Haushofer, his trusted geopolitical advisors, were arrested and detained, but neither was ill-treated and both were released without penalty. The aircraft designer Dr Willi Messerschmitt was merely rebuked by Göring, and no action at all taken against his chief test pilot Helmut Kaden (who had given Hess intensive instruction), or against Ernst Bohle, the chief of Hess’s own foreign intelligence bureau, the Auslandorganisation. His wife Ilse and son Wolf were allowed to remain in their villa in the Munich suburb of Harlaching, and awarded a pension. Had Hess really acted alone, and against the express wishes of Hitler and the party in general, one might have expected the outcome to have been very different.

  It has often been claimed that Hess was deliberately lured to Britain as part of an elaborate intelligence sting. This theory has spawned a number of books in recent years, including Hess: Flight for the Führer by Peter Padfield (1991), Ten Days That Saved the West by John Costello (also 1991), Churchill’s Deception by Louis Kilzer (1994) and Hess: The British Conspiracy by John Harris and M.J. Trow (1999). Certainly this chimes with the theory favoured by Stalin, who initially believed that Britain was in league with Germany to destroy the Soviet Union, and that the Hess mission was engineered by British intelligence with the Duke of Hamilton as a go-between. Moreover the Russians had some difficulty in understanding why Hess was not immediately prosecuted as a war criminal, and instead detained in comfortable quarters to await a postwar trial. In October 1942 the party newspaper Pravda (Truth) declared:

  It is no coincidence that Hess’s wife has asked certain British representatives if she could join her husband. This could mean that she does not see her husband as a prisoner. It is high time we knew whether Hess is either a criminal or a plenipotentiary who represents the Nazi government in England.

  Several days later Pravda published a photograph of ‘Mrs Hess’ giving a piano recital in London. However this turned out to be Myra Hess, the well-known pianist who boosted wartime morale in London by playing lunchtime concerts to packed houses at the National Gallery. Indeed Churchill and Stalin argued over the point when they met for the Moscow conference in October 1944. Churchill recorded in a later memorandum:

  The Russians are very suspicious of the Hess episode and I have had a lengthy argument with Marshal Stalin about it at Moscow in October, he steadfastly maintaining that Hess had been invited over by our Secret Service. It is not in the public interest that the whole of this affair should be stirred at the present moment.

  The intelligence sting theory is superficially attractive, if only because it would explain the dense veil of official secrecy which still surrounds much of the Hess affair. According to Padfield and Costello, MI5’s Double Cross Committee masterminded the affair, while Harris and Trow favour the Special Operations Executive. Anthony Cave Brown concluded that the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was behind the trap, while it has been suggested by Philip Knightley that MI6 induced Hess to come to Britain as they too favoured a negotiated peace with Germany. According to KGB sources, the traitor Kim Philby later revealed that SIS lured Hess to Britain by means of forged letters from the Duke of Hamilton, although Philby made no mention of this in his memoir My Secret War.

  The greatest problem with the sting theory is that it is not supported by the conduct of the British authorities after Hess landed at Eaglesham. Had Hess been expected by the intelligence services, and by extension the military, it seems unlikely he would have been detained in a number of scout huts by the Home Guard for four hours until transferred to Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow. Even if the confusion on the ground in Scotland is explicable in the fog of war, the fact remains that Britain did nothing to exploit the windfall as a political and propaganda coup, or announce to the world that Hitler was suing for peace. Instead the flight of the Deputy Führer to Scotland was announced to the world by Berlin, and only afterwards admitted by the British authorities on the most neutral terms. Far from being paraded before the world media, Hess was kept under close confinement for the next five years, and not seen in public until Nuremberg. If any photographs of Hess were taken between May 1941 and October 1945, not a single one has been released into the public domain. Even Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, expressed his bafflement. Moreover Hess himself seems never to have indicated that he was lured to Britain.

  Probably the most outlandish variation on this theme is the proposition that Hess was lured to Britain by bogus astrology. This fantastical notion was a favourite of spy writer Richard Deacon (alias Donald McCormick), who developed it at considerable length in books such as British Secret Service and 17F: The Life of Ian Fleming, despite the fact that there is no verifiable (or even circumstantial) evidence to support it. According to Deacon, the luring of Hess was ‘a brilliant coup’ for which Fleming, the creator of James Bond, deserved full credit:

  Hess, however, presented a somewhat easier target. Vanessa Hoffman’s information convinced Fleming that while Canaris could not be won over by any faked horoscopes, Hess might well be exploited in this way … There was everything to be gained and nothing to be lost by planting faked horoscopes on Hess. Fleming had discovered through various of his occultist friends such as Aleister Crowley and Ellic Howe that Hess regularly consulted astrologers, and that one of these was Karl Ernst Krafft … Exactly how the bogus horoscopes were worded, or the advice they gave to Hess, remains a mystery.

  According to Deacon, Fleming, in wartime a serving officer in the Naval Intelligence Division, was acquainted with infamous occultist Aleister Crowley, and with Dennis Wheatley became involved in a ‘very hush-hush’ assignment called Operation Mistletoe. This in turn involved nocturnal occult rituals staged in the Ashdown Forest, involving ‘a dummy dressed in a Nazi uniform, sat on a throne-like chair’, with the object of influencing Hess. Deacon also stated that after Hess arrived, Fleming suggested he be ques
tioned by Crowley. Others have cited the involvement of Maxwell Knight, Tom Driberg and Louis de Wohl in this same astrological plot. Deacon quoted with approval a claim by Nicholas Campion, cited as ‘one of the founders of the Institute for the Study of Cycles in World Affairs and a leading astrologer’, who in 1984 advised Deacon that he had:

  Cast the horoscope for the time at which Hess took off from Germany. It was most inauspicious. It transpires that this is a most evil horoscope in any traditional sense, largely because six planets were in the house of death and two other points were strong: the fixed star Algol (which leads one to lose one’s head) and the evil degree Serpentis, so called ‘the accursed degree of the accursed sign.’

  Aspects of this farrago of nonsense are repeated in books such as The Man Who Was M (Anthony Masters, 1984) and The Occult Conspiracy (Michael Howard, 1989). Yet in his own introduction Deacon had warned his readers that this tale of the luring of Rudolf Hess was ‘far removed from reality’ and ‘totally bizarre’. In truth, the only contemporary references to Hess and astrology appeared in newspapers in London and Berlin on the same day, 14 May 1941. According to an article in the Volkischer Beobachter:

  As is well-known in Party circles, Rudolf Hess was in poor health for many years and latterly increasingly had recourse to hypnotists, astrologers and so on. The extent to which these people are responsible for the mental confusion that led him to his present step has still to be clarified.

  In London The Times published some highly speculative information supposedly received from a correspondent in Switzerland:

  Certain of Hess’s closest friends have thrown an interesting light on the affair. They say that Hess has always been Hitler’s astrologer in secret. Up to last March he had consistently predicted good fortune and had always been right. Since then, notwithstanding the victories Germany has won, he has declared that the stars showed that Hitler’s meteoric career was approaching its climax.

  The detail disclosed by The Times was almost certainly official disinformation, with both newspaper reports intended to discredit Hess as deluded or mentally unstable. Hitler’s motive for a policy of plausible denial in relation to the Hess peace mission have already been discussed. In Britain, however, very different reasons may lie behind the official policy of silence and secrecy surrounding Hess.

  There is a strong body of evidence, not all of it circumstantial, that Rudolf Hess came to Britain expecting to conclude ongoing peace negotiations with senior officials, and then to fly back to Germany from Dungavel. In their minutely researched account Double Standards, Picknett, Prince and Prior offer the following facts in support of this argument. By May 1941 Britain was losing the war: Greece had fallen, Rommel was winning in North Africa, U-boats were sinking a colossal tonnage of Allied shipping, and Britain’s cities were being heavily bombed from the air. At this time Churchill was by no means as popular as postwar myth suggests, having endured a vote of confidence on 7 May. In Britain there remained a strong peace lobby, which included Lloyd George, Lord Halifax, Rab Butler, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Nevile Henderson and Sir Samuel Hoare. It is also possible that senior figures within MI6, including Sir Stewart Menzies, favoured peace. Moreover other senior establishment figures had been pre-war members of the Anglo–German Fellowship, including the Duke of Hamilton. Hamilton later denied this, just as he denied meeting Hess at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, but in fact his own archives betray his membership of the Fellowship in 1936, while there is ample evidence of the meeting in Berlin from Henry Channon, Kenneth Lindsay and even Churchill. Hitler too wished to end the war in the west, as is clear from his ‘last appeal to reason’ of 19 July 1940, since the occupation and administration of Britain and the Empire would be a complicated task, and deplete those resources required for the planned attack on Russia. Against this background it seems more than likely that Hitler knew of, and endorsed, the Hess mission.

  According to the authors of Double Standards, their research suggests that the proposed terms of the armistice included a 25-year alliance between Britain and Germany, and the adoption by Britain of an attitude of ‘benevolent neutrality’ towards Germany’s forthcoming war on the Soviet Union. Britain would continue to rule her Empire, while Germany would govern Europe. It is also suggested that there were detailed proposals regarding other issues, such as a reduction in strength of the Royal Navy and RAF. The main obstacle to the plan was the staunchly anti-Nazi Churchill, as the prime minister himself admitted to the Commons on 27 January 1942:

  When Rudolf Hess flew over here some months ago, he firmly believed that he had only to gain access to certain circles in this country for what he described as ‘the Churchill clique’ to be thrown out of power and for a government to be set up with which Hitler could negotiate a magnanimous peace.

  Sir Patrick Dollan, a former editor of the Glasgow Daily Herald and the then Lord Provost of Glasgow, seems to have been privy to inside information which he felt strongly should be made public. During a series of lectures given around the city in June 1941, Dollan made revelations which were summarised by the Bulletin and Scots Pictorial on 20 June, clearly having been missed by the censor:

  Hess came here an unrepentant Nazi. He believed he could remain in Scotland for two days, discuss his peace proposals and be given petrol and maps to return to Germany.

  The precise identity of those within the ‘certain circles’ to which Churchill alluded remains the subject of fierce debate, and is unlikely now to be established with any certainty. A wide-ranging study of pro-peace groupings in Britain before and during the Second World War can be found in Profits of Peace by Scott Newton, published in 1996. Some were pro-Hitler, but most appeasers simply wished to avoid another European war which would have a devastating effect on economic and social stability.

  It is clear from a letter which the Duke of Hamilton published in The Times of 6 October 1939 that he too remained pro-peace even after the outbreak of war. The Hess affair caused the Duke of Hamilton a great deal of personal embarrassment, and led to his uttering a number of libel writs against journalists and Hess commentators until his death in 1973. It is only since then that historians have been able to publish detailed research. According to the authors of Double Standards, there is reason to believe that a reception committee awaited Hess at Dungavel House, which may have included the Duke of Kent and a Polish contingent, and that the mission went awry only after Hess failed to locate his destination and instead baled out over Eaglesham. Hamilton, then a serving Wing Commander stationed at RAF Turnhouse near Edinburgh, remained a Privy Councillor and a Keeper of the Royal Household. A former member of the Anglo–German Fellowship who had hoped to avoid war, he was also a friend and sponsor of Albrecht Haushofer, a close political advisor to Hess who had been privy to the flight from its inception.

  On landing Hess asked to be taken to Hamilton, and although the official version holds that the Duke slept through the night and did not see ‘Alfred Horn’ until about 10 am the following day, at Maryhill Barracks, the evidence of his widow supports the theory that Hamilton in fact left his bed and went to meet Hess while the latter was being escorted to Maryhill. Indeed this was reported as fact by the Glasgow Herald on 16 May 1941, who added that ‘representatives of the Intelligence Service and the Foreign Office were present’. Some have claimed that it would not have been possible for Hess to have landed his Bf 110 on the small grass airfield at Dungavel, but the strip was a designated Emergency Landing Ground and there is evidence that a comparable Bristol Beaufighter set down safely there the previous month.

  What had initially been promoted as a crack in the Nazi regime was in danger of being recognised as a crack in the British hierarchy. Indeed rumours of collusion between Hess and people in high places, and whispers that Hamilton was a Quisling, quickly entered into circulation in Britain, raising the dread spectre of a Hidden Hand or fifth column. Although Churchill subsequently dismissed the Hess mission as merely an ‘escapade’, in truth he must have recognised it as a potent
ial turning point in the war. In May 1941 the defeat of Germany hinged on two main factors: America joining the conflict, and Germany invading the Soviet Union, so that Stalin too would become a British ally. Little was revealed to the press about Hess, and Churchill made no statement to the Commons until January 1942. Rather than exploit Hess’s arrival as propaganda for short-term gain, Churchill instead reversed the crisis to further his own ends. By accident or design, the truth slipped into print in America later in 1941, in the somewhat mystic book That Day Alone by the Canadian commentator Pierre van Paassen. According to van Paassen, Churchill pretended to negotiate with Hess in order to ensure that Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, to strengthen British ties with America, and to bring about the end of the Blitz. The book was published in abridged form in Britain in 1943, but with this passage deleted. It seems unlikely that van Paassen was privy to inside information. Nonetheless, the devastating night attack on London by 520 bombers on 10 May 1941 was the last significant German raid on the capital until the so-called Little Blitz early in 1944, which again suggests the complicity of Hitler in the Hess peace plan. In short, Churchill ruthlessly exploited the Hess affair to stifle the peace lobby, and those who wished to remove him from power.