CLYDESDALE, Marquis of, Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, eldest son of the Duke of Hamilton, the premier peer of Scotland. He and his three younger brothers, Lords George (‘Geordie’), Malcolm and David Douglas-Hamilton all took up flying and served in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force. Clydesdale became the youngest squadron leader of his time and in 1933 was appointed chief pilot for the first ever flight over Mount Everest; with his co-pilot and lifelong friend, D.F. McIntyre, he described the feat in The Pilot’s Book of Everest (1936). The grass landing strip adjacent to his home, Dungavel House, south of Glasgow, is believed to have been Rudolf Hess’s destination on his flight to Scotland. Clydesdale became 14th Duke of Hamilton on the death of his father in March 1940.
COLVILLE, Jock Seconded from the Foreign Office to 10 Downing Street at the outbreak of war, Colville served Chamberlain and then Churchill as Private Secretary, becoming particularly close to Churchill. The diaries he kept, although this was forbidden in wartime, provide unique insights into life and work with the Prime Minister, the personalities around him and the conduct of the war. The originals are held by the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge.
DANSEY, Claude, served as a junior officer in the South African (Boer) War of 1899–1902, latterly in intelligence. He was subsequently recruited into the Security Service, MI5, then joined the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. Serving in Rome in the 1930s, he recognised dangerous weaknesses in MI6’s structure in Europe and set up a parallel intelligence-gathering organisation comprised mainly of business people termed the Z Organisation (his own code-name was ‘Z’) with a particularly strong presence in Switzerland. After the outbreak of war he was recalled to London by a new head of MI6, Stewart Menzies, who made him his right-hand man (Assistant Chief of the Secret Service).
DE COURCY, Kenneth Before the war secretary and intelligence officer of the Imperial Policy Group of high Tory landowners, bankers, industrialists and military strategists aware of the disparity between Britain’s imperial commitments and her armed forces, and anxious to avoid any continental European entanglement. The group was dissolved on the outbreak of war, but de Courcy retained his influential connections and continued to be the recipient of confidences, which he noted in a diary kept in a locked safe. A friend of Stewart Menzies and the Duke of Buccleuch, both of whom favoured compromise peace with Germany to allow Hitler to attack Russia, he was considered potentially subversive by Guy Liddell of MI5, although never arrested.
DOUGLAS-HAMILTON, Douglas see Clydesdale, Marquis of
EDEN, Anthony Conservative politician who had served in the First World War and worked to prevent a second. Appointed Foreign Secretary in 1935 he attempted to use the League of Nations to curb the dictators, Hitler and Mussolini, but in 1938 resigned over disagreements with Chamberlain’s ‘appeasement’ policy. Churchill recalled him to succeed Lord Halifax as Foreign Secretary at the end of 1940.
GOEBBELS, Josef A rejected novelist and playwright, he had a PhD from Heidelberg University and was regarded as an intellectual by the old guard of the Nazi Party. Appointed Gauleiter (District Leader) of Berlin, and after the Nazis took power in 1933 Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, in which role he exercised total control over all media. One of Hitler’s closest colleagues during the war, and like his leader a visceral anti-Semite, he made speeches and commissioned poisonous films to inspire disgust and hatred of Jews. The diary entries he dictated each day were also informed by propaganda values.
GÖRING, Hermann A fighter pilot in the First World War, in the final months given command of the famous Fighter Squadron 1 formerly led by von Richthofen. An early convert to Nazism, when Hitler took power in 1933 he was appointed Minister of the Interior for Prussia; he formed the Prussian Secret State Police (Gestapo), using them in ruthless suppression of Communists and other opponents. Also appointed Minister of Aviation, he created a German air force and was appointed its chief in 1935. The following year Hitler commissioned him to head a four-year plan to speed up re-armament, rewarding his success by promoting him Reichsmarschall and designating him his successor. Hiding his brutal character under a grossly flamboyant exterior given to lavish entertainment and outlandish costumes, he convinced many from Britain that he would make an acceptable alternative to Hitler, and was the source of numerous peace offensives before and after the outbreak of war.
HALIFAX, Lord Nicknamed ‘the Holy Fox’ for his devotion to Christianity and the hunt, Hitler mocked him as ‘the English parson’. In 1938 on Eden’s resignation, Chamberlain appointed him Foreign Secretary to pursue ‘appeasement’, and was not disappointed. Dedicated to peace at almost any price, he strove for compromise with Germany up to and beyond the outbreak of war. When Chamberlain fell in May 1940, he was Buckingham Palace’s choice to succeed as Prime Minister, but his reluctance allowed Churchill to seize the prize. Despite their very different views Churchill retained him as Foreign Secretary in the War Cabinet until the end of that year when he sent him to Washington as British Ambassador.
HAMILTON, Duke of see Clydesdale, Marquis of
HASSELL, Ulrich von Career diplomat from the Prussian landed nobility married to the daughter of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, for whom he had worked as secretary after being wounded in the First World War. Posted as Ambassador to Rome in 1932, he joined the Nazi Party the following year, but became disgusted by Hitler’s methods. Recalled home in 1938 he supported opposition groups plotting a generals’ revolt to oust the regime. After the outbreak of war he passed messages to the British government through Halifax’s envoy, Lonsdale Bryans. He was arrested and executed after the failed July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler.
HAUSHOFER, Albrecht Academic geographer, the son of Professor Karl Haushofer and his half-Jewish wife, Martha. Rudolf Hess protected him and his brother from the consequences of their Jewish blood; in return Albrecht served Hess as a roving expert on foreign affairs, particularly on British politics and personalities. Keenly aware of the evil in Nazism and hating himself for his complicity with the regime, he also worked for an opposition group. He was executed by Himmler’s SS towards the end of the war.
HAUSHOFER, Professor Karl An army general turned academic; on retirement in 1919, he taught Political Geography at Munich University. Developing a Geopolitical doctrine including the necessity for expanding eastwards for living space (Lebensraum) to ensure food supplies, and stressing the need for friendship with Britain, he advised Hitler on these lines through Rudolf Hess when both were imprisoned after the failed ‘Beerhall Putsch’ of 1923. It is evident in Hitler’s testament, Mein Kampf, and in his policies after coming to power. Haushofer and his wife committed suicide after the lost war.
HAUSHOFER, Martha Daughter of Georg Ludwig Meyer, a German-Jewish businessman, she married Karl Haushofer in 1896 and was mother to Albrecht and Heinz.
HESS, Ilse, née Pröhl. Raised in an upper middle class family in Berlin, she first met Rudolf Hess in 1920 on moving to Munich to take her entrance exams for Munich University. He had just returned from a flying mission against a Communist uprising in the Ruhr and was wearing the field-grey uniform of the Freikorps Epp. She knew with an unforgettable clarity, she wrote later, that her life had been directed towards this young man. So it proved: they found they were living in the same pension, and they shared a love of walking and skiing and soon a dedication to Adolf Hitler; she also took on secretarial duties for Hess, and they married in 1927 with Hitler’s blessing. After the war she published his letters from captivity in two moving volumes.
HESS, Rudolf Born into the house of a prosperous German import-export merchant in the Egyptian seaport of Alexandria in 1894, and destined to follow his father into the family firm. He attended the small German school in the city until the age of twelve, and after being tutored at home for two years was sent to a boarding school at Bad Godesberg on the Rhine; there he excelled at maths and sciences and developed a love for the music of the German compose
rs, Beethoven in particular. Thence he was sent to a commercial college in Switzerland, and afterwards apprenticed to a firm in Hamburg to learn the practical side of business. But with no desire to follow the path his father had chosen for him the outbreak of the First World War came as a personal emotional release. He volunteered for the army and rose to commissioned rank before transferring to the air force. Germany’s defeat came as a profound shock. Enrolling at Munich University to study Political Economy, his life was given a new direction when in 1920 he heard Hitler speak at a meeting of the young National Socialist German Workers’ (‘Nazi’) Party, and promise to restore Germany’s honour. He became Hitler’s most faithful follower, his co-writer for his memoirs, his secretary and when he achieved power in 1933, his deputy.
HESS, Wolf Rüdiger The only son of Rudolf and Ilse Hess, born in November 1937 and only three-and-a-half years old when his father flew off to Scotland and captivity. After the war he qualified as an engineer and entered government service. He did not see his father again until at the age of 32 on Christmas Eve 1969 he visited him in Spandau prison with his mother. He led a vigorous but ultimately unsuccessful international campaign to have his father freed, edited a volume of his father’s letters and wrote two books about his father’s mission to Britain and inhumane period of imprisonment. He died in 2001.
HESSE, Prince Philipp of After service in the First World War, Prince Philipp of Hesse studied art history and architecture in Darmstadt, but left without a degree and moved to Rome, where he set up as an interior designer. In 1925 he married Princess Matilda, daughter of the King of Italy. Impressed by Fascism in Italy, he joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and acted as go-between for Hitler with Mussolini, also as Hitler’s art agent in Italy. Both he and his wife were arrested and sent to concentration camps in 1943 as Hitler grew disenchanted with the princely houses; both survived the war.
HEYDRICH, Reinhard, grew up in a musical household: his father, Bruno, was a composer and opera singer who founded the Halle Conservatory of Music; his mother was a piano teacher. He himself became a talented violinist. As a schoolboy false rumours that his father had Jewish blood meant he was taunted as a Jew. Distinctly Aryan in appearance – over six feet tall with blond hair, blue eyes and a long, equine face – he nonetheless tried to distance himself from the jeers by joining aggressively anti-Semitic societies. He entered the navy in 1922 and formed a fateful friendship in the cadet training ship with an officer, Wilhelm Canaris (see above), famed for clandestine re-armament, who inspired him with interest in espionage and intelligence. When Himmler was looking for an intelligence officer in 1931 Heydrich was discharged from the navy, allegedly for breaking a marriage engagement, and engaged to establish an intelligence office for him, soon named the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD). It was the beginning of a diabolic partnership between Himmler and his new chief executive that was to define Nazi repression, aggression and genocide: both were morally blind and completely ruthless. Heydrich was assassinated in 1942 by British (SOE)-trained Czech agents.
HIMMLER, Heinrich Born into a middle-class Catholic family, second son of a Munich Gymnasium headmaster, he attended church regularly and was a model pupil at school, invariably near the top of his class. The exception was the gym, where he proved physically inept and suffered humiliation. He wanted to become an army officer, but the war ended too soon. Instead he turned to agriculture, but soon lost his job and became swept up in the post-war ferment of nationalist anti-Communist politics in Munich, serving in Ernst Röhm’s paramilitary Freikorps during the failed ‘Beerhall Putsch’, subsequently touring rural Bavaria on anti-Communist, anti-Jewish speaking tours for the Nazi Party, and organising protection squads (Schutzstaffeln or SS) for party meetings. His conscientiousness in this role led to his appointment as Reichsführer-SS (National Leader-SS) in 1929 just as hyper-inflation was boosting party membership. He forged the SS into a pure-blooded (no Jewish ancestors) praetorian guard loyal to the Führer, attracting many from the higher social classes into the officer corps, including Reinhard Heydrich, whom he made chief of his Security Service. After the Nazis came to power he took over the secret state police (Gestapo) and formed a closed triangle of repression: SS–Gestapo–concentration camps. Commissioned by Hitler to eliminate European Jewry, he charged Heydrich with the detailed planning of what in 1942 became industrialised murder. Captured at the end of the war, he committed suicide with a poison pill.
HITLER, Adolf Son of an Austrian customs official who disciplined him savagely and a doting mother who spoiled him. At elementary school he was a leader of other boys playing war games, which he loved, but, sent to a Realschule (Technical Secondary School) in Linz, he hated it and failed to apply himself. Characterised by one teacher as stubborn and hot-tempered, he fantasised about becoming a great artist, but when he applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1907, he was rejected. His mother was stricken with cancer and he looked after her until she died, then moved to Vienna, living an indolent life, but painting city scenes, which he sold. Thence in 1913 he moved to Munich, artistic capital of Germany, there greeting the outbreak of the First World War with enthusiasm, and enlisting in the Bavarian infantry. He served with courage as a despatch runner on the western front and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st class, but rose no higher than corporal. In the turbulence after the war he was employed by the army to infiltrate the German Workers’ Party in Munich (soon changed to the National Socialist German Workers’, or ‘Nazi’, Party). He proved its most effective orator, and after discharge from the army became principal propagandist and leader of the party, drawing large crowds when he spoke. He played on the resentments and prejudices of his audiences, blaming the lost war and humiliation of the Versailles Treaty on international Jewry. As hyper-inflation ruined lives, swelling both Nazi and Communist Party membership, he struck deals with nationalist politicians and military and industrial chiefs who in 1933 brought him to power to defeat Communism and remove the limitations imposed on the armed forces by the Versailles Treaty. He used the burning of the Parliament building, the Reichstag, allegedly by a Communist, to liquidate the rule of law, establish a dictatorship and arm for war to smash Soviet Russia and gain hegemony in Europe. His overriding emotional goal was the purification of German blood; analysis of his writings and speeches suggests he suspected he himself had Jewish blood, but this Hebrew ancestor, if he existed, has never been found. At the end of the war he forced on Europe he committed suicide under the ruins of Berlin.
HOARE, Sir Samuel High-flying Conservative politician who first entered Parliament in 1910. His health prevented him serving in the First World War, but he learned Russian and was recruited into the Secret Service and served in St Petersburg, then Rome. Between the wars he held senior posts in government: Secretary of State for Air; for India; Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary. A supporter of Chamberlain’s ‘appeasement’ policy, he was subsequently blamed as one of the ‘guilty men’ opposing re-armament. Churchill dismissed him when he came to power in May 1940, but subsequently sent him as Ambassador to Madrid specifically to prevent General Franco from bringing Spain into the war on the side of the dictators. In this he succeeded, but it was his last appointment. He died in 1959.
HOHENLOHE, Prince Max zu Descended from one of Germany’s oldest and most illustrious princely houses with great estates in the Sudetenland and Spain and a wide circle of social contacts, he was a member of Himmler’s influential ‘Circle of Friends’ supporting the growth of the SS. A friend of Göring, he offered his services as a mediator between Germany and Britain before the outbreak of war, and continued to meet British agents and ambassadors throughout the war, reporting back to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin.
JAHNKE, Kurt Born into a Junker (landowning) family in the Prussian province of Posen in 1882, Jahnke emigrated to the United States at age sixteen, joined the US Marines and became a US citizen. During the First World War he worked for the German navy as an intelligence and sabotage
agent based in San Francisco, continuing his activities from Mexico after America entered the war. Returning to Germany during a period of secret German armament co-operation with the Soviets in the early 1920s, he worked for the Fourth Department of the Soviet Commissariat for War. Subsequently he created his own intelligence bureau in Berlin, working closely with Admiral Canaris (see above) and in the late 1930s was certainly in touch with the British, including Vansittart’s agents. His bureau was merged with Hess’s intelligence department under Pfeffer von Salomon before the outbreak of war, but dissolved for an unexplained reason in April 1940, when he was engaged as adviser to Walter Schellenberg, head of foreign counter-intelligence in Himmler’s Security Service (SD). Jahnke had a Swiss wife with whom he frequently visited Switzerland. After Hess’s flight to Scotland Schellenberg received a detailed report of Jahnke’s activities as a top-level British agent who met his contacts in Switzerland. Jahnke denied it. There is no doubt that he and his secretary and agent-runner, Carl Marcus, hated Hitler and Nazism. He was captured by the Russians in 1945 and executed; other reports have him returning to live in Berlin or Switzerland.
KENT, Duke of Prince George, fourth son of King George V, shared with his eldest brother Edward, Prince of Wales (subsequently Edward VIII and, after abdication, Duke of Windsor – see below), admiration for the benefits Nazism had brought Germany, and acted as conduit between Edward and the German Ambassador in London, von Ribbentrop. While taking royal duties seriously, he was also a cocaine-using bisexual playboy who had many affairs with both sexes. Married to Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark, they made one of the most glamorous couples on the international circuit. In April 1940 he joined the staff of RAF Training Command with the rank of Group Captain, subsequently touring RAF bases on morale-boosting visits. He was killed in an unexplained air crash in August 1942.
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