Hess, Hitler and Churchill

by Peter Padfield

  This hardly accords with the pathological anti-Semitism displayed in Mein Kampf – typed by Hess. A passage alleging that German defeat in 1918 had been caused by Marxists at home fomenting revolution behind the fighting front continues:

  If at the beginning of the war or during the war one had held twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew Volk-corrupters under poison gas such as hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers … had to endure in the field then the millionfold sacrifices of the front would not have been in vain.18

  This can be matched to a letter Hess wrote to Ilse Pröhl from Landsberg two weeks after the letter to Haushofer. He had taken tea to Hitler in his room and stayed to hear the latest section of his memoirs describing his arrival on the front line in Flanders in 1914 and the fear he had felt, constricting his chest and making his legs weak. Gradually he had overcome it; by the winter of 1915/16 he had been completely free of fear. Hess ended:

  … he spoke of his battles and injuries and then of the treachery at home – ‘oh, I will take a merciless and fearful revenge on the day I can do so! I will avenge in the name of the dead I saw before me then!’ We were silent when he stopped reading; but as I left we pressed our hands together for a long time – I am devoted to him more than ever! I love him.19

  DEPUTY FÜHRER

  Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933, sponsored by military, political and industrial power groups determined to launch Germany on a second bid for European and world mastery. He was the tool needed to bring the masses on side. Hess – now married to Ilse Pröhl – had been his secretary and confidant throughout this improbable journey from fortress detention a decade earlier. Recently he had accompanied him to a vital meeting with the leading conservative politician, von Papen. The deal was clinched after Hitler expounded his simple policy to bring order to political life: remove all Social Democrats, Communists and Jews from leading positions.

  The first two groups were suppressed in short time after he became Chancellor. An arson attempt in the Reichstag attributed to the Communists provided a pretext for rounding up and interning Communist and socialist leaders,20 and in the atmosphere of terror created­ Hitler was able to gain the necessary majority in the Reichstag for a law enabling him to govern without further parliamentary restraint.

  The following month, April, he appointed Hess his Stellvertreter, or deputy. Hess had no ministerial portfolio but ran the Verbindungsstab, a liaison office co-ordinating policy between Nazi Party headquarters in Munich and government and state ministries – insofar as policy was not simply handed down from the Führer. His offices in the Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin, also served as nerve centre for a bewildering network of intelligence agencies, overt and covert. Besides the internal secret state police services and the central security service, military intelligence and counter-intelligence, telephone and signals intercept services and agents from organisations of Germans living abroad, who reported to his office, he had his own diplomatic intelligence service, which, according to its chief, Captain Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, had penetrated the British, French, US and Russian embassies in London, Paris and Moscow.21 In addition to mediation and surveillance, Hess acted as a super ombudsman to whom every German had the right to appeal with his concerns.22

  Hitler had neutered parliament, but his control of the country could not be complete until he had either gained the loyalty of the military standing behind the elite groups which had sponsored him as Chancellor or, on the other hand, replaced them with his own paramilitary street-fighting force, the SA, under its chief, Ernst Röhm. The army leaders feared Röhm, with reason; consequently Hitler had to choose between them and his long-time ally. He chose the established military, and on 30 June 1934 – known afterwards as ‘the night of the long knives’ – Röhm and senior colleagues and other enemies of the party were rounded up and thrown into jail, where many were shot. It was done in collusion with the military, on the understanding that on the death of the ailing President, von Hindenburg, Hitler would be appointed President – while retaining his position as Chancellor.

  Von Hindenburg died in August. The army chiefs kept their side of the bargain and the loyal oath, bedrock of military commitment, was reaffirmed as ‘unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the Reich and of the German people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces …’ He had achieved total power.

  Hess had a central role in the deception campaign preceding the coup and afterwards; closeted alone with Hitler at party headquarters, he argued long and passionately for clemency for many on the ‘death list’ of those to be executed. According to his adjutant, who heard the altercation from an adjacent room, he refused to be intimidated by Hitler’s strongest outbursts and several men were spared – although not Röhm. When his name came up, Hess insisted he be shot: he was prepared to shoot the man himself.23

  Nonetheless, the purge of the SA leadership took a toll on his psychological resources. His adjutant testified after the war that the example of Hitler’s personal brutality ‘deeply wounded his marked, almost feminine sensitivities’, ageing him by years.24 It is significant that the way he signed his name changed about this time. What had been a flowing signature rising confidently in a straight line now drooped at the end to form an arc. Even the shortened version, ‘R. Hess’, dipped despondently at the end.

  Although in theory he was second only to Hitler in the councils of both state and party, formal structures counted for little in the Führer system of government by decree, and Hess, lacking the qualities of vivid showmanship or aptitude for faction of other paladins vying for Hitler’s favour, appears almost to have exaggerated his natural tendencies in the opposite direction towards reticence, humility, asceticism and mysticism, and to offset the ostentation of so many in the new elite he seems to have made a virtue of idealism and incorruptibility, turning himself into ‘the conscience of the party’. At the same time his goal remained, in the words of his adjutant, ‘to be the most loyal interpreter of Hitler’.25 These were impossible positions to straddle, especially in the chaotic system of parallel responsibilities that passed for government in Hitler’s administration. As a result his health suffered. He was subject to sleeplessness and griping stomach pains which confined him to bed for days at a time. Conventional doctors failed to find a cause, and he turned increasingly to herbalists, nature healers, mesmerists and astrologers.

  One problem that caused him particular concern at this time was the necessity to deal with ever more frequent outrages committed by Nazi Party rank and file against Jews.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Jewish question

  THE JEWISH QUESTION was at the core of Nazi ideology. Jews were seen as a parasitic and impure race which had to be eliminated from the national body. For Hitler it was an emotional imperative. His hatred of Jews was all-consuming, and from the early 1920s he had given vent in public and private to the most blood-curdling promises to eradicate them root and branch – ‘mit Stumpf und Stiel aus[zu]rotten’.1 Albert Speer, who observed Hitler closely during his years of power, reflected after the war on his ‘insane hatred of Jews’, concluding that this had been his central conviction, and everything else had been mere camouflage for this ‘real motivating factor’.2

  Speculation that Hitler’s obsession stemmed from a suspicion that his grandmother had been seduced by a Jew before she gave birth to his father – and that consequently his own blood was suspect – has not been validated. Prodigious research has failed to reveal the Jew supposed to have employed and seduced her. Nonetheless, Professor Robert Waite has produced telling indications from Hitler’s recorded speeches and conversations that he did indeed suspect he had Jewish blood from his father. In Mein Kampf he wrote – and Hess presumably typed – ‘the black-haired Jew-boy lurks for hours, his face set in a satanic leer, waiting for the blissfully innocent girl whom he defiles with his blood.’3 Jewish lust for pure German maidenhood was, of course, a cliché o
f popular anti-Semitic tracts.

  Whatever the root of Hitler’s phobia, he had given it open expression in speeches and conversation. He had talked of having gallows erected in Munich directly he had power: ‘Then the Jews will be hanged one after another, and they will stay hanging until they stink’;4 the same procedure would be adopted in other cities ‘until Germany is cleansed of the last Jew’. The word ‘cleansed’ is psychologically revealing, in terms of both his own blood and that of the ‘Aryans’ idealised by German nationalists as the ‘master race’ which was to inherit the earth, and which must be kept pure. Such a vision of eugenics on a national scale was recorded in Mein Kampf: ‘The völkisch state has to perform the most gigantic rearing task here. One day, however, it will appear as a deed greater than the most victorious wars of our present bourgeois era.’5 This was the task Hitler would lay on Heinrich Himmler.

  Two key works elaborating the theme were published in Munich in 1930, Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and Walther Darré’s New Nobility from Blood and Soil. Both stressed the need for laws to protect endangered Nordic Aryan blood by culling inferior-value specimens and promoting the selective breeding of the ‘ideal type’ inside a ‘closed blood source’. Himmler had made a start before Hitler attained power by selecting the tall, slender, fair-haired ‘ideal type’ for his praetorian guard, the SS.

  Rosenberg was the most influential exponent of the Nazi Party’s racial theories. An Estonian with German forbears and a romantic attachment to all things German, he had been a student in Moscow at the time of the Russian Revolution, and had come to Munich at about the same time as Hess convinced that Bolshevism was one arm of an international Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. Events in Munich at this period might have been designed to prove the point. Rosenberg had become Hitler’s intellectual mentor, editor of the Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, and pre-eminent party philosopher.

  The Jewish issue, the purity of the German bloodstock and the struggle against Bolshevism were thus linked at the heart of Nazi ideology­. Hess believed it uncritically; his numerous speeches on the Jewish question over the years leave no room for doubt. He told a mass rally in 1934 that National Socialism was ‘nothing but applied biology’,6 and among the party chief executives reporting to him was the Reichsärzteführer – the Reich Doctors’ Leader – Dr Gerhard Wagner, a vociferous advocate of anti-Jewish race laws, whose Head Office for Volks Health in Munich dealt with such matters as ‘Race Policy’ and ‘Kinship Investigation’.7

  Yet a precise answer to the Jewish question had not been formulated. Hitler’s accession to power had led to spontaneous action by party members against Jews and Jewish shops. The violence had provoked Jewish organisations abroad to call for a worldwide boycott of German goods, to which Nazi Party activists had responded by initiating a counter-boycott of Jewish shops and businesses in Germany. To placate the party and quell lawlessness on the streets, legal measures had been adopted to force Jews out of German life, beginning with a decree removing their right to sue for damages caused by pogroms and followed by laws excluding Jews from the Civil Service and the legal and medical professions. Many Jews with money and the skills to emigrate did so. Most remained, isolated within their communities.

  Fresh waves of violence battered them in 1935, inspired by Joseph Goebbels’ official propaganda machine and popular newspapers dispensing hatred and alarm at ‘racial defilement’. The scale of lawlessness and economic disruption became so damaging to the standing of the regime that in August Hitler called for the end of ‘individual actions’; Hess circulated the message to the party, insisting on the prosecution of anyone causing criminal damage or bodily harm to Jews. Since the activists to be disciplined were carrying out the central aim of the party – to eradicate Jewish influence and ‘contamination’ by Jewish blood – the situation was untenable. Pressure to achieve the party’s racial goal by legislation, making street action unnecessary, grew in leading government and party circles; the doctors’ leader Gerhard Wagner particularly called for a legal prohibition on sexual relations between Germans and Jews, and at the annual party rally in Nuremberg that September Hitler responded by announcing a ‘Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour’, which prohibited marriage or extra-marital relations between Jews and Germans, as well as a ‘Reich Citizenship Law’ depriving Jews of German citizenship.8

  What came to be known as the ‘Nuremberg Laws’ were followed by others reducing Jews to outcasts lacking any legal rights and enforcing their separation from Germans. Hess was an active participant in the process. He knew Hitler was determined to solve the ‘Jewish problem’ by removing them from the country, root and branch, but not how. And despite the brutal threats he had heard from him over the years, it is improbable he foresaw what was to become the ‘final solution’.

  THE ENGLISH QUESTION

  At the opposite pole to the Jewish-Bolshevik question stood the English question. The English were kinsmen, respected as much for their Aryan blood as for their control of a world empire. In Hitler’s strategic vision from the beginning they were necessary allies, or at least benevolent non-belligerents, so neutralising French hostility and securing the western borders while German armies thrust east to extirpate Jewish Bolshevism at source and gain Lebensraum for the Volk. He was determined not to repeat the Kaiser’s mistake of antagonising Britain by building a fleet to challenge the Royal Navy. Hess held these views as fervently: if only the British could be persuaded Hitler had no designs on their empire, they would welcome an agreement to remove the Russian-Bolshevik threat to India and the Middle East. He took English lessons to enable him to play his part in winning over influential Englishmen.

  One of the first of these was Geoffrey Shakespeare, a junior minister, who in 1933 took his son for treatment to a Bavarian Dr Gerl, with whom Hess was close. Hess invited Shakespeare on stalking expeditions after chamois and over the following years the English­man came to know him quite well. Later, he reported on him as ‘a man of some charm and a likeable creature’ of ‘superb personal courage’ but ‘no great intellectual gifts’; indeed, ‘he is the simplest of souls and incapable of acting a part.’ Shakespeare recognised Hess’s complete devotion to Hitler, ‘who is his god’; he also perceived a ‘queer streak of mysticism in his make-up, and his glance and countenance gave me the impression of an unbalanced mind’.9 After the war Karl Haushofer was to make similar comments about his former student’s lack of mental balance. He recalled having once sent him to his family physician, Dr Bock, ‘who discovered traces of infantilism’.10

  As for political and diplomatic skills, Shakespeare found Hess ‘a complete amateur’ with ‘no knowledge of government’:

  His fixed idea when I met him was that there was no reason why Germany could not exercise supreme power in Europe without lessening the power of the British Empire in the world. England and Germany between them could govern the world. I do not think he liked England, but he admired the English in many ways … He hated Russia and all it stood for.11

  Hess never altered these views.

  * * *

  England Politik reached its high point in 1935 when Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s improbably titled Commissioner for Disarmament Questions, brought home a bilateral naval agreement with Britain, limiting the Kriegsmarine to 35 per cent of the size of the Royal Navy. For Britain it was a shameful deal, in effect abandoning her former ally, France, and the aspirations for preserving peace through ‘collective security’ agreed at Versailles, gaining in return only an empty pledge. There was a failure in Britain to understand the nature and dynamic of Hitler’s Reich; there was also much sympathy for Germany in the highest circles. The Royal family, landed and banking interests especially saw Russia and Communism as the greater threat to the Empire and their established position, and subscribed to Goebbels’ line that Nazi Germany formed a barrier against the spread of international Communism. In extr
eme form, as expressed by the Governor of the Bank of England, Hitler and the President of the Reichsbank were ‘the bulwarks of civilisation … fighting the war of our system of society against Communism’.12

  Senior officers of the armed forces held similar views. In the aftermath of the first war public feeling had run strongly against armaments as a cause of war, and all three services had been starved of funds. The naval staff knew they could not defend the eastern Empire against the rising power of Japan while engaged against Germany and Italy in the West, and hankered after a ‘blue ocean’ policy without European entanglements. Neither had the army general staff any wish to repeat the appalling bloodbath on the Continent, while the air staff recognised that the advent of bombing aircraft had altered traditional British strategy by removing the sea-bound invulnerability of the homeland. Aerial bombing was feared by all who thought seriously on defence matters.

  The air staff had been an early target of Hitler’s campaign of amity. In 1934 Rosenberg had invited the head of British Air Intelligence, Group Captain Frederick Winterbotham, to Germany and introduced him to Hitler, Hess and officers of the general staff, who had openly explained their plans for the conquest of Russian space by tank columns supported from the air.13 The courtship continued, intensifying in summer 1936 at the time of the Berlin Olympic Games. The capital was transformed for the occasion. Swastika banners 45 feet tall were planted down Unter den Linden, in place of the lime trees from which this main thoroughfare took its name. Anti-Semitic notices and graffiti were removed from buildings and shop fronts; the chief Jew-baiting paper, Der Stürmer, disappeared from reading boxes at street corners; political prisoners on forced labour were kept from the vicinity of roads where they might be seen.14