Hess, Hitler and Churchill

by Peter Padfield

  Hess was at Hitler’s right hand at the grand opening ceremony on 1 August. Among the British guests of honour was a distinguished young aviator, the Marquis of Clydesdale, MP, heir to the dukedoms of Hamilton and Brandon. Hess himself was an enthusiastic flyer – in 1934 he had won the ‘Round the Zugspitze’ air race – while Clydesdale had been the first pilot to overfly Mount Everest. There were ample opportunities for the two to meet at official functions during the following days, and Clydesdale was precisely the sort of ‘influential Englishman’ Hess hoped to win round, but whether they did much more than exchange pleasantries seems doubtful.15 What is not in doubt is that Clydesdale had a long talk with Karl Haushofer’s son, Albrecht. For both men it was a fateful meeting.

  CLYDESDALE

  Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, Marquis of Clydesdale, was an uncomplicated sporting aristocrat. As a schoolboy he had boxed for Eton, and as an undergraduate for Oxford University; he had subsequently become amateur middleweight boxing champion of Scotland and toured the world, taking part in exhibition bouts to raise money for charity. He had taken up flying early, attaining the rank of squadron leader in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, reserve for the Royal Air Force, and commanded 602, City of Glasgow, Squadron.

  His flight over Mount Everest in 1933 had brought him worldwide fame; for readers of the popular press he was now ‘the Flying Marquis’. In a book written with his co-pilot on the expedition, and lifelong friend, David McIntyre, The Pilots’ Book of Everest, he ascribed their pioneering feat to the development of the super-charger and the large propeller.

  Clydesdale was Unionist Member of Parliament for East Renfrew, and it was as a member of a group of Parliamentarians observing the Olympics that he flew to Berlin in the summer of 1936. His real purpose was to see how the Luftwaffe was developing. He was accompanied by his brother, George – or ‘Geordie’ – who was also a squadron leader in the Auxiliary Air Force and commanded 603, City of Edinburgh, Squadron. Geordie had gained a Bachelor of Law degree from Edinburgh University after coming down from Oxford, and subsequently attended the Universities of Bonn and Vienna and the Sorbonne. Recently he had been admitted to the Scottish Bar (Faculty of Advocates). He spoke German, and since he later became the wartime chief of intelligence at RAF Fighter Command it is reasonable to assume that he, too, was keen to see something of the Luftwaffe.

  Clydesdale had two other brothers, Lords David and Malcolm Douglas-Hamilton. Both were officers in the Auxiliary Air Force and, like Clydesdale himself, both belonged to the Anglo-German Fellowship, one of several British societies dedicated to promoting trade and good relations between the two countries. David had a special interest in German social policies – although he abhorred Nazi methods – and had gained practical experience working in German labour camps. He spoke the language enthusiastically, if not always grammatically, and among his many German contacts, one whom he found especially interesting, and talked about to Clydesdale, was Karl Haushofer’s eldest son, Albrecht. When, at one of the official functions during the Olympics, Clydesdale and Albrecht found themselves at the same dinner, each already knew much about the other.16

  Albrecht was a fluent English speaker. Like his father he combined powerful intellect with personal, if somewhat heavy charm. External brilliance hid a tortured soul. He was, after all, through his mother a quarter Jew, legally excluded from any part in German life. That he was, nonetheless, attending a state banquet was entirely due to Hess. Under Hess’s protection he held a post teaching geography and geopolitics at the High School for Politics in Berlin, and travelled extensively, reporting particularly on attitudes in Great Britain and the United States for his father’s journal, Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, and to Hess. He was Hess’s principal expert on England and the Anglo-Saxon world. In a letter he wrote to Hess late in 1933 to express his gratitude that he and his brother, Heinz, had ‘not been swept on to the rubbish heap as Germans of inferior value’, he assured him of his ‘full personal commitment to him as a person’.17

  The words were carefully chosen. For while both he and his father were agreed on the general direction of German foreign policy – indeed, as has been seen, the policy was inspired in large part by Karl Haushofer’s geopolitical theory – both had strong reservations about Hitler and the NSDAP. Albrecht was a poet and playwright as well as a formidable scholar, and was far too sensitive and intelligent not to be acutely aware of the moral knife-edge on which he and his father were balancing. In July 1934, after the Austrian Chancellor had been murdered by local Nazis supported by Hitler and his own patron, he had written to his parents wondering ‘how long we can continue to carry the responsibility which we bear, and which starts little by little to turn into historic guilt or at least complicity’.18 And a month later, on his father’s birthday, he had expressed his doubts to his mother in even more pessimistic and prophetic vein, suggesting he should not wish his father ‘something which no one may wish a man, before he has to experience things which are best left unspoken. That says basically all that I expect and do not expect of the future.’19

  That autumn, less than a year after his letter of gratitude and commitment to Hess, he told a trusted student in Berlin about a small, close circle who were watching developments with a view to overthrowing the regime.20 Among the conspirators he named were the Prussian Minister of Finance, Johannes Popitz; the chief of the general staff, General Ludwig Beck; and later the diplomat, Ulrich von Hassell, a lynchpin in the undercover opposition to Hitler. Nonetheless, Albrecht continued to work for Hess in the belief that he could do more for the opposition while close to the centre of power. At the same time he knew his patron was completely devoted to the tyrant they sought to depose. It was an irreconcilable dilemma. ‘We are all indeed in the position of “conflicting obligations”,’ he had written to his parents in 1934, ‘and must carry on even if the task has become completely hopeless.’21

  He could hardly reveal his inner conflicts to Clydesdale and other British politicians at their first meeting during the Olympics. He gave them the party line: in return for modifications to the Versailles Treaty, Hitler would moderate German armaments and foreign policy. For his part, he had access to Hess and would do everything he could to persuade the Deputy Führer to use his influence in this direction. Albrecht knew this accorded with current policy in London. British politicians were bent on bringing Germany back into the comity of nations by ‘appeasing’ her demands for an end to the ‘unjust’ terms of the Versailles Treaty. This policy, dictated by weakness and the failure of ‘Collective Security’ under the League of Nations, was argued on high moral grounds as a search for ‘just solutions by negotiation in the light of higher reason instead of resort to force’.22 The Anglo-German Naval Agreement had been just such. For Hitler, the next stage was to convert the agreement into a tacit alliance that would free him to strike east against the Jewish-Bolshevik enemy. Albrecht was playing his part in this diplomatic drive, which agreed entirely with his own geopolitical convictions.

  Accordingly, when Clydesdale told him he would like to see something of the German Air Force, Albrecht introduced him to its chief, Hermann Göring, at an extravagant party laid on by the great man at his Karinhall estate outside Berlin. Göring called over his chief lieutenant in the covert development of the Luftwaffe, General Erhard Milch, and told him to give Clydesdale a tour of aerodromes. Interestingly, Milch’s genealogical table showed him as half Jew; his mother, however, had sworn his real father was Aryan. He offered to show Clydesdale anything he would like to see, adding with emphasis, ‘I feel we have a common enemy in Bolshevism.’23

  This was, of course, precisely the line Hitler, Hess and the officers of the general staff had taken two years earlier with the head of British Air Intelligence, Group Captain Winterbotham. Clydesdale was taken to see three Luftwaffe airfields that August, and in October, at Milch’s invitation, he visited the Junkers factory at Dessau producing bomber aircraft, and a plant making diesel aero
engines. He was left in no doubt about the pace with which the Luftwaffe was being expanded or the importance it was accorded in German military planning.

  Both Clydesdale and Albrecht Haushofer made sure that their acquaintance begun at the Berlin Olympics was refreshed. Thus at the end of 1936 Albrecht sent seasonal greetings to Clydesdale in Scotland, while Clydesdale, on a skiing holiday in Austria at the time, called on Albrecht in Bavaria on his way home. Albrecht drove him to see his parents at their estate. Geopolitics was not discussed. Afterwards Clydesdale sent Karl Haushofer a copy of The Pilot’s Book of Everest, and wrote to Albrecht to say that he had put his name before the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House.24 Albrecht replied that he would be happy to speak at the Institute; he would, in any case, be in London in March (1937) and hoped to see Clydesdale then.

  To judge by the way Albrecht was introduced to the Chatham House audience before he spoke on ‘Raw Materials and Colonies: A German Point of View’, ‘appeasement’ was very much alive at that august institution. It somehow survived even the crass analogy he used during his talk, likening the world war, a cosmic catastrophe, to a schoolyard brawl in which one of the bigger boys was set upon and kicked down by more numerous opponents, who then punished him, took his exotic toys – colonies – for themselves and forced him to sign a declaration that he was not fit to play with them – a ponderous allusion to German humiliation at Versailles. In his refusal to accept Berlin’s responsibility for the outbreak of the war, hence the essential justice of her punishment at Versailles,25 Albrecht revealed that beneath his genial exterior he nursed the malign prejudices of German nationalism. Clydesdale no doubt accepted his attitude in the interests of fair play or ‘appeasement’, to which he and his brothers and all members of the Anglo-German Fellowship were dedicated; in any event, Albrecht stayed at Clydesdale’s home after the talk, and in later correspondence and meetings they used Christian names, ‘Douglo’ and Albrecht, in place of formal address.

  It is not clear whether they became real friends or whether their continuing association was chiefly political. Both were working for amity between their two countries; each had the highest-level contacts in his own country. Albrecht assumed that Clydesdale was formally or informally an agent for the British Secret Service, and presumably Air Intelligence; Clydesdale knew that Albrecht was working for the Deputy Führer. They had to keep in touch. Towards the end of that year, 1937, when Clydesdale was about to marry, Albrecht wrote to send him his thoughts ‘and a very strong feeling of friendship’ as he stepped to the altar.26 Perhaps he meant it.

  Clydesdale married Lady Elizabeth Percy at St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, in November. She was the daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, an aristocrat at the extreme end of the anti-Bolshevik spectrum. He had served as a Guards officer in the Boer War and the Great War, and since the early 1920s had financed and produced a radical weekly journal, The Patriot, promoting anti-Communism and anti-Semitism. One of his leading writers, Nesta Webster, an occultist and conspiracy theorist, believed as fervently as Alfred Rosenberg in the Jewish plot to subvert civilisation. In one article for The Patriot she suggested that Hitler had successfully halted the Jewish attempt to control the world.27 Lady Elizabeth was too intelligent to swallow such views; there is no doubt, however, that they had a place in the circles in which she and Clydesdale moved.

  In April 1938 Albrecht stayed with Clydesdale at his Scottish home, Dungavel House, south of Glasgow. Hitler had recently seized control of Austria, and Albrecht expressed such concern about his further intentions that Clydesdale wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, informing him that Dr Albrecht Haushofer would be in London the following week and might have interesting information. Halifax was not able to see him, but Albrecht did speak at length to two of his colleagues at the Foreign Office, leaving them in no doubt about Hitler’s intentions for further advance in Czechoslovakia.28

  HALIFAX

  Hitler recognised before the British government that his hand of friendship would be spurned. From the beginning he had concentrated on armaments at the expense of exports; by summer 1936 a predictable foreign exchange crisis was threatening the import of food and vital raw materials. Rather than retreat, characteristically Hitler had advanced, decreeing increased arms production within a four-year plan for a self-sufficient war economy. Instead of trading in the world market, he would seize what was needed by force from Austria and Czechoslovakia as staging posts for his drive east for Lebensraum – hence Albrecht Haushofer’s warning to Clydesdale and the Foreign Office.

  Hitler knew that Britain and France must oppose Germany’s forceful expansion; yet he was frustrated by Britain’s cool response to his proposal for allowing her to keep her worldwide empire if she would only allow him his way on the continent of Europe, and he now viewed Italy under the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini as a more satisfactory friend. In November 1937, he revealed his strategy to his Foreign Minister, War Minister and service chiefs at a conference usually called by the name of his adjutant, Colonel Hossbach, who took notes. He left them in no doubt that he regarded Britain and France as ‘two hate enemies’ whom they would have to confront.29

  The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, had yet to take his full measure. The clues were abundant, but both were too rational to comprehend the hate and opportunism driving his conduct. Halifax was halfway there. He had met the Führer for the first time early that November, afterwards recording in his diary, ‘we had a different set of values and were speaking a different language.’30 This had not prevented Halifax from hinting at the possibility of territorial ‘alterations’ in the cases of Austria, Czechoslovakia and the Polish port of Danzig – precisely what realists in the Foreign Office had warned him not to do. It was full-blown ‘appeasement’ for the injustices Germany was supposed to have suffered at Versailles.

  The next day, Halifax had met Göring at his Karinhall estate. The great man was dressed in a green hunting costume with a chamois tuft in his hat and a dagger sheathed in red leather at his waist. His manner was equally extravagant, but Halifax was attracted by his personality and completely taken in by his assurances that Germany had no aggressive intentions.31

  This was disproved the following year. In the spring Hitler seized control of Austria with a mixture of internal subversion and military menaces, and in the autumn threatened to march on Czechoslovakia. Halifax at last saw the cloven hoof, and although Chamberlain, in collusion with the French, bought Hitler off at a conference in Munich by persuading the Czech government to hand over parts of their territory – returning home waving a peace pact he had persuaded Hitler to sign – Halifax knew there could be no more appeasement to Hitler or Nazism.

  Vindication of his about turn, if any were needed, came little over a month later, on the night of 9/10 November, when the terror subsequently known as Reichskristallnacht – or ‘night of broken glass’ – was unleashed in supposedly spontaneous mob actions against Jews throughout Germany; some 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed, 267 synagogues burned down or damaged, hundreds of Jews beaten – many to death – and 25,000 male Jews confined in concentration camps. A British diplomat in Berlin wrote of the forces of medieval barbarism let loose. Halifax was revolted. A patrician of deep religious conviction – nicknamed ‘the Holy Fox’ for his Anglicanism and love of fox hunting, and scorned by Hitler after their meeting as ‘the English parson’ – he was moved to initiate a discussion in cabinet about action to help German Jews. Mass emigration to Palestine, which Britain administered under a Mandate of the League of Nations, could not be contemplated because of the hostility it would arouse in the Arab world, but Western Australia and British Guiana were considered briefly as possible Jewish homelands.32

  Reichskristallnacht had an equally profound effect on Hess. The oppositionist von Hassell recorded in his diary how Hess’s old Munich friends, the Bruckmanns, had told him of Hess’s
despair at the nationwide pogrom; he had been depressed ‘as never before’ and beseeched the Führer to stop the outrages, without success.33 Certainly Hess was suffering frequent bouts of illness and sleeplessness at this period.

  The internal German opposition had gained impetus to act against Hitler after he outlined his war strategy at the ‘Hossbach’ conference. Emissaries had been despatched to London and New York urging the Western powers to stand firm in the face of Hitler’s demands, arguing that this would bring on a crisis of confidence within Germany that would allow the army to stage a coup. However, Hitler had taken steps to cripple the centre of resistance. He had caused the resignations through scandal of the War Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the Army, appointed himself Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, promoted a more malleable officer, von Brauchitsch, as Army Commander-in-Chief and, crucially, bypassed the army general staff by raising a co-ordinating department of younger, Nazified officers in the War Ministry to the status of Armed Services High Command.

  These changes made it virtually impossible for the traditional army and aristocratic elite, termed the Reaktion, to mount a successful coup. Nonetheless, figures from the opposition continued to nourish representatives of the Foreign Office in London with prospects of a ‘generals’ revolt’. Halifax, while treating their reports with caution, seems to have clung to his opinion of Göring as a rational leader who might be encouraged to take Germany on a peaceable course. Meanwhile he attempted by all diplomatic and economic means to ensure Hitler could not penetrate further into south-eastern Europe.34