Hess, Hitler and Churchill

by Peter Padfield

  The significance of this case in relation to Hess’s flight to Britain arises from comments made much later by Sir Maurice Oldfield, head of MI6, or ‘C’ during the Cold War. Interviewed about Hess by the journalist Phillip Knightley, Oldfield asked if Knightley knew that the head of Hess’s intelligence service had been an agent of the KGB, and followed this up by suggesting that he consider whether this KGB man had, perhaps, been behind Hess’s flight to Britain.27 Oldfield’s information appears to have come from a file on Hess he had removed from the MI6 registry to save it from destruction at a time when many files were being weeded.

  Jahnke, although not the head, was certainly the brains of Hess’s intelligence service, and fits Oldfield’s story better than the actual head, Pfeffer von Salomon, one of Hitler’s original ‘old fighters’. Reports in the recently released MI5 file on Jahnke reveal that both he and his secretary and agent-runner Dr Carl Marcus were opposed to Hitler and National Socialism, and probably had contacts with Communist circles;28 a report by Himmler’s counter-intelligence chief, Walter Schellenberg, who employed Jahnke later, stated that ‘he hated Hitler and nearly all Nazis’;29 and Schellenberg revealed in his post-war Memoirs that he once received a ‘detailed compilation of evidence proving that Jahnke was a top-level British agent’, who travelled to Switzerland to meet his British contacts.30

  It is clear from Liddell’s diary entry that Cowgill of MI6 ‘had been indirectly in touch’ with Jahnke in February 1940; and the index of documents in the MI5 file on Jahnke shows that correspondence about him with MI6 continued in March and April, July and December 1940, and picked up again on 2 May 1941,31 a week before Hess’s flight, although the documents themselves have been weeded from the file.

  THE ‘MADAGASCAR PLAN’

  Hitler’s field headquarters for his western campaign was in the Eifel massif west of the Rhine, close to both the Dutch and Belgian frontiers. Here on 25 May 1940 Himmler reported to him. After the conquest of Poland the previous year, Hitler had appointed him Commissar for the Consolidation of German Nationhood, with responsibility for settlement and population policy in the occupied east; he now presented Hitler with a memorandum containing his latest thoughts on the treatment of the Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, White Russians and other non-German ethnic groups in the newly acquired territory. His stated aim was to extinguish their national consciousness, deprive the young of education above primary school level and create ‘a leaderless work-Volk of annual itinerant labourers’ for their German masters.32

  Exceptions were to be made for children of good racial appearance: their parents would be notified that their child should attend school in Germany and remain in Germany permanently; thus ‘genetically valuable’ blood would be captured for the Reich: ‘Cruel and tragic as this may be in each individual case, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical extermination [Ausrottung] of a people from inner conviction as unGermanic and impossible, then this method is really the most lenient …’

  The sentence has drawn much attention. It suggests that at this date, May 1940, Himmler was not considering and had not yet been charged with the task of physically exterminating the Jews, an interpretation reinforced by the only detailed reference to Jews in the memorandum. It came in the context of removing all national consciousness from the different racial groups: ‘The concept “Jews” will be completely eliminated, I hope, through the possibility of a great exodus of all the Jews to Africa or otherwise into a colony.’33

  Hitler approved the memorandum and copies went to the governors of the provinces, or Gaus, into which the German half of Poland had been divided, to Hess’s secretary, Martin Bormann, and to other high officials, no doubt reinvigorating discussion of the ‘Jewish problem’. At all events, in early June a new young head of the Jewish department of the Foreign Ministry, Franz Rademacher, proposed a scheme for deporting Jews to the French Indian Ocean island of Madagascar. It was not a new idea. It had been mooted and investigated from long before the war. Rademacher updated it in the light of Hitler’s impending victory over France, suggesting that in the treaty ending the war France should be required to cede Madagascar to Germany under mandate. That the Royal Navy might prevent the shipment of Jews overseas was not considered a problem as England was expected to sue for peace after the defeat of her Continental ally.

  German troops entered Paris on 14 June; the armistice was signed eight days later. Hess, who was being treated by a masseur, Felix Kersten, for stomach cramps, accompanied Hitler to the signing ceremony. Returning afterwards to Kersten, he told him he was certain they would make peace with Britain as they had with France; the Führer had told him only a few weeks ago about the great value of the British Empire in the world. Germany and France had to stand together with Great Britain against Bolshevism, the enemy of Europe.34

  Kersten also treated Himmler, who had told him much the same thing in February. When Kersten asked why Britain should give up her traditional policy of preserving the balance of power on the continent, Himmler had said it was only the small ruling group backed by the Jews who wished to preserve the old policy; when the Führer made peace with England he would demand the expulsion of her Jews.35

  Churchill had, of course, resolved not to make peace. When this finally came home to the German leadership the ‘Madagascar Plan’ died a natural death. In the meantime, it appeared to gain brief approval. It was taken up by Eichmann, now heading the Department of Jewish Evacuation in Himmler’s Security Service Main Office, and the deportation of Jews to Poland was halted. Hitler mentioned the plan to Mussolini and others, including Goebbels, who noted it in his diary on 17 August: ‘The Jews we want to transport to Madagascar later. There they can build their own state.’36 In Eichmann’s project this was to be a police state controlled by the SS.

  To judge by Himmler’s memorandum of May 1940 and the subsequent detailed plans to deport European Jewry to Madagascar, it appears that the ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’ – physical extermination – was chosen only after expulsion overseas was rendered impossible by Britain’s refusal to make peace, that is, some time after the ‘Battle of Britain’ in autumn 1940. This is perhaps the consensus view of historians.

  An alternative view is that the Madagascar Plan was a deliberate deception fed the Jews and the outside world, particularly the United States with its influential Jewish lobby – for physical extermination had started with the war. Jews had been rounded up and slaughtered in local actions from the beginning of the Polish campaign; they had since been deliberately frozen to death in railway carriages, worked to death in labour camps, and many were dying of starvation in the ghettos into which they had been herded in major towns in Poland in the course of what Heydrich had termed in his September 1939 directive the preliminary stages of the ‘ultimate aim’ for the Jews. It is hard to understand why he had found it necessary to shroud the ‘ultimate aim’ in the strictest secrecy if it merely meant deportation out of Europe.

  When confronted with this directive of Heydrich’s at his trial long after the war, Eichmann could think of no other explanation for the term ‘ultimate aim’ than physical extermination, and had to agree that ‘this, call it basic, conception was already firmly established at this date, 21 September 1939.’37 His Israeli prosecutor had come to the same conclusion by studying Eichmann’s pre-trial police interrogation.38 And the most exhaustive recent study of Nazi Jewish policy concludes that behind the Madagascar project lay ‘the intention of bringing about the physical annihilation of the Jews under German rule’.39

  The same intention is also implicit in the first ‘General Plan East’ of May 1940, prepared in Himmler’s Head Office for the Consolidation of German Nationhood. This called for the deportation of all Jews in German-occupied Poland to the south-eastern province named the General Government, together with 3.4 million Poles, so freeing up settlement space for the introduction of 3.4 million ethnic Germans from the Reich and elsewhere.40 There can
be no doubt that, as in the updated General Plan East the following year, known as ‘the Hunger Plan’, those Jews and Poles crowded into the General Government were to be worked and starved to death.41

  * * *

  Ultimately the answer to the question of just when the physical annihilation of the Jews was decided depends on the pathology of the Führer. It is apparent from Mein Kampf and his speeches that he was a visceral anti-Semite. One speech stands out. It was made before the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, the sixth anniversary of his accession to power. He asserted that during his struggle for power the Jewish people had laughed at his prophecies that he would one day assume the leadership of the state and bring the ‘Jewish problem’ to a solution.

  Today I will be a prophet once more. If international finance-Jewry in Europe and outside should succeed in once more plunging the nations into a world war, then the consequences will not be the Bolshevisation of the world and thereby a victory for Jewry; but, on the contrary, the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.42

  Significantly, he was later to remind the world of this prophetic speech at the very time industrial methods were being applied to physical extermination of the Jews. No order or decree has been found to link him with this ‘ultimate’ or ‘final’ solution. Yet the gassing methods used were developed from ‘euthanasia’ programmes for the mentally ill or incurable – defined as ‘life unworthy of life’ – which he had demonstrably ordered in summer and autumn 1939. The first experimental group gassing had taken place in a disused prison in January 1940, and it was apparently the head of his Chancellery who suggested the ruse that came to be adopted to decoy the victims to their death: camouflaging gas chambers as shower rooms.43

  There are reasons for believing that the killing experiments conducted in the ‘euthanasia’ programmes were not only intended to devise an efficient method of mass killing, but also to act as a psychological selection process for those suited to administer the procedure. It was especially valuable in turning doctors into killers. In his study, The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton points to the involvement of doctors in every stage of the systematised genocide of the Jews, and he concludes that the ‘euthanasia’ programmes were crucial for breaking down the barriers between healing and killing, conditioning doctors for mass killing in the name of healing, or purifying the race.44

  If this was the intention and the physical liquidation of German and European Jews was on Hitler’s agenda before the outbreak of war – because certainly his primary goal was the purification of German blood – the Madagascar Plan was a deception of the kind Heydrich and Himmler used regularly against their enemies. In this light the reference Himmler made in his memorandum to ‘a great exodus of all the Jews to Africa or otherwise into a colony’ was at that time the agreed euphemism for physical extermination; and his rejection of extermination as ‘unGermanic’ applied to the Poles and other ethnic groups but not to Jews, whom he classed as Untermenschen, or sub-humans.

  The work of converting the general public, insofar as it still needed converting, to official anti-Jewish policy had also begun early in the war. Goebbels read the script for the film Jud Suss in November 1939, noting in his diary that it was ‘the first really anti-Semitic film’.45 Its effect, when released in the summer of 1940 about the time of the Madagascar Plan, was such that people coming out of the cinemas felt they wanted to wash their hands, and street demonstrators called for ridding Germany of the last Jew. Hess wrote Goebbels ‘a hymn of praise’ for the film.46

  PEACE OFFENSIVE

  Halifax and his undersecretary, ‘Rab’ Butler, shared Hitler’s expectation that Britain had to make peace after the fall of France. Since the demonstration of German armed might in the Norwegian campaign Butler had been working through Carl Burckhardt of the International Red Cross in Geneva for further contact with Prince Hohenlohe. The Prince, after sounding out Burckhardt and the British Ambassador in Berne in early May, had reported to Berlin that those in Britain who had opposed Churchill and his circle about intervention on the Continent were pointing out how right they had been: ‘Butler, in particular belongs to this group, [and] is overflowing with pessimism and feverishly seeking a way out.’47

  One path Butler was pursuing led through the Vatican. On 7 June he called in Kenneth de Courcy for his opinion on terms that might be acceptable. De Courcy had been secretary and intelligence officer of the Imperial Policy Group of high Tory and service circles – dissolved on the outbreak of war – which had lobbied against intervention on the Continent. De Courcy suggested that the US Ambassador, Kennedy, noted for his extreme pessimism about British prospects, be asked to press Roosevelt for an American peace initiative; Butler authorised him to put it to Kennedy, which he did, and found him surprisingly receptive.48

  Next day Butler told de Courcy Kennedy liked the idea and had already spoken to Halifax, who was delighted. He asked de Courcy to see Kennedy again. Before de Courcy could do so he received an urgent telephone call instructing him to meet Butler’s private secretary, ‘Chips’ Channon, on the bridge in St James’s Park. Both he and Channon were to express surprise at seeing each other.

  When they met Channon said to him, ‘My master is in deep trouble over this Kennedy business. I want you to go back to your office and destroy your file of letters with my master, then go up to Scotland for a couple of weeks and do not see any diplomats.’49 De Courcy assumed that Churchill had got wind of the proposal, and lay low for a while.

  On 17 June Butler himself, returning from lunch across St James’ Park, ‘chanced’ upon the Swedish Minister to London, Björn Prytz, and asked him to his room for a talk. It is probable that the encounter was arranged much as de Courcy’s had been,50 since the Swedish government was under pressure from Germany, particularly with regard to German troop movements through Sweden, and urgently needed to know London’s position after the fall of France. Butler told Prytz that Britain’s official attitude continued to be that the war must go on, but assured him that ‘no opportunity would be neglected for concluding a compromise peace if the chance was offered on reasonable conditions’, and added that ‘no diehards would be allowed to stand in the way.’51

  Butler then received an urgent summons from Halifax and left the room. He returned with a message from his master: ‘Common sense and not bravado would dictate the British government’s policy’, with the proviso that this should not be interpreted as ‘peace at any price’. Obviously Halifax had been aware of the meeting. Prytz reported his conversation by wire to Stockholm, where the Swedish Foreign Minister interpreted it as an indirect British approach to Berlin to pave the way for peace talks, and passed the contents to the Swedish ministers in Berlin and Moscow.52

  Churchill learned of the Butler–Prytz talk on the 26th and wrote to Halifax saying it was clear the Swede had derived a strong impression of defeatism; ‘would it not be well for you to find out from Butler what he did say.’ It was put to Butler the same day, and he wrote Halifax a letter denying he had given an impression of defeatism and omitting any mention of Halifax’s own input; whereupon Halifax assured Churchill he was completely satisfied with Butler’s discretion and loyalty to government policy.53 These incidents and the records of cabinet meetings of the period make it clear that Halifax and Butler were still running an appeasement policy in direct contravention of Churchill and behind his back.

  This was noticed in Berlin. Goebbels entered in his diary, ‘There are two parties [in the British government]: one thoroughgoing war party and one peace party. They wrestle for the upper hand.’54 And he noted that peace feelers had been extended via Sweden and Spain.

  On the 30th the head of the personal staff of the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, wrote to Prince Hohenlohe asking him to let him know if he heard of any approaches from the English. Hohenlohe visited Switzerland in early July, reporting afterwards that he had been told by Carl Burckhardt and others that the British Ambassador in Berne,
Sir David Kelly, wanted to see him. Kelly had found an opportunity at a diplomatic reception they both attended. Lady Kelly had found Hohenlohe first, urging him to lose no time in telling her husband what he thought about the possibilities for peace. Kelly then drew him into a side room and said he would like to discuss the situation and the future. Hohenlohe replied that if he were a postman for Churchill there was no more to be said. Kelly’s response was that their mutual friends in England, Butler, Vansittart and Halifax, had a following.55

  The meaning was clear: a strong opposition to Churchill existed. Yet it is inconceivable that Sir Robert Vansittart belonged in it. As Permanent Undersecretary or head of the Foreign Office before the war, ‘Van’ had been as dedicated as Churchill in warning of the danger of trying to appease Hitler.56 He had studied in Germany before the first war and saw Nazism not as an aberration but as the inevitable outcome of the militarism, hate and sense of racial superiority he had observed then.57 His unrelenting opposition to Chamberlain’s policy had led to his removal in 1938 into a specially created post outside active involvement in policy, titled, with exquisite irony, Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the Government.58 He retained sources of intelligence within Germany and western Europe though, and became active head of disinformation.59 His influence rose with Churchill’s accession to power, and for Kelly to link his name with Halifax and Butler is surely evidence of a deception campaign he was running for the Prime Minister. A poem Vansittart published in The Times that month indicates the clear water between him and those in Britain who sought a compromise peace: