Hess, Hitler and Churchill

by Peter Padfield

  It will be recalled that a copy of Albrecht Haushofer’s 23 September letter to Hamilton via Mrs Violet Roberts had been sent to the IRB (code name for SOE) by Censorship on 6 November. It is now known from John Harris’s researches that Mrs Roberts was the aunt of Walter Stewart Roberts, a contemporary of Stewart Menzies at Eton, and with him in the prefectorial society ‘Pop’, who was recruited into SOE as ‘Establishment and Finance Officer’ in November 1940.75 Violet Roberts was evidently close to him since after the tragic death of her only son, Patrick, in a car crash in 1938 she lived for a time in Walter’s London house – that at least was the address she gave on the probate papers for Patrick’s estate.76 Her husband had died some years before.

  By 1940 she had moved back to Cambridge. MI5, besides finding her Cambridge address from Thomas Cook & Sons on 29 November 1940, had established that her letter had been addressed to Martha Haushofer, Munich, and sent on 26 July.77 Yet no further action appears to have been taken until almost four months later on 22 March 1941 when Robertson’s deputy in B1a, John Marriott, sent a letter to the Regional Security Officer in Cambridge, Captain C.M. Hughes, asking him to check up on Mrs Roberts.78 Police enquiries turned up nothing, and Hughes appears to have forgotten the matter until 14 May when, accompanied by an inspector from the Cambridge force, he visited her at her home, 10 Wilberforce Road.79 It is hard to imagine this was not prompted by the news of Hess’s arrival in Scotland three nights before.

  Hughes and the inspector were ushered into a drawing room hung with religious pictures. Soon afterwards Mrs Roberts came in, a small, very thin woman in her early seventies with grey hair and grey eyes. ‘As soon as she began to talk,’ Hughes reported, ‘I realised that she was a well-educated, intelligent and very alive woman.’80

  She told him she had known the Haushofers for a long time and had stayed with them in Germany. Their son Patrick had been very friendly with Albrecht Haushofer and had brought him to stay with her and her husband in Cambridge on occasions when Albrecht was in England. She had never written to Albrecht, nor he to her. He was a friend of Hess, and she added that she had met Hess, who agreed with Professor Haushofer’s geopolitical principles.

  As to her July 1940 letter, she had been in constant communication with Martha Haushofer before the war, and when, after the outbreak of war, a German-born friend of hers, a Mrs Stephenson, told her about Thomas Cook’s facilities for communicating across enemy frontiers, she had decided to use them to continue her correspondence with Martha.

  Hughes concluded his report of the interview by stating that he had established at least two important facts: the letter from Albrecht was unusual since he had never written to her before; secondly, she did not know the Duke of Hamilton.81

  If Hughes asked to see examples of her pre-war correspondence with Martha Haushofer he did not mention it. He was evidently struck by her intelligence, and accepted all she told him. There the matter should, perhaps, rest – except that there is a curious postscript. She had written another letter to Martha some five weeks before this interview, on 6 April. Again, if she told Hughes about it he did not allude to it in his report.

  This second letter was until recently in the German Federal Archives in Koblenz. One scholar who saw it in the 1990s describes it as a reply to a postcard from Martha Haushofer about family affairs, not a reply to Albrecht Haushofer’s September 1940 letter, which she did not mention.82 Evidently that had never reached her. Her reply to Martha dealt with mundane matters such as reading and gardening; ‘a real letter’ was impossible, she wrote – since she was obviously aware of censorship – but she wanted to send her old friend and her family a message of love and friendship. It was a testament to the warm relationship between the two women.

  It was picked up by German Censorship, passed to the Gestapo and Martha was summoned for interview on 29 August 1941. She evidently gave satisfactory explanations for they released the letter to her.83 It has now disappeared from the archive, but there is nothing to connect it with Hess’s mission; indeed she did not receive it until three months after his flight.

  Nor is Violet Roberts’ original July 1940 letter in the Haushofer papers in the Federal Archives; this is not surprising, perhaps, since it was addressed to Martha and was probably regarded as ephemeral. Moreover, there is nothing to connect it with her nephew, Walter, and she sent it some months before he joined SOE. There is nothing, therefore, to support a conjecture that he or a colleague in intelligence prompted her to re-establish contact with the Haushofers because they were known to be close to Hess. Nonetheless, in view of her close relationship with Walter, who had known Stewart Menzies at Eton and was inducted into SOE later that year, and in view of Hess’s subsequent flight to visit Albrecht Haushofer’s friend the Duke of Hamilton, her decision to write to Martha Haushofer in July 1940 after the fall of France, if a personal whim, was a remarkable coincidence.

  AIR INTELLIGENCE

  As noted previously, It was not until 11 January 1941 that Archie Boyle, head of Air Intelligence, was alerted to Albrecht Haushofer’s 23 September letter to Hamilton.84 Long after the war Colonel ‘Tar’ Robertson ascribed the delay since receipt of the letter partly to the disruption of MI5’s move to Blenheim Palace, chiefly to the fact that the letter was not considered especially important.85

  Boyle gave it no higher priority, for it was over a month later, on 26 February, that Group Captain F.G. Stammers of Air Intelligence wrote to Hamilton asking if he would be in London in the near future as he was anxious to have a chat with him on a certain matter.86 The Duke, it will be recalled, had taken ten days leave from 12 to 21 November the previous year, possibly in connection with MI5’s investigation into his ‘bona fides’. He had taken another ten days leave from 26 January to 4 February 1941. His diary for that period has the single word ‘Lesbury’87 – his brother-in-law’s estate near Alnwick, seat of the Dukes of Northumberland. It is evident he had no further leave due. Yet he took a third period of ten days from 8 to 17 March, presumably in response to Stammers’ letter.88

  During this time he made a statement to the Provost Marshal’s department at the Air Ministry about his relationship with Albrecht Haushofer, and was asked if he would be prepared to meet him in Lisbon. His answer, recorded in the Provost Marshal’s report was:

  if it would be of any service to my country I would naturally go and meet this man but I would like to suggest that a better man to go would be my brother, David Douglas-Hamilton, who is a flying instructor at Netheravon and who has a considerable intimate knowledge of Germany.89

  When Guy Liddell came to describe the case later in his diary he wrote, ‘eventually the Air Ministry produced his [Hamilton’s] brother. After further delay they got hold of the Duke himself …’,90 suggesting that Air Intelligence had talked to one of the Duke’s brothers before the Duke was interviewed. Whether this was David or George ‘Geordie’ Douglas-Hamilton, then chief of intelligence at RAF Fighter Command, is unclear since there is no record of either brother in the MI5 files on this case. However, Guy Liddell was never intimately concerned with the project – he believed, as noted earlier, that Karl Haushofer had written to Hamilton – and it is likely that the actual sequence of interviews was Hamilton first, then his brother and after further delay Hamilton again, as will appear.

  On 15 March, a few days after making his statement to the Provost Marshal, Hamilton reported to Group Captain Stammers at the Air Ministry. Stammers asked him what he had done with the letter from Haushofer. Hamilton assumed he meant Albrecht’s last letter before the war and replied that he had lodged it with his bank.

  ‘The one you have just received,’ Stammers said, and pushed a photostat copy of Albrecht’s 23 September letter across to him.91

  Hamilton had not received the original and never would. He read the copy with amazement, as he told the author James Leasor after the war.92 This indicates that his brother, whichever one it was, had not been intervi
ewed yet, otherwise Hamilton would undoubtedly have been alerted. Stammers then explained that Haushofer was believed to be a significant figure and asked if Hamilton would go to Lisbon to meet him. The Duke had, of course, already told the Provost Marshal that he would go, while suggesting his brother David as a better choice.

  Stammers sent Hamilton’s statement to Robertson on 19 March. Probably David, or possibly ‘Geordie’ was approached about this time, but there is no record in the MI5 file. The next paper is an internal note to Robertson from his deputy, J.H. Marriott, dated 24 March: ‘The case seems to have been allowed to go to sleep for no particular reason, but the position now is that HAMILTON is prepared to go to Lisbon, and I suggest that he do it forthwith.’93 Robertson wrote to Stammers the next day: ‘My own personal view is that the Duke should make a trip to Lisbon and get in touch with Haushofer. However, I will arrange to have this done through Air Commodore Boyle who has expressed his willingness to help us in this direction.’94

  Twelve days later, on 6 April, he saw Boyle, and followed it up on the 7th with a letter asking Boyle to send Hamilton to Lisbon on an official mission that would make his presence ‘unsuspected by anyone’. In order to cover the long delay since receipt of Albrecht’s letter, he proposed that Hamilton should take the line, ‘he wrote almost immediately but … the letter must have been lost in transit.’95

  Boyle replied two days later, on 9 April, that before he attempted to find a posting for Hamilton it would be necessary to get the story ‘absolutely tidied up and clean’; he would wait, therefore, until Robertson had seen the Duke himself.96

  The meeting took place a fortnight later on 25 April in Group Captain D.L. Blackford’s room at the Air Ministry. In the course of a long talk Robertson suggested to Hamilton that he would be given the necessary cover to go to Lisbon for about three weeks; when he arrived he should write to Albrecht to tell him he had managed to get there at last, and would be glad to see him again.

  ‘Hamilton seemed to get quite pleased with the plan,’ Robertson reported, ‘and in general quite willing to carry it out’, but found difficulty in seeing what would be gained. ‘A good deal of information about how Germany is weathering the war,’ Robertson replied, and offered to write a script for him.97 His report continued:

  Hamilton at the beginning of the war and still is a member of the community which sincerely believes that Great Britain will be willing to make peace with Germany provided the present regime in Germany were superseded by some reasonable form of government.

  This view, however, is tempered by the fact that he now considers that the only thing that this country can do is to fight the war to the finish, no matter what disaster and destruction befalls both countries …

  He is a slow-witted man, but at the same time he gets there in the end, and I feel that if he is properly schooled before leaving for Lisbon he could do a very useful job of work.

  Hamilton had flown a Hurricane down to Northolt aerodrome for the interview.98 Afterwards he flew north to Acklington aerodrome, Northumberland, and on the 26th sought advice on Robertson’s project from his wife’s uncle, Lord Eustace Percy, a former Tory cabinet minister,99 before flying back via his RAF Group headquarters at Ouston to Turnhouse, and resuming command.

  Two days later he wrote to Blackford at Air Intelligence agreeing to go to Lisbon so long as the British Ambassador there was told of his mission, and provided he was authorised to explain the position to Sir Alexander Cadogan at the Foreign Office. Also, he was concerned that he should be able to explain to Haushofer why he was answering his letter after a delay of seven months; and he asked for an explanation of the circumstances in which the letter had been withheld from him last autumn.100

  Blackford replied on 3 May, saying he had discussed his letter with Air Commodore Boyle and both agreed that ‘this may not be the right time to open up a discussion, the nature of which might well be misinterpreted’. The delay since receipt of the letter – due to ‘another department’ mislaying it – made it ‘extremely difficult to find a watertight excuse for action at the present time’; he therefore asked Hamilton to regard the matter as in abeyance.101

  He sent copies of the correspondence to Robertson, who replied on 6 May that he thought Hamilton’s two ‘objections’ – presumably the two conditions he had stipulated – were ‘reasonable’; he would take up the questions raised immediately and let Blackford ‘know the result of our deliberations as soon as possible’.102

  The final decision was taken on 11 May. An internal note to Robertson states, ‘we discussed the case today and decided that in all the circumstances it would be better not to press the matter and that the project of angling for the Duke to go to Lisbon could therefore be dropped.’103 There is no explanation of ‘all the circumstances’ that led to the case being aborted. Long after the war Robertson told Hamilton’s son, Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, that he had advised dropping the matter because of the loss of the letter and the consequent long delay.104

  This had not been his view only a fortnight before. What had changed his mind will probably never be known. The two conditions Hamilton had imposed would hardly have hampered the operation – although they might have made it more difficult to deny had anything gone wrong. It is possible that MI6 intervened. Air Commodore Boyle had originally wanted the case run by both MI6 and MI5, and officers from these two and other intelligence services met every week on a committee set up in January 1941 – the Twenty or XX (‘Double-Cross’) Committee – to run double agents.105

  In the meantime, on 10 May, the day before MI5 dropped the case, Hamilton wrote to Group Captain Blackford agreeing to ‘regard the matter as in abeyance’106 until he heard from him again; and that evening Rudolf Hess took off from Messerschmitt’s Augsburg airstrip to fly to Scotland.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Deception operations

  WHILE ENGAGED INTERMITTENTLY with Albrecht Haushofer’s letter to Hamilton, Air Intelligence was confronted with an extraordinary proposal said to have come from Hitler’s personal pilot, General Hans Baur. It originated in Sofia, Bulgaria, in late December 1940. A peasant farmer named Kiroff approached the British Military Attaché claiming that his daughter was married to Baur. As proof he produced family photographs. Baur, he said, had lost two brothers in the war and had become ‘fed up’ with continuous duty for Hitler. He was prepared to aid world peace by attempting a forced landing in England with the Führer and entourage aboard his plane.1

  The Military Attaché passed the matter to the Air Attaché, who reported it to the Air Ministry and the Foreign Office. No one could be found to identify the ‘Baur family’ photographs; nonetheless the contact was approved by Cadogan; Kiroff was handed instructions detailing signals Baur should fire when approaching the English coast, and special instructions for receiving him in Hitler’s four-engined Focke-Wulf Kondor were sent to Lympne aerodrome in Kent. On 9 February Air Vice Marshal Trafford Leigh Mallory visited Lympne to inspect.2

  Subsequently Kiroff failed to arrive at an arranged meeting and disappeared, but Baur or someone acting in his name maintained contact with the Air Ministry, since on 7 March Archie Boyle wrote to the chief of Fighter Command, Air Marshal Sir W.S. ‘Sholto’ Douglas, describing changes Baur had made in the recognition signals he intended to make on his approach to Lympne, and giving the expected date of his arrival as 25 March or after, between 5.00 and 8.00 p.m.3

  Fantastic as it seemed that Hitler’s private aircraft with fighter escort should stray into British airspace and land at Lympne, the Air Ministry took it seriously. This was demonstrated on 17 March when the aerodrome was put on full alert for the arrival and a Ford V8 box-body touring car and two motorcycle escorts were sent down to collect the prisoners. The instructions were to bring ‘the booty’ straight up to the Air Ministry in London ‘from the scene of the “accident”’. Should there be ‘a large bag only the biggest birds need to be sent in the Ford’.4


  In the event Baur’s Kondor did not arrive. The special arrangements for receiving him were nonetheless kept in force. They were about to be called off in May, but Hess’s arrival in Scotland caused the Air Ministry to continue them until the end of the month.5 Finally on 1 June they were annulled and the box-body Ford and motorcycles were returned to London.

  It is possible that this curious plot had some connection with Hess’s mission. The historian Rainer Schmidt has pointed out that the Deputy Führer was the only person at that time with a motive for opening a channel to the British Air Ministry6 and perhaps probing aspects of British air defences. It is interesting that Baur was spelled ‘Bauer’ in the Air Ministry papers, possibly a mistake in the original transcription of his name from Sofia, but suggesting that later communications were verbal, not written, since both spellings sound the same.

  Baur himself was devoted to Hitler throughout his life and would never have contemplated betraying him.7 He did assist Hess with his flight by providing him with a map of forbidden air zones over the Reich,8 but no doubt unwittingly since Hess would not have told him his intended destination. The real significance of the extraordinary episode lies in the fact that Baur, or someone acting in his name, established a clandestine channel of communication with British Air Intelligence. Nowhere in the open files is there a hint of the method or persons involved after the Bulgarian, Kiroff, left the scene; yet the change in recognition signals notified on 7 March and the reception organised on 17 March could only have been prompted by communications from the enemy.