Hess, Hitler and Churchill

by Peter Padfield

  The instructions he gave when Colville rang from Downing Street have been obscured by Colville’s diary fictions, but whatever the nature of any negotiations preceding Hess’s flight, Cadogan’s diary entry for that day makes it clear he knew nothing until he received the phone call from Addis that afternoon.18 From this it follows that whatever negotations there may have been, the Foreign Office was not a party to them.

  * * *

  Churchill must have sent Colville over to the Foreign Office some time that afternoon, where he fielded Hamilton’s call and agreed to meet him at Northolt aerodrome with a car. On reporting back to Churchill Colville was evidently told that the Duke was to go to Ditchley. Consequently, when Hamilton arrived at Northolt in a Hurricane he was instructed to fly on to Kidlington, a new aerodrome just north of Oxford. There a car was waiting, and he was driven to Ditchley Park:

  I got out on the doorstep … and was met by a very pompous and smart butler. My appearance can be better imagined than described when I tell you that I had had no sleep, or practically no sleep, for four nights and had just finished a rather arduous journey from Scotland to southern England.19

  After washing in one of the prettily furnished bathrooms Hamilton was ushered into the dining room, the walls a soft grey with a greenish tinge, famously described by Nancy Tree as ‘the colour of elephants’ breath’. Dinner was over; the ladies had retired; the men sat at tall-backed yellow dining chairs with brandy and cigars. Churchill was holding forth ‘in tremendous form’, Hamilton wrote, ‘cracking jokes the whole time.’20 Hamilton was served dinner, then all except Churchill and Sinclair left the room. He showed them the photographs the German airman had brought with him and assured them this was the man he had interviewed that morning, adding, by his own account, that ‘whether the man was Hess or not was still very uncertain’.21 The Prime Minister, he wrote, ‘was rather taken aback’ by what he had to tell him.

  Churchill was anxious to see a Marx Brothers film about to be shown, so this first interview was brief; it was not until after the film that he and the Prime Minister and Sinclair met again in private and he was pressed on every detail. This session, which started about midnight, lasted some three hours.

  The following morning Hamilton was driven at high speed in the Prime Minister’s convoy to Downing Street, where he repeated his story to Anthony Eden, Cadogan and Stewart Menzies among others, while Churchill conducted a whirlwind of interviews and meetings on the weekend sensation. Cadogan’s diary gives a flavour of the activity:

  I have never been so hard pressed. Mainly due to Hess, who has taken up all my time … Talk with A [Eden] and Duke of Hamilton, who says it is Hess! Sent for ‘C’ & consulted him about sending IK [Ivone Kirkpatrick] up to ‘vet’ the airman. He approved. Got IK about 1.15 and gave him his instr. 3.15 meeting with A and IK. Duke came at 4. Packed them off in plane at 5.30 from Hendon.22

  Ivone Kirkpatrick had served as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Berlin from 1933 to 1938 and knew all the Nazi leaders. He was now director of the foreign division of the Ministry of Information and a senior member of SOE. The plane provided for Hamilton to fly him north was a short-haul passenger airliner, the de Havilland Rapide. Hamilton had to put down at Linton aerodrome on the way to refuel, and it was over four hours before they reached Turnhouse. There they were told of a wireless announcement by the German government that Hess had taken off from Augsburg on a flight from which he had not returned.23 It was assumed he had crashed or met with an accident.

  They also received a phone call from Sir Archibald Sinclair instructing them to proceed without delay to identify the prisoner.24

  THE BERGHOF

  Alfred Rosenberg, it will be recalled, had been summoned to an urgent meeting with Hess at his Munich-Harlaching villa just before he flew to Scotland. They had talked earnestly in private over lunch and continued in the garden afterwards. At about two o’clock Rosenberg left and, according to his adjutant, drove straight to Hitler’s mountain retreat, the Berghof above Berchtesgaden, probably arriving even before Hess took off from Augsburg.25 If so it is scarcely conceivable he did not tell Hitler that his deputy was about to fly on his peace mission to Britain.

  A few days later Hitler was to tell top party officials and service chiefs that he had received a packet that Saturday night but had put it aside unopened, thinking it was a memorandum. When later he opened it he found Hess’s letter explaining his plan to fly to ‘Lord Hamilton’ in Glasgow, and his reasons.26

  Perhaps he did not open the packet at the time; probably he did not need to. Rosenberg, hot foot from Harlaching, must surely have told him. Rosenberg was the ideologue of the party. He shared and had no doubt helped inform Hess’s hatred of Bolshevism; he shared Hess’s vision of forging an alliance with the British against the Bolsheviks; and, like Hess, he despaired at the fratricidal struggle with the island kingdom. Moreover, in April he had been given the responsibility for planning questions for the – to be conquered – east European area.27 It is difficult to imagine why he should have driven to the Berghof from his meeting with Hess if not to inform Hitler that his deputy was flying to Britain that day to bring peace in the west – allowing full force to be deployed east.

  Supposition is backed by the testimony of Hess’s driver, Rudolf Lippert: after release from Soviet internment and torture long after the war, he told Hess’s son, Wolf Rüdiger, that he and others who had escorted Hess to Messerschmitt’s Augsburg airstrip had been arrested by the Gestapo at Gallspach, Austria, at 5.30 in the morning of Sunday 11 May.28 This was several hours before staff and other witnesses at the Berghof recorded Hess’s adjutant, Karl-Heinz Pintsch, arriving with a letter from Hess informing Hitler that he had flown to Britain.

  This otherwise puzzling story finds support in Pintsch’s equally strange post-war testimony: after Hess took off he had waited at the Augsburg works until nine o’clock when he had rung a department of the Air Ministry in Berlin to order a radio beam for Hess to Dungavel Hill. Returning to Munich afterwards with Lippert and the security officer, he told the two of them to get something to eat, pack a few things and drive to the home of a homeopath friend of Hess in the Austrian village of Gallspach. They were to go in the two-stroke DKW, not the Mercedes, which was too conspicuous, and wait in Gallspach until they heard how the flight had gone. Pintsch would do his best to get a message to them as soon as he could.29

  He himself was dropped off at the railway station to catch the next train to Berchtesgaden. It left at midnight, arriving at 7.00 on Sunday morning. He rang the Berghof from the stationmaster’s office and explained to the duty adjutant, Albert Bormann, brother of Martin Bormann, that he had a letter from Hess to deliver personally to the Führer. Bormann sent a car to fetch him. Pintsch then waited in the great hall of the Berghof until Hitler appeared coming down the central stairway. He stood, saluted and handed him Hess’s sealed letter. Hitler told him to come into his study, and after opening the envelope and glancing at the first lines of the letter, asked, ‘Where is Hess now?’

  ‘Yesterday, Mein Führer, at 18.10 he took off from Ausgburg for Scotland to see the Duke of Hamilton.’30

  Pintsch’s account lacks any suggestion of the histrionics described by most who claimed afterwards to have witnessed Hitler receiving the letter, but his timing is consistent with most other accounts; it was some time before noon, for he described Hitler reading the letter through twice before having an adjutant summon Göring and Ribbentrop from their weekend retreats, after which Eva Braun appeared in the doorway in tweed skirt and woollen jumper to announce, ‘Lunch is ready!’31

  Hitler’s army adjutant, Major Gerhard Engel, recalled Pintsch wishing to speak to Hitler on an urgent matter when Hitler came down at about 11.00;32 and Bormann made an entry in his diary, ‘Midday Pintsch brings the Deputy Führer’s letters: latter took off for England on 10.5 at 17.40.’33

  However, Engel’s account has Hitler turni
ng chalk white, grinding his teeth and telling him in an agitated manner to get hold of Göring at once.34 Göring’s adjutant, General Karl Bodenschatz, also claimed to be alone with Hitler when he was handed the letter, but described him reading the first few sentences, then sinking into a chair, exclaiming, ‘Um Gottes Willen! Um Gottes Willen! Der ist darübergeflogen!’35 (For God’s sake! He has flown over there!’) Bodenschatz thought Hitler was putting on a performance, and remained convinced he was at least a party to Hess’s mission.36 Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, who also claimed to be at the Berghof that morning, recalled hearing Hitler’s incoherent, ‘almost animal cry’37 after receiving the letter. The various accounts seem mutually exclusive.

  Then there is the post-war memoir of Hitler’s valet, Heinz Linge: Hitler, Linge wrote, had given him explicit instructions not to call him before noon that day, but when Pintsch arrived at 9.30 with news that Hess had flown, Linge went to the Führer’s door and knocked. Hitler asked him what it was and, when Linge explained, opened the door, revealing himself fully dressed and shaved. Linge realised afterwards that he must have been waiting for the news, and the bemusement, anger and sense of betrayal he was to exhibit before others was play-acting. He too concluded that Hess had probably been sent to England.38

  Admittedly, this was not what Linge told the Russians immediately after the war. He was held for four years and interrogated brutally on his time serving Hitler.39 According to the account he gave then – preceding his published account above – Albert Bormann and Pintsch appeared at about 10.00 a.m. in the antechamber to Hitler’s study. Bormann asked Linge to wake Hitler as he had an urgent letter from Hess. When Hitler emerged, unshaven, from his bedroom he took Hess’s letter from Pintsch and hurried downstairs to the great hall, where he opened the envelope. He then called for Pintsch. A few minutes later he told Linge to fetch the chief of police on his staff, and Pintsch was summarily arrested.40 Of course, this does not square with Pintsch’s account of having lunch with Hitler, Eva Braun and guests.

  Hitler could not afford to be associated with Hess’s mission. Should it fail it would manifest weakness, even desperation before the coming reckoning with Stalin. It had to be deniable. Hess denied it persistently all his life. Apparently the final passage of his letter to Hitler ran: ‘And should, mein Führer, my project, which I must admit has very little chance of success, end in failure, should fate decide against me, it can have no evil consequences for you or for Germany; you can always distance yourself from me – declare me mad.’41

  This letter, like the longer explanation contained in the package Hitler had received the night before – indeed like so much else from both sides of the affair – has been lost, but Ilse Hess claimed after the war that she remembered these final words perfectly since her husband had enclosed a copy of the letter in a farewell note he left for her.

  If it is accepted that Hess flew on a deniable mission for Hitler, then Pintsch’s and Lippert’s otherwise bizarre tales become fully comprehensible. Pintsch could not drive straight to the Berghof from the Augsburg airstrip in Hess’s Mercedes without arousing suspicion that the enterprise had been ordered by the Führer. Ideally news of Hess’s arrival in Scotland would be announced by the enemy before his own arrival at the Berghof with Hess’s explanatory letter. Likewise the other two who had accompanied Hess to the airfield had to be kept out of the way until it was known how events would turn out, in case they talked or were arrested by the Gestapo for complicity in their master’s escapade. Hess left a letter for Himmler asking him not to act against his people, but the Reichsführer was evidently leaving nothing to chance and had the two picked up in the early hours, long before anyone was supposed to know.

  Pintsch sat down to lunch with Hitler and his entourage and several others with appointments to see the Führer that day. It was to be his last taste of life at the top table. He was arrested that afternoon on Hitler’s orders, together with Hess’s other adjutant, Alfred Leitgen.

  Despite the post-war accounts of Pintsch and Rosenberg’s adjutant, Hess’s driver and Hitler’s valet, despite the scepticism with which Bodenschatz regarded Hitler’s displays of anger and bemusement at Hess’s departure, there are serious historians, British and German, who believe Hitler knew nothing of his deputy’s plans.42 This is due partly to doubts about the testimony of witnesses like Pintsch, Lippert and Linge, who suffered torture in Soviet captivity and may have tailored their stories to what their jailers wished to hear, partly to overwhelming testimony to Hitler’s grief over the subsequent days. During a meeting of high party officials called to explain Hess’s flight on the 13th he broke down in tears;43 one of those present said afterwards he had never seen him so completely shocked.44

  The unanimity of contemporary eyewitness accounts leaves no doubt that Hitler was heartbroken over Hess’s departure. This does not necessarily indicate prior ignorance of Hess’s plans, only that, as the likelihood of Hess’s death turned into near-certainty, he grieved for his beloved friend and devoted colleague. It was an entirely natural reaction considering the duration and closeness of their relationship. It can have no bearing on the question of whether or not Hess flew to Britain on his commission or with his approval. On the other hand Pintsch’s and Lippert’s accounts in particular are so outlandish they could not have been fabricated and co-ordinated. The presumption must be that Hitler, and no doubt Göring and Himmler too, were complicit.

  Ilse Hess always said she believed her husband flew without Hitler’s knowledge. In this she was following the guidance of her man and, especially at the time of the Nuremberg war crimes trials, helping to distance him from Hitler’s attack on Russia. Whether she really believed it cannot be known.

  * * *

  Uncertainty about Hess’s fate dominated discussion at the Berghof, where Hitler was joined by Ribbentrop that afternoon and Göring and his air armaments chief in the evening. At first, it seems, Hitler refused to accept that Hess might have failed to reach his objective. He knew his man and his technical and mathematical abilities; when he set his mind to something he achieved it;45 he imagined him dining with the Duke of Hamilton even as they argued. But on Monday, the 12th, as the hours passed with no news from Britain or from Hess’s aunt, Frau Rothacker, in Zürich, hope faded and he was forced to conclude that an announcement could be postponed no longer. He instructed his Press chief to draft a release and incorporate Hess’s own suggestion to account for the flight: that he had gone crazy.46 After numerous amendments an inept version was finally agreed. It was broadcast on all home stations at 8.00 that evening.

  Party Comrade Hess, who has been expressly forbidden by the Führer to use an aeroplane because of a disease which has been becoming worse for years, was, in contradiction to this order, able to get hold of a plane recently. Hess started on Saturday, 10th May, at about 1800 from Augsburg on a flight from which he has not yet returned. A letter which he left behind unfortunately showed traces of mental disturbance which justifies the fear that Hess was the victim of hallucinations. The Führer at once ordered the arrest of Hess’s adjutants, who alone knew of his flights, and who in contradiction to the Führer’s ban, of which they were aware, did not prevent the flight nor report it at once. The National-Socialist movement has unfortunately, in these circumstances, to assume that Party Comrade Hess has crashed or met with a similar accident.47

  Albrecht Haushofer had been brought to the Berghof and placed under guard that morning. Karl Haushofer had been called the previous evening and asked for Albrecht’s Berlin telephone number – ‘which made us think,’ Martha Haushofer noted in her diary.48 Hitler had not received Albrecht but had ordered that he be set to write a full account of his part in Hess’s mission. It was a complex task. Albrecht knew his life would depend on how he completed it. He could assume Hitler knew of the feelers he had put out for Hess, but could not know what Himmler might have learned of his activities on behalf of von Hassell and the opposition. He bega
n:

  English connections and the possibility of employing them

  The circle of English people I have known personally for years, whose activity in favour of a German–English understanding in the years 1934–1938 was at the core of my work in England, comprised the following groups and personalities: …49

  The first group he cited comprised young Conservatives, many of them Scottish: the Duke of Hamilton, whom he had known as Lord Clydesdale; Chamberlain’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, Lord Dunglass; and two ministers in the present British government. He described the close connections this circle had with the court – strangely omitting Hamilton’s own position as Lord Steward of the Royal Household with personal access to the King – and went on to list old landed families with whom this young circle had close ties, and whom he himself ‘knew from close personal contact over years’. He did not include the big names in what might be called the ‘peace movement’: Londonderry, Buccleuch, Brocket, Tavistock. He did cite

  the present Under Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, [R.A.] Butler … [who] despite his many official statements is no follower of Churchill or Eden. Numerous connections lead from most of those named to Lord Halifax, to whom I likewise had personal access …

  Albrecht added more influential names, indicating how indispensible he would be in any future attempt to negotiate with the British, after which he described his talks with Carl Burckhardt in Geneva. Although he mentioned Hoare among other ambassadors he had suggested Hess might approach, he wrote nothing of his own approaches to Hoare via Stahmer in Madrid, an interesting omission since on the night of 10/11 May, after Hess had flown, Stahmer had wired the Foreign Ministry in Berlin with an urgent message for Albrecht to the effect that he had to give his lecture to the Academy of Sciences in Madrid on 12 May.50

  It has been assumed this could have been a coded message to inform Albrecht that a meeting had been fixed with Hoare for 12 May. Stahmer’s own post-war explanation was that it was a warning he had sent Albrecht after hearing a Reuter’s news flash that Hess had landed in England.51 Since no news of Hess’s flight broke until the German home stations broadcast of the 12th, this sounds like fabrication. On the other hand, if Hoare knew of or was party to negotiations preceding Hess’s flight, he may have got word to Stahmer that Hess had flown, in which case Stahmer may indeed have tried to warn Albrecht that he was in danger. This is scarcely more far-fetched than Albert Heal’s story of the coded message to Bevin from his ‘industrial contact’ inside Germany to let him know Hess was on his way.52