Hess, Hitler and Churchill

by Peter Padfield

  He set about composing a new communiqué to throw light on the background to Hess’s escapade. It was broadcast on German home stations at 2.00 that afternoon:

  On the basis of a preliminary examination of the papers Hess left behind, it would appear that Hess was living under the hallucination that by undertaking a personal step in connection with the Englishmen with whom he was formerly acquainted it might be possible to bring about an understanding between Germany and Britain. As has since been confirmed from London, Hess parachuted from his plane in Scotland near the place he had selected as his destination …

  As is well known in Party circles, Hess has undergone severe physical suffering for many years. Recently he has sought relief to an increasing extent in various methods practised by mesmerists and astrologers etc. …3

  At 4.30 this was expanded with the suggestion that it was ‘also conceivable that Hess was deliberately lured into a trap by a British party’;4 and that evening Goebbels’ deputy and chief radio commentator, Hans Fritsche, echoed the theme:

  Unless he has been consciously trapped by England, he – being an idealist and moreover a sick man – no doubt suffered from the growing delusion that in spite of the numerous and, heaven knows, sincere and generous peace proposals by the Führer, he himself might possibly, by a personal sacrifice and by personal contact with former English acquaintances, convince responsible Englishmen of the futility and hopelessness of further struggle on their part, a struggle which, the longer it lasts, will only demand ever-growing and more vain sacrifices from Great Britain …5

  This virtual paraphrase of Hess’s address to Kirkpatrick at his first interview, and the stress on the sincerity of the Führer’s desire for peace, suggests that Hitler may not have entirely given up hope of a successful outcome for his deputy’s mission, an implication supported by a curious reference Fritsche made later in his broadcast to the bombing of Westminster Abbey on the night of Hess’s flight almost exactly four years after the Coronation of King George VI (12 May 1937). He pointed out that the King who was crowned then should not really have been on the throne, and described the one who should have been ‘as a man with a heart for the poor and wishing for peace and collaboration with Germany’6 – a reference to the Duke of Windsor, now in exile in the Bahamas.

  * * *

  Nearly all those close to Hess or implicated in any way with his flight were dealt with ruthlessly over the following days: his adjutants, Pintsch and Leitgen, and his driver, Lippert, were expelled from the party, reduced to the ranks, sent to concentration camps and later to the Russian front, where they were captured.7 Hess’s brother, Alfred, was removed from his post as deputy to Ernst Bohle in the Auslands Organisation (Foreign Organisation) and expelled from the party. His intelligence chief, Pfeffer von Salomon, was interrogated at Gestapo headquarters for some months and then, on Hitler’s orders, expelled from the party.8

  Karl Haushofer was also interrogated by the Gestapo and although released was kept under surveillance, and a ban was placed on his books, virtually ending his professional career. Albrecht was held at Gestapo headquarters for over two months and when released was also placed under surveillance and prohibited from publishing. Hess’s secretaries, his Anglophile friend Professor Gerl, and his astrologers were sent to concentration camps; and in June all astrologers, clairvoyants, mesmerists and faith healers were rounded up in a co-ordinated action and imprisoned, their publications and all alternative medicine literature banned.9

  There were three important exceptions to this anathema: Ernst Bohle, who had by his own admission translated Hess’s letters to Hamilton, when interrogated by Heydrich pointed the finger at the Haushofers, especially Albrecht,10 and retained his post and party membership; Willi Messerschmitt, who had provided Hess with the aeroplane, whose staff had given him training and made the technical modifications necessary for his flight to Scotland, also escaped punishment. He was, of course, vital to the German war effort. Finally, despite Bormann’s best efforts to persecute her, Ilse Hess retained her large villa in Harlaching, a pension equivalent to that of a government minister, and her son, ‘Buz’, whose sponsor – or in Christian terms godfather – was Hitler himself.

  Bormann spread vicious rumours about his former chief, suggesting that he had been impotent for years, that Buz had been conceived during an affair Ilse had with an assistant to Dr Gerl, and that Hess had only flown to Scotland to prove he was a real chap (‘ein Mannsbild’).11 Yet Hitler stood by Ilse. When, two years later, there was a scheme to convert her Harlaching villa into a nursing home, he vetoed it and decreed she should retain the house and could claim for all costs necessary for its upkeep.12 Given Hitler’s merciless treatment of those who betrayed him – and their kin – the protection he extended to Ilse is, perhaps, the surest sign that her husband flew on his commission.

  CHURCHILL’S STATEMENT

  Goebbels was scathing about the British government’s failure to exploit Hess’s arrival in Scotland, accusing his opposite number, Alfred Duff Cooper – Minister of Information – of once again proving himself a ‘true dilettante’. Goebbels recognised that Churchill did not want peace discussions, but was clear that if he himself had been ‘English Propaganda Minister’ he would have known what he had to do.13

  In fact Churchill had been anxious to make a frank public statement from the start. After the first German announcement on the Monday evening, the 12th, that Hess was missing, presumed crashed, and before Kirkpatrick had even reached Hess in the Drymen Military Hospital, he had called Eden, Menzies and Cadogan to a meeting in the Cabinet War Room, and presented them with the text of an announcement he had drafted, including the statement that Hess had flown to Britain ‘in the name of humanity’.14 It will be recalled that Hess had told Hamilton when he first saw him at Maryhill Barracks hospital on Sunday morning, the 11th, that he had come ‘on a mission of humanity’.15

  Churchill was dissuaded from making this statement or announcing anything beyond the bare facts of Hess’s arrival; for as Cadogan noted, to talk of his arrival ‘in the name of humanity’ would look like a peace offer.16 Yet Churchill still wanted to give a full explanation.

  Goebbels produced one first. On Wednesday the 14th Berlin radio announced that on the evidence of papers Hess left behind he had intended flying to the estate of the Duke of Hamilton, whose acquaintance he had made at the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936:

  [He] believed that the Duke belonged to the British group in opposition to Churchill as representative of the clique of warmongers. Hess further believed that the Duke possessed sufficient influence to be able to wage an effective fight against the Churchill clique … [He] flew to Britain in order to explain to the circles with which he hoped to get into touch the fully hopeless position of Great Britain in the long run and to show them the unassailably strong opposition of Germany … Hess under no circumstances had the intention of getting in touch with Winston Churchill. On the contrary, he wanted to address himself to the internal political opposition against Churchill, as becomes unmistakeably clear from his notes. Rudolf Hess indeed had the absurd idea that he could return again to Germany after a short while when he had fulfilled his mission of rapprochement …17

  The communiqué ended by stating that Hess’s notes showed he was ‘well-nigh 100 per cent certain of success’. The close correspondence between this announcement and Kirkpatrick’s report after his first interview with Hess – phoned through before the broadcast – provides conclusive proof of Hess’s intentions, since Goebbels could not have known what Kirkpatrick said.

  The German announcement sharpened Churchill’s desire to give a full explanation in the Commons. That evening, Eden, Cadogan, Menzies and Duff Cooper gathered in No. 10 to hear what he proposed to say. Eden left after a while; the others waited while Churchill dictated. ‘How slow he is,’ Cadogan noted. ‘What he said was all wrong – explaining what Hess had said (peace proposals) corresponding exactly
to what Germans put out this afternoon. I said that, on that Hitler would heave sigh of relief. And the German people.’18 It is remarkable that Cadogan, like Churchill and indeed Duff Cooper, seems not to have cared about the effect on the home front of an announcement that Hess had flown over because Hitler wanted peace. His concern was for the effect on the Germans. It suggests that the ‘peace party’ Hess thought he could mobilise against the government was not perceived as such a threat; no doubt it was also felt that most British people took Churchill’s view of Hitler as the personification of evil who had to be defeated. Churchill laid stress on this moral aspect as he dictated his statement:

  It must not be forgotten that the Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, has been the confederate and accomplice of Herr Hitler in all the murders, treacheries and cruelties by which the Nazi regime imposed itself, first on Germany, and is now seeking to impose itself on Europe. The blood purge of June 30 1934 … the horrors of the German concentration camps, the brutal persecution of the Jews, the perfidious inroad upon Czechoslovakia, the unspeakable, incredible brutalities and bestialities of the German invasion and conquest of Poland … are all cases in point.

  He is at present being held as a prisoner of war who baled out in this country in uniform during an air raid. He is also being held in the character of a war criminal whose ultimate fate must, together with that of other leaders of the Nazi movement, be reserved for the decision of the Allied nations when the victory has been won.19

  For the rest Churchill was perfectly open about Hess’s idea of negotiating with ‘a strong peace or defeatist movement’ in Britain and his proposal that Britain and the Empire would be left intact so long as Germany under Hitler was left unquestioned master of Europe – the essence of Hess’s peace plan. He even listed Hess’s reasons for asserting that Germany was bound to win and American help would arrive too late. ‘He appears to hold these views sincerely and he represented himself as undertaking a (self imposed) mission to save the British nation from destruction while time remained.’20

  Here he was virtually allying Hess with Lloyd George, Liddell Hart and the many others who saw compromise with Hitler as the only hope before the country was forced to submit. He went on to defend the conduct of the Duke of Hamilton – named in the German broadcast – as in every respect honourable and proper, before concluding that the House, the country and their friends all over the world would be entertained and cheered by this remarkable episode, while the German armed forces, the Nazi Party and the German people would experience deep-seated bewilderment and consternation – as was the case.

  Cadogan was firmly against making the statement. Beaverbrook, who dined with Churchill that night, backed up Cadogan’s arguments, and later Eden in a heated telephone conversation persuaded him to say nothing.21

  One typed copy of this statement to Parliament that Churchill never made has a curious handwritten comment in the margin: ‘He [Hess] has also made other statements which it would not be in the public interest to disclose.’22 This is hard to interpret. Kirkpatrick had interviewed Hess twice by this time but there is nothing in the typed reports of these conversations that does not appear in Churchill’s intended statement. It is possible that Kirkpatrick reported ‘other statements’ verbally; it is also possible they were made to MI6 officers appointed to Hess, in Churchill’s words, as ‘guardians’, or to the Duke of Hamilton, or even perhaps to the Duke of Kent during an interview at Craigiehall House not recorded in the open files.23

  * * *

  The next day, Thursday 15th, Kirkpatrick made a third and final visit to the Drymen Military Hospital to interview Hess. His instructions were to probe him on German intentions towards America; Roosevelt had suggested he might let slip something that could be used to wake the American people to the Nazi threat.24 Hess did not oblige: ‘Germany had no designs on America.’ Hitler reckoned on American intervention, but was not afraid of it since Germany could outbuild America and Great Britain combined in aircraft. America, he went on, would be furious if Britain were to make peace now since she wanted to inherit the British Empire. Hitler on the other hand wanted a permanent understanding with Britain on a basis that would preserve the Empire. His own flight was intended to provide a chance for opening such negotiations without loss of prestige. If Britain were to reject the chance Hitler would be entitled, indeed it would be his clear duty, to destroy her and keep her in permanent subjection.25

  Hess was still expecting negotiations: he gave Kirkpatrick the names of two German internees he would like to assist him if talks were opened, also one German stenographer and a typist. Remarkably, he knew that the two German internees were held at Huyton camp, near Liverpool, and knew their internment numbers.26 Even more remarkably, both men had been transferred to a camp at Lochgilphead on the Scottish west coast just north of Glasgow only days before Hess’s flight, on 7 and 8 May.27 This is surely beyond coincidence. It must be proof of prior negotiation. Finally Hess complained to Kirkpatrick about his close guard; having flown over at great risk to himself, he said, he had no intention of running away or committing suicide.

  Kirkpatrick went to this meeting alone. Hamilton had handed over to his second-in-command and flown down to London. In view of the rumours linking him with Hess’s arrival, it is not surprising that Turnhouse station orders that day carried a reminder, ‘All personnel are forbidden to communicate any service information which might directly or indirectly assist the enemy’;28 and a notice instructed qualified barristers or solicitors to report to the adjutant.

  In London, Hamilton called on Cadogan to deliver Kirkpatrick’s reports of his first two interviews with Hess, typed up by Pearl Hyatt, and said he wanted to see the King; Cadogan advised him to see the Prime Minister first.29 Later Hamilton saw Duff Cooper to tackle him on Press and BBC reports that he had met Hess during the Olympic Games in Berlin and had received a letter from him only the previous September.

  The innuendo swirling around Hamilton’s role in the Deputy Führer’s arrival stemmed from Churchill’s failure to clarify events with an official statement or even to give Duff Cooper a clear line to take. Lack of any authoritative information from the British side had caused the British and American press corps especially to work themselves into what Sir Walter Monckton, Director General of the Ministry of Information, described as ‘a state of fury’ such as he had never seen before.30 In an effort to give direction, Beaverbrook had hosted a lunch for newspaper editors and lobby correspondents at Claridges earlier that day, the 15th, and undoubtedly with Churchill’s and Duff Cooper’s approval, called for ‘as much speculation, rumour and discussion about Hess as possible’.31 The Prime Minister would make no statement, he went on, as that would end discussion; would they do all they could to make the most of this episode to the detriment of Germany.

  Duff Cooper himself appears to have set the ball rolling by leaking the inaccurate story that Hamilton had received a letter from Hess the previous September. When Hamilton saw him that evening about clearing his name Duff Cooper suggested either an official statement in the Commons by Churchill or a reply to an inspired question. Next day Hamilton lunched with the King, who preferred the second option, and this was accordingly set in motion.32

  The following day Cadogan drafted a ‘Most Secret’ circular to explain government policy on Hess to ambassadors and other British representatives in neutral capitals:

  No indication of Hess’s statements or views should on any account be given to anyone except your immediate diplomatic staff. Our intention is to remain in constant contact with him and try to draw him. We do not know what will emerge, but we might eventually obtain information from him. For the time being we propose to say nothing officially about any results of interrogation, but to try to keep the Germans guessing. It may be possible however that by way of ‘whispers’ or gently inspired speculation in the press we may be able to cause embarrassment to the Germans …33

  The last sentence
was cut before the telegram was sent, and replaced by:

  Their own official statements show the confusion that has been caused by Hess’s escapade and we hope to make the most of this, so as to instil doubt and fear into the German government and people. Hess will be branded a war criminal and any attempt to sentimentalise over him discouraged.34

  THE MISSING DOCUMENTS

  Arrangements to isolate Hess in quarters near London where he could be studied and drawn out by picked MI6 ‘guardians’ were in hand. Churchill had decreed he should be treated as a prisoner of war – ‘with dignity as if he were an important general who had fallen into our hands’ – but was to have no contact with the outer world, see no newspapers, hear no wireless and receive no visitors.35 The instruction had not lacked a moral dimension: ‘This man, like other Nazi leaders, is potentially a war criminal, and he and his confederates may well be declared outlaws at the end of the war. In this case his repentance would stand him in good stead.’ It was a curious comment. Hess had expressed no repentance to Kirkpatrick; on the contrary he had blamed Britain for the war and threatened the country with starvation by U-boat and aerial blockade unless peace terms were agreed. He might have said something else to Hamilton at his first interview at Maryhill Barracks Hospital, but it is hard to imagine him expressing contrition.