Hess, Hitler and Churchill

by Peter Padfield

  There may be a small clue in the recollections of Professor Robert Shaw. In 1941 Shaw was a lieutenant in the Highland Light Infantry and was detailed to guard Hess when he was first brought to the Drymen Military Hospital. He had talked to him for some three hours, finding him articulate and polite. Hess explained the cause of the war as the refusal of the Poles to allow Germany the use of their deep-water port, Danzig, but, remarkably, he also tried to convince Shaw that Germany and Britain together should defeat Russia, a proposition he does not appear to have put to Kirkpatrick – if Kirkpatrick’s reports are to be believed. In the context of repentance, he told Shaw that the atrocities they were beginning to hear about were not typical of the German people.36

  So it is possible he made a similar remark to Hamilton, whose original ‘rough notes’ on his first meeting with Hess have disappeared. His ‘more detailed and accurate report compiled from these notes’, which Churchill had requested, was sent to the Prime Minister’s private office on 18 May;37 this report is in the open files and contains no suggestion that Hess mentioned German atrocities in Poland.

  While at the military hospital Hess talked fairly freely. A letter from a doctor serving there, which was intercepted by Censorship, described him as:

  surprisingly ordinary – neither so ruthless-looking nor so handsome nor so beetle-browed as the newspapers would have us believe. Quite sane, certainly not a drug-taker, a little concerned about his health and rather faddy about his diet, quite ready to chat (to one of our junior officers) even about the origin of the war in Poland and Czechoslovakia – on which he had orthodox Nazi views.38

  A Major Sheppard sent to Scotland to supervise his removal to London found him ‘conversing freely with the officers guarding him’, and noted the pleasure he seemed to take in describing the details of his flight; although at times he simply lay in his bed ‘deep in thought occasionally making a few notes’.39

  At 6.15 in the evening of Friday 16 May Sheppard informed him that he was to leave at once. Hess ‘seemed somewhat elated at the news,’ Sheppard noted, ‘and assumed an air of great importance. Was anxious to know his destination.’40 He had the grace, however, to thank the commanding officer of the hospital for the kindness shown him, and the treatment for his ankle.41

  At 7.00 he was removed by ambulance as a stretcher case to Glasgow Central Station, thence by night train to London, where he was taken by ambulance to the Tower. He was to stay there for three days until a house outside Aldershot selected for his permanent residence had been prepared, the quarters he was to occupy wired for sound recording by MI6. At the Tower a flavoured sleeping draught was made up to ease his nights.42

  * * *

  Meanwhile Giffnock Police, RAF and MI5 officers had been recovering souvenirs taken by locals from Hess’s plane and searching for documents at the crash site.43

  As noted previously MI5 had been taken completely unawares by Hess’s arrival. Guy Liddell had not noted it in his diary until three days after Hess landed in Scotland, and then as ‘sensational news … he seems to have been carrying some sort of message to the Duke of Hamilton from Professor Karl Haushofer’.44 If referring to the correspondence picked up by Censorship some months before, this was, of course, the wrong Haushofer, and surely rules out Liddell and MI5 from knowledge of any prior negotiations. Similarly ‘Tar’ Robertson of the Double-Cross Committee only learned of Hess’s arrival from the newspapers on Tuesday the 13th.45

  On the 14th Censorship intercepted photostat copies of a letter Hess had brought with him, and sent a copy to Group Captain Blackford of Air Intelligence, who advised MI5’s Regional Security Officer in Edinburgh, Major Peter Perfect, that ‘various pieces of paper, presumably belonging to Hess’ were in the hands of unknown persons.46 Perfect spent the next day with the Giffnock Police investigating the matter, but whatever conclusion was reached does not appear in the open files.

  Perfect also sent an officer called Buyers to interview those who had taken part in Hess’s arrest. Buyers did not talk to Hamilton, Benson or any RAF officers – his reasons are not recorded – and the last page or pages of his report are missing from the file. This is certain since there is no signature, address or date on the final page, numbered 3; instead, at the bottom left corner, the word ‘As’, which after the style of the time denotes the first word of the next, now missing, page.47

  It is evident from the covering letter with the report that the missing page contained references to lost documents, thus:

  I had not heard of the picking up through Censorship of a Photostat of a letter which Hess had in his possession at the time of his landing, but as Buyers concludes in his report, there is the possibility that some articles may have fallen from the plane at some distance from where it crashed. I do not know whether you think the documents which were recovered from a ditch in the field where Hess had landed, could have got there in such a way, or were as you think, planted there by someone who had pilfered them earlier.48

  There is a reference to these documents in a letter written to a friend by Margaret Baird, wife of the farmer in whose field Hess landed: ‘… the police was ordered to search for a valuable document which was missing, he found it over near the wee burn in the park. Davy found a kind of oxygen mask in the turnip field …’49

  These revelations are of extraordinary importance. Before the MI5 folder containing Major Perfect’s correspondence with head office was released there was nothing in the open files even hinting at the possibility that Hess carried a letter or documents with him to Scotland. Now there is irrefutable proof that he did so; moreover, Margaret Baird’s letter shows that the documents, which had either dropped from his plane or been taken by souvenir hunters, copied, then replaced in a ditch near the crash site, were recovered by the police.

  That the documents Hess brought with him went astray when he parachuted out might explain why Hamilton did not phone the Foreign Office before late afternoon on Sunday 11 May.50 No doubt Hess told him during his visit to Maryhill Barracks Hospital that he had lost his peace proposals; he probably assumed that they had dropped from his plane; and possibly Hamilton and Benson spent the rest of the day looking for them.

  Yet the true significance of the proofs that Hess carried documents to Scotland lies in the fact that they have disappeared from the open files in this country and elsewhere. And it can hardly be coincidence that the letter or documents themselves, the page or pages of Buyers’ report referring to them and all inventories of Hess’s possessions when he landed have disappeared.51 The documents presumably concerned Hess’s peace plan. It is no surprise that they were suppressed at the time: they would have encouraged all forces of appeasement in the country – for that, after all, was Hess’s purpose – and endangered Churchill’s coalition government. The question is why they continue to be suppressed so long after the end of the war, and why so many papers relating to them have been weeded.

  Their content, as divulged by an informant who claimed to have read them, does not provide the whole answer.

  THE INFORMANT

  The key to understanding Hess’s mission has been provided by an informant, yet he is in a sense the weakest link in the story, for he cannot be named; hence his testimony can neither be probed nor proved. He insisted on anonymity and although he has since died, the conditions he laid down have to be respected: neither his name, nationality nor his post at the time can be revealed.

  It can be said that he was in a position and had the qualifications to play the part he described: moreover, like Squadron Leader Frank Day, who stood guard during Hess’s visit to Craigiehall House, he did not volunteer the information himself. He told the story over a dinner table in Sussex, but when questioned realised it was not common knowledge and broke off. Afterwards his host and friend of long standing, John Howell, passed on the information.52 The informant provided further detail, but then checked with his former masters – presumably MI6 or the Foreign Of
fice – and afterwards closed down all contact.

  This is the story he told before he was silenced: the documents Hess brought with him consisted of a proposal for a peace treaty drawn up in official German in numbered clauses, typed on Chancellery paper, and a separate translation into English. The translation was stilted, as if made with the help of a dictionary, and as a fluent German speaker the informant was co-opted by Kirkpatrick into a small group to study the German text and render its convoluted phrases into accurate and comprehensible English.

  The informant could not recall the date he was approached for this task, but Kirkpatrick returned to London from Scotland on Friday 16 May and probably brought the documents down with him – or possibly Hamilton had delivered them to Cadogan the previous day. There is no record of their receipt in any open file, nor indeed in Cadogan’s diary. It was shortly afterwards, presumably, that Kirkpatrick invited the informant and a few other German-speakers to BBC headquarters at Portland Place. He gave them a brief talk on the vital importance of the documents they were about to see and the need for absolute secrecy; nothing whatever could be said. The Official Secrets Act was not mentioned; it was not necessary: these were all members of the network based on school, university or club and shared associations whose fictional counterparts are familiar from the stories of John Buchan. Each member of the group was then given a different section of the German treaty, which had been re-typed in parts, and asked to make a precise translation into English to clarify the terms and portmanteau German words. The work of this secret committee was supervised and administered by Jock Colville; no doubt the typing was done by one of Churchill’s female secretaries.

  The informant saw the complete treaty once. For the rest he worked on the section assigned to him. The first two pages detailed Hitler’s aims in Russia, outlining the precise plan for conquest and the destruction of Bolshevism. Other sections stipulated that Great Britain keep out of all Continental entanglements, in return for which she would retain her independence, her Empire and her armed services. German forces would leave France, but since France and other Western nations had colonies which provided potential sources of friction with the British Empire, detailed provisions were made for the strength of forces in these areas; the informant remembered that clause 12 dealt with troops in the Suez Canal theatre.

  Compare this with the post-war testimony of Ernst Bohle, who translated Hess’s letter to Hamilton into English:

  As to the content of the letter itself I can only say that Hess strove for a peace with England on the basis of the status quo, required discussions about the colonies and devoted page after page to downright prophetic portrayals of the reciprocal air war and the fearful consequences if the conflict continued.53

  Bohle believed the letter was never sent, but served Hess well as an aide-memoire for his discussions in England, since Hess sent him greetings in 1942 stating that he had made good use of his (Bohle’s) English-language proficiency. Bohle also insisted that throughout the time he worked for Hess he believed that Hitler knew of the mission and was in full agreement with it.54

  What he did not reveal was that he received assistance in the translation; yet the post-war testimony of his half-brother, H. Bohle makes it clear that he did:

  In 1941 … I was translator (German–English) in the Sprachdienst [language service] of the German Foreign Office. One day I was called to my brother’s office and was thunderstruck to find that my help was solicited to translate certain passages of a letter or letters from Hess to the Duke of Hamilton. This I was called upon to do on more than one occasion. I was sworn to secrecy.55

  Ernst Bohle had been born in Bradford, England. His parents had moved to South Africa when he was three years old and he had been to school in Cape Town, leaving with a first-class matriculation.56 He was obviously completely fluent in English, so it is a puzzle why he sought his half-brother’s assistance. It would not be a puzzle, though, if the ‘letter or letters’ to be rendered into English were actually passages in a draft treaty. Then his half-brother’s expertise as an official Foreign Ministry translator would have been required. H. Bohle’s testimony consequently provides strong support for the informant’s account, especially perhaps as it continued:

  The parts of the letter or letters which I had to translate were somewhat disconnected … My own indelible impression, based on the work I was doing, was that Hess was endeavouring, via the Duke of Hamilton, to come to some sort of an understanding with Britain …57

  After 50 years the informant could not remember whether an alliance was proposed, as in part ‘c)’ of the document André Guerber found in 1945 in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery,58 but he did remember one phrase which provoked debate: wohlwollende Neutralität, finally rendered as ‘well-wishing neutrality’. It will be recalled that part ‘d)’ of the plan Guerber found called for Britain’s ‘benevolent neutrality’ during the German–Russian war. As for the date of Hitler’s coming attack in the east, the informant was quite clear that Hess did reveal it.

  It seems equally clear from Kirkpatrick’s reports of his interviews with Hess that he was not told; indeed he reported Hess as saying that, contrary to rumour, Hitler had no immediate plans to attack Russia. If so, this was perhaps because Hess regarded Kirkpatrick as a representative of the Churchill government; He thought of Hamilton as an opponent of Churchill, and it is possible or even probable that he told Hamilton during their initial talk in the morning of Sunday the 11th that Hitler was about to launch his attack in the east. Lord Beaverbrook, who was brought into the affair by Churchill from the start, certainly believed so. In 1961 he wrote to the author James Leasor: ‘Hess must have made it clear in that interview [with Hamilton] that his object was – or probably made it clear – to negotiate with Britain concerning the impending attack by Germany on Soviet Russia.’59

  Beaverbrook also told Leasor that he believed Hess was on a mission for Hitler: ‘For my part I have always held the view that Hess was sent, that Hitler knew of his journey, and that he intended to negotiate a treaty of peace on most favourable terms if Germany could be given a free hand to attack Russia.’60

  It is interesting in this connection that during the War Cabinet meeting on Thursday 15 May, Ernest Bevin, who had originally informed Churchill of Hess’s imminent arrival, had said, ‘I think Hitler sent him here.’61 At the same meeting Churchill said, ‘I think they’ll attack Russia.’62 Churchill had many sources and reasons for his belief, but it is probably significant that he made the comment during a discussion about Hess.

  The circulation list for MI6’s subsequent report on reactions to Hess’s flight from sources around the world had ‘Sir R. Vansittart’ placed second after ‘Mr. Hopkinson’, Menzies’ Foreign Office liaison, and before ‘Major Morton’,63 Churchill’s intelligence adviser, an indication that Vansittart, Cadogan’s predecessor, who had been removed from his post before the war because of his strident anti-appeasement stance, was still engaged at the highest levels of intelligence.

  Vansittart’s views on the war were unchanged. He had recently aired them in a series of radio broadcasts which had been published in January 1941 as Black Record, probably the most influential propaganda instrument of the war. By May they had gone through nine editions. He argued that Nazism was ‘not an aberration but an outcome’ of German history,64 and pointed out: ‘in Poland, for example, the Brazen horde [Nazis] is carrying out a policy of racial extermination as systematically as Imperial Germany exterminated the Hererros [sic] [of German South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1904 to 1907] …’65 The implication is that the negotiations which had surely taken place in the lead up to Hess’s mission were, on the British side, bogus. Yet the informant’s description of the care taken in rendering the German text into precise English suggests that the proposed treaty was taken very seriously by Churchill – possibly as a fallback in case of necessity.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Negotiations?r />
  ON 20 MAY, the day Hess was moved from the Tower of London to the new home prepared for him in the home counties near Aldershot, Sam Hoare at the British Embassy in Madrid wrote a letter to Eden headed ‘Personal and Private’; it was couched in veiled terms:

  Dear Anthony

  I have just written Winston a short personal note in view of the fact that he took so much interest last year in agreeing to our secret plans. I thought that he would like to know that during the last 2 or 3 weeks they have worked out very much as we hoped.

  I am enclosing a curious and very secret note that has just been sent me from Beigbeder. The suggestions in it bear a remarkable resemblance to what I imagine Hess has been saying in England. You will therefore no doubt wish to take it into account in connexion with anything that you get out of Hess …1

  Juan Beigbeder was the former Spanish Foreign Minister, an Anglophile with an English mistress. His note, enclosed in Hoare’s letter to Eden, concerned an agent of Ribbentrop named Gardemann who had approached him through a personal friend to ask if he would speak to Hoare to find out what ideas the English had about peace. Gardemann claimed that a German victory was certain but that ‘the Germans did not wish to destroy the British Empire because it was an essential element in the future reconstruction of the world …’2 – exactly what Hess had been saying more discursively to Hamilton and Kirkpatrick.

  The question is, what ‘secret plans’ had Hoare and Eden hatched and Churchill agreed to? Hoare’s ‘short personal note’ to Winston might provide the answer but is not in Churchill’s files.

  Hoare had met Eden on 15 February at Gibraltar, where Eden stopped en route to the eastern Mediterranean on a special mission.3 It had been a time of increasing German pressure on Spain either to join the Axis or to allow German troops through the country to seize Gibraltar; and Juan Beigbeder had been replaced as Spanish Foreign Minister by the pro-German Serrano Suñer.4 The policies Hoare and Eden developed to meet what appeared to be the imminent danger of Franco succumbing to the proposition of inevitable German victory consisted chiefly of financial and food aid – allowing wheat in through the British naval blockade of the peninsula.5 Concerted with Roosevelt’s special envoy, Colonel ‘Bill’ Donovan, the policies were detailed in despatches to Churchill and the Foreign Office, and debated in Parliament. They were not secret.