Hess, Hitler and Churchill

by Peter Padfield

  Lieutenant Malone came on duty at 10.00 a.m. to find him lying awake in semi-darkness with curtains drawn. After a short silence Hess said he had written to his family the day before telling them what he was about to do, and explained his reason: he could not be mad in England.

  ‘Surely you did not intend to kill yourself?’

  Hess replied that he certainly had and still intended to do so. Malone’s subsequent report continued:

  In killing himself he would be acting like a man. He knew that recently he had been behaving like a woman. When he first came here he had behaved as a man. ‘I got up at eight o’clock in the morning, but then came a period of no sleep, no sleep’ and he had begun to go to pieces under the influence of wine and drugs …17

  Dicks’s chief, Colonel Rees, visited Hess that evening and saw him again two days later, reporting afterwards that his condition had deteriorated markedly since his first visit on 30 May:

  The delusional tendency which I then noticed has become more marked and more definitely organised so that he now has a delusional idea of poisoning and of a plot against his life and against his sanity which no one can argue him out of. He told me that his suicidal attempt was because he would rather be dead than mad in this country.18

  He was clear that Hess’s condition had ‘now declared itself as a true psychosis’ – insanity. The regime at Mytchett Place was altered accordingly: medical orderlies with mental nursing qualifications took over in place of the young Guards officers looking after Hess, and ‘Colonel Wallace’ and ‘Captain Barnes’ were returned to their normal duties, leaving Foley as Menzies’ only direct representative in the house. Also, Hess was allowed The Times every day – perhaps, as Cadogan had suggested, to watch his reactions to the news.19

  All intelligence from Enigma decrypts, agents and German troop movements suggested that Hitler was about to attack Russia; and on 9 June, the day of Simon’s interview, Göring had informed British and American representatives in Stockholm via his go-between, Birger Dahlerus, that Germany would attack Russia ‘by about the 15th’.20 Whether it was hoped that this might aid Hess in his talks with the British, whether the negotiations that must have prompted Hess to come to Britain were continuing through agents and middlemen, or whether Göring was playing a part in a great deception on Stalin – that the real target was Britain – is quite unclear.

  In the early hours of Sunday 22 June, anniversary of the French armistice in the Forest of Compiègne, massive German armies and Luftwaffe fleets deployed on the eastern front from Poland to the Balkans launched the invasion of Russia. The Red Army was caught by surprise and overrun, Red Air Force planes destroyed on the ground. Stalin, who had ignored all warnings under the impression that Hitler must secure his western front by coming to an under­standing with Britain before marching east, was paralysed by indecision.

  Later that morning at Mytchett Place Major Dicks came into Hess’s room to tell him the news.

  ‘So,’ Hess replied with an inscrutable smile, ‘they have started after all.’21

  Hitler was with Goebbels at this crucial moment in the war, pacing back and forth in the salon of the Reich Chancellery; Goebbels entered in his diary: ‘The Führer rates the peace party in England very highly. Otherwise there would not have been such systematic silence [about Hess]. The Führer only has words of contempt for Hess …’22

  THE APPEASERS

  On 19 June, three days before Hitler’s assault on Russia, the government’s stance on Hess’s mission had been questioned during the adjournment debate in Parliament.23 A Labour Member, Samuel Sydney Silverman, asked whether Hess had brought any proposals with him, and whether any reply was contemplated. Silverman was a Jew who had raised himself from humble circumstances. During the first war he had served over two years in jail as a conscientious objector, but Hitler’s accession to power had caused him to rethink his pacifism and he had supported Britain’s declaration of war in 1939. A campaigner on behalf of Jews worldwide, and especially in Palestine, he had recently been elected chairman of the British section of the Jewish World Congress.

  His question was echoed by Richard ‘Dick’ Stokes, also Labour, but from a very different background and with an opposing viewpoint. Stokes had a public school and Cambridge education; he had served in the Royal Artillery in the first war, winning an MC and bar, since when he had become chairman and managing director of a successful engineering firm in Ipswich, whose voters he represented. He shared Liddell Hart’s views on the war and led a campaign for a compromise peace which had been supported the previous year by Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers. On 10 May, the day Hess had flown to Scotland, the Duke of Bedford, formerly Lord Tavistock, the most outspoken aristocratic advocate of peace, had written to him suggesting that Lloyd George, ‘so obviously the one man who could save the country’, should make a public statement indicating peace terms to which Germany could respond.24

  While Silverman was anxious lest the government were talking to or even negotiating with Hess, Stokes believed that they should. In answering both, Churchill said that he had no statement to make at this time, but the United States government had been kept informed on the subject of Hess’s flight to Britain; to a supplementary question, he said he had nothing to add to his previous answer.

  Continuing to press him, Silverman referred to a statement published by the Lord Provost of Glasgow, Sir Patrick Dollan, that Hess had arrived in this country expecting to make contact with certain individuals or groups – unnamed – and to be able to go back again in two days’ time; and he asked, ‘Did he or did he not propose peace?’

  Stokes again supported his question: ‘To ordinary persons like me it appears that this is the most sensational thing that has happened for many hundreds of years’; and he referred to rumours that Hess was living at the Prime Minister’s country retreat, Chequers. This was rebutted by R.A. Butler. Before that Major Vyvyan Adams had taken up the case for the government, accusing Stokes of identifying himself with the opinions of Lord Londonderry. Adams continued:

  I believe that Hess came to this country under the fond delusion that he could debauch our aristocracy by saying to them join us or we join Russia. It seems that he came having in his pocket proposals which might attract the mentality which now wants peace at any cost. There is such a mentality and it is mainly to be found here and there in corners among the well-born and well-to-do. Those who have more money than sense, those who whisper the dangerous fallacy, better defeat with our possessions than victory with Bolshevism, which is exactly what Hitler wants them to say. Such an outlook is to be found, only half ashamed in the corners of another place [House of Lords]. Appeasement is not dead among those whom I may call for the purpose of rough convenience the Cliveden set, an expression as historically convenient and geographically inaccurate as the Holy Roman Empire. I have no doubt indeed that The Times newspaper would quickly make surrender or compromise appear respectable …25

  Whether Adams had learned Hess literally had proposals ‘in his pocket’, or whether he meant it in a general sense, there is no doubt the thrust of his rhetoric about the number of ‘appeasers’ and their high social standing was correct. Indeed the topic had been broached at a top-level meeting at SOE headquarters in Woburn Abbey – ironically the seat of the pacifist Duke of Bedford – on the very day Hess had taken off for Scotland. Most unusually, two cabinet ministers had been present: Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare and head of SOE, and the Foreign Secretary, Eden.26 The Director General of Political Warfare, Robert Bruce Lockhart, also there, had noted in his diary: ‘Sat. 10th May. Back to Woburn Abbey for meeting with Eden … [who] talked about appeasers in the Conservative Party, plenty of them … Dalton nearly gave away one of our biggest secrets at luncheon.’27

  Hess had, of course, come to talk with the appeasers; and it will be recalled that the whole thrust of the deception run by all arms of British intelligence in the effort to turn Hitler
eastwards was that Britain could be neutralised by negotiation with the powerful ‘peace party’ in the country.

  LIEUTENANT LOFTUS

  Although Hess’s daily supervision had been taken over by medical orderlies, the Guards officers remained at Camp Z and continued to visit him and share meals with him as he lay in bed with his left leg encased in plaster suspended from a Balkan frame. On 17 July a newcomer, Lieutenant Murrough Loftus of the Scots Guards, introduced himself. He was the son of the Conservative MP for Lowestoft, Pierse Loftus. Foley had briefed him for his meetings with Hess, suggesting he make much of a family visit to Germany before the war when his mother had met Hitler, implying they had been impressed by what they had seen there.28 The aim, as with all officers at Mytchett Place, was to extract information by gaining Hess’s confidence.

  The scheme, or Loftus’s natural charm, worked at once. Hess took to the young officer at their first meeting over lunch in his room, and talked freely for an hour on many topics.29 To a question about his flight he replied that he had intended to come as long ago as Christmas and had made two separate attempts, but had been forced back by bad weather or faults in the steering gear or wireless. He was quite certain that if only he had been able to contact some influential person in Britain they could have stopped the war between them. When asked whether he was sure that Germany would accept his peace proposals, he replied that Germany was Hitler, and he had complete agreement with Hitler. Asked what exactly his proposals were, he was studiedly vague. Afterwards Loftus wrote a long report on the conversation and his own assessment of Hess:

  He is incredibly vain, and flattery about his flight, for instance, makes him talkative and in a good humour. I don’t think he is a subtle man or a liar. I think he is one of the simplest people you could meet and I very much doubt whether he is at all intelligent, but he has what has lifted the whole mediocre bunch to power – that single-tracked blind and fanatical devotion to an ideal and to the man who is his leader.

  But he differs from the rest of Hitler’s henchmen in that he is genuinely religious and sincerely humanitarian. He doesn’t doubt for a moment that Germany will win the war and sees himself building a house in Scotland …30

  He was so obsessed with his mission, Loftus went on, that he could not see things as they were. His manners were courteous and he had a disarming smile, but his appearance was slightly spoilt by his upper teeth, which tended to protrude: ‘He is chiefly remarkable for his eyes which are astonishingly deep-set under pronounced brows and of striking intensity.’

  The following day, the 18th, Major Dicks, who had never gained Hess’s trust, was replaced by another psychiatric doctor. Two days later Colonel Scott noted in his diary that Hess seemed to improve every day; ‘one begins to wonder if Col. Rees & Major Dicks were right in their diagnosis that he is permanently insane.’31

  On the 25th Lieutenant Malone left Mytchett Place, and two days later at lunch Hess told Loftus he was the only one in the house he could trust, and he had something of momentous importance concerning his flight which he was prepared to divulge provided Loftus would give his parole not to repeat it to anyone in the house. Loftus refused to do so until he had consulted his father, who as a Member of Parliament and ‘a friend of Germany’ was to act as go-between to the Prime Minister. Colonel Scott noted in his diary that Loftus had said this ‘in order to gain information as instructed; he actually had no intention of approaching or informing his father’.32

  Foley did not expect much from the promised revelation; he was proved right. When Hess handed Loftus the report on 1 August it turned out to be little more than an amplification of his previous complaints, demands and suspicions, including almost clinical descriptions of the sensations produced by the drugs he alleged he had been given, and names of witnesses to incidents he complained of. He asserted that if he had given the impression of suffering from a psychosis it was because he wanted peace – presumably from the persistent questioning to which he had been subjected.33 It appeared to be an admission that he had been play-acting. Moreover, he went on, he had now made it more difficult to give him ‘harmful substances’ by sharing his food and drink with the young officers who lunched and dined with him. He added that they had behaved in exemplary fashion towards him.

  The latter part of the report was a request for an enquiry on the basis of his statements, to be conducted on the authority of the King, not the War Office or the Prime Minister; and he asked that a translation of this report should be given to the Duke of Hamilton: ‘That gentleman promised me when I landed that he would do everything to secure my safety. I know that in consequence the King of England has issued appropriate orders …’

  Having unburdened himself, Hess started on a second, this time political as opposed to personal, report. He handed it to Loftus a week later, on 7 August: 45 manuscript pages headed ‘Germany–England from the angle of the German–Bolshevik War’.34 Again he asked for a translation to be forwarded to the Duke of Hamilton.

  It was a logical, rather prophetic document, by no means the rambling of a psychotic. It began by questioning British war aims and asking whether the difference between coming to an understanding with Germany now or fighting on to achieve eventual victory was so great it was worth the sacrifices in men, materials, destruction and indebtedness to foreign countries which must ensue: ‘… the longer the war lasts the more the power relation between England and America becomes weighted in favour of the latter’, in support of which he cited the final chapter of Commander Russell Grenfell’s Sea Power, ‘published under the pseudonym T-124’. Further, all these sacrifices could be in vain since it was not at all certain that England would win. Which brought him to his second point, already elaborated endlessly to Hamilton and Kirkpatrick, Foley and the ‘companions’, the young Guards officers and Lord Simon, that Germany’s victory was certain. It would be accomplished chiefly by the U-boat campaign against British shipping and overwhelming air attack. It was this conception of the ‘frightful things to come’ that had strengthened his decision to attempt the flight to England; and he repeated previous assertions that his presence in England could be the best excuse for negotiations without Britain losing face.

  None of this was new, but he went on to develop a prophetic warning about the Soviet threat. Despite being certain of German victory, he posed the hypothesis for the sake of argument that Britain and Russia would win the war:

  A victory for England would equally be a victory for the Bolsheviks. The victory of the Bolsheviks would sooner or later mean their marching into Germany and into the rest of Europe. The military strength of the Bolsheviks is no doubt a surprise for the whole world … But Soviet Russia is doubtless only at the beginning of her industrial development. Imagine what the military strength of the Bolsheviks will be in the near future if their industries are strongly developed …

  Pointing to the size and population of Russia and her mineral riches, he supplied the answer: Soviet Russia would become the strongest military power on earth, the future world power, inheriting the world position of the British Empire. ‘Only a strong Germany supported by the whole of Europe and the confidence of England can avoid the danger.’

  This was the familiar Nazi appeal to regard Germany as the bulwark of Western civilisation against Communism, an argument which appealed and was intended to appeal to significant strands of British imperial thinking.

  This evidently worried Eden, for on 11 August, four days after Hess had handed the document to Loftus, Menzies alerted Foley to the Foreign Secretary’s disquiet:

  You will observe from the attached that the S of S [Eden] and Sir A.C. [Cadogan] are somewhat concerned lest the Duty Officer [Loftus] should convey anything whatsoever that he may glean about Jonathan [Hess] to his parents. I feel sure there is no danger, but can you confirm.35

  The implication is that Pierse Loftus was known to be on the ‘compromise peace’ wing of the Conservative Party. In his reply
Foley referred to the ‘special circumstances’ of Loftus’s case,36 which might suggest that the young officer had been posted to Mytchett Place specifically because his father was a Conservative MP in order to encourage Hess to talk. Immediately after Lieutenant Loftus’s arrival, Foley stated:

  to make quite certain that there could be no possible misunderstanding, Lt. Col. Scott, his superior officer, at my request, invited him to the orderly room and solemnly reminded him of his oath of secrecy and took from him a verbal assurance that he understood.

  I attach a minute which he has written today at my request. It will allay any anxiety.37

  The attached note signed by Loftus stated that his instructions, in common with those of other junior officers, were to extract from ‘Z’ any information that might be of use to the government:

  To achieve this end I set out to gain his confidence by pretending a sympathy towards many things which I myself and those people I introduced into the conversation were, in fact, very far from feeling.