Hess, Hitler and Churchill

by Peter Padfield

  By 24 August Churchill felt compelled to broadcast a speech on the atrocities, without, however, specifying the anti-Jewish nature of the campaign, and being careful to conceal the source of his information:

  As his [Hitler’s] armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands – literally scores of thousands – of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police-troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the sixteenth century [sic] there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale …13

  At the end of the month Churchill received decrypts reporting that the 1st SS Brigade had killed 283 Jews and Police Regiment South 1,342. Churchill circled the latter figure.14 By this date he had received reports on seventeen occasions of groups of Jews being shot.15 By 12 September when Police Regiment South reported disposing of 1,255 Jews, British intelligence had concluded that the figures were ‘evidence of a policy of savage intimidation if not of ultimate extermination’,16 and it was decided not to include reports of this nature in future briefings for Churchill: ‘The fact that the Police are killing all Jews that fall into their hands should by now be sufficiently well appreciated.’17

  BEAVERBROOK AND STALIN

  On 21 August Hess handed another ‘political’ deposition to Lieutenant Loftus, who gave it to Foley that evening. Unlike Hess’s former reports, Colonel Scott did not include it in his diary.18 It is impossible to say whether the omission is significant.

  Early the following month Hess received a letter from Lord Beaverbrook dated 1 September reminding him of their last meeting in the Chancellery in Berlin and suggesting they have some further conversation.19 Beaverbrook was due to fly to Russia for talks with Stalin about war materials, and knew that Hess would come up for discussion. Hess replied on the 4th that in recollection of the meeting in Berlin he would be happy to see him.20

  He had sunk into deep depression after the failure of his latest attempts to use Lieutenant Loftus to get through to the groups he still felt certain would be sympathetic to his proposals. His medical orderlies felt that he was ‘verging on the suicidal again’,21 and since his splint was due to be taken off a decision had been reached to refurbish his suite as a mental hospital ward with armoured glass in the windows.

  He started writing another report for his meeting with Beaverbrook, but as the date of the visit neared he became more and more agitated, exactly as he had before his interview with Lord Simon. The day before the visit, he refused all food except biscuits and asked the doctor for morphia for a pain in his gall bladder.22

  Beaverbrook arrived early in the evening of 9 September with a pass made out in the name of Dr Livingstone, and was shown up to Hess’s bedroom at 7.30. In the secret recording room an MI6 officer and a stenographer listened as the two exchanged greetings.

  ‘How well your English has improved,’ Beaverbrook said.

  ‘A little, not very much.’

  ‘You remember the last time we talked in the Chancellery in Berlin?’23

  The repeated reference to their last meeting in Berlin suggests Beaverbrook may have been covering up a more recent visit to Hess, possibly in the Tower of London. Perhaps it was merely small talk to break the ice.

  After further discussion of Hess’s understanding of English – there was no interpreter present – Beaverbrook said they had come to a bad pass. Hess agreed. Beaverbrook said he had been very much against the war; he had greatly regretted it, but it had all become extraordinarily complicated. He rambled on, attempting to draw Hess on what he knew. Hess pretended he knew nothing, but warned him that England was playing a very dangerous game with Bolshevism.

  ‘Yes,’ Beaverbrook replied, ‘I can’t myself tell why the Germans attacked Russia, I can’t see why.’

  ‘Because we know that one day the Russians will attack us.’

  ‘Will attack Germany?’

  ‘Yes … and it will be good not only for Germany and the whole Europe. It will be good for England too if Russia will be defeated.’24

  He was, of course, omitting the whole hinterground of Hitler’s ideological, racial and colonising ambitions in eastern Europe. He continued stonewalling for the rest of their conversation, but took the opportunity to give Beaverbrook the report he had been writing. It was virtually a repeat of the political deposition he had given Loftus the previous month, questioning Britain’s war aim in the light of the German–Russian war and warning against the danger Bolshevism would pose to Europe and the British Empire if Germany were defeated.25

  He made the same point in his halting English during the conversation: of one thing he was sure, Bolshevism would emerge stronger as a result of the war.26

  Beaverbrook left after an hour’s meandering discussion, clutching the sheaf of manuscript notes Hess had given him, and promising to come and see him again after his return from Moscow – a promise he was not to fulfil. He admitted to Colonel Scott’s adjutant he had got nothing new from the interview, ‘but he found it very hard to believe that “Z” was insane’.27

  Two years later he was to tell Bruce Lockhart, head of the Foreign Office’s political intelligence department, that he thought Hess had probably been given drugs to make him talk. He also said he believed Hess had been sent by Hitler to gain a free hand against Russia, with the proviso that he would be disowned if anything went wrong; he had meant to land in Scotland unbeknown to anyone, burn his plane and find the Duke of Hamilton.28 What Beaverbrook did not say, or what Bruce Lockhart omitted from his diary was why Hess and Hitler should have imagined the Duke of Hamilton would help. It is such an obvious question it suggests one or both held something back.

  Years later, after the publication of James Leasor’s groundbreaking book on Hess’s mission, an MI6 officer with the rank of captain wrote to Leasor claiming he had been stationed in the recording room during Beaverbrook’s conversation with Hess; afterwards he had made a copy of the transcript and taken it straight round to the British Communist Party headquarters. From the unrepentant tone of the letter it was evident the captain, whose name Leasor could not recall, believed he had done a good thing.29 If his story is true Stalin would have known exactly what Hess had said long before Beaverbrook arrived in Moscow.

  * * *

  The original news of Hess’s flight had caused alarm in the Kremlin in case he was carrying peace proposals to free Hitler for a strike east against Russia.30 Initial reports from agents suggested this was exactly the purpose. The first such appears to have been from Kim Philby of the Cambridge spy ring, code-named ‘Sohnchen’. A paraphrase of cryptogram No. 376 of 14 May from London ran ‘Information received from “SOHNCHEN”’ that Hess arrived in England to appeal to Hamilton, his friend and ‘member of the so-called Cliveden clique’. It continued:

  KIRKPATRICK, the first person from the ‘ZAKOYLKA’ [Foreign Office] who identified HESS who announced that he had brought with him peace offers. The essence of his peace proposals we don’t know yet.31

  How Philby obtained his information is not clear. He would later be recruited into MI6, but at this date he was in SOE, training recruits in clandestine propaganda at a camp near Southampton. He produced further information on 18 May, and this time named his source as Tom Dupree, Deputy Chief of the Foreign Office Press Department. He stated that Beaverbrook and Eden had visited Hess, although it was officially denied – and there is still no hint in any open file that either minister had seen Hess by this date. The message went on to say that Hess believed there was ‘a powerful anti-CHURCHILL party in Britain which stands for peace’, which would receive a powerful stimulus from his arrival. It concluded:

  ‘SOHNCHEN’ considers the time for peace negotiations has not arrived yet. But in the course of further developments in the war HESS will be the center of intrigues for the conclusion of the compromise peace and will be usefu
l for the peace party in England and for HITLER.32

  Agents in Washington and Berlin passed similar information to Moscow: Hess had been sent by Hitler to propose peace. One, a particularly trusted informant in Berlin code-named ‘EXTERN’, reported in addition that if Britain agreed to the proposals Germany would immediately turn on the USSR.33

  Stalin believed it: a British–German peace became in his mind the precondition for the German assault he knew he had to expect; thus, despite a spate of warnings of imminent attack in May and June, his forces were caught completely by surprise. As the Red Army was rolled back he fell into a state of shock, which, we are told, lasted several days.

  In September Moscow received a rather more reassuring report on Hess from an agent in Vichy France; according to this Hess had been lured to Britain by MI6 in retaliation for their humiliation at the capture of their agents, Stevens and Payne-Best, at Venlo in 1939.34 This time it was German intelligence that was fooled into believing in a fictitious conspiracy. Centred in Scotland and directed by ‘Lord Hamilton’, the conspirators had requested and arranged for the arrival of an important German representative to galvanise the movement. They had been astonished when this turned out to be the Deputy Führer. It is not known how much credence was placed in this report.

  Nonetheless, Hess was still in Britain and still a cause of anxiety, particularly because of the veil of silence in which the British government had wrapped him; and when, towards the end of September, Beaverbrook and Roosevelt’s envoy, W. Averell Harriman, arrived in Moscow at the head of an Anglo–American delegation to negotiate the war supplies Russia needed, Stalin asked Beaverbrook at dinner why Hess had not been shot.

  ‘You just don’t shoot a person in England,’ Beaverbrook replied, ‘he has to have a trial before a jury, but I can tell you why he is in Britain’, at which, according to his account, he produced the transcript of his talk with Hess.35

  It is more probable that he gave Stalin Hess’s handwritten memorandum on the German–Russian war, for years later, writing to James Leasor, Beaverbrook said he showed Stalin ‘a letter written to me by Hess in his own hand’.36 Stalin sent the letter off for translation, and no doubt it was photocopied before being returned. The original can be seen today in the Beaverbrook Papers.

  Towards the end of October Churchill’s personal intelligence adviser, Major Desmond Morton, divulged aspects of Hess’s mission at a lunch attended by a journalist from Time magazine named Laird. Some of the facts and remarks Morton attributed to Hess are so obviously false it is evident this was a disinformation lunch; to what end is not clear.

  Laird duly passed on what Morton had said to the US Military Attaché, Captain Raymond E. Lee, who sent a full report to Washington.37 The chief revelation was that Hess had flown to Scotland to tell Hamilton that Germany was about to fight Russia. Hess, Lee stated, had said, ‘I knew the Duke would see immediately that it would be absurd and awful for England to continue to fight Germany any longer.’38

  This conflicts with all the evidence from the open files. In June Lord Simon had been asked to probe Hess on Hitler’s intentions towards Russia,39 and after that interview Henry Hopkinson, Menzies’ liaison with the Foreign Office, had written a memo concluding, ‘We have no clear idea of Hitler’s aspirations and intentions in Russia.’40 While it is entirely possible that Hamilton and Kirkpatrick did not disclose all in their reports on their conversations with Hess – indeed it is clear they said nothing of the letter and documents he had brought – it is hard to believe that Menzies’ right-hand man in the Foreign Office would have written a deliberately misleading internal memo.

  Morton also revealed that Hess was living in a large estate near Glasgow reserved for higher German officers, but was apart from them in one of the servants’ cottages. He had a radio and listened to both English and German broadcasts, and ‘Every time someone says the word “Hitler”, Hess jumps to his feet and says “Heil Hitler”.’41

  Morton evidently did not divulge that Hess was confined to bed with his leg in a splint after a suicide attempt.

  Morton expected his remarks to reach Washington as he said that Hess was ‘especially interested in getting Roosevelt’s speeches on the short wave’.42 It is significant that he also credited Hess with the words, ‘we are obliterating the Jews’.43 Churchill, of course, knew that; Hess may have revealed it, but Morton’s lunchtime confidences are no evidence that he did.

  Moscow received a report of the same farrago of Morton’s inventions even before Washington, although it is not clear who the ‘agent source’ was.44 No doubt this was also intended: the impression that the British government had turned down an invitation from Hess to join Hitler’s anti-Bolshevik crusade might have been designed to defuse Stalin’s suspicions about Hess’s presence in Britain. Possibly it merely intensified them, for it was shortly afterwards that MI5 attempted to prosecute de Courcy,45 seen by Moscow’s friends as an enemy of Britain’s alliance with Russia.

  DISINFORMATION

  London had suffered its most destructive bombing raid of the war on the night Hess landed in Scotland.46 It is unlikely that this was coincidence. Assuming that Hess flew on Hitler’s commission, the raid was designed to herald the envoy of peace with an apocalyptic vision of the consequences of rejection. Yet a curious feature of the mission is that, despite the British government’s failure to respond, raids on London virtually ceased after 10/11 May 1941, not to be resumed until Hitler himself was facing defeat in 1943.

  One reason may have been that British agents maintained the lines of communication used in the negotiations that brought Hess to Scotland in the first place. At all events there is evidence of a continuing British deception in a file of correspondence between the German Security Service and Foreign Ministry in summer 1942. It opens with a letter from Heydrich dated 4 May, addressed to Ribbentrop personally.47 In mid-April, Heydrich wrote, one of his Gewährsleute (confidential agents) had discussed a number of questions with an Englishman who had been educated in Germany. They concerned an Englishman with first-rate connections in influential English circles who knew Rudolf Hess personally. He asked Ribbentrop to acquaint the Führer with the contents of the report, which he enclosed:

  The Englishman stated that in December last year he had spent four days in London with Hess at his [Hess’s] express wish with the approval of Churchill. Hess was housed in a villa in Scotland, had his personal servants and wanted for nothing. Churchill had expressly decreed that Hess, on account of his rank as SS-Gruppenführer, should be accommodated as a general. On the agent asking whether the Englishman had had the impression that Hess was, perhaps, somewhat mentally confused, he received the answer that the Englishman had not gained this impression. Hess enjoyed the best of health, was very lively and very concerned, on the one hand about the destructive fratricidal war between the best white races, on the other about the great losses in valuable human material allegedly caused the Germans by the enemy in the east. Hess’s four days in London served the purpose, in accordance with his wishes, of showing him London and above all the havoc of the bomb damage. The Englishman and Hess, equipped with dark glasses, had moved about London freely and Hess had been shown everything he had wanted to see. He had then parted from him, by the Englishman’s account, with the words, ‘Work with me to bring about peace in the soonest possible time.’48

  The report went on to mention other topics Heydrich’s agent had discussed with the Englishman, first the Japanese campaign in the Far East. The previous December Japan had entered the war as an ally of the Axis by attacking US and British Eastern possessions, so bringing the United States into the war on the Anglo–Russian side. The Englishman stressed his countrymen’s grave concern about Japanese successes, as a Japanese–Chinese–Indian bloc, rich in raw materials and cheap labour, would be a danger for the white races; Great Britain and Germany needed to unite quickly to save the predominance of the white races in Asia, although he saw no
possibility of that at present.

  The Englishman had gone on to specify three things that he considered most damaging for Germany:

  a) The Jewish question, which in his opinion had to be solved internally instead of allowing them out of the country, where they would have the possibilities of using their connections and money to work systematically against Germany.

  b) The bombardment of London had been mistaken since it had awakened feelings of hate against Germany in even the most simple Englishmen, which had not been present before …

  c) The unbelievable corruption spreading through Germany which is known everywhere abroad …49

  Ribbentrop requested more details on the source before he laid the report before Hitler. In the meantime Heydrich had been assassinated by Czech agents, and Schellenberg, who was expected to succeed him as chief of the Security Service, took up the case. Schellenberg had been in charge of the investigation into Hess’s flight. The files have never been found, but in his post-war memoirs Schellenberg stated that Hess had been influenced for some years by agents of the British Secret Service and their German collaborators, who had played a large part in his decision to fly to Scotland; he named especially Professor Gerl, the Bavarian gland specialist with top-level British contacts from his pre-war practice, who was a particular friend of Hess.50

  To the Foreign Ministry’s request for information on the source of the recent report on Hess Schellenberg replied that it came from a trustworthy German businessman, who often travelled to Switzerland and had dealings with Swiss business leaders with good connections to England. His evidence came on the one hand from the circle of Hess’s relations in Switzerland, on the other from their English associates. Among these the agent had met an Englishman ‘who had himself talked exhaustively on political questions with Rudolf Hess, Winston Churchill, Eden, Greenwood, Dr. Thompson and leading representatives of the Labour Party’.51