Hess, Hitler and Churchill

by Peter Padfield

  Yet this claim had been asserted as early as October 1942 by the Swedish Nazi newspaper Dagsposten, controlled and financed from Berlin. An article obviously inspired by Berlin had claimed that it was time to lift the secrecy about Hess’s flight to Britain. This had not been Hess’s independent venture but part of Hitler’s considered plan to form an alliance with Britain against Russia. To protect himself against a possible failure Hitler had agreed in advance to deny all knowledge, and to give this plausibility had subsequently punished those who helped Hess. The article stated that Churchill had turned down the offer without consulting Parliament or informing the British people of the proposal. He did consult Roosevelt, however, who emphatically opposed the Hess plan.8

  Following this article the British German-language magazine Die Zeitung, published for Germans living in Britain, had stated that ‘well-informed observers in London’ believed the Dagsposten version of events was ‘on the whole correct’.9 Cadogan had commented, ‘I do not know who the “well-informed political observers” were, but I am quite sure that they were not “well-informed”.’10

  Yet this is what the American Mercury article also claimed implicitly: that all details of Hess’s mission were arranged with the British side before he took off on 10 May and ‘a kind of official reception committee composed of Military Intelligence officers and Secret Service agents was waiting at the private aerodrome on the Hamilton estate [Dungavel].’11 It will be recalled that long after the war two members of the women’s services who had been stationed at Dungavel told the authors of Double Standards that a number of people, including the Duke of Kent, had been waiting in a small house adjacent to the Dungavel airstrip that night; further, that they had seen the landing lights switched on briefly and off again, and heard a low-flying aircraft shortly afterwards.12

  Because of Hess’s forced parachute landing ten miles from Dungavel, the article continued, by the time the official ‘reception committee’ found him he was in Home Guard custody; otherwise his arrival might have been kept dark for some time, if not for the duration. As we have seen, he was driven to Maryhill Barracks near Glasgow, thence to a military hospital, where his injured ankle was treated, and the next day Churchill sent Ivone Kirkpatrick up to Scotland to receive his proposals. The article presented these in general outline, withholding details:

  Hitler offered a total cessation of the war in the West. Germany would evacuate all of France except Alsace and Lorraine, which would remain German. It would evacuate Holland and Belgium, retaining Luxembourg. It would evacuate Norway and Denmark. In short, Hitler offered to withdraw from Western Europe, except for the two French provinces and Luxembourg, in return for which Great Britain would agree to assume an attitude of benevolent neutrality towards Germany as it unfolded its plans in Eastern Europe. In addition, the Führer was ready to withdraw from Yugoslavia and Greece …13

  Hess had refused to be drawn on military plans, the article stated, but had explained the importance of ‘Hitler’s Eastern mission “to save humanity” [from Bolshevism]’, and promised that Germany would take the full production of British and French war industries until they could be converted to a peacetime basis, in effect using ‘the arsenals of free capitalism against Asiatic Bolshevism’.

  Churchill had communicated Hess’s proposals to Roosevelt, who had agreed with his decision to reject them and avoid open discussion, instead accepting ‘the insanity explanation fed to the German people’. The article concluded that this episode was not the first time England had reduced a German stronghold by audacious Secret Service work.

  Although the author claimed information from German sources and indications from Hess himself, it is evident that many details could only have come from British insiders, Ivone Kirkpatrick’s role as a particular example. It is unlikely that MI6 officers would have talked: the service still refuses to open its files on the affair. The two most likely candidates are Churchill’s intelligence adviser, Desmond Morton, or his Minister of Information and confidant, Brendan Bracken. Both were capable of the more extravagant flourishes in the story – that Hess had an RAF escort on the final leg of his journey surely overstates Fighter Command’s contribution.

  Whoever the source, Churchill must have been behind it. The war had turned in his favour: in February 1943 what remained of the German 6th Army besieging Stalingrad had been forced to surrender; in the Pacific US forces had broken the domination of the Japanese carriers and taken Guadalcanal; Atlantic U-boats had suffered record losses; in North Africa Axis forces were trapped between Anglo–American armies advancing from east and west. The arguments for a compromise peace with Hitler had been demolished on battlefield and ocean and it was safe at last to reveal the terms Hess had offered. There must also have been a purpose. Perhaps it was to reassure Stalin, still fretting about the Western Allies’ failure to open a ‘second front’ in Europe. The article stated initially that ‘most of those in possession of the true story’ of Hess’s mission felt it should now be told:

  For one thing, it would place before critics of the Anglo-American policy towards Soviet Russia the vital and silencing fact that at a difficult moment, when he might have withdrawn his country from the war at Russia’s expense, Churchill pledged Britain to continue fighting as a full ally of the newest victim of Nazi duplicity. There would have been some semblance of poetic justice to such a withdrawal – was it not Stalin who set the war in motion by signing a friendship pact with Hitler in 1939? But the British Prime Minister never even considered such action.14

  Later that summer Brendan Bracken spoke about the affair in America, admitting that Hess had flown over ‘expecting to find quislings who would help him to throw Churchill out and make peace’, also that the Duke of Hamilton had met Hess before the war, thereby contradicting earlier statements in the Commons designed to protect Hamilton’s reputation.15

  On 1 September the Daily Mail published a more sensational disclosure, ‘The Daily Life of Hess in Prison Camp’, describing his confinement in the wing of a former lunatic asylum, and presenting him as a ‘paranoiac, suffering from persecution mania, convinced that people are in league against him, hearing voices which do not exist’.16 It is evident the author had inside information from an orderly or officer at Maindiff Court: this was indeed how Hess was reacting to the ever-worsening news for the Axis.17

  These revelations revived interest in the case; questions were put down for the Commons, and the War Cabinet decided an official statement could no longer be resisted.18 Eden was asked to produce one on the lines of the report Stafford Cripps had compiled for Stalin; he delivered it to the House on 22 September. It was the official version based primarily on the reports from Hamilton and Kirkpatrick available in the open files today. He made no mention of prior negotiations, bogus or otherwise, but expected the House to believe that Hess had flown to see the Duke of Hamilton simply because his friend Haushofer had told him that ‘the wing commander was an Englishman who would understand his point of view’.19 Nor did Eden mention a formal offer from Germany to evacuate occupied western Europe. According to his statement, the ‘solution’ Hess had proposed amounted to nothing more than Germany being given a free hand in Europe, England a free hand in the British Empire, which ‘so-called “terms”’ had been restated by Hess in a signed document dated 10 June.

  The account may have been true so far as it went: it asserted that Hess had arrived with photographs of a small boy and the visiting cards of the Haushofers; ‘No other documents or identifications were found on the prisoner’.20 No mention was made of the documents now known to have been found afterwards on the site of his crashed Messerschmitt.21 And it was these, if the anonymous informant is to be believed, not Hess’s own statements, which carried Germany’s official terms offering evacuation of the occupied countries of western Europe.22

  Whether the House or the country were satisfied, Stalin did not believe it. Churchill visited Moscow the following year, and dur
ing a dinner in the Kremlin expatiated on Hess’s motives and simple belief that if he could see the Duke of Hamilton, who was Lord Steward, he would immediately be taken to the King and everything would be settled. Instead, he was put in prison. ‘He is now completely mad,’ he concluded.

  At this, according to the recollections of the British Ambassador, who was at the dinner, ‘Marshal Stalin rather unexpectedly proposed the health of the British Intelligence Service which had inveigled Hess into coming to England.’ Churchill protested that the British government had known nothing of his flight beforehand. ‘The Russian Intelligence Service,’ Stalin replied, ‘often did not inform the government of its intentions, and only did so after their work was accomplished.’23

  THE END OF THE REICH

  In April 1945, as the Red Army closed in on Berlin, the Duke of Hamilton called on Brendan Bracken at the Ministry of Information to tell him that the RAF had released him for a month so that he could visit the United States to attend a conference of airline operators in a civilian capacity. He asked him for a note from the Prime Minister. Bracken wrote to Churchill’s private secretary to pass on the request, adding that Hamilton was bound to be pursued by a host of reporters ‘who will wish to extract the “low down” on Hess’.24 He enclosed a draft testimonial of the kind Hamilton sought, stating that the Duke’s actions ‘were in all respects becoming to a loyal serving officer’.25 He also provided Hamilton with character references of his own addressed to influential Americans, including Roosevelt’s aide, Harry Hopkins: ‘The bearer of this letter is the Duke of Hamilton, a great friend of mine. He is not a teetotaller and he would enjoy being shown the beauties of New York.’26

  Meanwhile Hamilton had prepared ‘Additional Notes on the Hess Incident’ to use as a basis for his replies to questions he knew he would be asked, and he sent these to the Foreign Office. An official there pencilled brackets around two passages it was thought should be omitted. These passages do not appear on the present file copy, although one phrase has been underlined: ‘He [Hess] made no remark at all on Russia, which then had a non-aggression pact with Germany …’27

  Churchill lost no time in vetoing Hamilton’s trip:

  Surely it is not necessary for the Duke to undertake this particular task. I quite agree that he will most certainly be badgered by American and Canadian reporters about Hess, and excitement would all the more be increased if I took the most unusual course of giving him a special testimonial of this kind. I have never been asked to do such a thing before …28

  The Russians, he went on, were most suspicious about the Hess episode, and he had had a lengthy argument about it with Marshal Stalin in October. It was not in the public interest that the affair should be stirred up at the present time. He concluded: ‘I desire therefore that the Duke should not, repeat not, undertake this task.’

  * * *

  A month later, after Berlin had been overrun and Hitler had taken his own life, Germany surrendered to the Allies. In September Japan surrendered; the most destructive world war in history was over. The following month Rudolf Hess, dressed in his Luftwaffe uniform with flying boots, was taken from Maindiff Court and flown to Nuremberg to stand trial with other captured Nazi leaders as a war criminal, as Churchill had foreseen almost from the day of his arrival in Scotland.

  In July 1942, after his move from Mytchett Place to south Wales, Hess’s health and disposition had improved remarkably. He had liked the doctors there, describing them in recollection to Ilse as ‘especially nice types’, cultivated and many-sided in their interests.29 He had enjoyed walking with them in the countryside, and had become especially friendly with an older lieutenant, Walter Fenton, who had a car allotted especially to drive him to local sites of interest. Years later Fenton looked back on this period as his best time in the war. ‘I got to like the old boy very much,’ he recalled, ‘he thought a lot of England and thought it was a great shame we ever came to war.’30

  Hess read much during this time, including the complete works of Goethe and books on British naval history; he made architectural drawings, painted and received and wrote letters to Ilse and Buz and friends and relations, remembering their birthdays, recalling old times and looking forward to refreshing them in the future. The letters showed no trace of the persecution complex he still exhibited to his captors when it suited him.

  In autumn 1943 his earlier black moods had returned. Whether triggered by a letter from Ilse about the treatment of his personal staff, who, she told him, had been expelled from the party, arrested and if male sent to punishment battalions on the eastern front, or by increasingly grim war news for Germany, or by a Parliamentary debate on the trial of war criminals which he probably read in The Times on 21 October,31 he reverted to the kind of psychotic behaviour he had displayed at Mytchett Place; and in November he again began faking amnesia. His performances were so convincing that the psychiatrists who examined him were completely taken in. He also faked pains, groaning and calling out for water. ‘It was grand theatre,’ he was later to recall for Ilse, ‘and a complete success!’32

  As Germany’s situation grew worse, his behaviour grew more bizarre, almost as if he were willing himself to suffer with his country and his Führer. The abdominal pains he complained of grew worse, his hallucinations more graphic. He raged and shouted at himself and his attendants, wrapped up portions of supposedly poisoned food and forgot where he put them, forgot what he had been told or people he had seen only five minutes before. As he was to explain to Ilse, it was a desperate act to gain repatriation to Germany.33

  In February 1945, as the ring of Allied forces closed on the Reich, he borrowed a bread knife, changed into his Luftwaffe uniform, sat in his armchair and stabbed himself twice in the left chest, without, however, penetrating his heart, then screamed out for the attendant. He said afterwards the Jews had placed the bread knife near him to tempt him to take his life. While convalescing from the apparent suicide attempt he refused to wash or shave and announced he had decided to fast to the death; at the same time he sealed his drinking glass with paper and string to prevent poison being administered in his water.

  In early April, after giving up his fast, he began writing a long memoir of his flight to Scotland and subsequent captivity and the secret chemical poisons administered to him. He continued over the following days as if consumed by the need to unburden himself before the end, as one attendant put it, seemingly ‘working against time’. He ascribed everything to the Jews:

  the Jews were behind all this … The British government had been hypnotised into endeavouring to change me into a lunatic … to revenge on me the fact that National Socialist Germany had defended itself from the Jews … revenge on me because I had tried to end the war too early which the Jews had started with so much trouble, whereby they would have been prevented from reaching their war aims …34

  Manifestly the ramblings of a deranged mind. Perhaps not: the letters he wrote at this time give no hint of madness. Taken together with his increasingly extreme behaviour as the Reich went down to disaster and Hitler finally committed suicide beneath the rubble of his Chancellery, the manic tone of the document suggests a lover’s cry of despair and affirmation, for he believed what he wrote about the Jews. Hitler made a similar statement in his last testament on 30 April, enjoining the nation to ‘merciless resistance to the world-poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.’35

  In June Hess, continuing to behave like a lunatic, although several of his captors were now convinced he was putting it on, wrote to Ilse about the Führer he had known and adored:

  It has been granted to few to take part as we have from the outset in the development of a unique personality, in joy and sorrow, cares and hopes, hates and loves and all the marks of greatness – and also in all the little signs of human weakness which alone make a man wholly lovable.36

  NUREMBERG

  Hess arrived in Nuremberg for the war crimes trial with a larg
e number of the statements, depositions and letters he had written in captivity, together with samples of food, medicines and chocolate carefully wrapped in tissue, sealed, numbered and signed, for use as proof that the British had tried to poison him.37

  Colonel Burton C. Andrus, the US commandant of the prison block attached to the courthouse, told him he would have to hand it all in. Hess tried to impress Andrus with his status as an officer, but made no impression; he had to surrender it all. His prison cell provided further proof of his dramatically reduced circumstances: instead of the comfortable furnishings of the rooms he had inhabited in Britain, there was a steel cot with straw mattress, a straight wooden chair, flimsy table, wash basin and lavatory bowl without seat or cover; instead of windows looking out on trees and a flower garden, a high, barred window admitted thin daylight. In the oak door opposite, a small aperture permitted the guards to observe him at any time they chose.

  Not unnaturally, perhaps, given the shock, when an American psychiatrist, Major Douglas Kelly, came to assess him he said he had forgotten every detail of his former life.38 The following day he was taken before the chief American interrogator, Colonel John H. Amen, and played the same game, able to remember nothing; yesterday the doctor had even had to tell him where he was born, he said. It was terrible for him because he would have to defend himself in the trial that was coming up.