* * *
The one constant against which all questions and all that is now known of the peace mission must be measured is Hess’s personality. This does not appear to have changed much. After the war Karl Haushofer, who knew him better than most, said he had to admit that ‘Hess had more heart and strength of character than intelligence’.96 Undoubtedly his strength of character was borne out by his lone flight into enemy territory.
When Haushofer was asked why he thought Hess had made the flight, he replied, ‘It was the escape of a heroic and idealistic man from an unbearable situation.’97
On another occasion Haushofer expressed his firm conviction that the reasons for Hess’s flight were ‘his own sense of honour and his desperation at the murders going on in Germany’.98 The industrial phase of genocide had not begun at the time of his flight, but Hess was aware of routine atrocities committed in Poland by the SS and police against Jews and the educated classes. As arbiter between party and state he received complaints from the army about the damage to morale caused by these crimes. Karl Haushofer was equally aware: Albrecht wrote anguished letters to his parents about his own conflict of loyalties: ‘An example: I sit at a table with a man whose task it will be to cause a great part of the Jews transported to the Jews’ ghetto in Lublin to freeze and starve to death according to programme.’99 Karl Haushofer may have used ‘the murders going on in Germany’ as a euphemism for the actions against Jews in Poland since he made the comment at a time when his former student, friend and protector was about to stand trial for war crimes.
All those who knew Hess testified to his sensitive moral character. Ernst Bohle described him as ‘the biggest idealist we have had in Germany, a man of a very soft nature’.100 And, as we have seen, his adjutant, Leitgen, stated that the example of Hitler’s personal brutality during the purge of the leadership of the Nazi paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) on 30 June 1934, had ‘deeply wounded his [Hess’s] marked, almost feminine sensitivities’.101
The finance minister, Schwerin von Krosigk, made a more profound point:
He [Hess] had recognized that the conflict between good and evil which ran through the whole development of the Nazi Party played itself out in the person of the Führer and had to be decided there. But his loyalty to the Führer prevented him interfering in the process. He suffered from this, but found no way out.102
In England Major Dicks, the army psychiatrist appointed to Mytchett Place, made a similar deduction: ‘In Hitler Herr Hess has seen the perfect father authority who would make the bad world right. The moment he felt that Hitler was ruthless and destructive, he must have experienced great anxiety …’103 He could not, of course, admit this, Dicks went on, or even allow himself to know that he felt it. The Führer was still perfect, and he had to be loyal. But the internal conflict became so great he could only save his mental balance by a dramatic act of redemption.
Or, as Karl Haushofer put it, his flight was, ‘the escape of a heroic and idealistic man from an unbearable situation.’104
It also seems true that he was assisted by the British Secret Service and was commissioned by Hitler; for it is inconceivable that in an informer society such as Nazi Germany neither Göring, head of the air force, nor Hitler was aware of Hess’s flying preparations – although academic historians seem prepared to accept it. The more powerful point is that for Hess to have flown off without Hitler’s knowledge or commission would have been a negation of his whole life purpose and indeed his personality. It would have been a betrayal. But Hess would never have betrayed his Führer. To believe that he did so on the word and play-acting of Hitler and Goebbels is risible.
The terms he carried – from Hitler – would have given Britain peace with some honour. Churchill, committed to the defeat of ‘that man’, Hitler, and Nazism, had to bury the message and write off the messenger; in doing so he almost single-handedly deflected the course of history – for realists would have accepted Hess’s terms. This is the real significance of his story: as a pivotal moment when history did not turn as might have been expected.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The answer?
COLONEL STEWART MENZIES belonged in the inner circle of the British ruling class. Moulded by Eton and the Guards, White’s in St James’ was his home from home, the Beaufort Hunt his enthusiasm when on occasion he could escape from London. Approaching 50 when appointed ‘C’, he was of medium height, slim, with a pale face, pale blue eyes and darkish blond hair. His voice was authoritative; he dressed elegantly and had an artless, even boyish manner. Underneath he was, in the words of one who worked with him, ‘sphinx-like and cunning’.1
This was the spymaster who in December 1940 invited the young Yugoslav banker and Abwehr agent, Dusko Popov, only recently arrived in England and inducted by Major ‘Tar’ Robertson as a double agent against his German masters, to join him for a family New Year house party; who then drew Popov aside into a book-lined study with deep armchairs and, after giving him such an accurate assessment of his character Popov felt as if he were looking at himself for the first time in his life, proceeded to talk about the Abwehr and its enigmatic chief, Admiral Canaris.2 He told Popov that he wanted information on anyone intimately connected with Canaris, mentioning particularly Colonel Hans Oster and Hans von Dohnanyi.
‘We know that Canaris, Oster and Dohnanyi are not dyed in the wool Nazis,’ Menzies went on, and said that Churchill had had an unofficial conversation with Canaris before the war and came to the conclusion that the admiral was a kind of catalyst for anti-Hitler elements in Germany. This was why he, Menzies, wanted to know more about the people around him. ‘Eventually I may want to resume the conversation that Churchill started.’3
Popov gained the impression that Menzies contemplated a dialogue with Canaris aimed at removing Hitler. The immediate task Popov was given, however, was to convince his Abwehr handlers that British defences against invasion were far stronger than they actually were, and to pass on gossip he was supposed to have gathered in society that British morale was low as a result of bombing raids and many politicians thought it was time to overthrow Churchill and his warmongering ‘clique’ and negotiate peace. This was, of course, the central deception on which ‘Tar’ Robertson and the Double-Cross Committee were working.
Three days later Popov was flown to Lisbon, where he reported to his controller on these lines, thence travelled to Madrid to meet his Abwehr colleague and old university friend, Johann Jebsen, who had briefed him for his English mission in the first place. Jebsen, whose Abwehr mentor was the convinced anti-Nazi Colonel Oster,4 was also pro-British and was soon to be recruited by Robertson as a double agent under the code name ARTIST. In his initial briefing for Popov he had told him that Rudolf Hess was talking of high personalities in Britain seeking contact with Germany.5 It was a curious comment: Hess was about the only top Nazi whose name had not thus far appeared in connection with German peace feelers. In his memoirs Popov did not reveal whether he told Menzies of Hess’s interest in British circles promoting peace, but it would be strange in view of the deception he was to promote if he had not done so.
Meeting Jebsen in Madrid Popov talked of the anti-Nazi officers in the Abwehr, and suggested there must be many others of influence in Germany who recognised Hitler’s madness and wanted to stop the war. It seemed to him that the Abwehr, with its freedom of movement, would be the ideal instrument through which these people might negotiate with Britain.
Jebsen rejected the idea. There was no opposition in Germany, he said; it had either been smashed or reduced to complete impotence, while German youth had been raised from the cradle to believe in Hitler. He asked if there was one example in history of generals revolting when victorious. Yet some minutes later, after reflection, he said that madly idealistic as the idea was, it was so attractive he would not be able to put it from his mind: ‘It is worth living or dying for.’6 And he promised to sound people out and let Popov know how thi
ngs stood when next they met. Popov had pledged absolute secrecy to Menzies, so felt he could not tell Jebsen that the chief of MI6 was ready to join hands with him.
Later in his memoirs after a conversation about Hess’s peace mission, Popov speculated whether the planted reports of low British morale might have influenced Hess, whether indeed British intelligence had unwittingly inspired the Hess incident.7 Did he insert the word ‘unwittingly’ to hide the fact that Menzies’ idea of using the Abwehr as a bridge to negotiations had indeed been tried and had brought Hess to Britain?
* * *
Stewart Menzies’ biographer refers to strong circumstantial evidence for Menzies’ involvement in the Hess affair and holds it ‘undeniable’ that the Double-Cross Committee was implicated.8 The late Alfred Smith asserted that an MI6 officer of that time had assured him ‘in the most categorical terms’ that MI6 was ‘in the Hess thing up to their necks’, although there was never any plan to lure Hess over to Britain.9
Claude Dansey, Menzies’ chief of staff, sent the art historian, Borenius, to Geneva to open a peace channel to Carl Burckhardt at about the time Menzies briefed Popov on his wish for dialogue with Canaris, whom he saw as the key to contact with anti-Hitler elements in Germany. This seems like a reversion to the Chamberlain–Halifax policy of supporting a generals’ revolt against Hitler, and is hard to understand in view of the Führer’s apparently unassailable position after his victorious campaigns in the west.
Nonetheless, accepting on the one hand that Menzies was attempting to build a bridge to Canaris, on the other that Hess had been trying to build a bridge to anti-Churchill elements in Britain for some months beforehand; accepting, too, the assertion of Alfred Smith’s MI6 officer that there was never any plan to lure Hess to Britain, the simple hypothesis presents itself that Hess learned of MI6’s channel to Canaris and linked in to it for his own purposes.
In such case Kurt Jahnke enters the picture. Until recently he had been the real force in Hess’s intelligence organisation; he had previously worked for Canaris and loathed the Nazis; and it is known from the MI5 registry that he was in contact with MI6 through 1940 and in early May 1941. Menzies’ biographer speculates that he ‘may have been one of Dansey’s most important informants’.10 Walter Schellenberg, chief of Himmler’s Security Service, stated in his memoirs that in 1942 he received a 30-page compilation of evidence proving that Jahnke was a top-level British agent.11 Then there is the suggestion of Sir Maurice Oldfield after retiring as chief of MI6 that the head of Hess’s intelligence service had been a Soviet agent, and might have been behind Hess’s flight to Britain.12 Between the wars Jahnke had worked for Soviet Military Intelligence.
There is no doubt that Menzies, like his great friend Buccleuch, believed Soviet Russia a far greater threat to the British Empire than Nazi Germany and wanted peace with Germany so that Hitler could attack Russia. He believed the German Army would take Moscow in a matter of weeks, then become sucked into a guerrilla war which would bleed both nations.13 To argue from this, as two recent books have, that Hess’s arrival was the result of a genuine peace move by Menzies in opposition to Churchill’s policy14 seems far-fetched, and fails on the simple fact that Churchill not only retained Menzies in post, making him responsible for isolating and interrogating Hess, but he and Menzies remained on intimate terms for the rest of the war and for a time afterwards15 – something inconceivable if Churchill had suspected him of treachery.
The hypothesis advanced here that Hess used contacts between Menzies and Canaris to advance his own mission is supported in the post-war testimony of Kenneth de Courcy. It will be recalled that de Courcy learned of Hess’s peace proposals from a Guards officer at Mytchett Place, Lieutenant Loftus. He never admitted this publicly, and in an Intelligence Digest he produced in 1984 claimed he had learnt details of Hess’s mission from Colonel W.S. Pilcher, commanding the Grenadier Guards at Windsor. He quoted from a note he had made on 28 May 1941 allegedly based on what Pilcher had told him:
the one man in all Europe who certainly knows the innermost details of the whole [Hess] business is Admiral Canaris … I suggest that there was little if anything known to Canaris which was not also known to Menzies and that secret agents of both men (Canaris and Menzies) frequently met in Spain and that Canaris was determined that Hitler should NOT, repeat NOT, defeat England.
If Hess came with the knowledge of Canaris and his real object was to topple Hitler before total war further developed, then it was of crucial importance to the Russian party to stop Hess …16
De Courcy then developed his theory that the Russian party headed by Lord Rothschild forced Churchill to banish Pilcher to Scotland.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to accept de Courcy’s main premise that Hess was prepared for Hitler’s removal, but this does not invalidate his claim, as repeated in a subsequent Intelligence Digest, that ‘Hess flew to Britain with the knowledge of Admiral Canaris, who worked closely with Sir Stewart Menzies.’17
If so, the answer may be that Hess tapped into a peace channel between Menzies and Canaris without realising that Hitler was to be sacrificed; the facilitator who deceived him was no doubt the Nazi-hating Jahnke, who had many contacts in Switzerland, and had been the real brains in Hess’s own intelligence service. There is only de Courcy’s testimony to support the hypothesis, but he was privy to high secrets, the confidant of many besides Lieutenant Loftus, and was undoubtedly targeted by MI5 and the Russians. He was certain that Canaris and Menzies were involved in Hess’s mission; further, it is known that Canaris supplied information to MI6, and MI5 records show that Jahnke was in touch with MI6 at the relevant dates. Until the vital documents are released, the presumption that Hess came at the invitation of Stewart Menzies with the agreement of Canaris for the purpose of toppling Hitler – although it is unlikely Hess was aware of that – is probably as close as it is possible to approach to the truth.
* * *
Two stories Kenneth de Courcy used to tell: Menzies was asked by King George VI what he would do if he (the King) required him to reveal his top man in Germany (Canaris, according to de Courcy). Menzies replied that his head would roll with his lips still sealed.18
Towards the end of the war in Europe de Courcy was dining at White’s with the Duke of Buccleuch when Menzies came up to them and said, ‘I have just lost my greatest friend.’19 He meant Canaris, hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp the day before with, according to de Courcy, eight strangulations – brought down and revived seven times before the end.
Notes
Books are referenced by author; if more than one book by that author is listed in the Bibliography, by author and key words in the title. The following abbreviations are used:
F & CO: Foreign and Colonial Office, London
FO: Foreign Office, London
IMT: The International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, Nuremberg, 1947 (English language edition)
IWM: Imperial War Museum, London (or Duxford)
TNA: The National Archives, Kew, London
Chapter 1: Death in the summer house
See E. Bird, p. 237; C. Gabel, p. 172; T. Le Tissier, p. 56 states that there were 27 appeals to the Soviet authorities, and that the UK was alone in appealing at ministerial level, doing so routinely from 1970 on thirteen occasions. [RETURN TO CH 1]
See Der Spiegel, 16, 41 Jahrg., 13 Apr. 1987, p. 151; also Richard von Weizsäcker to Adrian Liddell Hart, June 1987; A. Liddell Hart to author, 27 June 1990; and Abdallah Melaouhi, p. 101 [RETURN TO CH 1]
21 June 1987; cited W.R. Hess, Mord, p. 153 [RETURN TO CH 1]
Civilian staff in/out book, Spandau prison; Special Investigation Branch RMP BAOR 53052/7 (MOD reference pending transfer to TNA), Final Report, p. 41 [RETURN TO CH 1]
Abdallah Melaouhi, solemn declaration before notary, Reinhard Gizinsky, Berlin, 17 Feb. 1994 [RETURN TO CH 1]
Entries in Chief Warder’s log, Spandau prison; photocopy in Figaro Magazin, Paris, 1 Apr. 1989, copy in W.R. Hess, Mord, p. 244 [RETURN TO CH 1]
R. Hess, ‘Gesuch an den amerikanischer director, Herr Keane’, 4 Apr. 1987; copy in ibid., p. 243 (from photocopy in Figaro Magazin) [RETURN TO CH 1]
Entry in Chief Warder’s log, op. cit. ref. 6 above [RETURN TO CH 1]
Special Investigation Branch RMP BAOR 53052/7, Interim Report, pp. 1, 8, 28, Final Report, p. 5 [RETURN TO CH 1]
This and all subsequent citations from witness statements attached to Special Investigation Branch RMP BAOR 53052/7 Interim Report, unless otherwise referenced. [RETURN TO CH 1]
Chief Warder’s log, op. cit., ref. 6 above [RETURN TO CH 1]
A. Melaouhi, p. 111 [RETURN TO CH 1]
A. Melaouhi, solemn declaration, op. cit., ref. 5 above [RETURN TO CH 1]
W.R. Hess, Mord, p. 47 [RETURN TO CH 1]
Ibid., p. 50; The Daily Telegraph, 19 Aug. 1987 [RETURN TO CH 1]
W.R. Hess, Mord, pp. 50 f [RETURN TO CH 1]
Prof. J.H. Cameron, ‘Autopsy Report on Allied Prisoner No. 7’, undated; Special Investigation Branch RMP BAOR 53052/7, Addendum Report [RETURN TO CH 1]
The give-away phrase was, ‘Tell Freiburg that, to my immense sorrow, since the Nuremberg trial I had to act as if I didn’t know her …’ Yet he had told Ilse, his wife, and his son on his first meeting with them on 24 Dec. 1969 to pass this on to ‘Freiburg’, his former secretary – see p. 326 below. For full text of note see plate section 8 [RETURN TO CH 1]
Hess, Hitler and Churchill Page 42
