The Hitler–Hess Deception

by Martin Allen

  Later that same night Hess persuaded his new girlfriend, Ilse Pröhl, to accompany him to another meeting at the Sterneckerbrau, saying: ‘You must come with me to a meeting of the National Socialist Workers’ Party. I have just been there with the General. Someone unknown spoke … if anyone can free us from Versailles he is the man – this unknown will restore our honour.’13

  Adolf Hitler in 1921 was a case of a man with extraordinary speaking ability being in the right pace at the right time. What he said was on the whole well received because it was what the people wanted to hear. In 1920s Munich, the masses did not want to hear that Germany had lost the First World War through the ineptitude of its leaders; that the German military’s yearning to flex its muscles had blinded it to the dangers of fighting Russia, France and Britain at the same time, with disastrous results. Hitler charged into the political arena and, with all the venom of a maniacal bible-belt preacher, screamed that Germany had been tricked and deceived, that underhand people had worked behind the scenes to cause the country’s downfall. And worse yet, he proclaimed, those plotters were still at work against Germany and her people. With a powerful turn of phrase and a magnetism rarely seen in politics, Adolf Hitler indoctrinated his audiences with the idea that anti-German plotters, Communists and, worst of all, the Jews, were to blame for all their woes. Germany’s only saviours, he proclaimed, the only men willing to stand up against these evils, were the National Socialists – the Nazi Party.

  With Hitler’s arrival on the scene, a new phase of Rudolf Hess’s existence began. Over the next two decades the lives of Hess and Hitler would become inexorably entwined as the Nazi Party struggled to find its feet, fought for the hearts and minds of the German people, strove for success at the ballot box, and ultimately took and held power. The first and most serious hiccup to Hitler’s progression came a mere two years after Hess’s first encounter with his Führer, or the Tribune, as Hess at first called him.

  In 1923 Hitler mistakenly concluded that Germany’s fragility as a democratic state led by a weak government made it ripe for a coup d’état, and he believed he could take a short-cut to power by instigating a Putsch. That Hitler, with the backing of only a small nationalist movement, took this enormous step might with hindsight seem to have been total folly. However, Hitler was a great digester of newspapers. He had developed a passion for news, for reading about politics and foreign affairs, and he could see the other strong men of Europe successfully taking power whilst Germany crumbled into economic ruin. Indeed, only the year before the man Hitler most admired, Benito Mussolini, had led his Fascists on Rome where, aged only thirty-nine, he had been placed in power by King Victor Emmanuel III.

  At the beginning of 1923 Germany had defaulted on her reparations payments to France, as set down in the Versailles Treaty, and the French had invaded the Ruhr to enforce payment. Instantly Germany’s inflation rocketed out of control – soon a single postage stamp would cost ten thousand marks. Hitler must have thought the time was ripe to do away with the old order, and took the bold step of attempting to usurp power before events took the initiative away from him.

  Hitler’s second-in-command for the Putsch was a powerful force within the Nazi Party, former flying ace Hermann Göring, who led the Sturmabteilung (SA) or Storm Troopers.* Hess too had an important role, for whilst he officially led only the student wing of the SA, Hitler by now relied heavily on him, giving him ‘special orders’ to capture key members of Bavaria’s government, who would be attending a political gathering at Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller. Hess would later recall that his meeting with Hitler just prior to the coup attempt had ended with ‘a solemn handclasp … and we parted until evening’.14

  That evening, Thursday, 8 November 1923, saw an extraordinary scene, even by German standards of the 1920s, as a sedate political meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller was interrupted by machine-gun-toting, steel-helmeted SA men, led by a fanatical individual in a long black overcoat – Adolf Hitler.

  After bursting in, Hitler leapt up onto a chair, fired his pistol into the air, and as the speaker on the platform subsided into shocked silence, brazenly declared: A ‘national revolution in Munich has just broken out.’ To which he added untruthfully, ‘the whole city is at this moment occupied by our troops. This hall is surrounded by six hundred men.’15

  At this point Hess began picking out the politicians he wished to take into custody, taking them from their seats and ushering them from the hall to be sent away under armed guard to the home of a Nazi sympathiser, where they were to be held overnight.

  In 1923, however, the thirty-four-year-old Adolf Hitler was still a novice at the taking and holding of power, and he quickly lost control of the situation. Within the Bürgerbräukeller a wave of patriotic anthem-singing, Nazi saluting and volatile speeches on everything from the incompetence of the Social Democrats to the evils of Communism took the initiative away from Hitler, and he failed to consolidate his position by sending his men to take over the key buildings and services of the city. By the following morning Hitler’s Putsch lay in disarray, and it was at the Bürgerbräukeller that the Times correspondent in Munich found him still: ‘a little man … unshaven with disorderly hair, and so hoarse that he could hardly speak’.16

  During the course of the night, Hitler’s failure to consolidate his position had been surpassed in naïveté by Göring, who, after eliciting promises from the captured Ministers (as officers and gentlemen) that they would not act against the Putsch, released all his leading prisoners. However, much to Göring’s surprised consternation, and Hitler’s absolute fury, they discovered that as soon as the politicians had been released, they promptly summoned the army to aid them in putting down the attempted coup. The final act of this fiasco was a gun-battle in central Munich that would soon enter Nazi folklore: fourteen Nazis died, Goring was wounded, and Hitler dislocated his shoulder when he tripped over and someone fell on top of him.

  In the hours following the shoot-out, Hitler’s sense of self-preservation led him to find sanctuary with Karl and Martha Haushofer in their flat on Kolbergerstrasse, where he hid out for some hours. During this time Hitler and Karl Haushofer undoubtedly discussed what had occurred, what had gone wrong, and what would now ensue, for by 1923 Karl Haushofer had become important to both Hess and Hitler – the sage old expert on politics, nationalism and German ethnicity regularly gave the two up-and-coming politicians private lectures and political tutoring.

  One of the significant facts about the 1923 Munich Putsch is that it marked a watershed in the Hess-Hitler relationship. Hess would come to prominence as the loyal Nazi who followed his Führer to Landsberg prison, near Munich, for a year of confinement after the failed Putsch,* during which time he acted as Hitler’s secretary whilst he wrote his vitriolic book on political ideology, Mein Kampf.

  While they were incarcerated at Landsberg, Hitler and Hess were extensively tutored by Professor Karl Haushofer. Indeed, many of Haushofer’s geopolitical theories on Lebensraum, German ethnicity and nationhood, became adopted as Hitlerisms in Mein Kampf. In effect, Hitler was quite literally a captive audience to Hess and his political guru Karl Haushofer, receiving tutorials on the European balance of power, the distribution of peoples, ethnicity, colonies and nationalism.

  Hess’s importance to Hitler at this time should not be underestimated. Their long conversations were not between Führer and obedient disciple, but rather between two close friends and political colleagues, and set the tone for Hitler’s future reliance on his loyal friend. In private they were not ‘Mein Führer’ and ‘Hess’, but ‘Wolf’ (Hitler) and ‘Rudi’ (Hess); often seated with them in their enforced seclusion – a tight-knit political commune in a sea of criminality – was Karl Haushofer.

  At the end of the Second World War Haushofer would resolutely deny that he had made any contributions to Mein Kampf. However, during the 1930s he was not nearly so reticent. Deep within the microfilmed records of America’s National Archive in Washington DC are numerous
Haushofer letters from the 1920s and thirties, in which the extent to which his theories influenced Mein Kampf is not concealed. Indeed, even in 1939, between a letter to the head of the Volksdeutsche Mitelstelle (German Racial Assistance Office), or VOMI, and a report on the exploitable resources of Poland, reposes a nine-point statement by Haushofer enumerating his credentials and his importance to the Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland (the Committee for Germanism Abroad), known as the VDA, and listing amongst the accomplishments he was proud of his contributions to Hitler’s thinking, which appeared in Mein Kampf.17

  Rudolf Hess’s input into Mein Kampf was not insubstantial either. During Professor Haushofer’s interrogation by American Intelligence in 1945, he was asked: ‘Isn’t it true that Hess collaborated with Hitler in writing Mein Kampf?’ The by now very elderly Haushofer replied unhesitatingly: ‘As far as I know Hess actually dictated many chapters in that book.’18

  Hess was very much Professor Haushofer’s protégé, and as such had a keen understanding of the theories behind Lebensraum, the distribution of ethnic Germanic peoples across central Europe, and how this ethnicity could be mobilised in the future to create a Greater Germany and Reich.

  Haushofer’s original position had been that Germany’s living space should stretch from the Baltic to the Pacific. Hitler, however, was more circumspect, and advanced the view that if Germany were to conquer the east, it should initially aim to occupy only western Russia, using the Ural Mountains as a natural buffer between the Reich and Asia. This territory, Hitler proposed, would take Germany a century to exploit. In the summer of 1941, while Germany’s armies rolled ever eastward enjoying early successes under Operation Barbarossa, a relaxed Hitler became extraordinarily open about his aims in the east, and over dinner one evening confided to his guests:

  We’ll take the southern part of the Ukraine, especially the Crimea, and make it into a German colony … [Russia] will be a source of raw materials for us, and a market for our products, but we shall take care not to industrialise it …

  If I offer [people] land in Russia, a river of human beings will rush there headlong … In twenty years’ time, European emigration will no longer be directed towards America, but eastward.

  Finally, he added whimsically:

  The beauties of the Crimea, which we shall make accessible by means of autobahns – for us Germans, that will be our Riviera … [for] we can reach the Crimea by road. Along that road lies Kiev! And Croatia, too, a tourists’ paradise for us … What progress in the direction of the New Europe. Just as the autobahn has caused the inner frontiers of Germany to disappear, so it will abolish the frontiers of the countries of Europe.19

  This is a revealing insight into the world Hitler was attempting to create, a Reich that had been designed for him by Karl Haushofer.

  The impression has always been given that the Second World War was Hitler’s attempt at total European and then world domination, but this is not necessarily completely accurate. The above statement, allied to Map 2, is a much closer approximation of what Hitler’s war objectives really were.

  The Nazis’ rise to power took ten years of hard political struggle, during which the party grew into a membership that numbered well over a million souls disaffected with the Weimar Republic. From a handful of members of parliament, by 1933 the Nazis held the balance of power with over 70 per cent of the vote. Many of Hitler and Hess’s aspirations for the party had been accomplished, and their theories, as laid down in Mein Kampf, were about to be applied to the German nation. In the Germany of the 1930s, the majority accepted the concept of authoritarianism, of a ruling party which promised to take your children and turn out model citizens who would in turn have safe, if controlled, existences, free from the horrors of economic decline and the threat of the Communism. Through all this, at Adolf Hitler’s right hand stood Deputy-Führer Rudolf Hess, the upstanding, well-spoken, educated family man, who yearly took part in competition flying, and had no stigma of seediness – unlike other leading Nazis such as the drunkard Dr Robert Ley, or the appallingly anti-Semitic Julius Streicher.

  Rudolf Hess’s character was one that naturally instilled confidence. He was an unassuming man, frequently called ‘the conscience of the Party’, who annoyed his fellow top Nazis – ever attired in uniforms glittering with medals and bedecked with swastika armbands – by calmly going about his work in earnest fashion, often arriving at the Reich Chancellery dressed in a sports jacket, or neatly tailored suit. The image of the brown-shirt-wearing Hess standing at his Führer’s shoulder and screaming ‘Sieg Heil!’ was for public consumption. In private he was a very different man indeed. After the war, a close acquaintance of Hess’s, Ernst Bohle, the former head of the Auslandsorganisation,* was asked whether Hess was a sincere Nazi. After mulling the question over for a few moments, Bohle replied: ‘He was sincere as an idealist, in my opinion the biggest idealist we have had in Germany, a man of very soft nature, no uniforms with him or that sort of stuff, [and] he very seldom went into the public field.’20

  Hess was therefore an earnest politician, content to toil behind the scenes for the advancement of National Socialism, and in many ways he quickly became the all-round acceptable face of Nazi government.

  Importantly, the high regard in which Hess was held in the 1930s was not limited to Germany. Politicians and Foreign Office officials in many other European countries, including Britain, saw him as a moderating influence within National Socialism. Hess was viewed as a reliable, solid politician, a man who did not drink, lived modestly, had a model family life, and, most important of all, was a safe pair of hands. This last sentiment, particularly in light of the surprising level of disorganisation in the Nazi administration, placed Hess in a particularly strong position not only within government, but also with Adolf Hitler.

  When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, he quickly found that his long-sought position was an all-consuming task that affected his ability to interact with the party. He therefore appointed his trusted friend Rudolf Hess as Deputy-Führer of the Nazi Party, with the responsibility of leading the party as his direct representative. Hess proved so successful an administrator that within eight months, on Hitler’s proposal, the elderly German head of state President Hindenburg appointed Hess to the position of Reich Minister without Portfolio in 1934.

  Despite the ambiguity of this title, defined as ‘a Minister without an office or papers of state’, and the fact that his role during the 1930s has been largely overlooked, Hess’s position as Deputy-Führer was an important one. Whilst he did not have a prominent Ministry which people could easily identify him with (such as the air force under Göring, or propaganda under Goebbels), Hess nevertheless held a position of great power, working behind the scenes, making sure that the National Socialist machinery of state worked.

  Primarily, Hess’s role was party–government liaison, ensuring that ‘the demands of the National Socialist Weltanschauung [philosophy and ideology] were brought more and more to realisation’.21 This was a very important and far-reaching role, perhaps best compared to that of a political commissar who has the responsibility of ensuring that the government’s policies and state decisions follow the ruling party’s ideology. With his promotion to Minister without Portfolio, the Deputy-Führer became a high-ranking member of the Cabinet, and with his remit to oversee implementation of the Nazi Weltanschauung in state policy, he quickly developed interests in internal and foreign affairs.

  As Minister with interests in internal affairs, Hess had responsibility for applying Nazi theory to education, public law, tax policy, finance, employment, art and culture, health and ‘all questions of technology and organisation’. It was a powerful empire, the tentacles of which could infiltrate all areas of government in the name of ensuring that policy and projects corresponded with Nazi ideology.

  As Deputy-Führer with special interest in foreign affairs, Hess had responsibility for applying Nazi geopolitical theory to foreign policy. For this important and complicate
d role he built a sophisticated foreign affairs structure, creating three departments with which to pursue National Socialist foreign policy.

  Firstly, there was the Auslandsorganisation (the Foreign Organisation) under Ernst Bohle, which looked after the political interests of party members abroad. In the 1920s and thirties the Nazis had divided Germany into many political districts, each called a Gau and under a regional leader called a Leiter – hence Gauleiter, or regional political leader (akin to a Soviet Commissar). The same concept was now applied to ethnic Germans resident abroad, each region becoming a pocket of National Socialism abroad, under a leader who in turn reported to his leader further on up the chain, in a pyramid-like structure, all the way up to Ernst Bohle. Ausland members were thus all party members, ordered to submit monthly reports on events and incidents in their resident countries, which were destined eventually to land on Bohle’s desk in Berlin. Thus Bohle became the recipient of valuable up-to-date foreign intelligence, and he guarded his territory jealously, gaining a great deal of influence because of it.

  Next came the Aussenpolitisches Amt (the Foreign Affairs Office), under Alfred Rosenberg. This was controlled exclusively by and for the Nazi political machine to pursue National Socialist policy interests abroad, on its own and without deference to the Foreign Ministry.

  Lastly, there was the VDA, created with the aim of strengthening ethnic German groups living in Germany’s neighbouring regions such as Austria, the Sudetenland or the Polish Corridor which the Nazis intended one day to reintegrate into a Greater Germany.

  Hess appointed his old Professor of Geopolitics, Karl Haushofer, as Honorary President of both the Auslandsorganisation and the VDA.