The Hitler–Hess Deception Read online

  Maps

  Greater Germany as conceived by Karl Haushofer

  Greater Germany and the empire in the east as perceived by the Nazis

  The route of Hess’s Me-110, 10 May 1941

  Dedication

  For Jeanie, without whose invaluable assistance this book would not have been written

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  List of Maps

  Dedication

  Preface

  Prologue

  1 An Unlikely Triumvirate

  2 Peaceable Attempts

  3 Flag-Waving

  4 Negotiation

  5 A Tense Spring

  6 Someone is Expected

  7 An Emissary Comes

  8 A Fatal Decision

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  Source Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Footnotes

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  One wet Friday morning in the spring of 2000, I found myself in the Dorset market town of Dorchester to give a radio interview about a book I had written on the politico-diplomatic events of 1939–40, called Hidden Agenda.

  As I sat in the tiny broadcast studio staring at the microphone, my head clamped within a hefty pair of headphones, I little realised that within the next twenty minutes a question asked by a DJ tucked away in a BBC broadcast studio in Southampton would occupy my life for the next two years, cause me to collect many thousands of documents from as far afield as Germany, Japan, the United States and Russia, or travel many thousands of miles to interview experts and witnesses from as far afield as a nursing home in Glasgow, to a mansion in Bavaria, an apartment in Stockholm, and a townhouse on the outskirts of Washington DC.

  I took a sip of water from a plastic cup, blissfully unaware that a mysterious element of the Second World War would soon prove so magnetic to my curiosity that before the end of the week I would begin a hunt for documents and people who might help me solve a mysterious affair that had taken place over sixty years ago …

  Suddenly the headphones cracked into life and a disembodied voice greeted me jovially: ‘Hello. Are you there, Mr Allen?’

  After a brief acknowledgement from me, the voice pronounced ‘Great! I’m cutting you in now …’ and with that music that was being broadcast to the south of England burst loudly from the headphones for a few brief seconds, before almost immediately beginning to tail away again.

  ‘Wasn’t that nice, just the sort of thing for a wet summer’s day,’ the DJ announced to his audience. ‘Now, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been joined this morning by Martin Allen, who has just written a book on the Duke of Windsor which throws new light on events at the start of the Second World War. Hello Martin …’

  And so the interview got under way, with much banter from the distant DJ, and some searching questions as well for he had evidently read the book and wanted the most out of the interview.

  About halfway through the interview, whilst we were discussing the Duke of Windsor’s time in Lisbon, where surreptitious communication had begun between the German government and Britain’s former King at loose on a continent aflame with war, the DJ pointedly asked: ‘Given that the Duke of Windsor knew Hess, is it correct to say he was connected to Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941?’

  I paused, my immediate inclination was to answer yes, but in the nanosecond between the DJ asking his question and my considering the answer, I suddenly realised, No, it can’t be connected to Windsor. Hess’s flight to Britain was nearly a year later, and the Duke of Windsor had been in the Bahamas for much of that time. What then was the answer? I sidestepped the question, declaring that the Hess problem would not easily be solved until all the documents on the matter were released, and the interview duly progressed in another direction.

  I do not really remember the drive home that day, for my mind was back sixty years in those dreadful dangerous days of 1940–41, when Britain had stood alone and fought desperately for her very survival. Ignoring the heavy traffic and pouring rain, I found myself mentally sifting through the considerable Foreign Office and Intelligence evidence I had accumulated to write my last book, sure that a clue to what took place was there somewhere, yet positive it would not be the full answer.

  Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain had taken place on the night of Saturday 10 May 1941, 10 months after the Duke of Windsor had departed Portugal aboard the SS Excalibur bound for the Bahamas where he was to become the colony’s new Governor. That the Windsors did not want to go, considered the Bahamas little more than a gilded cage with golden sands, a ‘St Helena of 1940’ as Wallis called it, was without a doubt. However, I also knew that despite still feeling himself deserving of some greater task in life, the Duke of Windsor had lost his importance to the Germans by then and become superfluous to their needs. In addition, with the Duke of Windsor’s departure from war-torn Europe, Ribbentrop’s potential as a man capable of delivering that illusive peace deal Hitler wanted had taken yet another severe knock as well, for the German Führer had finally realised that his Foreign Minister was not up to the job of ending the war with Britain. Therefore, I concluded, Ribbentrop, together with the Duke of Windsor, was unlikely to have been connected to Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941.

  What, then, was the answer?

  To uncover the facts behind a wartime event that is in many respects still secret is extremely difficult, for a substantial number of key documents on this element of the Second World War have never been declassified. Against such a climate of secrecy, this paucity of available evidence, it can be almost impossible to uncover the truth, and it has to be said that one eventually learns new ways to uncover the facts.

  When I had written Hidden Agenda, a French-American named Charles Bedaux had proven to be the key to revealing the Duke of Windsor’s secret activities during the Phoney War. I therefore concluded that what I needed was a new version of Bedaux; someone who had been privy to the events of 1941, but who might have escaped undue attention. Having given some thought to the Hess mystery, it occurred to me that there had been another such person, someone who had been privy to Hess’s innermost thoughts during the 1940–41 period – his close friend and personal foreign affairs advisor, Albrecht Haushofer.

  What made me realise that Albrecht Haushofer might become my key to unlocking the Hess mystery was the knowledge that at the end of the war the Haushofer family itself had become a source of mystery. Great efforts had been made by Allied intelligence to investigate both Albrecht Haushofer and his father Karl Haushofer, but more intriguing still was the knowledge that certain of their papers had vanished from Allied custody. A sure sign someone had something to hide.

  And so I began the chase again – a search of the world’s archives, the tracking down of persons who had worked for the British and German Foreign Ministries, associates of Haushofer, Hess, Hitler, and Ribbentrop too; those privy to certain other secret events of 1941, and finally, the not insubstantial task of reading many thousands of pages of evidence.

  Slowly – by not only examining the obvious evidence, but also looking for the unobvious and spending a great deal of time pursuing dead-ends – the Rudolf Hess mystery began to give up its secrets, and what was revealed was not at all what I had expected …

  Martin A. Allen

  April 2002

  Prologue

  On a bright Saturday afternoon, 12 May 1945, the spring sunshine made harsh and uncompromising by the leaf-denuded trees and surrounding bombed-out buildings, a young German named Heinz Haushofer picked his way through the ruined shell of Berlin. He was largely
ignored by the numerous Russian troops who now occupied the city, and those he stopped to question had little patience for any German after the terrible war that had ended a mere five days before.

  Haushofer had arrived on foot in Berlin the previous evening and, after spending an uncomfortable night with an acquaintance in the suburbs, had ventured into the city centre to look for his missing brother Albrecht, who had spent the last eight months of the war as a prisoner of the SS at Berlin’s Moabit prison.

  After traversing the churned-up remains of the Tiergarten, almost treeless after a winter of Allied bombing and the Russian bombardment of April, Heinz managed to cross the River Spree by one of the few remaining bridges in Berlin. Quests like that being undertaken by Heinz were taking place all over Europe at the end of the war, particularly in Germany, as displaced persons travelled in search of missing loved ones. Sometimes these searches ended in the joy of reunion; but more often in sadness.

  On reaching Moabit prison, Heinz managed to find someone with news. Albrecht, he was told, had been marched away by the SS on the night of 22 April in the direction of Potsdam Station, accompanied by fifteen other prisoners.

  A little over an hour later, Heinz cautiously entered the bombed-out ruins of the one-time showpiece Ulap Exhibition Centre, just off Invalidenstrasse. After heavy Allied bombing, the vast building was almost completely buried under the shattered remains of the roof, which had collapsed. Following the directions he had been given, Heinz clambered over an enormous mound of rubble and twisted girders to get to the far side of the complex. There he was confronted by the last act of barbarism that the SS would ever commit on the direct orders of their leader, Heinrich Himmler. In the ruins of the exhibition centre, Heinz found the remains of the sixteen men who had been marched away from Moabit nearly three weeks before, to be murdered the same night. Steeling himself to the grim task, Heinz went from body to body, attempting to identify his brother.

  There was a puzzle here that would not be solved by Heinz. What had led Albrecht Haushofer, one of Germany’s foremost experts in foreign affairs, to such a dismal end with these fifteen other prisoners from such disparate backgrounds? A mechanical engineer, an Olympic athlete, a Russian PoW, an Argentinean, a German Communist, a Lieutenant-Colonel of the OKH (Germany’s high command), a lawyer, a legal adviser to Lufthansa, an Abwehr officer, a merchant, a State Secretary of Germany’s Foreign Ministry, an industrialist, an adviser to the Congregational Church, a professor of aviation, and, finally, a Councillor of State.

  Eventually, after searching through the entwined husks of these men brought together in death, a jumble of arms, legs, overcoats, Heinz finally found his elder brother. To have been murdered in such circumstances by the SS was a terrible end for anyone, yet it was particularly so for a man who had been not only Secretary General of Germany’s prestigious Society for Geography, the Geographie Gessellschaft, but a friend and adviser to Germany’s Deputy-Führer, Rudolf Hess, and to the Führer himself, Adolf Hitler.

  With his bare hands, Heinz dug a simple temporary grave for Albrecht out in the open air. It was now late afternoon, and he felt it prudent to hurry, for in the immediate aftermath of the war, Berlin was not a place to be out after dark, and he would have to find sanctuary for the night. After laying his brother to rest in a patch of ground outside the exhibition centre and saying a few simple words in farewell, Heinz set off for the suburbs.

  He did not, however, leave all of Albrecht behind. Tucked safely within his overcoat he carried his brother’s final words to posterity, written during his last months of captivity. Clutched in his brother’s hand, Heinz had found a sheaf of papers: a set of sonnets, one of which Albrecht had titled Schuld – ‘Guilt’.

  As Germany settled down to post-war occupation under the Allied powers, Allied Intelligence began to make enquiries about Albrecht Haushofer. During the war French, British and American Intelligence had been largely bonded together by the common cause of defeating Nazism, but victory brought about a rapid unravelling of that cohesion, as different national priorities once again took pre-eminence.

  By midsummer two distinct organs of Allied Intelligence, with two quite distinct agendas, were taking an interest in Albrecht Haushofer. The first was British Intelligence, the second non-British, primarily American. The main difference between the two was that while every document found by non-British Intelligence was registered and stored for future reference, those that fell into the hands of the British were comprehensively weeded, and certain sensitive pieces of evidence vanished completely, never to be seen again.

  Throughout the summer of 1945, British Intelligence made extraordinary efforts to locate the private papers of both Albrecht Haushofer and his father, Professor Karl Haushofer, and it was at this time that a set of six of Albrecht Haushofer’s diaries were found in Berlin. As they were located by the Americans, they were duly logged and their importance noted, for they covered the period of 1940–41 which had seen an extraordinary chain of events culminating in Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941. However, within a few days of the diaries arriving in Britain, on 7 June 1945, an American Intelligence officer was forced to report to his superior that they had vanished. They have never been seen since.1

  At the end of September 1945, consternation erupted amongst a select band of Whitehall civil servants when they learned that American Intelligence officers from the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS) had managed to track down Karl Haushofer at his substantial home, Hartschimmelhof, deep in the Bavarian forests south of Munich. Why British Intelligence had not already located and interrogated the elderly Professor Haushofer is something of a mystery, but their activities may have been impeded by the fact that Haushofer resided in the American Zone of occupation. That he had not been more actively pursued was now bitterly regretted, for it was discovered that Albrecht Haushofer had sent his father copies of certain sensitive sections of his correspondence (hoping thereby to protect himself in the future); and the Professor was proving to be a veritable fount of information to his American interrogators.

  Professor Karl Haushofer was a nineteenth-century-style imperialist who, after the end of the First World War, had been the leading academic promulgator of ‘geopolitics’ – the theory that in the future the world would be restructured into an age of great land-empires. He had also been Rudolf Hess’s university tutor, and during the rise of the Nazis to power he had privately tutored Adolf Hitler on the rudiments of foreign policy and European ethnicity. He was therefore widely recognised as the man chiefly responsible for the Nazis’ concept of Lebensraum – living space for the German people – which Hitler had used as his justification for wars of conquest. This was the man that three OSS officers tracked down to a house deep in the Bavarian forests on a late September afternoon in 1945.

  When the interrogation began, the senior American Intelligence officer, Edmund Walsh, had merely looked meaningfully at Haushofer and said a single word: ‘Hitler.’

  According to Walsh, the elderly Professor’s ‘face assumed a pained expression’. He admitted that he had taught Hitler geopolitics, but then qualified his answer by declaring that Hitler had ‘never understood’.2

  If this had been the extent of Haushofer’s knowledge, British Intelligence might not have subsequently taken much interest in him. However, during the course of the interrogation one of the Americans was intuitive enough to ask whether Haushofer’s son Albrecht’s expertise in British matters had been connected to Rudolf Hess’s mysterious flight to Scotland in May 1941. The OSS officers were surprised when Haushofer unhesitatingly replied: ‘In 1941 … Albrecht was sent to Switzerland. There he met a British confidential agent – a Lord Templewood, I believe.’ He then revealed that Hitler had wanted peace, and that ‘we offered to relinquish Norway, Denmark, and France. A larger meeting was to be held in Madrid. When my son returned, he was immediately called to Augsburg to see Hess. A few days later Hess flew to England.’3

  The OSS men listened to these reve
lations with shocked astonishment. Lord Templewood was Britain’s former Foreign Secretary and later Ambassador to Spain, Sir Samuel Hoare.

  Over the course of the next three hours, whilst Bavaria descended into darkness, the American agents struggled to digest all the elderly Professor Karl Haushofer told them. Yet this Aladdin’s cave was not limited to verbal information. At the end of the interrogation they asked him to hand over any documents he possessed that related to his work. If they had thought they would be able to leave with a few boxes of papers piled into the back of their Buick staff car, they were in for a shock: Haushofer’s archive of personal papers extended to nearly eighteen thousand documents, and the OSS men were forced to return the following morning with an army lorry.

  During the late autumn of 1945, other documents began to appear. Of particular importance were the papers from the Geopolitical Institute in Berlin, where Albrecht Haushofer had kept some of his records.

  On 27 November, an American Intelligence officer urgently dispatched to Washington ‘letters and material from the files of Albrecht Haushofer, regarding peace feelers to England’.4 He included a note drawing his superior’s attention to:

  Document No. 8.

  A personal memorandum, datelined Obersalzberg 5 May 1941, is from Haushofer to Hitler, and concerns Haushofer’s English connections and the possibility of their being used as contacts for peace discussions.5

  What was intriguing about this memorandum was that it was dated five days before Rudolf Hess had flown to Britain. This was at odds with the generally held belief that Hitler had not known what his Deputy was planning. Clearly, this document might have provided answers to some of the many questions which remain about what actually took place in 1941. Unfortunately, although the memorandum arrived safely in Washington DC on 11 December 1945, and an official of the US State Department signed for it, an unknown person removed it just three days later, scrawling ‘Enclosure removed 12-14-45’ across the receipt stamp.6 It has never been seen since.