The Hitler–Hess Deception Read online

  It was at this point that Hess’s friend, Haushofer’s son Albrecht, began to be increasingly involved in Hess and Hitler’s foreign affairs interests, and he became an extremely important behind-the-scenes adviser to the Nazi leadership, with the ability to directly influence Hitler’s foreign affairs decisions, even on occasion supplanting the opinions of Ribbentrop.* This brought him some powerful enemies (such as Goebbels, who hated him).

  Geographer, foreign affairs expert and leading light within the English Section of the Dienststelle Ribbentrop (the private office of Ribbentrop, which advised Hitler on foreign affairs), Albrecht Haushofer was to play a very important role throughout Germany’s time under Nazi rule. He frequented the Nazi social circuit, met, chatted and discussed foreign affairs matters with men like Himmler, von Neurath and Göring – yet Albrecht Haushofer’s existence as a major player in European foreign affairs in the late 1930s is virtually unknown today. The question has to be asked, how did this mild-mannered, part-Jewish academic become so inexorably entwined in the foreign affairs machinery of the Nazi state? To be valued by Hitler and part-Jewish was no mean feat in Germany in the 1930s.

  Regardless of the complications of an ancestry at odds with Nazi ideology, Albrecht Haushofer’s talents as an expert in foreign affairs, with an extensive range of political contacts in many parts of the world, especially Britain, gave him an immunity from the more brutal side of life in Nazi Germany. While his father was a fervent supporter and theorist of the regime, all the evidence points to Albrecht Haushofer being a different sort of person.

  Nine years Hess’s junior, Albrecht Haushofer had been too young to be called to active service during the First World War. He had, however, been old enough to see his country take the terrible journey from imperial power to humiliating defeat in 1918, and subsequently be reduced to mayhem as the far left attempted revolution. Years later he would still recall that period as representing ‘something to me which I shall never get rid of … an inexhaustible source of hatred, distrust, anger and scorn’.22 Even more importantly, it was also the time that Rudolf Hess first entered the Haushofer family home.

  In 1920, at the age of seventeen, Albrecht enrolled to study under his father at Munich University, together with his close friend ‘Rudi’ Hess. Both were recognised as star pupils. But in 1923 Hess’s participation in the abortive Bürgerbräukeller Putsch took him away from academia to a year’s enforced seclusion with Hitler at Landsberg prison. Here he was visited and continued to be tutored by his mentor, Karl Haushofer. Albrecht too was a visitor to Hess and his fellow prisoner, the enigmatic man nicknamed ‘Wolf’.

  In 1924, while Hess was still assisting Hitler with Mein Kampf in prison, Albrecht Haushofer graduated from Munich University with a doctorate in geography. In a few weeks, after a quiet word from Haushofer senior to his old-boy network, Albrecht was appointed as personal assistant to the renowned Dr Penck of Berlin, a world-class geographer.

  Within eighteen months Albrecht applied for, and was appointed to, the post of Secretary-General of Germany’s prestigious Society for Geography, a Berlin-based foundation with a worldwide reputation. A year later he became editor of the prestigious Periodical of the Society of Geography (a similar publication to the National Geographic). With this position came a sumptuous apartment on the top floor of the society’s central Berlin premises on Wilhelmstrasse.

  Throughout the next fifteen years, as Secretary-General of the Society for Geography, Albrecht Haushofer travelled the world – to South America and the Andes one year, India and the Himalayas the next; home again for a season’s lecturing at Berlin University, then off again, to China and Japan, Egypt or the Sudan. All this time he was making friends who would be invaluable to him in the 1930s, when the Nazi hierarchy suddenly realised that this quiet man had important political contacts in virtually every nation in the world. Thus, by the time Rudolf Hess approached Albrecht in 1931 to advise him on international matters, he found a man steeped in the art of diplomacy and foreign affairs.

  Despite Albrecht’s range of contacts across the world, the country that he – and also Hitler and Hess – had a predominant interest in cultivating was not an ocean or a continent away. It was a rather staid, old-fashioned, class-structured little nation a mere 350 miles from Germany’s western frontiers. It did however possess one of world’s great empires, and was one of the world’s major powers. Albrecht Haushofer was Germany’s foremost expert on Britain.

  Haushofer was fascinated by Britain and her people. During the 1920s he had visited Britain extensively, becoming near-fluent in English and developing a wide range of important personal acquaintances that allowed him to mix in the highest political and social circles. His initial entrée into British society had been through his old friend Patrick Roberts, who introduced him to many of his friends and colleagues, young men who in the early 1920s were junior Foreign Office minions, young aristocrats and political acquaintances, but who by the latter 1930s would be Britain’s top diplomats, civil servants and politicians.

  Slightly older than Albrecht Haushofer, Patrick Roberts had joined the Foreign Office, where he had an interesting, if slightly curious, career. His postings were numerous – ranging from Berlin, Warsaw and Addis Ababa through to Belgrade and Athens, ever hotbeds of Balkan discontent – with hardly ever enough time for him to become familiar with a place before he was transferred yet again. In 1937, Roberts would meet with a sudden and untimely end when he was killed in a bizarre road accident in a dusty, dead-end Greek village north of Athens. The question of whether his career was connected in some way to British Intelligence has remained unanswered ever since.

  Among the men Roberts had introduced to his young German friend Albrecht Haushofer was Sir Owen O’Malley, who had subsequently risen through the Foreign Office to become Ambassador in Budapest and Lisbon. At the end of the Second World War, O’Malley panicked when an American newspaper published an account of how newly discovered German documents revealed details of his friendship with Adolf Hitler’s private adviser on foreign affairs, and that he, together with other ‘British subjects both inside and outside the Government Service’ was being referred to at the Nuremberg trials in connection with the Rudolf Hess case. Keen to unburden his soul and protect his career, a flustered O’Malley swiftly wrote to a colleague at the Foreign Office: ‘I knew Haushofer quite well. He was originally introduced to me many years ago by the late Patrick Roberts, who had got to know both the Haushofers and Hess first during the period when he was learning German in Germany and secondly during his period when he was at the British Embassy in Berlin.’

  Keen to distance himself from his former friend, and apparently not at all loath to drop someone else in the mire, O’Malley went on: ‘Haushofer was a great fat smelly German with the usual German rather academic outlook on politics. I liked him although [being rather overweight, he] broke two of my more fragile Hepplewhite chairs by merely sitting on them. He used to come and spend the weekend at my house in the country round about the years 1932–1935 during the period he had been in contact with Lord Clydesdale and, I think also Lord Lothian.’23

  Intriguingly, Lord Lothian was the British Ambassador to Washington in the late 1930s whose sudden death in 1940 resulted in the former Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax’s appointment to his post. Lord Clydesdale was the man Rudolf Hess allegedly flew to Scotland to see in May 1941, for he was none other than Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, who in 1940 became the Duke of Hamilton.

  Thus Albrecht Haushofer’s connection to the Roberts family was firmly entrenched. His friend Patrick had introduced him to all his friends and colleagues, up-and-coming young men who by the late 1930s would be Britain’s top civil servants and politicians, and who in 1940 would be vital contacts to Haushofer in assisting the German leadership’s elusive search for peace.

  No less important was Patrick Roberts’ mother Violet. The next time she made an appearance in Albrecht Haushofer’s life, as an elderly widow in 1940, she would be the d
ab of honey at the centre of an intricately spun spider’s web of intrigue that would lure Haushofer, Hess and Hitler to destruction; for there was an aspect to the Roberts family of which both Karl and Albrecht Haushofer remained totally ignorant – a fortuitous coincidence that British Intelligence would use to doom Hitler’s hopes of winning the Second World War.

  By the mid-1930s Albrecht Haushofer’s range of aristocratic and political contacts had completely opened up British society to him, and he had dined and smoked after-dinner cigars with such pillars of the British establishment as Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald, Neville Chamberlain, Lord Dunglass (Alec Douglas-Home), Sir John Simon, Anthony Eden, Lord Halifax and, perhaps most intriguingly of all, Winston Churchill. Haushofer’s contacts were a veritable panoply of Britain’s high and mighty, and thus it is not surprising that when the Nazis took power in 1933 both Hess and Hitler looked upon him as a trusted friend who could confidentially advise them on foreign affairs, particularly with regard to the British, and embraced him as a gift sent down from on high.

  Despite Albrecht’s rise to eminence in German academic circles, and his abilities as a geographer and expert on European politics, he himself carried out little political activity on behalf of the Nazi regime, which he would eventually consider evil. Rudolf Hess and Adolf Hitler may have wanted to make use of his considerable expertise on foreign affairs and international politics, but that does not explain why Albrecht went along with them. At any point after 1933 he could easily have packed his bags and decamped to the democratic West, fled to the bright lights of America, where he would undoubtedly have been welcomed by virtue of his academic talents. Despite the fact that, even with Hess’s support, his part-Jewish ancestry prevented him from ever attaining his boyhood dream of becoming Germany’s Foreign Minister, in the 1930s he was largely an advocate of National Socialist foreign policy on the European stage – a reserved supporter, using his expertise to further Germany’s position as a major European power.

  Yet Albrecht’s correspondence with Hess tells a slightly different tale, in which he is on occasion shaky in his support of National Socialism, and in which Hess the politician undertakes a role as moderating force, and is himself occasionally flexible in his attitude to Nazism in order to persuade his friend to stay on side.

  An early example of this occurred in October 1930, when Hess wrote to Albrecht asking him to project a favourable image of National Socialism during his forthcoming trip to Britain, saying: ‘It is possible you will be asked in England about your opinion of us over state matters in Germany.’ He asked Albrecht to explain that Bolshevism posed a considerable threat not only to Germany but to democratic Europe as well, and that without Nazi intervention it was possible ‘that Germany could not be saved’. In what follows there is little sign of the ultra-Nazi Hess; in his place stands a pragmatic politician: ‘I am not writing this in the interest of the Party – for this alone I wouldn’t bother you, only I am sure that Germany is more important than the Party, and that its overall importance maybe for the whole of Europe [which] is threatened by Communism, is how [the party] in foreign countries, and especially England, is judged.’ He ended his letter hopefully, ‘I am sure you will meet with a lot of people with influence.’24

  For Rudolf Hess, of all people, to declare openly to Albrecht that he was not asking for help purely in the interests of the Nazi Party, and that he believed Germany was ‘more important than the Party’, was remarkable. It is amongst these rare glimpses behind the façade that can be found clues to the curious and dependant relationship between Hitler, Hess and Haushofer (the Führer, the moderating Deputy-Führer go-between and the part-Jewish expert on foreign affairs) – a most unlikely and unsuspected triumvirate of men united in their desire to pursue National Socialist foreign policy. Politically, Albrecht Haushofer was a ‘conservative-liberal nationalist’.25 He supported German nationalism, and hoped ‘to be able to exercise a moderating influence on Hess and Ribbentrop, and through them on Hitler. He saw himself as a sort of Talleyrand for the Third Reich.’26

  Within a few months of the Nazis coming to power in 1933, Albrecht began to undertake increasingly important tasks for the party hierarchy, and Hess soon appointed him as his personal adviser on foreign affairs.27 As well as providing the Nazi leadership with valuable political insight into the political mood of Germany’s neighbours – France, Italy and Britain – Albrecht now began to assist the Nazis establish a Greater Germany encompassing all Europe’s peoples of ethnic German origin.

  Albrecht’s first major assignment for the Nazi leadership came in 1934, when he travelled to Danzig,* where he acted on behalf of the VDA in a series of meetings intended to persuade Germans resident in Danzig and ethnic Germans in western Poland (over six hundred thousand of them) to participate in the powerful new cult of National Socialism. Everything went well, and a substantial number of ethnic Germans signed up to the Zapot Agreement, which supported a long-term policy of reunification with the Fatherland under the all-encompassing banner of the Nazi Party.

  Hess was delighted by Albrecht’s success, and sent Albrecht to Czechoslovakia to set up a similar arrangement with ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland, that area of Bohemia adjoining Germany that had been awarded to Czechoslovakia under the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1919. So significant were these first tentative steps by the Nazis’ foreign-political machine that ‘from 1935 onwards Hitler based some of his formulations on Volksdeutsch politics on statements submitted to him by Hess and prepared by Albrecht Haushofer’.28

  The expansion of Germany was not Hitler’s only objective at this time: the Treaty of Versailles had not only stripped valuable German territory away, it had also reduced Germany’s military to a skeletal force fit only for defence and internal security. This did not fit with Hitler’s future plans one bit, and by early 1935 he determined it was time to solve this problem. If Germany was to become a major power once again, she would need appropriate military forces to match her status.

  Consequently, it was announced in March 1935 that Germany would re-introduce conscription to meet her new military needs. Immediately, all Europe sat up and took notice, the press proclaiming dire warnings of future German aggression, causing a Europe-wide level of consternation and panic not seen since the First World War.

  ‘Let them curse,’ Goebbels commented. ‘Meanwhile we rearm and put on a brave face.’29

  Within a few days, Britain’s Foreign Secretary and Lord Privy Seal, Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden, hurriedly flew to Berlin to ascertain exactly what the German Führer intended to do next. Hitler, for his part, was deeply worried by the British reaction, and was indeed ‘putting on a brave face’. He absolutely did not want a conflict with the British, and made no secret of the fact that he considered the English to be Germany’s ‘Aryan cousins’. He therefore desperately wanted to persuade Britain’s politicians to let him do exactly as he wanted, without a war which he knew Germany would lose at that time.

  In a confidential meeting on Saturday, 23 March 1935, held at his Reich Chancellery office, Hitler met with Hess, Philipp Bouhler, the Chancellery head and party business manager, and Albrecht Haushofer, attending as a specialist on English affairs, to decide the course of action. It was concluded that an Anglo–German diplomatic banquet would provide the best low-key opportunity for Hitler to argue his case for Germany’s need to throw off of the shackles of Versailles. To Haushofer fell the task of drawing up the guest list, devising the seating plan30 and advising Hitler during his meeting with Simon and Eden.

  At the banquet the guests were placed so that Eden was seated close to Hitler, separated from him only by Lady Phipps, the British Ambassador’s wife, while Sir John Simon was placed opposite the German Führer. Other British guests included leading Tory politician Viscount Cranborne, the new Ambassador to Berlin Sir Eric Phipps and his predecessor Sir John Seymour, while the top Germans present included Göring, Hess, Goebbels and von Neurath. There were, however, no military men, no
SS or Schutzstaffel, and certainly no one whose presence would have hinted at the darker side of Nazism, such as Himmler or Heydrich. This was a diplomatic dinner aimed at defusing a sensitive international situation, not an occasion for military intimidation. However, as Goebbels later noted, Hitler did speak ‘out against Russia, [and] has laid a cuckoo’s egg which is intended to hatch into an Anglo–German entente’.31

  The event was a success, and further enhanced Albrecht Haushofer’s standing at the Reich Chancellery. Within a few weeks he began to expand his reputation as an expert on foreign affairs by writing a report for Hess on the problems with ‘Germany’s Foreign-Political Apparatus’. The report concluded that in order to attain Germany’s territorial aims, Hitler would have to take the lead in a two-pronged approach to further Germany’s position in Europe.

  Haushofer posed the question: ‘How do we view this instrument in reality, and proceed in the direction of the Führer’s difficult foreign policy [of territorial expansion]?’32 He then proceeded to explain that there existed a complicated conflict within Germany’s foreign ministry, which was split between the old guard – the stalwarts of the diplomatic service (mainly Weimar Republic appointees), who opposed National Socialist policy – and the new men, all party members who believed in a strong Nazi approach to attain the Führer’s territorial aims. The main problem, Albrecht pointed out, was that these new men were inexperienced, and the older diplomats were the more effective body within the ministry. Foreign governments, politicians and diplomats, he asserted, were exploiting these differences to Germany’s detriment. The problem would not be solved until a reorganisation of the Foreign Ministry took place.33

  Over the next four years Haushofer’s importance to Hess and Hitler continued to rise. His was often the hidden voice of reason that attempted to put a tone of mollification into Nazi foreign policy, his often the role of modest intermediary between the Führer and certain top Britons.