The Man who Knew too Much
By Thomas Dunskus
Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince, Stephen Prior, Double Standards: The
Rudolf Hess Cover-Up, Warner Little Brown & Co Ltd, 2002, 608pp.,
$16.95
Martin Allen, The Hitler-Hess Deception. British Intelligence’s
Best-kept Secret of the Second World War, Harper Collins, NY 2003,
352pp., $27.99
More than half a century ago, in May of 1941, during a conflict that
soon widened into the Second World War, at a time when most people now
alive were not yet born, a man flew unescorted from Augsburg in
Germany to the Scottish highlands in an unarmed Messerschmitt 110
twin-engine plane which he piloted himself. The plane had been
specially prepared for this mission by the installation of drop-tanks
under the wings and various other modifications. He expected to be
received at his destination by a number of very high-ranking British
politicians prepared, he thought, to discuss a possible peace deal
between Great Britain and Germany. When he discovered that no landing
preparations had been made for him, he bailed out of his aircraft and
was soon taken prisoner.
The man’s name was Rudolf Hess; he was Hitler’s deputy in the party
and next in line, after Göring, for the chancellorship in the German
government. From the moment he landed on Scottish soil until his death
by strangulation in Spandau prison 46 years later he would never be a
free man again. When his mission failed, he was declared insane by the
German side whereas Britain was never able to make up her mind as to
whether he was a prisoner of war or simply a mentally sick man who
should have been returned to his home country under the terms of the
Geneva Convention.
At the time of his daring flight, the National Socialists had
instituted a number of anti-Jewish laws, they had instigated or at
least tolerated a pogrom, and were following an expansionist and
aggressive policy, but with some hindsight, one wonders why this man
had to be shut up for the rest of his life by the Allied Military
Tribunal at Nuremberg, whereas other figures among Hitler’s close
associates who had, in later years, played a much more active role
were released from jail after a number of years that appear reasonable
under normal legal aspects. For the last twenty-five years of his life
he was the only prisoner at Spandau, guarded by a detachment of the
four Allies in rotation. His family was allowed monthly visits, but
the conversations were supervised and strictly limited to personal
matters. Various unsuccessful efforts were made to have him released
on humanitarian grounds but all failed. His death is shrouded in
mystery, the official version is that he hanged himself by means of an
electric cord, but an autopsy revealed that the cause of death may
well have been strangulation.
In the years after WW2, he became the subject of an occasional book,
but ever since his death there has been a profusion of titles dealing
with the man, his flight, his mission, and his end. It is as if his
spirit refused to be laid to rest and continued to haunt his captors,
for the majority of authors are British – Peter Padfield, Peter Allen,
Hugh Thomas, Martin Allen, and Lynn Picknett et al., to name only a
few.
Leaving aside some possibly far-fetched theories, the most recent
accounts set forth a number of points such as
* Hess was one of the sanest, most internationally experienced,
best informed, and least dogmatic men in the government of the Third
Reich.
* His influence on party politics was guided by high moral
standards.
* Despite official denials, he flew to Britain with Hitler’s full
knowledge and support.
* There was a substantial British peace party in 1941, which
included most of the aristocracy – and the Royal Family.
* His fate was closely linked with that of the Duke of Kent,
brother of the British King.
* Winston Churchill guilefully used Hess and the peace party to
encourage Hitler to wage war against the Soviet Union.
Obviously, the various authors concentrate on different aspects of
this topic and have somewhat divergent opinions on the importance of
the points at issue. Martin Allen’s most recent book The Hitler-Hess
Deception is strong when it comes to the events, which preceded Hess’
flight. In a way, it is a sequel to his book Hidden Agenda, which
deals with German efforts to court the Duke of Windsor and with the
deal that may have been struck between the Duke and Hitler in early
1940; some of the personalities involved appear, in fact, in both
works.
The main issue that Martin Allen as well as some of the other authors
expound is that Hess’ flight was not at all a flight undertaken by a
madman at the spur of the moment, rather, it was the culmination of a
series of flights by Hess to meet the British "Ambassador
Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary on Special Mission in Spain," Sir
Samuel Hoare. For Allen, this was a sting operation set up by
Churchill’s SOE organization with the aim of having Hitler wage war
against the Soviet Union and thus relieving the pressure on Britain.
Allen does not go very deeply into the question whether a peace party,
possibly under the leadership of the Duke of Hamilton, actually did
exist in Britain. For him the important point is that, regardless of
whether it did or not, the Germans were led to believe in its
existence and its ability to topple Churchill and were thus encouraged
to attack the Soviet Union.
Once Hitler had been launched against Stalin, Hess became expendable,
but as he knew about the initial overtures from Britain, he could not
be set free, nor could any telling traces of the operation be allowed
to remain. This was accomplished, in Allen’s view, by an immediate
seizure of all pertinent documents still available in occupied
Germany, and possibly even by the elimination of important witnesses
such as Prof. Karl Haushofer who, with his son Albrecht, had played a
major role on the German side in the negotiations with the "peace
party."
The book Double Standards, written by Lynn Picknett et al., presents
us with a more detailed analysis of the political situation in
war-time Britain; it strongly affirms the existence of a peace party,
with, at its head, the Duke of Hamilton, the leading Scottish peer
and, like Hess, an accomplished aviator. These authors leave open the
question of whether this party was knowingly playing into the hands of
Churchill, whether it was pressured into cooperation by the War
Cabinet that had begun to intern political opponents, or whether its
own peace moves were simply being used by the Prime Minister as bait
for the Germans. The authors strongly underscore the involvement of
British nobility, including the Royal Family, in the moves to end the
war with Germany.
Double Standards deals in great detail with the various places where
Hess was detained and with the circumstances of his transfers and
conditions of detention. The book describes an attempt involving the
Duke of Kent and aimed at spiriting Hess by plane out of the country,
perhaps to Sweden, in the course of which all on board, except one
man, met their death. This kind of theory ties in with the ideas of
other authors who claim that Hess died or was killed at some time
during the war and was replaced by a Doppelgänger who was suitably
conditioned for this unsavory role. As mentioned above, however, this
line of thought does not really sound convincing, even if the
circumstances of the Duke of Kent’s plane crash have, indeed, remained
mysterious to this day.
The general consensus of most authors is that, in one way or another,
the Churchill government managed to encourage the Germans to attack
the USSR, then waited which turn matters would take and eventually
joined forces with the Soviet Union once the German army had not
succeeded in overthrowing their enemy in a first onslaught. The
question is raised here and there in these books as to what extent
London informed Moscow of the impending attack. While there is no
documentary evidence, the presence of the ‘Cambridge Five’ at crucial
positions in the British administration renders it highly likely that
Stalin was indeed made aware of what was going on between Berlin and
London, even if he may not have been fed information via official
channels. The Soviet preparations for a war against Germany (and
possibly the rest of Europe) have recently been discussed in a number
of publications that converge on the conclusion that the deployment of
Soviet forces in the western part of the country was such that the
USSR, later in 1941, would have struck out on its own had the Germans
not made their pre-emptive move.
The question, which is looming large behind the many pages devoted to
this subject, is why Churchill was so adamant in his negative attitude
towards Germany, whether he was aware of the possibly horrible
consequences of his decisions, and to what extent he condoned the
scenario that he was conjuring up. Double Standards speculates that
Hess may have gone so far as to propose to Britain a change in the
German government with Hess becoming Chancellor and Hitler being moved
to the more ceremonial post of President of the Reich. This is not
unconvincing for, if Germany at Munich still thought that Britain
would not become active on the continent, the situation was different
in 1940/41 and may well have prompted the Reich government to become
more flexible.
What is frightening about the British sting operation is the apparent
lack of scruples, with which the Churchill government went about
setting two dictatorships up against each other. The outcome of this
duel was not at all certain; what was certain, though, was that the
independence of the countries of eastern Europe was doomed. This
consideration also invalidates the argument that Britain could not
possibly made peace with the Reich, because London had, after all,
gone to war to preserve the integrity of Poland. These are questions
of political morality, and in a way it would seem that the increasing
preoccupation of British authors with this turning point of WWII
reflects the unease they are feeling with respect to major and in the
end catastrophic decisions taken in their name and over their heads by
less than a handful of people in Whitehall.
A clue to the question as to why Churchill acted in this way can
perhaps be found in the documents reproduced in the German edition of
Martin Allen’s book (Churchills Friedensfalle), which were only quoted
in the English original. In September of 1940, Sir Robert Vansittart,
Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the Foreign Office, wrote a letter to Lord
Halifax, Secretary of State, on the subject of peace overtures made to
Mr. Mallet, the British ambassador in Sweden, by Dr. Weissauer,
Hitler’s personal lawyer:
"I hope that you will instruct Mr. Mallet that he is on no account to
meet Dr. Weissauer. The future of civilisation is at stake. It is a
question of we or they now, and either the German Reich or this
country has got to go under, and not only under, but right under. I
believe it will be the German Reich. This is a very different thing
from saying that Germany has got to go under; but the German Reich and
the Reich idea have been the curse of the world for 75 years, and if
we do not stop it this time, we never shall, and they will stop us.
The enemy is the German Reich and not merely Nazism, and those who
have not yet learned this lesson have learned nothing whatever, and
would let us in for a sixth war even if we survive the fifth. […] All
possibility of compromise has now gone by, and it has got to be a
fight to a finish, and to a real finish. […]" (emphases in the
original.)
This letter is a most instructive illustration of the state of mind of
the small group of people who governed Britain in the 1940s. It shows
that the fight against Hitler was incidental; it was only part of a
larger battle aimed at eliminating Germany as a political power in
order to preserve the British Empire. Vansittart’s references to the
"fifth war" – which Halifax undoubtedly understood – beg the question
of the other four. Obviously, WWI was one of them, but the three
others that Britain had supposedly fought against the Reich since the
1860s are somewhat mysterious, as there never were, during that time,
any declared hostilities between the two countries. One can only
surmise that for Vansittart the wars Prussia fought against other
countries in 1864, 1866, and 1870 or such conflicts as the Boer War,
the Agadir crisis, or the Baghdad railway project were, in essence,
wars, in which Britain herself confronted the German Reich. Such
considerations shed interesting sidelights on British activities
behind the scenes of European politics throughout the 19th century.
Thus, in a vain effort to stem the tide of history and save the
Empire, Churchill and the men around him lost not only what they were
trying to preserve but managed to ruin a good part of Europe at the
same time. The authors of Double Standards devote several pages to a
discussion of the tragedies on all sides that could have been avoided
if Hess’ mission had been a success. With a marvelously
tongue-in-cheek attitude they also consider, side by side, the kind of
Europe that, in 1941, would have resulted from a reasonable peace with
Germany, and the political structure we see emerging today in the same
geographical area: they find little to choose between the two.
While Martin Allen clearly casts Hess in a sympathetic light, the
three authors of Double Standards go a step further. Like so many
captains, they bear him to center stage and seem to say that, had he
been put on, he would have proved most nobel. With this regard it
matters but little whether his final resting place is at Wunsiedel,
next to his parents, or in Scottish soil, next to the poor fellows who
may have crashed with him on Eagles Rock.
The final book on this subject still remains to be written, but
certain and possibly crucial documents will not be released until
2017, and others have been transferred from official archives to the
archives of the Royal Family, which are not subject to normal holding
regulations. However, the existing literature contains information
waiting to be exploited further, we can thus hope for more light to be
shed on these events, which have so decisively shaped the world in
which we live today.
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"A recent report by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
found that Holocaust-denial is a real and growing problem, and continues
to be actively promoted in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere, and
in some cases enjoys government sponsorship."
Prof. David S. Wyman in letter to C-Span. 03/2005.
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