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The Hitler–Hess Deception
Martin Allen


This edition does not include illustrations.At last, new archival discoveries reveal the truth about the German Deputy-Führer’s incredible solo flight to Britain in May 1941, and explain the British government’s sixty-year silence as to what the Hess mission was all about.On the night of 10 May 1941, in one of the most extraordinary and bizarre incidents of the Second World War, a Messerschmitt-110 crash-landed on a remote Scottish hillside. Its pilot, who had parachuted to safety, was Rudolf Hess, the Deputy-Führer of the German Reich. Hess’s remarkable solo flight was immediately dismissed in both Britain and Germany as the deranged act of a disordered mind. He was disowned by Hitler, and Winston Churchill’s government insisted that his unexpected arrival on British soil was of no lasting consequence.Nevertheless, the mysterious circumstances of the flight, and Hess’s unbroken silence during fifty subsequent years of imprisonment, have led to endless speculation as to his true motives. Until now, no one has found the crucial pieces of evidence which prove that a small group of men within the British government and intelligence services were in fact conducting a brilliantly clever plot which was not only to lead to Hess’s flight, but would also have a decisive impact on the course of the war.Martin Allen’s researches in archives in Britain, Germany and the United States have unearthed many documents previously undiscovered by historians. The details they reveal are explosive, and alter our perception not only of the conduct of the Second World War, but of the secret forces which shaped post-war Europe and global politics.















Maps (#ulink_5846805e-7318-57db-b659-a00e5a3e6b5e)


Greater Germany as conceived by Karl Haushofer (#litres_trial_promo)

Greater Germany and the empire in the east as perceived by the Nazis (#litres_trial_promo)

The route of Hess’s Me-110, 10 May 1941 (#litres_trial_promo)




Dedication (#ulink_7cbea1cc-de50-5260-ac51-21546dbedc63)


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




Contents


Cover (#uc26c7b95-31fa-5bbe-81a2-b823c3e10148)

Title Page (#u05949b58-53aa-5665-941f-0d8332fafa32)

List of Maps (#ulink_62649770-718c-561f-a7ba-400ae701e4e0)

Dedication (#ulink_bd00b6b0-bcc5-5f78-b329-68c9a3a6e9a7)

Preface (#ulink_ab91f990-d9a3-5a50-b9b3-bef1792162e2)

Prologue (#ulink_a910c9c1-0baa-5b7f-9e66-b40a5adb50ed)

1 An Unlikely Triumvirate (#ulink_2e2b55d4-d1fc-5770-9c74-43485c94a7da)

2 Peaceable Attempts (#ulink_cc107b69-7e96-55d2-88f0-6f1b26120cbe)

3 Flag-Waving (#litres_trial_promo)

4 Negotiation (#litres_trial_promo)

5 A Tense Spring (#litres_trial_promo)

6 Someone is Expected (#litres_trial_promo)

7 An Emissary Comes (#litres_trial_promo)

8 A Fatal Decision (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Postscript (#litres_trial_promo)

Source Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Preface (#ulink_3bc1e074-01da-5c50-af0b-7122685c0438)


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 (#ulink_541ebfdb-4674-5cba-9e65-da98295f57c4)


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.


(#litres_trial_promo)

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’.




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.’




The OSS men listened to these revelations 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’.


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.




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.


It has never been seen since.

During the winter of 1945 the prosecution at the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg considered placing Karl Haushofer on trial with the leading Nazis, but concluded that it was not possible to prosecute an academic merely for putting forward theories, even theories as provocative as Professor Haushofer’s. It was, however, seriously debated whether Haushofer should be called as a key witness for the prosecution of Hitler’s Deputy Rudolf Hess and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, to explain his theories, which were at the core of Nazi foreign policy, and to give general evidence.

What occurred next cannot be viewed with anything but a sceptical eye. On Sunday, 10 March 1946, Professor Haushofer was discreetly visited at Hartshimmelhof by two Allied Intelligence officers. On this occasion the men were not Americans, but from British Intelligence. Several days later they wrote a brief memorandum to Ivone Kirkpatrick, a high-ranking official at the Foreign Office. They reported that Haushofer ‘knew nothing further on the subject in question’, and, curiously, concluded: ‘In response to our instructions, the problem concerning this man and the IMT has been removed.’




Two days later, on Tuesday, 12 March, Heinz Haushofer, puzzled by his inability to contact his parents on the phone, went to Hartschimmelhof. He found the house deserted, although the lights within were burning. With increasing concern, Heinz searched the substantial house, before moving on to the grounds and the surrounding forest. An hour later, deep within the woods in a hollow beside a stream about half a mile behind the house – a spot later described by an American Intelligence officer as the ‘loneliest hillside in Bavaria’ – Heinz Haushofer found his parents. Karl Haushofer was lying in a hunched position in the hollow, and his wife Martha was hanging from a nearby tree. It was later established that Professor Haushofer’s death had been caused by cyanide poisoning.

The local police, together with the American authorities, investigated the matter in some detail, but after all the horrors of the war, and with the desperate state of Germany in the spring of 1946, resources and time were limited, and the Haushofers’ deaths were officially recorded as suicides.

There is, however, a curious fact about the German police reports on the case, and the subsequent interest taken in the case by the American authorities. Nowhere, in any statement taken at any time, did anyone reveal, record or admit that the last people to see the Haushofers alive were almost certainly two British Intelligence agents. Agents who reported on their visit to Ivone Kirkpatrick, the Foreign Office official who in 1941 had been one of the very first men to interview Rudolf Hess after his unexpected arrival on British soil. Kirkpatrick was also, incidentally, later that year to land a plum appointment as Britain’s High Commissioner to Germany.

Almost from the moment Rudolf Hess parachuted out of the night sky on 10 May 1941 to land on a remote Scottish hillside, the official British line on the arrival of Germany’s Deputy-Führer on British soil was that he was mad. Intriguingly, within twenty-four hours Adolf Hitler would make much the same claim.

The two opposing parties had very different reasons to denigrate Hess’s importance. British Intelligence may have been hiding an entirely different, and infinitely more dangerous, secret. The arrival of Hess was merely an unplanned offshoot of an operation intended to achieve a much more important end. Right up until the moment they were confronted by Germany’s Deputy-Führer standing before them in a gleaming black flying-suit, British Intelligence had actually been expecting someone else.

In Germany, Hitler’s reaction to Hess’s flight was largely motivated by fear of losing face before his own people should they discover that their Führer, whilst exhorting them to fight on in his war of conquest, had actually been secretly involved in negotiations with certain top Britons to make peace and end the war. Indeed, he had even offered to withdraw all German forces from occupied western Europe in order to attain a deal.

The extraordinary truth is that, for sixty years, a potentially devastating political secret has been covered up by subterfuge. This secret was related to British fears in 1940 and 1941 that the country might go down to crushing defeat, and to how Britain’s top political minds determined that Britain would survive. The means they used to accomplish this were ingenious and extremely subtle, but also unscrupulous. They were the acts of desperate men, faced with the options of either catastrophic defeat or national survival.

By its very nature, what was done became a secret that could never be revealed. The decision to promulgate the legend of the standalone nation – that Britain had survived through pure military endeavour and luck – meant that disclosure during the dangerous years of the Cold War would have resulted in the shattering of Britain’s international credibility, and the ruin of many political careers.

Yet it could also be said that there was another, more noble, purpose to keeping this secret for all time. The impression has always been maintained that the Nazi leaders were a bizarre range of individuals, devoid of compassion for humanity – and, in many cases, evil personified. If, however, the truth should turn out to be that some of these men had considerable political acumen, but that the inexorable spread of the Second World War resulted largely from their inability to control the situation, the distinction between pernicious men of evil intent, and politicians unable to control the flames of war they had themselves lit, becomes less clear-cut.




CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_b3cb71c6-1b60-5a1c-a339-5d106d550049)

An Unlikely Triumvirate (#ulink_b3cb71c6-1b60-5a1c-a339-5d106d550049)


If one were looking for some lasting important artefact of the Third Reich, one should not seek a swastika-adorned fighter-plane or medal-bedecked army uniform in a military museum, for these are really the vestiges of failure, items of hardware used by the Nazis to attain their empire when the politics broke down. For a more meaningful relic of Nazism, one intent on exploring the darker side of humanity need only look as far as Mein Kampf. In its pages, more than by any other means, one can gain an insight into National Socialism. Nazism was a concept, a radical if unwholesome ideology that sprang from the disasters of the First World War, the German right’s patriotic yearnings for nationhood, and the fear of Bolshevism in the 1920s and thirties. The torchlit marches, the ostentatious neo-classical structures, the plethora of eagle-surmounted swastikas that adorned buildings, banners and uniformed breasts, were but a manifestation of thought, an ideology that powered National Socialism: the belief that Germany could rise phoenix-like from the ashes of Weimar mediocrity.

Nazism, history tells us, sprang from political theories implemented by a band of individuals who would have been regarded as social misfits in any other society, led by men such as Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Robert Ley, Julius Streicher, Joachim von Ribbentrop and, of course, Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess. All were determined to create a new world where Aryan supremacy and mysticism became fact, and where humanity would be classified into the top-of-the-heap Aryans, followed by the lower orders – the Slavs, the Jews, and other sub-humans.

But what if some of these top Nazis were not so strange? If they were in fact extremely capable and competent politicians? Our present-day perception of Nazism would be very different. National Socialism would not have been any less terrible or objectionable, but the boundaries between the normal political mind and the bizarre would be less easy to determine.

Nazi rule was a tree whose roots lay initially in a defeated nation’s fear and despair, and whose branches would eventually be strong enough to support the Gestapo, the SS and the ‘final solution’. The leaders of the Nazi Party controlled the German Reich on many levels, but the political alliances, the expedient agreements and the bitter feuds were all directed towards one grand master-plan: the creation of a Greater Germany and Reich that would last a thousand years.

Behind the party leadership stood many important academics who shared a fear of Bolshevism and hatred of the Treaty of Versailles. Over many years they had developed academic theories that would shape the modern world that, they believed, had to come. They came from many disciplines – from physics and medicine, economics and geography, psychiatry, anthropology and archaeology – and the Nazi Party cherry-picked their work for ideas that fitted in with their objectives.

There was, however, one elderly academic whose involvement with the Nazis actually helped formulate National Socialist policy. This man’s involvement with Adolf Hitler, through the intervention of Rudolf Hess, in 1921 would lead to his becoming the politico-foreign affairs tutor and adviser to the Führer and his Deputy.

Rudolf Hess was not a monumentally important personality in National Socialism, but it is certainly the case that had he never existed, or had he been killed during the First World War, the course of world history during the inter-war years may well have taken a very different path. His introduction of Adolf Hitler to Professor Karl Haushofer, Germany’s leading expert on geopolitics, was to have profound consequences.

Haushofer would provide Hitler with the theoretical concepts of Nazi expansionism, German ethnicity and Lebensraum, or living space, for the German people. Furthermore, in the years to come his son Albrecht would provide important assistance to Hitler and Hess, inexorably advancing the Nazis’ aims of territorial expansion within Europe, according to his father’s plans for a Greater Germany. By the late 1930s Albrecht Haushofer would become the hidden hand of Hess and his Führer in pursuing the Nazis’ foreign policy objectives.

However, Albrecht Haushofer would also unwittingly prove to be the key that would enable British Intelligence to unleash an overwhelming tide of disaster upon Hitler’s entire war strategy. This is a secret that has remained hidden since the Second World War. Indeed, Hitler himself never knew that a situation deep in the Haushofer’s past had been exploited to obliterate his hopes for victory, or that his own Deputy, Rudolf Hess, had himself set these destructive wheels in motion over twenty years before.

The story of how this occurred, of how Hitler, Hess and Haushofer, working towards ultimate German supremacy, in the end brought about their own undoing, is perhaps the strangest story of the whole war.

With the sudden end to the First World War in November 1918, many Germans, among them soldiers who had been fighting at the front without knowing what was happening at home, looked at the ruination of their country and asked themselves what had happened. How had Germany gone from a mighty imperial superpower in 1914, possessed of a superb army and the world’s second-largest navy, to be laid so low a mere four years later? The last months of the war had seen enormous political unrest in Germany, and the suspicion was born that the nation had not been defeated militarily, but that she had been undone by sly, underhand, political agitators and revolutionaries at home. Taking their lead from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, many left-wing revolutionary factions had sprung up in Germany in 1918, intent upon changing Germany’s political system. They demanded an end to the Kaiser, the aristocracy and the ruling classes, and power to the proletariat.

Just as in Russia, where sailors of the Imperial Navy had launched the revolution that had toppled the Tsar’s regime, so did the spark of Bolshevik revolution ignite in Germany’s Imperial Fleet. In October 1918, sailors of the German Navy had mutinied at Kiel, and large numbers of deserters quickly scattered inland to seek out fellow thinkers among the disaffected workers of Germany’s industrial heartland. Here they fomented social unrest and insurrection, cutting Germany’s supply of materials and power, and crippling the country.

Unable to restore order, and fearing the loss of his life in the same ghastly manner as had befallen his cousin Tsar Nicholas II four months previously, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s nerve failed. He abdicated and fled the country within a few days, leaving a hastily propped-up Socialist government to cope with an internal situation that threatened to turn into full-scale revolution. Faced with this dilemma, and knowing that the Allied forces were growing steadily stronger, the new German government promptly declared that the war could not be sustained any longer, and sued for peace. Germany had lost the war not only militarily, but also economically and politically.

Thus, when the twenty-four-year-old fighter-pilot Rudolf Hess journeyed home by train to his parents in Bavaria in December 1918, he took with him the bitter depression of defeat and the deep feelings of betrayal shared by the millions of other men suddenly discharged from Germany’s armed forces. However, Hess was not a typical German, and his background – for a man destined to hold high political office in 1930s Germany – was most unusual. He was what was called an Ausländer, an ethnic German born overseas.

Rudolf Walter Richard Hess had been born in a luxurious villa in the Egyptian coastal resort of Ibrahimieh, a few miles to the east of Alexandria, on 26 April 1894. His background was to have a profound effect upon the man he would become. Although recognised as a reasonably bright child, he would grow to be a frustrated young man, expected to take over the reins of the family business, the successful mercantile company Hess & Co., run by his domineering father, Fritz Hess.

Rudolf Hess’s childhood with his younger brother Alfred and sister Margarete was an idyllic one. The Hess children played adventurous games in the substantial grounds of the family home. At night they would stand on the villa’s flat roof, gaze up at the Egyptian night sky, and listen enraptured as their mother explained the wonders of the cosmos, the intricacies of the solar system.

Although Hess’s parents were established and well settled in Egypt, seeming to have made a successful transition to expatriate life, they had not broken their ties with the mother country. Fritz Hess was proud of his German heritage, displaying a large portrait of the Kaiser in his office, and being most particular to ensure he took his family ‘home’ to the more temperate climate of southern Germany every summer. On these visits the Hess children re-established their German identities, wandering the countryside north-west of Nuremberg, enjoying family picnics, and establishing friendships that would last a lifetime.

This charmed life ended for the young Rudolf when he reached the age of fourteen. In September 1908, instead of returning to Egypt with his family after their summer holiday, Rudolf travelled to Bad Godesberg to attend the Evangelical School, where he was to receive his first formal education, having been educated at home since the age of six by a tutor. The young Hess showed an aptitude for mathematics and science, much to the concern of his father, who was hoping for a son who would take over the family business when the time came. In the hope of igniting the commercial spark that would turn his son into a young entrepreneur, Fritz Hess sent Rudolf to the École Supérieur de Commerce in Neuchâtel, hoping that some of the Swiss acumen for business would rub off on his son.

In 1912, after a year of high expense for the father, and comprehensive cramming by the son, the eighteen-year-old Rudolf left Switzerland to join the flourishing Hamburg trading company of Feldt Stein & Co. as an apprentice. As he took his first tentative steps as an adult in the heady atmosphere of pre-war Hamburg, Rudolf was blissfully unaware that the worst war the world had ever seen was about to erupt. Yet this was also a war that would give Hess his first great adventure, his chance to break free of the future his parents had mapped out for him as a middle-class businessman.

Far from the delights of belle époque Hamburg, in distant Sarajevo the course of European history was changed forever on 28 June 1914, when a young Serb named Gavrilo Princip shot dead the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his consort Sophie Chotek, the Duchess of Hohenburg. Princip’s were the first shots that would herald an unimaginably terrible war that would not only sweep away the flower of Europe’s young men, but change forever the political complexion of the continent.

Rudolf Hess was among the very first bands of young men to volunteer, quitting his job in the summer of 1914 to join the German infantry. Over the next four years he would see action in many of the horror-spots of the war, from the Western Front at Ypres and Verdun to the Carpathian Mountains on the Eastern Front, where he was severely wounded. However, against all the odds, he survived – a remarkable testament not only to his luck, but to his mental strength as well. Eventually, with considerable persistence, he managed to get himself inducted into Germany’s fledgling Air Corps, where he trained and became a fighter-pilot flying Fokker triplanes in Belgium during the last weeks of the war.

Now, as he returned home at the end of the war only to find turmoil and political unrest, he commented bitterly: ‘I witnessed the horror of death in all its forms … battered for days under heavy bombardment … hungered and suffered, as indeed have all front-line soldiers. And is all this to be in vain, the suffering of the good people at home all for nothing?’


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Not only had Hess seen his once-glorious nation go down to crushing defeat, but his father’s successful business in Egypt had been ruined by the war, and was eventually taken over by the victorious Allies. It was a loss Fritz Hess never really recovered from, psychologically or financially; his son’s bitterness ran deep indeed, on both a national and a personal level.

The manner in which the First World War ended, and the deep sense of betrayal felt by the returning German soldiers, would dominate German politics for the coming twenty years. At this time were sown the seeds of bitterness that would be cultivated by the men who would rise to power in the 1930s – men just like Rudolf Hess, who believed that victory had been swindled from them by a devious gang of traitors at home: Communists, Socialists, wishy-washy liberals; and, worst of all, some of the more ultra-right wing declared, the Jews. It would become a dangerous and volatile cocktail of disillusionment and hate, just waiting to explode.

On returning to Bavaria at the end of November 1918, Hess found his country facing a peril he had only read about in newspapers – the threat of a Bolshevik revolution similar to that which had taken place in Russia a year before. A militant Bolshevik organisation called the Spartakusbund had taken over Bavaria, overthrown the legitimate Bavarian government, and set up its own Soviet Republic of Bavaria, the Räterepublik.

With the end of war, Germany had been plunged into political turmoil. On one side was the far left, predominantly led by militant workers and educated men well-versed in the works of Marx; on the other was the right wing, made up virtually without exception of the middle classes and war veterans determined that these Bolshevik troublemakers should be crushed completely before Germany descended into chaos. The country teetered on the very edge of an abyss that had the potential to mirror what was taking place in Russia.

Intent on taking his part in the struggle, Rudolf Hess quickly joined a right-wing band of veterans called the Thule Gesellschaft – the Thule Society – set up to counter the organised thuggery of the Spartakusbund. Over the course of the next five months, much bitter street-fighting ensued in the struggle to prevent the Spartakists consolidating their grip on power in Bavaria. The Thule Gesellschaft may be considered a forerunner of the Nazi Party, created before National Socialism became a concept; indeed, created even before Adolf Hitler became prominent. It was a nationalist anti-Bolshevik society, used the swastika as its emblem, and loudly proclaimed the motto ‘Remember you are German. Keep your blood pure.’ It was not as large an organisation as the Spartakists, and its struggle was hard, but events were about to turn in its favour.

In late April 1919, the Spartakists captured seven Thule Society members and an innocent bystander called Professor Berger, a Jewish academic who had the incredible bad luck to be swept up as a member of the anti-Semitic society. His luck was about to get worse, as all eight men were summarily executed. The Spartakists then made the fatal error of accepting three Bolshevik emissaries sent from Moscow by Lenin. These three Russian agitators promptly took over the Spartakusbund, and began to consolidate their power-base in Bavaria’s new Räterepublik by instigating a Soviet-style purge.

This was all too much for the new German government. From Weimar in Thuringia they watched events in Bavaria and blanched, for the Spartakusbund had nailed its colours to the mast by declaring that its ultimate aim was to topple the legitimate government and set up a Soviet Germany. Prompted by a sense of self-preservation, the government sent troops in to restore order, gladly accepting help from the Freikorp Epp (a right-wing paramilitary organisation affiliated to the Thule Society), and succeeded in toppling the Spartakists. With the collapse of the Räterepublik most people in southern Germany breathed an enormous sigh of relief, and hoped that the natural order of predominantly conservative Bavaria would re-assert itself, and that they could now get on with their lives.

It was at this time, mid-1919, that Rudolf Hess first made the acquaintance of Professor General Karl Haushofer, the man who would instil in him the political awareness and the understanding of world affairs that he would apply to his as-yet unplanned career in politics. Twenty-five years later, in October 1944, an investigation by the FBI would take a statement that revealed: ‘According to [Name Censored] Rudolf Hess … brought Hitler and Haushofer together [and this] combination of Hess and Haushofer was, in the opinion of [Censored] the root of the Nazi Party.’


But this statement missed the crucial fact that Karl Haushofer and his son Albrecht became confidential advisers to Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess on their most important foreign policy matters – in effect an unofficial Führer’s private office on foreign affairs.

On a balmy summer’s evening in 1919 a man called Beck invited his friend and fellow member of Thule Gesellschaft Rudolf Hess to dine with him at the home of Professor Karl Haushofer, ‘an old-time pan-Germanist’


who had commanded the Thirteenth Bavarian Infantry Division during the First World War. This first meeting between Haushofer and Hess, a purely social affair, was an immediate success. Long into the night, an enthralled Hess sat and listened intently to everything the eminent Professor had to say about the wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles, and his views on foreign affairs defined under the all-encompassing banner of Welt-Politik (world politics), as determined by his new theories of ‘geopolitics’. For Hess it was the opening of an intellectual door, and he suddenly came to believe that there was a bigger picture to consider – that of the new age to come – which through science would redefine the world. Haushofer had himself undergone this intellectual revolution in the late 1890s.

Basically, geopolitics was the theory, as promulgated by Haushofer, that in the future the world would be restructured into an age of great land-empires, dominated by ‘the Heartland’, an area ‘invulnerable to sea-power in Central Europe and Asia’.


This, Haushofer asserted, would revolutionise the world’s balance of power, ushering in a ‘new age’ of stability, peace and prosperity for all.

In 1904, the eminent British geographer H.J. Mackinder had written a paper titled ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’,


which Haushofer had read avidly, particularly the paragraph that declared: ‘The spaces within the Russian Empire and Mongolia are so vast, and their potentialities in population, wheat, cotton, fuel and metals so incalculably great, that it is inevitable that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will there develop inaccessible to oceanic commerce.’ Mackinder went on to expound his theory that

sea power alone, it if is not based on great industry, and has a great industry behind it, is too weak for offence to really maintain itself in the world struggle … both the sea and the railway are going in the future … to be supplemented by the air as a means of locomotion, and when we come to that … the successful powers will be those who have the greatest industrial base . .. [and] those people who have the greatest industrial base … [will] have the . . . power of invention and science to defeat all others.


[Author’s italics]

Hess listened to all this and more, as Haushofer explained his theory that ethnicity should be added to this geopolitical formula. All Europe’s current borders, he maintained, resulted from old-world wars and conflict dating back to the Dark Ages, the time of strife and confusion following the collapse of Rome. European peace would only truly come about when Europe was redefined according to ethnic background. And that meant, by happy coincidence, that Germany and the Germanic peoples would become the largest single bloc, dominating central Europe.

Hess quickly became a total convert to Haushofer’s theories, and for his part the elderly Professor took a keen interest in the intriguing young man, who showed signs of considerable ability. A ready friendship soon developed between the two, Hess finding the genteel Haushofer a stark contrast to the authoritarian figure his own father had been. ‘He is a wonderful man,’


wrote Hess, and within a few days of their first meeting the two would meet after Hess finished work to stroll in the park, often on their way to dinner at Haushofer’s home. Here Hess found himself readily absorbed into the Haushofer family, developing a close affection for Haushofer’s ‘very nice’ half-Jewish wife, Martha, and becoming firm friends with the Professor’s sons, Albrecht and Heinz.

Hess got on particularly well with Haushofer’s elder son, Albrecht, an intelligent young man of seventeen. A friendship swiftly developed that would last the rest of their lives. In a foretaste of events to come, Hess would comment: ‘I sometimes go for a walk with [Albrecht], and we speak English together.’


At the time, however, Hess could have had no concept of how entwined his and Albrecht’s lives would become.

Had Hess not fallen under Adolf Hitler’s spell in 1920, he would almost certainly have accompanied Albrecht into a life of academia. After five months of congenial friendship with Karl Haushofer – the relationship having quickly developed into one of devoted protégé and mentor – Hess quit his job at a Munich textile importers to enrol at Munich University as a student of geographical politics under Haushofer.

Who then, was this eminent Professor Karl Haushofer, the behind-the-scenes man of Nazi foreign policy, the sage figure consulted by the whole Nazi elite from Hess, Himmler, Göring and Ribbentrop, to Adolf Hitler himself ?

In 1946 Life Magazine published an article, dramatically titled ‘The Mystery of Haushofer’, that declared:

For something more than twenty years the voluminous writings and manifold activities of this German General, who later in life became a geographer on the faculty of the University of Munich, had engaged attention. He was discounted by many and dismissed by some as simply another obscure writer from Germany who exemplified the Teutonic passion for obscuring the obvious with unintelligible terminology. But by others he was considered a subtle and dangerous influence in the evolving challenge of National Socialism, a close collaborator with Rudolf Hess, Deputy-Führer, and the master genius of an organised movement designed to justify, by scientific argument, the Nazi gamble for total power.

The article went on to reveal that:

Through Haushofer’s pupil, Rudolf Hess, a vengeful philosophy of power and a technique for achieving it were communicated to Hitler, who avidly seized on the windfall and capitalised ruthlessly on the half-truths popularised in the name of objective science. [This] venerable scholar thus became not only an elder statesman in the field of geographical strategy but developed into a companion and political Nestor of the ruling clique … He testified under oath that he had been consulted on Japanese affairs by von Ribbentrop and was frequently summoned to the Foreign Office in Berlin. His residence on Kolbergerstrasse in Munich was the rendezvous for conferences between Nazi leaders and Japanese statesmen during the courtship of Nippon by Nazi Germany.


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Karl Ernst Haushofer was born in 1869, at the time of the creation of Germany as a state, and thus during his early years he grew to see Germany develop, gain colonies, prosper, and become a major power on the world stage. After a brief period of military service with the First Bavarian Artillery Regiment in the late 1880s, he secured a position with the Auslandskommando (the Foreign Service), and was posted to Germany’s distant Embassy in Japan.

The experience was a revelation to the young German, and after two tours of duty in Tokyo, during which he set himself the task of learning to speak fluent Japanese, and learned all he could about Japanese society, Haushofer returned to Germany in the early 1890s, taking up a post with the General Staff to teach at the Military Academy. He did, however, continue to conduct regular tours of the Far East, during which he almost certainly carried out some form of intelligence-gathering. Indeed, in 1942 British Intelligence would assert that Haushofer spent two years on attachment to the Imperial Japanese Army, and that during this time he also ‘conducted several extensive tours Greater Asia – India, Japan, China, Korea, and Asiatic Russia’.


This was a region of great sensitivity to Britain at the turn of the century, a source of much wealth and power to the British Empire, and she would not readily accept German attempts to usurp her position here. Haushofer’s trips were noted and logged away, but they were not forgotten.

In 1896 Haushofer courted and wed a certain Fräulein Martha Mayer-Doss, the half-Jewish daughter of a high-ranking Bavarian civil servant. The new Frau Haushofer’s ethnic background raised few eyebrows in Germany at the time, for the country had one of the better records in Europe with regard to the treatment of its Jewish citizens. In the 1940s, however, British Intelligence would speculate that it ‘accounted for the fact that Haushofer does not hold any official positions in the leadership of the National Socialist State’.


This was a misreading of Haushofer’s situation in Nazi Germany. Haushofer’s importance to the top Nazis protected him and his family from the fate that daily befell other Germans with Jewish connections. Indeed, Haushofer’s eminence would cause Hitler to welcome his elderly adviser and his wife as visitors to Berchtesgaden, where, unknown to Germany’s populace, the Führer always kissed Martha’s hand on meeting her, and treated her with the greatest courtesy and respect. It was a feature of Nazi Germany that what took place behind the scenes was frequently at odds with public appearance and policy.

After his marriage, Haushofer abandoned his military career, determining to carve out a new niche for himself in academia as a geographer. In 1898 the Haushofers visited Britain, where Karl was to conduct a series of lectures on ‘Internationalism’. It was during this tour that he first learnt of a theory that he would one day develop into geopolitics. During this trip, he also made several important contacts that would stand him in good stead in the coming years. In London he met the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain (father of Neville Chamberlain), considered at the time to be very much the coming man of British politics. After this the Haushofers had planned to travel on to Cambridge, where Karl was due to give a lecture. However, they first went to Oxford, where Karl made the acquaintance of a young Scot by the name of Halford Mackinder, a geography don who was developing an exciting new theory concerning the Eurasian ‘heartland’ (Eastern Europe and interior Asia) which, he claimed, would by ‘natural ascendancy eventually gain superiority’ over the ‘maritime lands’.

Mackinder was taking his first tentative steps in the new science of what Haushofer would one day adopt as his own and name geographical politics. It was from this meeting at the end of the nineteenth century between two men steeped in the application of Empire that Karl Haushofer went on to develop his theories of a dominant Eurasia. It was a concept, he immediately realised, that could become the basis for a land-based German empire to mirror the British, which was based on maritime supremacy.

It was a very quiet and thoughtful Haushofer who left Oxford a few days later, for he knew that what Mackinder had told him was important. By the late 1890s, Germany was in an arms race with Britain, pouring millions of marks into building ever more sophisticated and powerful battleships to keep the sea routes to her colonies open in time of war. But what if Germany changed the rules? What if she threw away her overseas colonies in exchange for a land-based empire? In this way she could circumvent Britain’s naval supremacy, rendering the British fleet largely impotent. It would take a great deal of theorising over the coming twenty years before Karl Haushofer’s concepts on geographical politics would be completely formulated, but by then Germany had suffered defeat in the First World War, and as a result had already lost her colonies and an empire. Thus Haushofer’s theories gained a disproportionate importance.

Following their visit to Oxford, Karl and Martha Haushofer travelled on to Cambridge. Here the Professor was due to complete his British tour with a lecture to the Cambridge Foreign Science Students Committee. The Secretary of this society was a Cambridge lecturer by the name of Herbert Roberts, and the Haushofers soon became firm friends with him, his wife Violet and their son Patrick, a brilliant young student at Eton.

Over the next forty years the two families would maintain their friendship, the Roberts visiting Germany to stay with the Haushofers at their Bavarian country home, Hartshimmelhof, and the Haushofers making return visits to Cambridge. Herbert Roberts and Karl Haushofer’s friendship was to be mirrored by their sons, Patrick and Albrecht.

By 1919, following a brief wartime career as an artillery general in the service of the Kaiser, Karl Haushofer, now titled Professor General, had become a member of Munich University’s Department of Geography. Here he lectured on his new science of geopolitics, defined as ‘a science concerned with the dependence of the domestic and foreign politics of peoples upon their physical environment’.


He was already redefining his theories, adjusting them to explain why Germany’s turn-of-the-century imperial and foreign policies had proven unworkable. His theories, which he was to postulate to the eager Rudolf Hess, had evolved in the following way: Imperial Germany’s attempts at empire had been fatally flawed. Her colonies lay far overseas, and thus were not safe so long as Britain ruled the waves. Therefore, Haushofer declared, Germany should recognise that these colonies were of no practical use, and should be given up in exchange for the right to expand Germany’s land-based European frontiers to re-absorb all Europe’s ethnic Germanic peoples in western Poland, the Sudetenland, Austria, the north-western extremity of Yugoslavia, Switzerland, northern Italy and Alsace-Lorraine, together with sufficient territory to meet her new needs (Lebensraum). Germany’s future prosperity lay in obtaining a land-based empire of connected territory (safe from the dangers of the sea) to the east, a vast ‘Eurasian Empire’ that might one day stretch from the Baltic to the Pacific. Haushofer quietly ignored the small but significant fact that this territory currently belonged to someone else – Russia.

Whilst Hess was becoming ever more involved with Professor Haushofer, taken in like a long-lost member of his family and enormously enjoying his new role of university student, another force began to enter his life. Late in the spring of 1921, Hess persuaded Professor Haushofer to accompany him one evening to a working-class district of Munich to hear a man – Hess did not know his name – speak.

With some misgivings, Haushofer accompanied Hess to a roughneck beerhouse called the Sterneckerbrau. Once inside, they took a seat at the rear of a dingy, smoke-filled back room, the air heavy with the scent of tobacco, beer and sweat. Soon a man stood up on a low platform at the front and began to talk. Haushofer would later recall how he noticed that once Adolf Hitler’s harsh-toned voice began haranguing his audience, rising in tempo and ferocity against the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles, venting his spleen against the evils of Communism and gesticulating wildly, Hess became mesmerised.






Karl Haushofer was not as immediately impressed with Hitler as Hess was. He thought Hitler’s rantings crude and without form, basically echoing and amplifying the cry of the Nationalists who could be heard on any street corner in Munich, angry men decrying the way Germany had been defeated, denouncing the injustices of 1919, and condemning those villainous Communists who would see their beloved fatherland ruined. However, despite his first impression that Hitler’s style was overly dramatic and noisy, the Professor of Geopolitics did pay attention to the evident way Hitler’s oratory instilled enthusiasm in the crowd by sheer force of will. Here was a man of potential, a man who with guidance and support could become an important force. All he needed was a political education; tutoring in the use of protocol, political finesse and style.

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.’




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’.




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.’




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’.




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.




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.’




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.




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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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,


(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’




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’.


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 complicated 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.

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.


(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.


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.’




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 dab 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.’




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’.


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.’




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.


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,


(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.




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.’




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 plan


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’.




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]?’


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.




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.

1935 was to be the high point of Hitler’s England-Politik, complete with the signing of the Anglo–German Naval Agreement, whereby Germany was permitted to expand its fleet beyond the constraints of the treaty of Versailles. In achieving this, Hitler made the catastrophic error of believing that the British government could be wooed into permitting an expanded Greater Germany, that they would calmly stand back whilst he carved out an enormous new empire for Germany in the east.

In 1937, two years after Anthony Eden and Sir John Simon’s visit to Berlin, Haushofer’s connections and talent for mediation meant that he was still very much in the fore of German diplomacy, particularly when Lord Halifax visited Germany and it was arranged for him to meet Hitler. The two politicians, eyeing each other warily, discussed the central European situation with regard to the Nazis’ increasing calls for unification of all ethnic German peoples – as defined by Albrecht’s father, Karl Haushofer. The meeting was unreservedly deemed a success, and during his train journey home, Halifax would note: ‘Unless I am wholly deceived, the Germans, speaking generally, from Hitler to the man in the street, do want friendly relations with Great Britain. There are no doubt many who don’t: and the leading men may be deliberately throwing dust in our eyes. But I don’t think so …’




In 1940 and 1941 Hitler would think back on his meeting with Lord Halifax, and remember that this eminent British politician, a leading member of the Conservative Party, had spoken earnestly of his desire to see a lasting European peace. Indeed, their discussions had seemed so propitious that Hitler had ‘talked of the possibility of disarmament’, beginning with ‘the possible abolition of bombing aeroplanes’. Halifax had later told the British Cabinet that he believed Germany would continue working towards ethnic unity, and that ‘the basis of an understanding might not be too difficult as regards to Central and Eastern Europe’


– which would have been music to Hitler’s ears. Following their meeting the German Führer had thought well of Lord Halifax, seeing him as a voice of reason in Britain, particularly after the declaration of war in September 1939. However, his opinion of this eminent man of British politics would later change radically. Feeling deceived and let down by fickle British politicians, he would comment bitterly, ‘I regard Halifax as a hypocrite of the worst type, as a liar.’




Albrecht Haushofer’s pre-war influence was perhaps most strongly felt during the Munich Crisis of 1938, when he acted on behalf of the VDA in the Sudetenland advising the German delegation during the negotiations that would see Czechoslovakia stripped of her western territories. One of the keys to explaining Haushofer’s participation in high-level German foreign affairs is that Hitler believed Germany’s Foreign Ministry to be a slow, plodding beast, run by old-fashioned diplomats who took forever to negotiate a deal with any foreign nation. He therefore encouraged the use of alternative diplomatic means in the form of his own Nazi Party foreign-political machinery, the Aussenpolitisches Amt, the VDA and the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, all of which were run by men whose primary loyalty was to the Führer himself, men Hitler knew he could trust to give him what he wanted. This group included Albrecht Haushofer. In 1936 Haushofer and a diplomat named Graf Trauttmansdorf were sent to Czechoslovakia on Hitler’s secret orders for private talks about the Sudetenland. However, ‘they were forbidden to have any contact with the German diplomatic mission in Czechoslovakia, and the then German Foreign Minister, von Neurath’.




The end of the 1930s saw the pressure-cooker of European politico-diplomatic tensions rise inexorably towards bursting point as the Nazis strained to expand Germany beyond her frontiers, to absorb every part of Europe containing ethnic Germans, as outlined by Karl Haushofer in the 1920s (see maps, pp. 16, 23). This objective closely followed Professor Haushofer’s theories, and like his son he was very active throughout the 1930s, contacting Ukrainian nationalists and working extensively with the Ukrainian Hetman Organisation, which supported the freeing of the Ukraine from Soviet domination. All of this would come together in June 1941, for Hitler would not attack the Soviet Union merely out of political ideology, but because western Russia played a critical role in the Nazis’ plans for their future Reich. The Nazis intended that the Ukraine would become the Reich’s breadbasket, while the Caucasus became her source of oil. Karl Haushofer was very important to this plan, and within his theories, his extensive range of contacts and his knowledge of the region lay the key, the Nazis hoped, to the Reich’s future success.

When Rudolf and Ilse Hess’s son, Wolf Rüdiger, was born in 1938, one of the child’s godfathers was Adolf Hitler; the other was Albrecht Haushofer. It may seem extraordinary that the co-signer of the infamous Nuremberg Laws (which removed German Jews’ political and social rights) chose the part-Jewish Albrecht Haushofer as his child’s godfather, despite the fact that he, Hitler, and all the top Nazis knew full well the Haushofer family’s Jewish connections. Indeed, at the christening party held at Hess’s Munich home in the affluent suburb of Harlaching, guest of honour Adolf Hitler mingled freely and happily with his and Hess’s friends, chatting gaily to his long-time acquaintance Martha Haushofer, who was half-Jewish.

1938 was a time of great change. The zenith of Nazi foreign policy successes was passing, and the Hess christening party was marred towards the end by a disagreement between Karl Haushofer and Hitler. The by-now elderly Professor Haushofer, who had become used to being regarded as the Nazis’ geopolitical guru, sought out for his wise counsel, now sensed that he too was passing his zenith. Hitler, like some Frankenstein’s monster of his own creation, was showing increasing signs that he intended to pursue Nazi foreign policy in an aggressive manner that the old Professor felt increasingly at odds with, and which he felt might well lead to war. Needless to say, when he voiced his opinion to Hitler, it was not well received.

Hitler should have listened to his old friend, for there would soon be signs that Germany’s European neighbours would no longer stand back and turn a blind eye to the Nazis’ expansionist agenda.

Following the autumn 1938 Munich Conference to settle the Sudeten Question, which was to strip Czechoslovakia of her western territories and leave her open to German conquest a mere six months later, certain high-ranking British civil servants and politicians regretfully concluded that Poland was likely to be next on Hitler’s agenda. He would demand the return of Danzig and the Corridor – the last remaining major strip of territory taken from Germany in 1919. However, what Hitler did next shocked everyone. Rather than sticking to Karl Haushofer’s plan for expanding Germany to encompass all ethnic Germans (which the British Foreign Office was well aware of), the German Führer swallowed up the rest of Czechoslovakia as well, in direct contravention of the agreement he had signed with Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in Munich the previous year.

Czechoslovakia proper had never been part of Germany, and there were few, if any, ethnic Germans living there. Yet Hitler had simply marched in and taken a foreign nation over. This raised the frightening prospect that no one was safe, if not from direct invasion, then from belligerent German aggression to protect their interests – and who could say where the Nazis might judge those to be?

British MP Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon summed up these feelings succinctly on the day Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, writing in his diary: ‘Hitler has entered Prague, and Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist. No balder, bolder departure from the written bond has ever been committed in history. The manner of it surpasses comprehension and his callous desertion of the Prime Minister is stupefying … The country is stirred to its depths, and rage against Germany is rising.’




It was not only the democrats of western Europe who were concerned by Hitler’s ill-judged departure from Karl Haushofer’s geopolitical game plan, which although blatantly nationalistic, at least made it appear that the Führer’s territorial ambitions were limited. No one could feel safe if Hitler could so easily tear up a treaty. Italy’s Fascist Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, immediately perceived the dangers of the situation: ‘The thing is serious, especially since Hitler had assured everyone that he did not want to annex one single Czech. This German action does not destroy the Czechoslovakia of Versailles, but the one that was constructed at Munich and Vienna. What weight can be given in the future to those declarations and promises which concern us more directly?’




Hitler’s move against Czechoslovakia also took Albrecht Haushofer by surprise. Despite his position close to the centre of Nazi geopolitical planning, he had remained largely unaware of Hitler’s true strategy for attaining his Greater Germany. Haushofer thought in terms of discussion, negotiation and plebiscite. Hitler, on the other hand, was running to a different timetable. He was aware that Germany would not be able to sustain her military superiority for very long before Britain and France attained parity.

Back in November 1937, Hitler had held a secret conference at the Chancellery to discuss this very situation, with War Minister Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, commander-in-chief of the army General Werner von Fritsch, commander-in-chief of the navy Admiral Erich Raeder, Reich Minister for Air and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe as well as President of the Reichstag Hermann Göring, Foreign Minister von Neurath, and a certain Colonel Hossbach, who took the minutes. Hitler had begun by ‘stating that the subject of the present conference was of such importance that its discussions would, in other countries, certainly be a matter for a full Cabinet meeting, but he – the Führer – had rejected the idea of making it a subject of discussion before the wider circle of the Reich Cabinet just because of the importance of the matter’.

After much debate on the subject of a Greater Germany, and how the nation was to attain Lebensraum for its people, Hitler declared: ‘Germany’s problem could only be solved by means of force and this was never without attendant risks … If one accepts as the basis of the following exposition the resort to force with its attendant risks, then there remain still to be answered the questions of “when” and “how” …’


The ‘when’ and ‘how’ were then divided into three criteria.

Firstly, Hitler judged that after 1943–45 Germany’s military position would become increasingly unfavourable, as ‘our relative strength would decrease in relation to the rearmament which would by then have been carried out by the rest of the world’.

Secondly, he declared it was hoped that ‘internal strife’ would occur in France (indeed, the Nazis began covertly financing the right-wing Cagoulards, who were gearing up to attempt a coup d’état


), precipitating a crisis that would absorb the French army completely and ‘render it incapable of use in a war against Germany’.

Thirdly, it was hoped that France might become ‘so embroiled by a war with another state that she cannot proceed against Germany’.

The implication was clear to the men seated around the conference table at the Reich Chancellery: Hitler was gearing up the German economy, as well as her politico-military bodies, for war.

Finally, Hitler revealed that he intended to absorb the Czech state into the Reich. Thus, what in the spring of 1939 appeared to be a belligerent Hitler whim was in fact part of his overall long-term strategy, for as he explained in November 1937:

the annexation of Czechoslovakia and Austria would mean an acquisition of foodstuff for five to six million people … The incorporation of these two states … means, from a politico-military point of view, a substantial advantage because it would mean shorter and better frontiers, the freeing of forces for other purposes, and the possibility of creating new units up to a level of about twelve divisions, that is, one new division per million inhabitants.




In a last-ditch effort to preserve the European peace, whilst at the same time pursuing a line that would enable Germany to settle her grievances over her eastern territories lost to Poland in 1919, Albrecht Haushofer wrote to his old friend, the British MP Lord Clydesdale, in July 1939: ‘My Dear Douglo, I have been silent for a very long time …’ After some brief introductory pleasantries, he quickly got down to business, explaining the difficulties faced by Germany after the end of the First World War. He expanded upon the fact that Germany had been unfairly stripped of much territory that she now wanted back, despite the terrible danger of war, and that Germany had a need – both politically and psychologically – to regain her formed territories. He continued:

I cannot imagine even a short-range settlement without a change in the status of Danzig and … the Corridor … (people in England mostly do not know that there are some 600,000–700,000 Germans scattered through the inner parts of Poland!) – but if there is to be a peaceful solution at all, it can only come from England and it must appear to be fair to the German people as a whole …

Last September Mr Neville [Chamberlain] had the trust of the majority of Germans. If you want to win a peace without – or even after – war, you need to be regarded as trustees of Justice, not partisans. Therefore – once more – if you can do anything to promote a general British peace and armaments control plan – I am sure you would do something helpful.




Clydesdale decided to discreetly show Haushofer’s letter to a few of his top-ranking political acquaintances. But rather than the Foreign Secretary or the Prime Minister, the first person he approached was Winston Churchill. After carefully reading the letter, Churchill handed it back to Clydesdale with the comment: ‘There’s going to be a war very soon.’

‘In that case,’ replied Clydesdale, ‘I very much hope that you will be Prime Minister.’

‘What a hell of a time to become Prime Minister,’ Churchill responded with a resigned shake of his head.




Clydesdale next showed the letter to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, before taking it on to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Yet neither felt compelled to act or reply.

It is noteworthy that even before war was declared, and indeed ten months before Chamberlain’s resignation, Clydesdale, like many other Britons, already knew who was going to become important in the terrible times to come; and it wasn’t going to be Neville Chamberlain.

Haushofer’s letter, which did nothing to deflect the progression to war, is important, if for no other reason than that it set the pattern for the line of communication that would begin just over a year later, and that again involved key men who all knew each other well – Albrecht Haushofer, Clydesdale (by then Duke of Hamilton), Winston Churchill and Lord Halifax.

Back in Germany, Rudolf Hess added his voice to the Nazi assertions of peaceable intent, giving a speech in Berlin in August 1939. Germany had already absorbed Austria, the Sudetenland and, worst of all, Czechoslovakia by intimidation and force of arms. Now Hess tried to legitimise the invasion of Poland, which he knew was just days away. Decrying Polish aggression, he publicly requested Neville Chamberlain to inspect German refugee camps and see with his own eyes the horrors of Poland’s terror campaign. ‘There is bloodshed, Herr Chamberlain!’ he declared. ‘There are dead! Innocent people have died.’ He went on to state that ‘England has point-blank refused all the Führer’s proposals for peace throughout the years.’




Hess’s pleas, however, fell on deaf ears. In London no one was listening any more. The time of appeasement had passed, and diplomatic deals were busily being done to bolster an Anglo–French partnership to support Poland.




CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_61ed5a57-1fc7-56e4-8cec-f553602d4d63)

Peaceable Attempts (#ulink_61ed5a57-1fc7-56e4-8cec-f553602d4d63)


At dawn on 1 September 1939, Hitler’s powerful new armies poured across the Polish frontier in a pre-emptive strike that would see Poland obliterated in under a month, and the Second World War begin. It would, however, be wrong to assume that the German Führer actually wanted an all-encompassing European war that was destined to become a world war, or that he realised that this would be the consequence of his actions. Over the next year, Hitler, increasingly aware of the Pandora’s Box of horrors he had unleashed – that Germany was now pitted in a life-or-death struggle against Britain and her empire – would repeatedly try to open a secret line of communication to the British government in the hope of undoing the disastrous situation he had himself created.

These secret peace moves, of which only a very select handful of top men in Britain and Germany were aware (and which were kept secret from their people for very different reasons), became known by Britain’s Foreign Office and War Cabinet as the ‘peaceable attempts’; petitions made by Hitler and certain other leading Nazis to open negotiations that would culminate in an armistice. As time went by these peaceable attempts would take on an ever-increasing urgency, reflecting Hitler’s mounting concern (despite his belligerent public stance for home consumption) that he was losing control of events.

In the first week of September 1940, whilst the skies above London thundered to the sound of the Battle of Britain, Britain’s Ambassador to Sweden, Victor Mallet, would send a ‘most secret’ encrypted telegram for ‘special distribution’ to the War Cabinet. In his telegram, an astounded Mallet reported that he had been contacted by a Berlin barrister named Dr Ludwig Weissauer, who ‘is understood to be a direct secret emissary of Hitler … [Furthermore, he wishes] me to meet him very secretly in order to … talk on the subject of peace.’

Dr Ludwig Weissauer was in fact not only chief lawyer to the Nazi Party, but also Adolf Hitler’s own private legal adviser. The Ambassador went on to reveal that this most eminent emissary ‘wished conversations, if they took place, to be known to nobody but His Majesty’s Government and Hitler to whom he intimated that he would report direct. Talks could begin at once … [if a Swedish, and therefore neutral,] judge might be present in order to avoid any suggestion of trickery. Weissauer realised that peace might not yet be attainable but nevertheless felt that conversation would be useful.’


Mallet concluded his report by asking whether he should go ahead and meet Weissauer, before ending hopefully, ‘of course [I will] say nothing to encourage him but it might be of interest to listen’.

This was an unusual and, until recently, unsuspected situation. That Hitler should make this secret approach to Britain – and it is worth noting that the initiative was kept secret from other top Nazis, as well as the German people – is indicative that something extraordinary was taking place behind the scenes. Hitler’s use of his own lawyer was the culmination of a year’s peace moves by the German Führer that had seen him attempt mediation through many avenues, ranging from neutral citizens and governments, to royalty and the Vatican. All had failed, undone, in Hitler’s eyes, by a political faction in Britain that was determined to continue the war, come what may. This had not prevented him, during the final months of 1939 and the first half of 1940, from pursuing an aggressive military strategy tied to his private attempts to make peace – a carrot and stick policy that he hoped would free him from a war in the west he did not want.

Despite all the evidence that Hitler wanted to flex his military muscles, and was willing to obtain by force what he was unlikely to gain at the diplomatic table, a full-blown war with Britain and France, supported by their substantial empires, was certainly not something he wanted in 1939. His primary objective had been to make the first moves in a politico-military game of chess that would see him expand and consolidate a Greater Germany, thereby placing Germany in the ideal position to expand her territories into an Eastern Empire. A substantial proportion of the responsibility for Hitler’s total miscalculation of the British and French reaction to the formation of a German super-state at the expense of her smaller neighbours, such as Czechoslovakia and Poland, has to be laid firmly at the door of his Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop.

In the months prior to the outbreak of war, Ribbentrop forcefully counselled Hitler that Britain would not come to the aid of Poland but would, bar the diplomatic protests and the fist-waving of a frustrated nation led by a weak government, flinch and stand back from outright war.


This view was in direct contrast to what Germany’s other foreign affairs experts, such as Albrecht Haushofer, were advising Hitler. In the late spring of 1939, Hess had commissioned Haushofer to write a report for him on the British reaction to German expansion. Within weeks the Deputy-Führer was alarmed to read Haushofer’s prophetic comments that:

many British politicians … [are] thoroughly friendly towards Germany … [and] would consider discussing border changes to Germany’s advantage … But a violent solution … would be a casus belli for England … In such a war the entire nation would support the government. England would wage the war as a crusade for the liberation of Europe from German nationalism. With the help of the USA (on which London could count) they would win the war against Germany [and] regrettably the actual winner in Europe would be Bolshevism.




On its way to Hitler, the report was first shown to Ribbentrop, who disdainfully scrawled in the margin: ‘English secret-service propaganda!’


But he was wrong.






On 3 September 1939, an utterly dejected Neville Chamberlain, worn out and disillusioned by his failure to deal with the dictator of Germany, stood before his colleagues in the House of Commons. He had seen his hopes for European peace blown away by the dry, hot wind of war. History is harsh, and Chamberlain’s twenty-five years of honest public service would be forgotten in an instant. His name would forever be linked to the appeasement of Nazism, the pandering to a dictator who was plunging Europe into war even as he addressed the House.

A hush descended amongst the MPs, and Chamberlain began to speak, his sonorous tones echoing around the chamber as he declared:

When I spoke last night to the House I could not but be aware that in some parts of the House there were doubts and some bewilderment as to whether there had been any weakening, hesitation, or vacillation on the part of His Majesty’s Government. In the circumstances, I make no reproach, for if I had been in the same position as hon[ourable] members not sitting on this Bench and not in possession of all the information which we have, I should very likely have felt the same.

After informing the House that the British Ambassador in Berlin had delivered an ultimatum to the German government demanding that German armed forces ‘suspended all aggressive action against Poland and were prepared to withdraw their forces from Polish territory’, Chamberlain went on to disclose that: ‘No such undertaking was received from [the German government] by the time stipulated, and, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.’

Finally, Chamberlain opened up slightly, expressing his own feelings of personal failure: ‘This is a very sad day for all of us, and to none is it sadder than to me. Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins. There is only one thing left for me to do; that is, to devote what strength and powers I have to forwarding the victory of the cause for which we have to sacrifice so much. I cannot tell what part I may be allowed to play myself; I trust I may live to see the day when Hitlerism has been destroyed and a liberated Europe has been re-established …’




Chamberlain’s wish was not to be fulfilled – he would be dead in little over a year.

In Berlin, Britain and France’s determination to stand by Poland and declare war on Germany left Hitler stunned. However, he quickly convinced himself and his intimates at the Chancellery that ‘England and France had obviously declared war merely as a sham, in order not to lose face before the world.’ Having given the Poles an assurance of protection, they could do little else. Hitler asserted that ‘there would be no fighting’,


and ordered Germany’s forces in the west not to provoke the Allies, but to remain strictly on the defensive. ‘Of course we are in a state of war with England and France,’ Hitler would confide to his dinner guests a few days later, ‘but if we on our side avoid all acts of war [against France and Britain], the whole business will evaporate. As soon as we sink a ship and they have sizeable casualties, the war party over there will gain strength.’




However, events in Britain were about to deal a bad hand of cards to Hitler: within a short time of the British declaration of war, he received news that Winston Churchill had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, and joined the War Cabinet. An eyewitness recalled that on hearing the news, Hitler ‘dropped into the nearest chair, and said wearily “Churchill is in the Cabinet. That means that the war is really on. Now we have war with England.”’




Regardless of the British and French declarations of war, and Hitler’s fear of a conflict in the west that he did not want, Germany maintained her relentless attack on the ever-weakening Polish forces. On 17 September Poland’s determination to fight off the German invaders turned to anguish when Soviet Russia attacked her rear, and as the Red Army poured into eastern Poland, Polish resistance began to disintegrate. A mere ten days later, on 27 September, Warsaw fell to the German army, and the following day saw what was left of Poland partitioned between Germany and Russia. Technically, Poland had ceased to exist.

Despite the military posturing that now took place on the Franco–German border, between the British and French armies on the one side and Germany’s forces on the other, a sort of peace did appear to settle uneasily over Europe. This was the time of the ‘phoney war’, described in Germany as the Sitzkrieg, the sitting war.

It was during this period that Hitler developed hopes that some form of accommodation could be found to end the conflict, with Germany retaining her conquests, and the Allies, having made their protests and metaphorically waved their fists at a belligerent Germany, backing down and agreeing to peace.

On 6 October, the fighting in Poland having finished and there being only a minimal level of conflict in the west, Hitler made his first public appeal for peace, giving an unrepentant yet placatory speech to the Reichstag. To many in the west, Hitler’s speech sounded like mere rhetoric. But, unbeknownst to the Reichsleiters and Reichsministers seated before him, the Führer had been making a concerted behind-the-scenes effort to negotiate an accord with Britain.

Ten days prior to Hitler’s appearance at the Reichstag, he had had a confidential meeting in his office at the Chancellery with a man named Birger Dahlerus, a prominent Swedish businessman who was also a close friend of the British Ambassador in Oslo, Sir George Ogilvie Forbes. Dahlerus informed Hitler that Ogilvie Forbes had told him that ‘the British government was looking for peace. The only question was: How could the British save face?’

‘If the British actually want peace,’ Hitler had replied, ‘they can have it within two weeks – without losing face.’


He informed Dahlerus that although Britain would have to be reconciled to the fact that ‘Poland cannot rise again’, he was prepared to guarantee the security of Britain and western Europe – a region he had little interest in, for despite some concerns about German access to the North Sea, German expansion into western Europe was not part of the Karl Haushofer plan for the Greater Germany.

Also present at this confidential meeting with Dahlerus was Hermann Göring, who suggested that British and German representatives should meet secretly in Holland, and that if they made progress, ‘the Queen [of Holland] could invite both countries to armistice talks’. Hitler finally agreed to Dahlerus’s proposal that he ‘go to England the very next day in order to send out feelers in the direction indicated’.

‘The British can have peace if they want it,’ Hitler told Dahlerus as he left, ‘but they will have to hurry.’




Now, ten days later, Hitler stood before the Reichstag and proclaimed Germany’s justification for taking back her former territories from Poland. For over an hour he discoursed on the history of the region that had led to the present state of affairs. Then, having taken this belligerent position, so that any placatory utterances he now made would not be seen as weakness, Hitler began to make his overtures for peace. First, he declared:

My chief endeavour has been to rid our relations with France of all trace of ill will and render them tolerable for both nations … Germany has no claims against France … I have refused even to mention the problem of Alsace-Lorraine … I have always expressed to France my desire to bury forever our ancient enmity and bring together these two nations, both of which have such glorious pasts.

He then went on to speak about his greater cause for concern:

I have devoted no less effort to the achievement of Anglo–German understanding, nay, more than that, of an Anglo–German friendship. At no time and in no place have I ever acted contrary to British interests. I believe even today that there can only be real peace in Europe and throughout the world if Germany and England come to an understanding … Why should this war in the west be fought? … The question of re-establishment of the Polish state is a problem which will not be solved by war in the west but exclusively by Russia and Germany.

After touching on a whole range of European problems that would in the end, Hitler felt, have to be resolved at the conference table, not on the battlefield, including the ‘formation of a Polish state’, Germany’s colonies, the revival of international trade, ‘an unconditionally guaranteed peace’, and a settlement of ethnic questions in Europe, Hitler proposed that a conference should be arranged to ‘achieve these great ends’. He concluded:

It is impossible that such a conference, which is to determine the fate of this continent for many years to come, could carry on its deliberations while cannon are thundering or mobilised armies are bringing pressure to bear upon it. If, however, these problems must be solved sooner or later, then it would be more sensible to tackle the solution before millions of men are first uselessly sent to death and billions of riches destroyed.

One fact is certain. In the course of world history there have never been two victors, but very often only losers. May those peoples and their leaders who are of the same opinion now make their reply. And let those who consider war to be the better solution reject my outstretched hand …




The following morning the Nazi Party mouthpiece, the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper, blared the headlines:

GERMANY’S WILL FOR PEACE.

NO WAR AIMS AGAINST FRANCE AND ENGLAND –

NO MORE REVISION CLAIMS EXCEPT COLONIES –

REDUCTION OF ARMAMENTS – CO–OPERATION WITH

ALL NATIONS OF EUROPE – PROPOSAL FOR A

CONFERENCE.




The olive branch had been proffered. Would it be taken up?

There followed nearly a week’s stony silence from Britain and France, prompting the German Führer to once again officially announce his ‘readiness for peace’ in a brief address at Berlin’s Sportpalast. ‘Germany,’ he declared, ‘has no cause for war against the Western Powers.’




On 12 October 1939, Neville Chamberlain finally responded to Hitler’s offer, terming his proposals ‘Vague and uncertain’, and making the comment that ‘they contain no suggestions for righting the wrongs done to Czechoslovakia and Poland’. No reliance, Chamberlain asserted, could be put on the promises of ‘the present German government’. After the humiliating defeats of Munich and Hitler’s move against Poland, Britain’s Prime Minister now suddenly exhibited a strength few thought him capable of. If Germany wanted peace, ‘acts – not words alone – must be forthcoming’, and he called for ‘convincing proof’ from Hitler that he really wanted an end to the conflict.

The following day, 13 October, Hitler responded by issuing a statement which declared that Chamberlain, in turning down his earnest proposals for peace, had deliberately chosen war. Such was the public face of the events at the time.

Yet what about the private face? What about the travels of Mr Dahlerus, which few people in Britain, including the House of Commons, ever got to hear about?

It was one thing for Chamberlain to turn down some airy peace proposal made by Hitler, presumably aimed at home consumption. In the world of diplomacy, much more credence would have been given to such a proposal if it had been made in writing, or delivered by an official emissary. It is not suggested that peace would have suddenly erupted on the receipt of an official communiqué more clearly outlining Germany’s peace proposal – but it would certainly have been a starting point, from which an accord approaching the Allied demands could have been discussed, even if those negotiations subsequently failed.

Incredibly, such a communiqué is exactly what the British government, in the form of Neville Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, had secretly received as far back as August 1939.

In the spring of 1941, Hjalmar Schacht, the head of Germany’s Reichsbank, approached the then non-combatant American government to ask if they would be prepared to act as intermediaries to help negotiate a peace between Germany and Britain. Soon a positive flurry of urgent memos were flying between Foreign Office mandarins in Whitehall querying what should be done, for they were not at all keen for America to interfere in Britain’s foreign policy decisions. Eventually the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, sent a ‘most secret’ memorandum to Lord Halifax, who was by then British Ambassador in Washington, that stated:

Many thanks for your letter of 17th June about Schacht’s peace feeler.

We recently prepared for our own use a memorandum summarising the various peace feelers which have reached us since the beginning of the war. The Germans are obviously now attempting to interest certain circles in the USA in the possibility of an early peace … It therefore occurred to us that you might like to see a copy of this memorandum and to communicate it very confidentially to the President for his own personal and secret information. In suggesting that you should do this we do not mean to suggest for a moment that the President is in any need of advice as to how to handle any such German approaches, but he may find details of our own experiences useful in helping him to handle the ‘weaker brethren’ in the USA …




The memorandum then went on to disclose details of sixteen peace attempts that had been made by the Germans since the outbreak of war. These included the Dahlerus peace initiative, about which it was revealed: ‘[Dahlerus] was convinced that Göring genuinely regretted the outbreak of the war and short of actual disloyalty to Hitler would like to see a truce negotiated. The unwillingness of the Polish government to treat in earnest about Danzig and The Corridor, coupled, perhaps, with deliberate malice on the part of Ribbentrop, had unleashed the conflict.’


The memorandum went on to explain that on 18 September 1939 a confidential meeting had taken place in London between high-ranking officials of the Foreign Office, including Cadogan, and Dahlerus, who ‘reported that the German army were now approaching a position in Poland beyond which they would not go and that the German government were seeking an early opportunity to make an offer of peace.’




At this meeting Dahlerus was informed that the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax ‘could conceive of no peace offer likely to come from the German government that could even be considered … and that the British government could not … define their attitude to an offer of which they did not know the nature’.

On 12 October 1939, the report went on, Dahlerus had transmitted the final details of Germany’s very comprehensive peace offer. These included the information that Hitler was prepared to discuss the Polish situation, non-aggression pacts, disarmament, colonies, economic questions and frontiers. Indeed, Dahlerus even communicated that ‘Hitler had taxed the patience of the German people over the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland, and that if Göring, as the chief negotiator, secured peace, Hitler could not risk acting counter to these national undertakings.’




This comprehensive peace initiative was kept secret in both Germany and Britain. However, even while admitting these details for ‘President Roosevelt’s Eyes Only’ in 1941, the British government was still sensitive enough about the subject to conceal certain details about what had taken place. To the uninitiated, Dahlerus’s efforts at peace in 1939 appeared a damp squib that had fizzled out. Yet there had been much more to them than the British government was prepared to admit to the American President.

During 1938, Neville Chamberlain had, with much effort, negotiated comprehensive deals with Hitler. Hitler, however, had shown a dangerous penchant for negotiating agreements and then reneging on them as soon as it suited his purposes. He wasn’t, as one diplomat later remarked, a gentleman. Chamberlain had therefore, not unnaturally, developed a marked sensitivity about being seen to negotiate again with the Nazis, whilst at the same time exhorting the British people to prepare themselves to make great sacrifices. Thus the report to Roosevelt, at a time when America was still neutral and Britain could not afford even to hint at the possibility of negotiating with the Nazis, for fear of losing American support, concealed the fact that Dahlerus had been involved in Hitler’s attempts to prevent war before the conflict had started. As consummate politician and diarist, close friend of Britain’s high and mighty, Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon commented two days before Germany’s invasion of Poland, on 28 August 1939: ‘Mr D[ahlerus] and a Mr Spencer have it appears been negotiating secretly here … I doubt the validity of the Walrus’s [Dahlerus’s] credentials, but he is taken seriously by Halifax, and a secret plane transported the two emissaries here, with special facilities at the airport.’




Exactly one month later, on 28 September, Channon recorded that Dahlerus, having been to Berlin to consult with Hitler, was back in London for another secret meeting – a meeting that would not be mentioned in the information released to Roosevelt: ‘Very Secret. “The Walrus” is in London. He arrived today by plane and this time his visit is known to Hitler. Halifax and others are seeing him this afternoon. No-one knows of this. What nefarious message does he bring?’

The following day, Channon noted:

The fabulously mysterious ‘Walrus’ … was interviewed secretly yesterday … This morning he walked about the Foreign Office openly. Also Cadogan had a talk with him and a report of their conversation was given to Lord Halifax, who read it I believe, at the War Cabinet … The French, always realistic, say ‘we had better make peace as we can never restore Poland to its old frontiers, and how indeed should we ever dislodge the Russians from Poland even if we succeeded in ousting the Germans?’




However, in the atmosphere of diplomatic and international distrust that had developed by October 1939, British contemplation of negotiating peace with Hitler quickly began to evaporate. Dahlerus’s initiative failed, and the war continued unabated.






This, however, did not mean that Hitler gave up on the idea, and he continued secretly trying to find a negotiated end to the simmering conflict in the west before it came to the boil, ruining his timetable for eastern conquest. In truth he had no choice. He had found himself fighting the wrong war.

This situation led, between the summers of 1939 and 1941, to the British government receiving a great many German peaceable approaches. A substantial number of these can be discounted, for they included such low-level attempts as the German Chargé d’Affaires in Washington contacting the British Ambassador to inform him that ‘if desired he could obtain from Berlin Germany’s present peace terms’.


On another occasion the British Legation to the Holy See reported that the Vatican would be prepared to arbitrate between Britain and Germany ‘through the Apostolic Delegate on the subject of Germany’s peace offer’.




Indeed, reports on the possibilities of peace were submitted back to London from far and wide – even from distant Angora, where Ambassador Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen reported that the ‘Netherlands Minister has sent me the following information regarding a conversation between Herr von Papen and Herr Hitler during the former’s recent visit to Berlin’. He went on to tell his seniors at the Foreign Office that ‘Herr Hitler discussed [with von Papen his] possible terms of peace’.




Each one of these reports required the attention of an Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office and the creation of its own file, and so became counted in the plethora of peaceable attempts made to the British government by German nationals or well-meaning neutrals. There were so many of these little snippets of peaceable intent that the whole matter of peace in 1939, 1940 and 1941 becomes rather a jumble, and to a large extent the important – real – peaceable moves made at this time have become hidden amongst all these lesser ones. However, it is possible to refine the plethora of peaceable initiatives down to just a few nuggets of gold – those that were stamped with the hallmark of Hitler.

There were basically three distinct strata to the peaceable attempts. The vast majority were low-level suggestions made by neutrals, junior German diplomats or the odd German official at loose in a neutral state. The second stratum, which was of some interest to the Foreign Office, emanated from respected neutrals, such as the King of Sweden, and upper-echelon German nationals, such as former War Minister Otto Gessler and even top Nazis such as Goebbels. These pitches for peace were made with an eye to the credit that would accrue to their originators, particularly with Hitler, if they brought Germany peace.

There was however, a third stratum of peaceable attempts, and these were of a different ilk altogether. They were top-grade offers that received the personal attention of the Foreign Secretary, and frequently the Prime Minister as well. Furthermore, there were occasions when these attempts were of such importance that they required the Prime Minister to consult the dominion heads of government in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa before they could be rejected.

The most intriguing fact about these top-grade offers is not only that they clearly emanated from Adolf Hitler himself, transmitted to the British authorities through his own personal emissaries, but that there was a discernible pattern to them. As each attempt failed or began to flounder, a new one was immediately initiated through another avenue to replace it, thereby creating an almost unbroken chain of peaceable attempts from the summer of 1939.

It was a situation that caused much interest and speculation within Britain’s Foreign Office and Intelligence Services. By the summer of 1940 it was realised that these secret Hitler-initiated attempts at peace mediation revealed a psychological flaw deep within the Führer’s character that Britain could, with skill and guile, exploit to Germany’s disadvantage.

Even as it became clear to Hitler that Birger Dahlerus’s attempts at mediation in September-October 1939 would fail, moves began to open another channel to the British government. However, the German Führer was still a relative novice at the art of opening secret lines of communication to Britain’s leadership, and rather than stepping back to assess the situation, calling upon expert advice before dispatching an eminent diplomat or well-respected neutral, he accepted the services of the SS. That was not a good idea.






On 17 October 1939 SS Colonel Walter Schellenberg was summoned to a meeting with the head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), Reinhard Heydrich, at RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt – the Directorate General of Security for the Reich) headquarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin – a building it shared with the Gestapo, which reveals much about the RSHA’s interests. Ushered into the presence of this extremely dangerous man, second only to Himmler in the SD–SS chain of command, Schellenberg was surprised to find Heydrich in congenial mood. ‘For several months,’ Heydrich confided, ‘one of our agents in the Low Countries … has been in contact with the British secret service.’


He went on to inform Schellenberg that this agent, a man named Morz, had made several important contacts with British Intelligence, including two agents based in Holland. These were Major Richard Stevens, the Passport Control Officer at the British Embassy in The Hague (all Passport Control Officers were members of Britain’s intelligence service MI6, better known as SIS), and Captain Sigismund Payne-Best, who ran the Z Network in Holland (an intelligence-gathering unit which reported to Passport Control Officers). Schellenberg’s orders were to use these two men to ‘get in touch with the English government’


in order to initiate Anglo–German peace negotiations.

Within a few days of his meeting with Heydrich, Schellenberg found himself in Holland, under the alias of Captain Schaemmel of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) Transport Service, pretending to Stevens and Payne-Best that he represented a group of leading Wehrmacht officers who wanted peace. This pretence was almost certainly adopted not only to protect Heydrich and Himmler should anything go wrong, but also because the British would have blanched at finding themselves negotiating with the SS. Schellenberg offered the very tempting bait that his faction might even be prepared to accept conditions that limited Hitler’s position within Germany, although he stressed that it was desirable that Hitler remained head of state – which in Nazi terms meant that in public Hitler would have remained the German head of state in a purely ceremonial capacity, while in private he continued in charge. This curious suggestion was not as improbable as it might first appear, for the SS was all-powerful in Nazi Germany, and Himmler secretly harboured great ambitions for it, planning that it would eventually supplant the Nazi Party as the controlling power in Germany.

Within hours of his meeting with Schellenberg, Stevens dispatched a ‘most secret’ telegram to London, putting forward the German peace proposals and relating the remarkable suggestions concerning Hitler’s future status. He soon received a reply that stated:

In the event of the German representatives enquiring whether you have had a reply to the questions which you said … you would refer to H.M.G., you should inform them as follows (not, however, handing them anything in writing):-

Whether Hitler remains in any capacity or not (but of course more particularly if he does remain) this country would have to see proof that German policy had changed direction … Germany [would not only] have to right the wrongs done in Poland and Czechoslovakia, but she would also have to give pledges that there would be no repetition of acts of aggression …




The message concluded:

It is not for H.M.G. to say how these conditions could be met, but they are bound to say that, in their view, they are essential to the establishment of confidence on which alone peace could be solidly and durably based …

Neither France nor Great Britain, as the Prime Minster said, have any desire to carry on a vindictive war, but they are determined to prevent Germany continuing to make life in Europe unbearable.




On receiving the bulk of this communication via Stevens, Schellenberg promptly reported to Heydrich: ‘The British officers [have] declared that His Majesty’s Government took great interest in our attempt which would contribute powerfully to prevent the spread of war … They assured us that they were in direct contact with the [British] Foreign Office and Downing Street.’


He concluded by informing Heydrich that the British had invited him to secret peace negotiations in London, and that Stevens had even given him a transmitter (call sign ON4) with which he could covertly contact the British directly.

Heydrich’s response was most interesting, indicating that there was a great deal more going on behind the scenes than Schellenberg ever knew about. ‘All this seems to me a little too good to be true,’ the head of the SD commented. ‘I find it hard to believe that it’s not a trap. Be very careful going to London. Before making a decision I shall have to talk not only with the Reichsführer [Himmler] but more particularly with the Führer. Wait for my orders before proceeding.’


Evidently from the German side the negotiations emanated from the pinnacle of Nazi government.

Events, however, were about to take a bizarre and unexpected twist. In distant Munich, on the night of Wednesday, 8 November, there was an attempt on Hitler’s life when a bomb blew up the Bürgerbräukeller just twenty minutes after he had cut short a speech and unexpectedly departed early. Outraged that this assassination attempt might have been prompted by the British, the SD took immediate action.

The very next afternoon, Stevens and Payne-Best, who were waiting to meet Schellenberg at the little Dutch–German frontier post at Venlo, were kidnapped by SD agents who dashed across the border, shot up the Dutch customs post, grabbed the two startled British Intelligence officers and made off with them across the frontier into Germany. Stevens and Payne-Best were intensively interrogated by German Intelligence, and after the German conquest of the west in 1940 the whole of Britain’s secret service network in western Europe would be brought crashing down, leaving it with virtually no intelligence-gathering assets. On the German side, the Venlo Incident, as it became known, ended any possibility of Schellenberg negotiating an end to the war.

As far as the British were concerned, this had been a true peace negotiation. The fact that Britain’s participants in the secret discussions were headed by Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain reveals the seriousness with which they were regarded by the British side, for Chamberlain was still keen to restore European peace. The Prime Minister was motivated by the desire to restore his reputation, but wanted to keep his failure hidden if he did not.

Although Halifax and Chamberlain had thought they could still negotiate an end to the conflict, the manner of the Venlo snatch by the SD finally impressed upon London that the Nazis were beyond the pale. How could Britain engage in meaningful peace negotiations with the Nazis when they reacted to an internal security problem by kidnapping peace negotiators?

When Winston Churchill discovered the truth behind the incident shortly after Stevens and Payne-Best’s kidnapping, his fury knew no bounds. Not only had Halifax and Chamberlain secretly engaged in a dangerous peace initiative, they had done so behind the back of the Cabinet. In Churchill’s eyes the appeasement of Nazism had led to the obliteration of the Czech state, the invasion of Poland, and to Britain and France facing a war just as they had in 1914. Yet Chamberlain had apparently not learned the lessons of appeasement, and had attempted mediation again. This was bad enough, but what Churchill also realised – which had apparently escaped Chamberlain – was that Chamberlain had unwittingly placed the alliance itself in dire peril. If the Germans were to leak details of the negotiations to the French, it would utterly shatter France’s confidence in Britain’s resolve to stand firm, ensuring victory to the Germans.

That German Intelligence did not leak the Venlo details to the French, however, is a clear indication that they too had much to hide, for it was no part of Hitler’s plans for the German Volk to hear that top Nazis were attempting secretly to negotiate peace with Britain until it was a done deal.

The Venlo Incident was not a clear-cut peace negotiation, for much double-dealing occurred behind the scenes, primarily organised by those masters of Machiavellian deceit, Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler. To call it instead an ‘SS peace move’ might be more accurate. But Venlo was important because it involved Britons and Germans at the highest level; it also set in motion a chain of events that would give the first seeds of an idea to British Intelligence that they might conduct a similar ‘sting’ of their own.

It is entirely possible that the Stevens/Payne-Best–Morz operation pre-October 1939 was originally an SD ‘sting’ aimed at crippling British Intelligence’s network in western Europe, but Heydrich’s participation in the operation post-Dahlerus indicates that a change in priorities had taken place. Moreover, Schellenberg’s reports on the affair were passed through Heydrich directly to Himmler.

On the British side, much of the remaining evidence suggests that the subsequent writing-off of Venlo as a ‘sting’ was primarily intended to protect Chamberlain from being caught holding secret peace talks with the Germans at the same time that he was condemning Nazi expansionism – a position he would have found hard to explain not only to Parliament, but to the Poles and the French. Intriguingly, in the Foreign Office’s ‘President Roosevelt’s Eyes Only’ communication of June 1941, Sir Alexander Cadogan would confidentially remark to Britain’s Ambassador in Washington that ‘the only important omission from our memorandum is the story of the Venlo incident in November 1939’.


Thus, within Whitehall, Venlo was classified as amongst the ‘peaceable attempts’, and not as an intelligence operation that went disastrously wrong.

Given what is known about Hitler’s desperation to end the war with Britain, it is possible that had the SS found a possible route to peace, Himmler would have ordered Heydrich to explore it, for he too was well aware of the extremely dangerous situation Germany was falling into. In 1942 Count Ciano would record that ‘Himmler, who now feels the real pulse of the country, wants a compromise peace’,


for his ‘plans for expansion into Russia were based on his hopes of coming to an understanding with the West’.


Indeed, when the tide of war had finally turned inexorably against Germany in 1944, Himmler would earnestly engage in his own secret peace negotiations, this time without Hitler’s knowledge, and would attempt to use Albrecht Haushofer to do this. It is therefore likely that Himmler was inclined to attempt to restore peace with Britain in 1939, at a time when it would have secured both the fortunes of the Reich and his own position at the top of the Nazi hierarchy.

The collapse of the Venlo/SS peace attempt unnerved Hitler, for he undoubtedly did believe that the Bürgerbräukeller attempt on his life had been connected in some way to the negotiations taking place in Holland. But unbeknownst to Himmler, Heydrich or anyone else in the SS, Hitler was already pursuing yet another entirely private avenue to peace – his own short-cut to European domination. Hitler was a great believer in auguries, mysticism, and what he liked to call his ‘destiny’. It is therefore little wonder that he took his salvation from the Bürgerbräukeller bombing very seriously indeed, and was sure fate had played a hand in saving him from being blown to bits. The reason Hitler had left the Bürgerbräukeller early was to travel back to Berlin to meet another emissary. Only this emissary wasn’t offering peace mediation, but a victory that would enable him to dictate peace terms to a defeated foe.

The important peaceable attempts (i.e. those that could be directly connected to Hitler’s interests) between 1939 and 1941 fall into a clearly discernible pattern. As soon as one of them began to falter or fail, so keen was Hitler to have peace in the west that another was instantly begun through some other medium – be it by banker, businessman, diplomat or royal – in an attempt to keep the dialogue going.

There were, however, two exceptions to this rule.

The first occurred from mid-November 1939 to July 1940, directly following the failure of Venlo. It was a time when, through a French-American named Charles Bedaux, and later through Baron Oswald von Hoyningen-Huene, Germany’s Ambassador in Lisbon, Adolf Hitler attempted to open a line of communication to the former King Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, whom he mistakenly believed was still an influential personality in British politics.

The other period of inactivity lasted from the second half of 1940 until mid-1941. At this time Hitler believed that the best opportunity for peace was through the efforts of Albrecht Haushofer and Rudolf Hess, whose high-level negotiations were aimed at permanently removing Britain from the war.

What this reveals is that Hitler repeatedly engaged in secret and complex efforts to negotiate his way out of a war in the west he did not want, except when he believed he had found an inside track to undermining the Allies’ (i.e. Britain’s) resolve and ability to continue the conflict – a carrot-and-stick approach to persuade or force Britain to the negotiating table. Two attempts to proffer the carrot – Dahlerus and Venlo – had failed, so now Hitler determined to use the stick.

Hitler’s first attempt to force Britain to the table involved a French-American businessman named Charles Bedaux, a close friend of the Duke of Windsor, who (according to documents in British, German and American archives) offered to act as an intermediary carrying messages between Germany and the former King Edward VIII.




Charles Bedaux was no novice in the world of espionage. He had been a spy for Germany in the United States during the First World War,


and had, in boom-time America of the 1920s, prospered to become a multi-millionaire. By the 1930s he was back in Europe, where his home, the Château de Candi, swiftly became known as a hotbed of Nazi intrigue and plotting.


During the 1930s Bedaux had played a key role in the reorganisation of German industry which enabled Hitler’s rearmament programme to take place. He thus moved in very high Nazi circles indeed, knew Hitler personally, and even had a villa at Berchtesgaden within sight of the Führer’s Berghof.




In 1937 Bedaux had hosted the wedding of the abdicated King Edward VIII to the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, at the Château de Candi. Having firmly insinuated himself into the Windsors’ lives, he swiftly became responsible for their tour of Nazi Germany, which although well received in Germany, was a public-relations disaster in Britain, where Edward had hoped to restore his standing. Thereafter the relationship had cooled, but in October 1939 Bedaux reported exciting news to Hitler concerning the Duke of Windsor, with whom he was back on friendly terms.

What had occurred was that in late September 1939, Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg, head of the Aussenpolitisches Amt, received a postcard from an old friend, purporting to be in neutral Switzerland and asking for a meeting. The friend, a Balt named Baron ‘Bill’ de Ropp of east Prussian stock, was also an old acquaintance of Group Captain Winterbotham, who was near the top of British Air Intelligence. De Ropp also had close associations with British Intelligence, and had been of considerable assistance to the British secret service during the 1930s.

After checking with Ribbentrop, Rosenberg travelled to Switzerland at the beginning of October. He was soon rubbing his hands in glee at what de Ropp told him, reporting back to Berlin that: ‘Because of the war psychology prevailing in England and the weak position of Chamberlain it was [currently] beyond to power of the [Air] Ministry [to move] in the desired direction of a termination of hostilities.’ However, he commented that de Ropp had also informed him that certain top men within the Air Ministry felt that Britain would agree to peace if ‘considerable losses on the part of the British Air Force and the related effects on the Empire [occurred]. It is believed then that the views represented by the Air Ministry would have to be taken into account, since the Empire could not permit its air strength to be reduced beyond a certain point.’




At a meeting held a week later de Ropp went further. He informed the Germans that the British Air Ministry, whom he was now clearly claiming to represent, was extremely concerned about the possible politico-economic damage Britain and Germany would sustain if the conflict became a protracted war. This, it was claimed, would lead to ‘the decline of the West, of the Aryan race, and the era of the Bolshevization of Europe, including England’. De Ropp’s next statements caused the surprised German official to report back to Berlin that the British Air Ministry did not support its own government’s policy regarding a continuation of the war, and that the Air Ministry was ‘convinced that the war would be decided by the Luftwaffe’. He went on to state that it would ‘therefore depend on the Air Ministry to explain to the British government that, in view of the losses it had sustained, it no longer found itself in a position of being able to continue the war’.




What de Ropp had intimated to the Germans was that if Britain suffered a swift military defeat in western Europe, Chamberlain might well loose his nerve and negotiate an end to the hostilities before any further damage to Britain – particularly to her ability to control the Empire – could take place. This idea would germinate in the Führer’s mind, and would become a strategy for the next seven months of conflict.

It also saved his life, for on the evening of 8 November 1939 Hitler left the Bürgerbräukeller early in order to travel back to Berlin for a meeting with Charles Bedaux at the Reich Chancellery the following morning.


He was thus mightily impressed both by the providence that had saved his life and by all that Bedaux was about to tell him.

With the coming of war the Duke of Windsor had been given the honorary rank of Major-General, and attached to the British Military Mission in Paris. His official role was to conduct a morale-boosting tour of the French front. However, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Edmund Ironside, also gave Windsor other secret orders. He was covertly to observe the strategic details of France’s defences, and submit a series of reports to London. The objective of this covert intelligence-gathering operation was to give Britain’s military planners a clearer picture of France’s defensive strengths and weaknesses, which they could use to formulate tactics to counter any potential German offensive in the west. The Duke’s mission was therefore important and very secret. As the head of the British Military Mission in Paris, Major-General Howard Vyse, declared: ‘It will be realised that to give the French any sort of inkling of the source of this information would probably compromise the value of any missions which I may ask HRH [the Duke of Windsor] to undertake subsequently.’




Unfortunately, however, Charles Bedaux also gained access to this highly confidential intelligence, apparently with the Duke of Windsor’s connivance. This occurred because Windsor believed that a war between France, Britain and Germany was a disaster that would lead to the Soviet domination of Europe; and the Duke hated and feared Communism very much indeed.

Throughout the 1930s the Duke of Windsor – or the Prince of Wales, as he had been then – had been a leading proponent of closer Anglo–German relations. Not the least of his reasons for this stance were his close blood ties to Germany’s aristocracy. However, he also saw Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany as bastions against the Communist menace from the east.

There were many high-ranking Britons, even within the upper echelons of government, who shared these views. Indeed, up until the latter 1930s the government’s official stance towards the Nazis had been placatory and somewhat accepting of the new political situation in Germany, perceiving National Socialism as a stabilising force in central Europe. It was the evidence of Hitler’s increasingly expansionist ambitions – the Anschluss with Austria, the Sudetenland crisis in 1938 and the taking of Czechoslovakia in early 1939 – that changed the British government’s position.

Throughout the 1920s and thirties the Duke of Windsor, first as Prince of Wales and then briefly as King, received frequent foreign policy briefings from the government. These ended on the day he abdicated in December 1936, and he soon became out of touch with the British government’s stance towards the swiftly deteriorating European situation. He could not comprehend why Germany was suddenly considered a threat. If the royal family’s intransigence against him had been relaxed, if he had received an occasional briefing on the government’s position, he may have understood the reasons for British fears more clearly. As it was, by late 1939 the Duke of Windsor was still thinking in the terms of 1936, when Nazism had been regarded as acceptable.

On Sunday, 3 December 1939, the first hints about the Windsor/ Bedaux relationship began to surface in London when an Intelligence officer named Hopkinson, serving in The Hague, reported on a confidential meeting he had had with a member of Dutch Intelligence called Beck. Hopkinson reported that Beck ‘informed me of an incident that might well be of interest to us concerning an American engineer named Charles Bedaux … On November 9 [the Dutch] M[ilitary] A[ttaché] in Berlin was delivering a note from de With [the Dutch Ambassador] to the Reich Chancellery, when he recognised B[edaux], who he’s met before … but B[edaux] ignored him, got into an official car (a Luftwaffe vehicle) and was driven off.’




From November 1939 to April 1940, Britain’s Field Security Police and Military Intelligence watched with mounting concern as Charles Bedaux and the Duke of Windsor resurrected their friendship. Repeatedly throughout this period, as soon as Windsor returned from a tour of the French lines, he would meet Bedaux for dinner, following which Bedaux would take a train to Holland, where he would call on Count Julius Zech-Burkesroda, the German Ambassador in The Hague.


A spy at the German Embassy who ‘had an opportunity to see the transcribed information that B[edaux] brings verbally’ reported to British Intelligence in Holland that the information was ‘of the best quality – defence material, strengths, weaknesses, and so on’.


In early April 1940, the agent reported that ‘Z[ech-Burkesroda] accidentally referred to B[edaux]’s source as “Willi”.’


‘Willi’ was the German code-name for the Duke of Windsor.

The information passed on by Bedaux enabled Germany to successfully circumvent France and Britain’s defences, aiming for the weak point at Sedan, and almost certainly caused the Allied rout that culminated in Dunkirk.

Throughout this period, the seven months from November 1939 to June 1940, there was an unusual cessation in the high-echelon, Hitler-originated peace moves. Because of the information passed on by de Ropp and Bedaux, Hitler had come to believe that if Germany could inflict a sudden crushing defeat on the Allied armies, the British and French governments’ resolve would evaporate, and they would sue for peace. There was only one flaw to this plan, but it was a devastating one. The plan was based on the character of Neville Chamberlain, and the assumption that he would wilt in the face of unrelenting military pressure. Unfortunately for Hitler, in May 1940, dogged by ill-health and the ruination of his credibility as a war leader, Chamberlain resigned, and was replaced as Prime Minister by Winston Churchill.




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