Extract from Hugh Thomas’ response to Timewatch, 17/1/90.
‘The main thrust of Timewatch’s programme [was] that I was unaware of new evidence from Munich Archives which was the hospital record of the real Rudolf Hess. The evidence had been in Timewatch’s possession for a long time, as the first interview with Dr Lappenkrupper — the researcher suggested long ago by Christopher Andrew — was by the sacked producer Alan Patient. This was in German. The second interview was much later in English. The documents had been totally translated for Timewatch, who therefore were fully aware of the contents of the whole document.
Christopher Andrew and (producer) Roy Davies asked me to specify the maximal damage that a high velocity rifle bullet would create on the torso, explaining the core destruction, the kinetic energy and the vacuum effect that they had heard about. I explained that a gun shot wound is comprised of:–
- the entry wound (the bullet hole, the surrounding observable tissue trauma, such as discolouration, damage to the underlying bone, ribcage, or muscle)
- the track — through various tissues, solid organs, muscle or lung
- the exit wound — usually bigger than the entry wound, depending upon the distance, the tumbling of the bullet and the deflection by bone, all resulting in the bullet hole and surrounding clinically observable defect.
I then explained the long-term healing of the entry wound, the track and exit wound, and how they could be discerned clinically and on X ray. I specified all the changes associated with the chest, due to the collapse of the lung. These were all clearly outlined in my book. In particular I was asked the question: —
Christopher Andrew: What evidence was there that Hess ever had an operation?
Thomas: None. No documentary evidence. There are, however, two references made to it by Dicks and by Haushofer, acting on supposed knowledge from the family.
Andrew: But if he had been operated on by Professor Sauerbruch what would you expect to find?
Thomas: Had he received an operation I would expect to find an operative scar….etc
I went on to describe Sauerbruch’s methods and why it was of medical historical interest to myself. I stressed the fact that I was looking for any wounds of any size, not necessarily operative and that I knew where to look, the only places where he could have been shot in those days and survived with or without an operation. Timewatch chose to include only my remarks relating to the maximal effects of gun shot wounds. They misrepresented my description of an entrance and exit wound as the scar in the skin. Whereas a scar will depend on whether the bullet hole had been left, as in those days, or excised as nowadays. They have thus played a word game with medical terminology to mislead the public into believing that I expected large scars including an operative scar.
In the last 10 minutes of the interview they produced the Munich documents, only three paragraphs of which had been translated, relating to the scars in the skin and their site. The actual limited translation was misleadingly inaccurate in that it denoted the wrong exit site. Timewatch possibly knew the significance of this mistranslation as, when corrected, they challenged the correction — on the grounds that the supposed correct site would put it too low down the back to be seen! They contined to mislead the forensic pathologist Bernard Knight (a non German speaker) in exactly similar fashion — despite by that time having the correct translation. They asked me to try and translate the photostat documents and comment on their findings and authenticity, in ten minutes. The whole conversation was recorded and witnessed, as was the TV interview.
Andrew: We want to be fair to you, we shall fully understand if you don’t wish to comment.
Thomas: You had an hour before we started interviewing when you could have shown me these documents. How long have you had them?
Andrew: Only, I have only seen them them for the first time on the drive coming down here.
Thomas: Why didn’t you show them to me earlier, these are difficult.
Andrew: Roy and I decided it wouldn’t be right for you to see them beforehand, we wanted your fresh reaction.
Roy Davies: It’s good drama.
Thomas: We’re not producing a drama.
Andrew: We’ll quite understand if you wish to say no comment — it’s probably not fair on you.
Thomas: Oh but I will.
Viewers will have noted that there was a complete absence of any such interview with myself to gain my all-important reaction to the new medical evidence. The following information should have been televised in a balanced, not biased programme.
Thomas: Yes they seem to be genuine as far as I can tell from photostats, but I would like to point out that they are incomplete. There would seem to be no sheet for the casualty entrance examination on the 9th prior to his ward admission. That would — there again the sheets are missing for the whole of his month-long hospitalisation for the shrapnel wound to his left upper arm — you don’t spend a month in all in hospital for a minor flesh wound. It would seem that he spent two weeks in an acute hospital and two weeks convalescing — presumably getting his arm wound cleaned and dressed, before being fit, before returning to his unit. That’s all I can make of the arm wound, but as you know that proves there was such a wound, as we — what I mean is — as described in the other archival material. I think you’ll agree that there was no mention of any wound in the post mortem.
Andrew Rosthorn writes:
Kenneth de Courcy, 80 year old former personal agent for Churchill’s wartime MI6 chief, Sir Stewart Menzies, says that two files have been stolen from his personnal archive, which is preserved at the Hoover Institution in the University of California, Stanford. In a letter of 19th January to Dr Scott Newton, Mr de Courcy wrote: ‘I regret to say that the Cabinet Office, anxious to conceal certain facts, ordered agents from SIS to steal files 10 and 11 from Box 3 at the Hoover Institution. The Hoover Institution wrote to inform me of the disappearance. They instructed the FBI.’ De Courcy claims that the FBI investigating officers refused him a list of their suspects because ‘they have been so instructed by the Cabinet Office’.
The Hoover Institution did confirm to Dr Newton that box 10 “World War 1939-45, Diplomatic History, Possibility of Negotiated Peace 39-40′ and box 11 ‘1946-63 Subversive activities of Soviet Sympathisers in Great Britain’ are indeed missing from the archive, presumed stolen.
Earlier in January a former MI6 agent, Charles Fraser-Smith, the original for Ian Fleming’s character ‘Q’, told Guardian journalist Richard Norton-Taylor that ‘In 1975 Sir Maurice Oldfield held a meeting to discuss releasing the whole story about Hess, about whether it was Hess or not.’ Fraser-Smith said that he had always considered that the man held in captivity after the Hess flight was a ‘phoney Hess’. In September 1989 I learned that a file marked ‘Most Secret’, apparently stolen from the Foreign Office by the former MI6 chief Sir Maurice Oldfield, has been smuggled out of Britain in an attempt to foil the Official Secrets Act.
The 1941 personal file on Hess had been declared a state secret until the year 2017. Sir Maurice wanted to prevent civil servants tampering with the documents in the file before it could be examined by historians, and handed the file to a small group of researchers before he died in 1981. The buff-coloured, loose-leafed foolscap file has been examined and filmed by the Dutch documentry producer, Karel Jille, whose second film on the Hess Affair was due to be screened in Holland in September 1990.
Dr Hugh Thomas said ‘I offered both Dr Andrew and the producer of the BBC programme sight of the old 1941 file but they refused to look at it.’ Thomas says he first met Oldfield when serving as an army surgeon in Belfast: ‘We kept in touch. After my book was published, both Sir Maurice and James Angleton of the CIA called me. Sir Maurice told me he had always been baffled by the Hess Affair. When he handed this file to the historians, he said to me: “See what you can make of it. I cannot find out what lies behind it.”‘
Hugh Thomas has twice been refused permission under the Official Secrets Act to reveal the contents of the letters from Lord Wilingdon to the Prime Minister of Canada, Mackenzie King. One of the letters from Lord Willingdon, who was apparently one of those involved in the ‘peace plots’, and who tipped off Churchill via Mackenzie King, refers to ‘the problem we have with the double’. Lord Wigram, the King’s equerry, was told by Lord Willingdon that the King was most concerned about a situation developing which could lead to civil war — if Churchhill refused to be removed from power at the price of a peace deal with Germany.’