Hess: A Tale of Two Murders
Hugh Thomas
Hodder and Stoughton, London 1988
This is an update of Thomas’ 1979, The Murder of Rudolf Hess. Thomas argues (a) that the ‘Hess’ in Spandau prison wasn’t Hess at all but a double; and (b) that both the real and false Hess were murdered. The first proposition Thomas proves beyond reasonable doubt. He is less successful with the murders but that hardly matters. The important thing is that as ‘P Hess wasn’t Hess at all, what was going on in 1941 when ‘Hess’ flew to Britain?
Thomas offers a scenario – it is little more than that – in which Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was trying to displace Hitler. Himmler, suggests Thomas, heard about the (real) Hess’s plan to go to Britain to seek peace, shot down Hess’s plane and sent the doppelganger ‘Hess’ instead. This is pretty tentative, as Thomas admits.
Nonetheless Thomas acquired a heavyweight ally during the summer, the Cambridge historian John Zametica. In one of the more startling book reviews of recent times (Spectator 23/7/88) Zametica drops a few hints about this curious episode. In 1941, says Zametica,
‘many powerful members of British society – political, military, commercial, among others – were dedicated to attaining peace. Losing money and apparently losing the war did not go down well with them. These people faced three problems: Churchill in Britain, Hitler in Germany, and a lack of strong leadership within their ranks.’
This is obviously true: from the point of view of the British ruling class, taking sides with the Bolsheviks against Germany was an absurdity. Yet it is still slightly shocking to read it stated as bluntly as that. Zametica offers some names in this droll manner:
‘Halifax was the man at the centre of this intrigue. He was supported, maybe by the Duke of Buccleuch. And behind them stood, shall we say, Mountbatten . . . imagine that extremely important negotiations took place between the British peace group and the Germans in, say, Co. Down, Ireland … General Sir Ian Hamilton who had been let us say, deeply involved in previous peace talks.’
But the Hess episode was May 1941: the search for a peace deal with Germany had been going on for a while. Involved in some of it had been the Duke of Windsor. His supporters in the Tory Party included the Imperial Policy Group, whose Secretary/ intelligence officer was Kenneth de Courcy. Just before the war de Courcy was running round Europe testing the waters, writing reports for Neville Chamberlain. (1)
‘IPG had sought at every level of government to convince the governments of France, Italy, Austria and Spain that, despite official pronouncements, Britain’s actual if secret foreign policy was to keep out of all European conflicts in order to give a free hand to Hitler and Mussolini against the Soviet Union.’ (2)
This might be true but Higham doesn’t actually offer anything like evidence. De Courcy may be an old man, well out of things now, but in the late 1930s he was close to some of Britain’s ruling elites. In an issue of his newsletter Special Office Brief (2nd April 1987) de Courcy presents an account of some events in 1940 and, in particular, the role of the former Tory Cabinet Minister, the late R. A. B. Butler, then an Under Secretary at the Foreign Office.
In February 1940 Butler received information which made him sure that the French wouldn’t fight. (De Courcy is modest: the information came from him.) (3) Without the French, thought Butler, peace had to be made. Butler saw Lord Halifax – who agreed. An envoy was sent to Joseph Kennedy, U. S. Ambassador. An isolationist, Kennedy approved and saw Halifax. De Courcy is vague at this point but, presumably, talks began, avenues explored. Given the limited communications equipment of the period, establishing a reliable and secure back channel into ‘the enemy’, was no simple task. The state was reading all mail in and out of Britain. Then Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940.
‘Churchill then found out and informed both Halifax and Butler that unless they stopped all such discussions he (Churchill) would not hesitate to lock them up … Amongst those of Butler’s views in 1940 were Queen Mary, the Duke of Windsor, the Aga Khan, the Dukes of Buccleuch and Westminster, and Lords Londonderry, Rushcliffe, Philimore etc.’
The Duke of Buccleuch, referred to by Zametica, was the brother-in-law of the Duke of Gloucester (thus a fringe member of the Royal Family). He was Lord Steward of the Royal Household, something like a bureaucratic gate-keeper to a Monarch who still had real power. He was a frequent visitor to Hitler and a friend of the exiled Duke of Windsor, someone else not enthusiastic about the war. (4) In 1940 Buccleuch was removed from his position in the monarchy’s administration apparently because of his involvement with attempts to negotiate peace with Hitler. (5) Lord Philimore was in the Imperial Policy Group: Lords Westminster and Londonderry had been members of the Anglo-German Fellowship and The Link.
In de Courcy’s narrative Churchill’s alleged threat to lock people up was made some time in 1940 between July and December. On becoming Prime Minister in May Churchill had immediately wanted to begin rounding up aliens and suspect persons. (6) Opposition to the proposals came from Sir John Anderson, the Home Secretary, on May 15 and 18 in Cabinet. Then, as Thurlow puts it:
‘This resistance was overridden by the implications of the Tyler Kent affair.’
Tyler Kent was a cypher clerk in the American Embassy in London. He had been under MI5 surveillance for some 7 months during which he had made contact with members of the Right Club, the hard-core pro-Nazis in London lead by the dotty Tory MP Captain Ramsay. Kent was arrested on 20th May 1940. It was very convenient for Churchill. The received view is that after Kent’s arrest Churchill/MI5 used the Kent-Captain Ramsay connection as evidence of a more organised conspiracy than really existed – a pretext – and the whole lot of them, Mosley’s group, Ramsay’s group, the remnants of The Link etc, were all rounded up. This version has already been challenged from one direction by Thurlow who shows that there was something going on, though how serious isn’t clear; Thurlow makes it sound like a fantasising fascist fringe; and from another by the Gillmans who argue that the treason committed was largely the result of the entrapment of Right Club member Anna Wolkov by MI5. (7) But the truth is we don’t know enough yet to say anything positive and the minutes of the Cabinet meeting at which MI5 presented their evidence are still suppressed. Charles Higham, as always, is certain:
Pressed by the Labour Party leader, Clement Attlee, he (Churchill) instantly acted to destroy the entire group that was planning a negotiated peace with Hitler.’ (8)
Higham lists the consequences:
- Buccleuch removed from Royal household
- Duke of Westminster warned off
- Mosley, Captain Ramsay and others interned
- Vernon Kell, head of MI5 dismissed
- Blackshirt supporter, Maj General Fuller warned off.
There is just about enough to make more tentative links. Highams tell us that in January 1940 Windsor had flown to London for secret talks: he saw Fuller. (9) Fuller had been part of the secret talks in 1939 between the various splinter groups on the fascist right about peace. (10) One of the participants had been in The Link.
Let’s take this speculation further. Tyler Kent had been stealing the secret communications between Roosevelt and Churchill (‘Former Naval Person’) in which they talked about the coming war. This was dynamite. At home Roosevelt was still publicly an isolationist, would not commit the US to another European War. His talks with Churchill said the opposite and had this correspondence been made public it is probable that Roosevelt would have lost the Presidential election – and the course of the war might have changed.
Kent had been spotted by MI5 through his connections with Anna Wolkov, a member of Captain Ramsay’s ‘Right Club’. (Wolkov made dresses for, among others, the Duchess of Windsor.) So, one of the leading fans of Hitler in Britain had access to the secret Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence; and had apparently done nothing with it. When Kent was arrested they found 1500 documents in his flat, including the Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence. What were Kent/Ramsay waiting for? Why had the documents not been transmitted to the American media, or given to Anna Wolkov to transmit through her channel to the Italian Ambassador? The published material on this episode is too thin to draw even a tentative conclusion. It is, however, impossible to overstate the danger the Kent-Wolkov connection presented to the Churchill, pro-war, anti-Hitler faction in the British establishment
By June 1940 this series of possibly interlinked manoeuvres against the war was aborted by the new Churchill Cabinet. But new attempts were made. One involved Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who was also looking for a way to peace. He contacted the intellectual Karl Haushofer who knew a number of prominent British politicians and diplomats personally. In September 1940 Karl and his son Albrecht Haushofer were corresponding with Hess about ways to enter secret negotiations with the British, perhaps through neutral Portugal. (11) On Sept 23 Albrecht Haushofer wrote to one of Karl’s pre-war connections, the Duke of Hamilton. But the letter, sent via Lisbon, was intercepted by British intelligence’s mail-opening. It apparently took until February for the British authorities to work out from whom the letter, signed just ‘A’, was from. Then in May 1941 Hess set off to fly to Britain. Thomas shows pretty clearly that the plane and the pilot that took off were not the same pilot and plane that arrived. Somewhere en route a switch had been made.
In the diaries of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, there are a number of entries after Hess’s flight to Britain expressing his bafflement that no propaganda was being made with Hess. (Hess was bunged in jail and nothing more was said.) Then on 22nd June 1941 there is this interesting comment:
‘The Fuhrer has high hopes of the peace party in England. Otherwise he claims, the Hess Affair would not have been so systematically killed by silence.’ (12)
So Hitler, for one, believed in this ‘peace party’. Who were they? Zametica has offered some starters.
In America there were parallel attempts to organise a peace. This is described in some detail in Higham’s earlier Trading with The Enemy. (13) Should we believe Higham? Neither of his two books in this area are adequately documented – perhaps just to keep other researchers off his sources. Higham says, for example:
‘In the summer of 1937, according to MI6 files in the Ministry of Defence, London, Bedaux met with the Duke of Windsor, Bedaux’s close friend Errol Flynn, Rudolf Hess and Martin Bormann … At the meeting the Duke promised to help Hess contact the Duke of Hamilton, who had a direct link with Himmler and Kurt von Schroder and the Worms Bank through their common membership in Frank Buchman’s Moral Rearmament movement. . .'(14)
(How would he know what is in MI6 files in the MOD?)
A little further on he mentions, without explanation or sourcing,
‘the ill-conceived Royalist/Schellenberg/I.G. Farben coup d’etat in which Himmler would take over and permanently restore the monarchy. A representative of Himmler’s Gestapo would then meet with Halifax in London to confirm the arrangements for an alliance with Great Britain.’ (15)
This, apparently, in 1940. And if all this wasn’t muddled enough there is the story in Anthony Masters’ The Man Who was M that Hess was lured to London by a cunning plot devised by Ian Fleming, using planted fake astrological advice. (16)
None of these fragments are detailed enough to be made much use of. However, taken together, even if some of them are dodgy bits of ‘evidence’ it is clear that something fairly strange was going on. We know someone who helped Highams with research for his Wallis. There is much more to come from Mr Hyams. Mr Zametica obviously knows a good deal more than he was willing to put down in the Spectator. Kenneth de Courcy knows more than he appears to have committed to print. We await the first stage synthesis and it can’t be far off now.
Notes
- Some of this, some of the contents of those reports, is to be found in brother John De Courcy’s Behind the Battle, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1942
- Charles Higham. Wallis, Sidgwick and Jackson, London 1988, p 145
- Author in a letter to me stated that he had been writing “secret reports of their request for Mr Chamberlain, Sir Stewart Menzies and R. A. B. Butler. Such reports merely dealt with facts largely on French opinion.”
- Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right, Oxford University Press, 1980 p363
- Higham, Wallis p239. Hyam’s evidence is thin, a clipping in the New York Times
- Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1987 p194, quoting Cabinet papers.
- Peter and Leni Gillman, Collar the Lot, Quartet, London, 1980, p37
- Higham p237
- Higham p239
- Thurlow p 181
- James Douglas Hamilton, Motive for a Mission, Corgi, London 1980 ch. 3
- The Goebbels Diaries, edited by Fred Taylor, Sphere, London 1983
- Robert Hale, London 1983
- Higham, Trading With the Enemy, p180
- Higham, p194
- Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1984 pp 126/7