by Peter Padfield
Papermac, London, 1993, £12.99
There are now several versions of the Hess affair. One is the official story – a politician whose star is one the wane, attempts a spectacular comeback, fails, is locked up for forty years and finally commits suicide in despair. Another is the double theory, first outlined in detail by Hugh Thomas and reiterated (though with an intriguing twist) by Frank Kippax. (1) Then there are the speculations by those who accept an element of conspiracy, both in Germany and Britain, in 1941 and 1987, but who reject the idea that the man in Spandau was an imposter. The recent work of John Costello (2) and Peter Padfield falls into this category.
Padfield’s books is for the most part carefully written and researched. It contains a good deal of useful information about the ‘peace plots’. The Hess mission is analysed against a background of covert links between the Nazi leadership and reactionary elements in the British state, located mainly in the City, the landowning aristocracy and the imperialist wing of the Conservative Party. (The activities of those representing a significant part of large-scale industry are not really discussed.) In an interesting ‘Afterword’ Padfield suggests that the Hess flight was the culmination of Anglo-German contacts stretching back to the outbreak of war: the Deputy Fuhrer was bringing a genuine peace offer approved by Hitler, guaranteeing independence and the integrity of the Empire in return for benevolent neutrality over Barbarossa. Churchill, keeping this secret from most of the Foreign Office and all but a handful of trusted colleagues, set up a committee to analyse the terms of what was, in effect, a draft treaty. The need for serious discussions was, however, obviated by the invasion of the Soviet Union and later by the entry of the USA into the conflict. This was what Churchill had banked on ever since becoming Prime Minister: by the end of 1941 Britain was not alone. Defeat was impossible.
The Afterword’s speculations, for which the evidence is tantalising but inevitably thin and second-hand, do at least make sense of the complete contradiction between the Foreign Office files on Hess (all but one of which were released last year) and documentary evidence found in the KGB and State Department archives.
The former adds nothing to our knowledge of the episode: they reveal the prisoner to have been a paranoid wreck of a man whose mental state was so bad that only reluctance to allow repatriation to Germany via Switzerland deterred HMG from agreeing to his being declared insane. This Hess knew nothing, spoke incoherently and wrote unbelievably childish and banal letters back to his family in Gemany. (3) Yet the KGB and State Department reports, based respectively on the testimony of Kim Philby, the Czech intelligence chief Colonel Moravetz, and Churchill’s personal link to the security and intelligence services, Sir Desmond Morton, all point to one fact: Hess came with Hitler’s backing so that the British would stand on the sidelines when the attack on the USSR was made. Padfield’s plausible suggestion is that the intelligence reports tell the real truth. The Foreign Office documents merely comprise a legend, worked out because any talk of peace, had to be buried deep in case it encouraged attempts to destabilise a government committed to toal war. As for the death of Hess, this looks to Padfield like a case of conspiracy and cover-up, although he is reluctant to say by whom and dismisses Hugh Thomas’s claim that all the evidence points to the British government.
And it has to be said that the major flaw in the Padfield book is its treatment of the Hugh Thomas theory – he states with authority (p. 304) that ‘there is no evidence for Thomas’s assertion that Hess was not Hess – plenty to indicate he was.’ Such a statement can only be made by ignoring all the aeronautical material concerning the Hess flight while simplifying and distorting the medical case for the doppelganger theory; and unfortunately this is exactly what Padfield does.
Thomas himself has made the case for the double convincingly enough. But Lobster readers not wholly au fait with the arguments might be interested to know the following. First, there is no way the plane which crash-landed at Dungavel late on 10 May could have been the same one which took off from Augsburg earlier that day. The plane which left Augsburg was a D type Me 110. For this we have the word of Helmut Kaden, who was there at the time, having worked on the Hess plane, not to mention an entry in his personal logbook which he proudly showed to West German TV viewers in 1978. But the plane which arrived in Scotland was an E type, the latest model, just off the production line. Kaden later tried to wriggle out of this by claiming that he had the wrong year: he had meant May 1940. Absurd: Hess wasn’t flying Me 110s at Augsburg in May 1940, nor for that matter in 1939; and as we all know he wasn’t in a position to fly anything in May 1942. So how could it have been ‘the wrong year’? There is more: the aviation number of the plane which landed in Scotland was 3869. Not only Helmut Kaden but Messerschmidt factory records say that the Hess plane was 1545 – the number of the D type.
Secondly, Padfield is cavalier with the medical evidence. He fails to mention that the RAMC medical report on ‘Hess’ includes an X-ray examination which states, ‘there is no evidence of a lesion, old or recent, in any other system’ than the lower vertebra, tibia and ankle – all damaged on landing in Scotland. (4) ‘No evidence of a lesion’? And this for a a man who was shot through the lung at 30 pages by a 7.62 mm Russian rifle in 1917? No entry wound? No exit wound?
Of course, one way round this difficulty is to claim that the scars were very small. But this does not explain why nobody could find them, either in 1941 or in 1987 during the course of (oddly) numerous post mortems. Padfield resorts to a conversation between Spandau Pastor Charles Gable and ‘Hess’ in 1978, in which the prisoner pointed to two small marks on his chest. What he fails to say is that Gable was later informed, to his astonishment, that ‘Hess’ was actually wrong about the location of his wounds and if he really had been shot where he said the bullet would have gone straight through his heart and killed him on the spot. All this was recorded and broadcast in an edition of the French TV documentary, Tribulation, shown in the summer of 1989. The marks shown to Gabel were the result of a mock suicide attempt the prisoner had made some years before, using a knife.
Leaving behind the medical evidence, Padfield tries to discredit Thomas’s hypothesis that Himmler assassinated the real Hess and sent over the double as part of a plot to remove Hitler, by reference to the hoary old view that Himmler was ‘utterly dependable’. Yet there is a pile of evidence from Foreign Office, State Department and U.S. intelligence files that Himmler was prepared to conspire against Hitler because he believed his Fuhrer commanded no confidence outside Germany and would never be able to negotiate peace with anyone. Some of this material has been in the public domain at least since the publication of the Von Hassell diaries in 1948. It is strange that Padfield should ignore it at this point especially since he acknowledges it earlier in the text, when discussing the Venlo affair (p. 110).
Ultimately it is Padfield’s dismissal of Thomas which is unconvincing – because it either ignores or plays games with hard fact. Maybe Thomas’s theory of the politics and plots behind the Hess affair is flawed. And certainly it is hard to imagine what kind of a man would play the part of another for 46 years – unless the consequences of coming clean were even worse than that. Yet the medical and aeronautical evidence cannot be brushed aside and both, as they stand, make a nonsense of the single plot Hess-was-Hess theory. Sherlock Holmes said somewhere that once you dismiss the impossible you have to live with the improbable. That is the reality of the Hess affair: for all his merits Padfield fails to address it.
Notes
- Hugh Thomas, Hess: a Tale of Two Murders (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988); Frank Kippax, The Butcher’s Bill (London: Harper Collins, 1991)
- John Costello, Ten Days that Saved the West (London: Bantam Press, 1991)
- PRO FO 1983, passim. There is however one intriguing paper among the dross. It is a comment by a Ministry of Information official called Hood (6 June 1941) on a Ministry of Aircraft Production request for an exhibition staged around the Hess flight. Hood says, ‘My Minister (Duff Cooper) is strongly opposed on the grounds that it can serve no purpose except to dramatise Hess’s flight.’ This is very odd. The word ‘flight’ is handwritten, a replacement for the typed word ‘bluff’ which has a line drawn through it. PRO FO 1093/10, 2nd of 2. How can ‘flight’ be mistaken for ‘bluff’, even assuming the memorandum was either typed from a hastily written scrawl or from shorthand notes?
- PRO PREM 3/219/7, 13 May 1941.
- Data concerning Hess’s World War One injuries can be found in the regimental archive in Munich (there is an English translation by Dr Arnold Meier) and in a paper by Tony Marczan, who recently traced the steps of Hess’s fateful campaign in Rumania.