Читать книгу The Hitler–Hess Deception - Martin Allen - Страница 7

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.¹

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’.²

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.’³

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’.⁴ 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.⁵

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.⁶ 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.’⁷

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.