The Hitler–Hess Deception. Martin Allen

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СКАЧАТЬ 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’.²¹ 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.^* 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’.²² 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 СКАЧАТЬ