The Hitler–Hess Deception. Martin Allen

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СКАЧАТЬ who introduced him to many of his friends and colleagues, young men who in the early 1920s were junior Foreign Office minions, young aristocrats and political acquaintances, but who by the latter 1930s would be Britain’s top diplomats, civil servants and politicians.

      Slightly older than Albrecht Haushofer, Patrick Roberts had joined the Foreign Office, where he had an interesting, if slightly curious, career. His postings were numerous – ranging from Berlin, Warsaw and Addis Ababa through to Belgrade and Athens, ever hotbeds of Balkan discontent – with hardly ever enough time for him to become familiar with a place before he was transferred yet again. In 1937, Roberts would meet with a sudden and untimely end when he was killed in a bizarre road accident in a dusty, dead-end Greek village north of Athens. The question of whether his career was connected in some way to British Intelligence has remained unanswered ever since.

      Among the men Roberts had introduced to his young German friend Albrecht Haushofer was Sir Owen O’Malley, who had subsequently risen through the Foreign Office to become Ambassador in Budapest and Lisbon. At the end of the Second World War, O’Malley panicked when an American newspaper published an account of how newly discovered German documents revealed details of his friendship with Adolf Hitler’s private adviser on foreign affairs, and that he, together with other ‘British subjects both inside and outside the Government Service’ was being referred to at the Nuremberg trials in connection with the Rudolf Hess case. Keen to unburden his soul and protect his career, a flustered O’Malley swiftly wrote to a colleague at the Foreign Office: ‘I knew Haushofer quite well. He was originally introduced to me many years ago by the late Patrick Roberts, who had got to know both the Haushofers and Hess first during the period when he was learning German in Germany and secondly during his period when he was at the British Embassy in Berlin.’

      Keen to distance himself from his former friend, and apparently not at all loath to drop someone else in the mire, O’Malley went on: ‘Haushofer was a great fat smelly German with the usual German rather academic outlook on politics. I liked him although [being rather overweight, he] broke two of my more fragile Hepplewhite chairs by merely sitting on them. He used to come and spend the weekend at my house in the country round about the years 1932–1935 during the period he had been in contact with Lord Clydesdale and, I think also Lord Lothian.’²³

      Intriguingly, Lord Lothian was the British Ambassador to Washington in the late 1930s whose sudden death in 1940 resulted in the former Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax’s appointment to his post. Lord Clydesdale was the man Rudolf Hess allegedly flew to Scotland to see in May 1941, for he was none other than Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, who in 1940 became the Duke of Hamilton.

      Thus Albrecht Haushofer’s connection to the Roberts family was firmly entrenched. His friend Patrick had introduced him to all his friends and colleagues, up-and-coming young men who by the late 1930s would be Britain’s top civil servants and politicians, and who in 1940 would be vital contacts to Haushofer in assisting the German leadership’s elusive search for peace.

      No less important was Patrick Roberts’ mother Violet. The next time she made an appearance in Albrecht Haushofer’s life, as an elderly widow in 1940, she would be the dab of honey at the centre of an intricately spun spider’s web of intrigue that would lure Haushofer, Hess and Hitler to destruction; for there was an aspect to the Roberts family of which both Karl and Albrecht Haushofer remained totally ignorant – a fortuitous coincidence that British Intelligence would use to doom Hitler’s hopes of winning the Second World War.

      By the mid-1930s Albrecht Haushofer’s range of aristocratic and political contacts had completely opened up British society to him, and he had dined and smoked after-dinner cigars with such pillars of the British establishment as Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald, Neville Chamberlain, Lord Dunglass (Alec Douglas-Home), Sir John Simon, Anthony Eden, Lord Halifax and, perhaps most intriguingly of all, Winston Churchill. Haushofer’s contacts were a veritable panoply of Britain’s high and mighty, and thus it is not surprising that when the Nazis took power in 1933 both Hess and Hitler looked upon him as a trusted friend who could confidentially advise them on foreign affairs, particularly with regard to the British, and embraced him as a gift sent down from on high.

      Despite Albrecht’s rise to eminence in German academic circles, and his abilities as a geographer and expert on European politics, he himself carried out little political activity on behalf of the Nazi regime, which he would eventually consider evil. Rudolf Hess and Adolf Hitler may have wanted to make use of his considerable expertise on foreign affairs and international politics, but that does not explain why Albrecht went along with them. At any point after 1933 he could easily have packed his bags and decamped to the democratic West, fled to the bright lights of America, where he would undoubtedly have been welcomed by virtue of his academic talents. Despite the fact that, even with Hess’s support, his part-Jewish ancestry prevented him from ever attaining his boyhood dream of becoming Germany’s Foreign Minister, in the 1930s he was largely an advocate of National Socialist foreign policy on the European stage – a reserved supporter, using his expertise to further Germany’s position as a major European power.

      Yet Albrecht’s correspondence with Hess tells a slightly different tale, in which he is on occasion shaky in his support of National Socialism, and in which Hess the politician undertakes a role as moderating force, and is himself occasionally flexible in his attitude to Nazism in order to persuade his friend to stay on side.

      An early example of this occurred in October 1930, when Hess wrote to Albrecht asking him to project a favourable image of National Socialism during his forthcoming trip to Britain, saying: ‘It is possible you will be asked in England about your opinion of us over state matters in Germany.’ He asked Albrecht to explain that Bolshevism posed a considerable threat not only to Germany but to democratic Europe as well, and that without Nazi intervention it was possible ‘that Germany could not be saved’. In what follows there is little sign of the ultra-Nazi Hess; in his place stands a pragmatic politician: ‘I am not writing this in the interest of the Party – for this alone I wouldn’t bother you, only I am sure that Germany is more important than the Party, and that its overall importance maybe for the whole of Europe [which] is threatened by Communism, is how [the party] in foreign countries, and especially England, is judged.’ He ended his letter hopefully, ‘I am sure you will meet with a lot of people with influence.’²⁴

      For Rudolf Hess, of all people, to declare openly to Albrecht that he was not asking for help purely in the interests of the Nazi Party, and that he believed Germany was ‘more important than the Party’, was remarkable. It is amongst these rare glimpses behind the façade that can be found clues to the curious and dependant relationship between Hitler, Hess and Haushofer (the Führer, the moderating Deputy-Führer go-between and the part-Jewish expert on foreign affairs) – a most unlikely and unsuspected triumvirate of men united in their desire to pursue National Socialist foreign policy. Politically, Albrecht Haushofer was a ‘conservative-liberal nationalist’.²⁵ He supported German nationalism, and hoped ‘to be able to exercise a moderating influence on Hess and Ribbentrop, and through them on Hitler. He saw himself as a sort of Talleyrand for the Third Reich.’²⁶

      Within a few months of the Nazis coming to power in 1933, Albrecht began to undertake increasingly important tasks for the party hierarchy, and Hess soon appointed him as his personal adviser on foreign affairs.²⁷ As well as providing the Nazi leadership with valuable political insight into the political mood of Germany’s neighbours – France, Italy and Britain – Albrecht now began to assist the Nazis establish a Greater Germany encompassing all Europe’s peoples of ethnic German origin.

      Albrecht’s first major assignment for the Nazi leadership came in 1934, when he travelled to Danzig,^* where he acted on behalf of the VDA in a series of meetings intended to persuade Germans resident in Danzig and ethnic Germans in western Poland (over six hundred thousand of them) to participate in the powerful new cult of National Socialism. Everything went well, and СКАЧАТЬ