Hess, Hitler and Churchill Read online

  KIRKPATRICK, Ivone Of Catholic Irish descent, he was severely wounded in the First World War at Gallipoli; subsequently transferred to propaganda and intelligence duties, he ended the war running a network of British agents from the Netherlands. He joined the Foreign Office in 1919 and served as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Berlin from 1933 to 1938, privy to top-level meetings between British ministers and top Nazis, including Hitler and Hess. In 1940 he was appointed director of the foreign division of the Ministry of Information; behind the official posting he served on the board of SOE after Churchill set up the sabotage and propaganda organisation. An obvious choice to debrief Hess on his arrival in Scotland, there are questions about what he may have omitted from his official reports on these interviews. His memoirs are uninformative. He died in 1964.

  LIDDELL, Guy Son of a Royal Artillery officer, cousin of Lewis Carroll’s muse, Alice Liddell, he was studying to be a professional cellist when the First World War broke out. Enlisting in the Royal Artillery, he was commissioned from the ranks and won the Military Cross. Afterwards joining Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, he transferred in 1931 to the Security Service, MI5. In June 1940, after Churchill dismissed MI5’s Director General and redirected priorities to combat fascist instead of Communist subversion, he was appointed Director of ‘B’ Division (Counter-Espionage). Dubbed by the intelligence specialist, Nigel West, as ‘unquestionably the pre-eminent Counter-Intelligence officer of his generation’, the fact that he engaged the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt and the pro-Soviet scientist Victor Rothschild in MI5, and spent much off-duty time with other members of the Cambridge spy ring, particularly Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, led to post-war charges that he was a double agent. Nigel West, who edited his wartime diaries (held at The National Archives, Kew) for publication, strongly refutes the allegations, ascribing the company he kept to social naïvety. He was far from naïve in his professional judgements, and while there is no direct evidence against him, questions will surely remain.

  LIDDELL HART, Captain Basil Leading military historian and strategist, military correspondent of The Daily Telegraph 1925–1935 and The Times 1935–1939, he believed Britain should not become militarily involved on the European continent, and after the outbreak of war promoted compromise peace with Germany.

  LLOYD GEORGE, David Liberal politician and cabinet minister, as a reforming Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1908 laying foundations for a welfare state. He opposed Winston Churchill, his friend and colleague at the Admiralty, for his determination to outbuild Germany’s growing navy, but unlike many Liberals supported Britain’s declaration of war in 1914 after the German invasion of Belgium. As Prime Minster from 1916 he prosecuted the war with determination and success. At the Paris peace conference in 1919 he tried to lighten the punishments imposed on Germany, subsequently supporting territorial concessions to Germany, and after Hitler’s accession to power praising him for the transformation he had wrought, even if not by democratic methods. After the outbreak of the Second World War he promoted a compromise peace with Germany and expected to succeed Churchill when he fell. He died in 1945.

  MENZIES, Stewart In all probability the son of Captain Sir George Holford, courtier to King Edward VII, who married Susannah Menzies, a favourite at court, in the Chapel Royal, St James, shortly after her husband’s death; Stewart was allowed to use Holford’s London residence, Dorchester House, as his own. After Eton, where he was president of the prefect society ‘Pop’, he was commissioned in the Life Guards and fought in the First World War on the western front. After being gassed in 1915 he was transferred to intelligence duties, and after the war joined the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Like the Service itself, he considered Soviet Russia a greater threat to British interests than Nazi Germany, and was strongly opposed to war with Germany. He continued to hold this view after he was appointed ‘C’, as the chief of the Service was known, in November 1939, after the death of the incumbent.

  MESSERSCHMITT, Professor Willi Designer and builder of Nazi Germany’s most successful fighter aircraft, the Me 109, and chairman and managing director of the company that bore his name, with works and airstrip outside Augsburg, near Munich. Hess had supported him through a difficult period, and Messerschmitt repaid him by giving him the fighter-bomber Me 110 he required to fly to Scotland in May 1941. He also provided Hess with flying training and all the modifications Hess requested for the aircraft.

  MORTON, Major Desmond Served in the Royal Artillery in the First World War. In 1917 he was shot in the heart, but recovered; awarded the Military Cross, he finished the war as ADC to the Commander of British Forces, Sir Douglas Haig. Subsequently he joined MI6. In 1929 he was appointed head of the Industrial Intelligence Centre investigating the arms manufacturing capabilities of the powers. He lived at Edenbridge, close to Churchill’s home, Chartwell, and during the 1930s supplied secret reports which Churchill used in his attempts to wake the country to the threat from Germany. When Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940 he appointed Morton his personal intelligence assistant to keep an eye on MI6, and installed him in an office next to the cabinet room. Morton, a garrulous raconteur given to over-egging his stories, gradually lost influence to Stewart Menzies.

  MUSSOLINI, Benito The founder of Fascism in Italy, an authoritarian, ultranationalist movement transcending class; Mussolini, a former socialist, came to power after leading a march on Rome and ousting the government in 1922, providing one of several models for Hitler’s dictatorship. Deposed soon after the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943, he was summarily executed by Italian partisans in April 1945.

  PHILBY, Harold ‘Kim’ Notorious member of the ‘Cambridge spy ring’, including Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, all said to have been recruited by the Soviet NKVD (later KGB) in the early 1930s while undergraduates at Trinity College, Cambridge, under the influence of Anthony Blunt. It was fashionable for intellectuals to look towards Communism as a panacea for unemployment and the class system in Britain. At the beginning of the war Philby was working as a correspondent for The Times. He was recruited into SOE in 1940 and posted to their training establishment at Beaulieu, Hampshire, and was still there in May 1941 when Hess arrived in Scotland. Recruited into MI6 later that year, he supplied secret intelligence to Moscow throughout the war and into the ‘Cold War’. Unmasked in the 1950s, he fled to Moscow in 1963, where he died, a hero of the Soviet Union, in 1998.

  RIBBENTROP, Joachim von The son of a Prussian army officer not entitled to the aristocratic ‘von’; the fact that he acquired it from a distant relative by adoption later in life reveals much. After a cosmopolitan childhood with no formal education after fifteen, and service in the First World War, winning the Iron Cross 1st Class, in 1920 he married into the family of a leading German Sekt (sparkling wine) manufacturer and became a prosperous international wine dealer in his own right. A convert to Nazism in 1932, he impressed Hitler with his knowledge of the world, and in 1935 delighted him when, appointed head of a mission to Britain, he brought back a naval treaty. He was sent to London as German Ambassador in 1936, annoying most of those he met with his pomposity and ignorance of British governance. Two years later Hitler appointed him Foreign Minister, and in 1939 he negotiated the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact precipitating the outbreak of war. He was scorned by Göring, Goebbels, Hess and the ‘old fighters’ of the party. At Nuremberg in 1946 he was sentenced to death and hanged.

  ROBERTSON, Major T.A. ‘Tar’ After public school and Sandhurst he was commissioned in the Seaforth Highlanders, but resigned after two years, possibly due to debts from high life in London. He joined a City bank, then the Birmingham Police before being recruited into the Security Service, MI5, in 1933. During the Second World War he was head of Section B1a, controlling Nazi spies in Britain who had been ‘turned’ to work as double agents for the British. The information or disinformation they sent their German stations was decided by representatives of service intelligence chiefs meeting weekly a
s the Twenty, or XX (‘Double-Cross’), Committee under the chairmanship of the Oxford historian, J.C. Masterman. Robertson proved outstanding at running double agents without letting the enemy suspect the deception, thereby influencing key campaigns, and equally talented at inspiring lifelong affection in his own team. He died in 1994.

  RÖHM, Captain Ernst Born in Munich, his father a railway official, he was commissioned in the Bavarian 10th Infantry Regiment in 1908. During the First World War he was severely wounded, bearing the scars for life. Returning to Munich after the war, he served with von Epp’s Freikorps to depose a Soviet government established in the city. He helped to arm Hitler’s paramilitary SA, and in 1923 took part in Hitler’s failed ‘Beerhall Putsch’. In 1931 Hitler appointed him chief of the SA, which grew under his leadership to an unruly force over 4 million strong, threatening the government and the regular military leadership. Hitler decided in favour of the army and conspired with Himmler and Heydrich to purge the SA, whose leaders they arrested on the 30 June 1934, ‘the night of the long knives’. Röhm was among the many subsequently executed.

  ROOSEVELT, Franklin D. President of the United States, first elected in March 1933, barely a month after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and noted for his ‘new deal’ legislation to reverse the economic malaise after the Wall Street crash. Re-elected in 1937, he began a major re-armament programme to deter Japanese expansion in the Pacific. In Europe he viewed the survival of Britain and the Royal Navy as vital for US security, and on 11 September 1939 initiated a personal correspondence with Chamberlain and Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, expressing his support. As Assistant Secretary of the US Navy in 1918, he had met Churchill and regarded him as a ‘stinker’, but the secret correspondence they exchanged in the opening years of the Second World War was vital for Churchill’s strategy and the development of a partnership in which US industry was mobilised as the ‘arsenal of democracy’. Isolationist sentiment in America prevented Roosevelt from openly joining the war against the fascist powers, but his industrial and naval support for Britain breached US neutrality in letter and spirit. After winning an unprecedented third term as President in 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor followed by Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States propelled America into the war. He died in office just before final victory in 1945.

  ROSENBERG, Alfred Born in 1893 in Estonia, then part of Russia, he was studying engineering in Moscow in 1917 when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out. Romantically attracted to Germany – his forbears had been German – he emigrated to Berlin, thence moved to Munich, where he met Hitler and impressed him with his first-hand knowledge of the Russian Revolution and his conviction that it was caused by the conspiracy of international Jewry which aimed to undermine all governments and seize power throughout the world. He became editor of the Nazi newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, and the party’s pre-eminent racial theorist, postulating in his key book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), a race hierarchy with ‘Nordic Aryans’ at the top and Jews at the bottom, and stressing the necessity for laws to protect Nordic blood from contamination. In April 1941, before the assault on Russia, Hitler appointed him his delegate for Central Planning for the East European area about to be conquered, and after the start of the offensive Reichsminister for the occupied east, but he was completely ineffectual against Himmler and regional Nazi governors. He was sentenced to death and hanged at Nuremberg in 1946.

  ROTHSCHILD, Victor, grew up at the grand Rothschild mansion, Tring Park, Buckinghamshire. His father, Charles, was a keen naturalist, his uncle, Walter, who lived at Tring, a zoologist, and they awakened in him an early interest in nature; it is said he could identify butterfly species before he could read their names. Educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, he developed into a good-looking young man of remarkable academic, musical and sporting talent. He also drove a racing car, played jazz, collected art and 18th-century books and threw champagne parties. Beneath the gilded exterior, under the influence of Anthony Blunt and others of the Cambridge secret society, the ‘Apostles’, he became a committed Communist, believing in scientific Marxism, and supporting the Soviet Union as potential saviour of the Jewish race threatened by Nazism. After university and a spell of only six months with the family bank, whose ambience bored him, he returned to Cambridge, gaining a research fellowship in Zoology. In 1937 his uncle died and he became 3rd Baron Rothschild and head of the dynasty. On the outbreak of war he applied his scientific mind to sabotage research for military intelligence, and in 1940 was recruited by Guy Liddell of MI5 and set up an anti-sabotage section (B1c). He introduced Blunt to Liddell, who recruited him as his personal assistant. Since Blunt and Guy Burgess sub-leased a flat in a London house Rothschild owned, where Liddell and Kim Philby were visitors, it is not surprising that after the defection of Burgess, Donald Maclean and Philby to Moscow and the unmasking of Anthony Blunt in the 1960s Rothschild was rumoured to be the ‘fifth man’ in the Cambridge spy ring. There is strong circumstantial evidence in support, but no direct proof has been found. He died in 1990.

  SIMON, Lord, a successful lawyer with a cold manner who liked to insist that despite his name he was not a Jew, entered Parliament as a Liberal in 1906 and was soon appointed to government. During the interwar years he served as Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Like Hoare, tarnished as one of the ‘guilty men’ for supporting ‘appeasement’, he was removed from the War Cabinet when Churchill became Prime Minister, raised to the peerage as Viscount Simon and appointed Lord Chancellor; this was his last government post. He died in 1954.

  STALIN, Joseph General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, de facto dictator of Soviet Russia. As a boy he had, like Hitler, suffered physical abuse from a brutal father. He won a scholarship to an Orthodox Seminary at sixteen but once there discovered Marxist literature and joined the Bolshevik Party; subsequently taking part in the Russian Revolution with Lenin, he took over Lenin’s political mantle on his death in 1924. Ruthless in purging rivals and promoting his own personality cult, he forced through collective farming and rapid industrialisation by terrible means: in terms of numbers driven from their homes, wiped out by famine, sent to concentration camps in Siberia, worked to death as slave labourers, executed as ‘enemies of the state’, tortured and murdered by sadists in the NKVD – People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs – and secret state police, Stalin’s victims were on a scale Hitler never matched. German historians have argued that his transformation of Russia forced its mirror image, Nazism, on Germany. Vansittart (see below) would not have agreed. Stalin knew Hitler would turn on him eventually; he agreed to the non-aggression pact of 1939, carving up eastern Europe between them, in order to create a buffer. Despite eventual victory over his enemy, he grew increasingly paranoid, and died of a stroke in 1953.

  TAVISTOCK, Marquis of see Bedford, Duke of

  VANSITTART, Sir Robert A spell at a school in Imperial Germany at the time of the South African (Boer) War when Anglophobia and militarist nationalism poured from all media moulded his view of Germany. In marked contrast to his own school, Eton, he found in German schools and universities ‘no real love of sport or games but only of fighting fitness’, aloof and inhuman teachers who took pleasure in humiliating their pupils, and spying and ‘sneaking’ everywhere. He entered the diplomatic service in 1902 and in 1930 was appointed Permanent Undersecretary (non-political head) at the Foreign Office. Realising that Hitler was bent on war, he advocated alliance with France and Soviet Russia to maintain the peace, while using his intelligence sources, including one inside the German Air Ministry, to brief Churchill on German re-armament. He opposed Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler so stridently that in 1938 he was removed from his post and appointed to a non-position designated Chief Diplomatic Adviser; but he retained his intelligence sources and after Churchill came to power in May 1940 played a senior intelligence and propaganda role.
A series of his wireless broadcasts published in January 1941 as Black Record, arguing that Nazism was a natural outcome of historic German militarism, became the most influential popular manifesto for continuing the fight, and also ran through several editions in the United States. He wrote plays, novels and poetry and died in 1957 while writing his memoirs, never reaching the period of appeasement when his career was so abruptly terminated.

  WINDSOR, Duke of Prince Edward, eldest son of King George V and Queen Mary, ascended the throne as King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth and Emperor of India in January 1936; he abdicated in December that year and was succeeded by his brother, Prince Albert, who took the title King George VI. The practical reason for the abdication was Edward’s insistence on marrying the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson; beneath this lay his open sympathy for Hitler and Nazism and Mrs Simpson’s closeness to the German Ambassador in London, von Ribbentrop. Given the title Duke of Windsor, he married Mrs Simpson in France in June 1937 and the couple toured Germany later that year, entertained by Hitler, Hess and other top Nazis. On the outbreak of war he was sent to France with the British Military Mission. After the fall of France Churchill appointed him Governor of the Bahamas to keep him out of the country. He was not forgiven by the British Royal family, particularly Queen Elizabeth, and after the war lived in exile with his wife in France until his death in 1972.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Death in the summer house

  17 AUGUST 1987: to all appearances, just another morning. Prisoner Number Seven eased himself from bed with the painful movements of age. He was 93. His hair was grey and thin on top, his eyes deep-set beneath bushy brows. Once he had been second man in Hitler’s Reich. Despite the changes wrought in him by age, those who had seen him then leading the massed ranks of the Nazi Party in ringing acclamation of the Führer would have had little difficulty in recognising him. He believed he was still due the dignity of that station. He had never accepted the jurisdiction of the victor powers at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, nor reconciled himself to his sentence.