The Hitler–Hess Deception

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.

CHAPTER 1

An Unlikely Triumvirate

If one were looking for some lasting important artefact of the Third Reich, one should not seek a swastika-adorned fighter-plane or medal-bedecked army uniform in a military museum, for these are really the vestiges of failure, items of hardware used by the Nazis to attain their empire when the politics broke down. For a more meaningful relic of Nazism, one intent on exploring the darker side of humanity need only look as far as Mein Kampf. In its pages, more than by any other means, one can gain an insight into National Socialism. Nazism was a concept, a radical if unwholesome ideology that sprang from the disasters of the First World War, the German right’s patriotic yearnings for nationhood, and the fear of Bolshevism in the 1920s and thirties. The torchlit marches, the ostentatious neo-classical structures, the plethora of eagle-surmounted swastikas that adorned buildings, banners and uniformed breasts, were but a manifestation of thought, an ideology that powered National Socialism: the belief that Germany could rise phoenix-like from the ashes of Weimar mediocrity.

Nazism, history tells us, sprang from political theories implemented by a band of individuals who would have been regarded as social misfits in any other society, led by men such as Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Robert Ley, Julius Streicher, Joachim von Ribbentrop and, of course, Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess. All were determined to create a new world where Aryan supremacy and mysticism became fact, and where humanity would be classified into the top-of-the-heap Aryans, followed by the lower orders – the Slavs, the Jews, and other sub-humans.

But what if some of these top Nazis were not so strange? If they were in fact extremely capable and competent politicians? Our present-day perception of Nazism would be very different. National Socialism would not have been any less terrible or objectionable, but the boundaries between the normal political mind and the bizarre would be less easy to determine.

Nazi rule was a tree whose roots lay initially in a defeated nation’s fear and despair, and whose branches would eventually be strong enough to support the Gestapo, the SS and the ‘final solution’. The leaders of the Nazi Party controlled the German Reich on many levels, but the political alliances, the expedient agreements and the bitter feuds were all directed towards one grand master-plan: the creation of a Greater Germany and Reich that would last a thousand years.

Behind the party leadership stood many important academics who shared a fear of Bolshevism and hatred of the Treaty of Versailles. Over many years they had developed academic theories that would shape the modern world that, they believed, had to come. They came from many disciplines – from physics and medicine, economics and geography, psychiatry, anthropology and archaeology – and the Nazi Party cherry-picked their work for ideas that fitted in with their objectives.

There was, however, one elderly academic whose involvement with the Nazis actually helped formulate National Socialist policy. This man’s involvement with Adolf Hitler, through the intervention of Rudolf Hess, in 1921 would lead to his becoming the politico-foreign affairs tutor and adviser to the Führer and his Deputy.

Rudolf Hess was not a monumentally important personality in National Socialism, but it is certainly the case that had he never existed, or had he been killed during the First World War, the course of world history during the inter-war years may well have taken a very different path. His introduction of Adolf Hitler to Professor Karl Haushofer, Germany’s leading expert on geopolitics, was to have profound consequences.

Haushofer would provide Hitler with the theoretical concepts of Nazi expansionism, German ethnicity and Lebensraum, or living space, for the German people. Furthermore, in the years to come his son Albrecht would provide important assistance to Hitler and Hess, inexorably advancing the Nazis’ aims of territorial expansion within Europe, according to his father’s plans for a Greater Germany. By the late 1930s Albrecht Haushofer would become the hidden hand of Hess and his Führer in pursuing the Nazis’ foreign policy objectives.

However, Albrecht Haushofer would also unwittingly prove to be the key that would enable British Intelligence to unleash an overwhelming tide of disaster upon Hitler’s entire war strategy. This is a secret that has remained hidden since the Second World War. Indeed, Hitler himself never knew that a situation deep in the Haushofer’s past had been exploited to obliterate his hopes for victory, or that his own Deputy, Rudolf Hess, had himself set these destructive wheels in motion over twenty years before.

The story of how this occurred, of how Hitler, Hess and Haushofer, working towards ultimate German supremacy, in the end brought about their own undoing, is perhaps the strangest story of the whole war.

With the sudden end to the First World War in November 1918, many Germans, among them soldiers who had been fighting at the front without knowing what was happening at home, looked at the ruination of their country and asked themselves what had happened. How had Germany gone from a mighty imperial superpower in 1914, possessed of a superb army and the world’s second-largest navy, to be laid so low a mere four years later? The last months of the war had seen enormous political unrest in Germany, and the suspicion was born that the nation had not been defeated militarily, but that she had been undone by sly, underhand, political agitators and revolutionaries at home. Taking their lead from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, many left-wing revolutionary factions had sprung up in Germany in 1918, intent upon changing Germany’s political system. They demanded an end to the Kaiser, the aristocracy and the ruling classes, and power to the proletariat.

Just as in Russia, where sailors of the Imperial Navy had launched the revolution that had toppled the Tsar’s regime, so did the spark of Bolshevik revolution ignite in Germany’s Imperial Fleet. In October 1918, sailors of the German Navy had mutinied at Kiel, and large numbers of deserters quickly scattered inland to seek out fellow thinkers among the disaffected workers of Germany’s industrial heartland. Here they fomented social unrest and insurrection, cutting Germany’s supply of materials and power, and crippling the country.

Unable to restore order, and fearing the loss of his life in the same ghastly manner as had befallen his cousin Tsar Nicholas II four months previously, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s nerve failed. He abdicated and fled the country within a few days, leaving a hastily propped-up Socialist government to cope with an internal situation that threatened to turn into full-scale revolution. Faced with this dilemma, and knowing that the Allied forces were growing steadily stronger, the new German government promptly declared that the war could not be sustained any longer, and sued for peace. Germany had lost the war not only militarily, but also economically and politically.

Thus, when the twenty-four-year-old fighter-pilot Rudolf Hess journeyed home by train to his parents in Bavaria in December 1918, he took with him the bitter depression of defeat and the deep feelings of betrayal shared by the millions of other men suddenly discharged from Germany’s armed forces. However, Hess was not a typical German, and his background – for a man destined to hold high political office in 1930s Germany – was most unusual. He was what was called an Ausländer, an ethnic German born overseas.

Rudolf Walter Richard Hess had been born in a luxurious villa in the Egyptian coastal resort of Ibrahimieh, a few miles to the east of Alexandria, on 26 April 1894. His background was to have a profound effect upon the man he would become. Although recognised as a reasonably bright child, he would grow to be a frustrated young man, expected to take over the reins of the family business, the successful mercantile company Hess & Co., run by his domineering father, Fritz Hess.

Rudolf Hess’s childhood with his younger brother Alfred and sister Margarete was an idyllic one. The Hess children played adventurous games in the substantial grounds of the family home. At night they would stand on the villa’s flat roof, gaze up at the Egyptian night sky, and listen enraptured as their mother explained the wonders of the cosmos, the intricacies of the solar system.

Although Hess’s parents were established and well settled in Egypt, seeming to have made a successful transition to expatriate life, they had not broken their ties with the mother country. Fritz Hess was proud of his German heritage, displaying a large portrait of the Kaiser in his office, and being most particular to ensure he took his family ‘home’ to the more temperate climate of southern Germany every summer. On these visits the Hess children re-established their German identities, wandering the countryside north-west of Nuremberg, enjoying family picnics, and establishing friendships that would last a lifetime.

This charmed life ended for the young Rudolf when he reached the age of fourteen. In September 1908, instead of returning to Egypt with his family after their summer holiday, Rudolf travelled to Bad Godesberg to attend the Evangelical School, where he was to receive his first formal education, having been educated at home since the age of six by a tutor. The young Hess showed an aptitude for mathematics and science, much to the concern of his father, who was hoping for a son who would take over the family business when the time came. In the hope of igniting the commercial spark that would turn his son into a young entrepreneur, Fritz Hess sent Rudolf to the École Supérieur de Commerce in Neuchâtel, hoping that some of the Swiss acumen for business would rub off on his son.

In 1912, after a year of high expense for the father, and comprehensive cramming by the son, the eighteen-year-old Rudolf left Switzerland to join the flourishing Hamburg trading company of Feldt Stein & Co. as an apprentice. As he took his first tentative steps as an adult in the heady atmosphere of pre-war Hamburg, Rudolf was blissfully unaware that the worst war the world had ever seen was about to erupt. Yet this was also a war that would give Hess his first great adventure, his chance to break free of the future his parents had mapped out for him as a middle-class businessman.

Far from the delights of belle époque Hamburg, in distant Sarajevo the course of European history was changed forever on 28 June 1914, when a young Serb named Gavrilo Princip shot dead the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his consort Sophie Chotek, the Duchess of Hohenburg. Princip’s were the first shots that would herald an unimaginably terrible war that would not only sweep away the flower of Europe’s young men, but change forever the political complexion of the continent.

Rudolf Hess was among the very first bands of young men to volunteer, quitting his job in the summer of 1914 to join the German infantry. Over the next four years he would see action in many of the horror-spots of the war, from the Western Front at Ypres and Verdun to the Carpathian Mountains on the Eastern Front, where he was severely wounded. However, against all the odds, he survived – a remarkable testament not only to his luck, but to his mental strength as well. Eventually, with considerable persistence, he managed to get himself inducted into Germany’s fledgling Air Corps, where he trained and became a fighter-pilot flying Fokker triplanes in Belgium during the last weeks of the war.

Now, as he returned home at the end of the war only to find turmoil and political unrest, he commented bitterly: ‘I witnessed the horror of death in all its forms … battered for days under heavy bombardment … hungered and suffered, as indeed have all front-line soldiers. And is all this to be in vain, the suffering of the good people at home all for nothing?’1

Not only had Hess seen his once-glorious nation go down to crushing defeat, but his father’s successful business in Egypt had been ruined by the war, and was eventually taken over by the victorious Allies. It was a loss Fritz Hess never really recovered from, psychologically or financially; his son’s bitterness ran deep indeed, on both a national and a personal level.

The manner in which the First World War ended, and the deep sense of betrayal felt by the returning German soldiers, would dominate German politics for the coming twenty years. At this time were sown the seeds of bitterness that would be cultivated by the men who would rise to power in the 1930s – men just like Rudolf Hess, who believed that victory had been swindled from them by a devious gang of traitors at home: Communists, Socialists, wishy-washy liberals; and, worst of all, some of the more ultra-right wing declared, the Jews. It would become a dangerous and volatile cocktail of disillusionment and hate, just waiting to explode.

On returning to Bavaria at the end of November 1918, Hess found his country facing a peril he had only read about in newspapers – the threat of a Bolshevik revolution similar to that which had taken place in Russia a year before. A militant Bolshevik organisation called the Spartakusbund had taken over Bavaria, overthrown the legitimate Bavarian government, and set up its own Soviet Republic of Bavaria, the Räterepublik.

With the end of war, Germany had been plunged into political turmoil. On one side was the far left, predominantly led by militant workers and educated men well-versed in the works of Marx; on the other was the right wing, made up virtually without exception of the middle classes and war veterans determined that these Bolshevik troublemakers should be crushed completely before Germany descended into chaos. The country teetered on the very edge of an abyss that had the potential to mirror what was taking place in Russia.

Intent on taking his part in the struggle, Rudolf Hess quickly joined a right-wing band of veterans called the Thule Gesellschaft – the Thule Society – set up to counter the organised thuggery of the Spartakusbund. Over the course of the next five months, much bitter street-fighting ensued in the struggle to prevent the Spartakists consolidating their grip on power in Bavaria. The Thule Gesellschaft may be considered a forerunner of the Nazi Party, created before National Socialism became a concept; indeed, created even before Adolf Hitler became prominent. It was a nationalist anti-Bolshevik society, used the swastika as its emblem, and loudly proclaimed the motto ‘Remember you are German. Keep your blood pure.’ It was not as large an organisation as the Spartakists, and its struggle was hard, but events were about to turn in its favour.

In late April 1919, the Spartakists captured seven Thule Society members and an innocent bystander called Professor Berger, a Jewish academic who had the incredible bad luck to be swept up as a member of the anti-Semitic society. His luck was about to get worse, as all eight men were summarily executed. The Spartakists then made the fatal error of accepting three Bolshevik emissaries sent from Moscow by Lenin. These three Russian agitators promptly took over the Spartakusbund, and began to consolidate their power-base in Bavaria’s new Räterepublik by instigating a Soviet-style purge.

This was all too much for the new German government. From Weimar in Thuringia they watched events in Bavaria and blanched, for the Spartakusbund had nailed its colours to the mast by declaring that its ultimate aim was to topple the legitimate government and set up a Soviet Germany. Prompted by a sense of self-preservation, the government sent troops in to restore order, gladly accepting help from the Freikorp Epp (a right-wing paramilitary organisation affiliated to the Thule Society), and succeeded in toppling the Spartakists. With the collapse of the Räterepublik most people in southern Germany breathed an enormous sigh of relief, and hoped that the natural order of predominantly conservative Bavaria would re-assert itself, and that they could now get on with their lives.

It was at this time, mid-1919, that Rudolf Hess first made the acquaintance of Professor General Karl Haushofer, the man who would instil in him the political awareness and the understanding of world affairs that he would apply to his as-yet unplanned career in politics. Twenty-five years later, in October 1944, an investigation by the FBI would take a statement that revealed: ‘According to [Name Censored] Rudolf Hess … brought Hitler and Haushofer together [and this] combination of Hess and Haushofer was, in the opinion of [Censored] the root of the Nazi Party.’2 But this statement missed the crucial fact that Karl Haushofer and his son Albrecht became confidential advisers to Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess on their most important foreign policy matters – in effect an unofficial Führer’s private office on foreign affairs.

On a balmy summer’s evening in 1919 a man called Beck invited his friend and fellow member of Thule Gesellschaft Rudolf Hess to dine with him at the home of Professor Karl Haushofer, ‘an old-time pan-Germanist’3 who had commanded the Thirteenth Bavarian Infantry Division during the First World War. This first meeting between Haushofer and Hess, a purely social affair, was an immediate success. Long into the night, an enthralled Hess sat and listened intently to everything the eminent Professor had to say about the wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles, and his views on foreign affairs defined under the all-encompassing banner of Welt-Politik (world politics), as determined by his new theories of ‘geopolitics’. For Hess it was the opening of an intellectual door, and he suddenly came to believe that there was a bigger picture to consider – that of the new age to come – which through science would redefine the world. Haushofer had himself undergone this intellectual revolution in the late 1890s.

Basically, geopolitics was the theory, as promulgated by Haushofer, that in the future the world would be restructured into an age of great land-empires, dominated by ‘the Heartland’, an area ‘invulnerable to sea-power in Central Europe and Asia’.4 This, Haushofer asserted, would revolutionise the world’s balance of power, ushering in a ‘new age’ of stability, peace and prosperity for all.

In 1904, the eminent British geographer H.J. Mackinder had written a paper titled ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’,5 which Haushofer had read avidly, particularly the paragraph that declared: ‘The spaces within the Russian Empire and Mongolia are so vast, and their potentialities in population, wheat, cotton, fuel and metals so incalculably great, that it is inevitable that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will there develop inaccessible to oceanic commerce.’ Mackinder went on to expound his theory that

sea power alone, it if is not based on great industry, and has a great industry behind it, is too weak for offence to really maintain itself in the world struggle … both the sea and the railway are going in the future … to be supplemented by the air as a means of locomotion, and when we come to that … the successful powers will be those who have the greatest industrial base . .. [and] those people who have the greatest industrial base … [will] have the . . . power of invention and science to defeat all others.6 [Author’s italics]

Hess listened to all this and more, as Haushofer explained his theory that ethnicity should be added to this geopolitical formula. All Europe’s current borders, he maintained, resulted from old-world wars and conflict dating back to the Dark Ages, the time of strife and confusion following the collapse of Rome. European peace would only truly come about when Europe was redefined according to ethnic background. And that meant, by happy coincidence, that Germany and the Germanic peoples would become the largest single bloc, dominating central Europe.

Hess quickly became a total convert to Haushofer’s theories, and for his part the elderly Professor took a keen interest in the intriguing young man, who showed signs of considerable ability. A ready friendship soon developed between the two, Hess finding the genteel Haushofer a stark contrast to the authoritarian figure his own father had been. ‘He is a wonderful man,’7 wrote Hess, and within a few days of their first meeting the two would meet after Hess finished work to stroll in the park, often on their way to dinner at Haushofer’s home. Here Hess found himself readily absorbed into the Haushofer family, developing a close affection for Haushofer’s ‘very nice’ half-Jewish wife, Martha, and becoming firm friends with the Professor’s sons, Albrecht and Heinz.

Hess got on particularly well with Haushofer’s elder son, Albrecht, an intelligent young man of seventeen. A friendship swiftly developed that would last the rest of their lives. In a foretaste of events to come, Hess would comment: ‘I sometimes go for a walk with [Albrecht], and we speak English together.’8 At the time, however, Hess could have had no concept of how entwined his and Albrecht’s lives would become.

Had Hess not fallen under Adolf Hitler’s spell in 1920, he would almost certainly have accompanied Albrecht into a life of academia. After five months of congenial friendship with Karl Haushofer – the relationship having quickly developed into one of devoted protégé and mentor – Hess quit his job at a Munich textile importers to enrol at Munich University as a student of geographical politics under Haushofer.

Who then, was this eminent Professor Karl Haushofer, the behind-the-scenes man of Nazi foreign policy, the sage figure consulted by the whole Nazi elite from Hess, Himmler, Göring and Ribbentrop, to Adolf Hitler himself ?

In 1946 Life Magazine published an article, dramatically titled ‘The Mystery of Haushofer’, that declared:

For something more than twenty years the voluminous writings and manifold activities of this German General, who later in life became a geographer on the faculty of the University of Munich, had engaged attention. He was discounted by many and dismissed by some as simply another obscure writer from Germany who exemplified the Teutonic passion for obscuring the obvious with unintelligible terminology. But by others he was considered a subtle and dangerous influence in the evolving challenge of National Socialism, a close collaborator with Rudolf Hess, Deputy-Führer, and the master genius of an organised movement designed to justify, by scientific argument, the Nazi gamble for total power.

The article went on to reveal that:

Through Haushofer’s pupil, Rudolf Hess, a vengeful philosophy of power and a technique for achieving it were communicated to Hitler, who avidly seized on the windfall and capitalised ruthlessly on the half-truths popularised in the name of objective science. [This] venerable scholar thus became not only an elder statesman in the field of geographical strategy but developed into a companion and political Nestor of the ruling clique … He testified under oath that he had been consulted on Japanese affairs by von Ribbentrop and was frequently summoned to the Foreign Office in Berlin. His residence on Kolbergerstrasse in Munich was the rendezvous for conferences between Nazi leaders and Japanese statesmen during the courtship of Nippon by Nazi Germany.9

Karl Ernst Haushofer was born in 1869, at the time of the creation of Germany as a state, and thus during his early years he grew to see Germany develop, gain colonies, prosper, and become a major power on the world stage. After a brief period of military service with the First Bavarian Artillery Regiment in the late 1880s, he secured a position with the Auslandskommando (the Foreign Service), and was posted to Germany’s distant Embassy in Japan.