The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

But I believe that the moment the menace of aggression and bad faith has been removed, war against Germany becomes wrong and meaningless. This generation is conscious that injustices were done to the German people in the era after the last war. There must be no repetition of that. To seek anything but a just and comprehensive peace to lay to rest the fears and discords in Europe would be a betrayal of our fallen.

I look forward to the day when a trusted Germany will again come into her own and believe that there is such a Germany, which would be loath to inflict wrong on other nations such as she would not like to suffer herself. That day may be far off, but when it comes, then hostilities could and should cease, and all efforts be concentrated on righting the wrongs in Europe by free negotiations between the disputing parties, all parties binding themselves to submit their disputes to an impartial equity tribunal in case they cannot reach agreement.

We do not begrudge Germany Lebensraum, provided that Lebensraum is not made the grave of other nations. We should be ready to search for and find a colonial settlement, just to all peoples concerned, as soon as there exist effective guarantees that no race will be exposed to being treated as Hitler treated the Jews on 9 November last year [Kristallnacht]. We shall, I trust, live to see the day when such a healing peace is negotiated between honourable men and the bitter memories of twenty-five years of unhappy tension between Germany and the Western democracies are wiped away in their responsible co-operation for building a better Europe.

Hamilton’s letter, which may have been covertly backed by Neville Chamberlain, was not just for British consumption: it was evidently designed to alert Nazi Germany to the fact that there were Britons who would deal with them. Overtures from Nazi Germany duly arrived, via the floating Nazi emissary Albrecht Haushofer—the son of Hess’s friend and mentor Professor Karl Haushofer. The younger Haushofer not only knew Hess but was a friend of Hamilton, hence the familiar tone he uses in his letter to Hamilton of 23 September 1940:

My dear Douglo

…If you remember some of my last communications in July 1939 you and your friends in high places may find some significance in the fact that I am able to ask you whether you could find time to have a talk with me somewhere on the outskirts of Europe, perhaps in Portugal…

On receiving Haushofer’s letter, Hamilton apparently showed it to the Air Minister, Sir Archibald Sinclair, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, both of whom were well known to be lukewarm for war. The letter was deliberately kept from Churchill the bulldog. According to Double Standards (2001), the account of the Hess mission by Picknett, Prince and Prior, there then followed months of arrangements for Hess’s secret flight to Britain—made with Hitler’s connivance—to deal with an elite pro-peace lobby which had sufficient control of a sector of the RAF to ensure no one shot down Hess’s Me.110 as it neared Scotland. Two Czech pilots with the RAF, Vaclav “Felix” Bauman and Leopold Srom, later recounted that they intercepted Hess’s Me.110 but, as they moved in for the kill, Bauman was told by his radio controller, “Sorry, Felix, old boy. It is not possible. You must return. Now.”

Although Hamilton would later profess total amazement that Hess was seeking him out, it is more likely that he was expecting the Deputy Fuhrer. According to eyewitnesses, Hamilton was shocked and agitated when he found that “Horn” had been captured by the Home Guard—Hess had bungled the operation by failing to land at Hamilton’s house, Dungavel. After the plane had crashed noisily and “Horn” been publicly captured, any chance of a secret meeting between Hess and the pro-peace group had gone.

The Hess affair massively increased Churchill’s power vis-a-vis the peace wing of the British establishment (which included the Duke of Kent and ex-Prime Minister Lloyd George). Not only had the peacemongers committed an embarrassing faux pas, they had given Churchill a pawn in a disinformation campaign. As Pierre van Passen noted in That Day Alone (1941), Churchill publicly pretended to take Hess’s peace proposal seriously—in return Hitler de-intensified the Blitz and diverted his focus towards the Soviet Union. When the Wehrmacht’s tanks rolled into Russia in July 1941, Britain was no longer alone in the fight against Nazism. Henceforth it was unlikely to lose a war that only weeks before Hess’s flight had seemed unwinnable.

There was, though, the problem of what to do with Hess. Initially, the ex-Deputy Fuhrer was imprisoned in the Tower of London, then at Mytchett Place, Surrey, then at Maindiff Court near Abergavenny in Wales. Confusingly, intelligence reports by Nazi Abwehr spies in Britain placed Hess in Scotland, in the western Highlands, at the same time he was in Wales. How could Hess be in two places at once? Either the Abwehr was mistaken— or, fantastically, there were two Rudolf Hesses.

The Hess “doppelganger” theory was given credence in 1979 in The Murder of Rudolf Hess by Dr Hugh Thomas, a military surgeon who had examined Hess in Spandau prison six years before. To Thomas’s befuddlement, his examination of Prisoner Number Seven failed to detect the First World War bullet wound that Hess was known to have received. Thomas’s book prompted other researches, many of which ostensibly confirmed the doppelganger thesis. Under influence of the truth drug sodium pentothal in 1944 at Maindiff Court, “Hess” apparently refused to recognize the names of intimates, including Karl Haushofer and Willy Messerschmitt. Then there was his bizarre inability at Nuremberg to remember former colleagues. Amnesia might account for these mental lapses; less easy to explain is the fact that the dental records of the Hess held in 1941 seem to belong to someone other than the person held at Maindiff in 1943. And why did Hess the prisoner at Spandau refuse to see his wife and son for 26 years?

Thomas hypothesizes that the real Hess was shot down (on Goring’s instructions) and that it was the doppelganger Hess who arrived in Scotland in 1941. Aviation records, including testimony by Hess’s aircrew, refute this: Hess’s Me110 bore the identification code VJ OQ and the Messerschmitt which crashed in Scotland bore this marking. (A section of fuselage is on display in the Imperial War Museum, London.) A more plausible explanation is suggested by Peter Allen in The Crown and the Swastika (1983): the doppelganger was substituted while Hess was in British custody. Allen cites in evidence the recollections of Charles Fraser-Smith, the intelligence service gadget- maker who was the inspiration for Q in the Bond movies. In the immediate aftermath of Hess’s arrest, Fraser- Smith was asked to make an identical copy of Hess’s uniform. Fraser-Smith could think of no reason for the request unless the uniform was to be worn by a double. According to him, MI6 held a top-level meeting in 1975 to discuss the identity of “Hess”.

If the Hess incarcerated in Spandau was the doppelganger, where was the real one? Intriguingly, Picknett, Prince and Prior suggest that the fate of the real Hess was tied into the mysterious plane crash which killed George, Duke of Kent, on 25 August 1942. On that day the Duke’s RAF Sunderland flying boat crashed into Eagle’s Rock, Caithness, Scotland, an event an MOD inquiry found to be caused by: “A/C [AIRCRAFT] BEING ON WRONG TRACK AT TO [SIC] LOW ALTITUDE TO CLEAR RISING GROUND… CAPT OF A/C CHANGED FLIGHT-PLAN FOR REASONS UNKNOWN & DESCENDED THROUGH CLOUD WITHOUT MAKING SURE HE WAS OVER WATER.”

The Duke’s flying boat was piloted by some of the RAF’s most experienced crew. By operational rules it should not have been flown over land. Immediately after the crash, the MOD announced that all 15 crew had been killed and their bodies recovered. A day later a survivor, Andy Jack, wandered dazed into a crofter’s cottage. That made 16 men aboard the doomed Sunderland, one more than the take-off complement. The extra man was, Picknett, Prince and Prior suggest, Hess himself, who had been picked up from a nearby loch by Kent, the king’s brother and a known softliner on Germany, with the intention of taking the Deputy Fuhrer to neutral Sweden. Kent’s Sunderland, it later transpired, had been painted white—the colour for flights to neutral countries. Numerous records relating to the Duke’s crash are missing from the Public Record Office.

A frequent objection to the doppelganger theory is that the false Hess would never have admitted to war crimes at Nuremberg and accepted life in prison. He would have shouted his innocence to the court ceiling. Unless, that is, the false Hess had been brainwashed. This seems fanciful… until the success of the Russians in the 1930s Show Trials and the CIA with its MK-ULTRA programme is recalled.

Almost fittingly, the death of “Hess” in Spandau on 17 August 1987 was as much a mystery as his life had been. During a walk in the prison garden, Hess’s guard was called away to take a telephone call. When he returned he found Hess lying in the garden hut with electrical cable wound around his neck. Two days later a