The Hitler–Hess Deception. Martin Allen

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 a substantial number of ethnic Germans signed up to the Zapot Agreement, which supported a long-term policy of reunification with the Fatherland under the all-encompassing banner of the Nazi Party.

      Hess was delighted by Albrecht’s success, and sent Albrecht to Czechoslovakia to set up a similar arrangement with ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland, that area of Bohemia adjoining Germany that had been awarded to Czechoslovakia under the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1919. So significant were these first tentative steps by the Nazis’ foreign-political machine that ‘from 1935 onwards Hitler based some of his formulations on Volksdeutsch politics on statements submitted to him by Hess and prepared by Albrecht Haushofer’.²⁸

      The expansion of Germany was not Hitler’s only objective at this time: the Treaty of Versailles had not only stripped valuable German territory away, it had also reduced Germany’s military to a skeletal force fit only for defence and internal security. This did not fit with Hitler’s future plans one bit, and by early 1935 he determined it was time to solve this problem. If Germany was to become a major power once again, she would need appropriate military forces to match her status.

      Consequently, it was announced in March 1935 that Germany would re-introduce conscription to meet her new military needs. Immediately, all Europe sat up and took notice, the press proclaiming dire warnings of future German aggression, causing a Europe-wide level of consternation and panic not seen since the First World War.

      ‘Let them curse,’ Goebbels commented. ‘Meanwhile we rearm and put on a brave face.’²⁹

      Within a few days, Britain’s Foreign Secretary and Lord Privy Seal, Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden, hurriedly flew to Berlin to ascertain exactly what the German Führer intended to do next. Hitler, for his part, was deeply worried by the British reaction, and was indeed ‘putting on a brave face’. He absolutely did not want a conflict with the British, and made no secret of the fact that he considered the English to be Germany’s ‘Aryan cousins’. He therefore desperately wanted to persuade Britain’s politicians to let him do exactly as he wanted, without a war which he knew Germany would lose at that time.

      In a confidential meeting on Saturday, 23 March 1935, held at his Reich Chancellery office, Hitler met with Hess, Philipp Bouhler, the Chancellery head and party business manager, and Albrecht Haushofer, attending as a specialist on English affairs, to decide the course of action. It was concluded that an Anglo–German diplomatic banquet would provide the best low-key opportunity for Hitler to argue his case for Germany’s need to throw off of the shackles of Versailles. To Haushofer fell the task of drawing up the guest list, devising the seating plan³⁰ and advising Hitler during his meeting with Simon and Eden.

      At the banquet the guests were placed so that Eden was seated close to Hitler, separated from him only by Lady Phipps, the British Ambassador’s wife, while Sir John Simon was placed opposite the German Führer. Other British guests included leading Tory politician Viscount Cranborne, the new Ambassador to Berlin Sir Eric Phipps and his predecessor Sir John Seymour, while the top Germans present included Göring, Hess, Goebbels and von Neurath. There were, however, no military men, no SS or Schutzstaffel, and certainly no one whose presence would have hinted at the darker side of Nazism, such as Himmler or Heydrich. This was a diplomatic dinner aimed at defusing a sensitive international situation, not an occasion for military intimidation. However, as Goebbels later noted, Hitler did speak ‘out against Russia, [and] has laid a cuckoo’s egg which is intended to hatch into an Anglo–German entente’.³¹

      The event was a success, and further enhanced Albrecht Haushofer’s standing at the Reich Chancellery. Within a few weeks he began to expand his reputation as an expert on foreign affairs by writing a report for Hess on the problems with ‘Germany’s Foreign-Political Apparatus’. The report concluded that in order to attain Germany’s territorial aims, Hitler would have