The Hitler–Hess Deception. Martin Allen

yet another severe knock as well, for the German Führer had finally realised that his Foreign Minister was not up to the job of ending the war with Britain. Therefore, I concluded, Ribbentrop, together with the Duke of Windsor, was unlikely to have been connected to Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941.

      What, then, was the answer?

      To uncover the facts behind a wartime event that is in many respects still secret is extremely difficult, for a substantial number of key documents on this element of the Second World War have never been declassified. Against such a climate of secrecy, this paucity of available evidence, it can be almost impossible to uncover the truth, and it has to be said that one eventually learns new ways to uncover the facts.

      When I had written Hidden Agenda, a French-American named Charles Bedaux had proven to be the key to revealing the Duke of Windsor’s secret activities during the Phoney War. I therefore concluded that what I needed was a new version of Bedaux; someone who had been privy to the events of 1941, but who might have escaped undue attention. Having given some thought to the Hess mystery, it occurred to me that there had been another such person, someone who had been privy to Hess’s innermost thoughts during the 1940–41 period – his close friend and personal foreign affairs advisor, Albrecht Haushofer.

      What made me realise that Albrecht Haushofer might become my key to unlocking the Hess mystery was the knowledge that at the end of the war the Haushofer family itself had become a source of mystery. Great efforts had been made by Allied intelligence to investigate both Albrecht Haushofer and his father Karl Haushofer, but more intriguing still was the knowledge that certain of their papers had vanished from Allied custody. A sure sign someone had something to hide.

      And so I began the chase again – a search of the world’s archives, the tracking down of persons who had worked for the British and German Foreign Ministries, associates of Haushofer, Hess, Hitler, and Ribbentrop too; those privy to certain other secret events of 1941, and finally, the not insubstantial task of reading many thousands of pages of evidence.

      Slowly – by not only examining the obvious evidence, but also looking for the unobvious and spending a great deal of time pursuing dead-ends – the Rudolf Hess mystery began to give up its secrets, and what was revealed was not at all what I had expected …

      Martin A. Allen

      April 2002

Prologue

      On a bright Saturday afternoon, 12 May 1945, the spring sunshine made harsh and uncompromising by the leaf-denuded trees and surrounding bombed-out buildings, a young German named Heinz Haushofer picked his way through the ruined shell of Berlin. He was largely ignored by the numerous Russian troops who now occupied the city, and those he stopped to question had little patience for any German after the terrible war that had ended a mere five days before.

      Haushofer had arrived on foot in Berlin the previous evening and, after spending an uncomfortable night with an acquaintance in the suburbs, had ventured into the city centre to look for his missing brother Albrecht, who had spent the last eight months of the war as a prisoner of the SS at Berlin’s Moabit prison.

      After traversing the churned-up remains of the Tiergarten, almost treeless after a winter of Allied bombing and the Russian bombardment of April, Heinz managed to cross the River Spree by one of the few remaining bridges in Berlin. Quests like that being undertaken by Heinz were taking place all over Europe at the end of the war, particularly in Germany, as displaced persons travelled in search of missing loved ones. Sometimes these searches ended in the joy of reunion; but more often in sadness.

      On reaching Moabit prison, Heinz managed to find someone with news. Albrecht, he was told, had been marched away by the SS on the night of 22 April in the direction of Potsdam Station, accompanied by fifteen other prisoners.

      A little over an hour later, Heinz cautiously entered the bombed-out ruins of the one-time showpiece Ulap Exhibition Centre, just off Invalidenstrasse. After heavy Allied bombing, the vast building was almost completely buried under the shattered remains of the roof, which had collapsed. Following the directions he had been given, Heinz clambered over an enormous mound of rubble and twisted girders to get to the far side of the complex. There he was confronted by the last act of barbarism that the SS would ever commit on the direct orders of their leader, Heinrich Himmler. In the ruins of the exhibition centre, Heinz found the remains of the sixteen men who had been marched away from Moabit nearly three weeks before, to be murdered the same night. Steeling himself to the grim task, Heinz went from body to body, attempting to identify his brother.

      There was a puzzle here that would not be solved by Heinz. What had led Albrecht Haushofer, one of Germany’s foremost experts in foreign affairs, to such a dismal end with these fifteen other prisoners from such disparate backgrounds? A mechanical engineer, an Olympic athlete, a Russian PoW, an Argentinean, a German Communist, a Lieutenant-Colonel of the OKH (Germany’s high command), a lawyer, a legal adviser to Lufthansa, an Abwehr officer, a merchant, a State Secretary of Germany’s Foreign Ministry, an industrialist, an adviser to the Congregational Church, a professor of aviation, and, finally, a Councillor of State.

      Eventually, after searching through the entwined husks of these men brought together in death, a jumble of arms, legs, overcoats, Heinz finally found his elder brother. To have been murdered in such circumstances by the SS was a terrible end for anyone, yet it was particularly so for a man who had been not only Secretary General of Germany’s prestigious Society for Geography, the Geographie Gessellschaft, but a friend and adviser to Germany’s Deputy-Führer, Rudolf Hess, and to the Führer himself, Adolf Hitler.

      With his bare hands, Heinz dug a simple temporary grave for Albrecht out in the open air. It was now late afternoon, and he felt it prudent to hurry, for in the immediate aftermath of the war, Berlin was not a place to be out after dark, and he would have to find sanctuary for the night. After laying his brother to rest in a patch of ground outside the exhibition centre and saying a few simple words in farewell, Heinz set off for the suburbs.

      He did not, however, leave all of Albrecht behind. Tucked safely within his overcoat he carried his brother’s final words to posterity, written during his last months of captivity. Clutched in his brother’s hand, Heinz had found a sheaf of papers: a set of sonnets, one of which Albrecht had titled Schuld – ‘Guilt’.

      As Germany settled down to post-war occupation under the Allied powers, Allied Intelligence began to make enquiries about Albrecht Haushofer. During the war French, British and American Intelligence had been largely bonded together by the common cause of defeating Nazism, but victory brought about a rapid unravelling of that cohesion, as different national priorities once again took pre-eminence.

      By midsummer two distinct organs of Allied Intelligence, with two quite distinct agendas, were taking an interest in Albrecht Haushofer. The first was British Intelligence, the second non-British, primarily American. The main difference between the two was that while every document found by non-British Intelligence was registered and stored for future reference, those that fell into the hands of the British were comprehensively weeded, and certain sensitive pieces of evidence vanished completely, never to be seen again.

      Throughout the summer of 1945, British Intelligence made extraordinary efforts to locate the private papers of both Albrecht Haushofer and his father, Professor Karl Haushofer, and it was at this time that a set of six of Albrecht Haushofer’s diaries were found in Berlin. As they were located by the Americans, they were duly logged and their importance noted, for they covered the period of 1940–41 which had seen an extraordinary chain of events culminating in Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941. However, within a few days of the diaries arriving in Britain, on 7 June 1945, an American Intelligence officer was forced to report to his superior that they had vanished. They have never been seen since.¹

      At the end of September 1945, consternation erupted amongst a select band of Whitehall civil servants when they learned that American Intelligence officers from the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS) had managed to track down