The Hitler–Hess Deception. Martin Allen

western Europe in order to attain a deal.

      The extraordinary truth is that, for sixty years, a potentially devastating political secret has been covered up by subterfuge. This secret was related to British fears in 1940 and 1941 that the country might go down to crushing defeat, and to how Britain’s top political minds determined that Britain would survive. The means they used to accomplish this were ingenious and extremely subtle, but also unscrupulous. They were the acts of desperate men, faced with the options of either catastrophic defeat or national survival.

      By its very nature, what was done became a secret that could never be revealed. The decision to promulgate the legend of the standalone nation – that Britain had survived through pure military endeavour and luck – meant that disclosure during the dangerous years of the Cold War would have resulted in the shattering of Britain’s international credibility, and the ruin of many political careers.

      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.