The Hitler–Hess Deception. Martin Allen

background raised few eyebrows in Germany at the time, for the country had one of the better records in Europe with regard to the treatment of its Jewish citizens. In the 1940s, however, British Intelligence would speculate that it ‘accounted for the fact that Haushofer does not hold any official positions in the leadership of the National Socialist State’.¹¹ This was a misreading of Haushofer’s situation in Nazi Germany. Haushofer’s importance to the top Nazis protected him and his family from the fate that daily befell other Germans with Jewish connections. Indeed, Haushofer’s eminence would cause Hitler to welcome his elderly adviser and his wife as visitors to Berchtesgaden, where, unknown to Germany’s populace, the Führer always kissed Martha’s hand on meeting her, and treated her with the greatest courtesy and respect. It was a feature of Nazi Germany that what took place behind the scenes was frequently at odds with public appearance and policy.

      After his marriage, Haushofer abandoned his military career, determining to carve out a new niche for himself in academia as a geographer. In 1898 the Haushofers visited Britain, where Karl was to conduct a series of lectures on ‘Internationalism’. It was during this tour that he first learnt of a theory that he would one day develop into geopolitics. During this trip, he also made several important contacts that would stand him in good stead in the coming years. In London he met the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain (father of Neville Chamberlain), considered at the time to be very much the coming man of British politics. After this the Haushofers had planned to travel on to Cambridge, where Karl was due to give a lecture. However, they first went to Oxford, where Karl made the acquaintance of a young Scot by the name of Halford Mackinder, a geography don who was developing an exciting new theory concerning the Eurasian ‘heartland’ (Eastern Europe and interior Asia) which, he claimed, would by ‘natural ascendancy eventually gain superiority’ over the ‘maritime lands’.

      Mackinder was taking his first tentative steps in the new science of what Haushofer would one day adopt as his own and name geographical politics. It was from this meeting at the end of the nineteenth century between two men steeped in the application of Empire that Karl Haushofer went on to develop his theories of a dominant Eurasia. It was a concept, he immediately realised, that could become the basis for a land-based German empire to mirror the British, which was based on maritime supremacy.

      It was a very quiet and thoughtful Haushofer who left Oxford a few days later, for he knew that what Mackinder had told him was important. By the late 1890s, Germany was in an arms race with Britain, pouring millions of marks into building ever more sophisticated and powerful battleships to keep the sea routes to her colonies open in time of war. But what if Germany changed the rules? What if she threw away her overseas colonies in exchange for a land-based empire? In this way she could circumvent Britain’s naval supremacy, rendering the British fleet largely impotent. It would take a great deal of theorising over the coming twenty years before Karl Haushofer’s concepts on geographical politics would be completely formulated, but by then Germany had suffered defeat in the First World War, and as a result had already lost her colonies and an empire. Thus Haushofer’s theories gained a disproportionate importance.

      Following their visit to Oxford, Karl and Martha Haushofer travelled on to Cambridge. Here the Professor was due to complete his British tour with a lecture to the Cambridge Foreign Science Students Committee. The Secretary of this society was a Cambridge lecturer by the name of Herbert Roberts, and the Haushofers soon became firm friends with him, his wife Violet and their son Patrick, a brilliant young student at Eton.

      Over the next forty years the two families would maintain their friendship, the Roberts visiting Germany to stay with the Haushofers at their Bavarian country home, Hartshimmelhof, and the Haushofers making return visits to Cambridge. Herbert Roberts and Karl Haushofer’s friendship was to be mirrored by their sons, Patrick and Albrecht.

      By 1919, following a brief wartime career as an artillery general in the service of the Kaiser, Karl Haushofer, now titled Professor General, had become a member of Munich University’s Department of Geography. Here he lectured on his new science of geopolitics, defined as ‘a science concerned with the dependence of the domestic and foreign politics of peoples upon their physical environment’.¹² He was already redefining his theories, adjusting them to explain why Germany’s turn-of-the-century imperial and foreign policies had proven unworkable. His theories, which he was to postulate to the eager Rudolf Hess, had evolved in the following way: Imperial Germany’s attempts at empire had been fatally flawed. Her colonies lay far overseas, and thus were not safe so long as Britain ruled the waves. Therefore, Haushofer declared, Germany should recognise that these colonies were of no practical use, and should be given up in exchange for the right to expand Germany’s land-based European frontiers to re-absorb all Europe’s ethnic Germanic peoples in western Poland, the Sudetenland, Austria, the north-western extremity of Yugoslavia, Switzerland, northern Italy and Alsace-Lorraine, together with sufficient territory to meet her new needs (Lebensraum). Germany’s future prosperity lay in obtaining a land-based empire of connected territory (safe from the dangers of the sea) to the east, a vast ‘Eurasian Empire’ that might one day stretch from the Baltic to the Pacific. Haushofer quietly ignored the small but significant fact that this territory currently belonged to someone else – Russia.

      Whilst Hess was becoming ever more involved with Professor Haushofer, taken in like a long-lost member of his family and enormously enjoying his new role of university student, another force began to enter his life. Late in the spring of 1921, Hess persuaded Professor Haushofer to accompany him one evening to a working-class district of Munich to hear a man – Hess did not know his name – speak.

      With some misgivings, Haushofer accompanied Hess to a roughneck beerhouse called the Sterneckerbrau. Once inside, they took a seat at the rear of a dingy, smoke-filled back room, the air heavy with the scent of tobacco, beer and sweat. Soon a man stood up on a low platform at the front and began to talk. Haushofer would later recall how he noticed that once Adolf Hitler’s harsh-toned voice began haranguing his audience, rising in tempo and ferocity against the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles, venting his spleen against the evils of Communism and gesticulating wildly, Hess became mesmerised.

      Karl Haushofer was not as immediately impressed with Hitler as Hess was. He thought Hitler’s rantings crude and without form, basically echoing and amplifying the cry of the Nationalists who could be heard on any street corner in Munich, angry men decrying the way Germany had been defeated, denouncing the injustices of 1919, and condemning those villainous Communists who would see their beloved fatherland ruined. However, despite his first impression that Hitler’s style was overly dramatic and noisy, the Professor of Geopolitics did pay attention to the evident way Hitler’s oratory instilled enthusiasm in the crowd by sheer force of will. Here was a man of potential, a man who with guidance and support could become an important force. All he needed was a political education; tutoring in the use of protocol, political finesse and style.

      Later that same night Hess persuaded his new girlfriend, Ilse Pröhl, to accompany him to another meeting at the Sterneckerbrau, saying: ‘You must come with me to a meeting of the National Socialist Workers’ Party. I have just been there with the General. Someone unknown spoke … if anyone can free us from Versailles he is the man – this unknown will restore our honour.’¹³

      Adolf Hitler in 1921 was a case of a man with extraordinary speaking ability being in the right pace at the right time. What he said was on the whole well received because it was what the people wanted to hear. In 1920s Munich, the masses did not want to hear that Germany had lost the First World War through the ineptitude of its leaders; that the German military’s yearning to flex its muscles had blinded it to the dangers of fighting Russia, France and Britain at the same time, with disastrous results. Hitler charged into the political arena and, with all the venom of a maniacal bible-belt preacher, screamed that Germany had been tricked and deceived, that underhand people had worked behind the scenes to cause the country’s downfall. And worse yet, he proclaimed, those plotters were still at work against Germany and her people. With a powerful turn of phrase and a magnetism rarely seen in politics, Adolf Hitler indoctrinated his audiences with the idea that anti-German plotters, Communists and, worst of all, the Jews,