Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
When Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess set off for Britain on a peace mission in May 1941, he launched one of the great mysteries of the Second World War. Had he really acted alone, without Hitler's knowledge? Who were the British he had come to see? Was British intelligence involved? Award-winning historian Peter Padfield presents striking new evidence that demands the wholesale reappraisal of the episode. For, allied to a powerful argument that Hess must have had both Hitler's backing and considerable encouragement from Britain, Padfield demonstrates that he also brought with him a draft peace treaty committing Hitler to the evacuation of occupied European countries. Made public, this would have destroyed Churchill's campaign to bring the United States into the war. Expertly woven into a compelling narrative that touches on Lord (Victor) Rothschild and the Cambridge spy ring, possible British foreknowledge of Operation Barbarossa and the 'final solution', MI6's use of Hess to prevent the bombing of London and the mysterious circumstances of his death in Spandau prison – including the previously unseen witness accounts from that day – Hess, Hitler and Churchill is among the most important history books of recent years.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 805
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
i
HESS, HITLER & CHURCHILL
THE REAL TURNING POINT OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR – A SECRET HISTORY
PETER PADFIELD
iii
For Jane
Contents
List of illustrations
Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess at a Nazi rally in Weimar in 1936.
Winston Churchill with Viscount Halifax in 1938.
Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, the ‘boxing Marquess’ of Clydesdale.
Albrecht Haushofer.
James Lonsdale Bryans.
Sir Samuel Hoare with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
Colonel Stewart Menzies with his second wife in 1932.
Claude Dansey of MI6 in the 1930s.
Abwehr chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.
Kenneth de Courcy.
Carl Burckhardt.
Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden in 1941.
Hitler, Goebbels and Hess celebrating the anniversary of the Nazi ‘seizure of power’ at the Berlin Sportpalast, January 1941.
The wreckage of Hess’s Me Bf 110 at Floors Farm, Eaglesham, Renfrewshire.
The Duke of Hamilton in flying kit.
The Duke of Kent in RAF uniform.
The ‘summer house’ in the garden of Spandau jail, where Hess died.viii
The extension flex with which he hanged himself, attached to the window catch.
The lower end of the flex unplugged.
The back of Hess’s neck at the post-mortem, showing a horizontal mark more typical of strangulation than hanging.
The ‘suicide note’ found in Hess’s clothes.
Acknowledgements
I have to thank Andrew Lownie, my agent, for providing important contacts and documents for this project and for his unfailing support from the beginning. One of those contacts, the late Duc de Grantmesnil-Lorraine, Kenneth de Courcy in this story, was a mine of information on the personalities and politics of the war years, especially Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, the Duke of Buccleuch and Lord Rothschild, patron of the ‘Cambridge ring’ of Soviet spies. It was only after Grantmesnil’s death that I learned he had been given first-hand information on Hess’s peace mission by an officer who guarded Hess in captivity.
The late Adrian Liddell Hart, son of Captain Basil Liddell Hart, was generous in sharing the results of his own researches into Hess’s mission. The late Duchess of Hamilton, wife of the 14th Duke, provided much information about her husband and the events surrounding Hess’s arrival, as did her son, the 15th Duke, and his brother, James Douglas-Hamilton, now Lord Selkirk of Douglas, who wrote a pioneering book on Hess’s arrival, Motive for a Mission; I am grateful for permission to quote from letters he published from his father’s papers.
Rudolf Hess’s son, the late Wolf Rüdiger Hess, besides providing much material assistance, granted permission to quote from his father’s letters and alleged suicide note, and released the pathologists who conducted the second autopsy into his father’s death, Professors W. Eisenmenger and W. Spann of Munich University, from their oath xof silence. In their turn they spent much time and trouble answering my queries, for which I am most grateful.
I am particularly grateful to the late John Howell, who provided the introduction to the informant whose testimony provides the key to the original official cover-up of Hess’s peace mission, and who arranged question and answer sessions. Unfortunately the informant, after referring to his former masters (in the Foreign Office or MI6) insisted on anonymity, which I have to honour.
The late Robert Cecil, liaison between MI6 and the Foreign Office during Hess’s captivity in Britain, helped enormously with Foreign Office personalities and procedures, as did the late Lord Sherfield (Roger Makins at the time of this story), Sir Frank Roberts, Lord Gladwyn (Gladwyn Jebb) and Lord (David) Eccles, who was adviser to Sir Samuel Hoare in the Madrid Embassy. From the other side of the intelligence divide, the late Drs Wilhelm Höttl, Otto John and Eduard Calic, author of the most insightful biography of Reinhard Heydrich, provided information on Albrecht Haushofer and the German resistance to Hitler, as did my friend, Peter C. Hansen, one-time courier for Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr; and I am grateful to Ernst Haiger for much information from his current researches into the Haushofers, especially Albrecht.
Dr Scott Newton provided valuable insights into the personalities and motives of the British ‘appeasers’, as did John Harris and Richard Wilbourn, whose lateral thinking and persistent investigation into all matters connected with Hess’s mission have provided some of the most telling information I have included in this book. I should also like to thank Ron Williams, whose father was involved in the search for peace, for his researches on my behalf, his hospitality and his constant support.
Roy C. Nesbit, co-author of The Flight of Rudolf Hess: Myths and Reality, helped enormously with RAF and Messerschmitt technicalities, and was most generous with the results of his own researches. I was helped by former MI6 officers who wish to remain anonymous; by the late Group Captain Frederick Winterbotham, former chief of Air Intelligence; the late Colonel ‘Tar’ Robertson of MI5 and the ‘Double-Cross Committee’; the late Lieutenant Colonel John xiMcCowan, who was ordered to apprehend SS parachutists on a mission to assassinate Hess in England; by Squadron Leader R.G. Woodman, who investigated Hess’s flight into British air space; Maurice Pocock, who was ‘scrambled’ in his Spitfire too late to intercept the intruder; and Felicity Ashbee, Moira Pearson and Nancy Goodall who helped plot Hess’s incoming aircraft. I should also like to thank all those who replied to my original request for information, who are listed in my earlier (1991) biography of Hess.
My wife, Jane, was, as ever, a constant support and did much excellent work on the files in The National Archives; our son, Guy, gave invaluable advice and technical IT support; Mary and David Thorpe provided such generous hospitality at their home near Kew that our visits to the archives were a real pleasure. The final script was edited by Robert Sharman with care, sensitivity and attention to the questions readers might ask, for which I am most grateful.
Finally, I should like to thank the following authors, editors and publishers for permission to quote from published works: The National Archives, Kew, for Guy Liddell’s diaries, filed as KV 4/186; W.R. Hess (ed.) Rudolf Hess: Briefe 1908–1933 © 1987 by LangenMüller in der Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, München; Druffel Verlag for Ilse Hess (ed.) Ein Schicksal in Briefen; K.G. Sauer Verlag for E. Fröhlich (ed.) Die Tagebücher von Josef Goebbels; and Churchill Archives Centre for permission to quote from the papers of Sir Alexander Cadogan, ACAD 1/1. I have been unable to trace the copyright holder in Lieutenant Colonel A.M. Scott’s ‘Camp Z’ diary at the Imperial War Museum.
Dramatis personae
ATTLEE, Clement Leader of the Labour Party and a fierce critic of ‘appeasing’ Hitler. When Churchill came to power in May 1940 Attlee brought Labour into coalition government with the Conservatives. Appointed Lord Privy Seal, later Deputy Prime Minister, he looked after domestic affairs while Churchill ran the War Cabinet.
BEAVERBROOK, Lord A Canadian who came to England in 1910, entered Parliament as a Conservative and bought the Daily Express, the first of several newspapers he acquired and increased in circulation. In 1917 he was raised to the peerage. During the 1930s he promoted ‘appeasement’ of Nazi Germany, and wobbled in that direction after the outbreak of war, but Churchill, on becoming Prime Minister, harnessed his immense energy by appointing him Minister of Aircraft Production; in this role he made a major contribution to winning the Battle of Britain. Although not in the War Cabinet, he was one of Churchill’s closest confidants.
BEDFORD, Duke of A prominent pacifist. At the outbreak of war, as Marquis of Tavistock, he co-founded the British People’s Party advocating an immediate end to war with Germany and the adoption of a monetary policy known as ‘social credit’. In February 1940 he travelled to Dublin to discuss peace terms at the German Legation. Later that year he succeeded as 12th Duke. Disliking the family seat, Woburn Abbey – acquired by the government as headquarters for xivSOE – he lived at Cairnsmore in Galloway, Scotland. Although kept under surveillance by MI5, he was not arrested as it was felt this would only give his views more prominence.
BLUNT, Anthony Homosexual art historian and member of the notorious Soviet spy ring including Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. Recruited into MI5 in June 1940 as personal assistant to Guy Liddell, head of B Division, he passed intelligence to the Russians throughout the war. At war’s end he was despatched to Germany by Buckingham Palace on a mission to retrieve sensitive royal documents, thereby it is said, gaining immunity from prosecution when he was unmasked in 1963.
BORMANN, Martin A farm estate manager and Freikorps activist, he joined the Nazi Party in 1927, becoming regional business manager in Thuringia. Successfully concealing his coarse appetites and unprincipled ambition he was appointed Rudolf Hess’s personal secretary and head of his cabinet in July 1933; he also managed Hitler’s finances, so insinuating himself into the Führer’s confidence.
BROCKET, Lord Conservative politician from a millionaire brewing family with great estates in England and Scotland. A member of the Anglo-German Fellowship committed to increasing friendship with Germany, he was an active Nazi sympathiser and used by Lord Halifax to convey British government views to the German government. In April 1939 he travelled to Berlin with the Duke of Buccleuch and General J.F.C. Fuller to attend Hitler’s 50th birthday celebrations. After the outbreak of war he promoted and financed efforts for a compromise peace.
BUCCLEUCH, Duke of The grandest of Conservative grandees with the largest private landholding in the kingdom and several great houses: Drumlanrig, Dumfriesshire, Bowhill in the Border region (and perhaps by coincidence practically on Hess’s flight path in May 1941), Boughton, Northamptonshire, and others. A great friend of Stewart Menzies and on first name terms with King George VI, his sister was xvmarried to the king’s younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester. He was committed to friendship with Germany on imperial strategic rather than ideological grounds.
BURCKHARDT, Carl Swiss academic and diplomat. As League of Nations High Commissioner for the Free City of Danzig from 1937 to 1939 he acquired experience of the German demands for living space (Lebensraum) in eastern Europe; Hitler told him personally that he wanted ‘nothing from the West’, but ‘must have a free hand in the east’. During the war as a member of the International Committee of the Red Cross based in Geneva he had occasion to visit Germany on ICRC business, and was used as an intermediary for peace overtures by both sides.
BUTLER, R.A. ‘Rab’ Conservative politician with a first-class intellect. He supported Chamberlain’s policy of ‘appeasing’ Hitler, and in 1938 was appointed Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Like many others, he distrusted Churchill, describing him in private after he succeeded Chamberlain as ‘a half breed American’ and ‘the greatest adventurer of modern political history’. He and his senior, Lord Halifax, continued to pursue ‘appeasement’ clandestinely in 1940 in contravention of Churchill’s policy of no negotiation with the enemy.
CADOGAN, Sir Alexander Passed top in the exams for entry into the diplomatic service in 1908; 30 years later he was appointed Permanent Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs (head of the permanent staff of the Foreign Office) in place of the outspoken anti-German, Vansittart (see below). Outwardly restrained, he reserved often acid assessments of colleagues for his diaries, published posthumously; the originals are held by the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge.
CANARIS, Admiral Wilhelm The son of a wealthy industrialist, Canaris had a distinguished record in the First World War, latterly as a U-boat commander. After the lost war he was active in the clandestine re-building of the U-boat arm in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles. Appointed head of the Abwehr (Military xviCounter-Intelligence) in 1934, he had by 1938 realised that the Reich was being led to disaster, and he began conspiring against Hitler. During the war he passed information to the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). With a subtlety of mind unusual in the German naval officer corps, he was an enigma to his colleagues, and remains so to history. He was brutally executed as a traitor in the final days of the war.
CHAMBERLAIN, Neville Conservative politician and British Prime Minister from 1937 to May 1940, when he lost the confidence of the Labour and Liberal parties after British defeats in Norway. He is remembered chiefly for attempting to preserve peace by conciliating, or ‘appeasing’ Hitler’s territorial demands. His choices were limited as Britain’s armed services had been run down in the atmosphere of disarmament after the horrors of the First World War, yet his policy demonstrated complete misunderstanding of the determination of the German military leadership to reverse the decision of the first war, and of Hitler’s aim for European hegemony.
CHURCHILL, Winston A descendant of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, he was the son of Lord Randolph Churchill and Jennie Jerome, socialite daughter of a New York millionaire; he saw too little of either parent while growing up, which distressed him, and he did not distinguish himself at school. His career as a cavalry officer, war reporter, Member of Parliament and minister in the social reforming Liberal government of 1905–1915 reads like adventure fiction. Subsequently he crossed to the Conservative benches, serving in the post-war Conservative government as Chancellor of the Exchequer. After the government fell he found himself at odds with the party leaders and spent the 1930s writing the biography of his illustrious ancestor, Marlborough, gaining strategic insights which were to illumine his subsequent war leadership, while attempting to convince the government and a complacent public of the need to re-arm against Hitler. On the outbreak of war Chamberlain appointed him First Lord of the Admiralty. Although distrusted by many as an impulsive adventurer, when Chamberlain fell he had sufficient support from all sides to succeed him as Prime Minister. A brilliant conversationalist and xviiorator with an original mind, he yet suffered periods of deep depression which he called his ‘black dog’. He has been judged by history as one of the greatest Britons.
CLYDESDALE, Marquis of, Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, eldest son of the Duke of Hamilton, the premier peer of Scotland. He and his three younger brothers, Lords George (‘Geordie’), Malcolm and David Douglas-Hamilton all took up flying and served in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force. Clydesdale became the youngest squadron leader of his time and in 1933 was appointed chief pilot for the first ever flight over Mount Everest; with his co-pilot and lifelong friend, D.F. McIntyre, he described the feat in The Pilot’s Book of Everest (1936). The grass landing strip adjacent to his home, Dungavel House, south of Glasgow, is believed to have been Rudolf Hess’s destination on his flight to Scotland. Clydesdale became 14th Duke of Hamilton on the death of his father in March 1940.
COLVILLE, Jock Seconded from the Foreign Office to 10 Downing Street at the outbreak of war, Colville served Chamberlain and then Churchill as Private Secretary, becoming particularly close to Churchill. The diaries he kept, although this was forbidden in wartime, provide unique insights into life and work with the Prime Minister, the personalities around him and the conduct of the war. The originals are held by the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge.
DANSEY, Claude, served as a junior officer in the South African (Boer) War of 1899–1902, latterly in intelligence. He was subsequently recruited into the Security Service, MI5, then joined the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. Serving in Rome in the 1930s, he recognised dangerous weaknesses in MI6’s structure in Europe and set up a parallel intelligence-gathering organisation comprised mainly of business people termed the Z Organisation (his own code-name was ‘Z’) with a particularly strong presence in Switzerland. After the outbreak of war he was recalled to London by a new head of MI6, Stewart Menzies, who made him his right-hand man (Assistant Chief of the Secret Service). xviii
DE COURCY, Kenneth Before the war secretary and intelligence officer of the Imperial Policy Group of high Tory landowners, bankers, industrialists and military strategists aware of the disparity between Britain’s imperial commitments and her armed forces, and anxious to avoid any continental European entanglement. The group was dissolved on the outbreak of war, but de Courcy retained his influential connections and continued to be the recipient of confidences, which he noted in a diary kept in a locked safe. A friend of Stewart Menzies and the Duke of Buccleuch, both of whom favoured compromise peace with Germany to allow Hitler to attack Russia, he was considered potentially subversive by Guy Liddell of MI5, although never arrested.
DOUGLAS-HAMILTON, Douglassee Clydesdale, Marquis of
EDEN, Anthony Conservative politician who had served in the First World War and worked to prevent a second. Appointed Foreign Secretary in 1935 he attempted to use the League of Nations to curb the dictators, Hitler and Mussolini, but in 1938 resigned over disagreements with Chamberlain’s ‘appeasement’ policy. Churchill recalled him to succeed Lord Halifax as Foreign Secretary at the end of 1940.
GOEBBELS, Josef A rejected novelist and playwright, he had a PhD from Heidelberg University and was regarded as an intellectual by the old guard of the Nazi Party. Appointed Gauleiter (District Leader) of Berlin, and after the Nazis took power in 1933 Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, in which role he exercised total control over all media. One of Hitler’s closest colleagues during the war, and like his leader a visceral anti-Semite, he made speeches and commissioned poisonous films to inspire disgust and hatred of Jews. The diary entries he dictated each day were also informed by propaganda values.
GÖRING, Hermann A fighter pilot in the First World War, in the final months given command of the famous Fighter Squadron 1 formerly led by von Richthofen. An early convert to Nazism, when Hitler took power in 1933 he was appointed Minister of the Interior for xixPrussia; he formed the Prussian Secret State Police (Gestapo), using them in ruthless suppression of Communists and other opponents. Also appointed Minister of Aviation, he created a German air force and was appointed its chief in 1935. The following year Hitler commissioned him to head a four-year plan to speed up re-armament, rewarding his success by promoting him Reichsmarschall and designating him his successor. Hiding his brutal character under a grossly flamboyant exterior given to lavish entertainment and outlandish costumes, he convinced many from Britain that he would make an acceptable alternative to Hitler, and was the source of numerous peace offensives before and after the outbreak of war.
HALIFAX, Lord Nicknamed ‘the Holy Fox’ for his devotion to Christianity and the hunt, Hitler mocked him as ‘the English parson’. In 1938 on Eden’s resignation, Chamberlain appointed him Foreign Secretary to pursue ‘appeasement’, and was not disappointed. Dedicated to peace at almost any price, he strove for compromise with Germany up to and beyond the outbreak of war. When Chamberlain fell in May 1940, he was Buckingham Palace’s choice to succeed as Prime Minister, but his reluctance allowed Churchill to seize the prize. Despite their very different views Churchill retained him as Foreign Secretary in the War Cabinet until the end of that year when he sent him to Washington as British Ambassador.
HAMILTON, Duke ofsee Clydesdale, Marquis of
HASSELL, Ulrich von Career diplomat from the Prussian landed nobility married to the daughter of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, for whom he had worked as secretary after being wounded in the First World War. Posted as Ambassador to Rome in 1932, he joined the Nazi Party the following year, but became disgusted by Hitler’s methods. Recalled home in 1938 he supported opposition groups plotting a generals’ revolt to oust the regime. After the outbreak of war he passed messages to the British government through Halifax’s envoy, Lonsdale Bryans. He was arrested and executed after the failed July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler. xx
HAUSHOFER, Albrecht Academic geographer, the son of Professor Karl Haushofer and his half-Jewish wife, Martha. Rudolf Hess protected him and his brother from the consequences of their Jewish blood; in return Albrecht served Hess as a roving expert on foreign affairs, particularly on British politics and personalities. Keenly aware of the evil in Nazism and hating himself for his complicity with the regime, he also worked for an opposition group. He was executed by Himmler’s SS towards the end of the war.
HAUSHOFER, Professor Karl An army general turned academic; on retirement in 1919, he taught Political Geography at Munich University. Developing a Geopolitical doctrine including the necessity for expanding eastwards for living space (Lebensraum) to ensure food supplies, and stressing the need for friendship with Britain, he advised Hitler on these lines through Rudolf Hess when both were imprisoned after the failed ‘Beerhall Putsch’ of 1923. It is evident in Hitler’s testament, Mein Kampf, and in his policies after coming to power. Haushofer and his wife committed suicide after the lost war.
HAUSHOFER, Martha Daughter of Georg Ludwig Meyer, a German-Jewish businessman, she married Karl Haushofer in 1896 and was mother to Albrecht and Heinz.
HESS, Ilse, née Pröhl. Raised in an upper middle class family in Berlin, she first met Rudolf Hess in 1920 on moving to Munich to take her entrance exams for Munich University. He had just returned from a flying mission against a Communist uprising in the Ruhr and was wearing the field-grey uniform of the Freikorps Epp. She knew with an unforgettable clarity, she wrote later, that her life had been directed towards this young man. So it proved: they found they were living in the same pension, and they shared a love of walking and skiing and soon a dedication to Adolf Hitler; she also took on secretarial duties for Hess, and they married in 1927 with Hitler’s blessing. After the war she published his letters from captivity in two moving volumes. xxi
HESS, Rudolf Born into the house of a prosperous German import-export merchant in the Egyptian seaport of Alexandria in 1894, and destined to follow his father into the family firm. He attended the small German school in the city until the age of twelve, and after being tutored at home for two years was sent to a boarding school at Bad Godesberg on the Rhine; there he excelled at maths and sciences and developed a love for the music of the German composers, Beethoven in particular. Thence he was sent to a commercial college in Switzerland, and afterwards apprenticed to a firm in Hamburg to learn the practical side of business. But with no desire to follow the path his father had chosen for him the outbreak of the First World War came as a personal emotional release. He volunteered for the army and rose to commissioned rank before transferring to the air force. Germany’s defeat came as a profound shock. Enrolling at Munich University to study Political Economy, his life was given a new direction when in 1920 he heard Hitler speak at a meeting of the young National Socialist German Workers’ (‘Nazi’) Party, and promise to restore Germany’s honour. He became Hitler’s most faithful follower, his co-writer for his memoirs, his secretary and when he achieved power in 1933, his deputy.
HESS, Wolf Rüdiger The only son of Rudolf and Ilse Hess, born in November 1937 and only three-and-a-half years old when his father flew off to Scotland and captivity. After the war he qualified as an engineer and entered government service. He did not see his father again until at the age of 32 on Christmas Eve 1969 he visited him in Spandau prison with his mother. He led a vigorous but ultimately unsuccessful international campaign to have his father freed, edited a volume of his father’s letters and wrote two books about his father’s mission to Britain and inhumane period of imprisonment. He died in 2001.
HESSE, Prince Philipp of After service in the First World War, Prince Philipp of Hesse studied art history and architecture in Darmstadt, but left without a degree and moved to Rome, where he set up as an interior designer. In 1925 he married Princess Mafalda, daughter of the King of Italy. Impressed by Fascism in Italy, he joined xxiithe Nazi Party in 1930 and acted as go-between for Hitler with Mussolini, also as Hitler’s art agent in Italy. Both he and his wife were arrested and sent to concentration camps in 1943 as Hitler grew disenchanted with the princely houses; both survived the war.
HEYDRICH, Reinhard, grew up in a musical household: his father, Bruno, was a composer and opera singer who founded the Halle Conservatory of Music; his mother was a piano teacher. He himself became a talented violinist. As a schoolboy false rumours that his father had Jewish blood meant he was taunted as a Jew. Distinctly Aryan in appearance – over six feet tall with blond hair, blue eyes and a long, equine face – he nonetheless tried to distance himself from the jeers by joining aggressively anti-Semitic societies. He entered the navy in 1922 and formed a fateful friendship in the cadet training ship with an officer, Wilhelm Canaris (see above), famed for clandestine re-armament, who inspired him with interest in espionage and intelligence. When Himmler was looking for an intelligence officer in 1931 Heydrich was discharged from the navy, allegedly for breaking a marriage engagement, and engaged to establish an intelligence office for him, soon named the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD). It was the beginning of a diabolic partnership between Himmler and his new chief executive that was to define Nazi repression, aggression and genocide: both were morally blind and completely ruthless. Heydrich was assassinated in 1942 by British (SOE)-trained Czech agents.
HIMMLER, Heinrich Born into a middle-class Catholic family, second son of a Munich Gymnasium headmaster, he attended church regularly and was a model pupil at school, invariably near the top of his class. The exception was the gym, where he proved physically inept and suffered humiliation. He wanted to become an army officer, but the war ended too soon. Instead he turned to agriculture, but soon lost his job and became swept up in the post-war ferment of nationalist anti-Communist politics in Munich, serving in Ernst Röhm’s paramilitary Freikorps during the failed ‘Beerhall Putsch’, subsequently touring rural Bavaria on anti-Communist, anti-Jewish speaking tours for the Nazi Party, and organising protection squads (Schutzstaffeln or xxiiiSS) for party meetings. His conscientiousness in this role led to his appointment as Reichsführer-SS (National Leader-SS) in 1929 just as hyper-inflation was boosting party membership. He forged the SS into a pure-blooded (no Jewish ancestors) praetorian guard loyal to the Führer, attracting many from the higher social classes into the officer corps, including Reinhard Heydrich, whom he made chief of his Security Service. After the Nazis came to power he took over the secret state police (Gestapo) and formed a closed triangle of repression: SS– Gestapo–concentration camps. Commissioned by Hitler to eliminate European Jewry, he charged Heydrich with the detailed planning of what in 1942 became industrialised murder. Captured at the end of the war, he committed suicide with a poison pill.
HITLER, Adolf Son of an Austrian customs official who disciplined him savagely and a doting mother who spoiled him. At elementary school he was a leader of other boys playing war games, which he loved, but, sent to a Realschule (Technical Secondary School) in Linz, he hated it and failed to apply himself. Characterised by one teacher as stubborn and hot-tempered, he fantasised about becoming a great artist, but when he applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1907, he was rejected. His mother was stricken with cancer and he looked after her until she died, then moved to Vienna, living an indolent life, but painting city scenes, which he sold. Thence in 1913 he moved to Munich, artistic capital of Germany, there greeting the outbreak of the First World War with enthusiasm, and enlisting in the Bavarian infantry. He served with courage as a despatch runner on the western front and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st class, but rose no higher than corporal. In the turbulence after the war he was employed by the army to infiltrate the German Workers’ Party in Munich (soon changed to the National Socialist German Workers’, or ‘Nazi’, Party). He proved its most effective orator, and after discharge from the army became principal propagandist and leader of the party, drawing large crowds when he spoke. He played on the resentments and prejudices of his audiences, blaming the lost war and humiliation of the Versailles Treaty on international Jewry. As hyper-inflation ruined lives, swelling both Nazi and Communist Party membership, he struck deals with xxivnationalist politicians and military and industrial chiefs who in 1933 brought him to power to defeat Communism and remove the limitations imposed on the armed forces by the Versailles Treaty. He used the burning of the Parliament building, the Reichstag, allegedly by a Communist, to liquidate the rule of law, establish a dictatorship and arm for war to smash Soviet Russia and gain hegemony in Europe. His overriding emotional goal was the purification of German blood; analysis of his writings and speeches suggests he suspected he himself had Jewish blood, but this Hebrew ancestor, if he existed, has never been found. At the end of the war he forced on Europe he committed suicide under the ruins of Berlin.
HOARE, Sir Samuel High-flying Conservative politician who first entered Parliament in 1910. His health prevented him serving in the First World War, but he learned Russian and was recruited into the Secret Service and served in St Petersburg, then Rome. Between the wars he held senior posts in government: Secretary of State for Air; for India; Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary. A supporter of Chamberlain’s ‘appeasement’ policy, he was subsequently blamed as one of the ‘guilty men’ opposing re-armament. Churchill dismissed him when he came to power in May 1940, but subsequently sent him as Ambassador to Madrid specifically to prevent General Franco from bringing Spain into the war on the side of the dictators. In this he succeeded, but it was his last appointment. He died in 1959.
HOHENLOHE, Prince Max zu Descended from one of Germany’s oldest and most illustrious princely houses with great estates in the Sudetenland and Spain and a wide circle of social contacts, he was a member of Himmler’s influential ‘Circle of Friends’ supporting the growth of the SS. A friend of Göring, he offered his services as a mediator between Germany and Britain before the outbreak of war, and continued to meet British agents and ambassadors throughout the war, reporting back to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin.
JAHNKE, Kurt Born into a Junker (landowning) family in the Prussian province of Posen in 1882, Jahnke emigrated to the United xxvStates at age sixteen, joined the US Marines and became a US citizen. During the First World War he worked for the German navy as an intelligence and sabotage agent based in San Francisco, continuing his activities from Mexico after America entered the war. Returning to Germany during a period of secret German armament co-operation with the Soviets in the early 1920s, he worked for the Fourth Department of the Soviet Commissariat for War. Subsequently he created his own intelligence bureau in Berlin, working closely with Admiral Canaris (see above) and in the late 1930s was certainly in touch with the British, including Vansittart’s agents. His bureau was merged with Hess’s intelligence department under Pfeffer von Salomon before the outbreak of war, but dissolved for an unexplained reason in April 1940, when he was engaged as adviser to Walter Schellenberg, head of foreign counter-intelligence in Himmler’s Security Service (SD). Jahnke had a Swiss wife with whom he frequently visited Switzerland. After Hess’s flight to Scotland Schellenberg received a detailed report of Jahnke’s activities as a top-level British agent who met his contacts in Switzerland. Jahnke denied it. There is no doubt that he and his secretary and agent-runner, Carl Marcus, hated Hitler and Nazism. He was captured by the Russians in 1945 and executed; other reports have him returning to live in Berlin or Switzerland.
KENT, Duke of Prince George, fourth son of King George V, shared with his eldest brother Edward, Prince of Wales (subsequently Edward VIII and, after abdication, Duke of Windsor – see below), admiration for the benefits Nazism had brought Germany, and acted as conduit between Edward and the German Ambassador in London, von Ribbentrop. While taking royal duties seriously, he was also a cocaine-using bisexual playboy who had many affairs with both sexes. Married to Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark, they made one of the most glamorous couples on the international circuit. In April 1940 he joined the staff of RAF Training Command with the rank of Group Captain, subsequently touring RAF bases on morale-boosting visits. He was killed in an unexplained air crash in August 1942. xxvi
KIRKPATRICK, Ivone Of Catholic Irish descent, he was severely wounded in the First World War at Gallipoli; subsequently transferred to propaganda and intelligence duties, he ended the war running a network of British agents from the Netherlands. He joined the Foreign Office in 1919 and served as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Berlin from 1933 to 1938, privy to top-level meetings between British ministers and top Nazis, including Hitler and Hess. In 1940 he was appointed director of the foreign division of the Ministry of Information; behind the official posting he served on the board of SOE after Churchill set up the sabotage and propaganda organisation. An obvious choice to debrief Hess on his arrival in Scotland, there are questions about what he may have omitted from his official reports on these interviews. His memoirs are uninformative. He died in 1964.
LIDDELL, Guy Son of a Royal Artillery officer, cousin of Lewis Carroll’s muse, Alice Liddell, he was studying to be a professional cellist when the First World War broke out. Enlisting in the Royal Artillery, he was commissioned from the ranks and won the Military Cross. Afterwards joining Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, he transferred in 1931 to the Security Service, MI5. In June 1940, after Churchill dismissed MI5’s Director General and redirected priorities to combat fascist instead of Communist subversion, he was appointed Director of ‘B’ Division (Counter-Espionage). Dubbed by the intelligence specialist, Nigel West, as ‘unquestionably the pre-eminent Counter-Intelligence officer of his generation’, the fact that he engaged the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt and the pro-Soviet scientist Victor Rothschild in MI5, and spent much off-duty time with other members of the Cambridge spy ring, particularly Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, led to post-war charges that he was a double agent. Nigel West, who edited his wartime diaries (held at The National Archives, Kew) for publication, strongly refutes the allegations, ascribing the company he kept to social naïvety. He was far from naïve in his professional judgements, and while there is no direct evidence against him, questions will surely remain.
LIDDELL HART, Captain Basil Leading military historian and strategist, military correspondent of The Daily Telegraph 1925–1935 xxviiand The Times 1935–1939, he believed Britain should not become militarily involved on the European continent, and after the outbreak of war promoted compromise peace with Germany.
LLOYD GEORGE, David Liberal politician and cabinet minister, as a reforming Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1908 laying foundations for a welfare state. He opposed Winston Churchill, his friend and colleague at the Admiralty, for his determination to outbuild Germany’s growing navy, but unlike many Liberals supported Britain’s declaration of war in 1914 after the German invasion of Belgium. As Prime Minster from 1916 he prosecuted the war with determination and success. At the Paris peace conference in 1919 he tried to lighten the punishments imposed on Germany, subsequently supporting territorial concessions to Germany, and after Hitler’s accession to power praising him for the transformation he had wrought, even if not by democratic methods. After the outbreak of the Second World War he promoted a compromise peace with Germany and expected to succeed Churchill when he fell. He died in 1945.
MENZIES, Stewart In all probability the son of Captain Sir George Holford, courtier to King Edward VII, who married Susannah Menzies, a favourite at court, in the Chapel Royal, St James, shortly after her husband’s death; Stewart was allowed to use Holford’s London residence, Dorchester House, as his own. After Eton, where he was president of the prefect society ‘Pop’, he was commissioned in the Life Guards and fought in the First World War on the western front. After being gassed in 1915 he was transferred to intelligence duties, and after the war joined the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Like the Service itself, he considered Soviet Russia a greater threat to British interests than Nazi Germany, and was strongly opposed to war with Germany. He continued to hold this view after he was appointed ‘C’, as the chief of the Service was known, in November 1939, after the death of the incumbent.
MESSERSCHMITT, Professor Willi Designer and builder of Nazi Germany’s most successful fighter aircraft, the Me 109, and chairman xxviiiand managing director of the company that bore his name, with works and airstrip outside Augsburg, near Munich. Hess had supported him through a difficult period, and Messerschmitt repaid him by giving him the fighter-bomber Me 110 he required to fly to Scotland in May 1941. He also provided Hess with flying training and all the modifications Hess requested for the aircraft.
MORTON, Major Desmond Served in the Royal Artillery in the First World War. In 1917 he was shot in the heart, but recovered; awarded the Military Cross, he finished the war as ADC to the Commander of British Forces, Sir Douglas Haig. Subsequently he joined MI6. In 1929 he was appointed head of the Industrial Intelligence Centre investigating the arms manufacturing capabilities of the powers. He lived at Edenbridge, close to Churchill’s home, Chartwell, and during the 1930s supplied secret reports which Churchill used in his attempts to wake the country to the threat from Germany. When Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940 he appointed Morton his personal intelligence assistant to keep an eye on MI6, and installed him in an office next to the cabinet room. Morton, a garrulous raconteur given to over-egging his stories, gradually lost influence to Stewart Menzies.
MUSSOLINI, Benito The founder of Fascism in Italy, an authoritarian, ultranationalist movement transcending class; Mussolini, a former socialist, came to power after leading a march on Rome and ousting the government in 1922, providing one of several models for Hitler’s dictatorship. Deposed soon after the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943, he was summarily executed by Italian partisans in April 1945.
PHILBY, Harold ‘Kim’ Notorious member of the ‘Cambridge spy ring’, including Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, all said to have been recruited by the Soviet NKVD (later KGB) in the early 1930s while undergraduates at Trinity College, Cambridge, under the influence of Anthony Blunt. It was fashionable for intellectuals to look towards Communism as a panacea for unemployment and the class system in Britain. At the beginning of the war Philby was working as a correspondent for The Times. He was recruited into SOE in 1940 and posted xxixto their training establishment at Beaulieu, Hampshire, and was still there in May 1941 when Hess arrived in Scotland. Recruited into MI6 later that year, he supplied secret intelligence to Moscow throughout the war and into the ‘Cold War’. Unmasked in the 1950s, he fled to Moscow in 1963, where he died, a hero of the Soviet Union, in 1998.
RIBBENTROP, Joachim von The son of a Prussian army officer not entitled to the aristocratic ‘von’; the fact that he acquired it from a distant relative by adoption later in life reveals much. After a cosmopolitan childhood with no formal education after fifteen, and service in the First World War, winning the Iron Cross 1st Class, in 1920 he married into the family of a leading German Sekt (sparkling wine) manufacturer and became a prosperous international wine dealer in his own right. A convert to Nazism in 1932, he impressed Hitler with his knowledge of the world, and in 1935 delighted him when, appointed head of a mission to Britain, he brought back a naval treaty. He was sent to London as German Ambassador in 1936, annoying most of those he met with his pomposity and ignorance of British governance. Two years later Hitler appointed him Foreign Minister, and in 1939 he negotiated the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact precipitating the outbreak of war. He was scorned by Göring, Goebbels, Hess and the ‘old fighters’ of the party. At Nuremberg in 1946 he was sentenced to death and hanged.
ROBERTSON, Major T.A. ‘Tar’ After public school and Sandhurst he was commissioned in the Seaforth Highlanders, but resigned after two years, possibly due to debts from high life in London. He joined a City bank, then the Birmingham Police before being recruited into the Security Service, MI5, in 1933. During the Second World War he was head of Section B1a, controlling Nazi spies in Britain who had been ‘turned’ to work as double agents for the British. The information or disinformation they sent their German stations was decided by representatives of service intelligence chiefs meeting weekly as the Twenty, or XX (‘Double-Cross’), Committee under the chairmanship of the Oxford historian, J.C. Masterman. Robertson proved outstanding at running double agents without letting the enemy suspect the xxxdeception, thereby influencing key campaigns, and equally talented at inspiring lifelong affection in his own team. He died in 1994.
RÖHM, Captain Ernst Born in Munich, his father a railway official, he was commissioned in the Bavarian 10th Infantry Regiment in 1908. During the First World War he was severely wounded, bearing the scars for life. Returning to Munich after the war, he served with von Epp’s Freikorps to depose a Soviet government established in the city. He helped to arm Hitler’s paramilitary SA, and in 1923 took part in Hitler’s failed ‘Beerhall Putsch’. In 1931 Hitler appointed him chief of the SA, which grew under his leadership to an unruly force over 4 million strong, threatening the government and the regular military leadership. Hitler decided in favour of the army and conspired with Himmler and Heydrich to purge the SA, whose leaders they arrested on the 30 June 1934, ‘the night of the long knives’. Röhm was among the many subsequently executed.
ROOSEVELT, Franklin D. President of the United States, first elected in March 1933, barely a month after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and noted for his ‘new deal’ legislation to reverse the economic malaise after the Wall Street crash. Re-elected in 1937, he began a major re-armament programme to deter Japanese expansion in the Pacific. In Europe he viewed the survival of Britain and the Royal Navy as vital for US security, and on 11 September 1939 initiated a personal correspondence with Chamberlain and Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, expressing his support. As Assistant Secretary of the US Navy in 1918, he had met Churchill and regarded him as a ‘stinker’, but the secret correspondence they exchanged in the opening years of the Second World War was vital for Churchill’s strategy and the development of a partnership in which US industry was mobilised as the ‘arsenal of democracy’. Isolationist sentiment in America prevented Roosevelt from openly joining the war against the fascist powers, but his industrial and naval support for Britain breached US neutrality in letter and spirit. After winning an unprecedented third term as President in 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor followed by Hitler’s declaration of war against the United xxxiStates propelled America into the war. He died in office just before final victory in 1945.
ROSENBERG, Alfred Born in 1893 in Estonia, then part of Russia, he was studying engineering in Moscow in 1917 when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out. Romantically attracted to Germany – his forbears had been German – he emigrated to Berlin, thence moved to Munich, where he met Hitler and impressed him with his first-hand knowledge of the Russian Revolution and his conviction that it was caused by the conspiracy of international Jewry which aimed to undermine all governments and seize power throughout the world. He became editor of the Nazi newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, and the party’s pre-eminent racial theorist, postulating in his key book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), a race hierarchy with ‘Nordic Aryans’ at the top and Jews at the bottom, and stressing the necessity for laws to protect Nordic blood from contamination. In April 1941, before the assault on Russia, Hitler appointed him his delegate for Central Planning for the East European area about to be conquered, and after the start of the offensive Reichsminister for the occupied east, but he was completely ineffectual against Himmler and regional Nazi governors. He was sentenced to death and hanged at Nuremberg in 1946.
ROTHSCHILD, Victor, grew up at the grand Rothschild mansion, Tring Park, Buckinghamshire. His father, Charles, was a keen naturalist, his uncle, Walter, who lived at Tring, a zoologist, and they awakened in him an early interest in nature; it is said he could identify butterfly species before he could read their names. Educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, he developed into a good-looking young man of remarkable academic, musical and sporting talent. He also drove a racing car, played jazz, collected art and 18th-century books and threw champagne parties. Beneath the gilded exterior, under the influence of Anthony Blunt and others of the Cambridge secret society, the ‘Apostles’, he became a committed Communist, believing in scientific Marxism, and supporting the Soviet Union as potential saviour of the Jewish race threatened by Nazism. After university and a spell of only six months with the family bank, whose ambience bored him, he xxxiireturned to Cambridge, gaining a research fellowship in Zoology. In 1937 his uncle died and he became 3rd Baron Rothschild and head of the dynasty. On the outbreak of war he applied his scientific mind to sabotage research for military intelligence, and in 1940 was recruited by Guy Liddell of MI5 and set up an anti-sabotage section (B1c). He introduced Blunt to Liddell, who recruited him as his personal assistant. Since Blunt and Guy Burgess sub-leased a flat in a London house Rothschild owned, where Liddell and Kim Philby were visitors, it is not surprising that after the defection of Burgess, Donald Maclean and Philby to Moscow and the unmasking of Anthony Blunt in the 1960s Rothschild was rumoured to be the ‘fifth man’ in the Cambridge spy ring. There is strong circumstantial evidence in support, but no direct proof has been found. He died in 1990.
SIMON, Lord, a successful lawyer with a cold manner who liked to insist that despite his name he was not a Jew, entered Parliament as a Liberal in 1906 and was soon appointed to government. During the interwar years he served as Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Like Hoare, tarnished as one of the ‘guilty men’ for supporting ‘appeasement’, he was removed from the War Cabinet when Churchill became Prime Minister, raised to the peerage as Viscount Simon and appointed Lord Chancellor; this was his last government post. He died in 1954.
STALIN, Joseph General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, de facto dictator of Soviet Russia. As a boy he had, like Hitler, suffered physical abuse from a brutal father. He won a scholarship to an Orthodox Seminary at sixteen but once there discovered Marxist literature and joined the Bolshevik Party; subsequently taking part in the Russian Revolution with Lenin, he took over Lenin’s political mantle on his death in 1924. Ruthless in purging rivals and promoting his own personality cult, he forced through collective farming and rapid industrialisation by terrible means: in terms of numbers driven from their homes, wiped out by famine, sent to concentration camps in Siberia, worked to death as slave labourers, executed as ‘enemies of the state’, tortured and murdered by sadists xxxiiiin the NKVD – People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs – and secret state police, Stalin’s victims were on a scale Hitler never matched. German historians have argued that his transformation of Russia forced its mirror image, Nazism, on Germany. Vansittart (see below) would not have agreed. Stalin knew Hitler would turn on him eventually; he agreed to the non-aggression pact of 1939, carving up eastern Europe between them, in order to create a buffer. Despite eventual victory over his enemy, he grew increasingly paranoid, and died of a stroke in 1953.
TAVISTOCK, Marquis ofsee Bedford, Duke of
VANSITTART, Sir Robert A spell at a school in Imperial Germany at the time of the South African (Boer) War when Anglophobia and militarist nationalism poured from all media moulded his view of Germany. In marked contrast to his own school, Eton, he found in German schools and universities ‘no real love of sport or games but only of fighting fitness’, aloof and inhuman teachers who took pleasure in humiliating their pupils, and spying and ‘sneaking’ everywhere. He entered the diplomatic service in 1902 and in 1930 was appointed Permanent Undersecretary (non-political head) at the Foreign Office. Realising that Hitler was bent on war, he advocated alliance with France and Soviet Russia to maintain the peace, while using his intelligence sources, including one inside the German Air Ministry, to brief Churchill on German re-armament. He opposed Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler so stridently that in 1938 he was removed from his post and appointed to a non-position designated Chief Diplomatic Adviser; but he retained his intelligence sources and after Churchill came to power in May 1940 played a senior intelligence and propaganda role. A series of his wireless broadcasts published in January 1941 as Black Record, arguing that Nazism was a natural outcome of historic German militarism, became the most influential popular manifesto for continuing the fight, and also ran through several editions in the United States. He wrote plays, novels and poetry and died in 1957 while writing his memoirs, never reaching the period of appeasement when his career was so abruptly terminated. xxxiv
WINDSOR, Duke of Prince Edward, eldest son of King George V and Queen Mary, ascended the throne as King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth and Emperor of India in January 1936; he abdicated in December that year and was succeeded by his brother, Prince Albert, who took the title King George VI. The practical reason for the abdication was Edward’s insistence on marrying the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson; beneath this lay his open sympathy for Hitler and Nazism and Mrs Simpson’s closeness to the German Ambassador in London, von Ribbentrop. Given the title Duke of Windsor, he married Mrs Simpson in France in June 1937 and the couple toured Germany later that year, entertained by Hitler, Hess and other top Nazis. On the outbreak of war he was sent to France with the British Military Mission. After the fall of France Churchill appointed him Governor of the Bahamas to keep him out of the country. He was not forgiven by the British Royal family, particularly Queen Elizabeth, and after the war lived in exile with his wife in France until his death in 1972.
CHAPTER ONE
Death in the summer house
17 August 1987: to all appearances, just another morning. Prisoner Number Seven eased himself from bed with the painful movements of age. He was 93. His hair was grey and thin on top, his eyes deep-set beneath bushy brows. Once he had been second man in Hitler’s Reich. Despite the changes wrought in him by age, those who had seen him then leading the massed ranks of the Nazi Party in ringing acclamation of the Führer would have had little difficulty in recognising him. He believed he was still due the dignity of that station. He had never accepted the jurisdiction of the victor powers at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, nor reconciled himself to his sentence.
Six other leading Nazis confined with him in Spandau jail, West Berlin, had been freed long since. He alone remained, the sole inmate of a cell complex built to house 600, watched over by a prison directorate, warders, guards, kitchen and laundry staff and a platoon of soldiers provided by one of the four victor powers of the war on a monthly rota. August was the American month.
He had been held for just over 40 years in Spandau, in total 14,640 days, and for six years before that in captivity in Britain and Nuremberg, altogether almost half his life span. Appeals for his release made by his family, groups of sympathisers and prominent individuals in the West appalled by the unprecedented length of his imprisonment had been rejected by the Russians. At Nuremberg they had wanted him 2hanged as a prime mover in the Nazi assault on their country. They had not forgotten nor forgiven;1 and now, in the Cold War with the West, Spandau provided them with a convenient listening post in the British sector of Berlin.
There had been recent signs of change. A thaw in East–West relations inspired by a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had been accompanied by hints of clemency for the prisoner in Spandau;2 and in June the German-speaking service of Radio Moscow had held out the prospect of ‘the long-standing endeavours for the release of the war criminal Rudolf Hess soon being crowned with success’.3 His supporters felt that such a sensational statement must have been approved at the highest level in the Kremlin.
Over the past two decades his living conditions had been rendered easier. He now occupied a double cell, formerly used as the chapel for the seven. The cell door was no longer locked, in case he needed to get out quickly to the lavatory. Beside his bed he had a table with a mug, a ceramic pot with an immersion heating coil for boiling water, the wherewithal for making tea and coffee and an anglepoise reading lamp. On the wall behind the bedhead were large charts of the moon’s surface sent to him by NASA in Texas. He had made himself a lay expert in space exploration over the years. The study of history, philosophy and the latest developments in space travel, and brief periods listening to his favourite composers – Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert – on an old record player whose sound was no longer true, had been his release from the emptiness of his solitary confinement without end.
Outside, the garden provided solace. It had been created by the prisoners from a wild area of some twelve acres between the rear of the cell block and the high red-brick wall enclosing the prison grounds. Prisoner Number Four, Albert Speer, formerly Hitler’s architect and armaments minister, had designed a scheme of paths and lawns and overseen the planting of roses, forsythia, lavender and hydrangia bushes and lilac trees among the existing trees. Birds flitted among the branches.
Besides the warders who guarded him in shifts, Number Seven had a male nurse to attend him, a Tunisian named Abdallah Melaouhi, who lived in a flat just outside the prison walls. An experienced senior 3nurse, Melaouhi had looked after the old man in Spandau for five years, and the two had come to trust and like one another. Melaouhi had entered the prison at 7.00 that morning, as he did on most mornings;4 he now escorted his charge from the lavatory to the wash cell and helped him shower, shave and dress; thence to the First Aid Room or dispensary, where he weighed him, measured his blood pressure, pulse and temperature, trimmed his hair and gave him his daily massage before counting out the pills he was prescribed for hypertension, heart and circulatory ailments.5
After escorting him back to his cell, Melaouhi left and went back to his apartment, returning to the prison shortly after 9.00. Meanwhile, the old man lay back on his bed, tired, and dozed off. On most mornings he slept for an hour or so before going out into the garden, but on this morning he stayed in, and later, as it was a Monday, made out his weekly requisition form, this time for 30 packets of paper tissues, three rolls of lavatory paper, a sheet of writing paper and a ruler. The form was handed in to the chief warder at 10.20.6 Ten minutes later his lunch was wheeled in to the cell block. As always, Melaouhi took the first mouthful, indulging the suspicion of poison the old man had manifested long ago during the first days of his captivity in England. Shortly afterwards he asked Melaouhi to go to the nearby shops in his lunch break and buy a replacement for the ceramic pot he used as a kettle. Melaouhi was logged leaving the prison at 11.07.
At 12.15 a black American warder named Tony Jordan relieved the British warder on cell duty. During the previous American tour of guard duty in April, Number Seven had requested Jordan’s dismissal on the ground that the man’s poor education, rudeness and antagonism towards him endangered his health.7 The request had been refused. It was believed among prison staff that the real reason for the complaint was Number Seven’s prejudice against black people, manifested on earlier occasions.
The August day was warm and bright. Shafts of sunlight filtered through the small barred windows high in his cell, and at about 1.30 he sought permission for his usual outing in the garden. Jordan helped him dress for the walk – as always a protracted process, finishing with a light tan raincoat and a wide-brimmed straw sombrero hat. He then 4escorted him slowly to the lift that had been installed specifically to ease his passage to ground level. The two were logged going down together at 2.10.8
At the bottom Jordan left his charge and went outside, taking a path through the garden that led to a metal cabin some twelve feet by seven, variously termed the ‘summer house’, the ‘garden house’ or the ‘resthouse’. Reaching it, Jordan unlocked the single door in the cabin wall facing the prison. There was a small window in the same side; the opposite side facing the perimeter wall of the prison grounds was formed of sliding glass doors. The two ends were windowless. Inside was a straw mat on the floor, two chairs, a bench and a table and four electric reading lamps. Here the old man liked to sit alone, whatever the weather, and read or think or frequently just doze off. The warders, instructed to watch him at all times, usually respected his privacy and sat outside, checking him at intervals.9
But this was no ordinary day: it was the last day of the old man’s life, and a subsequent Military Police investigation was to find he had been planning it for some time. The witness statements on which this conclusion is based, released a quarter of a century later, leave little room for doubt about the sequence of events.
