ON 10 MAY 1941, a customised Messerschmitt-110 crashed in Scotland. The pilot parachuted to safety. When captured, he claimed to be a Luftwaffe captain called Alfred Horn. In fact, he was Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer of the Third Reich. Found in his possession was the calling card of his principal adviser, Albrecht Haushofer, and, almost certainly, a peace treaty that subsequently vanished.
Hess’s story is riddled with anomalies. Many of the official records are missing or embargoed. Nevertheless, everything points to his destination being Dungavel House, the estate of the Duke of Hamilton. Hamilton had been an ardent proponent of appeasement and was a pillar of the Establishment: Lord Steward of the Household of George VI, he was also on familiar terms with Churchill. In 1936, he had attended the Berlin Olympics, where he met Albrecht Haushofer, who would describe the Duke as his closest friend and visit him at Dungavel.
Haushofer was a Mischling, half Jewish on his mother’s side, granted immunity by Hess from the Nuremberg Race Laws. In the early years of the war, he explored several avenues for peace, representing both Hess and the resistance against Hitler. In September 1940, Haushofer wrote to Hamilton suggesting they meet in a neutral country. British Intelligence intercepted the letter. Haushofer’s last peace feeler was in late April 1941, a short while before Hess’s flight. He went to Geneva to meet Carl Jacob Burckhardt, a leading light in the International Committee of the Red Cross. Burckhardt conveyed “greetings from his friends in Britain” to Haushofer, who would become famous after the war due to theMoabit Sonnets, which he wrote in the eponymous prison where he was held and killed by the Nazis.
The conventional narrative has it that Hess, horrified by the attack planned against Russia and convinced the British ‘peace party’ was far stronger than it was, flew to Scotland to negotiate with Hamilton an end to the war. But why would Hess abandon his wife and the young son he adored, risk disgrace and lifetime imprisonment, on the off chance of bumping into a well-connected but not particularly influential Scottish duke?
Hamilton was not even at Dungavel. He was fifty-two miles away, in charge of RAF Turnhouse, now Edinburgh Airport. An unidentified plane flew into the sector at around 10 pm. It did not respond to communications, nor did it show the colours of the day. Identified as a Messerschmitt-110, its flight path would potentially take it over Glasgow, the target of recent devastating bombing raids. The consensus in the control room was that they should immediately shoot the intruder down. Hamilton vetoed this, insisting an Me-110 would not have enough fuel to return to base, so the identification must be false. This provoked a “spat”. In fact, Hess had fitted the plane with additional fuel tanks. No air raid sirens were sounded. The Deputy Führer was at liberty to fly on. If Hamilton wasn’t waiting for Hess at Dungavel, then who was?
On 9 May, Prince George, the Duke of Kent, fourth son of George V, was at Sumburgh in the Shetlands. On the eleventh, he was at Balmoral. His whereabouts on 10 May have never been established. There is every likelihood he remained in Scotland, where he had a house near Rosyth in Fife.
Prince George was a flamboyant individual whose youth was notable for flagrant bisexuality. Hollywood film stars, Barbara Cartland, Noël Coward, and quite probably Anthony Blunt were among his lovers. On a visit to the louche Happy Valley set in Kenya, the Prince became addicted to morphine and cocaine during a fling with Kiki Preston, an American socialite known as “the girl with the silver syringe”. Kent cleaned up with the help of his brother, the future Edward VIII, whose pro-Nazi sympathies are well known.
Kent’s half-German mother, Queen Mary of Teck, was a keen advocate of appeasement, as was her second-born son, the future George VI, who initially objected to Churchill replacing Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister. After the Abdication, Kent was widely seen as the leader of the peace party. He maintained a close relationship with Joachim Von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador to London, and with Princess Stephanie Von Hohenlohe, identified by British Intelligence as a Nazi spy. While visiting Germany, he may well have met Hess and certainly encountered another Reichsminister, the Estonian-born Alfred Rosenberg. A report written by Rosenberg for Hitler in October 1935 stated that Kent was a key player in pro-German political manoeuvring. Rosenberg was Hess’s lunch companion on the day of the fatal flight. In early 1939, Kent secretly conspired with his German cousin, Prince Philip of Hesse, who was Hitler’s art dealer, to prevent the coming war. In July of the same year, he urged his brother, George VI, to negotiate directly with the Führer.
Hamilton was informed of Hess’s capture in the early hours of May 11 and told the prisoner had intended to land at Dungavel. There was a small landing strip on the estate beside the Kennels, an outbuilding that had been loaned to the Red Cross, under whose aegis it was neutral territory. If Hess had landed there to parlay, there was nothing to prevent him from flying back to Germany. Touchdown was frustrated by pursuit from a Defiant night fighter, forcing him to bale out.
There are two alleged sightings that, if true, confirm that Kent was waiting at Dungavel. In the 1950s, a former member of the ATS claimed she had been at the Kennels along with the Duke. The report was suppressed. An employee on the estate described the landing lights being switched on in the presence of a duke whom she stated was not Hamilton. In his September 1940 letter to “Douglo” Hamilton, Haushofer refers to “you – and your friends in high places”. In another 1940 letter, this time from Haushofer’s geo-politician father Karl to his son, there is a reference to “middlemen”, naming the Duke of Hamilton as one.
According to spartacus-educational.com, Hamilton’s diary records several meetings with the Duke of Kent during the early part of 1941. Elizabeth Byrd, the secretary of Hamilton’s brother, Lord Malcolm Douglas-Hamilton, claimed her employer told her that the Duke of Hamilton took the “flak for the whole Hess affair in order to protect others even higher up the social scale”. Byrd also stated that “he (Lord Malcolm) had strongly hinted that the cover-up was necessary to protect the reputations of members of the royal family”.
Hess himself told one of his guards that elements in the British government knew about his mission. He continued to maintain he was under the personal protection of George VI, whom he and Hitler erroneously believed wielded immense power, akin to that of the German Kaiser. Initially, Churchill disbelieved the Deputy Führer had crashed in Scotland and went off to watch a Marx Brothers’ film. In his History of the Second World War, he describes Hess’s flight as a “frantic act of lunatic benevolence” whose aim was an attempt “to get at the heart of Britain and make its king believe how Hitler felt towards it”. The Duke of Hamilton is on record as nursing a lifelong grievance about the affair.
The Duke of Kent was killed in an air crash on 25August 1942. The collision of his Short S-25 Sunderland Mark III flying boat with Eagle’s Rock in the Scottish Highlands at an altitude of around 650 feet remains a mystery. The plane was en route to Iceland, where the Duke, an air commodore, was due to visit the RAF base in Reykjavik. Two highly experienced Australian pilots were at the controls. Their squadron leader, also a pilot, was on board, and the dukehimself was a qualified flyer. The plane’s flight path is missing, but the standard route followed the coastline. It may have deviated inland to take a shortcut, but it is difficult to understand why it was flying so low. A flying boat over land would usually ascend in the conditions prevailing at the time: poor visibility due to heavy cloud. There exists the possibility that the Duke was at the controls, and the more proficient crew were too tongue-tied by deference to prevent a disaster brought on by his lack of experience.
Though the Sunderland possessed a rudimentary form of radar, navigation was still largely dependent on human judgement – and human error. There are many other instances of planes hitting Scottish hillsides during the war. According to Accident Investigation Branch records, eighty Sunderland flying boats were lost around Scotland, with only two downed by enemy action. Another flying boat from the same squadron crashed in the Highlands ten days after the Duke’s death. Among those killed was a Glasgow journalist investigating the Eagle Rock disaster.
On impact, the 2,500 gallons of fuel carried in the wings exploded. The Duke’s plane erupted into a fireball. When they found Prince George’s body, the attaché case handcuffed to his wrist had burst open, reportedly scattering Swedish hundred-krona notes over the hillside. Just what this money was for – of no use in Iceland – remains an enigma. One exotic speculation has the flying boat on course to nearby Loch More to collect Rudolf Hess and take him to neutral Sweden to negotiate a peace deal. A policeman at the scene claimed he found a woman among the dead. She was presumably smuggled aboard for the Duke’s enjoyment, though his 1934 marriage to Princess Marina and the arrival of three children attest to a happy family life.
Fifteen bodies were found, but the tail gunner, Andy Jack, had been thrown clear and survived with injuries. Unusually, he was obliged to sign the Official Secrets Act in hospital. The widowed Princess Marina visited him on several occasions. Information he gave her is believed to have influenced the inscription on Kent’s memorial, which refers to a “special mission”. Similar wording was used to a family member by a pilot officer who died at the scene. Yet the morale-boosting flight was routine, one of many such flights the duke had undertaken. Almost all the official documents that might cast light on the tragedy are lost or sealed.
The tributes and messages of condolence included one from General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the Polish Prime Minister-in-exile. He described the Duke as a “proven friend of Poland and the Polish armed forces”. Sikorski was a frequent visitor to the Kents’ home and had even offered the Prince the crown of Poland. One theory suggests Kent was helming a coup to oust Churchill, timed to coincide with Hess’s arrival, backed up by the 30,000 Polish troops stationed in Britain. Sikorski flew back from the United States on the morning of 11 May 1941. He landed at Prestwick Airport, a 40-minute drive from Dungavel. It would have been easy for him to be party to a negotiation.
Another intriguing connection between Sikorski and Hess came to light only in 2005, with the publication of the wartime diaries of the head of British counter-intelligence, Guy Liddell. The entry for 7 July 1941 records a Polish plot to attack Camp Z, the fortified country house in Surrey where Hess was being held and murder him. An MI5 file describes a gun battle between soldiers guarding the house and Polish troops driven by vengeance and a wish to prevent Britain from signing up to Hess’s peace terms. Did a desire to silence Hess, lest he reveal who was really waiting for him at Dungavel, supply an additional motive?
On 4 July 1943, just over ten months after the Eagle Rock disaster, a Liberator II crashed off Gibraltar sixteen seconds after take-off. Eleven lives were lost, including those of General Sikorski, his daughter, his Chief of Staff, two British officials and an M.P. Only the pilot, Eduard Prchal, survived. Though much was made of the fact that Prchal was fully harnessed in his Mae West life jacket, when following a common superstition among pilots, he claimed to never wear one, sabotage was blamed, attributed variously to the Nazis, the Soviets and the British. A British Court ofEnquiry ruled this out, determining the crash was an accident “due to the jamming of the elevator controls”. The Polish government found this unsatisfactory and conducted its own investigation, which proved inconclusive. In 2008, Sikorski’s body was exhumed for a fresh inquiry that found no evidence of murder but did not exclude sabotage.
Nazi propaganda naturally pointed the finger at a British-Soviet conspiracy. In 1967, David Irving published a book which touched on British complicity, though the soon-to-be discredited historian recorded an open verdict, at least in that edition. Less hesitant was the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, whose controversial play Soldiers, An Obituary for Geneva, debuting in London the following year, made Churchill the culprit. The Prime Minister was allegedly desperate that his relationship with Stalin should not be jeopardised by Sikorski’s outrage at the Soviet massacre of twenty-two thousand Polish officers in Katyn Forest. The killings took place in the spring of 1940 but were only discovered when German forces came upon the mass graves in April 1943. Hochhuth was unaware that Prchal had survived the crash. The pilot successfully sued him for libel.
Poland was the casus belli, the country where hostilities commenced. If the Duke of Kent was waiting for Hess at Dungavel, was Sikorski due to join them and rubber-stamp the treaty? Did the Hess crash frustrate this, leading to the sabotage of Kent and Sikorski’s planes to prevent any leaking of their collusion and the ensuing embarrassment to the royal family?
Support for this is circumstantial. Like his great-great-nephew, Prince Harry, Kent felt himself to be a “spare”, a sense of irrelevance that ballooned during wartime. He was a man desperate for a role, as was Hess, who, despite his grand titles and the Reich organisations he helmed, was widely seen as “a flag without a pole”. Disgusted by the kitsch art on display at his deputy’s Munich home and repelled by Hess’s obstinacy and perceived soft-heartedness, Hitler had made Göring his successor. Hess’s flight was a desperate attempt to restore himself to favour with the leader he worshipped. Ending the war in Western Europe would have been a personal triumph for both the Deputy Führer and the Duke of Kent.
Yet who could have commissioned their assassinations, if such really was the case? In the early disaster-filled years of the war, many powerful figures in the Establishment, including some of Churchill’s Cabinet, regarded the Prime Minister as a reckless warmonger whose policies would result in the loss of empire and the Soviet Union’s dominion over Europe. Might he, in turn, have entertained the idea of liquidating those suspected of secretly negotiating with the enemy?
Churchill could be ruthless. He advocated the summary execution of Hitler and other leading Nazis. Yet it strains credulity to believe he was party to the killing of the Duke of Kent, whom he eulogised in the Commons as “a gallant and handsome prince”, or of Sikorski, a close wartime ally whose rivals were far more hardline when it came to the Russians. Were there others, hiding in the shadows, not constrained by such scruples?
During a supper in the Kremlin on 6 November 1944, Stalin toasted British Intelligence for having successfully inveigled Hess to come to Britain. Churchill poured scorn on this. Stalin took this with good humour and pointed out that his own secret service often kept secrets from him. In January 1941, a British-based Finnish art historian, Tancred Borenius, visited Haushofer’s contact, Burckhardt, in Geneva. Borenius was connected to Sikorski and the British royal family. There is evidence he was there to put out peace feelers on behalf of the royals and MI6. In the same month, an MI6 major called Frank Foley, who was to become the chief interrogator of Hess at Camp Z, went to Portugal to talk up the “peace party” and lure a top-ranking Nazi to Britain. Was Churchill privy to these missions?
The head of MI6, Sir Stewart Menzies, known as ‘Control’, passed all the code-breaking intelligence from Bletchley Park to the Prime Minister. He may also have revealed the secret channel he had to Admiral Canaris, the disaffected head of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and the warning of Hess’s flight that came via this route. Menzies was allegedly implicated in another assassination, that of Admiral François Darlan, commander-in-chief of the Vichy armed forces, in Algeria on 24 December 1942. Menzies, who hardly ever left London, was in Algiers at the time of the killing.
Evidence may one day surface that resolves the mystery of the three crashes. In the meantime, we are left grappling with puzzling questions that are not beyond all conjecture, like Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century polymath, who wondered what songs the sirens sang.
This article grew out of original research for my book Aleister Crowley MI6: The Hess Solution
A meticulous researcher and author of the first order. Masterfully intelligent and creatively daring, Richard is at the top table of this exquisite genre.