Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

In his letter, Heß had outlined his motives for flying to meet the Duke of Hamilton, and aspects of a plan for peace between Germany and Britain to be put before ‘Barbarossa’ was launched. He claimed he had made three previous attempts to reach Scotland, but had been forced to abort them because of mechanical problems with the aircraft.¹⁸¹ His aim was to bring about, through his own person, the realization of Hitler’s long-standing idea of friendship with Britain which the Führer himself, despite all efforts, had not succeeded in achieving. If the Führer were not in agreement, then he could have him declared insane.¹⁸²

Göring — residing at the time in his castle at Veldenstein near Nuremberg — was telephoned straight away. Hitler was in no mood for small-talk. ‘Göing, get here immediately,’ he barked into the telephone. ‘Something dreadful has happened.’ Ribbentrop was also summoned.¹⁸³ Hitler, meanwhile, had ordered Pintsch, the hapless bearer of ill tidings, and Heß’s other adjutant, Alfred Leitgen, arrested, and spent his time marching up and down the hall in a rage.¹⁸⁴ The mood in the Berghof was one of high tension and speculation.¹⁸⁵ Amid the turmoil, Hitler was clear-sighted enough to act quickly to rule out any possible power-vacuum in the Party leadership arising from Heß’s defection. That very day, he issued a terse edict stipulating that the former office of the Deputy Leader would now be termed the Party Chancellery, and be subordinated to him personally. It would be led, as before, by Party Comrade Martin Bormann.¹⁸⁶ It was reminiscent of the way Hitler had dealt with the Gregor Strasser crisis of 1932 by — at least nominally — taking the reins into his own hands.¹⁸⁷ In practice, making Bormann the chief of the Party’s central office would provide from now on a level of interventionist zeal by the Party, increasingly imposing its ideologically driven activism on the regime’s administration, on a scale which had never been witnessed under Heß.¹⁸⁸

Accompanied by General Ernst Udet, Göring arrived during the evening. Hitler repeated the hope that Heß had crashed. He asked Göring and Udet whether it was probable that Heß would manage to reach his flight-target near Glasgow. They thought it could be ruled out. In their view, Heß did not have sufficient mastery of the technical equipment. Hitler disagreed. At that, Ribbentrop was dispatched to Rome to prevent any potential rift in the Axis. The news from London could break at any time. It was vital to obviate any presumption by Mussolini that Germany was attempting to arrange a separate peace with Britain.¹⁸⁹

Hitler was furious to learn that Heß, despite being banned from flying, had prepared his plans in minute detail. He persuaded himself — taking his lead from what Heß himself in his letter had suggested — that the Deputy Führer was indeed suffering from mental delusion, and insisted on making his ‘madness’ the centre-point of the extremely awkward communiqué which had to be put out to the German people.¹⁹⁰ Since there was still nothing from Britain, but some sort of official announcement from Berlin was thought to be unavoidable, it was suggested that the Deputy Führer had probably crashed en route. There was still no word of Heß’s whereabouts when the communiqué was broadcast at 8p.m. that evening. The communiqué mentioned the letter which had been left behind, showing ‘in its confusion unfortunately the traces of a mental derangement’, giving rise to fears that he had been the ‘victim of hallucinations’. ‘Under these circumstances,’ the communiqué ended, it had to be presumed that ‘Party Comrade Heß had somewhere on his journey crashed, that is, met with an accident’.¹⁹¹

Goebbels, overlooked in the first round of Hitler’s consultations, had by then also been summoned to the Obersalzberg. ‘The Führer is completely crushed,’ the Propaganda Minister noted in his diary. ‘What a spectacle for the world: a mentally-deranged second man after the Führer.’¹⁹² The following day, on reaching the Berghof, he was shown the letters left by Heß. ‘A muddle-headed shambles, schoolboy dilettantism,’ was his verdict on Heß’s intention to work through the Duke of Hamilton to bring down Churchill and attain peace-terms. ‘That Churchill would immediately have him arrested hadn’t, unfortunately, occurred to him.’ The letters, he claimed, were full of ‘half-baked occultism’. He pointed to Heß’s belief in horoscopes. ‘A thoroughly pathological business,’ he concluded.¹⁹³ Meanwhile, early on 13 May, the BBC in London had brought the official announcement that Heß indeed found himself in British captivity.