The first German communiqué composed by Hitler the previous day would plainly no longer suffice. The new communiqué of 13 May acknowledged Heß’s flight to Scotland, and capture. It emphasized his physical illness — he had suffered from a gall-bladder complaint — stretching back years, which had put him in the hands of mesmerists, astrologists, and the like, bringing about ‘a mental confusion’ that had led to the present action. It also held open the possibility that he had been entrapped by the British Secret Service. Affected by delusions, he had undertaken the action of an idealist without any notion of the consequences. His action, the communiqué ended, would alter nothing in the struggle against Britain.194
The two communiqués, forced ultimately to concede that the Deputy Führer had flown to the enemy, and attributing the action to his mental state, bore all the hallmarks of a hasty and ill-judged attempt to play down the enormity of the scandal. Remarkably, Goebbels had not been informed of what had happened until the evening of 12 May.195 Hitler had not turned to him for propaganda advice on how to present the débâcle, but had relied instead at first on Otto Dietrich, the Press Chief. Goebbels was highly critical from the outset about the ‘mental illness’ explanation. None of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter who inundated him with telephone calls about the position, he wrote, believed the ‘madness’ story. ‘It sounds so absurd that it could be taken for a mystification,’ he frankly admitted.196 His own preference would have been to say nothing until forced to do so, then to suggest that Heß, as had been claimed of Gregor Strasser in 1932, had ‘evidently lost his nerve’ at the last minute.197 This way, weakness rather than insanity could have been blamed. It would have been an easier interpretation to defend.198 As it was, a real difficulty had to be faced: how to explain that a man recognized for many years as mentally unbalanced had been left in such an important position in the running of the Reich. ‘It’s rightly asked how such an idiot could be the second man after the Führer,’ Goebbels remarked.199
SD reports and other soundings of popular reactions told Goebbels of the damaging impact on the morale of the people.200 For the Nazi Party’s standing, the fall-out from the Heß affair was disastrous. Hefty and sustained criticism of the Party and its representatives had been widespread even during the victorious summer of 1940. Alongside the adulation for the Führer and the eulogies for the Wehrmacht went feelings that the Party and its representatives had perhaps once served some purpose, but were by now superfluous. Many thought the Party functionaries were corrupt, interfering, and self-serving — feathering their own nest at home, shirking, and draft-dodging while the indomitable Führer and his brave soldiers were at the front, facing the enemy. As before the war, the corruption, high-handedness, loose living, and other personal failings of the jumped-up ‘tin-pot gods
A sense of the popular feeling could be grasped from the innumerable wild rumours that sprouted overnight in all parts of the Reich in what one government official dubbed ‘the month of rumours’.202 It was, for instance, rumoured that Himmler and Ley had fled abroad, that the Gauleiter of Upper Bavaria, Adolf Wagner, had been caught on the border trying to export into Switzerland 22 million Reich Marks robbed from monasteries, and that Alfred Rosenberg, Julius Streicher, Count Helldorf (the Police Chief of Berlin), and Walther Darre (the
