Heß’s British interlocutors rapidly reached the conclusion that he had nothing to offer which went beyond Hitler’s public statements, notably his ‘peace appeal’ before the Reichstag on 19 July 1940. Kirkpatrick concluded his report: ‘Heß does not seem… to be in the near counsels of the German government as regards operations; and he is not likely to possess more secret information than he could glean in the course of conversations with Hitler and others.’219 If, in the light of this, Heß was following out orders from Hitler himself, he would have had to be as supreme an actor — and to have continued to be so for the next four decades — as was, reputedly, the Leader he so revered. But, then, to what end? He said nothing that Hitler had not publicly on a number of occasions stated himself.220 He brought no new negotiating position. It was as if he presumed that the mere fact of the Deputy Führer voluntarily — through an act involving personal courage — putting himself in the hands of the enemy was enough to have made the British government see the good will of the Führer, the earnest intentions behind his aim of cooperation with Britain against Bolshevism, and the need to overthrow the Churchill ‘war-faction’ and settle amicably.221 The naivety of such thinking points heavily in the direction of an attempt inspired by no one but the idealistic, other-worldly, and muddle-headed Heß.
His own motives were not more mysterious or profound than they appeared. Heß had seen over a number of years, but especially since the war had begun, his access to Hitler strongly reduced. His nominal subordinate, Martin Bormann, had in effect been usurping his position, always in the Führer’s company, always able to put in a word here or there, always able to translate his wishes into action. A spectacular action to accomplish what the Führer had been striving for over many years would transform his status overnight, turning ‘Fräulein Anna’, as he was disparagingly dubbed by some in the Party, into a national hero.222
Heß had remained highly influenced by Karl Haushofer — his former teacher and the leading exponent of geopolitical theories which had influenced the formation of Hitler’s ideas of
By August 1940, when he began to plan his own intervention, Heß was deeply disappointed in the British response to the ‘peace-terms’ that Hitler had offered. He was aware, too, that Hitler was by this time thinking of attacking the Soviet Union even before Britain was willing to ‘see sense’ and agree to terms. The original strategy lay thus in tatters. Heß saw his role as that of the Führer’s most faithful paladin, now destined to restore through his personal intervention the opportunity to save Europe from Bolshevism — a unique chance wantonly cast away by Churchill’s ‘warmongering’ clique which had taken over the British government. Heß acted without Hitler’s knowledge, but in deep (if confused) belief that he was carrying out his wishes.
Heß now became an unwitting pawn in the moves by British intelligence to bluff Stalin. Churchill was reluctantly dissuaded by Anthony Eden and Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, from his initial instinct to make maximum propaganda capital out of Heß’s capture — something Hitler and Goebbels both expected and feared.224 Prompted by a report from Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Ambassador to Moscow, that Heß’s flight to Scotland had newly inflamed the old paranoia in the Soviet leadership of a peace arranged between Britain and Germany at Russia’s cost, Eden and Cadogan devised a more subtle ploy, aimed at strengthening Soviet resistance to Hitler. The absence of anything more than the most terse public statement about Heß’s capture was part of the idea.225
