Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

Hess had once won an air race around Germany’s highest peak, but recently he had been forbidden to fly. Late on May 10, a date chosen on astrological grounds, in a daring, skillful maneuver, he piloted a Messerschmitt Bf-110 bomber across the North Sea toward Britain, some 900 miles, and, in the dark, parachuted into Scotland.²³¹ His pockets were filled with abundant pills and potions, including opium alkaloids, aspirin, atropine, methamphetamines, barbiturates, caffeine tablets, laxatives, and an elixir from a Tibetan lamasery (passed to him by the explorer Sven Hedin).²³² He was also said to be carrying a flight map, photos of himself with his son, and the business cards of two German acquaintances, but no identification. Initially, he gave a false name to the Scottish plowman on whose territory he had landed; soon, members of the local Home Guard appeared (with whisky on their breath). The British were not expecting Hess; no secure corridor had been set up. Those on the scene, breaching secrecy, brought in a member of the Polish consulate in nearby Glasgow to serve as interpreter; it was he who noticed that the captive was the spitting image of Hess. British air intelligence ignored the first reports of the captive’s evident importance.²³³

No one in the Nazi entourage outdid Hess for devotion. He had been in the forefront of the Beer Hall Putsch and had recorded Hitler’s prison dictations that became Mein Kampf, volunteering his own thoughts, too.²³⁴ Hess was among the small circle in the know about the firmness of Hitler’s intentions to invade the USSR.²³⁵ At the Berghof on May 11, Hitler received one of Hess’s adjutants, who delivered a sealed letter left by his boss. The Führer raged that he hoped the missing Hess had “crashed into the sea.”²³⁶ Germany disclosed his absence over the radio at 8:00 p.m. on May 12, mentioning a letter that exhibited “traces of mental derangement” and speculating that Hess had “crashed en route.”²³⁷ Finally, several hours later, the British issued a statement, with precious few details and no photographs but confirmation that Hess had landed in Scotland. The next day, Hitler summoned the sixty or so top Nazi officials to the Obersalzberg. “The Führer,” observed Hans Frank, head of the General Gouvernement (Poland), “was more completely shattered than I have ever experienced him to be.” Hitler stated that Hess had acted without his knowledge, and called him a “victim of delusions.”²³⁸ Ribbentrop was sent to assure Mussolini that there were no Anglo-German peace talks.²³⁹ “What a spectacle for the world,” Goebbels confided in his diary of the defection.²⁴⁰

Hess jokes proliferated. (“So you’re the madman,” Churchill says to Hess. “Oh, no,” Hess replies, “only his deputy.”)²⁴¹ He had lost his role in the Nazi regime to his private secretary, Martin Bormann, and seems to have wanted to reingratiate himself with the Führer, intending to land at the hunting lodge owned by the Duke of Hamilton, a commander in the Royal Air Force whom Hess had met at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. (He missed his property by around twelve miles.) Hess imagined that negotiations could take place with pro-German members of the British establishment, who might even overthrow Churchill. The British moved Hess to a military hospital as a POW and maintained public silence about his motivations or any secret revelations (of which there were none). “He had come without the knowledge of Hitler,” the report of Hess’s first interrogation established (May 13), “in order to convince responsible persons that since England could not win the war, the wisest course was to make peace now.” Hess proffered the old deal, publicly announced by Hitler, of a free hand on the continent in exchange for preservation of the British empire, and denied that Hitler planned to attack the USSR.²⁴²

Soviet intelligence tasked its entire network with sussing out the real story of Hess’s flight, and they duly reported that Hitler had expressly sent his deputy on a peace mission.²⁴³ Stalin needed no confirmation. That a second in command could undertake such a flight without permission was, for him, implausible. Hess had to have been sent to negotiate a separate peace with Britain and a joint attack on the Soviet Union, and in a way that cleverly allowed Hitler to deny it.²⁴⁴ Molotov had met Hess in Berlin in November 1940: he was not a madman. It all seemed to add up: Schulenburg tells Dekanozov that Stalin should exchange letters with Hitler, then suddenly backs off; Hess flies to the UK. Now, the most sinister interpretation crystallized of Churchill’s cryptic message to Stalin and Cripps’s written suggestion to Molotov that the British might come to terms with Germany.²⁴⁵