‘And what exactly was the Aktion Hess?’ Donald McCormick asks himself and his readers on page 108 of Murder By Witchcraft. And, more importantly, what has it got to do with the Hagley Wood murder?
And if, my Führer, this project – which I admit has but very small chance of success – ends in failure and the fates decide against me, this can have no detrimental results either for you or for Germany: it will always be possible for you to deny any responsibility, simply say I was mad.
On the night of 10 May 1941, a lone German aircraft was spotted flying low over the coast of eastern Scotland. Although the observers from the ground and the Spitfires sent up to intercept it could not know it, the Messerschmitt 110Bf had neither bombs nor guns on board. It had been modified at Augsburg airfield to be able to make the flight to the small airstrip near Lennoxlove House. Something went wrong with the flight plan and the pilot bailed out, letting his plane crash into fields near Dungavel House. Dazed and with a damaged leg from his parachute jump, the pilot was soon arrested. He gave his name as Hauptman Alfred Horn and asked to see a serving RAF officer, the Duke of Hamilton.
It was quickly established that Horn was actually Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who was leader of the Nazi Party and before the war had run the Ausland organization which provided intelligence on Britain’s military capacity in the 1930s. At the time, despite reports of the plane’s crashing, details were understandably scant. And, despite the release of previously classified documents over the last few years, we still know relatively little about the extraordinary flight even today. It may count as the most bizarre single event of the Second World War, except perhaps for someone stuffing a woman’s body in a wych elm.
It was left to A.P. Herbert, politician, writer and member of the Naval Auxiliary Unit, to speculate on the Hess flight:
He is insane. He is the Dove of Peace.
He is Messiah. He is Hitler’s niece.
He is the one, clean, honest man they’ve got.
He is the worst assassin of the lot.
He has a mission to preserve mankind.
He’s non-alcoholic. He’s a ‘blind’.
He has been dotty since the age of ten
But all the time was top of Hitler’s men.
(Indeed, from all the tales he had to tell,
Joe Goebbels must be slightly touched as well)
He is to pave the way to Britain’s end.
He is – as dear old Lindbergh was – a ‘friend’.
He’s fond of flying. He was racked with fear.
He had an itch to meet a British Peer.
He thought that Russia was a crashing bore.
He simply can’t stand Hitler any more.
In such rich fancies I am not engrossed,
For this is what appears to matter most –
He came unasked, an enemy, a Hun;
And nobody was ready with a gun.
Eventually, they were; or at least, a ligature. Having escaped execution at the Nuremberg trials on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and having no direct links with the Holocaust, Rudolf Hess was imprisoned for life at Spandau prison in Berlin. For years he was its only inmate, but on 17 August 1987, he was found in a garden summerhouse in the gaol’s grounds with electric flex around his neck. The cause of death was suspension by hanging, but the jury is still out on whether this was suicide or murder. As far as I am concerned, it was the latter. The old man was far too frail to hoist himself or even the cable on to the relevant window catch, but no one was charged with murder. Instead, there was an international sigh of relief – the Nazi era was at last over.
There is little doubt today that the purpose of Hess’s flight to Scotland was to secure a peace deal with Churchill, the prime minister, to give Hitler a free hand in his forthcoming invasion of Russia – Operation Barbarossa. There is no doubt in my mind that if Hess’s mission had succeeded, Hitler’s devastating blitzkrieg would have destroyed Stalin’s Red Army of brainwashed conscripts in record time. But it did not succeed – and the rest is history.
Two things concern us in the context of the Hess flight. The first is the reaction to it in Germany, known as Aktion Hess and the second is; was the Stellvertreter expecting a welcoming committee at Lennoxlove – and could that committee have extended as far south as Hagley, Worcestershire? The response to the flight in Berlin was instant. Josef Goebbels’ press release proclaimed:
It seemed that party member Hess lived in a state of hallucination, as a result of which he felt he would bring about an understanding between England and Germany … The National Socialist Party regrets that this idealist fell a victim to this hallucination. This, however, will have no effect on the continuance of the war which has been forced on Germany.
This, as usual from Goebbels, was nonsense. Hess was party leader, not merely a member and he did not suffer from hallucinations. The most egregious lie of all, of course, was that the Second World War had been ‘forced’ on Germany, not caused by the megalomania of Goebbels’ boss. Hitler himself had flown into one of his famous rages, as usual, carefully acted out, because he must have known of Hess’s plans and probably actively approved them, given the two men’s long and close friendship. Hess’s immediate staff and family were arrested, but all were released soon afterwards. One of the common themes in the weeks that followed 10 May is that Hess was mad. He had suggested it himself to Hitler in the letter quoted at the beginning of this chapter. It formed a ‘plausible denial’, a loophole which allowed Hitler to distance himself from his deputy. Germany and Russia were still nominally allies at this point and the last thing Hitler wanted was to tip Stalin off about a possible German rapprochement with the west, which would have left him free to launch Barbarossa.
And, if Hess was mad, what could have caused it? Could it have been his dabblings with the occult? Goebbels, as Hitler’s mouthpiece to the German – and world – press, said, ‘Recently [Hess] had sought relief [from “physical suffering”] to an increasing extent in various methods practised by mesmerists and astrologers.’ There is little doubt that Hitler, Hess and above all, Himmler, head of the SS, were fascinated by the occult. When they were in prison together at Landsberg after the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1924, Hitler said one night:
You know, Rudi, it’s only the moon I hate. For it is something dead and terrible and inhuman. And human beings are afraid of it … It is as if in the moon a part of the terror still lives which the moon once sent down over the earth. I hate it! That pale and ghostly fellow.
Psychologists would have a field day with this bizarre comment, but he and Hess thought alike on this, as on most other things.
Admiral Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence during the war, believed that Hitler’s astrologers had predicted that the Führer’s achievements must be accomplished by the end of February 1941 and that his luck would run out after that. There is no evidence to suggest that Hitler ever visited an astrologer, but Hess and Himmler almost certainly did.
From the British point of view, black propaganda, however bizarre and unlikely, was used to destabilize the Reich’s plans and spread disinformation far and wide. The men working for SO1 (part of the Political Intelligence Division of the Foreign Office) were largely laws unto themselves. Hugh Dalton ran the organization and he had mavericks like the journalists Sefton Delmer and Ellic Howe under him who came up with all sorts of ruses. From the American angle, after their entry into the war in December 1941, William ‘Wild Bill’ Donavan of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, was another black propagandist, given to outlandish disguises and even more outlandish ideas. One of these, along with infected laundry in U-boats, was to bombard Hitler with pornography so that he became insane! This sounds like a hangover from Victorian times, when it was widely held that masturbation causes insanity/blindness/you name it.
We have to be careful about this espionage link with the occult. Much of it was nonsense, the stuff of gentleman’s club jokes and a fevered press once the war was over where the Allies gloated over their victory and belittled the Axis war effort. James Hayward’s Myths and Legends of the Second World War (2003) explodes much of this rubbish, but somewhere at its heart lies a kernel of truth. One genuine use of astrology by the Allies was to employ the double agent Louis de Wohl, a Hungarian on the run from the Nazis. As an astrologer, he lectured extensively in the United States in the months before Pearl Harbor, giving doom-laden predictions on the German war effort based on the stars. He did this for cash rather than ideology and was given a commission in the British army for services rendered.
The involvement of Aleister Crowley is more mysterious and less likely to be true. Crowley’s son Amado remembered as a 9-year-old in 1940 watching a ceremony in Ashdown Forest involving robed figures and a dummy wearing a Nazi uniform, sitting on a throne. His deranged father was master of ceremonies and the idea was, perhaps, to ward off the likelihood of a German invasion.
Aleister Crowley was a neurotic fantasist who called himself ‘the wickedest man in the world’, a reincarnation of the Beast referred to in the ludicrous ramblings of the Book of Revelations, whose number is 666. Like many people mentioned already, he changed his name for spurious reasons. Christened Edward Alexander to Plymouth Brethren parents, Crowley turned against the cult and joined another one – the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Moving to Egypt, Italy and the United States, he set up various cults of his own, performing ‘magick’ with a fluctuating group of adoring female acolytes. Like many cult leaders before and since Crowley’s time, sex was at the heart of most of it.
Most of the fascination with Crowley dates from the 1960s, by which time he had been dead for years. His following in the 1940s, especially in Britain, was very small and it is not known how far his reputation had spread to Germany.
What has all this mumbo-jumbo to do with the body of a woman found in Hagley Wood? The Aktion Hess definitely happened, a rounding up of astrologers, fortune-tellers and occultists throughout Germany. Heinrich Himmler, who had invested time and money in establishing a romantic, mystic and wholly spurious back-story for the SS, must have been seething – he believed that stuff. One victim of Aktion Hess was Hitler’s own astrologer (according to him) Karl Ernst Krafft, whose fate remains unknown. Another was Ernst Schulte-Strahaus, Hitler’s astrological adviser.
