Professor Karl Haushofer was a nineteenth-century-style imperialist who, after the end of the First World War, had been the leading academic promulgator of ‘geopolitics’ – the theory that in the future the world would be restructured into an age of great land-empires. He had also been Rudolf Hess’s university tutor, and during the rise of the Nazis to power he had privately tutored Adolf Hitler on the rudiments of foreign policy and European ethnicity. He was therefore widely recognised as the man chiefly responsible for the Nazis’ concept of Lebensraum – living space for the German people – which Hitler had used as his justification for wars of conquest. This was the man that three OSS officers tracked down to a house deep in the Bavarian forests on a late September afternoon in 1945.
When the interrogation began, the senior American Intelligence officer, Edmund Walsh, had merely looked meaningfully at Haushofer and said a single word: ‘Hitler.’
According to Walsh, the elderly Professor’s ‘face assumed a pained expression’. He admitted that he had taught Hitler geopolitics, but then qualified his answer by declaring that Hitler had ‘never understood’.2
If this had been the extent of Haushofer’s knowledge, British Intelligence might not have subsequently taken much interest in him. However, during the course of the interrogation one of the Americans was intuitive enough to ask whether Haushofer’s son Albrecht’s expertise in British matters had been connected to Rudolf Hess’s mysterious flight to Scotland in May 1941. The OSS officers were surprised when Haushofer unhesitatingly replied: ‘In 1941 … Albrecht was sent to Switzerland. There he met a British confidential agent – a Lord Templewood, I believe.’ He then revealed that Hitler had wanted peace, and that ‘we offered to relinquish Norway, Denmark, and France. A larger meeting was to be held in Madrid. When my son returned, he was immediately called to Augsburg to see Hess. A few days later Hess flew to England.’3
The OSS men listened to these revelations with shocked astonishment. Lord Templewood was Britain’s former Foreign Secretary and later Ambassador to Spain, Sir Samuel Hoare.
Over the course of the next three hours, whilst Bavaria descended into darkness, the American agents struggled to digest all the elderly Professor Karl Haushofer told them. Yet this Aladdin’s cave was not limited to verbal information. At the end of the interrogation they asked him to hand over any documents he possessed that related to his work. If they had thought they would be able to leave with a few boxes of papers piled into the back of their Buick staff car, they were in for a shock: Haushofer’s archive of personal papers extended to nearly eighteen thousand documents, and the OSS men were forced to return the following morning with an army lorry.
During the late autumn of 1945, other documents began to appear. Of particular importance were the papers from the Geopolitical Institute in Berlin, where Albrecht Haushofer had kept some of his records.
On 27 November, an American Intelligence officer urgently dispatched to Washington ‘letters and material from the files of Albrecht Haushofer, regarding peace feelers to England’.4 He included a note drawing his superior’s attention to:
Document No. 8.
A personal memorandum, datelined Obersalzberg 5 May 1941, is from Haushofer to Hitler, and concerns Haushofer’s English connections and the possibility of their being used as contacts for peace discussions.5
What was intriguing about this memorandum was that it was dated five days before Rudolf Hess had flown to Britain. This was at odds with the generally held belief that Hitler had not known what his Deputy was planning. Clearly, this document might have provided answers to some of the many questions which remain about what actually took place in 1941. Unfortunately, although the memorandum arrived safely in Washington DC on 11 December 1945, and an official of the US State Department signed for it, an unknown person removed it just three days later, scrawling ‘Enclosure removed 12-14-45’ across the receipt stamp.6 It has never been seen since.
During the winter of 1945 the prosecution at the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg considered placing Karl Haushofer on trial with the leading Nazis, but concluded that it was not possible to prosecute an academic merely for putting forward theories, even theories as provocative as Professor Haushofer’s. It was, however, seriously debated whether Haushofer should be called as a key witness for the prosecution of Hitler’s Deputy Rudolf Hess and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, to explain his theories, which were at the core of Nazi foreign policy, and to give general evidence.
What occurred next cannot be viewed with anything but a sceptical eye. On Sunday, 10 March 1946, Professor Haushofer was discreetly visited at Hartshimmelhof by two Allied Intelligence officers. On this occasion the men were not Americans, but from British Intelligence. Several days later they wrote a brief memorandum to Ivone Kirkpatrick, a high-ranking official at the Foreign Office. They reported that Haushofer ‘knew nothing further on the subject in question’, and, curiously, concluded: ‘In response to our instructions, the problem concerning this man and the IMT has been removed.’7
Two days later, on Tuesday, 12 March, Heinz Haushofer, puzzled by his inability to contact his parents on the phone, went to Hartschimmelhof. He found the house deserted, although the lights within were burning. With increasing concern, Heinz searched the substantial house, before moving on to the grounds and the surrounding forest. An hour later, deep within the woods in a hollow beside a stream about half a mile behind the house – a spot later described by an American Intelligence officer as the ‘loneliest hillside in Bavaria’ – Heinz Haushofer found his parents. Karl Haushofer was lying in a hunched position in the hollow, and his wife Martha was hanging from a nearby tree. It was later established that Professor Haushofer’s death had been caused by cyanide poisoning.
The local police, together with the American authorities, investigated the matter in some detail, but after all the horrors of the war, and with the desperate state of Germany in the spring of 1946, resources and time were limited, and the Haushofers’ deaths were officially recorded as suicides.
There is, however, a curious fact about the German police reports on the case, and the subsequent interest taken in the case by the American authorities. Nowhere, in any statement taken at any time, did anyone reveal, record or admit that the last people to see the Haushofers alive were almost certainly two British Intelligence agents. Agents who reported on their visit to Ivone Kirkpatrick, the Foreign Office official who in 1941 had been one of the very first men to interview Rudolf Hess after his unexpected arrival on British soil. Kirkpatrick was also, incidentally, later that year to land a plum appointment as Britain’s High Commissioner to Germany.
Almost from the moment Rudolf Hess parachuted out of the night sky on 10 May 1941 to land on a remote Scottish hillside, the official British line on the arrival of Germany’s Deputy-Führer on British soil was that he was mad. Intriguingly, within twenty-four hours Adolf Hitler would make much the same claim.
The two opposing parties had very different reasons to denigrate Hess’s importance. British Intelligence may have been hiding an entirely different, and infinitely more dangerous, secret. The arrival of Hess was merely an unplanned offshoot of an operation intended to achieve a much more important end. Right up until the moment they were confronted by Germany’s Deputy-Führer standing before them in a gleaming black flying-suit, British Intelligence had actually been expecting someone else.
In Germany, Hitler’s reaction to Hess’s flight was largely motivated by fear of losing face before his own people should they discover that their Führer, whilst exhorting them to fight on in his war of conquest, had actually been secretly involved in negotiations with certain top Britons to make peace and end the war. Indeed, he