I was led up to the first floor of the house, where I was introduced to the three Ministry of Defence intelligence officers on duty that morning. At last I was led through a solidly constructed metal door and along a short hallway to the rooms where the prisoner was being kept. As I entered the first of the two rooms, he was lying on his back in the centre of the floor, full-length on the bare boards. He was dressed in the uniform of a Luftwaffe Hauptmann. His eyes were closed and his hands were folded across his chest.
It came as a considerable shock to discover that the man being held in the building was Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess.
19
In the first nine months of the war, until the beginning of May 1940, I notched up only eleven sorties against the enemy. After the German invasion of France and the Low Countries I was posted to 148 Squadron, which until recently had been operating the obsolete Fairey Battle in France, with horrific losses of both men and machines. Now back in the UK, based at Tealby Moor, the squadron itself was being re-manned and re-equipped, this time with the Wellington night bomber. Although the summer of 1940 was a period of maximum danger for Britain, the squadron had been pulled back from the front line while the process of reconstruction went on. Everyone was anxious to do what we could, to give back to the Germans what we were taking from them, but for several weeks the squadron to which I was attached did not even have aircraft to fly.
At the beginning of August, when I was going through a dull refresher course on night-time navigation, I received a letter from Birgit.
The last time I had seen her was during the disastrous family reunion the previous Christmas, during which she hardly spoke to me or even looked in my direction. After that I had not expected to hear from her again, although I had in fact received an earlier letter from her, back in May. It was a short, semi-formal note telling me that Joe had been beaten up by some off-duty squaddies. They apparently took exception to his not being in uniform. That at least was how my mother described it when I phoned her to find out more. She told me that Joe was not badly hurt and that after a short spell in hospital he would be back to normal.
But now Birgit had written to me again. When her letter was brought round during the daily distribution at the airfield, she was so far from my thoughts that I did not recognize her handwriting on the envelope.
The letter was short and written in her plain, almost formal English. I could sense her straining to write carefully and correctly to me. Without explaining why she had decided to write at that particular moment, she told me the circumstances of her present life. She said she had not heard from her parents for more than three years and feared they were dead. She was trying to find out what might have happened to them, but the war made communications with Europe almost impossible. A problem that seemed to her connected was that she was in danger of being interned by the British authorities, as she was known to have been born in Germany. She had already been visited twice by the police but on both occasions Joe had persuaded them to let her stay at home. Now there was a new danger: she said that Joe had been sent to London to work for the Red Cross and he was therefore away for weeks on end. Travel was so difficult with all the fears of invasion, the defensive preparations going on, that he had been home for only one weekend since he left. Being alone terrified her, but because of everything else that had happened she felt especially vulnerable.
That was all her letter said: she made no requests, no suggestions, asked for no help.
It threw me into an emotional quandary. I was living with the idea of her marriage to Joe by ignoring it. The latest row between Joe and me made that easier, of course. Because Birgit did not intervene at the time, and because she was after all his wife, I assumed she was allied with him on whatever it was, whatever new thing we rowed about that evening. She was still Birgit, though. Now she was in her early twenties, Birgit, as I witnessed from a distance during the Christmas reunion, had matured both physically and emotionally. The slightest thought of her would tip me into a long reverie about what might have been had events worked out differently.
Now I had a whole letter from her.
I wrote back to her the same day. I composed what I intended to be a thoughtful letter, one that was helpful and sympathetic without trying to interfere in any way. At the end I said, as blandly as possible, that if she thought it would help I could probably obtain a short leave and make a hurried trip across to see her.
Two days later I received a one-sentence reply from her: ‘Come as soon as you can.’
I immediately put in an application to the station commander’s office for a forty-eight-hour pass, but at the same time I felt I should take a final precaution against the impulses of the heart. I too wrote a one-sentence letter to her.
‘If I come to visit you,’ I said, ‘am I likely to see my brother Joe?’
She did not reply. As soon as my leave was confirmed I went anyway.
20
My meetings with Rudolf Hess at Mytchett Place extended over three days. As soon as I realized who the prisoner was, I assumed that I had been sent because he remembered me from our meeting in Berlin, or he had asked to see me for some other reason. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He showed no sign of recognition at all, was suspicious of me and for the first day the only responses I had from him were hostile or uninterested.
Hess’s circumstances had changed a great deal in five years. In 1936 he was one of the most important and feared people in Germany, but by the time he was incarcerated in Mytchett Place he had become a prisoner of war allowed only the minimum of comforts or privileges. The easy bullying manner had gone. The small talk did not exist. When he spoke at all, it was to complain about his treatment or to make demands to which I was simply unable to respond. For most of that first day he was sullen and silent, unwilling even to acknowledge my presence in the room.
Matters changed and improved on the second day. Although his suspicions remained, I think it finally sank in that I really had been sent by Churchill himself. For that day, and the next, I made much more progress than at first. It wasn’t an ideal meeting, because of the circumstances, but by the time I finished I felt I had gained some important information for the Prime Minister.
I left Mytchett Place on the fourth morning, immediately after an early breakfast. I did not see Hess again before I left. The car drove swiftly to London, taking me to Admiralty House. My mind was swirling with a heady mixture of excitement, intrigue, anticipation and the more prosaic memories of many hours of awkward boredom. Whatever the circumstances, Hess was the worst of social company.
As soon as my arrival at Admiralty House was known I was taken to a two-roomed suite of offices which had been set aside for me on the top floor of the building. That my investigation was something of a priority was borne in on me because, as well as being allocated the rooms, I also had assigned to me a secretary and a translator. I was promised that the archivists in the library would treat any requests from me as a priority. Still feeling as if I had been thrown suddenly into a world of intrigues I barely understood, I settled down to assemble my thoughts and try to write them down in a coherent form.
I worked solidly for the next few days, travelling into central London every morning from my base at Northolt. In that time, two reminders came through to me from the Prime Minister’s office, asking when my report might be ready. Time was of the essence and I was not to be allowed to forget it.
I had never been involved in this sort of work before, so organizing the material sensibly was a serious problem. My first version of the report was a lengthy and ill-arranged affair. I presented it as a verbatim account of each of my several meetings with Hess, including unedited transcriptions of the recordings of our conversations (translated into English when we had spoken in German) and supported by much other detail and elaboration that I was able to obtain from the library archives. I tried to produce a comprehensive account, a definitive record, comparing my own observations of Hess with what facts I coul
d find about him in the Foreign Office archives. They had been observing him for years and the files were stuffed with information.
Miss Victoria MacTyre, the War Office secretary who was assigned to me, took the report away and had it typed out in full. She distributed it among four typists downstairs in the pool. If I say that it took them a day and a half of intensive typing this will give some impression of how many pages the report comprised.
Miss MacTyre brought the finished report to my office. While the secretarial work was going on, she managed to read the whole thing. She complimented me generously on it and told me that in the two years since the outbreak of war she had never read such an interesting piece of work. However, she said, there was a particular problem.
‘Group Captain, I must warn you that Mr Churchill will not read it,’ she said.
‘I think he will. He commissioned it personally and has been pressing me to deliver it to him as quickly as possible.’
‘I do understand that, sir. The fact remains that he will take one look at it and send it back to me.’
‘Why should he do that?’
‘It’s far too long,’ she said. ‘It presents a brilliant analysis of the subject and I’ve never read any report that is so well cross-referenced and supported by evidence, but the plain fact is that Mr Churchill does not have the time to read anything so lengthy and detailed.’
‘There are an incredible number of ramifications,’ I said. ‘Until I went to the place, to Camp Z, I had no idea how complex the situation is. It wouldn’t do justice to the problem if I left half of it out.’
‘What the Prime Minister requires,’ Miss MacTyre said, with what I belatedly realized was immense patience, ‘what he needs is a succinct and reliable summary of the salient points. You should add detail where it is necessary, but wherever possible the supporting material should be contained in a separate report. That is the version the officials will analyse and retain as the basis for whatever actions the Prime Minister decides to take.’
Still feeling the pressure of Mr Churchill’s expectations on me, I stared gloomily at the thick pile of typewritten sheets on my desk, wondering how I should ever be able to organize such rambling and discursive material. Everything in it needed to be there, because everything I had learned about Rudolf Hess had a bearing on what I had discovered. I began sifting through the pages, trying to see what I could distil from them.
After leaving me for an hour to work on the problem alone, Miss MacTyre returned and briskly offered me the solution. She brought with her a copy of a report commissioned by the Admiralty into what had gone wrong during the Narvik campaign at the beginning of 1940. It was four pages long.
‘This took more than three months to prepare,’ she said, laying it on my desk. ‘The original depositions amounted to over five hundred sheets of paper. What Mr Churchill read is the first four pages, from which he gained an accurate summary of the main points. The rest of the report was distributed to the various departments who needed to act on the lessons learnt from what went wrong.’
I glanced through the four-page report. It looked so easy, so plain and straightforward. It consisted of a number of fairly short sections, each one of which was preceded by a question.
It was such a practical and obvious solution that I was amazed I hadn’t thought of it myself.
Miss MacTyre said, ‘As you know, sir, I’ve read your report and I think I have drawn from it a number of different leading questions. I’ve taken the liberty of suggesting some for you.’
She passed me the sheet with a list of questions neatly typed. The first was: Before you arrived at Camp ‘Z’, did you know the identity of the prisoner you were going to meet?
The second question was: Did you recognize the prisoner when you met him?
The third read: Why did you recognize him?
The fourth: What were your first impressions of the prisoner?
‘Thank you,’ I said simply.
‘You can leave some of them out if you wish,’ she said. ‘Or you could add some of your own.’
‘But not too many of them, I suppose,’ I said.
‘No, sir.’
I settled down to work.
21
Birgit and Joe were living in a rented house in a tiny village on the western side of the Pennine hills, overlooking the Cheshire Plain, with a longer view to the north-west across a large part of the city of Manchester. This much I knew from my mother’s description. Otherwise, I had only the address on Birgit’s letter to guide me.
I borrowed a motorbike from Robbie Finch, another pilot with 148 Squadron, scrounged some petrol, then rode the bike at high speed on the almost traffic-free roads across the breadth of England. The main part of the journey took me less than two hours, but I spent another hour driving around in the general area of the village before I found the house.
Birgit opened the door to me, ushering me in coolly and politely. When the door was closed I held out my arms towards her. We pecked a kiss on each other’s cheek.
My first words to her were, ‘Is Joe here?’
‘No. I don’t know where he is.’
She pulled herself away but smiled encouragingly at me. She showed me around the house, which she kept in a state of scrupulous cleanliness. It had many rooms, some of a good size and with stunning views across the countryside below. She had made one of the upstairs rooms into her studio, where there were music-stands, a glass-fronted cabinet to hold her sheet music, a large gramophone, a wireless, a long couch. Her violin lay in its case on top of a low cupboard.
In spite of its generous proportions the house was in dilapidated condition, with several holes in the roof, windows that would not open or close properly and floorboards that were uneven and in places rotting away. There was running water and a crude inside toilet, but the water-heater, run from bottled gas, had stopped working several weeks earlier. The house had no proper heating. There was no cooker, just a small hob with two gas rings, which used the same bottled gas as the water-heater. As we went around from room to room I noted all this, thinking how cold and uncomfortable the place must be in winter. Even on the sunny day in August when I arrived, the inside of the house felt draughty and damp.
With the tour of the house soon out of the way, we sat together in her stone-flagged kitchen drinking tea. She had no coffee, said how much she missed it, how much she would like to offer me some.
We had much to talk about. We spoke mostly in English and although her manner to me was warm she was clearly holding her feelings back. She treated me like her closest friend, but a friend she kept at a distance. To me, she had never looked more attractive, more so because I could see the signs of recent stress in her appearance. She looked thin and her face fell easily into a troubled look, but to me she was as beautiful as I ever remembered her. Now that I was there with her, though, it was the beauty of reality, not of some lonely, wishful dream. During my noisy motorbike ride across the country I had been harbouring a vision of a passionate, loving reunion with her, but once I was really there all that changed. She made me happy, but it was the happiness of being with her, not of yearning for her.
She told me about her troubles and worries: Joe’s frequent and long absences, the loss of contact with her parents, her fears that they were dead or in one of the Nazis’ concentration camps. More pressing still was her situation here, in England. Our youthful adventure, in which we had smuggled her out of Germany, seemed long ago in the past, but it was a small indicator of the worse trouble that was to come.
When the war broke out, her German birth meant that she faced internment with many other German nationals. Only the fact that she was married to a Briton and had taken out British citizenship saved her from the first round of internments. A second round had followed, two months later, at the time of Dunkirk when the country was rife with rumours of a fifth column. She again managed to avoid that, partly through the intervention of the Red Cross in Manchester, for whom Joe was working. She and
Joe had assured the police that she was pregnant, though in fact she was not. Now once again, with the air battles in the south-east of England going on every day and huge numbers of invasion barges being assembled by the Germans in the Channel ports, the British authorities were again casting their net. She had come increasingly to see Joe as her last defence: so long as he was there with her, she had a form of security. But Joe’s work had taken him to London, from which he was rarely able to return. She was existing from one day to the next, waiting for the police to arrive.
‘I am British!’ she said to me desperately, as she wept. ‘I became British because of what I had been. When I was growing up … [I thought I was German, because that’s how we thought of ourselves, a German family. An ordinary German family. I was a German first who was born a Jew, but still a German]. Then I found out I was only a Jew, not a German at all. So I came to England to escape being German, to escape being Jewish. But here I am not British, not even Jewish, but German again! [I fled from Germany because of what the Nazis were doing. Now I am to be persecuted again because they think I am a German spy, a Nazi! I am just a woman with an English husband. Can’t they leave me alone?] Who will look after me, now that Joe is away all the time?’
I had answers to none of this, but I comforted her as well as I could.
She gave me lunch: a simple snack of bread and cheese, with some lettuce she said she had grown in the garden.
Afterwards she said, ‘JL, I want to ask you a favour. A big, big favour.’
‘What would it be?’
Then she retreated, wouldn’t tell me what it was. I didn’t need to be asked, because for Birgit no favour would be too big. A few minutes later, she started again, building it up before she would tell me what it was, explaining that she was so reluctant to ask because she did not want me to think that it was the only reason she was pleased to see me. I assured her that I would not think that. Finally, she came out with it.