THE ROYAL CONNECTION

In the Autumn of 1937 the Duke of Windsor, the abdicated King of England, Edward VIII,  and his wife, Mrs Wallace Simpson, met Rudolf Hess. He had invited them to a private dinner to round-off a day in which they had met Adolf Hitler.(See photo below.) We therefore have evidence to suggest that Hess had a Royal connection. What part did this play in Hess' mission to make peace with Great Britain in May 1941?

British Intelligence had already prevented the Duke from becoming King of England, using Mrs Simpson as a pretext to make him abdicate. They didn't want a Nazi sympathiser on the throne of the British Empire.

The Duke of Windsor had been under observation by the British Security Service since 1936 when Military Intelligence had established his links with minor officials of the Nazis regime. Hess would meet the Duke again on the 28th July 1940 in Lisbon.

The meeting was secret and very brief, but it must have been about one thing alone: Germany wanted to obtain re-assurances that Great Britain would not attack her when she invaded Poland. This meeting, between Rudolf Hess and the King's brother was supposed to secure peace.

Both governments denied that it ever happened and many secret documents were destroyed by subsequent British governments to hide the truth. The meeting was arranged through high officials in Nazi Germany, notably the Schellenberg and Reinhard Heydrich, the chiefs of the SS and SD Intelligence organisations.

The Duke saw Germany as a bulwark against the spread of Stalinist World Communism. Hitler was pro-Royal family. The Duke was absolutely convinced that Britain should try to avoid war, and isolate herself from participating in a war with Nazi Germany. Such a war he must have thought, could only strengthen Communist Russia.

It is therefore unlikely that the Royal connection was something that was created by SO1. It is far more likely that this connection was created with the help of German intelligence using the Duke's own natural sympathies. The Duke provided Hess with a direct link to King George VI. Hess was told through Haushofer by Carl Burkhardt that he would meet the King at Luton Hoo, on the night of 27-28 May 1941.  Hitler had to have known about this, and so the Lone Flyer theory is disproved because of the following and remarkable event:-

On the night of 27-28 May 1941 at least two German assassins, dressed in plain clothes  parachuted into Luton Hoo. (A recent publication by Stephen Prior claims it happened on the 12 May, but this is unlikely.) They were captured and subsequently executed as spies. Why Luton Hoo? This was where the Wernher family lived, close friends of the King and Queen. Britain's current Queen spent her honeymoon there, due to this relationship. It has been suggested that Hess must have been told that here he would meet the King and Queen of England, and the leading members of the Duke of Hamilton's Peace Party: Lords Brocket, Buccleuch and Bedford. Here came the SS assassins hoping they would find the Deputy Fuhrer and kill him.

All they found was Major John McGowen and his Army unit waiting for them to arrive amidst a heavy bombing raid on Luton. McGowen was tipped off by Air Chief Vice Marshall Leigh Mallory, who simply told him that by 'some unusual means' they knew that paratroopers would land.

Peter Padfield speculated that this meant that Leigh Mallory was perhaps part of the Hess plot, because McGowen was given to suspect he had obtained the information by the monitoring or radio traffic (Y Service) and that a message had arrived from Willi Messerschmitt personally addressed to Leigh Mallory. This is highly unlikely, and was probably Leigh Mallory's way of keeping *ULTRA secret. This event on its own proves beyond reasonable doubt that Adolf Hitler knew about Hess' mission to Britain.

NOTES

*ULTRA - the top secret operation to decode ENIGMA machine codes used by German forces to communicate with one another. By the end of the war they had developed an electrical programmable computer (COLOSSUS) the ancestors of all current computer technology. ULTRA was based at Bletchley Park, only a few miles from the offices used by SO1.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Crown & the Swastika by Peter Allen.

The Double Cross Committee by J C Masterman.