6
Munich to Marbella
Prince Max Egon zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg
Prince Max Hohenlohe usually receives a ‘walk-on-part’ in books on secret intelligence during the Second World War. Authors dedicate a few lines to him, mentioning that he was working in Czechoslovakia in 1938 and during the war was involved in talks with the Allies in Switzerland. It never seems to be quite clear though for ‘whom’ he actually worked: Göring, or Göring’s rival Himmler or perhaps the German spy chief Canaris? The British journalist Sefton Delmer, who knew Hitler’s entourage intimately in the 1930s, was adamant that Max Hohenlohe worked as an ‘amateur agent’ for Ribbentrop.1 The Foreign Office did not share this interpretation, but saw him as a useful go-between nonetheless. The vagueness about his affiliation certainly helped Hohenlohe to survive turbulent times unscathed. As a result, some interpretations of him are to this day surprisingly friendly, culminating in his German Wikepedia entry which portrays him as a man who ‘promoted peace’. Even the UK National Archives describe him rather generously as a ‘Scarlet Pimpernel figure’.2 Digging deeper into his work, it becomes clear that he certainly never rescued inocents from the guillotine.
There are several plausible reasons why Max Hohenlohe is seen in a positive light: first, the fact that his private papers have not been made available by the Hohenlohe family. Only selective parts were seen by the journalist Heinz Höhne in the 1960s.3 Höhne worked for the German magazine Der Spiegel and was the first journalist to contact Prince Max Hohenlohe. Second, Hohenlohe had an interest in being interviewed. After the war he was naturally eager to set the record straight, portraying himself as an early critic of Hitler. His written replies to Höhne’s questions are intriguing. He claimed he had never been connected with Himmler’s SD (Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service). He probably was not aware of the fact that Höhne had unearthed his SD number. Instead Max claimed that he acted as a private individual, who happened to know several leading people in Germany and ‘the West’, including Churchill and Alan Dulles. He conceded that he had talked to Hitler at the Olympics in 1936 and therefore got ‘to know Ribbentrop, Göring, Himmler, ambassador Hewel [a Nazi diplomat] and others’. Whether some of the people he talked to had belonged to the SD he ‘could really not say’.4 He claimed to have cared about one thing only, persuading a member of the Nazi leadership to support his peace plans. For this end alone he stressed, he had worked before and after the outbreak of war with the Nazis. Max Hohenlohe’s son Alfonso later continued this narrative, describing his father as ‘an independent and trustworthy mediator … between the several fronts, a true European’.5 At a time of European integration this was a politically correct line of argument.
Apart from his son, another man made sure that Max was seen in the most favourable light. His name was Reinhard Spitzy. Spitzy was a dedicated Nazi who fully identified himself with Hohenlohe. In his memoirs he portrayed him as a seeker for peace. Spitzy’s books were popular in postwar Germany because he was a highly prominent talking head in TV documentaries. Witty, charming, and rotten to the core, his expertise was saucy stories about Hitler’s private life. It was therefore due to Spitzy that Max Hohenlohe became ‘a good Nazi’. He was certainly a very shrewd one. It was his shrewdness that turned him into a go-between.
Hohenlohe was the third of six children, born at the family seat Rothenhaus, in November 1897.6 As a young man Hohenlohe would have described himself as a Bohemian German belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, after the First World War his ‘home’ became part of Czechoslovakia and this placed Hohenlohe in a dilemma.
Unlike Stephanie Hohenlohe, who had married her name, Max was the genuine thing—a grand seigneur with a long pedigree. But even though they were not blood relations and did not even belong to the same branch of the House of Hohenlohe, in many ways they could have been identical twins. Both were larger than life characters, determined to succeed under whatever regime was in charge. Both had many reasons for becoming go-betweens. Neither of them was altruistic.
As we have seen in Chapter 5 on Stephanie, the House of Hohenlohe was divided into several different branches. Because of their connections with the British royal family the Protestant branch of the Hohenlohe-Langenburgs had high status. They were, however, not a very rich family and Queen Victoria had more than once helped them out financially. She did not help the Catholic Hohenlohe-Langenburg line, though, of which Max was a member. Money was certainly a problem for a socially ambitious man like him. As a third son he had not much hope of an inheritance. His prospects of one day running at least a moderate estate collapsed completely in 1918. Until then he had been serving in the Austrian army and enjoyed the social status of his family. After the war he faced a social and financial abyss. His father’s property was situated in the newly founded Czechoslovakia and threatened to be diminished by agrarian reforms.7 It is therefore not surprising that Hohenlohe deeply resented the Czech government. But the Hohenlohe family motto was: ‘Ex flammis orior’ (I will rise out of flames) and Max would make sure of that.
Like Stephanie and so many other Austro-Hungarian aristocrats at the time, Max had to choose a new passport in 1918. He could have taken Czech citizenship but decided against it. Instead he chose the passport of a safe little place—Liechtenstein. This was possible because the Hohenlohes were related to the house of Liechtenstein. Once the passport was issued, Hohenlohe sorted out other pressing problems. To improve his dire financial situation he married well. This turned out to be easy since he was in his youth a good-looking man, described as ‘tall, sporty, a good tennis and polo player’ and therefore popular with women.8 He chose them well. In 1921 he married Piedita Iturbe, Marquesa de Belvis. Her father had been the Mexican ambassador to St Petersburg and Madrid. Her mother, María de la Trinidad von Scholtz-Hersmendorff y Caravaca, came from a Spanish-Mexican family and ran an influential political salon in Madrid. Marrying Piedita therefore opened up the highest Spanish society contacts for Hohenlohe. He quickly made friends with King Alfonso XIII of Spain. The King became the godfather of Hohenlohe’s first born son Alfonso, a great honour for the Hohenlohe family. The christening was held in the Spanish royal palace and little Alfonso Hohenlohe would later become as notorious a playboy as his royal godfather.
Max Hohenlohe’s wife was not just well connected, she was also extremely rich. The Iturbes had in 1766 left the Basque country for a life in Mexico and accumulated a fortune in gold, jewels, and spices.9 Piedita’s wealth made it possible for Max by 1935 to buy the Hohenlohe family seat Rothenhaus in Bohemia from his older brother. In a subtle way he therefore made himself the most important member of this Hohenlohe branch, a development that must have confused his elder brother, who was after all the head of the family. While his brother sank into oblivion, Max rose to become a social star of inter-war society. His aim was to turn the Bohemian castle, together with his wife’s Spanish palace El Quexigal, into centres of political influence. He was driven by the conviction that politics were his true calling. After all this was a vocation that had been in the family blood for generations. His friend Spitzy would later recall: ‘Max Hohenlohe was made to think on a European scale, since his ancestors worked all over Europe, producing: ‘a German Chancellor, a French Marshal, a Roman Catholic Cardinal, a number of Austro-Hungarian Field Marshals, Generals of Prussia and Baden, hereditary Marshals of Württemberg and ADCs General to the Russian Tsar. Hohenlohe got involved with foreign affairs, because this was what his family had done since the Middle Ages.’10
Indeed, in Max’s eyes there seems to have been a natural continuity: generations of his family had served monarchs, he would now serve a new prince—Hitler.
The reasons why he chose Hitler were purely opportunistic. They were also quite common among his peer group. As we have seen, three points of Hitler’s foreign policy were highly attractive to German and Austrian aristocrats who had been landowners in several countries: Hitler’s anti-Czech policy, his plans for Austria, and his policy towards Poland. In 1934 no less a person than Goebbels fought for the property of the princely Pless family, confiscated by the Poles.11 It was an act that made an impression on aristocrats. The Nazi party seemed supportive when it came to their grievances.
Max Hohenlohe-Langenburg was not particularly interested in Poland, but the other two foreign policy issues on Hitler’s agenda were of great importance to him. First of all the Führer promised a new awakening of an old idea: a greater Germany. At long last Austria and Germany might become united. Reinhard Spitzy, himself an Austrian, wrote how much the ideal of a greater Germany meant to his friend Hohenlohe: ‘[Max] was a tough and clever grand seigneur with immense charm. He was a convincing patriot for the old and the new greater Germany.’12
Hitler offered something else that was irresistible: an aggressive policy towards Czechoslovakia. Hohenlohe was only one of many former Austro-Hungarian landowners who had developed a hatred towards the Czech government.
In the 1920s two aristocratic groups emerged in Czechoslovakia: the ‘German’ and the ‘Czech’ ones.13 While the German group consisted of two-thirds of the whole aristocracy, the Czech one only covered one-third. They immersed themselves in Czech culture, they took Czech passports and made their arrangements with the Republic. These aristocrats naturally had a greater chance of being integrated into the new Czechoslovakia than aristocrats who made their pro-German leanings obvious.14 However, in the 1920s both groups were sympathetic to fascist ideas. They saw them as an ideal counterweight to Bolshevism and liberalism.15 Though they all favoured fascism per se, not everyone could agree with Nazism. The aristocratic Czech group had great problems supporting the Nazis, because Hitler seemed determined to break up Czechoslovakia. The gap between the German and Czech group of aristocrats consequently widened. It was a divide that is still playing out today in aristocratic circles, each faction accusing the other of their ancestors siding with the Nazis, the Czech Republic, or (later) the communists.16
For the German group Hitler represented in the 1930s a bulwark against their two greatest enemies—Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, allies from 1935. The fear of communism was an enormous driving force for Hohenlohe and his friends. During the Sudeten crisis in 1938 the British Foreign Office adviser Frank Ashton-Gwatkin pointed this out:
They have a horror of Russia and ‘Bolshevism’, which they believe is a real danger to them, to what is left of their possessions, and to the tradition for which they still stand.17
To protect their possessions the German group of aristocrats sided with Conrad Henlein, the leader of the German minority in Czechoslovakia, the so-called Sudeten Germans.
What happened to Czechoslovakia in the summer and autumn of 1938 has already been discussed. We have seen how Stephanie Hohenlohe and Wiedemann tried to influence Halifax. Max Hohenlohe had an identical brief and he carried it out with the utmost finesse. Long after the war, his old friend Spitzy was still enjoying the coup they had pulled off in 1938: ‘It was easy for our friend and benefactor Prince Max Hohenlohe-Langenburg to use his excellent contacts in the West to promote the case of the Sudeten Germans.’18
After the war, Hohenlohe always claimed that he had worked on his own and that his aim had been to prevent a war over Czechoslovakia. It was the same narrative Stephanie Hohenlohe used to describe her involvement. Both could hardly admit that Göring was ‘running’ them. It remained their closely kept secret. The Czechs as well as the British were under the misapprehension that Hohenlohe was their ‘intermediary’ to Henlein.19
Max Hohenlohe’s role was to pose in Britain as the moderate, the voice of reason ‘helping’ the British to solve the thorny problem of the Sudetenland. It might seem surprising that he was listened to in London, but the Foreign Office had a history of being in contact with German-Czech nobles. Shortly after the First World War, the Czech socialist press had even suspected that the British were colluding with local aristocrats to install a King. The Czech newspaper Ceske Slovo wrote: ‘[Aristocrats] are conspiring to place a King on the throne of Bohemia, in which connection HRH Prince Arthur of Connaught is alluded to.’ The paper went on to say that ‘members of the British, French and Italian diplomatic and military missions are too often seen at the houses of the nobility and in particular at that of Prince Frederic Lobkowicz’.20
Though the idea of a king was far fetched, the visits to princely houses never stopped. British diplomats had forged good contacts within the local aristocracy and these contacts lasted well into the 1930s. Hohenlohe was eager to use them for his own purposes. He and Göring knew all too well that a go-between with an impressive pedigree would be appreciated in a class-conscious society like Britain. Indeed, Chamberlain and Halifax preferred to talk to someone with an impeccable background. Hohenlohe seemed to be a familiar type, a grand seigneur of the old school, whose country seat just happened to be in Bohemia and not in the Shires. As an international aristocrat he was obviously as much at home in Britain as in Paris, Vienna, or Madrid. He was independently wealthy and a jovial man—an ideal interlocutor. He knew Churchill, members of the Foreign Office, the Intelligence Services, and also many foreign diplomats in London—including Churchill’s distant relative the Duke of Alba, and the number two at the German embassy Prince Otto II von Bismarck.
In retrospect the Foreign Office commented on his work in the Sudetenland: ‘he was very active as an intermediary with Göring and other so-called moderate Germans before the Munich agreement.’21
By then it might have dawned on the Foreign Office that the ‘moderate Germans’ led by Göring never actually existed. But in 1938 Hohenlohe seemed an ideal ‘intermediary’, a man who would help to prevent trouble in Czechoslovakia.
The British government had not acted against the annexation of Austria in March 1938 and hoped for no more aggravation in regard to Czechoslovakia. To his sister Chamberlain had written: ‘If we can avoid another violent coup in Czechoslovakia, which ought to be feasible, it may be possible for Europe to settle down again, and some day for us to start peace talks again with the Germans.’22
Chamberlain thought this feasible because, among other things, he had back channels to the Germans. The Prime Minister had already made up his mind on Czechoslovakia. He had not much patience with the Czech President Beneš, whom he distrusted. In his opinion the Czechs should solve the Sudeten problem quickly and spare the French from having to fulfil their guarantee to Czechoslovakia in case of war. He was in denial of the fact that the Sudeten problem was just a pretext being used by Hitler to acquire the whole of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain also did not realize that the Sudeten German leader Henlein was from the beginning Hitler’s puppet. After a meeting with the Führer in March 1938, Henlein summed up the instructions he had been given: ‘we must always demand so much that we cannot be satisfied.’ As Zara Steiner rightly pointed out ‘such instructions, unknown in London, Paris or Prague, made a mockery out of subsequent Czech efforts to find an acceptable solution to the Sudeten problem’.23 In fact, what happened during the summer of 1938 was a long theatre performance with an excellent cast of German go-betweens. Max Hohenlohe had a good character role playing the well-meaning friend of the British who ‘just wanted to help’. Apart from Max another excellent performance was given by Stephanie Hohenlohe. Like Max, she sold Henlein to the British as a man whose demands for autonomy were reasonable. As has been shown, Stephanie was Henlein’s hostess in London in May 1938—a month after Henlein demanded political autonomy for his people in a major speech at Carlsbad. His demands more or less aimed at the disintegration of Czechoslovakia, but, despite this speech, he was well received in London. With the knowledge of Halifax and Chamberlain, Henlein talked to Vansittart and Churchill.
After selling Henlein as an upright politician on the London stage, Göring and Hitler had used a go-between in July to bring home to Chamberlain how serious the situation in the Sudetenland could become if Britain ignored Henlein’s demands. As we know, Wiedemann had visited Halifax privately with Stephanie Hohenlohe and told him that if nothing was done about the problem, Hitler would start a war. While Wiedemann and Stephanie were busy in London, the other go-between, Max Hohenlohe, was busy in Czechoslovakia feeding the British with his own Sudeten German ‘spin’. His point of contact was Sir Robert Vansittart, until earlier in the year the Permanent Under Secretary of State at the Foreign Office. Vansittart, despite his anti-German stance was also interested in solving the Sudeten question peacefully. He trusted Max Hohenlohe and had sent one of his best men to liaise with him—Group Captain Malcolm Christie. Christie was an intelligence officer who had befriended lots of leading Nazis over the years.
In Vansittart and Christie’s eyes Max Hohenlohe was a man one could do business with. To keep their conversations confidential, they chose code names for each other. Christie’s code names were Graham and Gordon while Max Hohenlohe’s was Smiler (which might have something to do with his sunny disposition). Henlein was called chicken, a translation of his German name. In July 1938 Christie reported on his conversation with Smiler: ‘Prince Hohenlohe rang up, expressed anxiety about Czech tactics. Hohenlohe is absolutely convinced (and I am equally so) that nothing short of some reasonable measure of cultural autonomy (for the Sudeten Germans) would do. Hohenlohe feels that it will require at least such an offer to take the wind out of Germany’s sails to undermine her pretext for intervention.’24
This sounded as if Hohenlohe genuinely wanted to help the British against a bellicose Hitler. In fact he knew that Hitler did not want autonomy for the Sudetenland, but to annexe it. This was the ultimate aim, but Hohenlohe rightly calculated that the British would not accept this outright. They had to be persuaded slowly and they needed help to save face with the French.
There were at least two reasons why Göring and his go-between Hohenlohe worked so hard on the British to achieve a ‘peaceful’ annexation of the Sudetenland. First of all Göring genuinely feared the reactions of the western powers if Hitler simply marched into the Sudetenland. But apart from the external threat, there was also an internal one. Göring knew all too well that the Führer’s war plans for Czechoslovakia (codename Case Green) had been criticized by some of his own generals. They feared a political and military disaster. Indeed the Czech army was not weak; it had been increased over the years, and importantly most of the Czech fortifications were situated in the Sudetenland.
As we have seen in the chapter on Stephanie Hohenlohe, Göring hoped that if the Sudetenland could be handed over by peaceful means, Czechoslovakia would lose the majority of its border fortifications. German soldiers could simply take over the fortifications without a shot being fired. After that, occupying the rest of Czechoslovakia would be plain sailing.
Hitler knew about and had supported the Wiedemann/Stephanie Hohenlohe channel to Halifax and he probably also knew that Göring was running another back channel in Czechoslovakia. To this day his actions in the summer of 1938 puzzle historians. He seemed determined to carry out his ‘Case Green’ and attack Czechoslovakia. But he also had periods of doubt. He was not sure how the British would react and it was therefore important for him to get as much information via go-betweens as possible. Consequently people like Max Hohenlohe were extremely useful.
In July 1938 the ‘moderate German’ Hohenlohe therefore came to London and explained to his Foreign Office contacts that Hitler was bound to start a war over Czechoslovakia and that Henlein needed support so this could be avoided. Giving in to Henlein’s demands for the autonomy of the Sudetenland would de-escalate the situation. Hohenlohe also portrayed Göring as the man in Hitler’s entourage who was eager to find a peaceful solution.
The British listened carefully. By then they had come to the conclusion that a British arbiter should get involved. Chamberlain and Halifax had the right candidate for this endeavour, the 68-year-old Lord Runciman. Runciman was seen as a safe pair of hands: ‘he could, be relied upon to put the results across. His background, political career and Establishment credentials left him naturally capable of knowing exactly how London would wish him to act.’25 To the public Runciman was sold as ‘independent’.
The Runciman mission to Czechoslovakia lasted from 3 August to 16 September. During this visit he talked to the Czech President Beneš, the Prime Minister Hodza, and the leader of the Sudeten party Henlein.26 In his ‘fact finding mission’ Runciman was supported by Hohenlohe. Hohenlohe seemed a genuine mediator to him because he was trusted by Hodza and Henlein. It was Hohenlohe who brought Runciman and Henlein together at his castle for talks. He volunteered as a translator and after the meeting remained the link between the two men.
Runciman was not alone on his ‘reconnaissance trip’, but was accompanied by Ashton-Gwatkin from the Foreign Office. Ashton-Gwatkin came to the obvious conclusion that Hohenlohe and his fellow Sudeten German aristocrats were strong supporters of the SDP (Sudeten German party) and were personally very fond of ‘the Chicken’ (Henlein).27 Ideally this ‘revelation’ should have led Ashton-Gwatkin and Runciman to find out more about the other side of the argument. Yet the Sudeten Germans tried their best to prevent this. Hohenlohe invited all his persuasive aristocratic friends to charm Runciman. The historian Eagle Glassheim has shown how well this succeeded: ‘during his six week stay in Czechoslovakia, (Runciman) spent all but one weekend as a guest of Bohemian nobles. He ate lavish dinners with them, shot partridges on their estates, and toured the countryside in their motorcars.’28 It was a country-house-style entertainment which Runciman felt thoroughly at home with. Hohenlohe introduced him to the best families in the region—the Kinskys, the Clary-Aldringens, and the Westphalens.29 The agenda behind this was so obvious that it was already criticized at the time.
The Daily Express saw the closeness of Runciman to Hohenlohe and his friends as inappropriate, especially after the Sudeten Germans kept rejecting Czech offers:
Until now Lord Runciman had dealt in his talks only with Henlein’s lieutenants. This morning with all the Czech newpapers carrying attacks on the Sudetens for turning down the Government’s offer yesterday of partial home rule, he and Lady Runciman sent for their car and set out for [Hohenlohe’s] castle. Prince Max Hohenlohe, who is a Liechtenstein subject, and close Nazi sympathiser, was waiting for them.30
The Times claimed that Stephanie Hohenlohe had joined Max and Runciman in Czechoslovakia.31 Stephanie always denied having been part of the Runciman entertainment group. For once she may have been honest; she was probably too exposed after the press had caught her and Wiedemann leaving Halifax’s house in July.32
That Hohenlohe could work so well on the British was also to some extent the fault of the Czech government. They did not seize the chance to impress Runciman. This is the more surprising since the Czech President Beneš was offered help by Czech-minded aristocrats who wanted to entertain Runciman. Beneš did not take them up on the offer and lost the hospitality race. But he did try to solve the Sudeten question. On 4 September he declared he would fulfil all the demands Henlein had made. Hitler was not interested. Instead he ordered ‘incidents’ to be organized against the ‘suppressed’ Sudeten Germans to enable him to raise his demands.
In the meantime Hohenlohe continued to work on Runciman. To drum the point home that the Sudeten Germans were suffering under the Czech regime, Hohenlohe’s friend Count Kinsky even gave Runciman a tour of some of the Sudetenland’s more run-down areas. In a secret report to the Foreign Office, an informant noted that Kinsky’s tour utterly misrepresented the real conditions. Runciman had on purpose been shown ‘the dirtiest smelters’ and ‘the worst houses’ in the area.33 He may have noticed that he was being manipulated, but his wife certainly did not. Hilda Runciman, herself a politician, accompanied her husband to Czechoslovakia and was ‘worked on’ by female Sudeten German aristocrats. One of her hostesses showed her a prized autograph picture of Hitler and marvelled about his achievements. Hilda Runciman noted in her journal: ‘all this doesn’t sound like a man who is eager to take over all of Europe, which so many people persistently believe.’34
Chamberlain would have agreed with her analysis, even though other messages were reaching him by now, urging him not to give in to Hitler. Anti-Nazi Germans begged the British to help the Czechs. They quite rightly pointed out that German generals were doubtful whether a war against Czechoslovakia could be won. This fear should be used to topple Hitler. But Chamberlain simply dismissed such arguments.35 Instead he announced that he would negotiate with Hitler in Berchtesgaden. Runciman was ordered to leave Prague and come to London. But when he arrived in Downing Street he gave an ambivalent report. Chamberlain ignored this. He told the House of Commons on 28 September a different story:
the Cabinet met and it was attended by Lord Runciman who, at my request, had also travelled from Prague on the same day. Lord Runciman informed us that although, in his view, the responsibility for the final breach in the negotiations at Prague rested with the Sudeten extremists, nevertheless in view of recent developments, the frontier districts between Czechoslovakia and Germany, where the Sudeten population was in an important majority, should be given the full right of self-determination at once. He considered the cession of territory to be inevitable and thought it should be done promptly.36
This was not what Runciman had said. Despite all the pressure of Hohenlohe and his associates, he still seems to have had his doubts. In the end Chamberlain manipulated Runciman into writing the report he wanted. The American journalist Dorothy Thompson was already describing it as a ‘rigged report’. In fact Runciman’s first draft seems to have been cut and adapted to suit Hitler and Chamberlain. The Runciman report should in fact have been called the Chamberlain report. Tapped Czech telephone conversations indicate that Runciman had been overruled by his Prime Minister.37 Yet at the end of the day he bears the responsibility, because he did not stand up and air his doubts. His loyalty to Chamberlain and—in some ways—perhaps to his Sudeten German hosts was greater.
In the meantime Hohenlohe’s pro-Sudeten German activities did not go unnoticed by the Czech government. He became the victim of reprisals. While Hitler and Chamberlain were working out the Munich agreement that would seal the fate of Czechoslovakia, Hohenlohe’s castle was being pillaged. Hohenlohe’s British protector, Sir Robert Vansittart, tried to help him:
Prince Max Hohenlohe has just told me that he has news that his castle is being pillaged and its contents removed. In view of all that he has done recently by way of mediation in the Czech–Sudeten question, I feel that the least I can do is to ask you to make an appeal to the Czech authorities to stop this, and I shall be very grateful if you will put in a word on Hohenlohe's behalf as soon as possible.38
It turned out that Hohenlohe did not need their help regarding his castle, though. A day after Vansittart’s note, on 30 September, the fear of Czech reprisals was over once and for all. The Sudetenland and Hohenlohe’s castle now belonged—thanks to the Munich agreement—to Germany. The German army marched into the Sudetenland and took over all the Czech fortifications. From then on it was only a matter of time before they seized the whole of Czechoslovakia.
After the Munich agreement Runciman and Hohenlohe stayed friends. In 1939 they visited Göring together at his country seat Carinhall.39 It probably never occurred to Runciman that his charming friends, Göring and Hohenlohe, had ‘played’ him during the Sudeten crisis.
The Munich agreement was not just a great victory for Göring and Hitler. It was also a great victory for go-betweens. We have seen that Stephanie Hohenlohe congratulated Hitler enthusiastically on its completion, thereby celebrating herself a little bit too. It was also a great victory for her fellow go-between Max Hohenlohe. He received recognition for his help in many different ways. One was financially.
According to the files of the British security services, ‘(Max Hohenlohe) was reported to have been rewarded for his undercover aid for the Nazis by membership of the board of Skoda-Brün, the Czech munition works, which firm he subsequently represented in Spain.’40
The ‘Waffen-Union Skoda Brün’ was an armaments trust the Nazis set up in 1940. Hohenlohe later represented Skoda in Spain as well. According to Spitzy, Hohenlohe explained to him that Spain was useful for business and at the same time business was a good cover for his ‘peacework with the West’.41 It was also his wife’s home and he could entertain there in style.
Hohenlohe had done well out of the Sudeten crisis. Czech aristocrats who had shown solidarity with the Czech government on the other hand were less lucky. They were outraged by the betrayal of Czechoslovakia. However, they would not be rewarded for their rectitude. After suffering reprisals under the Nazi regime, in 1948 the new communist rulers made sure that they lost all their remaining property.
With his Sudeten German mission over, Hohenlohe’s next moves became even murkier. He continued to travel widely, so it is difficult to follow his tracks. He was in America but since his FBI files have not been released yet, we cannot verify what he was doing there, apart from sorting out his wife’s business interests. He also appeared in London again in the summer of 1939 but his ‘conversations’ with politicians there must have become more and more difficult. Germany had invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and consequently trust in Nazi representatives had become scarce. Chamberlain’s appeasement policy was now increasingly under attack by the opposition and by Churchill.
Since Hohenlohe worked for Göring, it is highly probable that in the summer of 1939 he was involved with preparations for the proposed Göring visit to Britain. The visit was planned for August 1939 and of course never took place. Whether it was ever seriously contemplated by the Germans is unclear. Most probably it was an avenue Hitler left open for himself. Yet the visit was one of the many reasons why the British government did not see the Nazi–Soviet pact coming. The Foreign Office firmly believed that Hitler was deeply ideological, and would never negotiate seriously with the Soviet Union. When the pact was signed, it sent shock waves through Whitehall. They were not the only ones surprised. The pact must have irritated Hohenlohe as well. He had not been privy to such secret negotiations and must have been confused. Since the generally unprincipled Hohenlohe was a principled anti-Bolshevik he too must have found the pact hard to swallow. Worse was to come. After Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war in September 1939, Hohenlohe appeared badly informed to his German employers (Figure 10). Up to the outbreak of war, he had always argued that an understanding with the British was possible.42 In September 1939 he had to adjust overnight. After the war he claimed that he went on the offensive and wrote a forceful memorandum to Göring:
Figure 10. The shady go-between: Prince Max Egon zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg.
In initiating World War II Germany has started from false premises and has miscalculated in every way. She did not calculate that England and France would fight for Poland, overlooking the fact that Poland is not the point—it is something quite different—the maintenance and assurance of peace in Europe. … Even at this late stage the possibility of an overall solution must be borne in mind. It must include: re-establishment of confidence, a guarantee for the respect of treaties, disarmament under mutual control and possibly withdrawal from Czechoslovakia and its reconstruction as a demilitarized state.43
The journalist Heinz Höhne believed this document to be genuine, but it could be backdated or a fake. Still, it points to something Hohenlohe did next. He wanted to work as a go-between again and bring about nothing less than a peace deal with Britain. He was not the only seasoned go-between who had such an idea. As we have seen Stephanie Hohenlohe hoped to pull off a similar coup from an American hotel room, using the intelligence officer Wiseman. Their ambition did not seem that misplaced. Both Hohenlohes had been successful before and they thought of themselves as much more effective than diplomats. After all, back channels had been useful all through the 1930s—why not now?
Indeed, with the outbreak of war, people like Max Hohenlohe became important again. What happened next was reminiscent of aristocratic peace feelers in the First World War. Since Britain and Germany could not talk to each other officially, they needed trusted go-betweens.
Another reason why go-betweens were listened to was the great insecurity within the British government. The hope that some kind of understanding with Germany (though not necessarily with Hitler) could still be found was not given up overnight. Hohenlohe understood this. He knew the psychology of the Chamberlain circle well. They wanted to talk to someone they could understand, a moderate, ‘conservative’ German, and he offered them such an option. His idea was to keep the conversation with the British going by creating the illusion of an alternative Germany. He therefore stressed in his first conversations after the outbreak of war that there was opposition to Hitler and that this opposition might be able to end the war. According to Hohenlohe Göring could be an alternative leader.
Today we know that an opposition to Hitler did exist and would form again later in the war. Yet Göring was a decoy. Though he had advised a more cautious route before the war, after Hitler’s overwhelming successes he never seriously thought of challenging the Führer’s position.
This does not mean though that Göring did not want to try peace feelers. But they were most probably with Hitler’s approval and never intended to overthrow him. Göring just did for Hitler what he had always done. He made use of his go-betweens. The most famous go-between he used after the outbreak of war was his friend the Swedish businessman Dahlerus, who kept pestering the British. But Göring also used Max Hohenlohe, who was at this point still trusted by the British.44
That Göring thought he could be successful with peace feelers was not unrealistic. Though the Chamberlain government had failed with its appeasement policy, Britain was still in a state of ‘phoney war’ with Germany. Between the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the summer of 1940, there were several British appeasers who wanted to end the war. Hohenlohe and the Nazi leadership were informed about this group of people by the Duke of Alba.
Alba was the Spanish ambassador to Britain. He had supported Franco, was pro-German, and thoroughly anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik. He was connected to the British aristocracy through the Marlboroughs, i.e. the Churchill family. His diplomatic status gave him access to the British government but because of his perfect pedigree he also had easy access to the British establishment in general, including key peers of the House of Lords. What he was hearing from his friends in the House of Lords in February 1940 encouraged him. They were very much hoping to come to an understanding with Hitler and had agreed to put pressure on Chamberlain. Alba informed the Spanish Foreign Ministry in a secret report about this group. The report was passed on to the German embassy in Madrid. Reading it must have given considerable pleasure to the Germans.45
Because the Royal Archives are closed on this issue we do not know whether aristocrats tried to encourage King George VI to intervene as well. But we do know that Alba was right and many peers tried to put pressure on Halifax and Chamberlain to approach Germany. Among them were the Duke of Buccleuch-Queensbury, and the Lords Brocket, Buxton, Elibank, Darnley, and Holden.46
Their letters also show that the idea of using back channels had become an absolutely normal feature of political life. First of all the Earl of Darnley, on 10 November 1939, wanted to make sure this method was used. He advised Chamberlain to make a ‘constructive forward step through the King of the Belgians’, to get into peace negotiations. On 9 February 1940 the Duke of Buccleuch also urged such a method:
[we should back up] our armed effort by active diplomacy behind the scenes. … It would be natural for negotiations to take place with the official and accepted rulers of the German nation, but if ours refuse to have any dealings with Hitler are they prepared to discuss the future with anyone in Germany? If though, with whom? Individuals have a right to ask that there should not be an indefinite prosecution of the war if an opportunity for discussion of peace can be secured. I must assume that the Government is aware of the possibility of discussing this question with others than Hitler. May we not hope that they are willing to take active steps to arrange this? If not, will they accept or consider information from others?
Of course, the Duke had someone in mind:
Would the Government negotiate with Göring … If not with Göring then with whom? … There has been strong evidence from knowledgeable forces that Göring and others were probably in a position and might still be able to discuss and arrange a peace provided proposals are fair towards Germany. … You assured Britain at the beginning of the war that we were fighting Hitlerism and not the German nation. Now the belief is held both in Germany and in Britain that they and we are fighting for [our] very existence.
The Duke wanted a different war: ‘If the British Government has any intention of saving Finland [which was at war with the Soviet Union] surely the only possible way is by ending war with Germany.’
Saving Finland would have meant attacking the Soviet Union. Lord Brocket also thought that the wrong war was being fought and Russia should be the target. He was a classic appeaser, who had supported the Munich agreement. Furthermore he was a friend of the Duke of Coburg and had taken over the Anglo-German Fellowship in 1939. He spoke German well and felt close to many members of the Nazi leadership. Now he tried to put pressure on Neville Chamberlain. On 27 January 1940 he wrote: ‘a defeated Germany and a dictated peace may mean Bolshevism in that country, spreading to France and Britain.’
Brocket was also of the opinion that the British did not want this war. ‘[T]here is a great feeling of unrest and discontent and hopelessness.’ He therefore urged Chamberlain ‘to hold out a carrot’ and give Germany some positive signal: ‘has Germany any evidence that you would make peace? … from considerable experience from this country, its bluntness … I know for a fact that stiff speeches make them all the stiffer … in fact their reaction is “England has declared war on us and wants to destroy us” … Germany should be told by you [that there would be no] second Versailles and a reasonable peace can be made.’
Brocket even offered a go-between for Chamberlain:
I have reason to believe from a friend of mine who lately returned from Italy and whom I sent to see Halifax, that the Göring faction (which is in the document my friend brought home written by an Italian married to the daughter of a leading Nazi, estimated to be 70% of the Party) would be willing to agree to peace on the following terms (quoted from the document which Halifax has)
Halifax could give you further details of this document and its source. … You may remember that I told you over a year ago and again just before the War, that Göring had said to me that in a War with the West he would not drop a single bomb on Britain or France until we did so on Germany. He has kept to that statement entirely and I believe he could be trusted to make a lasting peace.
Chamberlain’s reply to Brocket on 6 February 1940 seems to have been cautious because Brocket told him indignantly: ‘[Peace at any price] is not my policy. A last attempt should be made to get an enduring and lasting peace. Germany should be informed that she would not be dismembered.’
Brocket believed that Germany had misunderstood British policy:
I was told when I was there [in Germany] at the end of April [1939] that our pledge to Poland and the re-iteration of our determination to fight to fulfil it, were taken to mean that Britain had decided in any event to wage a preventive war to destroy Germany. From this assumption they argued, that as they would have to fight in any case, the conquest of Poland and the Russian agreement were necessary to them as a first instalment in the war they regarded as inevitable.
It seems that Brocket was lying here. In April 1939 the German–Soviet negotiations were top secret and it is highly unlikely that he knew about them.
But Brocket’s claim that Halifax had been contacted was correct. It was known by several people that Halifax had not closed down channels to Germany. This was one reason why Stephanie and Max Hohenlohe hoped well into 1940 that a peace between Britain and Germany could be engineered via Halifax. Stephanie had no chance of brokering this one, though. Halifax made sure that he would not be associated with her again. He had many other options. As the diaries of Guy Liddell, the MI5 Director of Counter-Espionage, show:
Stewart Menzies tells me that Halifax has been asked to see Lord Darnley and the Marquess of Tavistock regarding certain peace proposals. I gather that there have been six or seven approaches of this kind. It indicates that the Germans are feeling about but at present their terms are quite impossible. It seems also that these overtures may be a part of what the Germans call Zermürbungstaktik, the general purpose of which is to keep this country off the boil. Tavistock is, of course, connected with the British Council for Christian Settlement in Europe which is a mixture of the Link, Nordic League and BUF, and a most mischievous body.47
In fact Halifax’s visitor Tavistock had worked for the Nazis for some time. In 1933 he had been singled out as ‘useful’ by the German embassy since ‘he had always courageously stood up against the anti-German propaganda’ [during the First World War]. He was keen on Nazi contacts and after the outbreak of the Second World War established them via Dublin. Halifax probably did not help Tavistock, but he helped Brocket. He made travel arrangements for Lord Brocket’s go-between John Lonsdale Bryans. Lonsdale Bryans had first contacted members of the German opposition but then switched. He wanted to get directly in contact with Hitler. How far this went could never fully be verified. Halifax’s role in this, however, came out in 2008.
Over the years Halifax has been portrayed either as the cunning fox who played a long game towards Germany, or as an unreformed appeaser who hoped to broker a peace deal with the Germans. For both versions there exists strong evidence. The truth is probably much more banal. By the beginning of 1940 he was out of his depth. He shared the opinion of many of his aristocratic friends that this war should be ended as quickly as possible and he therefore helped them unofficially.
That he had helped Lonsdale Bryans was known to the British intelligence services. They had come across an associate of Lonsdale Bryans named Anderson who was ready to talk: ‘The main point which seemed to emerge from the interrogation was that according to Anderson, Lonsdale Bryans was a personal friend of Lord Brocket and also claimed to be something in the nature of an unofficial envoy of Lord Halifax. He wished to see Hitler and with this in view had asked Anderson to get in touch with a certain Stahmer.’ For the rest of the war the Foreign Office (and in particular Halifax) must have feared that Lonsdale Bryans and Anderson would sell their stories to the press.48 Instead Göring would cause Halifax a final uncomfortable moment in the winter of 1945. To his friend the Duchess of Portland Halifax wrote: ‘My dearest Ivy, I am amused with you saying that some of the peers are apprehensive of being summoned to give evidence at Nuremberg.’ He can’t have been that amused though: ‘Göring has requested me and Alex Cadogan to go and testify to how earnest a seeker of the peace he was up to the war.’49 Of course Halifax declined.
While Chamberlain and Halifax took people like Brocket, Buccleuch-Queensbury, and Darnley seriously, Churchill made clear as early as September 1939 that he would not. One of his old friends was the Duke of Westminster,50 a staunch anti-Semite, who had developed an interest in Nazi Germany through his relatives the Pless family. As a result Westminster supported German peace feelers in September 1939. To this effect he had written a memorandum which he read out to a selected group of British appeasers. The memorandum cannot be traced, but Churchill’s reply to it makes clear what is was about. Though Churchill was not yet Prime Minister, he demonstrated to Westminster in no uncertain terms what he thought of his pro-German meddling:
Dear Bernie,
It seems to me on reading it [Westminster’s memo] that there are some very serious and bad things in it, the full bearing of which I feel you could not have properly apprehended. I am sure that pursuance of this line would lead you into measurless odium and vexation. … Very hard experiences lie before those who preach defeatism and set themselves against the will of the nation.51
Since Churchill was a friend of Westminster, the language he uses here shows how strongly he felt on this issue. Once he was in power he had to unite the Conservative party behind him, though, and did not start a revenge campaign against Halifax and former appeasers. He had made his point and they understood.
Psychological warfare is a key element in the work of security services. Go-betweens can become part of such warfare. Not even go-betweens themselves necessarily know whether their mission is genuine or not. Their instructions are on a ‘need to know’ basis. Ideally they should believe in it in order to carry it out well. The question, however, remains in many cases whether they are in fact sent off on a genuine mission or whether they are simply being sent off on a mission to test how determined the opposite side is.
This is exactly the dilemma when one looks at Max Hohenlohe’s go-between work after the outbreak of war. He himself would claim for the rest of his life that the peace overtures he was instructed to make to the British were genuine. It is possible that he believed this. On the other hand he was a highly intelligent man who had already played a sinister double game in 1938. Ever since the Sudeten crisis Hohenlohe had built up Göring as the voice of peace. Göring was portrayed to the British as the ‘moderate Nazi’ the Allies could talk to. As we know today, it was correct that Göring had doubts about some of Hitler’s decisions. But in the end, he always went along with them.
Coming to an arrangement with the British would have elevated Göring‘s position in Hitler’s eyes and ousted Göring’s old rival Ribbentrop. Göring dreamt a dream that Rudolf Hess would also dream and that ended quite dramatically with his doomed flight to Scotland. Hohenlohe and Göring failed long before Hess boarded his plane.
In October 1939 Hohenlohe started his overtures to the British. It was obvious to everyone involved that the first few months of the war were vital if an Anglo-German arrangement could be achieved. The emotional and financial costs had not yet amounted to much. Hohenlohe wanted to exploit this vacuum.
During the Runciman mission Hohenlohe had built up a particularly close relationship with Colonel Christie and they had prepared for all eventualities—even developing their own secret language. Henlein, the ‘chicken’, was no longer important, but the idea of chickens was never far away. The code name they now used for Germany was chicken farm. After the outbreak of war the chicken farm seemed in a tense state, or at least this was the impression Hohenlohe wanted to give Christie. In October 1939 he asked his British friend for a meeting.
He sent three telegrams to Christie from Berne. Christie passed them on immediately: ‘I have reason to believe that the attached wire from Berne comes from Max Hohenlohe: he is a friend of mine who tried to be helpful in many talks between Henlein and myself in 1937–1938. VAN (Vansittart) knows him very well. … If it is not a trap it should mean that Hohenlohe has come out of Germany into Switzerland and wants to indicate that there are some possibilities of a new Government in Germany.’52
This was from now on the question. Were these possibilities serious?
During the months October 1939 to August 1940 Hohenlohe travelled several times to Switzerland. Papers in the Churchill Archives show in detail Hohenlohe’s conversations with Colonel Christie. What Hohenlohe told Christie was quite daring. He claimed that he had talked to Göring and that if the peace terms were right, Göring was ready to sideline Hitler and the more radical elements within the Nazi party. This was a great teaser to which Christie naturally reacted excitedly. He was, however, not completely sure whether Göring would be a good alternative. He knew him well, after all, and thought him, despite all his rakish charm, to be as ruthless as Hitler. Still, the British kept sending Christie off for more meetings.53 Again these meetings in Switzerland seem familiar. In the First World War, go-betweens had met in elegant Swiss hotels for secret peace feelers; now Hohenlohe and Christie continued this tradition. To the meeting in a Lausanne hotel, Christie brought along another expert on Germany who knew Hitler well: Conwell-Evans. Conwell-Evans had been the secretary of the Anglo-German Fellowship and had arranged Lloyd George’s visit to Hitler in 1936. To the Germans, Conwell-Evans was a known quantity, an appeaser they hoped to manipulate. In his 1947 interrogation by the Russians, Wilhelm Rodde (former aide to Ribbentrop and an Oberführer in the SS) even claimed that Conwell-Evans was one of Ribbentrop’s agents:
[Prof. Conwell-Evans] visited Germany very often and met with Ribbentrop not only in his office but in his apartment in Dahlem, near Berlin. I remember one instance in 1935, one of those Saturdays, not long before the Büro closed, Ribbentrop came to me in my office and asked what sums of money in English and American currency I had at my disposal. I gave him 300 Pounds Sterling and many Dollars. I put to you [his Soviet interrogator] that this money was given by Ribbentrop to Evans who left the following day for London, giving speeches in England in defence of the NSDAP.54
It is not clear to this day what Conwell-Evans actually was. He posed as an academic, but he was probably, like Christie, very close to the British intelligence services. Whether he used his work in the Anglo-German Fellowship as a cover or was genuinely pro-Hitler is hard to verify. He was definitely a very close friend of Christie and travelled with him often. At Lausanne Christie informed Hohenlohe that the British were adamant Hitler had to go, otherwise peace talks could not start. Hohenlohe indicated that this might be possible and described in great detail how divided the German leadership was. He wanted the British to believe in this ‘group of critics’ that could bring about regime change. Asked for more details about the opposition group Hohenlohe claimed to work for, he became rather vague. He was not willing to give names.
Apart from the hope of toppling the Führer, Christie wanted to know what would happen to Czechoslovakia and Poland in a peace agreement and Hohenlohe signalled that concessions could be made here too. He also stressed that there was another channel Göring was using for negotiations via Stockholm [Birger Dahlerus] and that several people could always be contacted—including the pro-German King of Sweden and the former British intelligence officer William Wiseman. It was the same Wiseman who Stephanie Hohenlohe had contacted in America.
It was agreed that Conwell-Evans should go to The Hague and wait for Hohenlohe to contact him if there were further developments. But then something happened to endanger this work. At the same time as the Hohenlohe–Christie channel was flowing, on 9 November 1939 the ‘Venlo incident’ took place: two British MI6 agents operating in the Dutch city of Venlo had been given to understand that they were about to meet German opposition leaders. It was a trap and the agents were captured, giving away vital information about MI6. The Venlo incident was organized by Walter Schellenberg, who would become a close friend of Hohenlohe (though Hohenlohe claimed that he did not know him until 1942).
After this disaster for MI6 the Christie–Hohenlohe contacts were interrupted. The British now had reason to believe that Hohenlohe might not have genuine opposition contacts after all but posed another trap. Hohenlohe’s promises that Göring would get rid of Hitler turned out to be misinformation. Hohenlohe suddenly backpedalled, claiming that Göring had never made such promises explicitly to him. Instead he had sent him off to ask Hitler whether he, Göring, should take over the peace negotiations with the British. At least this was Hohenlohe’s new version. He also claimed he had actually gone ahead and been granted an audience with Hitler who had not made any commitments one way or the other.55 How correct this version actually was is hard to verify. Hohenlohe probably invented the whole story for Christie. But it was not at all what Christie had hoped for. Nonetheless, they discussed details regarding a future constitution of Germany once Hitler was gone and also the future of Poland. In summary Hohenlohe demanded a signal from the British that they were ready for serious negotiations. He had not offered much himself, though, and could not seriously have expected to get much in return. The British had grown too cautious. A second Munich was not in sight.
Apart from Hohenlohe, Christie talked to several other Germans in February 1940: the former German Chancellor Joseph Wirth, the industrialist Fritz Thyssen, and his most important informant Johnny Ritter, rather obviously codenamed ‘Knight’ (a World War I air ace who had worked for Junkers and in 1935–38 was German air attaché in Paris). Even though the success in Poland seemed to have made Hitler untouchable in Germany, these men agreed with Hohenlohe on some points. They told Christie that the army was critical of the Führer and not interested in any further crusades. They also told him that there had been clashes between the army and the party. On 12 March 1940 Christie, together with Conwell-Evans, met Wirth and Ritter in Lausanne.56 Wirth and Ritter claimed the German opposition also included generals. Ritter, however, ‘felt personally uncertain as to whether the generals, even after being encouraged and fortified by the Prime Minister’s speech … , would pluck up enough courage.’57
The signals that were reaching the British were therefore confusing. Hohenlohe himself seemed to be switching between posing as an opposition leader and a channel to Hitler. Eventually Christie told Hohenlohe that his superiors were seriously underwhelmed by what he had offered them so far. He put this into their code language, pretending to be a businessman who had to inform Hohenohe that his ‘shareholders’ (the British government) were not convinced by the ‘proposal’. They had no trust ‘in the business methods of the management and most of its co-directors’ (Göring). In other words, they had developed serious doubts about Göring and other ‘moderate’ Germans as an alternative.
By then many people were booking Swiss hotel rooms. MI6 was a particularly frequent guest. Its agents needed as much information about the enemy as possible. Sir Stuart Menzies, chief of MI6, also wanted to know whether there was a genuine opposition in Germany and, if so, whether it would overthrow Hitler. Dusko Popov, who worked for Menzies as a double-cross agent, mentions in his memoirs a discussion with him on this subject. Menzies was interested in people he had identified as potential Hitler critics: Max Hohenlohe, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris [the head of military intelligence, the Abwehr], and two other Abwehr officers, Colonel Hans Oster and Hans von Dohnanyi.58 Menzies was of the opinion that Canaris might become a leader of the opposition to Hitler. In the long term Menzies’ interest in this group had a dangerous effect on Anglo-Russian relations. One of Menzies’ agents, Kim Philby, was a mole, working for the Russians. He passed on Menzies’ interest in Canaris. Philby had pointed out to Menzies that Admiral Canaris could be killed on a trip to Spain, but Menzies replied: ‘I’ve always thought we could do something with the Admiral.’ Philby concluded: ‘It was only later that I learnt he was in touch with Canaris via a cut-out in Sweden.’59
To the Russians this information confirmed that the British might make peace with Germany. This was something that Stalin feared all along. It was in Russia’s interest to hinder any such contacts.
Once Churchill became Prime Minister, the contacts had in fact already decreased. The appeasement minded were elegantly outmanoeuvred by Churchill. In the tradition of the civil service he moved several of them upstairs and sideways. He sent his old rival Halifax as ambassador to Washington and Samuel Hoare in the same capacity to Spain. These were important postings but hardly dangerous to the Prime Minister. The appeasers had lost their power base and the tide of the war also made contacts with the Germans more and more unlikely. The higher the human costs of the war, the more difficult a peaceful solution had become.
After Christie had lost interest in him, Hohenlohe tried to make contact with the new British ambassador to Switzerland, Sir David Kelly. Hohenlohe now claimed to have a direct message from Hitler: ‘[Hitler] does not wish to touch Britain or the British Empire (although a deal over one of the old German colonies would be helpful); nor to ask for any reparation.’ Kelly’s reaction was: ‘knowing the vital importance of gaining time, I made a show of interest.’60
Hohenlohe had obviously dropped the pretence of Göring as an alternative to Hitler. In fact Göring had lost power at Hitler’s court and this was well known to Hohenlohe. After the war he claimed he had given up on Göring because his old friend seemed not to help enough with his ‘peace work’.
Despite Churchill being in power, Hohenlohe still had hopes of getting peace talks going. In his memoirs Sefton Delmer claims that Hohenlohe’s reports had an effect in Germany. Delmer was in quite a good position to judge this. He had become part of a section in British Intelligence that specialized in black propaganda.61 He was ideal for this job, since he knew members of the Nazi leadership well. As mentioned before, he also knew Hohenlohe, whom he suspected of being Ribbentrop’s agent. Though Delmer was wrong about this, he was much closer to the truth when it came to what Hohenlohe passed on to Germany. Delmer knew that Hohenlohe still believed that there was a peace faction in Britain that could be encouraged, despite the fall of Chamberlain. One of Hohenlohe’s sources was, according to Delmer, the Aga Khan.
In fact the Aga Khan had told Hohenlohe in Switzerland that Lord Beaverbrook was advocating a peace deal with Hitler. On 25 July 1940 Hohenlohe quoted this in a memorandum: ‘Beaverbrook is the only man who has enough courage, the power and the standing to bring about a change in England even against Churchill, since Churchill has for a long time been in Beaverbrook’s pay.’62
This was an allusion to the time Beaverbrook had kept Churchill financially afloat, paying generously for his articles. During his years in the political and financial wilderness, this support had been important to Churchill and to the building of his country retreat, Chartwell. And indeed Beaverbrook had for a long time hoped for a peace settlement. But Churchill had managed to win him over and the information was now dated. Delmer nonetheless believed that Rudolf Hess must have been aware of the Aga Khan report in which Beaverbrook was identified as an opponent of the war. It must have made sense to Hess. Together with Hitler, he had met Beaverbrook several times in Berlin between 1935 and 1939. As we know today, apart from Beaverbrook there were other signs that made Hess believe in a British peace party. His ‘reception’ in Scotland was naturally a let-down. The British security services handled the situation extremely badly. In fact a contemporary like Sefton Delmer already realized their mistakes at the time. He knew Hess well from his years as a reporter in Berlin and thought him to be a neurotic megalomaniac whose vanity had to be appealed to. If played rightly one could have used Hess as an excellent source. Instead he was confronted with the futility of his mission and clammed up completely. He only opened up for a moment when he was visited in captivity by Beaverbrook. Hess did not know that Beaverbrook was no longer interested in peace negotiations. They had in the past often discussed the Soviet threat and this was what Hess now brought up again: he wanted peace with Britain if Britain would help to attack Russia. It was a dream Hohenlohe had also helped to nurture.
After the war Max Hohenlohe would use his meetings with the British in 1939/40 to ‘prove’ his peace work. He would also tell the journalist Höhne in 1967 that he had sent ‘warning messages to the Reich via a Vatican channel’. Indeed he was a master at spinning events to whatever was politically advantageous.
The UK National Archives website suggests that after 1941 Hohenlohe was used as a ‘gentleman agent’ by Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr. After Canaris’ s fall, he ‘was taken over as a “special informant” by Walter Schellenberg, who became head of foreign intelligence following the abolition of the Abwehr’. Like an unfaithful lover he had moved away from Göring and found new high ranking Nazi friends. After the war Hohenlohe claimed that he was impressed by Schellenberg because he had given him hope that a regime change could be achieved. According to Hohenlohe, Schellenberg’s conclusion was that as long as Hitler was in power the Allies would not make peace with Germany. He also indicated that if Hitler was not going to go himself, he would have to be removed by force. According to his postwar version of events, Hohenlohe agreed with this wholeheartedly.
To work for Schellenberg, however, meant working for Himmler. There were at least two reasons for Max Hohenlohe to get involved with Himmler and his SD (he became agent number 144/7957): first, to protect his estates in the Sudetenland; and secondly, because being hooked up to Himmler potentially offered other rewards in the long run. After all it was now Himmler rather than Göring who might become a possible successor to the Führer. Hohenlohe did not of course admit to working for Himmler. He claimed that as a consequence of his conversation about overthrowing Hitler, he put Schellenberg in contact with the Americans. Indeed a meeting between a Schellenberg emissary and American intelligence officers took place in Lisbon in December 1942. Whether Hohenlohe really was the matchmaker for this meeting cannot be verified. But Schellenberg would have never decided to do this on his own initiative. He was obviously encouraged by Himmler to establish channels to the Americans. This means that at this early point in 1942/3 Himmler already had doubts whether the war could be won by Germany. But he was unsure how to proceed. Getting rid of Hitler and taking over himself was one option. His biographer Peter Longerich, however, claims that Himmler started his overtures to the Allies, much later in ‘mid 1944’.63 He then offered Jews in exchange for money or goods. This was, according to Longerich, not his main incentive. He was probably trying to get in contact with the Allies in order to end the war. Longerich also thinks that Himmler may have wanted to use the negotiations to play off the Russians against the Americans. John F. Waller has shown that several channels were becoming active in 1944:
Strangely insensitive to the revulsion felt toward him by the West for atrocities he was known to have committed, but well aware of his fate if the Russians were to capture him upon Germany’s ultimate capitulation, Himmler was sending out feelers to the Americans in Sweden and other neutral countries through a variety of go-betweens.64
Yet in fact Himmler started to build these channels much earlier, probably thinking of them as a future insurance policy. The Swedish channel became very active when he used Jacob Wallenberg (an uncle of the tragic Raoul Wallenberg). Jacob Wallenberg told an American OSS officer that ‘cells were forming in Germany for the purpose of overthrowing Hitler’.65 According to Jacob Wallenberg the only alternative to Hitler was Himmler. Schellenberg also made contacts for Himmler via the Swedish Red Cross and Count Bernadotte—using the traditional aristocratic channels reminiscent of the First World War.
Hohenlohe was Schellenberg and Himmler’s Spanish channel and he naturally relished the idea, which introduced him to the new power brokers in Europe. Whether he switched to the Americans to save his skin or whether he did it for Himmler remains unclear—it was probably a bit of both.
The Americans did not mind talking to Hohenlohe. Their agenda was naturally to find out more about the alleged rift within the Nazi hierarchy. They even brought in their OSS chief Allen Dulles for this. Again Hohenlohe may have made this meeting of high ranking officials possible. He had known Dulles since 1923 and told Schellenberg: ‘He is a tall, burly, sporting type of 45, healthy-looking with good teeth and a fresh simple open-hearted manner.’66 Dulles was a partner in the American law firm that represented the business interests of Hohenlohe’s wife. He was certainly more complex than was suggested by his ‘open hearted manner’.
Hohenlohe met Dulles three times between January and April 1943, bringing along another officer from Himmler’s department for western Europe. Also present at these meetings were the US ambassador, Leland Harrison, and Lieutenant-Colonel Duncan Lee. As Jonathan Haslam shows in his book on Soviet intelligence there was a certain irony in this, since these meetings were immediately leaked. Duncan Lee was secretly working for the Russians. He had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where he was most probably recruited as a student (to this day the Oxford spy ring, unlike the Cambridge one, is mainly unidentified). Lee’s Russian codename was rather oddly ‘Koch’, which means cook in German. Koch could certainly not have liked what was being cooked up by the old anti-Bolshevik Hohenlohe at these meetings. Hohenlohe suggested ‘a cordon against Bolshevism and Panslavism’ by ‘expanding Poland to the East, maintaining the monarchy in Romania and a strong Hungary’. Dulles seemed to agree.67
Thus Hohenlohe was playing the old trump card with the Americans, the idea of a bulwark against the Russians. Hearing this—thanks to agent Koch—certainly did not encourage Stalin to trust his American allies.
The British noticed that Hohenlohe had moved to the Americans. When Hohenlohe was in Spain ‘visiting relatives’ it was Sir Samuel Hoare’s brief to watch him. Hoare had been an appeaser before 1939 and become ambassador to Spain in 1940. In conversations with Spanish diplomats in 1940 the Duke of Windsor had praised Hoare highly. But Hoare knew which way the wind was blowing. His brief was to keep Spain out of the war, and he had given up his old appeasement friends once Churchill was secure. He had also changed his mind about Hohenlohe. His reports on him switched from positive to negative over the years. In 1942 he wrote to Foreign Secretary Eden:
Max Hohenlohe turned up. He met John [an unidentified colleague of Hoare] at a party and claimed that the position in Germany is intolerable. Hitler’s relationship with generals intolerable. John made it clear that we were not at all interested in any proposals for peace. We intended to smash Hitler. Max seemed to accept this.68
By 1943 Hoare was writing that Hohenlohe wanted to move his family permanently to Spain:
Max and his kind are getting very nervous in Germany and he is [in Spain] to see whether there is any chance for peace talks. … John could not have been more resolute with him about peace. Max posed very much as the confidante of Göring and the anti-Hitler section in the country.69
Hoare was busy enough keeping an eye on the larger picture of a complicated intelligence scene. Neutral Spain was a hotbed of agents during the war. It was the ideal place to plant disinformation and Hoare had to spend most of his time figuring out who was behind which rumour. Hoare had many different ‘contacts’ who kept him informed. He made sure he covered the whole of Spain and did not just concentrate on Madrid. The Catalans were important for him too, and it was in Barcelona where he heard of another peace feeler. An influential businessman had told him that
a German industrialist of great importance had arrived in Barcelona and that he was anxious to start peace feelers. He claimed to represent Himmler and Speer … who, he declared, were dissociating themselves from Hitler and Goebbels. … The Himmler crowd had definitely come to the conclusion that as no one can, in their view, win the war, the best course is for the belligerents to make peace. I told [him] at once that we did not accept for a moment the conclusion of a stalemate and that we could not dream of starting peace talks with any one.
To Hoare this story about the ‘Himmler crowd’ sounded all too familiar. It reminded him of a conversation he had had with Max Hohenlohe:
You remember that some months ago I wrote to you about a similar suggestion that emanated from Max Hohelohe. It seems to me that the interest of the move attempted by the Alcalde’s German friend consists in the fact that the proposal is on exact all fours with Max Hohenlohe’s.70
He concluded that Max was certainly a German agent.
Officially, in his day job, Hohenlohe, however, posed as a representative of the Skoda car manufacturers in Spain. He now opened up his Spanish home for Nazis abroad and gave his old friend Reinhard Spitzy a nice job at Skoda. Spitzy’s unofficial boss was Walter Schellenberg. Naturally Spitzy was happy about the arrangement and claimed in his memoirs that he took part in some of the conversations Max had with the OSS.
These American contacts meant much to Hohenlohe. In a postwar world, he wanted to be on the side of the winners. To make absolutely sure he would be associated with the right crowd, he also started an Austrian ‘independence’ group in January 1945. He suddenly remembered that he had once been an Austro-Hungarian subject. Though he now had a Liechtenstein passport and a SD number he simply turned himself into an Austrian patriot again. The British intelligence services were not fooled. On 8 January 1945 they reported:
Source states that [an agent was in contact with] Count Seefried and Prince Hohenlohe through the new Austria group allegedly formed in Madrid. Source also states that he believes Hohenlohe is secretary to this new Austria group which has been outwardly formed for the purpose of pleading for Austrian independence: however, source’s informant states that the group is in fact a secret German organisation which requires watching.71
This intelligence report on Hohenlohe also stated that he ‘has many influential friends, including Lord Templewood [Samuel Hoare] and the Duke de Alba’ and that he was ‘very wealthy’. They were not very complimentary about his looks: ‘Heavy build, large head, bloated face, fair hair going bald, blue eyes, large fat hands, dominating appearance, speaks Spanish, French, English and Czech. Holds German and Liechtenstein passports.’
By then the stresses of the war seem to have affected Hohenlohe’s looks. If he had kept a picture of himself in the attic, it would have been truly hideous by 1945.
Prince Max Hohenlohe-Langenburg had started his career as a go-between in the Sudetenland but by 1940 had definitely turned into a German agent. He was an agent who did great damage. Because he had faked Göring’s alleged opposition and exaggerated the influence of critics among the Nazi leadership, the British lost trust in the existence of a German resistance movement. When a more plausible opposition group around Count Stauffenberg actually emerged, they were sceptical. By then they were also locked in an alliance with the Russians who were hawkishly watching out for any contacts between Britain and Germany.
In the end Hohenlohe had played everyone. His greatest coup was to be remembered as ‘a good Nazi’.