H-Diplo REPRINT ESSAY 265

7 August 2020

“A Little Memoir: The Rudolf Hess File in the Late 1960s.” 1

https://hdiplo.org/to/E265
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

Essay by David Stafford, University of Victoria

B
ack in 1967, I was a third secretary in the British Diplomatic Service, where I shared an office with two senior
colleagues. With their pinstriped suits and highly polished shoes, they appeared ineffably fuddy-duddy but were
certainly still in their ‘thirties. It was my first and, as it turned out, my last posting. Shortly after promotion to
second secretary, I decided that this was not the career for me and returned instead to the scruffier halls of academe. My
room in the Foreign Office overlooked No 10 Downing Street, where Harold Wilson was prime minister. Over that
summer, I occasionally caught a glimpse of Giles, his Oxford undergraduate son, peering out gloomily from an upper
window as if trying to find out what was going on.

I felt some sympathy for him. Much the same question was troubling me. I had assumed when joining the Service that
between drinking cocktails at glamorous parties with diplomats from around the world, I would be briefing ministers for
high-level conferences or tricky parliamentary debates on some matter of deep policy significance. Instead, by a quirk of fate
– otherwise known as the impenetrable ways of the personnel department – I had found myself appointed the desk officer
for a country that Her Majesty’s Government did not officially recognize. This was the so-called German Democratic
Republic, then still described in Whitehall as the ‘Soviet Zone of Germany,’ and which had no official representation in
London. It did have a ‘trade mission,’ but as this was mostly cover for Stasi operations monitored by others more expert
then myself in such matters.

All this meant that instead of vital exchanges with an opposite number at one of London’s foreign embassies, and a diary
stuffed with evening invitations to drinks and dinners, I found myself confined to my desk moving files between my in-tray
and my out-tray. Outside, London was at the height of the swinging sixties. Inside, it was all dreary red tape. Occasionally,
an ancient and stooped Dickensian figure would appear with a bucket of coal and replenish the fireplace.

Then, one day, something out of the ordinary happened to lift my spirits. One of my colleagues handed me a file. “Perhaps
you’d like to take care of this,” he said, “I’ve got enough on my hands right now.” I looked at the file’s heading: “Hess.” It was
marked “Secret” and not just “Confidential,” as the run-of-the mill files were marked, and had suddenly become very active.

The reason had nothing to do with Hess himself. After all, it was a quarter of a century since the deputy führer of Adolph
Hitler’s Germany had flown solo in his Messerschmitt on his quixotic peace mission to Scotland during the Second World
War. Since then, after being sentenced to life imprisonment at Nuremberg, he had spent most of his time puttering
harmlessly about in the garden of Spandau Prison in Berlin, which lay in the British sector of the divided old German
capital. Only the previous year, his two remaining fellow inmates, Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach, had completed
their 20-year sentences and had been released. The Prison was now kept running for Hess alone. Suddenly, in the minds of
some of my fellow citizens at least, his image transformed from that of being Hitler’s feared and fanatical acolyte into the

1
This article was originally published in Diplomacy & Statecraft, 30:3, 602-605, DOI:
10.1080/09592296.2019.1641928 (online publication 20 August 2019). It appears here with the kind permission of
the author and of the Editor of Diplomacy and Statecraft, Brian McKercher

© 2020 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US

H-Diplo Reprint Essay 265

pathetic ‘Lone Prisoner of Spandau.’ With its echoes of “The Prisoner of Chillon,” Byron’s lyrical poem about a monk held
unjustly in solitary confinement in a castle on Lac Leman, the moniker apparently carried a certain romantic appeal. I was
actually feeling rather like a lone prisoner myself at the time, marooned in the Foreign Office while my fellow inmates
walked the wider world. But I had no sympathy at all for the fanatical Nazi and anti-Semite who had shown not an iota of
remorse since the war.

Page | 2
Letters on Hess began to pour into the Foreign Office demanding his immediate release, hence the ‘offer’ from my colleague.
He was in charge of the Berlin desk and had serious things to do. The Wall had gone up just six years before, and Berlin was
still a dangerous flashpoint in Cold War power-play. Later, I learned my colleague was a stable mate of David Cornwell, aka
John Le Carré, the spy novelist, and they had been close colleagues in Bonn. Large numbers of the missives about Hess came
from places such as Bournemouth or Cheltenham, presumably from the retired with little much better to do with their time.
Some were addressed to the prime minister, others to the foreign secretary, and many just more generally to the Foreign
Office. But eventually all of them landed on my desk. Responding to each individually became tedious, so I drafted a
standard reply and handed the letter to my secretary – yes, a real human being with a typewriter, none of this do-it-yourself
computer stuff – who then topped and tailed it with carefully crafted words of my own to suit the recipient or the signatory.
Before long, I could recite the letter in my sleep. Indeed, I still can. In essence, it explained that the fate of Hess was not a
matter for Her Majesty’s Government alone. He was a prisoner of all four of the still then occupying Powers in Berlin, and
the consent of each was necessary for his release. And, whatever Her Majesty’s Government’s view on the matter, the Soviet
Union refused point blank to release him. For them, he was the last living symbol of the Nazi regime that had caused the
death of some 20 million of its citizens, and would stay there until he died. Which is, in fact, what happened.

This Soviet stance lay at the heart of the whole business. The letters, I soon noticed, were invariably prompted by one of
many articles on Hess being regularly published in the Daily Express, the Lord Beaverbrook empire’s flagship newspaper that
was still, in those distant days, far more popular than the Daily Mail. After painting a heart-wrenching portrait of poor old
Rudolf pining away all alone in his gloomy prison, the article would then demand angrily why Britain insisted on inhumanly
keeping him there. The paper would then answer its own question. Clearly, it was because Prime Minister Wilson refused
to stand up to Moscow: the Labour Government, obviously, was soft on communism. In truth, the Beaverbrook press cared
little if anything about Hess. They had Wilson in their sights. Rumours were rife at the time in right-wing circles about
Wilson’s possible links with the Kremlin. Anything that could embarrass Wilson was grist to the Beaverbrook mill.

It is unlikely that many of the letter writers appreciated this political sub-text, and they appeared to show genuine pity for
the ex-deputy führer, possibly generated by puttering about alone in their own gardens themselves during their twilight
years. By the time I handed the file on to my successor, it was by far the thickest and most active on my desk. It still exists in
the National Archives in Kew. I recently looked it up. But the weeders have thinned it out, along with the many letters, and
both the context and subtext have vanished.

Beware official files, say I.

David Stafford moved to Canada after leaving the Diplomatic Service and became a professor of history at the University of
Victoria (1970–1984) and Research Director and Executive Director at the Canadian Institute of International Affairs in
Toronto (1985–1990). He was then a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies and subsequently Project Director at the
Centre for Second World War Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is now an Adjunct Professor at the University of
Victoria. His many books include Britain and European Resistance, Camp X, Canada’s School for Secret Agents, Churchill
and Secret Service, Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets, Ten Days to D-Day, Endgame 1945, Spies Beneath Berlin, and an
official history commissioned by the Cabinet Office, Mission Accomplished: SOE and Italy 1943–1945. His latest book,
Oblivion or Glory: Churchill 1921, is forthcoming in 2019.

© 2020 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US