Mrs. Roberts and the Deputy Fuhrer’s Secret Plot
The plot of Hitler’s Deputy to isolate Russia, and the unlikely involvement of Mrs. Violet Roberts from Cambridge, described by MI5 as a ‘typical grandmother’
By the summer of 1940 Britain faced Hitler’s seemingly unstoppable war machine alone, following defeat of France and the success of the Blitzkrieg against the low countries. Hitler paused as the German tanks reached the channel, allowing the bulk of remaining British forces to escape from Dunkirk. Conventional wisdom is that Hitler expected peace overtures from Westminster that never came.
Deputy Fuhrer Rudolph Hess (1935) [Photo credit]
As the drama unfolded in the fierce battles in western Europe elderly Mrs. Violet Roberts continued to send and receive her letters to Germany via a box number at the Thomas Cook office in Lisbon, capital of neutral Portugal. But within a year she was in the sights of MI5 for her involvement in a covert plot directed by Germany’s Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolph Hess, to secure a peace deal with Britain. The scheme was designed to ensure the full weight of Nazi Germany’s forces were free to assault Stalin’s Russia and fulfil Hitler’s dream to destroy Communism. Violet Robert’s had come to the scrutiny of the British Security Services because she was seemingly acting as a postal cut-out in covert communications between Albrecht Haushofer, a leading Nazi, and the Duke of Hamilton, part of scheme directed by the Deputy Fuhrer to put out peace feelers to pre-war friends in Britain. Ultimately, the communications would fail leading to one of the most bizarre events in the entire war as Deputy Fuhrer Hess secretly piloted his own plane to Scotland and bailed out in an attempt to contact the the British peer directly and instigate peace negotiations. And in a shocking twist late in the conflict Hess’s agent in the plot, Haushofer, would fall foul of Hitler’s Nazi fanatics after the failed plot to kill the Fuhrer, for which he would pay the ultimate price.
Mrs. Roberts and Haushofer came to the attention of British Intelligence following the interception by the censors of a September 1940 letter from Albrecht Haushofer to Mrs. Roberts, sent via Lisbon, containing a sealed note to be forwarded to the Duke of Hamilton, which contained a request to meet the senior Nazi in Portugal.
Suddenly MI5 and MI6 had a problem; who was this Mrs. Roberts? Was she a Nazi agent and was she involved in a spy-ring that included the Duke of Hamilton? He and a number of other members of the British aristocracy were already know by the Security Services to have long established contacts in Nazi Germany, but did these associations amount to sympathy with Hitler and his war aims, or worse, outright treachery?
This is the part of the story where MI5 and MI6 bumbling, miscommunication and indecision led to a bizarre turn of events resulting in Deputy Fuhrer Hess’s ill-fated flight to England.
MI5 and MI6 couldn’t decide what to do with the Duke of Hamilton, with some favouring confronting him with the letter and the approach from Haushofer and attempting to recruit him to meet the German in Lisbon in some form of double-cross operation against the Nazis. Others suspected the British aristocrat harboured deep Nazi sympathies and should not be allowed to meet Hitler’s representatives while Britain was alone in the war and vulnerable to German invasion.
Neither MI5 nor MI6 knew exactly what the other service was doing about the case and in the process inexplicably lost the original letter, although they did at least manage to retain photostat copies. Without the original letter, which had never actually been seen by the British peer, Security Service dithering about the wisdom of using the Duke of Hamilton as a double cross agent continued. MI6 meanwhile sent a senior agent to Lisbon to make enquiries into whether or not the whole thing was a German intelligence plot, perhaps to expose Nazi sympathies within the British aristocracy and gain a propaganda coup. Eventually MI6 decided that a mission to Lisbon making use of the British nobleman was too risky and scrapped the whole idea.
While indecision and confusion reigned in British intelligence time slipped by. It wasn’t until 1941 that MI5 tracked down the well-travelled Mrs. Roberts and attempted to figure out if she was a Nazi secret agent or not.
In May 1941 British Security Service and Police colleagues tracked Mrs. Roberts down, not anywhere near the Lisbon cut-out address, but in a sleepy English university city. Violet Roberts was eventually informally interviewed at her home address, 10 Wilberforce Road, Cambridge, by experienced security officials. The interview is described in detail in MI5 files, with Mrs. Roberts painted by the agents acting on behalf of the Security Service as:
“a woman about 5ft …very thin, with grey hair and grey eyes, aged approximately 70 years. When she began to talk, I realised that she was a well-educated, intelligent alive woman, who I think is best described as a typical grandmother.”
It became apparent that Mrs. Robert’s husband, who was now deceased, had been employed by the Appointments Board of Cambridge University. Her association with the Haushofer family began prior to the First World War. Mrs. Roberts said that by the 1920’s, family friend General Carl Haushofer was a “disappoint man”, and finding that there was little or no future for him in what was left of the German Army following Versailles peace treaty, he joined Munich University. Mrs. Roberts said that she had remained in “constant communication” with General Haushofer’s wife prior to the outbreak of war in 1939; however, she added that little of interest was contained in the letters which she received, as the Haushofer’s feared that their correspondence was being censored.
Now MI5 interviewers also established the reasons for Mrs. Roberts extensive travel; not at the behest of Nazi spymasters, but in reality, down to the movement of her son, Patrick M. Roberts. Patrick worked for the British Foreign office and had held various overseas posts. His overseas postings as a diplomat included Berlin, Poland, the Balkan’s, as well as Addis Ababa, where he was when the Italians invaded Abyssinia in support of agreed Axis war strategy with Hitler. The details are not recorded but it seems from the interview notes that Mrs. Robert’s son was, like her husband, by now also dead.
Mrs. Roberts added in the seemingly cordial conversation that the Haushofer family were her only German friends, and that she had from time to time stayed with them in Munich on her way to the Balkans, one of her son’s overseas postings for the Foreign Office.
With regards to Albrecht Haushofer, it became clear in the interview that he was a friend of her son Patrick. It seems that it was at the instigation of Patrick and some of his friends that Albrecht Haushofer was able to come to England and lecture in London before the war. Mrs. Roberts added that during one of his visits to Britain Albrecht had been with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Minister of Foreign Affairs. During this trip Haushofer had stayed with her. She added that the younger Haushofer was a friend of Rudolph Hess, whom she incidentally mentioned she had herself met.
Mrs. Roberts also clearly articulated that she did not think the Haushofer’s were Nazi at heart, but added that she hesitated to speak for Albrecht in view of the fact that he was working “in the German Foreign Office.”
But the key points established by MI5 during their rather charming interview with Mrs. Roberts were, they concluded in their subsequent memorandum:
“(1) the letter which has been lost was an unusual letter in view of fact that Albrecht had never written to her before, and
(2) that she does not know the Duke of Hamilton.
The delightful and grandmotherly Mrs. Roberts the British Security Service determined was no Nazi spy. However, even now precisely what to do about the letter from Albrecht and the overtures from the Deputy Fuhrer seemed no clearer in British Intelligence thinking.
Meanwhile the months long delay in receiving any form of British response through the Duke of Hamilton to Rudolph Hess’s messages, via Haushofer and Mrs. Roberts, seemingly pushed the Deputy Fuhrer to dramatically take matters into his own hands.
The wreckage of the Messerschmitt Bf110D Hess bailed out from in Scotland, May 1941. [photo credit]
Hess took off on May 10, 1941, in a Messerschmitt Bf110D bomber aircraft, which he piloted himself, from the German airfield at Augsburg-Haunstetten, headed for Scotland. Before midnight he had parachuted from the plane, which crashed about 12 miles from Dungavel House, the Duke of Hamilton’s home.
Hess it seemed was determined to make direct contact with the Duke of Hamilton and pursue his peace plan with the British personally, in an attempt to secure a deal and end hostilities in the west before the Nazi invasion of Russia began later that year. But Hess’s mission was doomed to failure. It had not been sanctioned by Hitler and now the Deputy Fuhrer was denounced by the Nazi leader.
Hess asked to speak to the Duke of Hamilton when he was picked up by British soldiers, who had no idea who he was, having injured himself on landing. The Duke of Hamilton, realizing the seriousness of the situation, contacted Churchill immediately. After a series of interviews MI5 could find no use for Hess, who they eventually determined was mad, interning him in a military hospital in Abergaveny, Wales, until the end of the war. After this Hess was tried at Nuremberg and given a life sentence for war crimes, which he served out in Spandau Prison in Berlin until his death in 1987.
As for Albrecht Haushofer, things worked out no better for him. As the war spiralled toward calamity from his viewpoint, he came to agree that the only way to save Germany was to replace Hitler. But the failure of Claus von Stauffenberg’s July 1944 bomb plot to kill the Fuhrer meant that Haushofer had to go into hiding. He evaded the Gestapo until he was found in Bavaria in December 1944, after which he was thrown into prison. On the night of 22nd April 1945, as the Red Army entered Berlin, Albrecht Haushofer and other political prisoners were taken out by the SS and shot. Posthumously Haushofer’s confessions were published in 1946. In them he laments that he should have earlier confronted the evils of the Nazi regime.
Mrs. Roberts, rather fittingly, disappeared without a trace; a further trace in MI5 files that is.