David Guyatt Wrote:I'm waiting for my invitation to the wedding feast signed by SS Gruppenfuhrer Bettenberg.

Btw, some paltry little curiosities, but Gruppie, as I call him, was educated in Britian and Germany at schools run by "the German Jewish educator Kurt Hahn." And apparently, his son and heir was subjected to the "snip" by a mohel - and so is William it is believed.

And all the while, Gruppie's sisters were married to Himmler men during WWII.

Talk about sending out different signals.

It's all very curious don't you think Pete.

Quote:Prince Philip pictured at Nazi funeral
by ANDREW LEVY, Daily Mail
Last updated at 09:17 06 March 2006


Prince Philip (circled) at the Nazi funeral in 1937

Prince Philip has broken a 60-year public silence about his family's links with the Nazis.

In a frank interview, he said they found Hitler's attempts to restore Germany's power and prestige 'attractive' and admitted they had 'inhibitions about the Jews'.

The revelations come in a book about German royalty kowtowing to the Nazis, which features photographs never published in the UK.

They include one of Philip aged 16 at the 1937 funeral of his elder sister Cecile, flanked by relatives in SS and Brownshirt uniforms.

One row back in the cortege in Darmstadt, western Germany, was his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, wearing a Royal Navy bicorn hat.

Another picture shows his youngest sister, Sophia, sitting opposite Hitler at the wedding of Hermann and Emmy Goering.

Explaining the attraction of the Nazis, 84-year-old Prince Philip told an American academic: "There was a great improvement in things like trains running on time and building. There was a sense of hope after the depressing chaos of the Weimar Republic.

"I can understand people latching on to something or somebody who appeared to be appealing to their patriotism and trying to get things going. You can understand how attractive it was."

The revelations are in the book Royals and the Reich

He added that there was 'a lot of enthusiasm for the Nazis at the time, the economy was good, we were anti-Communist and who knew what was going to happen to the regime?'

Philip stressed that he was never 'conscious of anybody in the family actually expressing anti-Semitic views'. But he went on to say there were 'inhibitions about the Jews' and 'jealousy of their success'.

Philip was born Prince of Greece and Denmark on Corfu in 1921, the youngest of five children and the only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg. All four of his sisters married German princes and three - Sophie, Cecile and Margarita - became members of the Nazi party.

Sophia's husband, Prince Christoph of Hesse, became chief of Goering's secret intelligence service and they were frequent guests at Nazi functions.

Philip went on to fight with distinction for the Allies in the Second World War before marrying the young Princess Elizabeth in 1947, five years before she became Queen. He served with the Royal Navy where, by 1945, he had risen to the rank of first lieutenant on a destroyer and was mentioned in despatches.
All of his sisters and brothers-inlaw are now dead but he keeps in contact with his German relatives.

His comments on the family's Nazi connections appear in Royals and the Reich, by Jonathan Petropoulos, to be published in Britain in May.

Quote:On Royal Nazis and the Scottish connection


Prince Philip
King Edward VIII
Prince George, Duke of Kent
Gordonstoun School
Royal Nazis part 2

In Reflections at My family, my father and mother' I note that my father introduced Prince George's son Prince Michael of Kent into Free Masonry. Not so well known is that British Intelligence removed Prince George, Prince Michael's father, and the King's brother, via a staged plane accident. Prince George was not only a prominent listed in the the Red Book' but perceived to be a central figure in a British Nazi conspriracy against his brother, the King, and Churchill.

The information sources for the article below is derived from personal knowledge, information from British intelligence and Russian intelligence -- who secured most of their information from Anthony Blunt -- a homosexual confidant of Prince George. Nor is Nazi or ultra right wing thinking absent from the current Scottish scene for Richard, the son of Mr Ian Smith (as per the Lady Smith essay), and a recent ex pupil from Gordonstoun, happily testifies that right wing thoughts still permeate the schools teaching philosophy.

One of the biggest public relations hoaxes ever perpetrated by the British Crown, is that King Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne in 1938, due to his support for the Nazis, was a ``black sheep,'' an aberration in an otherwise unblemished Windsor line. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The British monarchy, and the City of London's leading Crown bankers, enthusiastically backed Hitler and the Nazis, bankrolled the Führer's election, and did everything possible to build the Nazi war machine, for Britain's planned geopolitical war between Germany and Russia. Support for Nazi-style genocide has always been at the heart of House of Windsor policy, and long after the abdication of Edward VIII, the Windsors maintained their direct Nazi links. So, when Prince Philip, co-founder with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), tells an interviewer that he hopes to be ``reincarnated as a deadly virus'' to help solve the ``population problem,'' he is just ``doin' what comes naturally'' for any scion of the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy.

To get beyond the soap opera stuff and truly understand the Windsors today, it is useful to start with Prince Philip. Not only was he trained in the Hitler Youth curriculum, but his German brothers-in-law, with whom he lived, all became high-ranking figures in the Nazi Party.

Before his family was forced into exile, Prince Philip had been in line of succession to the Greek throne, established after a British-run coup against the son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, who became King Otto I of the Hellenes. Having dispatched King Otto in 1862, London ran a talent search for a successor, which resulted in the selection of Prince William, the son of the designated heir and nephew to the Danish king, Crown Prince Christian.

In 1862, Prince William of the Danes was installed as King George I of Greece, and married a granddaughter of Czar Nicholas I in 1866. Prince Philip is a grandson of Queen Victoria, and he is related to most of the current and former crowned heads of Europe, including seven czars.

The marriages of Prince Philip's sisters definitely strengthened the German aristocratic ties. During 1931-1932, Philip's four older sisters married as follows:

Margarita to a Czech-Austrian prince named Gottfried von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a great-grandson of England's Queen Victoria;

Theodora to Berthold, the margrave of Baden;

Cecilia to Georg Donatus, grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, also a great-grandson of Queen Victoria;

and, Sophie to Prince Christoph of Hesse.

Three of Philip's brothers-in-law were part of a group of German aristocrats who were Anglophile and pro-Nazi at the same time, and who remain a subversive force in Germany to this day.

Enter Prince Bernhard

His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard, royal consort to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and father of Queen Beatrix, co-founded and became the first head of the World Wildlife Fund (now the World Wide Fund for Nature) in October 1961. When the Lockheed scandal forced Prince Bernhard to resign from his most important public functions in 1971, he was replaced by Prince Philip. Prince Bernhard, like Prince Philip, whom he recruited to the eco-fascist cause, had strong roots in the Nazi movement.

In fact, the whole House of Orange did: Queen Wilhelmina, mother of the future Queen Juliana, married a right-wing playboy who begged for money for Hitler; Juliana married an SS man (Prince Bernhard); and, Queen Juliana's daughter Beatrix married a former member of Hitler Youth.
Prince Bernhard first became interested in the Nazis in 1934, during his last year of study at the University of Berlin. He was recruited by a member of the Nazi intelligence services, but first worked openly in the motorized SS. Bernhard went to Paris to work for the firm IG Farben, which pioneered Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht's slave labour camp system by building concentration camps to convert coal into synthetic gasoline and rubber. Bernhard's role was to conduct espionage on behalf of the SS. According to the April 5, 1976 issue of Newsweek, this role, as part of a special SS intelligence unit in IG Farbenindustrie, had been revealed in testimony at the Nuremberg trials.

When Bernhard left the SS to marry the future Queen Juliana, he signed his letter of resignation to Adolf Hitler, ``Heil Hitler!'' William Hoffman writes in his book Queen Juliana:

``Tensions [over the marriage] were not cooled when ... Adolf Hitler forwarded his own congratulatory message. The newspaper Het Volk editorialized that `it would be better if the future Queen had found a consort in some democratic country rather than in the Third Reich.'''

This is the man who recruited Prince Philip to eco-facism, but Prince Philip's Nazi roots had been laid much earlier.

Hitler Youth and Universal Fascism

Through the influence of his sister Theodora, young Philip was sent to the German school near Lake Constantine that had been founded by Berthold's father, Max von Baden, working through his long-time personal secretary, Kurt Hahn. During World War I, Prince Max von Baden had been chancellor, while the Oxford-trained Hahn first served as head of the Berlin Foreign Ministry's intelligence desk, then as special adviser to Prince Max in the Versailles Treaty negotiations. Von Baden and Hahn set up a school in a wing of Schloss Salem, employing a combination of monasticism and the Nazis' ``strength-through-joy'' system. At first a supporter of the Nazis, Hahn, who was part Jewish, soon got into trouble with the SS, and came to support the more centrist elements of the Nazi Party. What Hahn really had become is what Henry Kissinger's friend, Michael Ledeen has termed a ``universal fascist,'' in the sense of Vladimir Jabotinsky, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, the Strasser brothers, and other fascists whom the hard-core Nazis would have no dealings with.

Gordonstoun School

Although Hahn's powerful connections permitted him to escape the concentration camps, he was forced to leave the school he founded in Germany before Philip's arrival there, and established a new school in Scotland, called Gordonstoun. It would play a major role in rearing all the male children of Queen Elizabeth II and Philip. When Philip arrived at Hahn's school in Schloss Salem, it was in control of the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party, and the curriculum had become Nazi ``race science.'' Hahn became an adviser to the Foreign Office in London, urging policies of appeasement based upon appeals to the ``centrist'' Nazis.

Philip's Relatives Work for the SS

The husband of Philip's sister Sophie, Prince Christoph, was embraced by the Nazis, who saw him as a channel to the appeasement faction in Britain epitomized by King Edward VIII. Joining the Nazi Party in 1933, by 1935 Prince Christoph was chief of the Forschungsamt (directorate of scientific research), a special intelligence operation run by Hermann Göring, and he was also Standartenführer (colonel) of the SS on Heinrich Himmler's personal staff. The Forschungsamt used electronic intelligence-gathering methods to police the Nazi Party, while working with the Gestapo against the Catholic Church, the Jews, and labour organizations. When rumours of homosexuality spread against Capt. Ernst Roehm of the Stormtroopers, Himmler turned to the Forschungsamt's eavesdroppers, and ordered the ``Night of the Long Knives'' as a result. The eldest of Prince Christoph and Sophie's children was named Karl Adolf, after Hitler. Later, Prince Philip would promote his education.

Prince Christoph's brother, Philip of Hesse, married a daughter of the King of Italy, and became the official liaison between the Nazi and Fascist regimes.

Four years after Prince Philip left Schloss Salem to attend Gordonstoun Academy in Scotland, on Nov. 16, 1937, Philip learned that his sister Cecilia and her husband Georg Donatus, hereditary grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, had crashed in one of Göring's Junker aircraft on a trip to London for George's brother's wedding. According to the magazine Private Eye, the funeral became a gathering point for leading Nazis and their appeasers. Prince Philip himself developed secretive ties with King Edward VIII, continuing after Edward was deposed in 1938.

In fact, one of the central figures in the 1930s Nazi-British back-channel was Philip's uncle and sponsor, Lord Louis Mountbatten (originally, Battenberg, a branch of the House of Hesse). Until he was forced to abdicate, King Edward VIII enjoyed the full backing of ``Dickie'' Mountbatten. Through much of World War II, secret channels of communication were maintained between the British royal family and their pro-Hitler cousins in Germany, by Lord Mountbatten, through his sister Louise, who was crown princess of pro-Nazi Sweden. Louise was Prince Philip's aunt.

Although Buckingham Palace's rumour mill has tried to depict this wartime collaboration with the enemy as mere family correspondence, the channel apparently included messages from Prince Philip's secret ally, the Duke of Windsor (the former Edward VIII). On Nov. 20, 1995, the Washington Times reported, based on recently discovered Portuguese Secret Service files first published in the London Observer, that the Duke of Windsor had been in close collaboration with the Nazis in Spain and Portugal to foment a revolution in wartime Britain, that would topple the Churchill government, depose his brother King George VI, and allow him to regain the throne, with Queen Wallis [Simpson, the American divorcée, for whom he abdicated the throne] at his side. Portuguese surveillance revealed that Walter Schellenberg, head of Gestapo counterintelligence, was one point of contact in this plot. After Schellenberg met with the Spanish ambassador to Portugal, Nicolás Franco, brother of fascist Gen. Francisco Franco, Ambassador Franco told a Portuguese diplomat: ``The Duke of Windsor, free from the responsibilities of the war, in disagreement with English politicians, could be the man to put at the head of the Empire.''

Whatever correspondence was hidden in Sophie and Prince Christoph's Kronberg Castle, King George VI, in June 1945, felt compelled to dispatch the former MI-5 officer turned ``Surveyor of the King's Pictures,'' Anthony Blunt, to gather up the correspondence. Queen Elizabeth II reportedly insisted that there be no interrogation of Blunt about his secret trip to the castle. Otherwise, it is notable that starting with an exchange between King George VI and President Eisenhower, the House of Windsor has been desperate to keep classified those documents from Kronberg Castle that fell into American Army hands, long beyond the normal length of time. Clearly, Prince Philip's patron Lord Dickie Mountbatten, Mountbatten's sister Crown Princess Louise, and Philip's brother-in-law Prince Christoph of Hesse were not just exchanging Christmas greetings.

Prince George, Duke of Kent (1902 1942)

His Royal Highness The Prince George, Duke of Kent (George Edward Alexander Edmund von Wettin, later Windsor) (20 December 1902 - 25 August 1942) was the fourth son of King George V of the United Kingdom and Queen Mary. He was the father of the current Duke of Kent, Princess Alexandra, the Honourable Lady Ogilvy, and Prince Michael of Kent.

Prince George was born at York Cottage, Sandringham House, near King's Lynn, Norfolk, England, to the then Prince and Princess of Wales. At the time of his birth, he was styled "HRH Prince George of Wales". From his father's ascension to the throne on 6 May 1910 until his creation as Duke of Kent on 12 October 1934, he was styled "HRH The Prince George". He became a Knight of the Order of the Garter (KG) at age 21. He received the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order (GCVO) in 1924 and the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (GCMG) in 1934. In 1935, he became a Knight of the Thistle (KT) and two years later he became a member of the Privy Council.

Prince George received his early education from a tutor and then followed his elder brother Prince Henry (later the Duke of Gloucester) to St. Peter's Court Preparatory School at Broadstairs in Kent. At age thirteen, like his brothers Prince Edward (later Edward VIII) and Prince Albert (later George VI) before him, he went to naval college, first at Osborne and later at Dartmouth. He remained in the Royal Navy until 1929, serving on the HMS Iron Duke and later the HMS Nelson. After leaving the navy, he briefly held posts at the Foreign Office and later the Home Office, becoming the first member of the British Royal Family to work as a civil servant. At the start of World War II, he returned to active military service at the rank of Rear Admiral, briefly serving on the Intelligence Division of the Admiralty. In April, 1940, he transferred to the Royal Air Force. He temporarily relinquished his rank as Air Vice-Marshal (the equivalent of Rear Admiral) to assume the post of Staff Officer in the RAF Training Command at the rank of Air Commodore. The Duke also was a designer of some note, trying his hand at furniture, jewelry, and the like.

On 29 November 1934, the Duke of Kent married Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark, the daughter of Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark and a great niece of Queen Alexandra, at Westminster Abbey. It was the last marriage between a son of a British Sovereign and a member of a foreign royal house to date.

Dismissed by one observer as cultivated, effeminate, and smelling too strongly of perfume, the Duke of Kent had a long string of affairs with men and women before and during his marriage. The better known of his partners were black cabaret singer Florence Mills, banking heiress Poppy Baring, Ethel Margaret Whigham (later Duchess of Argyll), musical star Jessie Matthews and actor Noel Coward, with whom he carried on a 19-year affair. (Love letters from the Duke to Coward were stolen from Coward's house in 1942). There is some suggestion that the duke had an affair with Indira Raje, the Maharani of Cooch Behar (1892-1968), in the late 1920s, according to British historian Lucy Moore. He also is said to have been addicted to drugs (notably morphine and cocaine) and reportedly was blackmailed by a male prostitute to whom he wrote intimate letters. Another of his reported homosexual affairs was with his distant cousin Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia; spy and art historian Anthony Blunt was another lover. Much of this history was outlined in "The Queen's Lost Uncle", a documentary film that aired on Britain's Channel 4 in 2003. The Duke's bisexuality and drug addictions were explored in "African Nights", a 2004 play written by American playwright Jeffrey Corrick.

In addition to his legitimate children, the Duke is said to have had a son by Kiki Preston (née Alice Gwynne) (1898-1946), an American socialite whom he reportedly shared in a ménage à trois with Jorge Ferrara, the bisexual son of the Argentine ambassador to the Court of St. James's. Known as "the girl with the silver syringe", drug addict Preston, a cousin of railroad heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, was married first to Horace R.B. Allen and then, in 1925, to banker Jerome Preston. She died after jumping out of a window of the Stanhope Hotel in New York City. According to the memoirs of a friend, Loelia Westminster, Prince George's brother the Duke of Windsor believed that the son was Michael Canfield (1926-1969), the adopted son of American publisher Cass Canfield and the first husband of Lee Radziwill (sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis).

The Duke of Kent was killed in a plane crash on active service in World War II at Eagles Rock near Dunbeath, Caithness, Scotland. His wife had given birth to their third child, Prince Michael of Kent, only six weeks earlier. He was initially buried in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, England: his remains were later moved to the royal burial ground, adjacent to Queen Victoria's mausoleum, at Frogmore, Windsor, England. He was succeeded as Duke of Kent by his elder son, Edward.


Anthony Blunt

Anthony Frederick Blunt (September 26, 1907 - March 26, 1983) was an English art historian and the "Fourth Man" of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies working for the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

He was born in Bournemouth, where his father had been a vicar. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduated in 1930, and became a teacher of French. He became a Fellow of the college in 1932, and in 1965 was Slade Professor of Fine Art in Cambridge. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, a secret society which at that time was Marxist, formed from members of Cambridge University. He was also a homosexual and close aide of Guy Burgess.

After visiting Russia in 1933, he was recruited by the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB) in 1934. He joined the British Army in 1939 and in 1940 was recruited to MI5, the military intelligence department, where he had access to Ultra intelligence from decoded Enigma messages. After the war he became director of the Courtauld Institute of Art (1947-1974)

In 1945 he became Surveyor of the King's Pictures, and retained the post under Queen Elizabeth II, for which work he was knighted in 1956. He retained the post until 1972. He was particularly knowledgeable on the works of Nicolas Poussin.

MI5 learned of his espionage in 1963 from an American, Michael Straight, whom he had unsuccessfully tried to recruit. Blunt confessed to MI5 on April 23, 1964, but his spying career remained an official secret until he was publicly named by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979. His knighthood was immediately revoked, followed by his honorary fellowship of Trinity College. According to MI5 papers released in 2002, the organization was told by writer Lady Moura Budberg in 1950 that Blunt was a member of the Communist Party, but the information was ignored.

He was the brother of writer Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt and of numismatist Christopher Evelyn Blunt.

Royal Nazis 2

2006-03-07

George I of Britain was German. He spoke only in German. The British used German troops to attempt to suppress the colonist rebels in the American War of Independence. Queen Victoria married a German. Had it not been for Churchill the British Royal family would still be known by a German name -- in short, the British Royal family is thoroughly Germanic. But in being of German stock does that make the British Royal family Nazis?

There is an assumption that on account of its German pedigree the British Royal family had or has Nazi sympathies. The truth is much blacker. The British Royal family did act as one of the conduits of anti-Semitic and racial ideas, yet not from Germany to Britain but in the other direction, namely from Britain to Germany.

The current British family caught their Nazi ideology not from Germany but from the British establishment. For centuries the British establishment, and especially the Scottish dimension, were (and still are) imbued in ideas of superiority and racial dominance. Such ideas found fertile ground in Europe witness the unification of Germany and Italy during the 19th century. Might equates to right'. That is a basic national socialist idea borrowed and corrupted from British aristocrat thought. Simply put Hitler and his cronies admired the British Empire and sought to emulate and improve upon' those ideas and the raison d'etre of that Empire's existence.

On this website I recount some of the joined up thinking of Nazi sympathisers. In On Royal Nazis and the Scottish connection' there is a useful summary of Prince Philip; King Edward VIII; Prince George, Duke of Kent; and Gordonstoun School. Yes Gordonstoun School, the same place where the current King in waiting, Prince Charles, was educated.

In On Why Judges?' there is a helpful précis of Nazi sympathies in the British establishment during the Second World War and I recount the influence of the Right Club and the importance of the Red Book' noting the transcript from the Debate in the House of Commons (12th October, 1944):

Tom Driberg asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will now publish the complete list of members of the Right Club, the activities of which were the subject of police enquiries.

Herbert Morrison: No, Sir. For reasons which I have explained on a previous occasion I do not think that it would be fair or in the public interest to publish this list, but I can give an assurance that appropriate steps are taken to watch any individual against whom there are grounds of suspicion.'

In the article Al Fayed is right?' I suggest he is correct to have his concerns yet hint that some in the British establishment, like many in the US, still carry anti-Semitic views indeed there appears to be a prevalent generalisation now that a Jew is a good Semite, while a Moslem (Arab) is dubious.

Again the article On Princess Diana's Death' I relate my current understanding upon what the UK establishment may or may not be capable of.

Too often we are blind to the obvious. My article Plot to overthrow Labour Government' attracted a little attention. Yet Prince Philip was a leading light in that scenario. He remains the Queen of the Commonwealth's consort.

There still remains a wish in many quarters to secure an Anglo-Saxon hegemony for this world such I will write on later but in the meantime I leave you with another thought provoking article taken from Ynet News'.


Prince Philip: We were jealous of Jews
Taken from Ynet News 2006-03-06

Queen Elizabeth's husband admits family had 'inhibitions about Jews,' sympathized with Nazis early on. Queen Elizabeth II's husband, Prince Philip, broke a long silence about his family link to the Nazis, Britain's Daily Mail reported on Monday.In a rare interview, the prince said his family found Hitler's plans to bring Germany at the helm of European power were "attractive" and admitted they had "inhibitions about the Jews."

The comments were published in a book called "Royals and the Reich," which describes the German royalty's acquiescence to the Nazis. The book, written by American historian Jonathan Petropoulos, includes pictures never published before. One picture from 1937 shows Prince Philip aged 16 with relatives at his sister Cecile's funeral in dressed in SS and Brownshirt uniforms. Lord Mountbatten, his uncle, is seen wearing a German Navy hat. Another photograph shows his sister Sophia sitting opposite Hitler at the wedding of Hermann and Emmy Groening, the Daily Mail said.

'Trains ran on time'
The 84-year-old Philip told Petropoulos about his family's sympathy to the Nazis: "There was a great improvement in things like trains running on time and building. There was a sense of hope after the depressing chaos of the Weimar Republic. "I can understand people latching on to be something or somebody who appeared to be appealing to their patriotism and trying to get things going. You can understand how attractive it was."

He added that there was a lot of enthusiasm for the Nazis at the time, the economy was good, we were anti-Communist and who knew what was going to happen to the regime?' Philip said that he was never conscious of anybody in the family actually expressing anti-Semitic views,' but acknowledged that that there were inhibitions about the Jews' and jealousy of their success.'

Philip was born Prince of Greece and Denmark on Corfu in 1921, the youngest of five children and the only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg. Three of his sisters Sophie, Cecile, and Margarita became members of the Nazi party. All his sisters married German princes. Sophie's husband, Prince Christoph of Hesse, became the head of the secret intelligence service in Germany under Goering.

Philip fought for the Allies in WWII and married the young princess Elizabeth in 1947. She was crowned Queen of England in 1953. Although his sisters and brothers-in-law are now dead, he keeps in touch with his German relatives.

Quote:DOUBLE STANDARDS

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO RUDOLF HESS?

Numerous books have been written about the Second World War; and the many and varied claims and counter-claims concerning Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, are legendary. However, it is fair to say that no-one has successfully penetrated the inner sanctum of official secrecy that surrounds the Hess affair - until now, that is.

According to the authors of Double Standards: The Rudolf Hess Cover-Up, for sixty years an unprecedented conspiracy has existed at the highest levels of the British Establishment to prevent the truth about Rudolf Hess and his fateful flight to Scotland in May 1941 from surfacing into the public domain.

Long dismissed as the misguided attempt of a madman to make contact with a non-existent British peace party, Hess's mission - as Double Standards asserts convincingly - was one of the pivotal events of the twentieth century. And the Establishment had very good reasons for covering up the truth: for the Establishment was the peace party that Hess had come to meet!





Even more controversial, Double Standards reveals that members of the Royal Family itself - whose involvement in the Hess affair has been conveniently airbrushed out of history - were at the heart of this group.a
Exposing the wartime propaganda that still masquerades as fact, and based on entirely new material from eyewitnesses, hitherto inaccessible archives and intelligence sources, Double Standards reveals that:

(1) Despite official denials Hess flew to Britain with Hitler's full knowledge;

(2) There was a substantial peace party in Britain in 1941, which included most of the aristocracy - and the Royal Family;

(3) The King's brother, the Duke of Kent, was actively involved in Hess's peace mission;

(4) There is substantial evidence that the prisoner who died in Spandau prison was not the real Rudolf Hess;

(5) The fate of the real Deputy Fuhrer was inextricably linked with that of the Duke of Kent - Double Standards finally presents a solution to the long-acknowledged mystery of the Duke's death in 1942;

(6) Winston Churchill guilefully used Hess to influence Hitler and change Britain's fortunes in the War.
But that is not all - as co-authors Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince make abundantly clear.

LP: The official story behind Rudlof Hess's flight to Britain in 1941 is that he was a lone madman who had stolen a plane and flown to Scotland with the wild idea of contacting a non-existent peace party spearheaded by the Duke of Hamilton - who was totally innocent of course and knew nothing about it - in an attempt to broker a peace deal and end the War. But from there, Hess was arrested and following the end of the War was tried at Nuremberg and spent the rest of his life in Spandau Prison. The story was that Hitler knew nothing of it either and he said so and also said that Hess was suffering from a mental illness and had been for some time. And Churchill basically stated that the only time that he ever agreed with Hitler was on that story! Now, there are some very interesting things about this story that we uncovered for our book that show the official line wasn't anywhere near the truth and that Hitler had knowledge of what was going on, that Hess had links with the Duke of Kent, that both of them may have been killed, that the Hess put on trial at Nuremberg wasn't the real Hess and the impostor or double was the man who died at Spandau. Hess's wife said that Hess had left a letter to be given to the Fuhrer and it said effectively, "If the mission fails you can always say I was mad." Also, after the mission effectively failed, the Gestapo interrogated Hess's staff; and the reports - which we've seen - make it clear that Hitler knew. Hess's son, Wolf Hess, tells how almost immediately before the flight Hitler and Hess had this enormous row for about three hours - Hess was one of the few people who could argue with Hitler and get away with it. But then it went quiet in the room and when they came out, Hitler had his arm around Hess and he said: "You know Hess, you always were and are one of the most stubborn men," and as Wolf Hess says: "I don't think they were talking about the weather."

EYE SPY!: So what does your research suggest the truth behind the flight was?

LP: It wasn't altruism, obviously. But there was a very practical reason: the Nazis wanted to be assured that they could open the Eastern Front and attack Russia without having to watch their backs with Britain. But actually it would have suited us to because not only would we have got a respite from the War - which was going badly for us at the time - but Russia and the Nazis would have battled it out between them and that was fine with us as they would have weakened each other. And after the War they would both have been so weak that there would have been no Cold War and that would almost certainly have worked to our benefit.

EYE SPY!: What evidence exists to support the notion that the man who died in Spandau Prison wasn't Rudolf Hess?

LP: Alan Dulles, who became the head of the CIA, was of the opinion that the man who was condemned to life imprisonment at Nuremberg, was not the real Rudolf Hess - as was President Roosevelt himself. And in the 1970s, a British surgeon and ballistics expert, Dr. Hugh Thomas, actually had chance to physically examine the old man in Spandau. He knew that the real Hess had been wounded by a bullet in the First World War; so he looked on the old man's body for signs of the wound but couldn't find it. Now we're not talking about someone who simply cast an eye over the man without knowing what he was looking for. Dr. Hugh Thomas, I must stress, is a surgeon and a ballistics expert who has been used in trials such as Bloody Sunday, so he really knows what he's talking about. Also, there are circumstantial things, if you like. The man at Nuremberg refused to see his family and in fact he also refused to see anyone other than his lawyer for over twenty years - which is astonishing considering that he'd been locked up as you would think he would want to see them. Also, at Nuremberg the man had very, very convenient amnesia. He behaved very oddly at Nuremberg, he failed to recognise people that had worked very close with the real Hess. And at times he also failed to recognise colleagues in the Nazi hierarchy. And they seemed to think there was something strange about him especially Hermann Goring, a co-defendant at the trial. He was quite amused when someone was talking to him about Hess. This isn't an exact quote, but Goring said: "Hess? Which Hess? The Hess you have here? Our Hess? Your Hess?" It was that kind of exchange. The man had also agreed to give evidence on behalf of one of the co-defendants but on the day claimed not to remember anything. In the book too we reproduce dental records of Rudolf Hess and of the old man who died at Spandau and they are not of the same man. We took them to a consultant dentist in this country and asked if they were from the same person and his reply was "Absolutely not". The other thing I must point out, which is the clincher, when Dr Hugh Thomas came up with the revelation that the old man was a double, the British Government tied itself in knots trying to prove that this was Rudolf Hess - and they couldn't do it.

EYE SPY!: And do you have any idea who the double may have been?

LP: All we know is that he was German and presumably a Nazi. He might have been interned in Britain - or he might have been sent over after the event. We don't know who the double was but we did learn that when Hess arrived, he asked for by name two prisoners - two German internees, Dr Eduard Semelbauer and Kurt Maass. He knew where they were held and, interestingly, these two had already been moved from their respective internment camps - which suggests someone here knew about the flight and the plans - to a place near Glasgow. Now we don't really know why he wanted them - he said it was to interpret for him but he spoke very good English! But we did discover that they were later sent to a camp on the Isle of Man for, quote, "Non-returnable Nazis", which is a rather sinister phrase, I think! But it's possible that one of them became the double as part of Churchill's plot to deflect attention away from the real Rudolf Hess. For example, when Hess was first imprisoned in England it was at Aldershot and the place was a fortress; but then all of a sudden after a few months "Hess" was moved amid virtual fanfare to Abergavenny and the staff lined up to meet him and it was in the newspapers. So it seems that this was really a case of drawing attention to the double. Also there is evidence that the double was seen to meet Churchill in a place opposite Windsor Castle. The importance was to imply to the peace party and thereby to the Germans that Churchill was talking to Hess, even though in fact he wasn't and was against the peace plan. So Churchill was playing a very, very cunning game.

EYE SPY!: And why was the ruse continued after the War?

LP: Well, Hess, or whoever the old man in Spandau was, became the focus for the Cold War; and as far as the Russians were concerned, the focus for their hatred of the Nazi regime. There was no way that the British were going to announce that "By the way, he's not really Hess"! He was very useful. And one reason why he was looked after during the Cold War was because as long as he was alive Spandau would be there. And as long as Spandau was there, it gave the four victorious powers a reason to continue to occupy Berlin. It literally came down to this one man in the end.

EYE SPY!: You mention in the book the links between Hess and the Duke of Kent. What is the story there?

LP: The Duke of Kent was the father of the present Duke of Kent and the youngest brother of King George VI. It's interesting that although he was such an amazing character (he was the first member of the Royal Family to die in active service in over five hundred years) very few people today are aware of who he was. He was very glamorous; a slightly camp, James Bond-like character in a way and he'd acted as political advisor for three kings. So at the time of his death in 1942 Kent was acting as political advisor for George VI. He had been involved in peace moves before the War and he was married to Princess Marina of Greece who was very anti-Bolshevik. It wasn't so much that he was pro-Nazi or sucking up to Hitler - he was simply pro-peace. He thought that anything was better than going to war again - as did George V. Had there been a deal with Germany the peace party would have insisted that Hitler be removed. And as we understand it from the German side, they would have wanted Churchill removed before they started to negotiate.

EYE SPY!: And how does the Duke of Kent's death tie in with Hess?

LP: The story is that Hess came over on a peace mission in May 1941 with peace proposals which Churchill does not show the War Cabinet and Hess is locked up - despite the fact that he's a peace envoy. Now in 1942, we know that there were definitely two Hess's held in Abergavenny, Wales. One was a decoy and one was the real one - to try and prevent rescue attempts or assassinations. In fact, most notable figures have doubles - like, for example, Montgomery. But later in the summer of 1942, one of the Hess's had disappeared. Now, what had happened, we discovered, was that the real Hess had been secretly taken up to Scotland where he was kept on the shores of Loch More. Now we had been researching this, as had Stephen Prior; but at the same time our historical researcher, Robert Brydon, had been researching the death of the Duke of Kent and had masses of material and he and Stephen discovered an explosive connection between the two. The Duke of Kent had set off in August 1942 on, allegedly, a morale-boosting trip to Iceland and his Sunderland flying boat had crashed in the Scottish hills and everyone except one member of the crew had died, including the Duke of Kent. The plane crashed approximately two miles from where Hess was kept but there's something else too: the flying time of the plane had an extra half hour unaccounted for. Then from our investigations, we were able to determine that there was an extra person on board the plane! Had they used the extra half an hour to put down on Loch More to pick somebody up who then died in the crash? We believe - and it does look like - the real Rudolf Hess died with the Duke of Kent in 1942.

EYE SPY!: And why was Hess on the plane?

LP: Our research suggests that they were not heading for Iceland but were in fact en-route to Sweden to broker a peace deal. Things were going badly wrong at the time and it looked like we would lose the War and Kent was fanatically pro-peace and so, in his own way, was Rudolf Hess. There are other reasons to link them too. One thing that is often over-looked is that before the War both Kent and Hess were aviation aces. In those days there was a kind of loose-Freemasonry, if you like, among flyers and a kind of chivalry between them. And there is evidence that George VI had given safe passage to Hess but that Churchill got to him first and locked him up. So under the circumstances, one of these knights of the air perhaps thought it incumbent on him to help another knight of the air to escape to safety - a chivalric element to it perhaps.

EYE SPY!: If this was an attempt at a peace deal and there were those within the British Government who didn't want this to come about such as Churchill, is there anything sinister to the air-crash that killed Kent and possibly Hess?

LP: That's one of the biggest questions! It does look very, very coincidental. The plane just exploded and the wreckage was quickly taken away by teams of people who suddenly appeared. Now often in similar circumstances in the Highlands the bodies were removed but the wreckage was left there because it was seen as too difficult a job. But in this crash every last piece was removed. And we do point out that about a year later, Kent's great friend and ally, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the leader of the Free Polish forces and who was based in Scotland died in a similar crash. And there is evidence that General de Gaulle was almost the subject of a similar assassination while preparing for a flight to Glasgow from Hendon. At the time it was thought that this might have been the work of Nazi infiltrators but the evidence now points towards the Special Operations Executive working on the orders of Churchill and of course it failed. And this was all to prevent the brokering of a peace deal.

EYE SPY!: You talk in the book about how Churchill used Hess to influence Hitler and change Britain's fortunes in the War. Can you expand on that?

CP: First of all, Churchill was in a very, very insecure position politically in May 1941. In fact, three days before Hess arrived, there had been a vote of no-confidence in Churchill. He didn't have the support of the aristocracy or the support of MI6 and the King. But the Hess affair basically gave Churchill the opportunity to blackmail his opponents who were involved with the Hess flight into supporting him. It made his position secure and he made veiled hints and threats in the House of Commons where he would drop Hess's name in. It was like "Back me or I'll tell the full story." He also used the Hess flight to ensure that Hitler went ahead with his attack on Russia six weeks after Hess arrived. He also used it to worry the Americans that a deal was about to be done and to get Roosevelt to increase his support and ensure that the great Triple Alliance happened.
Churchill also fooled Hitler into thinking that the British Government was negotiating with Hess. It's very clear that when he was held at Aldershot, Hess was under the impression that he was negotiating with representatives of the Government. Churchill had his own network in the intelligence services and he was well aware of what was going on with bringing Hess over.

EYE SPY!: You talk in the book about new files surfacing on this whole controversy. Where did these come from?

CP: The two main new files that we found and used in the book and that haven't been seen before were, firstly, the archives of the Duke of Hamilton who was involved in the Hess affair and that are kept at the Scottish Office. And although some had been available to other researchers, we were able to get almost unrestricted access that most previous researchers hadn't really had before. The other thing that hadn't really seen the light of day before - and this relates more to the death of Hess or whoever the prisoner in Spandau was in 1987 - were the administration records from prison. Now, the British authorities said that all the records for the prison should be destroyed - and they were. But before that the Russians insisted that they make a microfilm record of everything and the Russians then gave microfilm copies to the other three powers. And we managed to get hold of one of the copies that contains a lot of interesting material relating to Hess's death and what was going on. The files at the Public Record Office that were held by MI5 and released in 1999 fill in some of the holes - one MI5 file in particular which blows the lid on the accepted story of the flight refers to Hess's request for access to the two German internees Semelbauer and Maass. Maass was the more interesting one because he was a member of the Nazi party. In the PRO files we found a lot of background on him and contacted the Red Cross in Geneva and found that it was three days before Hess's arrival that they were transferred out to the camp near Glasgow. Yet no-one is supposed to know he's arriving! In a margin note in one of the PRO files written by the head civil servant in the Foreign Office, he had been told that Maass had been released! So whoever transferred these people out of the internment camps, there was a lot of skull-duggery going on. In fact, it was almost like whoever got them out of the camps did it without the official knowledge of the Government. We're certain that MI6 was totally involved in the Hess affair - they weren't luring him over: they were inviting him over. This was because MI6 were supportive of the idea of ending the War with Germany. MI6 saw the real enemy as being Russia. Sir Stuart Menzies - the head of MI6 - advised Churchill to stay out of things and let the Nazis and the Russians get on with it and which ever one wins to pick a fight with them afterwards! So up until the middle of 1941 MI6's primary thing was to get Britain out of the War. Now the fact that the Foreign Office didn't know what was going on with Maass and Semelbauer suggests to us it was the peace group that got them out. Presumably, if everything had gone to plan and Hess hadn't been captured, these two guys would have acted as secretaries for Hess at the peace talks, Hess would then have flown back to Germany and Maass and Semelbauer would have been returned to their camps. As it was, the whole thing went very messy but MI6 wanted this plan to succeed.

EYE SPY!: Do you think that there are factions of the Intelligence community and the Establishment that want this story to come out?

CP: Well, Sir Maurice Oldfield, a former head of MI6, is known to have essentially stolen one of the files on Hess to stop it being destroyed and gave it to certain historians and it's now in safe-keeping in Holland. So it shows that he was unhappy with the fact that a lot of these files were being destroyed to stop them being released.

EYE SPY!: Bearing in mind the sensitive nature of the story, did you find yourselves thwarted in anyway?

LP: Let's put it this way: it would have been very surprising if we weren't being watched: authors who had written only a fraction of what we uncovered had found their paths strewn with obstacles. But having said that, of course, we now have a Labour Government and it was always the Conservatives who were very anti documents leaking out; and now there appears to be a greater openness. But, in saying that, on a couple of occasions manuscripts went astray in the post for suspiciously long periods of time and turned up having obviously been opened. This was the whole typescript that vanished for 10 days and it only had to travel across London! But the book came out! And Rhodri Morgan, the First Minister for Wales, who had always been intrigued by the Hess mystery, was prompted by the launch of the book to say on television that he believed that the British had Hess bumped off in Spandau and I don't think that would have happened under the old regime. So there is a new openness up to a point!

EYE SPY!: How do you feel now having completed the book and looking back on things?

LP: Writing, researching and being involved in this story has really opened my eyes - not so much about skull-duggery in high places because we've learned to expect that - but because of the way in which Churchill got away with this and was feted for it. And yes, okay, Hess was a Nazi - the Deputy Fuhrer - but he came over that night on his own, unarmed, under virtually a white flag and was then locked up for the rest of his life - however long or short that was. My father was a straight-down-the-line regimental sergeant major and I was brought up to start off with a kind of simple patriotism. Obviously as I got older things changed and they have certainly changed with this. They really have!

Double Standards: The Rudolf Hess Cover-up by Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince & Stephen Prior (with additional research by Robert Brydon) is available from the Eye Spy! shop. £20.00 plus £3.50 p & p. Ref: ES/512. eyespymag.com shop
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