Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Padfield Peter
Title : Hess, Hitler and Churchill The real turning point of the Second World War : a secret history
Year : 2013

Link download : Padfield_Peter_-_Hess_Hitler_and_Churchill.zip

Acknowledgements. Have to thank Andrew Lownie, my agent, for providing important contacts and documents for this project and for his unfailing support from the beginning. One of those contacts, the late Duc de Grantmesnil-Lorraine, Kenneth de Courcy in this story, was a mine of information on the personalities and politics of the war years, especially Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, the Duke of Buccleuch and Lord Rothschild, patron of the ‘Cambridge ring’ of Soviet spies. It was only after Grantmesnil’s death that I learned he had been given first-hand information on Hess’s peace mission by an officer who guarded Hess in captivity. The late Adrian Liddell Hart, son of Captain Basil Liddell Hart, was generous in sharing the results of his own researches into Hess’s mission. The late Duchess of Hamilton, wife of the 14th Duke, provided much information about her husband and the events surrounding Hess’s arrival, as did her son, the 15th Duke, and his brother, James Douglas- Hamilton, now Lord Selkirk of Douglas, who wrote a pioneering book on Hess’s arrival, Motive for a Mission; I am grateful for permission to quote from letters he published from his father’s papers. Rudolf Hess’s son, the late Wolf Rüdiger Hess, besides providing much material assistance, granted permission to quote from his father’s letters and alleged suicide note, and released the pathologists who conducted the second autopsy into his father’s death, Professors W. Eisenmenger and W. Spann of Munich University, from their oath of silence. In their turn they spent much time and trouble answering my queries, for which I am most grateful. I am particularly grateful to the late John Howell, who provided the introduction to the informant whose testimony provides the key to the original official cover-up of Hess’s peace mission, and who arranged question and answer sessions. Unfortunately the informant, after referring to his former masters (in the Foreign Office or MI6) insisted on anonymity, which I have to honour. ...