Motive for a Mission

A Grand Illusionistic story by the son of the Duke of Hamilton, whom Rudolf Hess tried to convert to the goal of Anglo-German peace in May 1941 by flying to his Scottish estate. . . the ""mission"" in question. The book is however mostly about the political life of Albrecht Haushofer, aide and plenipotentiary of Hess and Ribbentrop, and son of the plutocratic Karl, propounder of Lebensraum and German ""autarchy."" The letters and memoranda from Albrecht to Hess, Ribbentrop, Hitler and the Duke, unearthed by the younger Hamilton, display a class-oriented solidarity and intimacy which transcended national boundaries. During the Czech crisis Albrecht writes the Duke to grieve over the prospect of Anglo-German war and requests that the Duke's ""inside people"" put a certain amount of pressure on ""the big man in Rome."" Haushofer lamented war with Britain as the ""suicide of the white race,"" but, as Hamilton comments apologetically, ""like most patriotic Germans [he] supported the Anschluss."" Haushofer is indeed portrayed as a ray of cultivated reason in high Nazi circles, desperately maneuvering to circumvent ""Hitler's mental limitations"" and avoid war. Carefully avoiding any mention of the Cliveden or Beaverbrook sets, or any indication of the Duke's relation to them, this limited, self-serving narrative reveals a glimpse of the European upper class of the period without providing new insight into the origins-of-World-War-II dispute. Christopher Sykes' study of Adam von Trott zu Solz (Troubled Loyalty, 1969) gives a broader view of this milieu with more complex, if little more admirable, protagonists on both the British and German sides.