Hello. My name is Elizabeth Haines, and I’m a specialist in international and military records at The National Archives.
Today, we’re going to look at a document from our KV document collection. The documents in this collection all relate to the Security Service, a government department we also know as MI5. The KV collection also contains a few files from the early years of what is often known as MI6, the department that does secret intelligence work overseas. However, most of the files we have in the collection here relate to the Security Service MI5, who deal specifically with counter-terrorism and espionage within the UK. We have documents in the KV collection covering the time period 1905 to 2009. But today we’re going to focus on a file from the Second World War – a personal file from the series KV 2.
So what kind of material can we find in this collection? What is a personal file? Personal files contain the information that was gathered by the Security Service on specific individuals that were being investigated for various reasons concerning national security. These suspected individuals might be prominent people such as scientists, journalists, or the wealthy elite, or they might have been employed in more ordinary jobs or worked as businesspeople, for example.
So in this series, we have a file on Kwame Nkrumah, who fought for African independence from British colonial rule and became the first president of Ghana. We also have files on Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize-winning author who moved from South Africa to Britain in 1949. And she was kept under watch because of her anti-colonial and communist views. Within the personal files, we mostly find reports written about the activities of those individuals. And these have been gathered in a wide variety of covert or secret ways, such as, for example, direct reports by British agents who might have followed or made friends with the individuals or kept watch at airports. We also have testimonies or interrogations of other people about the individuals. And we also have examples of the government reading an individual’s mail or listening to their telephone calls. But sometimes there’s more than that.
So, for example, we have a file that was kept on Margaret Joyce, a fascist sympathiser from Manchester who moved to Germany in 1939 where she worked as a journalist for the duration of the Second World War. She broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany back to the UK on the radio and was known as Lady Haw-Haw. Because she was arrested in Germany after the war, the security service file includes her own personal material such as her diaries and her personal photographs of her family.
Before we look in more depth as an example from this collection we need to notice that this document has a unique reference: KV 2/35, so that we can use our catalogue to find it.
So this is a personal file from the KV series, and this personal file ‘PF’ is dedicated to the Nazi leader Rudolf Hess. You could well be familiar with the name Rudolf Hess. Hess was a close associate of Adolf Hitler from 1922. He was imprisoned with Hitler in the 1920s for taking part in the famous Beer Hall Putsch and in the early 1930 Hess was Hitler’s closest ally and second in command. Yet on the 10th of May 1941, during the early stages of the Second World War, Hess stole an airplane from the German Luftwaffe, flew to Britain single-handedly, and crashed in a field in west Scotland. On his arrival, Hess claimed to be on a mission to try to broker peace between Britain and Germany.
But the British weren’t sure about his motives. Why had Hess come? Had he made the journey alone or in collaboration with someone in Britain? Did he come with Hitler’s knowledge? What did others know about Hess and his intentions? And what could Hess’s flight tell the British about the state of the highest levels of the Nazi government? To protect British interests the Security Service needed to find out more. So they began collecting information and opened a file on him.
Hess’s extraordinary departure from Nazi Germany has been the subject of speculation ever since that day in 1941. There are many myths and conspiracy theories about this event so let’s take a closer look in the file and see how the documents can help us understand this pivotal moment in history when one of the Nazi elite tried to alter the course of the Second World War.
So here we have a typewritten report that was produced just over two weeks after Hess arrived in Scotland. It’s the report of an interrogation carried out at the Glasgow Police Headquarters on the 29th of May 1941. It’s three pages long, and we see right at the end of the report that it was carried out by Lieutenant John Mair. Mair was interrogating someone called Roman Battaglia. We learn from the document that Battaglia was the first German speaker who could be found interview Hess on the night of his crash landing in Scotland. And Mair wanted to find out what took place in that discussion.
We can see from his report that the British is still very confused by Hess’s arrival . Mair says, ‘I asked Battaglia whether he had been able to gather where the Hess’s flight was at his own volition or the German government’s orders,’ and Hess said that ‘he had been forbidden to fly both because of his age and his health, but nevertheless had done so, and asked Battaglia jokingly whether he didn’t think it was a fine performance’. However, Mair is trying to assess Battaglia’s reliability at the same time. ‘Battaglia is an extremely shrewd man, and although he gave every appearance of being willing to help, far better acquaintance with him would be necessary before trusting him completely.’
So who was this report for and why was this information being collected? We know from the covering letter that the report was being sent to the Director of Counter-Espionage in the Security Service. The report was being brought together with other information to help answer the questions that the Security Service were asking themselves about his motives and his possible collaborators.
So is this document useful for understanding why Hess flew to Scotland in 1941, or whether Hitler knew or didn’t know about his flight? As we’ve just seen the Security Service themselves found it difficult to be sure which sources were reliable or true or useful, and what was made up or misleading.
So the Security Service gathered as much material as they could and eventually ended up producing five files on Hess and collecting a very wide range of material. For example, we find letters between Hess and his family here in Germany. We also have notes about rumours about Hess’s arrival that were heard in the gentlemen’s clubs of London. And there are also reports from British agents overseas where there’s been speculation that Hess was moving money into Swiss bank accounts.
However, despite all these sources, there was still a great deal of uncertainty at the time. This was partly because of Hess’s own psychological condition, which was fragile, and partly because events and discussions at the centre of Nazi government were largely inaccessible to the British. So how can we evaluate the significance of the documents in Hess’s personal files? I’d say that this file teaches us less about the facts of Hess’s arrival in Britain in 1941 and more about the challenges of obtaining reliable information about the enemy in wartime. It helps us to understand the methods that the Security Service were trying to use to overcome those challenges in the Second World War. So in order to try to draw conclusions about Hess, his actions and whether he worked with the knowledge of Hitler or whether he was collaborating with someone in Britain, historians have needed to use these documents in combination with other records, both in the UK and in Germany.
So why does The National Archives have these secret files? The National Archives preserves records from all different parts of the British government, and that includes the Security Service. The files at MI5 are reviewed on a regular basis and those that can are released into the public domain. Although the records of the Security Service are not subject to the Public Record Act in the same way as other government departments. If you were using the material in this file as historical evidence, it would also be important to note that some of the documents remain classified. That means that they aren’t available to the public and are still held by MI5 in their own offices. We don’t know what’s contained in those missing documents or exactly why a particular document is still classified. That could be a variety of potential reasons. For example, it might be because those individual documents have personal information about someone who is still alive because their rights are protected or it might be that the document still has the potential to disrupt today’s international political situation. As more of the documents from these files on Hess become declassified it’s possible that more important details in the story of Rudolf Hess will emerge although probably the main elements are now already known.
So these are just some of the many documents to be found in our Security Service collection, which can be used to find out about the challenges of getting information in wartime. As we saw earlier, there are many more KV personal files on figures famous and unknown, and there’s a lot more history to be learned from this series.