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His plan was reasonable enough. Hitler did want peace with England. Earlier efforts to draw Churchill into negotiations had failed. The Führer probably knew what Hess was up to, Leasor theorizes, and tacitly permitted it, carefully avoiding precise knowledge of the details to keep himself from implication if the mission failed. When it did fail, he followed the advice Hess left him in a parting letter and declared that Hess was the victim of "hallucinations." Moreover, in the spring of 1941, Leasor asserts, England was nearer to capitulation "than anyone now likes to admit." Winston Churchill was so afraid of the effect the peace offer might have on British morale that his representatives came to interview Hess disguised as psychiatrists, so that no word of continued government interest could possibly leak out.
Lebensraum with a View. Haunting Hess's mind was a compulsive fear and hatred of Communist Russia. For years Hess was under the spell of Professor Karl Haushofer, the geopolitical genius of Naziism who provided Hitler with his slogan of Lebensraum as a pretext for aggression. Hitler was parroting Haushofer when, in Mein Kampf, he wrote of the absolute need to avoid war on two fronts. But the success of the German armies intoxicated him, and he became more and more intent on attacking Russia. In the months before the flight, Haushofer kept telling the impressionable Hess that he and he alone could save the impetuous Hitler and Germany by bringing about a peace with England.
The idea of an Anglo-German alliance against Russia, which at the time was officially regarded in the West as a monstrous form of near madness, was taken with deadly seriousness by the Soviet Union. One of the fascinating sidelights of the book, in fact, is its documentation of the persistence of Russia's interest in the Hess mission, long after the Allies had brushed it aside. Stalin continually quizzed Churchill about Hess. In 1944, when the Russian armies captured Hess's luckless aide Major Pintsch, who had been released from Nazi prison in order to fight them, they systematically tortured him, breaking one finger a day for ten days, to find out what he knew.