This article is part of an ongoing investigation into the occult and intelligence networks that operated across national boundaries during and after the Second World War. It follows our recent pieces on Rudolf von Sebottendorf and the Thule Society. It should be read alongside our existing articles on Rudolf Hess and British intelligence’s documented use of occult operatives.
There is a phrase that appears in a British intelligence memo dated March 10, 1946.
It was written by two agents reporting to their superior — Sir Ivan Kirkpatrick, the senior MI6 officer who had originally interrogated Rudolf Hess after his famous flight to Scotland in 1941, and who would later become Britain’s High Commissioner for Germany.
The memo reads:
“In accordance with instructions of March 8, K. Haushofer was visited on March 10. During interrogation it emerged that the gentleman knew nothing further about the problem in question. In response to our instructions we inform you that the problem concerning this man and the International Military Tribunal has now been removed.”
The problem has been removed.
On the same day the agents visited — March 10, 1946 — Karl Haushofer and his wife Martha were found dead.
Who Karl Haushofer Was
To understand why he needed to be a problem at all, you need to understand who Karl Haushofer was and what he knew.
He was Germany’s most influential geopolitician — founder of the discipline in its modern form, Professor at Munich University, the man whose concept of Lebensraum became, however distorted, a cornerstone of National Socialist foreign policy. He was Rudolf Hess’s academic mentor and closest intellectual companion — a relationship his secretary described as “almost a father substitute.” They addressed each other informally. They met regularly throughout the war years.
But Haushofer was more than an academic. He had traveled extensively in India and Tibet before the First World War, where he encountered figures whose names appear at every intersection of early twentieth-century occultism and geopolitics. He was the man who connected Rudolf von Sebottendorf — whose Sufi and Rosicrucian initiatory background we examined in a previous article — to the medium Maria Orsic, whose transmissions shaped the inner circle of the Thule Society’s esoteric programme.
He sat, in other words, at the precise intersection of three things: the academic and intellectual architecture of the NSDAP, the occult networks that preceded and shaped it, and the diplomatic back-channels that connected Germany to Britain throughout the 1930s and into the war itself.
And there was one more thing.
The Haushofer family possessed copies of every letter Rudolf Hess had written to his British contacts in the months before his flight to Scotland on May 10, 1941. Every letter. The full documentary record of what Hess believed he had been promised, who had promised it, and what the British intelligence services had actually been doing with those communications — running a sophisticated deception operation that lured Hess to Scotland under false pretences.
Karl Haushofer knew what the England flight had actually been. He knew who had arranged it and what it was designed to achieve. He was scheduled to testify about it at Nuremberg.
He never did.
The Son Who Died First
Before examining what happened to Karl and Martha Haushofer, one detail deserves attention.
Their son Albrecht Haushofer — poet, geographer, member of the July 20 resistance circle that attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944 — was arrested after the failed plot. He spent the last months of the war in Moabit prison in Berlin, writing the Moabiter Sonette, the poems for which he is remembered.
On the night of April 22-23, 1945, with Soviet forces entering Berlin and the Third Reich in its final days, Albrecht Haushofer was taken from his cell and shot in the back of the neck by SS men. He was found with the sonnet manuscript still in his coat pocket.
He had known things from inside the regime. He had known things from inside the resistance. A man who had access to both sides simultaneously — shot in the final days, when there was no longer any strategic reason to kill him except the permanent reason: silence.
His parents buried him on their Bavarian estate.
Less than a year later, they would lie beside him.
The Visit
The Hartschimmelhof. A family estate on the Ammersee lake in Bavaria — deep in what was then the American occupation zone. British intelligence had no jurisdiction there. None whatsoever.
They came anyway.
On March 8, 1946, Kirkpatrick issued instructions. On March 10, two British intelligence agents arrived at the Hartschimmelhof. Karl Haushofer was due to testify before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in the coming days.
What was said during the interrogation is not fully documented. The memo records only that Haushofer claimed to know nothing further about “the problem in question.” Whether this is true, whether it was a formula offered and accepted, whether the conversation proceeded differently — we do not know.
What we know is what followed.
The Bodies in the Forest
Karl and Martha Haushofer were found dead in the forest on their estate. Not near the house. In the forest — at a considerable distance from their home, in an isolated, almost hidden location in the trees.
The official finding: suicide.
The evidence presented for this: a farewell letter found in the house, and a hand-drawn map supposedly prepared by Martha Haushofer to show their surviving son Heinz where to find the bodies.
Both documents gave investigators pause.
The farewell letter was written on a single page but interrupted four times, each continuation in different ink and with a different pen. It bore no date. A letter written by a man preparing for death, interrupted four times, switching pen and ink on each resumption — this is not the document of a man sitting quietly at his desk on a final morning. The interruptions suggest something else entirely. What interrupted him, and why he continued each time with different writing materials, the letter does not say.
The map is more troubling still.
Martha Haushofer was a skilled draughtswoman. Her diary, which survives, is illustrated with drawings of considerable quality. The map supposedly drawn by her to guide her son to the bodies in the forest was, according to the documentary examination of the evidence, strikingly amateurish — wholly incompatible with her documented abilities.
More significantly: the handwriting on the map bore no resemblance to Martha Haushofer’s actual handwriting as recorded in her diary. The documentary analysis found instead a striking similarity to Anglo-American typography.
The two British intelligence agents who visited on March 10 were the last people to see Karl and Martha Haushofer alive.
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The agents returned and wrote to Kirkpatrick.
“The problem concerning this man and the International Military Tribunal has now been removed.”
We note only what the phrase says and what it does not say. It does not say: we visited and he died the same day. It does not say: we found him dead. It says the problem has been removed — in the passive construction that in bureaucratic language everywhere signals that something has been done without specifying who did it.
Kirkpatrick, the recipient of this memo, was not a peripheral figure. He was the senior MI6 officer who had personally interrogated Hess after the Scotland landing in 1941. He would go on to become Britain’s High Commissioner for Germany — one of the most powerful positions in the post-war reshaping of the country. He knew what the Hess flight had actually been. He knew what Haushofer knew. He issued the March 8 instructions. He received the March 10 report.
The problem was removed. Kirkpatrick was informed. Nuremberg proceeded without Haushofer’s testimony.
What Nuremberg Did Not Hear
Rudolf Hess arrived at Nuremberg in a condition that puzzled everyone who had known him. His own secretary, Hildegard Fath, was brought to testify and confronted him directly. She looked into his eyes and said she felt — somewhere beneath the surface — that the same man was still there. Yet he claimed to remember nothing.
The official explanation involves tactical simulation. But Double Standards documents a darker possibility that deserves equal weight.
From the moment of his arrival in Britain, Hess had been subjected to a systematic programme designed to destabilise his mind. He was given drugs — almost certainly sodium pentothal, which in small doses extracts information but used regularly dramatically increases suggestibility. He named his tormentors specifically in a formal written protest: Dicks, Foley and Kendrick. His protest was dismissed as proof of paranoia — the closed loop that the treatment itself had created. Accuse your druggist of drugging you, and the accusation becomes the symptom.
Lord Beaverbrook — one of Churchill’s closest advisers — admitted privately in 1943 that he believed Hess had been given drugs to make him talk. The same Beaverbrook who, in 1962, told journalist James Leasor that it was he who had suggested to Churchill they manufacture the insanity cover story. His reasoning was brutally practical: most people automatically assume anyone in the care of a psychiatrist must be insane. Hand him to two psychiatrists — he even specified two, because no two psychiatrists can ever agree on a diagnosis — and Churchill would have a choice of verdicts available whenever he needed one.
Beaverbrook described this period as the darkest point in his life.
Churchill had issued his written instruction before any psychiatric assessment took place: Hess was on no account to be treated as a psychiatric patient. He pre-ordered the outcome. Then, when the diagnosis arrived confirming what he had ordered, he cited it.
So when Hess sat in the Nuremberg dock claiming amnesia — after months of chemical destabilisation, systematic psychological pressure, and a manufactured insanity narrative that had been running for years — the question is not simply whether he was performing. The question is what condition his mind was actually in, and who had put it there.
His secretary looked into his eyes and thought she saw the real man. Perhaps she did. Or perhaps she saw a man fighting his way back through damage that had been deliberately inflicted — and winning, just enough, just in time to stand with his comrades and accept the sentence with dignity.
The British had specifically ordered that the England flight not be mentioned at Nuremberg. The flight was off limits. Whatever Hess might have said about why he went, who had arranged the contacts, what correspondence had been conducted in Hamilton’s name — none of it entered the record.
Karl Haushofer, who held the documentary foundation for all of it, never testified.
Albrecht Haushofer, who knew what connected the regime and the resistance, was shot in the final days of the war — with his manuscript in his pocket.
The record has a shape. The shape is the outline of something that was deliberately removed.
The Three Graves at Hartschimmelhof
Karl and Martha Haushofer lie on their Bavarian estate beside their son Albrecht.
Father, mother, son. All three dead within a year of Germany’s surrender. All three at the intersection of the same knowledge — what connected the occult networks, the diplomatic back-channels, the intelligence operations that ran on both sides of the war simultaneously.
The son shot in the last days. The parents removed the day before the father was due to testify.
A memorial stone marks where the bodies were found in the forest. It is still there.
The British intelligence files on Haushofer remained classified for decades. Some are still restricted.
Sir Ivan Kirkpatrick received the memo. Became High Commissioner. Shaped post-war Germany. Died in 1964, knighted, with a career of distinguished public service recorded in his obituaries.
The problem, once removed, stayed removed.
One Question
We have presented here only what is documented — the memo, the forensic anomalies in the letter and map, the timing, the jurisdiction question, the Nuremberg gap. We have made no claim about what happened on the afternoon of March 10, 1946, in the forest at the Hartschimmelhof.
We leave you with the question the evidence raises and cannot answer.
When a British intelligence operation — documented in Foreign Office archives, reconstructed by historian Martin Allen from primary sources — lured Rudolf Hess to Scotland under false pretences in 1941, the man who had arranged the contacts and held the documentary evidence of what had been done was Karl Haushofer.
He was due to testify about this at the most important war crimes tribunal in history.
The day before he was due to testify, two British agents visited him in an occupation zone where they had no jurisdiction.
That day, he died.
Their superior was informed that the problem had been removed.
What do you call that?
Next in this series: Churchill’s Peace Trap — what the British Foreign Office archives reveal about the England flight, the twenty-four rejected peace initiatives, and the deliberate prolongation of the Second World War.
