Who killed Heinrich Himmler?

This essay was first published in September 2022 and is republished today to mark the anniversary of Heinrich Himmler’s birth on 7th October 1900. Este artículo también está disponible ahora en traducción al español.

A few weeks ago on this website I documented the death in 1987 of Rudolf Hess – officially ruled a suicide. I explained that he was almost certainly murdered by an American prison warder, and that both the official explanation of suicide and alternative conspiracy theories that he was murdered by British agents are very unlikely.

I went on to give some details of an earlier failed conspiracy to murder Hess that did involve some British as well as Polish officers, soon after his arrival in the UK in 1941 – a conspiracy that can partly be traced in British archives, even though the British authorities still refuse to release documents detailing the extent of the plot.

Today I turn to the other most famous ‘suicide’ of a leading national-socialist in Allied custody – Heinrich Himmler, who died soon after being taken prisoner by British forces on 23^rd May 1945, at an interrogation facility in Lüneburg.

Mysterious aspects of Himmler’s ‘suicide’ have been discussed elsewhere, notably by the British historian David Irving who recently published the first volume of a definitive biography, True Himmler.

Yet it is only today in this article that the British officer with overall responsibility for Himmler’s death can be properly identified. This identification is a major breakthrough for historical revisionism and adds further weight to Irving’s argument that Himmler was murdered. The man in charge of the operation – an officer of the British security service MI5 who had been given control of counter-intelligence operations in occupied Germany – was Lt.-Col. Niall MacDermot.

MacDermot was a very important and well-connected officer from an influential Anglo-Irish family: one uncle was a clan chief, Prince of Coolavin, while another uncle was a member of the Irish parliament. He was one of the sharpest intellects in the British security and intelligence set-up. But months before the war he had already killed a man in controversial circumstances – a fellow member of a peculiar semi-political cult led by a Bosnian Serb mystic – and faced manslaughter charges at the Old Bailey. While acquitted of these charges, and escaping any scrutiny for his role in Himmler’s death, MacDermot’s later political career was derailed by scandal when his former MI5 employers secretly tipped off the Prime Minister that he was a security risk.

The killer of his own best friend; a member of a bizarre politico-religious cult; wartime counter-intelligence officer; and perhaps a Soviet spy – was Niall MacDermot the man who killed Heinrich Himmler?

Official records concerning Himmler’s demise are remarkably sketchy, considering that this was the most important national-socialist leader to die in British hands. Irving has carried out the most substantial investigation of the circumstances, but as with Himmler’s other biographers – Peter Longerich, Peter Padfield, and Roger Manvell & Heinrich Fraenkel – he has not been able to find a full, officially documented version of the events leading to Himmler’s death, because no such comprehensive documentation exists.

In a book of 750 pages (plus endnotes), Longerich devotes only three pages (!) to the circumstances surrounding Himmler’s capture and death, and a large part of those three pages is mere speculation as to what Longerich presumes might have been Himmler’s reasons for suicide. Padfield relies heavily on written accounts sent to him more than forty years later by Niall MacDermot (see below) and Chaim Herzog, the former minimising his role in Himmler’s final days and the latter exaggerating.

Speaking at the dedication ceremony of the US Holocaust Museum in April 1993, the President of Israel – Chaim Herzog – repeated his frequent claim that he was “one of a small group to whom Himmler, chief perpetrator of the vast ghastly murder surrendered”. There is absolutely no evidence that this was the case. It’s possible that Herzog was on the scene at some point before or after Himmler’s death, but he was far junior to the officers I identify below – Sidney Noakes and Niall MacDermot – in the MI5-led counter-intelligence set-up, and he certainly wasn’t part of the original group of British soldiers who arrested, guarded and processed Himmler.

As with so many other “eye-witnesses” of Herzog’s ilk, this didn’t stop him repeating and embellishing the tale, which has also been peddled repeatedly by his son Isaac Herzog, who followed in his footsteps to become President of Israel since 2021. The Herzog connection is one of several false trails that obfuscate the task of discovering the truth about Heinrich Himmler’s death. Readers who think they already know the story of Himmler’s murder should be careful: the internet (and even published books) contain many inventions and outright forgeries designed to distract from the true story.

A more detailed account – partly based on the one surviving War Office report on the case in the UK National Archives – was given by Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel in their book first published in 1965 and in several later editions. Manvell (himself a British propaganda filmmaker during the war) and Fraenkel (a German Jewish émigré and Hollywood screenwriter) rely partly on an account written almost twenty years after the events by military intelligence colonel Michael Murphy. And the most recent, detailed and sceptical investigation is by David Irving, who has spent more than twenty years examining the case and had access to unpublished private papers including another even later account by Colonel Murphy.

Longerich points out that during the first week of May 1945, in the days following Hitler’s suicide, Himmler appeared several times at the headquarters of the Führer’s designated successor, Grand Admiral Dönitz. He did not behave like a fugitive fearing execution. In fact according to the memoirs of Dönitz’s adjutant Walter Ludde-Neurath and the new Foreign Minister Count Schwerin von Krosigk, “at the time Himmler made a decidedly optimistic, cheerful impression and spoke of how he and his SS would take on an important role in the emerging post-war order, while claiming that if that were not to come off he could manage to go into hiding.”

He left Flensburg (where the transitional Dönitz government was based) on 11^th May 1945, equipped with papers in the name Heinrich Hizinger – adapted from those that had belonged to a real individual of that name. Longerich describes this as “superficially disguised” and attempts a psychological explanation: in fact it’s quite common in the intelligence world for officers to use a cover name similar to their real name – especially to use the same first-name, and often the same initials. Himmler was accompanied by his adjutants Werner Grothmann and Heinz Macher, plus his private secretary Rudolf Brandt; Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, and security chief Josef Kiermaier. The latter three split from Himmler’s party after a few days, once they had arrived near the town of Meinstadt, but only Müller apparently made good his escape and disappeared forever.

Ten days after leaving Flensburg, Himmler and his two adjutants were stopped at a checkpoint by released Soviet prisoners, who (though not realising the identity of their captives) handed them over to the British authorities, at first to a civilian interrogation camp near Lüneburg. After only a few hours Himmler insisted on seeing the commandant, Capt. Tom Selvester. During his travels he had shaved off his moustache, removed his spectacles, and wore a black eye-patch, but on entering Selvester’s office he removed the eye-patch, put on his spectacles, and identified himself as Heinrich Himmler.

According to Selvester’s statement, he searched Himmler and discovered a brass case containing a phial of what he assumed was poison, which naturally he confiscated. Supposedly he also found a second brass case which was empty, and suspected that Himmler was concealing a second phial of poison somewhere on his person. According to the official version, neither Selvester nor his colleagues at a second interrogation centre managed to discover this poison, and Himmler had somehow contrived to conceal it in his mouth, taking the poison when a doctor seemed about to discover it.

Around 8 pm, Col. Michael Murphy arrived at the camp to collect Himmler and take him to a special interrogation centre at the British 2nd Army’s headquarters in Lüneburg about ten miles away. Earlier in the war Murphy had been intelligence chief for Gen. Bernard Montgomery and now had the same role for Gen. Miles Dempsey, commander of the 2nd Army.

Himmler told Murphy that he wished to be taken to see Montgomery, and that he had a letter for him – though Murphy later couldn’t remember ever actually seeing this letter and it has never appeared in British archives. On arrival at this new interrogation centre, Murphy sent for an army doctor to carry out a further examination, allegedly because he suspected Himmler still had poison concealed on his person. It was only when this doctor started to examine his mouth that Himmler bit down on the phial and supposedly poisoned himself.

So the official version requires us to believe that Himmler was carrying not one but two phials of poison; that he managed to conceal the second one throughout the days of his captivity, from his arrest by the Russians, through his detention at Selvester’s camp, and on into his last hours at Murphy’s interrogation centre. We have to believe that he didn’t kill himself when captured by Russians, nor when first handed over to the British, but only when taken to a second British camp. Having chosen to identify himself and specifically asked to be taken to Montgomery, he then killed himself when getting closer to this aim (i.e. when in the custody of one of Montgomery’s senior intelligence officers).

Even more questionably, we are asked to believe that Himmler’s death in British custody led only to the most cursory of official reports: so cursory in fact that biographers have had to rely on accounts written privately by long-retired British officers 20-40 years after the events. Himmler was swiftly buried in a secret grave and we have no autopsy report or other detailed official explanation of his death.

We are asked to believe in a series of contradictory embellishments to the story, including a Reuters report written within hours of the supposed suicide and published in The Times the next day: “Everything seemed normal, but in order to make sure the medical officer brought him to the window and told him to open his mouth again.”  As Irving points out, this must have been at 11 pm when there was only weak starlight: given the location of the house there would have been no moonlight from the window.

And as I can reveal today, we have the very suspicious circumstantial evidence of the involvement of Niall MacDermot and efforts to conceal this from official records.

The only document revealing MacDermot’s involvement is in the Military Intelligence Museum, which is located inside the British Army Intelligence Corps headquarters at Chicksands, Bedfordshire, 35 miles north of London. This document accompanies several items of Himmler memorabilia that were donated to the museum in 2019 by the family of an MI5 interrogator, Lt. Col. Sidney Noakes. The items include Himmler’s braces (what Americans would term ‘suspenders’), and the false identity papers he was using when captured.

Why this paperwork in particular ended up in Noakes’ private possession for decades rather than in official archives is a mystery. But it’s evident that part of his motive was to protect himself against any allegations that might arise postwar that he or his immediate superior Niall MacDermot had acted improperly. As we shall see, while the braces might seem merely a souvenir, there were other items removed from the scene of the ‘suicide’ which are more suspicious.

The items now at the Chicksands museum include notes by Noakes on the circumstances leading to Himmler’s arrest. At the end of these are handwritten lines in pencil: “This story agreed by Mr Neil McDermott QC [sic] formerly GSO1 (Int b) at HQ 21st Army Group,” with the additional remark that “a gentle interrogation [of Himmler] by MI5 reps also took place.”

No record of this “gentle” MI5 interrogation appears anywhere in published MI5 files, but we do know who Noakes and MacDermot were. One obvious thing to point out is that the note misspells both MacDermot’s Christian name and his surname, which is one reason why I am the first person to identify him properly. And as readers have good reason to notice this week of all weeks, the reference to QC (Queen’s Counsel – a term for senior barristers) is an anachronism. In 1945 there were no QCs, as King George VI was still on the throne so the appropriate term was KC (King’s Counsel): the term QC had been superseded on the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and was not revived until the accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1952.

Moreover Niall MacDermot wasn’t a KC in 1945 either – as I explain below he wasn’t yet even a barrister, and he didn’t become a QC until 1963! It’s quite obvious that these notes were concocted several years – perhaps many years – after the events described. There were very good reasons why Noakes (and MacDermot in particular) would be concerned to protect their reputations in the postwar world. These were no ordinary soldiers.

Sidney Noakes (1905-1993) had already been a practising barrister for a decade before the outbreak of war, and was immediately commissioned in the Intelligence Corps in 1939 and given a role as an MI5 interrogator. His name appears quite frequently in a wide range of MI5 files. While some interrogators (especially at the end of the war in occupied Europe) were employed primarily because of their language skills, Noakes was chosen because of his legal mind and handled interrogations of several important suspects, during MI5’s attempts to discover whether there was a German ‘fifth column’ in England.

For example documents from 1942 show Noakes and fellow barrister Blanshard Stamp (later to become Lord Justice Stamp, an Appeal Court judge) interrogating Bill Allen, an MI6 officer who had been a senior aide to Sir Oswald Mosley. Noakes also handled the case of Hans Zech-Nenntwich, an SS officer who was disgraced after his conviction for rape and had then escaped and defected to the British side, where he assisted ‘black propaganda’ operations against his former comrades. And among Noakes’ other German cases was the still mysterious recruitment of Robi Mendelssohn, a Jewish banker who retained a senior role inside national-socialist Germany and whose role as a British agent I have exclusively documented elsewhere on this blog.

After the war Noakes returned to the Bar and eventually became a County Court Judge in Croydon, retiring in 1977. But the reason he was in Germany and available to interrogate Himmler in May 1945 was that his presence had been specially requested six months earlier by Niall MacDermot to join his select team of counter-intelligence experts in newly-conquered Germany.

MacDermot wasn’t yet a barrister and though outranking Noakes was eleven years younger. Like Noakes he was one of MI5’s best brains. They were both public school and Oxford men: Noakes at Merchant Taylor’s School and St John’s, while MacDermot was an Old Rugbeian who just before the war had completed his law degree at Balliol after an earlier modern languages degree at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. War broke out just before MacDermot’s 23^rd birthday and he was immediately recruited to MI5. Tracing his progress is a very complex task and requires patient trawling through a huge archive, but it’s obvious that by the end of 1943 Niall MacDermot (though still only 27 years old) was first choice when MI5 came to consider appointment of a G-II (i.e. military intelligence liaison) for COSSAC – the Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Command. This meant planning of the Allied invasion of north-western Europe – what eventually became the landings in Normandy beginning on D-Day. It was codenamed “Overlord” and was among the biggest secrets of the war.

The concept of COSSAC dated back to the Allied conference at Casablanca in January 1943, which looked ahead to a potential invasion of NW Europe at some point in 1944. It was assumed at Casablanca that the supreme commander would be British and should therefore have a British chief of staff. In March 1943 a 59-year-old career soldier – Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan (1894-1967) – was duly appointed COSSAC.

By November 1943 the invasion was becoming a serious plan rather than distant aspiration. It was necessary to appoint an MI5 officer to take charge of the operation’s security and counter-intelligence. This involved not only preventing loose talk at home, but liaising with MI6, the secret warriors of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the codebreakers of Bletchley Park so as to coordinate understanding of how much the Germans knew (or thought they knew) of British plans; also preparing for counter-intelligence work on the ground in Europe, assuming the invasion succeeded in its initial objectives. Priorities would include tracking down British renegades and other Allied ‘traitors’ who had worked with Germany, and capturing and interrogating priority targets on the German side, partly so as to crush the expected national-socialist resistance movements.

The minutes of “Most Secret” meetings during November-December 1943 show that MacDermot was secretary to a high-powered inter-agency committee on “Overlord” invasion plans. His colleagues were a far brighter bunch than would have been found at the pre-war MI5, including Dick White (an Oxford contemporary of Sidney Noakes who went on to become the only man to head both MI5 and MI6) and Kenneth Younger, yet another Oxford barrister who (like MacDermot) became a Labour MP after the war.

At the end of 1943 it was clear that the supreme commander of the invading forces would in fact be an American – the job eventually went to Eisenhower, who brought in his own chief of staff Gen. Walter Bedell Smith (who in 1950 became the second head of the CIA). Morgan became one of Smith’s deputies, and for the first months of 1944 MacDermot was part of his staff at SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force).

Then at the end of February 1944 MacDermot was again “head-hunted” for another senior role in the Allied military and intelligence effort. Gen. Montgomery’s intelligence chief Bill Williams had dinner with MI5 officer Guy Liddell and the legendary Oxford don J.C. Masterman, who chaired the Allied deception programme known as the XX Committee, which successfully deceived German leaders about the forthcoming invasion plan.

Williams was yet another Oxford historian involved in wartime intelligence – during 1942-45 he is widely regarded as having been the finest military intelligence officer on either side in the Second World War. And it was this man who came to London to ‘poach’ Niall MacDermot, obtaining his transfer from SHAEF to work for Williams as head of counter-intelligence at 21 Army Group – the general staff for the entire British ground force in the forthcoming invasion, led by Montgomery.

After D-Day it was Williams who successfully nominated MacDermot for the OBE, writing: “Col. MacDermot was primarily responsible for the preparation of the security instructions and coordination of the security measures for ‘Overlord’. The way he tackled many vexed matters and assisted the Armies in sorting out their security and counter-intelligence difficulties was excellent. The degree of surprise enjoyed by the landings was a tribute to the standard of security and to Col. MacDermot’s part in organising that security.”

As part of this task (and his later work in occupied Germany) MacDermot was one of the few allowed to know the so-called “Ultra” secret: the fact that British codebreakers at Bletchley Park were able to read the product of Germany’s supposedly uncrackable “Enigma” machines. Throughout 1944 and 1945 he handled many bureaucratic turf wars between MI5, the Army and (especially) the secret intelligence service MI6, which had its own counter-intelligence branch Section V, whose deputy head (in occasional contact with MacDermot) was the later notorious Soviet spy Kim Philby.

In November 1944 Williams again intervened to ensure that MI5 in London acceded to MacDermot’s request to send Sidney Noakes to join his team, working at an interrogation centre partly modelled on MI5’s ‘Camp 020’ at Latchmere House, near Ham Common in South-West London, where British fascists and German prisoners were tortured.

So by the time of Himmler’s capture, interrogation and death in May 1945, the chain of command involved three Oxford men – 40-year-old MI5 interrogator, barrister and future judge Sidney Noakes; 28-year-old counter-intelligence chief and future government minister Niall MacDermot; and at the top of the military intelligence hierarchy, 32-year-old historian Brigadier Bill Williams. In the postwar years as Sir Edgar Williams he was to become Warden of Rhodes House, Oxford – the world’s premier centre for study of British imperial history – and secretary to the trustees responsible for awarding Rhodes Scholarships to students drawn from around the world – including the young Bill Clinton.

Once it was clear that Heinrich Himmler had been captured, it’s difficult to imagine that he was left in the care of ordinary soldiers. This tightly knit team of intellectual officers – Noakes and MacDermot, reporting to Williams – would quickly have been notified – and in the one documentary fragment now at last available at the Military Intelligence Museum, we can glimpse just part of this truth.

Another interesting scrap of evidence is in the diary of Guy Liddell, who had been MacDermot’s boss as Director of MI5’s B Division. On 25th May 1945 Liddell wrote just two sentences about Himmler’s death – the only lines on this subject that appear in any of the thousands of pages of MI5 documents that have been declassified at the UK National Archives in recent years.

Liddell wrote: “The news has come through that Himmler committed suicide under circumstances which are perhaps excusable and even desirable. His death will certainly save everyone a great deal of trouble.”

If Himmler was murdered, we must consider two broad possibilities. One is that he was killed under brutal interrogation, or by a guard who lost his temper – as when the American prison warder Tony Jordan killed Rudolf Hess on 17th August 1987. However the circumstances are very different. Hess was 93 years old; Himmler was 44. Moreover it’s almost certain that British officers in 1945 (even ordinary soldiers let alone elite-educated intelligence officers of Noakes’ and MacDermot’s calibre) were more disciplined than a 1987 vintage American prison warder.

Given that MacDermot had six years earlier killed his own best friend in a scuffle (see below), we can’t rule out the possibility that he interrogated Himmler too roughly, causing his death, but it seems unlikely. If MacDermot and Noakes killed Himmler, it was surely because they intended to do so and had been ordered to do so. During 1966-68 there was evidence that MacDermot was a security risk with ties to Soviet intelligence (see below), so we must also consider the possibility that if he killed Himmler he was acting as a Soviet agent rather than as a British officer, but again on present evidence this seems unlikely. On balance, we must assume that if MacDermot and Noakes killed Himmler, the orders came from London.

When considering the possibility of such an order, we need to examine earlier official documents including the views of Winston Churchill himself. It was not inevitable that leading Third Reich officials would face trial at Nuremberg – the war crimes trial procedure grew out of years of discussions between Allied leaders. In a secret paper circulated to the British War Cabinet in November 1943, Churchill wrote that a list of “major criminals” should be drawn up by the Allies. He expected this would comprise fewer than fifty, and certainly fewer than a hundred names.

The men on this list, Churchill wrote, would “be declared world outlaws. No penalty will be inflicted on anyone who puts them to death in any circumstances.”

Once anyone on this list had been captured by any of the Allied forces, the Prime Minister continued, “the nearest officer of the rank or equivalent rank of Major-General will forthwith convene a Court of Inquiry, not for the purpose of determining the guilt or innocence of the accused but merely to establish the fact of identification. Once identified, the said officer will have the outlaw or outlaws shot to death within six hours and without reference to higher authority.

“By this means,” Churchill concluded, “we should avoid all the tangles of legal procedure.”

In September 1944, three months after D-Day, this question was becoming a matter of practicality rather than speculation. As part of Anglo-American discussions of how harshly defeated Germans should be treated, the senior American official John McCloy (who eventually became the first civilian Allied High Commissioner of occupied Germany) asked the number two at the British Embassy in Washington, Sir Ronald Campbell:
“Whom do we shoot or hang? The feeling is that we should not have great state trials, but proceed quickly and with despatch. The English idea, once proferred but then withdrawn, was to give the Army lists to liquidate on mere identification. What has happened to this idea? Besides individuals, what categories should be shot?”

David Irving has detailed some of the physical evidence (facial bruising etc.) suggesting that Himmler had been roughly treated before his death. One important fragment of evidence concerns Himmler’s spectacles. As mentioned earlier, as part of his disguise, Himmler had been travelling without his spectacles and wearing an eye-patch, but soon after arriving at the British detention camp he removed the eye-patch, put his spectacles back on, and identified himself.

When his corpse was presented to the press and photographed, Himmler was indeed wearing spectacles – but they were not his own. One account has it that the originals were pocketed as a souvenir by the officer in immediate charge of his cell, Company Sergeant Major Edwin Austin. But more than forty years later, Niall MacDermot admitted both to biographer Peter Padfield and to journalist David Leigh that he had ended up in possession of the original spectacles, and had kept them for many years, then had “thrown them away in disgust”.

Senior counter-intelligence officers do not normally steal items on a whim or as “souvenirs”. If MacDermot had taken away the spectacles there is one obvious reason – they had been smashed during the struggle leading to Himmler’s murder, so an undamaged pair would have to be substituted.

So why would MacDermot suddenly start telling the truth in 1988, having kept quiet since 1945? Was it that by now in his early 70s, the old lawyer wished to clear his conscience (though in fact he didn’t die until 1996)?

The more likely explanation involves MacDermot’s need to get an agreed ‘line’ on the record with historians and journalists about his past, and perhaps hint to the British authorities that there were some secrets best left unreported – because by 1988 other aspects of MacDermot’s past were threatening to catch up with him.

After leaving the Army and MI5 in 1946, Niall MacDermot resumed his legal studies and became a barrister in the chambers of Ronald Armstrong-Jones, who had been a fellow officer on Montgomery’s staff in occupied Europe, handling legal matters as Deputy Judge Advocate during the Allied invasion and occupation, and whose son Tony married the Queen’s sister Princess Margaret.

During the 1950s and early 1960s MacDermot built up a strong reputation as a criminal advocate and in 1956 joined the Labour Party, becoming an MP within months and despite losing his seat in 1959, returning to Parliament at a by-election in 1962.

When Labour returned to office MacDermot immediately became a junior minister at the Treasury and seemed destined for promotion, even a possible future party leader. Instead – after a sideways move in 1967 – he left government in 1968 and retired from Parliament in 1970, emigrating to Geneva where he spent the next twenty years as secretary-general of a human rights group, the International Commission of Jurists.

It was not until the mid-late 1980s that anyone outside the inner circles of Westminster and Whitehall understood what had gone wrong for MacDermot’s apparently stellar political career.

There had been skeletons in MacDermot’s cupboard for decades. Even during his MI5 career these had threatened to block his promotion. While frequently praising MacDermot’s work, the diary of his MI5 boss Guy Liddell refers to the first of these scandals.

A security check in the autumn of 1943 belatedly turned up the awkward fact that MacDermot had killed his closest friend more than four years earlier. This should already have been known – it had been reported in the press at the time – but the circumstances raised troubling questions for a man who was being entrusted with some of the war’s most sensitive secrets.

In his youth MacDermot had been recruited into a strange organisation called ‘New Britain Movement’ founded in 1932 as part of the ‘New Europe Group’ led by a Bosnian Serb mystic, Dimitrije Mitrinović, who before the First World War had been one of the leaders of an illegal radical faction – Young Bosnia.

Mitrinović’s circle had been linked to quasi-Masonic terrorist groups of Serb nationalists – the Black Hand and Narodna Odbrana (‘People’s Defence’). This milieu – still to some extent mysterious – spawned the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, which triggered the First World War.

On the outbreak of war, Serb nationalists (even terrorist ones) became British allies, and Mitrinović moved to London as part of a new Serbian Legation. He remained in London for the next four decades until his death, and his messianic philosophy attracted a certain avant-garde following in the postwar years.

It was never quite clear to the authorities whether Mitrinović’s political idealism was part of the far left or the far right, but it was certainly peculiar, though he built connections with prominent intellectuals and artistic figures including Ezra Pound and the monetary reformer Frederick Soddy. Among those on the fringes of Mitrinović’s circle were Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (now far better known, and who like Mitrinović espoused vague notions of world government since pursued by others) and John Macmurray, who was half a century later to be described by Prime Minister Tony Blair as his main philosophical influence.

MacDermot followed his mother into Mitrinović’s mid-1930s group ‘New Britain’. MI5 has not yet released its files on Mitrinović, New Britain or MacDermot, so again the historian must depend on threads of evidence, but having read those files Liddell was worried, writing that Mitrinović had “succeeded in collecting round him a number of cranks over whom he seemed to have an almost hypnotic influence. Free love and homosexuality seemed to play some part.”

On investigation there was, Liddell wrote, no doubt that MacDermot “was in the middle of the ‘New Britain’ movement” and had still not entirely repudiated Mitrinović’s philosophy, “although he admits that his hypnotic influence and theories about free love were definitely unhealthy”.

What certainly proved “unhealthy” was a personal dispute that broke out between MacDermot and his closest friend from Cambridge, Christopher Mayne, at a flat in Bloomsbury on 15th April 1939, where Mitrinović and some other group members were present. There had been factional tensions within the group, and these might have contributed to a fight that broke out between the two friends. MacDermot admitted punching Mayne several times: his friend (a newly qualified barrister) turned out to have a previously undiagnosed heart condition. Though only 25, Mayne died.

MacDermot was arrested and charged with manslaughter. Police and the judge at the Old Bailey agreed when he came to trial that he should be acquitted, and the jury reached a “not guilty” verdict without even retiring.

Read alongside MI5’s remarks about “free love” and “homosexuality”, MacDermot’s choice of words in his initial statement to police after killing Mayne read slightly oddly: “We were discussing our future and I expressed a hope that he would join his life and career with mine, on the basis of an unbreakable bond of friendship. We had discussed this before. Although superficially he seemed to agree with me I felt he had some hidden reserve and I thought he appeared scornful. I questioned him about this. I cannot remember what I said, or what he said, but the way he said it annoyed me. I lost my temper and punched him in the chest a fairly hard blow and followed this up with three or four more. He slumped to the ground apparently unconscious.”

Whatever the jury thought, this type of scandal might have been expected to end a career in the security or intelligence services – let alone a political career, in that far more morally censorious age when homosexual acts between consenting adult males remained illegal.

Yet Liddell (whose own private life was unorthodox and who had a relaxed attitude towards homosexuals and eccentrics) took the view that MacDermot was still the best man for the counter-intelligence post.

A quarter-century later, an embittered but influential figure in the security world took a different view. This was Colonel Sammy Lohan, who in the 1960s was secretary to the “D Notice Committee”, responsible for contacting journalists, editors and broadcasters and warning them not to publish certain stories that might endanger national security.

During 1967 Lohan (until then part of the secret world known only to media insiders) became the central figure in a scandal known as the “D Notice Affair” that rocked the Labour Government and permanently scarred the reputation of Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

The “D Notice Affair” is described in many books on the period, but can only now be understood in its proper context following the release during the last year or two of numerous once secret government documents.

I shall explain other aspects of the scandal – and what it tells us about the reasons for Prime Minister Wilson’s eventual and still mysterious resignation – in later articles.

But in relation to MacDermot I can reveal two previously unpublished facts. Going way beyond his official role, Lohan had spread gossip about MacDermot among journalists and politicians from the opposition Conservative Party. He described MacDermot (then still a Treasury minister) as the “éminence grise” behind a subversive faction in the governing party that included communist agents.

At a pre-Christmas 1966 drinks party in the exclusive London district of Knightsbridge, Lohan told a Conservative MP whom he believed to be a fellow right-winger that MacDermot was “a very underground figure” who despite his moderate reputation was working to engineer a far-left takeover of the Labour Party. He also informed the MP that “MacDermot was up on a murder charge just before the war”.

As we have seen this was an exaggeration but had a grain of truth. What Lohan didn’t mention – and is not recorded anywhere in official files, but which I know to be the case – is that Lohan himself had been a member of Mitrinović’s pre-war sect, and had ended up in a rival faction to MacDermot.

To make matters worse, though probably by coincidence, MacDermot ended up having to answer for the government in a parliamentary debate in July 1967 – after the “D Notice Affair” had broken – when opposition politicians were supporting Lohan. At the time neither MacDermot nor anyone else outside a small group of spies and the Prime Minister’s senior aides, knew that MacDermot had personally been targeted by Lohan. (Though of course MacDermot did know that he and Lohan had both been members of the Mitrinović cult thirty years earlier, this was not revealed in Parliament or anywhere else.)

Lohan and his friends in the Tory party were seeking revenge for the security scandals that had helped destroy the previous Conservative government, and MacDermot’s case gave them ammunition.

All the more so because there were yet more scandals in MacDermot’s life. He had married a fellow member of the Mitrinović cult, a medical doctor called Violet Maxwell, and postwar she had remained loyal to the strange Serb mystic while MacDermot had moved leftward.

This contributed to the breakdown of their marriage. In any case it wasn’t unusual for men who had seen and done extraordinary things during wartime to return home as very different people, no longer compatible with their wives.

In 1954 MacDermot met Ludmila Benvenuto, a half-Russian, half-Italian woman who was studying in London to enhance her language skills as part of her work as a translator. They began an affair that continued for more than a decade before MacDermot decided to end his marriage and begin a new life with Miss Benvenuto. He was divorced by his first wife and married his second in 1966, shortly before Colonel Lohan began his scandal-mongering.

For MI5, MacDermot’s remarriage raised questions that went far beyond morality.

They discovered that not only was the new Mrs MacDermot half-Russian – she had for years worked for the main KGB officer in Italy, Nikolai Gorshkov. Supposedly she had not known anything of his espionage role, and had worked for him only as part of his “cover” job importing Soviet films.

However it was inevitable that in the circumstances of the 1960s, MI5 would react badly to a government minister having an affair with, and then marrying, a half-Russian who had been on the staff of a KGB officer!

Nor was this all. There are hints – no more than hints until MacDermot’s own file is released – that regardless of his wife’s previous employment, MacDermot himself was seen by MI5 as potentially an undercover communist.

During 1966 and 1967 MI5 repeatedly questioned MacDermot’s fellow Labour MP Bernard Floud, who had been one of the leaders of Oxford communism during the 1930s, including MacDermot’s own time as a postgraduate. They established that Floud had been part of a Soviet intelligence recruitment at Oxford, encouraging fellow Marxists to drop overt far-left activity and seek influential positions in British life where they could be of more use to the Soviet cause.

It was already well known that a similar ‘spy ring’ in 1930s Cambridge had caused critical damage to the British security and intelligence services. Among the scandals that had destroyed the previous Conservative government was the exposure and defection of Kim Philby, the senior MI6 officer and Soviet ‘mole’ with whom MacDermot had liaised during 1944-45.

Inevitably MI5 were now asking whether similarly damaging recruitment had occurred at Oxford during the same period. MacDermot had been at both Cambridge and Oxford during the relevant period and some of his connections gave rise to suspicions that cannot be properly assessed until MI5 release his file.

His involvement with the Mitrinović cult, plus his second marriage, added further complications.

If MacDermot had been responsible directly or indirectly for the murder of Heinrich Himmler, then the question would inevitably arise: did Soviet intelligence know this, and would they use this and other information at some point for devastating propaganda purposes?

Available records already show that in this same period MI5 and other secret organisations of the British state were worried that the Kremlin might have some knowledge about the death of Polish leader General Sikorski that could be similarly exploited – click here for my article on this and related topics.

The outcome was that during 1966-67 MI5 interrogated Floud, leading to his suicide in October 1967. During the same period as the later Floud interviews, MI5 briefed Prime Minister Wilson in August 1967 that MacDermot might be a security risk. Probably because of the shock caused by Floud’s suicide, Mrs MacDermot’s interview with MI5 was delayed until February 1968.

It went badly: MI5 were convinced that she was lying about how much she knew of her ex-employer’s KGB role.

MacDermot’s situation exemplified the small world of the Whitehall and Westminster elite, especially that of the veterans of Britain’s secret war.

• The MI5 officer who interrogated MacDermot’s wife – Patrick Stewart – had been at Rugby School with MacDermot in the early 1930s; his uncle Sir Findlater Stewart was a senior wartime civil servant who handled many intelligence tasks, including adjudicating between MI5 and MI6 in some of the bureaucratic turf wars with which MacDermot was embroiled in 1944-45.
• MacDermot’s wartime MI5 colleague Martin Furnival-Jones, whom MacDermot had beaten in the contest for promotion to the senior counter-intelligence role in occupied Germany, stayed with MI5 postwar and was now its Director-General.
• MacDermot’s close colleague Dick White, who had been the top counter-intelligence adviser at SHAEF and would certainly have been privy to whatever secret role MacDermot played in Himmler’s death, had gone on to be Furnival-Jones’s predecessor as the head of MI5 and was now Chief of MI6.
• And of course Sammy Lohan – a relatively minor figure compared to the wartime hero and Oxford intellectual MacDermot, but who knew some of the minister’s closest personal secrets – had just been fired from his role at the D Notice Committee but still had close contacts both among defence and intelligence journalists and at the top of the Conservative Party, eager to revenge themselves for earlier security scandals.

After the February 1968 MI5 interrogation of his wife, MacDermot sought a meeting with the Prime Minister. Again we do not yet have access to the official files, but we know that he failed to get Wilson’s full backing and decided he had no future in politics, though he waited another seven months before leaving the government.

It was not until the mid-1980s that even fragments of this story began to leak out, thanks to a book that was written illegally by Peter Wright, one of the MI5 ‘molehunters’ who had been on the trail of Floud, MacDermot and many others in the 1960s. Wright had retired to Australia, but encouraged for mysterious reasons by another MI5 veteran and consummate Whitehall insider Lord Rothschild, Wright first supplied information to British journalism’s best-known espionage specialist Chapman Pincher (a close friend of MacDermot’s old enemy Sammy Lohan), then wrote his own book Spycatcher.

The ensuing furore caused front page headlines around the world. Among many revelations reaching the public for the first time was that Niall MacDermot, long out of the public eye and still working in Geneva for his ‘human rights’ organisation the ICJ – had been “hounded out” of government by MI5.

It was in this context that MacDermot spoke about some aspects of his secret past, and (perhaps not accidentally) happened to mention in interviews during 1988 with journalist David Leigh and Himmler biographer Peter Padfield, the curious story about his having purloined Himmler’s spectacles.

An odd thing for an old spy (or counter-spy) to let slip after more than forty years of discretion. Neither Leigh nor Padfield took full advantage of the disclosure, though we can now see that this is a potentially important piece of evidence. Himmler’s spectacles were not purloined by accident or as a souvenir. It is fairly obvious that MacDermot removed them because they had been smashed in the struggle leading to Himmler’s murder. Smashed spectacles would not fit the story of Himmler having simply poisoned himself, so they had to be replaced by an undamaged pair before press photographers viewed the corpse.

With the disclosures by his old enemies Pincher and Wright during the 1980s, MacDermot might have started to fear that whatever truce had been agreed in 1968 would no longer hold, and that he and/or his wife would face awkward questions about their ties to the Kremlin. In any case the Soviet era was about to end, and who knew what unwelcome secrets might be leaked from Moscow itself?

Perhaps it was time to remind Whitehall that MacDermot had a few secrets up his own sleeve – notably the murder of Heinrich Himmler? Concern to protect this secret might be the reason for a peculiar blunder in The Times obituary of Niall MacDermot, published on 26th February 1996. In the second paragraph of this obituary in the world’s leading “newspaper of record” appears this crass error: “His [MacDermot’s] incisive interrogation of Goebbels foreshadowed his future legal career.”

There was of course no interrogation of Goebbels by MacDermot or anyone else: Goebbels committed suicide alongside his wife and children in Berlin on 1st May 1945 before they could be captured by Stalin’s advancing Red Army. Yet the same strange mistake appears also in the Daily Telegraph‘s obituary published on 27th February 1996: “At the end of the war, he helped to track down Nazi war criminals, and was able to practise his legal skills interrogating Goebbels.”

Slips of this kind can sometimes be an unintended consequence of nervous attempts to obscure the truth.

In the mid-2000s there was a strange attempt to ‘poison the well’ at the UK National Archives by planting fake documents about Heinrich Himmler’s murder, falsely implicating a number of British officials whose signatures were blatantly forged. For legal reasons I cannot give a full account of this affair, except to say (a) that I have no doubt at all these documents were forged; and (b) that at some level the forgery was a deliberate ‘inside job’ by the British authorities to discredit and distract from any genuine attempt to analyse Himmler’s murder on the basis of real documents.

In 2022, we still await full official archival releases on this entire saga. But if one is patient enough, there is sufficient material now available in the archives to build a strong circumstantial case. We don’t know many of the answers, but we know enough to ask the right questions.

That makes it all the more imperative to resist attempts to criminalise those asking questions about the national-socialist era, especially about the infamous story with which Himmler’s name is most associated – the alleged ‘Holocaust’: murdering six million Jews, mostly in alleged homicidal gas chambers, on the orders of Adolf Hitler and Himmler himself.

Had Heinrich Himmler not been murdered, he would of course have been the main defendant at Nuremberg – the man where the buck stopped, who could not point to anyone else and say – “well yes, these terrible things happened, but it was down to X, Y or Z, not me”.

That’s why the question of whether he committed suicide or was murdered is so crucial.

If Himmler committed suicide, then it’s possible for orthodox historians to argue: “Himmler knew the game was up, he killed himself to escape justice.”

But if Himmler was murdered on London’s orders, then this points to a very different agenda regarding the entire Holocaust story as we have come to accept it.

I shall therefore end this essay by quoting what I believe to be a very telling assessment by Leonard Ingrams, one of the chief propagandists from the Political Warfare Executive, who was sent to occupied Germany during the summer of 1945 to interrogate leading Germans who were now in British captivity. His mission was to gather evidence that could be used not just in war crimes prosecutions, but as part of a broader agenda of what Ingrams and colleagues in the Foreign Office Political Intelligence Department termed “winning the peace”.

In his plan for the visit, Ingrams and the Foreign Office agreed that his main priorities would be to build a case around themes such as:
“(i) German atrocities, both in Germany (e.g. concentration camps) and in occupied Europe.
“(ii) German guilt for the various aggressions, 1938-41, and British/US innocence. Plans for world-domination.”

Obviously these themes were not going to be put to the German interviewees openly in such terms. Ingrams understood how best to get his subjects to contribute their pieces to the jigsaw of German guilt:
“The author of a deposition will tend to exculpate himself by incriminating other people or other classes. By piecing together depositions from different persons, of different categories, we may hope for a complete picture in which everyone will have been incriminated by someone else.”

Please read that paragraph carefully, and then think about the case of Heinrich Himmler. Quite obviously he would not be in a position to behave in that manner, even if he were dishonourable enough to attempt it (which itself seems unlikely).

Himmler’s only defence would not be to deflect blame on to others but to address the historical facts directly: to dispute the developing legend of the ‘Holocaust’ with all the knowledge, intellect and courage he possessed.

Is that why Heinrich Himmler had to die?