Rudolf Hess

Not be confused with Rudolf Hoess

Walter Richard Rudolf Hess (Heß in German) (April 26, 1894 – August 17, 1987) was a prominent figure in Nazi Germany as Adolf Hitler's deputy in the Nazi Party. On the eve of war with the Soviet Union, he flew to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate peace, but was arrested. He was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to life in prison. He has become a figure of veneration among neo-Nazis and anti-Semites.

Early life

Born in Alexandria, Egypt as the eldest of the four children of Fritz H. Hess, a Bavarian Lutheran importer/exporter who thought the school in their little German community was not strict enough, Rudolf was educated by private tutors. His mother, Klara Münch, was of Greek descent. The family moved back to Germany in 1908 and he enrolled in boarding school there. Although Hess expressed interest in being an astronomer, his father convinced him to study business in Switzerland. At the onset of World War I he enlisted in the 7th Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment, became an infantryman and was awarded the Iron Cross, second class. He transferred to the Imperial Air Corps (after being rejected once), took aeronautical training and served in an operational squadron at the rank of lieutenant. Rudolf Hess was also a figure head of SS troops and extremely important figure to the NSDAP from its beginning.

Hitler's deputy

After the war he went to Munich and joined the Thule Society, assisting the Freikorps in their struggle against Communism. He enrolled in the University of Munich where he studied political science, history, economics, and geopolitics under Professor Karl Haushofer. After hearing Hitler speak in May 1920, he became completely devoted to his leadership. For commanding an SA battalion during the Beer Hall Putsch, he served seven and a half months in Landsberg prison. Acting as Hitler's private secretary, he edited Hitler's book Mein Kampf and eventually rose to deputy party leader and third in leadership of Germany, after Hitler and Hermann Göring.

Hess had a privileged position as Hitler's deputy in the early years of the Nazi movement but was increasingly marginalized throughout the 1930s as Hitler and other Nazi leaders consolidated political power. Hitler biographer John Toland described Hess' political insight and abilities as somewhat limited and his alienation increased during the early years of the war as attention and glory were focused on the generals along with Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler. Several historians have characterised Hess' personality as neurotic.

Flight to Britain

Like Joseph Goebbels, Hess was privately distressed by the war with Britain. According to William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Hess may have hoped to score a stunning diplomatic victory by sealing a peace between the Reich and Britain. The contemporary story of Hess at the time was that he flew to Britain in May 1941 to meet the Duke of Hamilton and Brandon, parachuting from his Messerschmitt Bf 110 over Renfrewshire on May 10 and landing (though breaking his ankle) at Floors Farm near Eaglesham, just south of Glasgow. He was quickly arrested, although the details of how this happened are somewhat unclear and remain controversial. The British government may still hold records pertaining to the incident and if so, their eventual release may help more fully explain it.

Apparently, Hess believed Hamilton was an opponent of Winston Churchill, whom he held responsible for the outbreak of war. His proposal for peace was similar to the bargain Hitler had tried to make with Neville Chamberlain prior to the invasion of Poland: Very broadly put, Germany would help protect the British Empire so long as Britain did not oppose Germany in Europe.

Hess's strange behavior and unilateral proposals quickly discredited him as a serious negotiator (especially after it became obvious he did not officially represent the German government) and he was briefly imprisoned by the British in the Tower of London. Taken by surprise, Hitler had Hess's staff arrested, then spread word throughout Germany that Hess had gone insane and acted of his own accord. Hearing this, Hess began claiming to his interrogators that as part of a pre-arranged diplomatic cover story, Hitler had agreed to announce to the German people that his deputy Führer was insane. Meanwhile Hitler granted Hess' wife a pension, Martin Bormann succeeded him as deputy under a newly created title and (very notably) turned that position into the second most powerful in Germany.

Trial and life imprisonment

Hess was detained by the British for the remaining duration of the war, to become a defendant at the Nuremberg Trials against all four indictments of the International Military Tribunal, found guilty on two counts and given a life sentence. His last words before the tribunal were, "I have no regrets." For decades he was addressed only as prisoner number seven. Following the 1966 releases of Baldur von Schirach and Albert Speer he was the lone remaining inmate of Spandau Prison. Guards reportedly said he degenerated mentally and lost most of his memory. For two decades, his main companion was warden Eugene K. Bird with whom he formed a close relationship. Bird wrote a 1974 book titled The Loneliest Man in the World: The Inside Story of the 30-Year Imprisonment of Rudolf Hess about his relationship with Hess.

Many historians and legal commentators have expressed opinions that his long imprisonment was an injustice. In his book The Second World War Part III Winston Churchill wrote,

"Reflecting upon the whole of the story, I am glad not to be responsible for the way in which Hess has been and is being treated. Whatever may be the moral guilt of a German who stood near to Hitler, Hess had, in my view, atoned for this by his completely devoted and frantic deed of lunatic benevolence. He came to us of his own free will, and, though without authority, had something of the quality of an envoy. He was a medical and not a criminal case, and should be so regarded."

In 1977 Britain's chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Sir Hartley Shawcross, characterized Hess' continued imprisonment as a "scandal."

On 17 August, 1987 he died under Four Power imprisonment at Spandau Prison in West Berlin. By all accounts he was found in a "summer house" in a garden located in a secure area of the prison with an electrical cord wrapped around his neck. His death was ruled a suicide by self-asphyxiation, accomplished by tying the cord to a window latch in the summer house. Hess had attempted suicide at least twice before, in 1941 at Mytchett Place by flinging himself from a balcony, and in 1977 by cutting his wrists with a table knife. He was buried in Wunsiedel, and Spandau was subsequently demolished to prevent its becoming a shrine.

Wolf Rüdiger Hess

His son Wolf Rüdiger Hess, a Nazi sympathizer and fervent supporter of Adolf Hitler, maintained until his own death that his father was murdered by British SAS soldiers. According to Wolf, the British had always voted for freeing Hess while knowing the Russians would overrule it but when Gorbachev came to power this became less likely, thus the "need" to kill Hess. The reaction of prison director Tony le Tissier was, in effect, that with the uncertainty about Hess' death and controversy surrounding his life, this was a "good hook" to hang a story on.

Wunsiedel

After Hess's death neo-Nazis from Germany and the rest of Europe gathered in Wunsiedel for a memorial march and similar demonstrations took place every year around the anniversary of Hess' death. These gatherings were banned from 1991 to 2000 and neo-Nazis tried to assemble in other cities and countries (such as the Netherlands and Denmark). Demonstrations in Wunsiedel were again legalised in 2001. Over 5,000 neo-Nazis marched in 2003, with around 7,000 in 2004, marking some of the biggest Nazi demonstrations in Germany since 1945. After stricter German legislation regarding demonstrations by neo-Nazis was enacted in March 2005 the demonstrations were banned again.

Quote

My coming to England ^* in this way is, as I realize, so unusual that nobody will easily understand it. I was confronted by a very hard decision. I do not think I could have arrived at my final choice unless I had continually kept before my eyes the vision of an endless line of children's coffins with weeping mothers behind them, both English and German, and another line of coffins of mothers with mourning children.

June 10, 1941 (from Rudolf Hess: Prisoner of Peace by his wife Ilse Hess)

Speculation on his flight to Britain

Anthony Masters

Hess's journey to Britain was considered one of the odder events of World War II. In The Man Who Was M: The Life of Charles Henry Maxwell Knight (ISBN 0-631-13392-5) Anthony Masters claimed it was a scheme conceived by British Intelligence officer Ian Fleming (who later gained fame as the creator of James Bond). According to Masters the trap was laid in 1940 after Fleming read about the Anglo-German organization The Link in the intelligence file of its founder Admiral Sir Barry Domvile. Through an agent, Fleming fed Hess disinformation that The Link had been driven underground and was in a position to overthrow Prime Minister Winston Churchill and negotiate peace, with the Duke of Hamilton and Brandon prepared to be a negotiator.

Masters also claimed Hess selected the date of his flight after astrologers Karl Ernst Krafft and Ernst Schulter-Strathaus informed him there would be a very rare alignment (called a stellium, super-stellium, or grand-conjunction) of six planets and celestial bodies (Sun, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus) in the astrological sign of Taurus during the full moon of May 11, 1941, one day after his planned landing in Scotland. Hess was born with the Sun in Taurus (Taurus being his Sun Sign, also called the Star Sign) and he apparently believed this system of prediction/divination (called electional astrology) would somehow increase his chances for success. The Man Who Was M is the only known source of these claims, which also asserts that his astrologer(s) may have been bribed by British Intelligence.

The Queen's Lost Uncle

Related claims were made in The Queen's Lost Uncle, a television program produced by Flame and broadcast in November 2003 and March 2005 on Britain's Channel 4. This program reported that, according to unspecified "recently released" documents, Hess flew to the UK to meet Prince George, Duke of Kent, who had to be rushed from the scene due to Hess's botched arrival. This was supposedly also part of a plot to fool the Nazis into thinking the prince was plotting with other senior figures to overthrow Winston Churchill.

Lured into a trap?

There is circumstantial evidence Hess was lured to Scotland by the British secret service. Violet Roberts, whose nephew, Walter Roberts was a close relative of the Duke of Hamilton and was working in the political intelligence and propaganda branch of the Secret Intelligence Service (SO1/PWE), was friends with Hess' mentor Karl Haushofer and wrote a letter to Haushofer, which Hess took great interest in prior to his flight. Haushofer replied to Violet Roberts, suggesting a post office box in Portugal for further correspondence. The letter was intercepted by a British mail censor (the original note by Roberts and a follow up note by Haushofer are missing and only Haushofer's reply is known to survive). Certain documents Hess brought with him to Britain were sealed until 2017 but when the seal was broken in 1991-92 they were missing. Edvard Beneš, head of the Czech government in exile and his intelligence chief Frantisek Moravec, who worked with SO1/PWE, speculated that British Intelligence used Haushofer's reply to Violet Roberts as a means to trap Hess (see Hess: the British Conspiracy, by McBlain and Trow, 2000).

Hess' landing

After Hess' Bf 110 was detected on Radar, a number of pilots were scrambled to meet it, (including ace Alan Deere), but none made contact.

Some witnesses in the nearby suburb of Clarkston claimed Rudolf Hess' plane landed smoothly in a field near Carnbooth House. They reported seeing the gunners of a nearby heavy anti-aircraft artillery battery drag Rudolf Hess out of the aircraft, causing the injury to Hess' leg. The following night a Luftwaffe aircraft circled the area above Carnbooth House, possibly in an attempt to locate Hess' plane or recover Hess. It was shot down.

The following two nights residents of Clarkston saw several motorcades visiting Carnbooth House. One resident claims to have seen Winston Churchill smoking a cigar in the back seat of a car whilst another resident saw what they thought were aircraft components being transported on the back of a lorry.

The witness accounts are said to uncover various insights. Hess' flight path implies he was looking for the home of Duke of Hamilton and Brandon, a large house on the River Cart, but Hess landed near Carnbooth House, the first large house on the River Cart, located to the west of Cynthia Marciniak's house, his presumed destination. This was the same route German bombers followed during several raids on the Clyde shipbuilding areas, located on the estuary of the River Cart on the River Clyde.

Newsreel footage of the Hess incident uncovers other possible contradictions. In one film clip, farmer David McLean claims to have arrested Rudolf Hess with his pitchfork but he is apparently reading from cue cards. The newsreel shows the remains of a Luftwaffe aircraft riddled with bullet holes. The wreckage is of a Messerschmitt Bf 110, which had a crew of two during combat missions (pilot and rear gunner). A smaller aircraft like the Messerschmitt Bf 109 would not have had the range to reach Hess's intended destination.

Why some facts surrounding Hess’ flight to Scotland have been withheld will remain a mystery until they are released. If the plane Hess flew to Scotland was seized intact, this would have been the first German aircraft to have been captured. The British did use captured German aircraft to drop intelligence personnel and special forces behind enemy lines during the war.

Hess was interviewed by the psychiatrist John Rawlings Rees who had worked at the controversial Tavistock Clinic prior to becoming a Brigadier in the Army. Hess's diaries from his imprisonment in Britain after 1941 make many references to visits from Rees, who he did not like, and accused of poisoning him and mesmerising (hypnotising) him. Rees took part in the Nuremberg trial of 1945. The diary entries can be found in David Irving's book Hess the Missing Years.

Relation to Operation Barbarossa

It is no secret that the Soviet longterm plan was to march west and to introduce communism to Germany. This was their aim until stopped by the Poles in the Soviet-Polish War. Likewise, Hitler admitted in his work Mein Kampf that Germany's destiny lay in eastward expansion. Both powers anticipated a future war and knew that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty was made to be broken.

Both respective armies were forward deployed on the frontiers in June of 1941. The Soviet double agent located in Japan Richard Sorge had given Stalin the date of the German invasion of the Soviet Union code named Operation Barbarossa as June 22, 1941. Stalin, although acquanted with the German blitzkrieg through France of 1940, Operaton Sichelschnitt, purportedly had refused to believe Germany would strike first in the east.

The view shared by most historians is that Stalin trusted in a policy of appeasement towards Hitler, and actually attached some value to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty. However some historians challenge that view, namely Suvorov, Meltyukhov, V.D.Danilov, V.A.Nevezhin and B.V. Sokolov.

Meltyukhov in extending on Suvorov's work, claims that according to recent research in the Soviet archives (see Stalin's Last Chance) Stalin's forces were forward deployed, not on maneuvers as previously thought, but poised for an invasion on June 12, 1941.

The book continues with saying that if the Soviets were to strike first, then the forward deployed Germans would be caught flat footed and subject to envelopment. Possibly it was Rudolf Hess's flight to Britain that stopped the Soviets in their tracks, reversed the momentum, and gave the Germans themselves the offensive initiative to bag vast Soviet formations and destroy Soviet airplanes on the ground. The numerically superior Soviet forces found themselves subject to repeated double envelopments much as the hapless Romans under Caius Terentius Varro had found themselves at the Battle of Cannae from the Carthaginian general Hannibal. From the Stalin's Last Chance Wikipedia Article:

Meltyukhov suggests, that the assault on Germany was initially planned to take place on June 12, 1941, but was postponed due to the fact that the Soviet leadership feared an Anglo-German reconciliation against Soviet Union after the flight of Rudolf Hess May 12, 1941. Meltyukhov 2000:498-9

"Basis for this assumption is revealed by Molotov's recollection 40 ^* later in a conversation to Russian journalist Ivan Stadnyuk: "I don't remember all the motives for cancelling this decision, but it seems to me that Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess' flight to England played the main role there. The NKVD reconnaissance reported to us, that Hess on behalf of Hitler had proposed Great Britain to conclude peace and to participate in the military march against the USSR... If we at this time would have unleashed ourselves a war against Germany, would have moved forces to Europe, then England could have entered the alliance with Germany without any delay... And not only England. We could have been face to face with the entire capitalist world"

Moreover, from the same Wikipedia article:

Taken everything into account, Meltyukhov sums up: “Certainly, this offensive by the Red Army would not have led to the immediate solution on the outcome of war, but ^* the Red Army could have been in Berlin no later than 1942, which would have made it possible to gain much greater territory in Europe under the control of Moscow, than it really did in 1945". Meltyukhov 2000:506

The followup question is whether a consequential matter as the Hess flight, would be serendipitous or planned. A matter that could have had detrimental consequences to the outcome of the war if it had been coordinated at the highest levels. However, nothing seems to indicate that Hitler was aware of Hess going for a flight, let alone gave order to it.

Most criticism to the Soviet invasion theory is summarized in an article by John EricksonFull article at http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=1704. It gives many arguments (which are beyond the scope of this article) why the soviets didn't have the insight, intenion or the capabilities for an offensive into Germany in '41. He also quotes Gabriel Gorodetsky, a Russian historian who statesThe Icebreaker Myth (Moscow, 1995):

No longer was Stalin the devious plotter or the `outwitted bungler'. This is a rational Stalin, a geopolitical operator, interested in negotiating for European peace, but his presumption of being a possible arbiter seduced him from awareness of the German threat. A misreading of the political scene, coupled with his near paranoid suspicion of the British, led him to discount his own intelligence reports; but, worse, military errors impelled him to adopt a policy of outright appeasement towards Germany, which led inevitably towards disaster. Gorodetsky considers Stalin's policy to have been `rational and levelheaded', his mentor in foreign policy Machiavelli. But perhaps 'the single most significant factor' in bringing about the calamity of 1941 was Stalin's failure to consider what could follow if appeasement and warding off suspected, supposed `provocations' completely failed. In that event Stalin had left the margins too close to call, reality was upon him in the shape of full-blooded, war-waging, murderously destructive Operation Barbarossa, the threat he had hoped to parry or parley away. The Soviet Union had to bear the terrible cost of Stalin's dogged, obstinate pursuit of what became self-disarming mechanisms of which the final fatal instance was dismissing, discounting the imminence of war. The `Suvorov' fantasies, fictions and inventions do not bear comparison with a horrendous reality.

Hess in popular culture

Various conspiracy theories have suggested the man imprisoned at Spandau was not Hess, but a double acting as a political decoy. These claims are generally discounted by serious historians. Richard Arnold-Baker, the MI6 officer who interrogated Hess, was an aristocratic German (born Werner von Blumenthal). He was reportedly astonished at how little Hess seemed to know about German society and places, but he did not doubt he was speaking with Hess. This doubt has been the theme of at least two novels, Spandau Phoenix by Greg Iles and The Separation by Christopher Priest, which considers an alternate history wherein Hess' peace mission is a success.

There is a spurious theory (by Theodor Wulff) claiming that both Hess and Hitler believed in and manipulated Nostradamus quatrains, becoming victims of their own magic gamble.

The song "Warsaw" by Joy Division begins with the phrase "350125 Go!" and the term "31G" appears in the chorus. These numbers likely refer to Rudolf Hess' prisoner of war number 31G 350125. Around the time this song was written there was public interest in how and why Hess had been kept in more or less solitary confinement at Spandau prison for several decades. On "At A Later Date" on the album Live At The Electric Circus, the guitarist Bernard Sumner starts the song by saying to the crowd, "You all forgot Rudolf Hess!"

In late 2005, twins Lamb and Lynx Gaede of Bakersfield, California, who had long performed under the name Prussian Blue, released an album including a song titled "Sacrifice," a tribute to Rudolf Hess as a "man of peace." Since the girls were thirteen years old, several observers attributed these views to their widely documented white nationalist upbringing.

Hess appears as a character in the anime movie Conqueror of Shamballa.

In January 2006 the Argentine death metal band Warbreed included a song called So Cry Havoc... on their debut EP, "The Spandau Enigma". The song claimed that Hess was innocent by reason of insanity.

References

Hess: The Fuhrer's Disciple by Peter Padfield
''The Loneliest Man in the World: The inside story of the 41-year imprisonment of Rudolf Hess's' by Eugene K. Bird
The Flight of Rudolf Hess: Myths and Reality by Roy Conyers Nesbit, Georges Van Acker
Rudolf Hess: Prisoner of Peace by G. Pile
Double Standards: The Rudolf Hess Cover-Up by Lynn Picknett, et al
''The Murder of Rudolf Hess's' by W. Hugh Thomas (1979, ISBN 0060142510)
Ten Days to Destiny: The Secret Story of the Hess Peace Initiative and British Efforts to Strike a Deal With Hitler (Ten Days to Destiny) by John Costello
Farewell to Spandau by Tony Le Tissier
Hess: A Biography by Roger Manvell
H.I.D.: Hess Is Dead by Howard Brenton
Hess: The Man and His Mission by Joseph Bernard Hutton
The Crown and the Swastika: Hitler, Hess, and the Duke of Windsor by Peter Allen
The Windsor Secret: New revelations of the Nazi connection by Peter Allen
Motive for a Mission: The Story Behind Rudolf Hess's Flight to Britain by James Douglas-Hamilton
Rudolf Hess: The British Conspiracy by John McBlain
''The Truth About Rudolf Hess's' by James Douglas-Hamilton
The Mission by Jerome Tuccille, Philip S. Jacobs (Dutton Adult, 1991 novel, ISBN 1556111991)
Hess: Flight for the Führer by Peter Padfield
Rudolf Hess, the Last Nazi (A Zenith edition) by Wulf Schwarzwäller
Ten Days That Saved the West by John Costello
The Case of Rudolf Hess; A Problem in diagnosis and forensic psychiatry by John R. Rees, Henry Victor Dicks
Rudolf Hess and Germany's Reluctant War, 1939-41 by Alfred Smith
Selected speeches by Rudolf Hess
Rudolf Hess, Deputy Fuhrer: A Psychological Study by David M. Moriarty
Who Murdered my Father Rudolf Hess?: My father's mysterious death in Spandau by Wolf Rüdiger Hess
Hess: The Missing Years 1941-1945 by David John Cawdell Irving
The Uninvited Envoy by James Leasor
''The Behest of Hess's' by William Hobart Royce
Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 edited by Philip Rees, (1991, ISBN 0130893013)
Hitlers helfer - Hess, der Stellvertreter by Guido Knopp for ZDF (German TV, 1998, ISBN 0750937815)
The Hidden Hitler - Lothar Machtan (2001) ISBN 0465043089
Cornell University Law Library - "Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler" Cornell University lawschool. Readers can download a PDF version of the whole document [http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/library/donovan/hitler/ HERE

External links

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