Book Review: the Rudolf Hess cover-up, "Double Standards"

[Apollonian]

Book Review: Double Standards: The Rudolf Hess Cover-Up
(Apollonian, 26 Aug 15)​

"Double Standards: The Rudolf Hess Cover-Up," by Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince, Stephen Prior, and Robert Brydon; Little, Brown, and Co., London, UK, 2001; xxiv, 578 pages, 504 text, notes, bibliography, index, is well-written historical account, extremely interesting and informative for the many fans of heroic Third Reich, and specifically having to do w. interesting character of Rudolf Hess, Deputy Fuhrer to Hitler, 2nd in the Nazi party, 3rd in the state gov., who assisted Hitler in writing of "Mein Kampf." What was that episode of Hess's flight to Scotland on 10 May, 1941, all about, anyway? For there are still many details unknown and covered-up, but this excellent book by Picknett and associates does a good deal to un-cover some, even much significant info that had been hidden.

For it seems Rudolf Hess was involved in serious negotiations regarding cessation of hostilities btwn UK and Germany, and it involved a significant faction, including British royalty, including noneother than brother to King George VI, the Duke of Kent, these being bro.s to recently deposed/abdicated Edward VIII who was allegedly opposed at time of abdication to the coming and planned war w. Germany.

Thus the story is, as seems to be the case, that Hitler was keen to make and keep peace w. the British, Hitler having allowed British army to escape at Dunkirk. But the Brits weren't having it (peace), merely wanting to keep the continent embroiled in fighting btwn Germans and Russians, and keeping the Germans out of the Mediterannean much as possible. Hess then was lured to Scotland on a fool's errand, imagining there was serious peace party within Brit politics, which seems to have been rather illusory.

And it's now what happened to poor Hess and co. that's interesting and notable for our researchers. For it seems there's significant evidence, un-covered by our researchers/authors, that Hess was subsequently killed/murdered in a deliberately caused plane-crash, along w. noneother than the Duke of Kent, brother to the king, this happening in the following yr after Hess's flight, 25 Aug. 1942. Thus it was a double ("doppleganger") for Hess who was placed on trial at Nuremburg and then imprisoned at Spandau and finally murdered in 1987--as Brits couldn't allow it to be known full details of the Hess saga. Such then was the life and career of Rudolf Hess and the royal sibling, the Duke of Kent, sacrificed to the war aims of utterly ruthless and satanic powers behind "perfidious Albion."

Thus Hess was lured to Scotland to confirm the German commitment to invading Russia, relieving pressure upon Britain, the Brits sure of their alliance w. USA soon to entering the war under some pretext or other, USA already, as during previous WWI, financing, supplying, supporting Britain, invested in the general war effort/project and coming world gov. under "United Nations" (UN).

And there probably was something of an anti-war, anti-Bolshevik, pro-German party in Britain, though not nearly as strong as Hitler and Hess had imagined, so the plane crash of Aug '42 rather handily removed two birds w. one stone, the embarrassing Hess and the refractory royal sibling, sending a msg to one and all for who was in charge and what was to happen--world gov., w. the close collaboration of the Bolsheviks, bolshies actually providing a working model for the world gov. to come.

 

[Apollonian]

 

[Apollonian]

Nazis ‘offered to leave western Europe in exchange for free hand to attack USSR’​

It was one of the most perplexing episodes of the Second World War which, more than 70 years on, remains shrouded in mystery.

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/...in-exchange-for-free-hand-to-attack-USSR.html

By Jasper Copping
12:06PM BST 26 Sep 2013

But a new book claims to have solved the riddle of the flight to Britain in 1941 of Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s deputy.

Hess’s journey to Britain by fighter aircraft to Scotland has traditionally been dismissed as the deranged solo mission of a madman.

But Peter Padfield, an historian, has uncovered evidence he says shows that, Hess, the deputy Fuhrer, brought with him from Hitler, a detailed peace treaty, under which the Nazis would withdraw from western Europe, in exchange for British neutrality over the imminent attack on Russia.

The existence of such a document was revealed to him by an informant who claims that he and other German speakers were called in by MI6 to translate the treaty for Churchill.

The figure, who is not named by Mr Padfield, was an academic who later worked at a leading university. He has since died. Before his death, he passed on an account of how the group were assembled at the BBC headquarters, in Portland Place, London, to carry out the task.

The academic said Hess had brought with him the proposed peace treaty, expressed in numbered clauses and typed on paper from the German Chancellery. An English translation was also included, but the British also wanted the original German translated.

The informant said the first two pages of the treaty detailed Hitler’s precise aims in Russia, followed by sections detailing how Britain could keep its independence, Empire and armed services, and how the Nazis would withdraw from western Europe. The treaty proposed a state of “wohlwollende Neutralitat” – rendered as “well wishing neutrality”, between Britain and Germany, for the latter’s offensive against the USSR. The informant even said the date of the Hitler’s coming attack on the east was disclosed.

Mr Padfield, who makes the claims in a new book, Hess, Hitler and Churchill, said: “This was not a renegade plot. Hitler had sent Hess and he brought over a fully developed peace treaty for Germany to evacuate all the occupied countries in the West.”

Mr Padfield, who has previously written a biography of Hess as well as ones of Karl Dönitz and Heinrich Himmler, believes the treaty was suppressed at the time, because it would have scuppered Churchill’s efforts to get the USA into the war, destroyed his coalition of exiled European governments, and weakened his position domestically, as it would have been seized on by what the author believes was a sizeable “negotiated peace” faction in Britain at that time. At the same time, since the mission had failed, it also suited Hitler to dismiss Hess as a rogue agent.

There is no mention of the treaty in any of the official archives which have since been made public, but Mr Padfield believes this is because there has been an ongoing cover-up to protect the reputations of powerful figures. The author says that his informant broke off contact with him after approaching his former masters in the security services.

Mr Padfield added: “If the Royal Family was seriously involved in compromise peace plans, that would be very damaging, though I think it more likely that Hess brought news to Churchill of the coming Holocaust. It could damage perceptions of his and Britain’s wartime record if that were released.

“This was a turning point of the war. Churchill could have accepted the offer, but he made a very moral choice. He was determined that Hitler, who could not be trusted, would not get away with it. He wanted the US in the war, and to defeat Hitler.”

Mr Padfield has also assembled other evidence to support the existence of the treaty and its contents – as well as the subsequent cover-up.

He has established that two inventories were taken of items carried by Hess when he was arrested after parachuting out of his aircraft, a Messerschmitt 110, on the evening of May 10 1941, near Eaglesham, outside of Glasgow. Neither has ever been released.

He has found witness statements from a woman living near where Hess had landed, which indicate that police were “ordered to search for a valuable document which was missing”. The item, according to the witness, was found “over near the wee burn in the park”.

Mr Padfield also points out that Hess had used a specialist translator from the German Foreign Ministry – even though he had the use of another, fluent English speaker – when drawing up documents for his negotiations with the British, before his flight. This suggests, Mr Padfield claims, that approved wording was required for the documents.

Hess was kept captive in Britain until the end of the war when he was returned to Germany to stand trial at Nuremberg. He was sent to Spandau Prison where he died in 1987. The authorities said he had committed suicide, although his son and some historians have claimed the British state had him murdered to protect secrets.

 

[Apollonian]

The Legacy of Rudolf Hess​

By Mark Weber

lINK: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v13/v13n1p20_Weber.html

On the evening of May 10, 1941, the Deputy Führer of the Third Reich set out on a secret mission that was to be his last and most important. Under cover of darkness, Rudolf Hess took off in an unarmed Messerschmidt 110 fighter-bomber from an Augsburg airfield and headed across the North Sea toward Britain. His plan was to negotiate peace between Germany and Britain.

Four hours later, after successfully evading British anti-aircraft fire and a pursuing Spitfire, Hess parachuted, for the first time in his life, and sprained his ankle landing in a Scottish farm field. An astonished farmer found the injured pilot and turned him over to the local Home Guard unit. [1]

Winston Churchill promptly rejected Hess' peace offer and jailed him as a prisoner of war, even though he had arrived unarmed and of his own free will. Rudolf Hess, ambassador of peace, was to remain a prisoner until his death in August 1987 at the age of 93.

For many, the passing of the one-time Deputy Führer and last surviving member of Hitler's inner circle simply marked the welcome end of a terrible era. But his true legacy is something far different. He spent 46 years -- half his life -- behind bars, a victim of a cruel victor's justice. More than any other man, Rudolf Hess symbolizes the vindictiveness and hypocrisy of the Nuremberg Tribunal.

The Mission

Hess was deeply shaken by Britain's declaration of war against Germany in September 1939. With Hitler's approval, he began a secret effort a few months later to negotiate a peace agreement between the two "fraternal Germanic nations" through British officials in neutral Portugal and Switzerland. [2] When the endeavor failed, Hess began preparations for his flight to Britain, an unquestionably sincere if perhaps naive effort to end war between his beloved homeland and a nation he greatly admired.

"My coming to England in this way is, as I realize, so unusual that nobody will easily understand it," Hess told a British official a few weeks after the flight. "I was confronted by a very hard decision. I do not think I could have arrived at my final choice [to fly to Britain] 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." [3]

Though there was little chance that Hess' mission could have succeeded, some aspects of his flight and its aftermath remain unclear. The British government took the extraordinary step of sealing dozens of Hess documents for release only in the year 2017. Sefton Delmer, the wartime head of Britain's propaganda broadcasts to Germany, has speculated that the British government might have had good reasons for the secrecy: [4]

At the time, Churchill published nothing about the Hess case; he was passed over in silence. There was a large peace party in Britain, and Churchill probably feared that this party would throw him from his Ministerial seat because he had not agreed to Hess' peace proposals.

Victor's Justice

At the end of the war, Hess was taken to Nuremberg to be tried, along with other German leaders, by the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and France as one of the "major war criminals."

Although Hess was perhaps treated more unjustly than any other man on trial at Nuremberg, the Tribunal itself was of doubtful legal and moral standing. Many prominent men in America and Europe pointed out that the process violated two cardinal principles.

First, it was a trial of the victors against the vanquished. The former were their own law maker, prosecutor, judge, alleged victim and, in part, accomplice (in the case of the Soviets, in the division of Poland).

Second, the charges were invented for the occasion and defined after the fact ("ex post facto").

US Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone called the trials a fraud. "[Chief US prosecutor] Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg," he wrote. "I don't mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas." [5]

Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of "substituting power for principle" at Nuremberg. [6] He later also wrote: "I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled. Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time." [7]

Soviet participation in the "International Military Tribunal" lent it the aura of a political show trial. Judge I. T. Nikitchenko, who presided at the solemn opening session, had been a judge at the infamous Moscow show trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1936. Before the Tribunal convened, Nikitchenko explained the Soviet view of the enterprise: [8]

We are dealing here with the chief war criminals who have already been convicted and whose conviction has been already announced by both the Moscow and Crimea [Yalta] declarations by the heads of the [Allied] governments ... The whole idea is to secure quick and just punishment for the crime.

Besides the Tribunal's dubious legal standing, it held Hess and the other German leaders to a standard to which the Allies were never held. In sharp contrast to his public utterances, the chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, Robert Jackson, privately acknowledged in a letter to President Truman that the Allies [9]

have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of [German] prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them [for forced labor in France]. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.

Nothing better points up the essential injustice of the Nuremberg process than the court's treatment of Rudolf Hess.

He was in the dock primarily because of his important-sounding but somewhat hollow title of Deputy Führer. His duties as Hitler's stand-in were almost entirely ceremonial: He delivered the annual Christmas address to the nation, welcomed delegations of ethnic Germans from abroad, appeared at charitable functions, and presented the Führer at the annual Nuremberg party congress. It is this image of the wide-eyed and ecstatic Hess that much of the world remembers best, most of all from a brief clip of him from the Leni Riefenstahl film of the 1934 Congress, "Triumph of the Will."

Known as the "conscience of the party," he often used what power and influence he had to intervene on behalf of victims of persecution by extremists in the National Socialist party. In his detailed study, Justice at Nuremberg, which is generally very critical of the German defendants, historian Robert E. Conot called Hess a "decent and honest" man and "a pacifist at heart." [10]

In their Nuremberg indictment of the Deputy Führer, the four Allied powers predictably portrayed him in the most sinister way possible. [11] "Hess began his conspiratorial activities immediately upon termination of World War I by joining militaristic and nationalistic organizations," it charged. It went on to absurdly claim that "Hess was one of the members of the [Nazi] conspiracy who professed as early as 1933 the aim of complete world domination." The joint Allied indictment concluded with the almost ludicrous words:

All through the years from 1920 to 1941 Hess remained the most faithful and relentless executor of Hitler's aims and designs. This complete devotion to the success of the conspiracy was climaxed by his flight in Scotland in an attempt to end the war with England [!] and to receive English support for Germany's demands against Russia, which he had helped to prepare.

The share of Hess' participation in the Nazi conspiracy is as great as that of the Party which he directed. The Party's crimes are his.

In fact, the Allied case against Hess was weak. The Führer had kept his deputy in the dark about his foreign policy and military decisions. It was clearly established at Nuremberg that Hess had not been present at any of the meetings at which Hitler discussed his military plans. [12] And, of course, he could not be held responsible for German actions that took place after his flight to Britain, including those carried out during the campaign against the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, the Tribunal declared Hess guilty of "crimes against peace" ("planning and preparation of aggressive war") and of "conspiracy" with other German leaders to commit the alleged crimes, but innocent of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity."

No reputable historian today believes the Nuremberg charge that Hess was guilty of "crimes against peace." Almost all of the criticism of Hess in recent years has focused instead on his signature on the 1935 Nuremberg laws that stripped German Jews of their rights as full citizens and banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. These laws allegedly "paved the way" for the extermination of the Jews several years later. [13] Whatever the merits of this argument, Hess had nothing to do with the drafting or promulgation of these laws, and his signature on them was completely pro forma. And even so, the laws were domestic statutes that have had counterparts in numerous other countries, including the United States.

Unlike fellow defendant Albert Speer, the wartime armaments minister who did far more than the Deputy Führer to keep Germany's war machine going but who received only a 20 year sentence, Hess refused to ingratiate himself with the Tribunal. He expressed no remorse for his loyal support of Hitler and the National Socialist regime.

In his final statement to the court on August 31, 1946, he declared:

I had the privilege of working for many years of my life under the greatest son my nation has brought forth in its thousand-year history. Even if I could, I would not wish to expunge this time from my life.

I am happy to know that I have done my duty toward my people, my duty as a German, as a National Socialist, as a loyal follower of my Führer. I regret nothing.

No matter what people may do, one day I shall stand before the judgment seat of God Eternal. I will answer to Him, and I know that He will absolve me.

When it came time to decide his sentence, the judges were not inclined to deal leniently with such an unrepentant defendant. The Soviet judge and his alternate thought he should be executed. The British and American judges and the American and French alternates voted for life imprisonment, while the French judge suggested a sentence of twenty years. The British alternate abstained. They settled on life imprisonment. [14]

The eminent British historian Professor A. J. P. Taylor summed up the injustice of the Hess case in a 1969 statement: [15]

Hess came to this country in 1941 as an ambassador of peace. He came with the ... intention of restoring peace between Great Britain and Germany.

He acted in good faith. He fell into our hands and was quite unjustly treated as a prisoner of war. After the war, we could have released him.

No crime has ever been proven against Hess ... As far as the records show, he was never at even one of the secret discussions at which Hitler explained his war plans.

He was of course a leading member of the Nazi Party. But he was no more guilty than any other Nazi or, if you wish, any other German. All the Nazis, all the Germans, were carrying on the war. But they were not all condemned because of this.

That Rudolf Hess -- the only one at Nuremberg who had risked his life for peace -- was found guilty of "crimes against peace" was certainly the Tribunal's most ironic perversion of justice.

Spandau

From 1947 until his death, Hess was held in West Berlin's Spandau prison, which was run by the four Allied powers. Regulations stipulated that "imprisonment will be in the form of solitary confinement" and forbad prison officials to ever call Hess by name. He was addressed only as "prisoner No. 7."

Conditions were so bad that French chaplain Pastor Casalis protested to the prison Directorate in 1950: "It can safely be said that Spandau has become a place of mental torture to an extent that does not permit the Christian conscience to remain silent ..." [16]

For 20 years, Hess at least had the limited company of a few other Nuremberg defendants, but from October 1966 until his death 21 years later, he was the only inmate in the fortress-like prison originally built for 600. He was, in the words of Spandau's American Director, Lt. Col. Eugene Bird, "the loneliest man in the world."

Keeping this one man in Spandau cost the West German government about 850,000 marks a year. In addition, each of the four Allied powers had to provide an officer and 37 soldiers during their respective shifts, as well as a director and team of warders throughout the entire year. The permanent maintenance staff of 22 included cooks, waitresses and cleaners.

In the final years of his life, Hess was a weak and frail old man, blind in one eye, who walked stooped forward with a cane. He lived in virtually total isolation according to a strictly regulated daily routine. During his rare meetings with his wife and son, he was not allowed to embrace or even touch them. [17]

Long before his death, Hess' imprisonment had become a grotesque and absurd spectacle.

Even Winston Churchill expressed regret over his treatment. In 1950 he wrote: [18]

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 a 1977 interview, Sir Hartley Shawcross, who was Britain's chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, called the continued imprisonment of Hess a "scandal." [19]

The injustice against Hess was not something that happened once and was quickly over. It was, rather, a wrong that went on, day after day, for 46 years. Rudolf Hess was a prisoner of peace and a victim of a vindictive age.


Notes

1. Ilse Hess, Rudolf Hess: Prisoner of Peace (Torrance, Calif.: IHR, 1982), pp. 31-38, 25-27; Wolf R. Hess, My Father Rudolf Hess (London: W.H. Allen, 1986), pp. 17-24; Eugene K. Bird, Prisoner # 7: Rudolf Hess, (New York: Viking Press, 1974), pp. 184, 200, 209-210.

2. W. R. Hess, My Father Rudolf Hess, pp. 50, 66-67; Ilse Hess, Rudolf Hess: Prisoner of Peace, pp. 15, 24.

3. Hess statement to Sir John Simon, June 10, 1941. Quoted in: Ilse Hess, Rudolf Hess: Prisoner of Peace, p. 14.

4. Quoted in: W. R. Hess, My Father Rudolf Hess, pp. 391-392.

5. Alpheus T. Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (New York: Viking, 1956), p. 716.

6. William O. Douglas, An Almanac of Liberty (1954), p. 96. Quoted in: William J. Bosch, Judgment on Nuremberg (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina, 1970), pp. 132-133.

7. Quoted in: H. K. Thompson, Jr. and Henry Strutz, eds., Dönitz at Nuremberg: A Reappraisal, (Torrance, Calif.: 1983), p. 196.

8. Report of Robert Jackson, United States Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, London, 1945 (Washington, DC: US State Dept., 1949), pp. 104-106, 303.; Whitney R. Harris, Tyranny on Trial: The Evidence at Nuremberg (Dallas: S.M.U. Press, 1954), pp. 16-17.

9. Jackson letter to Truman, Oct. 12, 1945. Quoted in: Robert E. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 68.

10. R. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 44.

11. Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (11 vols.), Washington, DC: US Gov't., 1946-1948. (The "red series."), Volume 2, pp. 466, 469, 477-478.

12. R. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg, pp. 347-348, 501; W. R. Hess, My Father Rudolf Hess, p. 229.

13. See, for example: "Rudolf Hess," Washington Post (editorial), August 19, 1987; Letter by Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, The New York Times, May 1, 1984.

14. R. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg, p. 487; W. R. Hess, My Father Rudolf Hess, pp. 235-236.

15. Sunday Express, London, April 27, 1969. Quoted in: W. R. Hess, My Father Rudolf Hess, pp. 392-393.

16. W. R. Hess, My Father Rudolf Hess, pp. 265-266.

17. Eugene K. Bird, Prisoner # 7: Rudolf Hess, p. 152 and passim.

18. Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), p. 55.

19. Interview with Bild am Sonntag, April 10, 1977. Quoted in: Wolf R. Hess, My Father Rudolf Hess, p. 402.


From The Journal of Historical Review, Jan.-Feb. 1993 (Vol. 13, No. 1), pp. 20-23.

 

[Apollonian]

Will We Ever Know Why Nazi Leader Rudolf Hess Flew to Scotland in the Middle of World War II?​

The remarkable tale of insanity, espionage, and conspiracies remains unanswered after 75 years

Link: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...-flew-scotland-middle-world-war-ii-180959040/

By Brian Handwerk
smithsonian.com
May 10, 2016

On the night of May 10, 1941, a Scottish farmer named David McLean found a German Messerschmitt airplane ablaze in his field and a parachutist who identified himself as Captain Alfred Horn. McLean’s mum was soon serving him a cup of tea by the cottage fireside, but their surprise guest was no ordinary Luftwaffe pilot. Incredibly, he was Rudolf Hess, a longtime Hitler loyalist, to say the least. Hess joined the Nazi party in 1920, stood with his friend Adolf Hitler at the Beer Hall Putsch, and served in Landsberg prison -- where he took dictation for much of Mein Kampf. As deputy Fuhrer, Hess was positioned behind only Hermann Goering in the succession hierarchy of the Nazi regime that had Europe firmly under the heel of its jackboot.

Hess’s appearance on Scottish soil, a self-described mission of peace just weeks before Hitler would launch his ill-fated invasion of the Soviet Union, was one of the war’s strangest incidents. The search for explanations began on the morning after and has roiled on now for 75 years, spawning theories both intriguing (World War II might have ended differently) and bizarre (the man wasn’t Hess at all but a body double.) The truth is likely as interesting as any of the fantasies—but it’s still not entirely certain what happened 75 years ago.

The Hess flight was remarkable in itself. He left an airfield near Munich in a small Messerschmitt fighter-bomber a little before 6 p.m., flying up the Rhine and across the North Sea. Hess displayed considerable skill by navigating such a course alone, using only charts and maps, on a foggy dark night over largely unfamiliar terrain—all while avoiding being shot down by British air defenses. By 10:30, Hess was over Scotland, out of fuel, and forced to bail out just 12 miles from his destination.

That unlikely site was Dungavel House, home of the Duke of Hamilton. Hess hoped to make contact with one of the highly placed British figures who, unlike Churchill, were willing to make peace with the Nazis on Hitler’s terms. Hess believed that Hamilton headed a faction of such people and immediately asked his captors to be taken to him. But Hess was misinformed. Hamilton, who wasn’t home that night but on duty commanding an RAF air base, was committed to his country and to its fight against Germany.

The unlikely envoy’s mission quickly took a turn for the worse. When granted a meeting with Hamilton the next day Hess’s pleas fell on deaf ears. Worse for Hess, he denied from the start that Hitler knew anything of his mission, which meant that the British afforded him none of the diplomatic respect to which he thought he’d be entitled. Instead he was imprisoned, and by the night of June 16, the obvious failure of his mission left Hess so mentally shattered that he attempted suicide by hurling himself down a flight of stairs.

Hess spent the war in British hands, confined in various locales including (briefly) the Tower of London and a military hospital at which he was even allowed guarded drives in the country. He was visited frequently by intelligence officers eager for secrets and by psychiatrists eager to plumb the Nazi mind—which in Hess’s case increasingly showed serious signs of mental illness. The psychiatric examinations were rooted less in concern for Hess’s mental health than in the hope that this fanatically devoted Nazi could provide them valuable insights about how the criminals ruling Germany, including Hitler himself, thought.

Hess was transferred back to Nuremberg for the post-war trials in October, 1945, where he escaped the hangman but was sentenced to life in prison. He spent the rest of his long life, 46 years, as Prisoner Number 7 in Spandau where he lingered long after the other Nazis were freed. Hess was the facility’s only prisoner for more than 20 years, his term ending only when the 93-year-old was found hanging from a lamp cord in a garden building in August 1987. The suicide was denounced as a murder by those, including Hess’s own son, who suspected he’d been silenced.

But Hess’s death didn’t end the questions. Had he really come alone? Had someone sent him to Scotland or had someone sent for him?

News of Hess’s flight was a bombshell in Berlin, and Nazi authorities quickly moved to disassociate him from the regime. The German public was quickly told that Hess suffered from mental disturbance and hallucinations.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist who knew much about such tactics, feared that the British would use Hess as part of a devastating campaign targeting German morale. He worried in his private diary on May 14 that the German public was “rightly asking how such a fool could be second to the Fuhrer.”

But the furor gradually died down. Though Hess held a powerful title, his actual influence in the Nazi hierarchy had waned dramatically by 1941, so much so that some have speculated that his flight was born of hopes to regain Hitler’s favor by delivering him an agreement with the British. Instead his departure simply consolidated the power of his ambitious and manipulative former deputy Martin Bormann.

Yet a persistent theory has suggested that Hess’s ill-fated peace mission was actually carried out with Hitler’s knowledge—and the understanding that he’d be disavowed as insane if it failed.

In 2011, Matthias Uhl of the German Historical Institute Moscow unearthed some purported evidence for this claim. Hess’s adjutant, Karlheinz Pintsch, had handed Hitler an explanatory letter from Hess on the morning after the flight, and Uhl discovered a report featuring Pintsch’s description of that encounter in the State Archive of the Russian Federation.

Pintsch claimed that the Hitler received his report calmly. The flight occurred “by prior arrangement with the English,” Pintsch wrote, adding that Hess was tasked to “use all means at his disposal to achieve, if not a German military alliance with England against Russia, at least the neutralization of England.”

This version aligns well with Soviet claims dating back to Stalin himself that British intelligence services had been touch with Hess and duped him into the flight. In fact they may align too well, for the statement was produced during the decade when Pintsch was an often-tortured Soviet prisoner and its language smacks of Cold War propaganda terminology—suggesting the Soviets coerced the version from Pintsch.

Indeed other witnesses reported a very different reaction from Hitler. Inner circle Nazi Albert Speer, waiting outside Hitler’s office during the meeting, described the Nazi leader’s reaction as “an inarticulate, almost animal out-cry” of rage. “What bothered him was that Churchill might use the incident to pretend to Germany’s allies that Hitler was extending a peace feeler,” Speer wrote in Inside the Third Reich. “‘Who will believe me when I say that Hess did not fly there in my name, that the whole thing is not some sort of intrigue behind the backs of my allies? Japan might even alter her policy because of this,’” he quotes Hitler, while also noting Hitler’s hope that Hess might luckily crash and die in the North Sea.

Speer discussed the flight with Hess himself 25 years later when both were incarcerated in Spandau. “Hess assured me in all seriousness that the idea had been inspired in him in a dream by supernatural forces,” he said. “We will guarantee England her empire; in return she will give us a free hand in Europe.” That was the message he took to England— without managing to deliver it. It had also been one of Hitler’s recurrent formulas before and occasionally even during the war.”

British historian Peter Padfield explores the “British duped Hess” theory in Hess, Hitler & Churchill. As with much of the Hess affair definitive evidence is lacking but a few tantalizing possibilities exist. Padfield has unearthed intriguing nuggets from period sources: the diary of a well-placed Czech exile who’d viewed a report suggesting an English trap, reports of Soviet spies who’d uncovered now untraceable evidence of the same. In 2010 the son of a Finnish intelligence agent who’d been on Britain’s payroll claimed that his father was involved in the plot.

The official records that have been made available, perhaps not surprisingly, reveal no such role for the British intelligence services. The most plausible motivation for such a plot, were it ever to have existed, was that the British hoped it would convince Hitler to scrap or at least postpone an invasion of Britain; a peace settlement would make such a drastic and dangerous step unnecessary and free him to focus on the battle against his most hated enemy—the Soviet Union.

MI5 files declassified in 2004 suggest that Hess did have his adviser Albrecht Haushofer pen a letter to Hamilton in 1940, suggesting that a neutral site meeting could advance secret peace talks. British intelligence intercepted that letter, investigated (and exonerated) Hamilton for being part of a pro-peace Nazi plot, and seriously considered the possibility of replying to set up a double-cross.

But they dismissed the scheme and simply let the matter drop without ever knowing that Hess was the man behind the communication, the official files suggest.

However those files are far from complete. Some of the intelligence files on the Hess affair are known to have been ‘weeded,’ or destroyed. Whatever information they held is lost—but other classified files remain and have yet to be released.

Earlier this week, the Duke of Hamilton’s son, James Douglas-Hamilton, called for the British government to release its remaining classified documents concerning the affair.

Conspiracy theorists suspect that the documents could contain not only transcripts of interrogations but correspondence between Hess and other figures including George VI. But Douglas-Hamilton, who has written his own book on the Hess affair, suspects they won’t embarrass prominent Britons who really did want to deal with Hess but rather they’ll likely confirm the standard story.

“The evidence shows Britain had an honorable record in fighting the Third Reich and did not swerve from that position,” he told The Scotsman. “Excessive secrecy with regard to the release of relevant material has, and can serve to, obscure that reality.”

In recent years a few other secret files have emerged. In 2013 a U.S. auction house offered an astounding folder of documents, still marked top secret, some 300 pages that appear to have been authored by Hess himself during his wartime captivity and carried with him to the Trial of the Major War Criminals in Nuremberg. They had been missing ever since.

The files are shrouded in a Hollywood-style intrigue; who got their hands on them, and how exactly, and why did they then simply give them away to the current seller for nothing via an anonymous phone call? But the papers themselves tend to dispel mysteries rather than raise them, and that’s assuming that the contents are genuine. The auction house made some scans and transcripts of them public for the sale, and it’s unclear if they ever changed hands. In one of the digitized documents, Hess described his interview with Hamilton on the morning after his flight in a passage that perhaps provides the best window into the workings of the mind that conceived this unusual attempt.

“The British cannot continue the war without coming to terms with Germany…By my coming to England, the British Government can now declare that they are able to have talks…convinced that the offer by the Fuhrer is genuine,” the files note.

But the rulers of Great Britain were convinced of no such thing. Former Foreign Secretary Lord Simon, the highest-placed person known to have met Hess, interviewed him on June 10 a few days before his first suicide attempt. “Hess has come on his own initiative,” Simon wrote of the meeting. “He has not flown over on the orders, or with the permission or previous knowledge, of Hitler. It is a venture of his own.”

With that Hess was simply locked up for the rest of his long days, though Winston Churchill, writing in The Grand Alliance, claimed at least some distress at his fate.

“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 wrote. “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.”


RELATED: During his captivity Hess often suspected that his meals were being poisoned. Incredibly, food packets that he wrapped and sealed at Nuremberg for future analysis have been sitting in a Maryland basement for 70 years.

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...e-world-war-ii-180959040/#TGsT206cWqfFrSOm.99