Hess, Rudolf

Hess, Rudolf (1894–1987), Hitler's entirely devoted Nazi Party deputy who, from March 1939, was second in line to the chancellorship after Göring.

Born in Alexandria, where his Bavarian father owned an export firm, Hess was educated in Germany from the age of fourteen before he entered the family business. During the First World War he served in the same regiment as Hitler, was wounded twice, received a commission, and joined the German Air Force. After the war he went to Munich, fell under Hitler's spell, and became a close confidant of the future Führer. In 1923 Hess took part in Hitler's attempted Munich putsch and they subsequently shared a cell in Landsberg prison where Hitler dictated most of Mein Kampf to him, and to it Hess added the concept of Lebensraum.

However, after Hitler assumed power in January 1933, Hess's influence within the party steadily diminished. He was elected to the Reichstag and became a minister of state, but was never considered Hitler's successor. In fact, as Hitler continued on his triumphal way, Hess must have begun to feel unappreciated, a feeling which was intensified by the advent of war. It is therefore possible that he had a desperate desire to re-establish himself in Hitler's eyes and that it was this desire that partly caused him to undertake the bizarre mission to the UK for which he is best known. But he also enjoyed dabbling in foreign affairs and after trying, but failing, to make contact with British intermediaries on the Continent, he must have decided to present his plan—whereby the UK and Germany would ally themselves against the USSR—in person.

On the evening of 10 May 1941 he flew from Germany to Scotland in a twin-engined Messerschmitt 110, his third attempt to make the flight, and parachuted to the ground, as planned, near the country seat of the Duke of Hamilton. He hoped the duke, whom he had met, would arrange for him to meet King George VI to discuss his peace terms. When he was captured he did not reveal his identity until he met the duke. In due course the British diplomat Ivone Kirkpatrick arrived and identified him. Hess then explained that he had come to negotiate peace.

If a conversation partly overheard by one of Hess's adjutants is to be believed, Hitler was aware of his deputy's scheme, though whether he took it seriously is another matter. It was almost certainly not authorized, for when Hitler heard what Hess had done he flew into a rage and was quick to follow Hess's suggestion, in a letter written before he left, that if his mission failed he could be disowned as being insane.

Hess certainly appeared unstable to those who interrogated him in the UK. Once Churchill had decided to have nothing to do with him, and to treat him as a prisoner-of-state, he was put into the care of psychiatrists and he twice made feeble attempts at suicide. The British press speculated wildly about his flight, but no hint of his peace plans reached a public which, at that particular juncture of the war, might have been receptive to them. He was kept first at a Scottish military hospital, Buchanan Castle; then in the Tower of London; then, until June 1942, at Mytchett Place near Aldershot, and finally at a former hospital, Maindiff Court, at Abergavenny, South Wales. At the Nuremberg trials he was found guilty of war crimes, sentenced to life imprisonment, and incarcerated in Berlin's Spandau prison. Before a prisoner could be freed, his release had to be agreed by the four main Allied powers. By 1966 only Hess remained in Spandau but the Soviets refused to free him. When he died the prison was demolished. It was officially confirmed that he had committed suicide by strangling himself with an electric cord, but some believe he was murdered.

A number of stories, partly fuelled by the British government's refusal to release all the relevant files, have grown up around Hess and his mission. One of them, that it was not Hess who flew to Scotland but a double, has been disproved. Another, that Stalin believed that Hess's mission was to negotiate an Anglo-German attack on his country and somehow received a transcript of an interview between Hess and Beaverbrook during which Hess proposed just that, might explain the Soviets' vindictiveness towards him.

Though diagnosed as a psychopath and then as suffering from hysterical amnesia—which he later said he faked—no one ever considered Hess clinically insane.

Bibliography

Gabel, C. , Conversations Interdites avec Rudolf Hess (Paris, 1988).
Hess, W. , My Father Rudolf Hess (London, 1986).
Schwarzwäller, W. , Rudolf Hess (London, 1988).