The
Flight of Rudolf Hess
by
TempleofMysteries.com
Copyright 2012 TempleofMysteries.com
Smashwords Edition
Who
Was Rudolf Hess?
The
Secret of the Hess Mission
Mysteries
Surrounding Hess's Capture
A
British Peace Party?
Hess's
Peace Proposals
The
Doppelganger Enigma
The
Hess Flight
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Few mysteries of recent times have the power to seize the imagination like that of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's Deputy, who flew to Scotland alone and unarmed in the middle of the Second World War in order to broker peace.
Arrested ignominiously by the Home Guard - 'Dad's Army' - Hess was imprisoned, all the while protesting that he had come to meet the Duke of Hamilton, Scotland's Premier Peer and, Hess believed, the leader of an aristocratic peace party. Meanwhile, Hitler denounced him as a madman who had stolen a plane while in the grip of a delusion, and the German nation, to whom he had been something of a hero, abruptly disowned him.
After spending the rest of the war confined in Britain, Hess was taken to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau Prison, Berlin. It was there that he died, apparently by his own hand, in August 1987, aged 93, after over twenty years as the sole prisoner in the jail.
Suspicions that there is more to the Hess affair than the official explanation are inevitable when the enormous secrecy and obvious cover-ups surrounding the Hess affair are taken into account. Although understandable during the war, the Hess files were kept closed under a special 75-year rule, which were not due to be opened until 2017. Under pressure following Hess's death in 1987, the Government did agree to their early release in 1992, but even then a few files were held back because, according to Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, they 'still pose a risk to national security'.
Even a brief glance at the details of the story prompts any researcher worth their salt to pose dozens of questions. These are just some of them:
What was Rudolf Hess's true role in the rise to power of the Nazis, and what was the real extent of his influence in the Third Reich? Was he Hitler's ineffective yes-man - or a real power to be reckoned with?
What was the purpose of Rudolf Hess's flight in May 1941? Which of the many theories put forward to explain this astonishing event is correct? Did Hitler know about - and even approve of - his plan, despite his denials when it all went wrong?
Has the full story surrounding Hess's capture been told? Did he have accomplices in high places in Britain - and did the RAF deliberately allow his plane to fly unmolested over Britain?
Was Hess right about the existence of an aristocratic peace party - and had they arranged to meet him that night? If so, who were its members? Why has the Hess affair been hushed up, and why is it obviously still deemed too sensational to be made public?
Did Hess bring peace proposals, particularly terms that the British could have taken seriously? And if he did, what happened to this historic document?
Does the theory - first made public by surgeon Hugh Thomas - that the man who died in Spandau was not Rudolf Hess but a double bear close scrutiny? If it does, what became of the real Deputy Führer? And how was a double persuaded to undertake Hess's terrible fate?
Rudolf Hess was Hitler's Deputy Führer and Reichsminister in the Nazi government.
Born in 1894 in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father had an import/export business, Hess served in the Bavarian Infantry in the First World War, where he was injured twice, the second time by a rifle shot that passed through his left lung, causing serious injuries that kept him from active service until the Armistice in November 1918. In the final months of the war he enrolled in the Flying Corps, his first taste of aviation. He became a skilled pilot, as demonstrated by his winning the major German air race, the Zugspitze, in 1934.
After the end of the war, in Munich, Hess threw himself into politics, determined to reverse the humiliations inflicted on the defeated Germany. He was active in the overthrow of the Communist regime that had seized Bavaria in 1919, proclaiming it a Soviet republic. It was his hatred of Bolshevism, and his desire to see Germany great again, that led him into the extreme nationalist circles in which he first met Adolf Hitler.
Contrary to his accepted image, Hess was not Hitler's poodle, nor a rather embarrassingly ineffectual member of the Nazi Party, but was actually so important that he had the dubious honour of having created Adolf Hitler. It was Hess who recognised in the intense and brooding Austrian the leader who would rouse the people, and set about moulding the future Führer's visceral nationalism into a viable political agenda.
It was Hess who schooled Hitler in etiquette, introducing him into the cultured and aspiring middle- and upper-class circles that they would need to win over if the Nazi Party was to achieve power.
Hess masterminded the plan that succeeding in giving Hitler sole control of the Party in the early 1920s. He also formulated the Nazi Party's doctrine and policy, writing the articles setting out their aims and agenda in the Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter.
After the failed coup in Munich of November 1923 (the 'Beer Hall putsch'), Hitler and Hess were imprisoned together in the fortress of Landsberg am Lech. Here they began work on Mein Kampf. Although standard histories describe Hess merely as Hitler's secretary, to whom he dictated the “bible” of National Socialism, according to those who knew and worked with Hess before the war, Hess was actually Hitler's co-author, writing most of the chapters dealing with geopolitics.
It was Rudolf Hess who developed the ultimate method of whipping up Nazi hysteria: he envisaged and organised the infamous Nuremberg Rallies, and developed the 'Cult of the Führer', inventing the Romanesque 'Heil Hitler!' greeting and the craven 'Mein Führer' mode of address. He was, in many respects, the perfect spin doctor.
When the Nazis achieved power in 1933, Hess was named Minister without Portfolio and Deputy Führer. He had complete control of the Nazi Party – having responsibility for appointments at every level, both local and national, throughout Germany. All laws had to be approved by him - it was his signature, not Hitler's, that had to appear on them.
According to the Nazi Party Yearbook for 1941 (the year that he flew to Britain):
'By decree of the Führer of 21st April 1933, the Deputy of the Führer received full power to decide in the name of the Führer on all matters concerning Party leadership. Thus, the Deputy of the Führer is the representative of the Führer, with full power over the entire leadership of the National Socialist German Workers' Party... All the threads of the Party work are gathered together by the Deputy of the Führer. He gives the final Party word on all intra-Party plans and all questions vital for the existence of the German people.'
The man so often marginalised by historians held the following offices: Commissar for Foreign Policy; Commissar for All Technological Matters and Organisation; Commissar for All University Matters and University Policy, and Head of the Office for Racial Policy. Hess was in sole charge of two supremely important organisations: the Auslandorganisation (Foreign Organisation), which controlled the Nazi Party abroad, using its outlets for propaganda and intelligence gathering. This organisation had been useful to Berlin in agitating in Czechoslovakia and Poland before they fell. The other organisation of great significance was the Verbindungsstab (Liaison Staff), which acted as a central intelligence agency and in which all the information gathered by other organisations - such as the Gestapo - ended up, being used to keep an eye on potential threats, including members of the Nazi hierarchy. Within the Verbindungsstab was a foreign intelligence organisation that worked through the diplomatic circles abroad, the Pfeffer Network, which was under Hess's personal control.
On the verge of war, he represented Hitler on the Secret Cabinet Council, and when war erupted, on the Ministerial Council for Defence of the Reich, which ran the Nazi war effort.
All this suggests that, contrary to the post-war image of Rudolf Hess, he was an extremely important and powerful figure - and consequently his flight to Britain in May 1941 must have been considerably more than the unimportant sideshow historians love to portray. It was the Deputy Führer, not some political has-been, who flew to Britain in the middle of the war as a peace envoy.
THE SECRET OF THE HESS MISSION
There are three key questions about the Hess mission that any theory needs to address, which are:
What was Hess's ultimate aim in undertaking such a hazardous journey into the heart of enemy territory?
Did Hitler know about it?
Did anyone in Britain know he was coming? Did they assist him to get there? And if so, who were they?
The Official Story
The standard explanation of the affair is that Hess had fallen out of favour with Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy and was trying to re-establish himself by undertaking a desperate mission that would please his Führer, but without Hitler's knowledge. (Hitler had never wanted to be the enemy of Britain and in any case was about to launch an attack on Russia, so was keen not to have another enemy at his back.) Hess conceived the plan and carried out all the preparations single-handedly. He was of unsound mind, believing that there was an influential British peace party that would usurp Churchill.
The main supporters of the official line today are Lord James Douglas-Hamilton (son of the wartime Duke), in The Truth about Rudolf Hess (1992), and Roy Conyers Nesbit, The Flight of Rudolf Hess: Myths and Reality (1999).