The Tragedy Of Rudolf Hess.pdf

Rudolf Hess’s daring, although fruitless, flight for peace to Britain in May 1941 was one of the most dramatic

episodes of World War II. Hess was a courageous and genuine idealist, buoyed with hope for a last-minute reconcil-

iation between Great Britain and Germany. Hess is shown, head in hand, in a 1946 photo at the Nuremberg

International War Crimes Tribunal, as the verdict is read. Hess, a prisoner of peace, was held in solitary confine-

ment for much of the remainder of his life, until his murder by one of his guards, at the age of 93, on August 17, 1987.

ARTICLE 1: HESS SYMPOSIUM

T HE T RAGEDY OF R UDOLF H ESS

W HAT M ANNER OF M AN W AS H E ?

B Y M. R APHAEL J OHNSON , P H .D.

The life of Rudolf Hess constitutes one of the glaring examples of myth

within the study of World War II and beyond. In the orgy of demonization

that brought on and sustained World War I and its aftermath, Rudolf Hess’s

memory needed to be effaced from the earth. His mission to Britain for

peace, according to the Nuremberg Trials, was a “war crime” for which Hess

needed to be punished. Hess was sentenced on October 1, 1946 to life impris-

onment. He was, without question, a sympathetic character, repelled by war

and violence and, most famously, sought a just and lasting peace with Great

Britain. As a result, he landed in prison for the rest of his long life, and was

murdered in the end.

T he purpose of this essay is to explore the personality of Hess in relation to his famous mission to Britain. His letters to his wife

are available to the public, and many of them have been published in a book, Prisoner of Peace (abbreviated PP, Britons

Publishing, London, 1954), edited by George Pile with commentary by Meyrick Booth, Ph.D. The very fact that a National

Socialist could ever be a sympathetic character is a thought of the utmost subversiveness. Another useful book is that by his son, Wolf

Rudiger Hess, My Father Rudolf Hess (Star, 1984, abbreviated by FRH), as well as James Leasor’s Uninvited Envoy (McGraw-Hill,

1962) and David Irving’s Hess: The Missing Years 1941-1945 (Macmillan, 1987).

A s war clouds loomed over Europe

my teeth into anything of this sort I

brought to bear such devotion and concen-

tration that in this case—with all the tech-

nical and mathematical knowledge I had—

he was convinced that I would get there all

right” (PP 71). The mission being a success,

of course, was another matter.

Upon landing on Scottish soil, Hess was

promptly arrested and was eventually vis-

ited by major players in British politics, Sir

Ivone Kirkpatrick (who once worked at the

English embassy in Berlin) and the duke of

Hamilton (a Conservative member of the

House of Lords), the latter having informed

Prime Minister Winston Chur chill that

Hess had landed in Britain, while Chur -

chill himself made it clear that he would

rather watch the Marx brothers in the

prime minister’s movie theater (FRH 98).

Upon meeting these two, Hess launched

into the purpose of his mission, to spell out

Germany’s case for peace between the two

countries. Hess explained Germany’s posi-

tion with regard to Austria, going as far

back as World War I. Then, Hess made his

case that only by German assistance

against the Soviets could Bri tain hold on to

its empire; and that war between the two

countries would be de structive for Euro -

pean culture as a whole (FRH 112). Finally,

Hess proposed a peace plan that divided up

the world into spheres of interest between

Ger many and Britain.

Churchill remarked in response to

Hess’s visit: “[L]ike other Nazi leaders, this

man is potentially a war criminal, and he

and his confederates may well be declared

outlaws at the close of the war. In this case

his repentance would stand him in good

stead.” Churchill wrote this in his The

Second World War (quoted from Prisoner of

Peace , pg. 117). Kirkpatrick summed up

Hess’s position thus:

1. The Germans were reckoning on

American intervention and were not

afraid of this. They know everything

about American aircraft production and

the quality of the aircraft. Germany, the

German leaders felt, could produce more

than Bri tain and America together.

2. Germany had no designs on Ameri -

in the late 1930s and into the

1940s, Adolf Hitler was the last

man who wanted war. A war with Britain 1

would harm a great fellow Germanic

empire (at least in Hitler’s eyes), not to

mention divert attention from the true

enemy of Europe, Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Germany had refrained from destroying

the British at Dunkirk around the same

time, betraying a solidly conciliatory line

toward the United Kingdom.

Wolf Hess, Rudolf’s son, is vacillating

when it comes to the relation of Hitler to

Hess on peace with Britain. He believes

that Hitler knew of Hess’s famous ﬂight to

meet with Britain’s government over the

situation in Europe; but Hess the younger

makes it clear that Hitler had his misgiv-

ings about the probability of Hess’s ﬂight

being a success (FRH 66-67). Rudolf Hess,

himself, writes, however, on May 8, 1947,

that, concerning his planned ﬂight to

Scotland to meet with the British, Hitler

“replied that he knew me, and when I got

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ca. The so-called German menace was a

ridiculous invention of the imagination.

Hitler’s interests were European.

3. If we were to make peace now,

America would be furious. In fact, Ameri -

ca wanted to inherit the British empire.

(Quoted in FRH 123, originally in the form of

a Nuremberg document, entitled “Record of a

Conversation with Herr Hess on May 15th

1941.”)

Hess. Thanks to scholars, published by the

Jeffery Simmons Literary Agency, who

main tain the rudolphhess.com site, the

contents of a 1941 BBC memorandum have

been disclosed, to a young soldier, that

claims, among other things: “payment of

expenses incurred by you on your visit to

Broadcasting House, Glasgow, on Tuesday,

May 13th, when you gave an interview to

us on the capture of Rudolf Hess.”

Previously, it was thought that a local

farm family had alerted the Home Guard

concerning Hess’s arrival (or someone who

they thought looked an awful lot like Hess);

now, however, it is clear that Hess’s visit

was well known previous to the ﬂight.

Home Guard units did not meet Hess until

he was sitting in a farmhouse nearby, al -

ready guarded by regular infantry.

In spite of Hess’s occasional warnings

that German military power was capable of

starving out a surrounded island of Bri -

tain, Churchill counted on American in -

volvement to enable Britain to win any war

against Germany. The famous British

belief of their inherent right to rule the

world made it impossible that Britain

could ever share that right with the up -

start Germans. To demonstrate the atti-

tude of the British at this time, the former

chief editor of The Times had made this

comment about elite British opinion in the

early 1940s: “No peace with the German

people until it throws out and punishes the

Nazis.... [a division of the country] either

into the former states or into province[s]

made up of the former states” (quoted in

Hess, 132). Britain wanted war because

they believed they could win it, with Amer -

i can help, of course.

The reality of the Hess case is that he

ﬂew to Britain with the intention of open-

ing up peace talks with the British. Of

course, there were sound economic and po -

litical reasons for this. He hoped that his

contact, the duke of Hamilton, would assist

him in setting up negotiations with the

Bri tish government. But, as already

discussed, the British were uninterested in

shar ing any power with the Germans. The

result was that Hess never experienced

freedom again, and, importantly, that such

a sympathetic character such as Hess

could never be allowed to disrupt the end-

less torrent of anti-German propaganda

that poured from London. That Hess was a

clear peacemaker was no doubt a living

threat to the entire British propaganda

effort, an effort that was vital to any con-

duct of war with Germany.

G enerally speaking, the British view of

the matter was that Hess, though

acting alone, acted through the authority of

Hitler and represented his fundamental

ideas. A war with Russia would take all the

energy of the Reich, and with the possibili-

ty of American intervention, war with

Britain would be suicidal for Germany.

Hess was viewed as rather naive, and

Churchill did not believe him to represent

any signiﬁcant set of opinions of the

German leadership. The notion of the

“spheres of inﬂuence” idea was already

dealt with and rejected before the outbreak

of hostilities, i.e., it was nothing new. Hess

was viewed, in general, as a desperate

character who wished, against all hope, to

save both the Reich and Britain, but also as

one who did not understand the British

(FRH 125).

There is little doubt today that the

British were expecting Hess’s arrival.

Previously it had been merely speculation.

Recently a group of researchers published

some preliminary ﬁndings that prove the

British purposely sent ofﬁcers to Scotland

previous to the ﬂight speciﬁcally to arrest

T he purpose of this essay is not to pro-

vide the details of Hess’s ﬂight, but

rather to explore the character of the man

who was condemned for “war crimes” com-

mitted while sitting in prison for the dura-

tion of the war. His letters in the 1940s

(from England, before Nuremberg) show a

jovial countenance, one almost without

worry concerning his condition. Indeed,

Hess really did not understand the British.

It is questionable if Hess himself was

aware of what had happened. His amnesia,

as David Irving has written, was faked for

tactical reasons. He admits this in his 1947

account of what happened to him on the

ﬂight: “When I was in England, playing the

part of a man who had lost his memory, I

learned many things by heart as a means

of saving myself from the fate which I was

carefully pretending to have suffered. ...”

(PP 38.) He told his wife that he had lost

his memory in a letter dated January 15,

1944, knowing full well the censors would

see it.

Hess remained optimistic. He viewed

the coming defeat of Germany with some

hope for the future: “History is not ended. It

will sooner or later take up the threads

apparently broken off forever and knit

them together in a new pattern.” (PP 49,

letter dated June 18, 1945.) Hess was sim-

ply glad to have been a part of the early

days of German resurgence after the humil-

iations of Versailles. Immediately after his

capture, Hess had written on the fate of

mankind: “Nevertheless, I am convinced

that God will sometime really come to us,

conquer Lucifer and bring peace to tortured

Above, Hess in France in 1940. Always respectful of any nation’s military sacri-

fices, Hess here visits a French soldiers’ cemetery.

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humanity.” (July 1947, PP 38.) Here, Hess

clearly shows his faith in history and the

eventual victory of peace over war.

As the Nuremberg trials heated up,

Hess was clearly becoming more anxious.

Mostly, he was worried about the propa-

ganda in the world’s major media more

than anything else. He worried quite a bit

about his son. Near the end of the trials,

Hess was thinking quite clearly:

I do not propose to argue about

charges that are concerned with the

internal affairs of Germany, with which

foreigners have no right to interfere. I

make no complaints about statements,

the aim of which is to discredit and dis-

honor myself and the entire German

people. I regard such statements com-

ing from enemies as conﬁrmations of

our honor. It has been my privilege to

serve for many years under the greatest

son to whom my people has given birth

in its thousand years of history. Even if

it were possible for me to do so, I would

never wish to wipe this period of service

out of my life. It ﬁlls me with happiness

to know that I did my duty toward my

people. ... I regret nothing. Whatever

men may do to me, the day will come

when I will stand before the judgment

seat of the Eternal: to Him I will give an

account of my actions, and I know that

He will pronounce me innocent. (Dated

August 31, 1946, PP 58.)

This is Rudolf Hess during World War I, wherein he was a fighter pilot.

role in the war. Hess was convicted of

“crimes” which are familiar to nationalists

and Revisionists today. Basically, the kan-

garoo court of Nuremberg convicted Hess

of something like knowing that Hitler was

aggres sive, and thus Hess is guilty of ag -

gres sion against Poland, Austria and

Czechoslovakia. Because Hess gave “public

approval” of Hitler’s invasion of these coun-

tries (especially Austria), Hess was found

guilty by the court and sentenced to life in

prison.

The destruction of the German nation

was far from merely an attempt to destroy

a possible rival, but to destroy the only

threat the left ever had in Europe in the

20th century; a barrier to the creation of a

world superstate under Bri tish ruling class

domination. Nuremberg, particularly in

the Hess case, is the real United Nations

Charter. Interestingly, Hess was painfully

aware of what the reorganization of Ger -

many would, ideologically speaking, have

in store when he wrote on May 26, 1947:

“... I assume that as part of the ‘reeduca-

tion program,’ the German woman will be

liberated from masculine tyranny, and her

situation in life brought into line with that

of American women[.]” In other words, the

reorganization of Germany was to be total-

itarian, affecting all aspects of German life.

At the end of December in 1946, Hess

wrote that “from the crucible of these years

we shall all emerge puriﬁed by ﬁre.”

To a great degree, this statement shows

Hess’s refusal to adjust to the new condi-

tions after the war. Hess’s wife had written

previously to him: “ ... [M]any of our men

are lacking in a background of concrete

knowledge of the conditions which exist in

the world of today, and thus live in a world

which no longer exists and will never again

exist in that form.” (Dated May 7, 1946, PP

54.) The whole idea of World War II, the

destruction of Germany and the coming

New World Order (which National Social -

ism knew quite a bit about) all seem to be

lost on Hess. Indeed, he reiterates, in no

uncertain terms, his commitment to Na -

tion al Socialism and the justice of his

actions, but the British purpose in World

War II was to eliminate Germany from the

earth as a power of any signiﬁcance. This is

why they believed themselves to be able to

judge Germany’s “internal affairs.” Ger -

many had no right to any internal affairs

at all. She was a property of the New World

Order. Hess was from a different world; to

adjust to a completely reversed global polit-

ical universe, where Josef Stalin can stand

in moral judgment of anyone, is a task

indeed beyond even great men.

The judgment of Nuremberg deﬁes the

imagination. To allow Hess to go free would

have meant to allow him to speak publicly

about National Socialism and Germany’s

T o show the condescending nature of

the treatment of Germany after the

war, one need look no farther than I.R.

Rees’s The Case of Rudolf Hess , where he

writes in typical disdain for Hess (in this

case, concerning his marriage) and, by

extension, all Germany:

“Monumental hypocrisy” is far too weak

a term to describe the crass and criminal

aggressiveness of the American/Zionist rul-

ing plutocracy since Nuremberg. If Ameri -

can intervention into the domestic affairs of

more than 100 sovereign nations, not to

mention military invasions of Korea, Viet -

nam, Iraq and Serbia, does not convict

Amer ican leaders of “waging aggressive

war” far more than German leaders ever

dreamt, we live with Alice behind the look-

ing-glass.—Ed.

The relationship be tween Hess and

his wife—a simple girl be longing to a

social stratum somewhat lower than his

own—was typical. She seems, on princi-

ple, to have been excluded from all pub-

lic and even party ofﬁces.... She was an

unessential portion of his private life,

within the limits of which he could be

amiable and considerate. It was the

marriage of a completely egocentric

person—it was typically German.

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Even the most cursory analysis of

Hess’s letters to his wife disprove this typ-

ical view of Germans after World War II;

and, like Churchill’s comment earlier, show

the world’s view of things German and

Ger man people. Hess writes to his wife,

Ilse, on June 26, 1947: “Your last letter

made me more concerned for your plight—

especially because of the vast assortment of

the all-too-feminine which crowds in upon

my little wife, herself so capable and pre-

ferring men’s serious conversation!” This

“irrelevant” woman was arrested in 1947

for the horriﬁc crime of being Hess’s wife.

curean; but when misfortune threatened,

he became a Stoic, as once he smilingly

admitted to his sister, the countess of

Bayreuth. Not a bad system! Myself, I am

a Stoic in the ﬁrst place. (November 23,

1947, PP 96.)

Throughout Hess’s prison correspon-

dence he grapples with questions of reli-

gion, however brieﬂy. In his letter of

October 3, 1948, Hess struggles between

or thodox Christian theology and gnosti-

cism. First, he writes that,

ing the censoring and intercepting of the

mail by the occupation authorities in

Germany: “Somewhere, somebody must be

really ill. For not only did your letter of

March 22 reach me all right, but also it got

here before the end of the month. This is

the ﬁrst time that two letters have reached

me, one after the other, but I am quite sure

that the responsible person will soon be

better again.” (Dated April 10, 1949.)

This is just a brief sample of some of

Hess’s thoughts during the early years of

his imprisonment, an imprisonment that

cannot be justiﬁed with even the most tor-

tured use of human reasoning and lan-

guage. It reveals a troubled but still opti-

mistic personality, one grasping for mean-

ing behind what had happened to him and

to Germany generally. It shows a tremen-

dous ability to get to the root of the matters

before him, understanding, with a bit of

trouble, the future for Europe and Ger -

many speciﬁcally. Hess, at least during this

period, never lost his hope for a resurrected

Europe and his belief that these sorts of

things happen for a reason.

I ﬁnd it impossible to avoid the belief

that, side by side with God, there must

exist something that is an opposite pole,

such as is commonly called the devil.

This seems all the more likely when one

reﬂects that throughout the whole of

existence we ﬁnd polarity.... Every now

and then the devil gets the better of

things—or let us say God allows him to

do so—as with Mephistopheles in Faust .

A s he was being transferred to Span dau

Prison in Germany, Hess wrote on

July 15, 1947:

I must admit, however, that this is

very difﬁcult for you, since your belief

in the inevitability of fate is not so

absolute and unshakable as mine, and

thus your attitude toward the question

of my removal must be fundamentally

different. But, believe me, neither min-

isters with special powers, arbitrary

judges, nor Allied courts of Russian

commissars can make our fate. That

belongs solely to ourselves—to accept it

for what it is, and through acceptance

shape it.” (PP 91.)

Of course, if God allows the devil to do

things, then he does not exist “side by side”

with God, but beneath Him. Clearly, Hess

wrestled with such questions while living

out a life sentence, the emotional nature of

the issue coming to the fore with him writ-

ing such things as: “Is this so in order to

purify human beings, to cause them to

develop inward life?”

His humor was always maintained,

however, as seen in this comment concern-

W hat is particularly amazing is that,

even when Hess reached his old

age in the 1970s, he was still not released,

though amnesty at that age was not

uncommon. Other “lifers” from the Third

Reich such as Neurath, Raeder and Funk

had been released in the late 1950s. Speer

and Schirach were released in 1966.

Somehow, however, this sort of clemency

did not apply to Hess. After 1966, Hess lan-

guished alone in prison. Even after his

stroke in 1978, and his partial blindness,

the Allied powers still refused to release

Hess from his solitary conﬁnement. Out -

side of sheer cruelty, it would seem that

there would have to be some quite powerful

political reason why Hess needed to rot in

jail. One simple notion is that Hess could

be used to put a sympathetic face on

National Social ism. The very existence of

Hess is a reminder that Britain, not

Germany, wanted a global war and massive

loss of life. Hess reminds the world that

peace overtures came from National

Socialists, not the English ruling class. The

entire 20th-century mythology of World

War II might come crumbling down with

the release of Hess and any sort of popular

interest in his story. For, most certainly, pol-

itics in the early 21st century are still high-

ly conditioned by the myths of World War

II. Without them, the system loses its legit-

imacy. Hess’s son writes: “The only reason

that Hess could think of to account for his

not being released, in spite of serious state

of health, was that the custodial powers

Philosophically, Hess’s thinking of Fre -

d erick the Great might well apply to him:

“[W]hen things went well, he was an Epi -

Hess here displays one of his many interests. Homeopathy was a major thrust of

the Third Reich’s health policies, rejecting the pharmaceutically based drug cul-

ture of modern Europe and America. Hess is pictured delivering an address at

the International Conference on Homeopathy in Berlin, 1938.

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