The choice of the word "mess" to describe this opera is much more than just a clever rhyme. What the Hess Mess represents is undoubtedly akin to the proverbial Rabbit Hole; the Chapel Perilous of Robert Anton Wilson.
The mess is riddled with so many twists, turns and contradictions that what ultimately emerges is the grandest conspiracy at not only the highest levels of the British government, but one that includes multiple superpowers and their various intelligence agencies.
In addition, something about the secret at the heart of the Hess Mess is so significant that it still warrants concealing from the public after more than three quarters of a century.
What could be so unacceptable to Britain, or the Allies, in the early 21st century? What does the Rudolf Hess story conceal that would in some way shock even today's cynical world?
The best place to start the Hess Mess is at the end, and a messy end for Hess it was.
On August 17, 1987, Rudolf Walter Richard Hess, once Adolf Hitler's Deputy Führer, was pronounced dead at a British Military Hospital in Berlin.
Having spent the last 41 years of his life in prison, the 93-year-old inmate had reportedly chosen to end his own life, hanging himself from a window latch with an electrical cord.
Only Hess among all the Nazis incarcerated after World War II was made to serve out his entire life sentence, and this includes other individuals of comparable rank, such as the Reich's Armaments Minister Albert Speer, the two chiefs of the German Kriegsmarine, Grand Admirals Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz, Reichsbank President Walther Funk, diplomat Konstantin von Neurath, and Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach.
These were some of the men that kept the gigantic war machine of the Third Reich smoothly running and functioning as a military power right up to the end of the war, and in Dönitz's case, had nearly brought Britain to its knees in the unrelenting U-boat warfare.
Indeed, of all the "designated successors" to Hitler, it was Dönitz that finally succeeded Hitler as the legal head of state and government after the latter's problematical "suicide" in the Berlin Führerbunker.
All of these men were released, including Raeder and Funk, even though both had received life sentences. Although their premature release was for "health and humanitarian" reasons, no explanation was ever offered for why Hess remained for another 21 years, despite suffering considerable health problems, which began in earnest after a perforated ulcer in 1969.
To make matters even more strange, an entire prison facility, known as Spandau Prison, was maintained just to house Hess! Built in 1876, Spandau Prison had a single occupant from the years 1966-1987: Rudolf Hess.
It's an absurd picture: the Allied powers--France, Great Britain, the USA, and the Soviet Union--all contributed to the maintenance and upkeep of the entire Spandau Prison, changing their military guards at regular monthly intervals, just to guard this one man.
The guard rotation shifted on a monthly basis, with the French guards during the months of February, June, and October; British guards in January, May, and September; American guards in April, August, and December; and Soviet guards in March, July, and November.
Why did Hess have to be guarded at all costs and have his access to the outside world strictly, and even cruelly, controlled?
Why was it necessary to maintain an entire prison, and the military guards and medical staffs of four world powers, just to keep watch over one individual who, by the end of his life, was a frail old man, and a threat to no one?
What secrets did he know that the Four Powers wanted to prevent others from knowing? Did they themselves even know what those secrets were, or did they only suspect? Or were they trying to break him and learn those secrets?
Or did Hess not know anything at all?
Was the man they were guarding even really Rudolf Hess?
Was "Spandau Hess" someone else, a double, substituted at some point in the drama? Was that the real reason for the Spandau Ballet of elaborate changings of the guard and maintaining an entire prison for just one man, and refusing to let him out, lest the substitution--the real secret--be discovered?
Of the myriad legendary characters that populate the lore of the two World Wars, countless biographies have been written. But there is a curious absence of writings concerning the life of times of one Rudolf Walter Richard Hess.
Born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1894, Hess was the son of a moderately well-to-do German merchant. After enlisting in World War I, he sustained numerous wounds on both the Eastern and Western fronts, for which he earned the Iron Cross, 2nd class.
While several of his earlier wounds required months of recovery, his worst injury occurred in August of 1917, in which Hess was pierced by a bullet "that entered the upper chest near the armpit and exited near his spinal column" and collapsed his lung. While convalescing, Hess decided to train as a pilot in the air corps, and soon became very skilled.
After the war, Hess began networking extensively and started getting involved with certain paramilitary organizations in Germany and Bavaria.
These were veterans' groups, largely of conservative political and economic leanings, that were determined to prevent any Communist or Bolshevik revolution in Germany as had happened in Russia.
In Hess's case, in 1919 he joined one of the most famous--or infamous--of these Freikorps (Free Corps), the Freikorps von Epp, commanded by former Bavarian General Franz Ritter von Epp.
Later that year Hess enrolled in the University of Munich and joined the infamous Thulegesellschaft, the Thule Society. Having been introduced to the quasi-occult lodge in Munich by a Freikorps friend, Hess was very taken with the society and thus began his well-known fascination with the occult.
While there has been much unfounded speculation regarding Hitler's connection to the Thule Society, including the theory that Hess and Hitler met at a meeting in 1919, there is no evidence that Hitler was even involved with the Thulegesellschaft, and in fact he had the head of the society arrested after his rise to power.
The Thule Society borrowed heavily from the racist doctrines and beliefs of Lanz von Liebenfels and Guido von List, doctrines which also included a "revisionist history" of an ancient very high civilization, from which the Aryans were descended.
This was blended with the claims of the ancient lore, that the Aryans descended to Earth at the poles, and dispersed themselves throughout the planet, marrying the "lesser" humans already on the planet, and thus "corrupting" their race.
These doctrines proved to be highly influential, as they could "justifiably be regarded as a predecessor of the National Socialist German Workers' Party."
All of these considerations become terribly important when one understands that the influence of the Thule Society and its doctrines on the Nazi party were possibly mediated directly by Hess himself, for it was Hess who, after all, became Hitler's "Deputy," in charge of running the day-to-day affairs of the Nazi Party itself, and maintaining its doctrine and ideology.
With this in mind, it's very curious indeed that the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutors forbade any mention of the occult during the trials, ostensibly for fear of Hess pursuing an "insanity" defense. This may have been a convenient cover story:
One would know much more about the political and even the occult machinations of this period if Hess had been encouraged to speak instead of being held incommunicado in Spandau prison for over 40 years.
Hess was familiar not simply with the "run-of-the-mill" occult doctrines typical of the Western esoteric trdition, but with much more peculiar doctrines via his membership in the Thule Society.
How influential were these occult societies and their doctrines on the Nazi power structure? Did there exist a faction within the Nazi government itself that opposed the policies of Hitler?
The influence of the Haushofers on Hess, and therefore Hitler, cannot be understated, despite Albrecht eventually being executed for his alleged involvement in the 1944 bomb plot against Hitler.
General Haushofer envisioned a complete revamping of German imperial policy, which included the belief that confronting Great Britain was completely unnecessary. He also saw no reason for a substantial German navy. In this vision:
Germany, in order to remain a great power, would have to increase its Lebensraum (living space) to encompass what effectively had been the old Holy Roman Empire in order to ensure that all ethnic Germans were in a common Lebensraum.
The Haushofers happened to have numerous contacts in British Society, including the Duke of Hamilton, and these strange bedfellows had a mutual concern:
The future belonged to Russia and the USA, unless the two principal economic and military powers of Europe united to prevent it. Haushofer foresaw the need for a "united Europe," a federation of the European powers, led by Germany.
How much did the ideologies of the Haushofers affect the vision of Hess, and therefore Hitler, as well as the formation of the Nazi Party?
Was Rudolf Hess's "quixotic flight to Britain the last attempt of the old Thule Society--long dissolved, or driven underground--to affect world politics in the face of a Führer who had escaped their clutches and completely deformed their visions?"
In the aftermath of World War I, a veritable crucible of tensions began to emerge between the radical left and right in Germany, often in the form of street battles, with Bavaria in particular being a hotbed of this unrest.
The socialist-communist revolutionaries, known as the Spartacists, attacked and raided the Thule Society, stole documents and murdered some of its members.
The Thule Society soon struck back and retrieved the documents, and eventually the conservative element in Bavaria, "fed up with the growing slide of the Reich government to the left, attempted to seize power in Bavaria via Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who was made a councilor of Bavaria and given dictatorial powers."
The goal was to break Bavaria out of the German Reich and restore its complete independence as a sovereign nation, the status it had prior to the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871.
It was because of this threatened break with the German Reich that Hitler, Hess, and the Nazi leadership acted, for they were not trying to seize power in Bavaria to break with "Greater Germany," but rather the contrary, they were trying to prevent that break.
On November 8, 1923, Hitler and 2,000 Nazis attempted to seize power in Bavaria in the Beer Hall Putsch. Hermann Göring was in charge of the "wet works" to be performed during the counter-coup, and Hess was entrusted with "secret orders to round up the ministers of the Bavarian state itself, which Hess was successful in doing."
As the coup collapsed, Hitler was captured and put on trial for treason. Göring fled to Sweden, and Hess fled to Austria where he was to remain for five months, until, upon learning of Hitler's shockingly light sentence, he returned to Munich, stood trial, and was sentenced to prison.
During their time together in Landsberg Prison, Hess and Hitler began to forge an even stronger relationship, and they were also regularly visited by General Karl Haushofer. The experience established Hess as Hitler's "confidant, muse, and mentor."
Far from being kept in the dark about Hitler's plans, Hess himself shaped many of them. The two men were their own charmed inner circle, from which the likes of Hermann Göring were excluded.
It's well known that Hitler dictated much of Mein Kampf to Hess during this period of incarceration, and Hess's contributions shouldn't be understated, "particularly in those few lucid passages in the work, which were not the ravings of Hitler the thwarted artist, but of Hess, the multi-lingual university student of Haushofer."
Those chapters of Mein Kampf which deal with the propaganda and organization of the Nazi movement owe their inspiration to Rudolf Hess and most of the actual composition was done by him. He was also responsible for the chapters dealing with Lebensraum and the function of the British Empire in the history of the world.
During the Nuremberg trials, General Haushofer himself stated that it "was actually Hess, not Hitler, who had dictated some passages of the work."
After their short stint in prison, Haushofer and Hitler would soon serve as groomsmen for Hess's wedding, and a decade later, as godfathers for his son, Wolf Hess, who we will meet again near the end of the mess.
Before his fateful flight in 1941, Hess's power within the Nazi State apparatus could hardly be understated. Hess orchestrated the inception of the "Führer cult" by transforming "Herr Hitler" into der Führer.
Hess facilitated the incorporation of Thule Society imagery, like the Swastika, into Nazism, and even acted as the "sophisticated face" to Nazism when attempting to woo German industrialists and bankers to support the 1932 political campaign.
Hess became the Stellvertreter, which is usually translated as "Deputy", but is actually:
...a stronger term than can be rendered into English, and Hess's relationship to Hitler and Göring has been the source of some confusion because of this, since many view Göring's being designated as Hitler's successor as head of state and government as a demotion of Hess in the pecking order of Nazi hierarchy.
The term, however, in its etymology, suggests something far more powerful: a place-holder or personal emissary. Hess was literally "place taker" or personal representative for Hitler in the Party hierarchy. This made him the de facto head of the operational day-to-day management of the Party, of its various intelligence agencies, and bureaucratic appointments.
At the time, CFR-influenced American journal Foreign Affairs wondered if "Hess was not the ultimate intellectual creator of Adolf Hitler to the extent that a piano creates music."
Because of this powerful position, Hess's signature appears on German legal documents, signing on behalf of the party as a kind of witness for Hitler. This fact was at the core of the Nuremberg Tribunal's prosecution's case against Hess, for during its presentations, the emphasis remorselessly lay not only on Hess's culpability, but on his power within the Third Reich up to 1941.
In other words, nothing could happen in Germany without Hess's knowledge or approval. Prior to 1941, Hess was really the "brains of the operation."
Despite his role as the "conscience" of the party, and although he objected to the actions taken during the infamous Kristallnacht, Hess's signature was indeed on the infamous Nuremberg Race Laws. In addition, Hess reportedly disagreed with Hitler's halt order issued to the Wehrmacht at Dunkirk, an order which ultimately saved many British lives.
Hess also spotted the talent of Martin Bormann, making him his right hand man, "particularly of the party's own intelligence services." Together they urged action to take out the leadership of the Brownshirts during the Night of the Long Knives.
Although this particular foray into the Hess Mess gives Bormann no further mention, his role in the entire affair, and everything that followed (even after Bormann's "death"!), should not be discounted.
On May 10, 1941, a supremely enigmatic event occurred that is given remarkably scant mention in most of the standard histories of World War II.
One of the 20th century's greatest mysteries began when Rudolf Hess took off from Germany in a Messerschmitt 110 and flew to England. The general consensus is that he was attempting to bring about peace between Germany and England by a personal intervention, the implication being that "Hess's flight was a more-or-less a spontaneous affair, ill-thought-out and sloppily planned."
Hess was one of the only major Nazi leaders who had misgivings about Operation Barbarossa, the code name for the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. To Hess, this was far too risky with Great Britain still in the war, as well as the looming possibility of an American entry.
Luftwaffe General Adolf Galland also had misgivings about Barbarossa, and his first impression was that Hess's flight was a "desperate attempt to prevent the two-front war that would follow."
Shortly after Hess's flight, Galland was ordered by Hermann Göring to put up his fighters and intercept the Deputy Führer. "The order I received was mad," said Galland, who was well aware that darkness was falling. "Just as a token, I ordered a takeoff. Each wing commander was to send up one or two planes. I did not tell them why. They must have thought I had gone off my head."
This chain of events raises several questions: When did Göring learn about the flight? What did he know about Hess's motivations? Why did he order a shootdown, especially a futile one? Göring, too, had his own concerns about Barbarossa:
Why would Göring, always a practical military man, want to stop Hess and his peace mission, assuming he knew the purpose of Hess's flight? Was the order merely a cover to mask his own involvement in a larger plot?
Despite the narrative of the "official" version of events, Hess's flight wasn't "spontaneous" at all, as secret meetings did take place between Hess, General Haushofer and the General's son Albrecht to discuss the feasibility of peace overtures to Great Britain.
This interpretation of the Hess Mess suggests that "Hitler himself gave tacit approval for the idea, and that Albrecht Haushofer then utilized his prewar contacts and friendship with the Duke of Hamilton to contact the Duke to propose a meeting between him and Hess."
Hess had practiced flights in the twin-engine Messerschmitt 110, and persuaded the head of the company, Willi Messerschmitt himself, to add two 700 litre drop tanks to the wings and special radio equipment to the two-man cockpit. Additionally, Hess obtained a very secret map of the Luftwaffe's air defense and forbidden flying zones from Hitler's personal pilot, Hans Baur.
Hitler's pilot provided Hess with maps! As for Baur, he was rumored to have been involved in a plot to "kidnap" Hitler and fly him to Great Britain to surrender, but these allegations have never been verified. Coups aside, Baur did help Hess in some capacity.
This fact, coupled with Göring's phone call to Galland, now raises the prospect that Hess had "assistance" in his flight--very covert assistance--from inside Hitler's highest command structure to a more definite possibility.
Let us start by examining the "standard" narrative of Hess's flight:
Hess rose early on the morning of May 10, and upon learning that the weather forecast was good, kissed his wife's hand and dashed into the nursery to take a last look at their slumbering son. Hess took off from the Augsburg airport and headed for the North Sea. Abruptly, contrary to the weather report, the cloud cover vanished and for a moment he thought of turning back. But he kept going and found England covered by a veil of mist.
Seeking shelter, he dived down with full throttle, at first unaware that a Spitfire was on his tail. Outdistancing the pursuer, he hedgehopped over the dark countryside, narrowly skimming trees and houses. Baur had always claimed Hess was the type of pilot who liked to fly through open hangar doors and it was in the barnstormer's spirit that he aimed at the mountain looming ahead. Just before 11PM he picked out a railway and small lake which he remembered were just south of the duke's residence.
After bailing out, "he was found by a farmer, marched off to the Home Guard and brought to a barracks in Glasgow. Insisting that he was one Oberleutnant Alfred Horn, he asked to see the Duke of Hamilton."
Meanwhile, in Germany, one of Hess's aides delivered a message to Hitler, who was in a conference at the time. Allegedly, upon receiving the letter, Hitler shouted "Oh my God, my God! He has flown to England!" In the letter, Hess wrote:
My Führer, when you receive this letter I shall be in England. If this project--which I admit has but very little chance of success--ends in failure and the fates decide against me, this can have no detrimental results either for you or for Germany; it will always be possible for you to deny all responsibility. Simply say I am crazy.
Hitler then ordered his aids to contact Göring, Bormann and Joachim von Ribbentrop, and he immediately placed Hess's adjutant under arrest.
At this juncture, Hitler inquired to Luftwaffe General Ernst Udet, present for the conference, whether or not a ME-110 could even reach Britain; Udet replied "No."
This is a hint that something is amiss with the standard narrative, for very obviously, Hess's 110 did reach England, and Udet, as a Luftwaffe General, would have known that a one-way flight was at least possible with drop tanks or even re-fueling.
An announcement was soon made that Hess had commandeered an aircraft against orders and that he may have been "a victim of hallucination."
This was of course a propaganda blunder of the first order, since it implied that one of Nazi Germany's top leaders was insane, and that the rest of the leadership had not detected it!
The British followed with their own statement a few hours later, merely stating that Hess had come to Great Britain. In response, the German's updated their statement, making things look even worse:
As is well known in party circles, Hess had undergone severe physical suffering for some years. Recently he had sought relief to an increasing extent in various methods practiced by mesmerists and astrologers, etc. An attempt is also being made to determine to what extent these persons are responsible for bringing about the condition of mental distraction which led him to take this step.
Hess, via contacts to the Haushofers, flew to Britain to negotiate a peace for which, according to his own letter to Hitler, he held out little chance of success. He was denounced as insane by both the Nazi and later the Churchill governments, and remained to rot in confinement for the rest of his (many) days.
Even in this standard narrative, Hitler's foreknowledge of the plan is still up for considerable debate, suggesting that his "rage and fulminations on learning of the mission from Hess's letter was a bit of very convincing theater."
Hitler later would state that "I am deprived of the only two human beings among all those around me to whom I have been truly and inwardly attached: Dr. Todt (builder of the Westwall and Autobahn) is dead and Hess has flown away from me!"
In some deep way Hitler never recovered from the personal loss, and it affected the day-to-day governance of the Third Reich.
Further indication of a wider plot can be found in the strange actions of Göring, who not only issued an impossible shootdown order, potentially to cover his own tracks, but he proceeded to deny any knowledge of the event the following day.
The more this event is scrutinized, the less likely that the Hess flight was the spontaneous blunder of a lone madman, rather it was "an international conspiracy of the highest order, involving powerful elements within both the United Kingdom and Nazi Germany."
And neither was Hess a "martyr for peace" as some revisionist works portray him--after all, he was still a Nazi.
It's important to consider the strategic position Great Britain and Germany found themselves in during the early months of 1941. Everything looked good for Germany, "yet, as preparations for Operation Barbarossa moved forward, the Churchill government continued to woo America to enter the war. Time was on Britain's, and not Germany's, side."
Britain simply was not strong enough to prosecute a successful war against Germany on its own. It essentially had two choices: it could hold out until American entry, thus virtually dooming the British Empire as the dominant world power and ensuring its replacement by the USA, or it could preserve the Empire at the cost of a negotiated peace with Germany.
A third problem confronted the Churchill government. The British Royal Family were half German, and saw Germany as a natural ally, albeit preferably without Hitler as leader. They were certainly in the 'those with much to lose' camp.
The Royal family was merely "the tip of the iceberg of a pro-peace party in Britain, a party that had some representation in the British peerage, and the various organs of government."
Many researchers believe that this "peace faction" emboldened Hess to make his fateful flight.
Another speculative scenario adds a fascinating new dimension to the Hess flight: the atomic bomb.
If the Germans believed that they were close, did this underpin Hitler's confidence in winning what was seen by many as an unwinnable war with Russia? When Hitler attended the Reichstag on May 4, 1941, just six days before the Hess flight, he observed that '...the scourge of modern weapons of warfare, once they were brought into action, would inevitably ravage vast territories.'
When Hess was in captivity, if he wanted attention, he too would speak of the bomb. He knew the British would want to know the reality of German nuclear production.
While the standard narrative of WWII depicts the Nazi atomic bomb project as fruitless, considerable evidence suggests otherwise, and the case has been made that actual tests of atomic bombs were performed by the Germans in October of 1944 and then again in March of 1945.
This possibility aside, "an actual existing atomic bomb project does rationalize Hitler's confidence in his invasion plans for Russia, and also rationalizes his inexplicable decision to declare war on the USA as his armies were freezing before the gates of Moscow."
For Churchill, Hess's sudden arrival was surely unwelcome, as it put the Prime Minister and his government in a very awkward position:
It made it look like he could be double-dealing the USA, on the one hand trying to woo an American entry into the war, and on the other, covertly negotiating a peace with Nazi Germany. The fear was that the flight would give new strength to yet another "peace faction," the American isolationists.
Two contemporary magazine articles written about the event both propagated the so-called "lure" hypothesis, namely that Hess was lured by British intelligence, "the implication being that there was no 'peace party' nor realistic hope that a negotiated peace with the Churchill government was possible."
One difficulty with the lure hypothesis often pointed out by investigators is that if Hess was lured to Great Britain, why did Britain not seek to capitalize on the propaganda value of his capture much more than it did? If anything, the British reaction was inexplicably muted and low-key.
Although certainly feasible, the lure hypothesis could itself be a "spinning" of the event, a "legend created to reassure America that Britain was not double-dealing and to extricate the Churchill government from the diplomatic difficulty caused by the Hess flight."
In 1942, soon after the USA entered the war, Churchill finally publicly addressed the Hess matter in an oft-overlooked exchange on the floor of the House of Commons:
We have to remember how oddly foreigners view our country and its way of doing things. When Rudolf Hess flew over here some months ago he firmly believed that he had only to gain access to certain circles in this country for what he described as 'the Churchill clique.'
The only importance attaching to the opinions of Hess is the fact that he was fresh from the atmosphere of Hitler's intimate table. But I can assure that since I have been back in this country I have had anxious inquiries from a dozen countries, and reports of enemy propaganda in a score of countries; all turning upon the point whether His Majesty's present Government is to be dismissed from power or not.
To some observers, this speech is the "beginning of the conundrum" and clearly states the motivation of the Hess flight was to "gain access to the certain circles that could remove Churchill and his government from power."
In a further blow to the "spontaneous event" explanation for the Hess flight, "by the time of his flight to Scotland, several contacts had already been made between the German and British peace parties." In addition, discussions had already taken place in Sweden, Switzerland and Spain.
Hess was not flying to add to the detail--that had already been agreed. He was flying in to seal the deal and his arrival was to demonstrate his commitment--at the highest level.
The reason Scotland was chosen as the destination was because of the German "peace party" and its connection to the Duke of Hamilton, Scotland's highest ranking peer, who had access to the Royal Family. Hess had been doing his homework as well, even brushing up on the British Constitution itself:
The British constitution is not a "written document," but rather has evolved from various covenants, conventions, precedents and courses of performance over time. One of these "courses of performance" well-established in British constitutional practice is that the Monarch "should act upon ministerial advice."
However, there were and are cases in recent British history where the Monarch acted independently from the ministerial advice of his or her own government, and actually created British policy.
The British sovereign has certain "reserve powers" that can be used in times of constitutional crisis.
The powers included the appointment and dismissal of ministers; the summoning and dissolution of Parliament; the making of treaties; declaration of war; recognition of foreign states; and the accreditation and reception of their diplomats.
This was the reason that Hess was obtaining books on the British Constitution in April 1941. He could request the monarch to invoke royal prerogative, dismiss the prime minister and, presumably, appoint in his place a prime minister who would act in accordance with the King's wish--to make a peace treaty with Germany.
In other words, Hess wasn't merely petitioning the Duke of Hamilton, rather he was using the Duke to petition King George VI himself.
Hess was "quite able" under the British constitution to achieve an overthrow of the British government of Winston Churchill. It was to be, in effect, another "Churchill-Halifax moment," for after all, it was George VI who made the decision to appoint Churchill using precisely the royal prerogative, and not Lord Halifax, to the premiership in May of 1940.
Hess's infamous flight is beginning to seem less fanciful after all.
As one plunges deeper into the Hess Mess, a tangled web of covert connections is uncovered. Various correspondence from the time reveals a Haushofer-Hess peace faction in Germany that was carrying on secretive discussions with the British peace faction. In addition, they often attempted to avoid both the official channels of Great Britain and Germany for much of this correspondence. In one of these letters, Albrect Haushofer stated:
If the worst came to the worst, the English would rather transfer their whole Empire bit by bit to the Americans than sign a peace that left to National Socialist Germany the mastery of Europe.
In addition, the "only genuine solution to European peace and security was a European federation, and a "fusion" between Germany and Britain, a fusion that the English are now about to conclude with the United States."
Note that Haushofer is not talking about an alliance of the UK and USA, but of fusion, the old goal of Cecil Rhodes. If true, then it provides yet another motivation for Hess's flight, for such a "fusion" had to be prevented at all costs, and in spite of any chances of the success of a "peace mission," the risks of not doing so were far higher.
However, according to Albrecht Haushofer, there seemed to be very little possibility of a negotiated peace with Hitler.
Which brings us to a key question: What did Hitler know about the flight?
Clearly, someone in the Nazi hierarchy knew about it, for we have already encountered the fact that Göring knew about it, ordered General Galland to shoot him down, and then, a day later in front of Hitler, claimed no knowledge at all!
It seems much more likely, given what appear to be the coup plotters' eventual goals, that Hitler was kept in the loop to a certain extent, but not entirely.
The Hess initiative was not the only peace feelers being sent out. Many levels of the Nazi regime were involved, all of them leading back to Hitler himself, who repeatedly indicated that Germany and Britain were not natural enemies, an idea that he had absorbed from Karl Haushofer via his influence on his own Deputy.
Despite these attempts at negotiation, the response from Britain was unwavering: their distrust of Hitler was a "fatal obstacle" to any peace. Notably absent is any reference to peace with Germany. The Germans had similar demands regarding the future of the Churchill government.
For the German side, it was "get rid of Churchill," and for the British it was "get rid of Hitler." No peace was possible with either government, and thus, if there was to be a negotiated peace, both governments would have to go.
Hess's flight was not simply to "seal a peace deal" but that, in order to seal that deal, it was also a component in a wider scheme to overthrow both governments in internationally and bilaterally coordinated coups d'etat.
To get a better understanding of the scope of collusion involved with such a scheme, it's important to consider the extraordinary details of the flight itself.
A technical analysis of the flight reveals that Hess could not have attempted such a flight without significant amounts of high-level help both on the German and on the British sides. This raises obvious questions as to the level of German involvement.
Hess's plane itself, a Me 110E-2/N series aircraft, had undergone significant modification, including custom drop tanks and enhancements to his radio system.
Modifications aside, a glaringly inconvenient detail emerges when one considers the oil consumption required for such a lengthy flight. Some researchers have noted that it's unlikely the aircraft would have had made the trip without running out of oil and crashing into the sea.
He may well have had enough fuel, but he did not have enough oil. Accordingly, Hess had to have landed in Germany at some point during his flight to replenish the oil tank for the remainder of the flight.
After considering the possible routes and options, the city of Göttingen becomes a strong possibility.
Göttingen was then the research site for the Horton brothers, who were pursuing their revolutionary 'flying wing' designs. Hess was known to them so this would seem to be a sensible choice.
This suggests that Hess made use of the Third Reich's existing secret black projects research infrastructure in order to accomplish this mission. It is this possibility that may also inform why, and how, Göring was aware of the mission, since these projects would also clearly be known to him.
There is similar evidence of collusion on the British side, as the response has long been acknowledged to have been lackluster, including testimony from a Royal Air Force radar operator that "he was given orders to relay to aircraft that the incoming German airplane was not to be attacked."
Some have even accused the RAF of "pulling its punches" that May evening, stating that "at least some in the Royal Air Force command structure in Scotland were well aware of where Hess intended to land."
According to the "official" narrative, Hess's destination was Dungavel House, but its small airstrip has led some to suggest that a nearby RAF base was Hess's real target.
The airstrip at Dungavel was, quite simply, not long enough to accommodate an aircraft of the ME 110's size. Thus, if the target was an operational RAF base, then this implies not only collusion, involvement and conspiracy at some level on the part of the RAF in that region with the Hess flight, it also indicates the profile of who might have been dealing with Hess.
In short, Hess needed (1) someone with RAF command authority; and (2) he needed a peer, i.e., someone with access to the Monarch, and the Duke of Hamilton was both.
However, clearly, something went wrong on that fateful night, and Hess was forced to parachute:
By parachuting, Hess was placing the entire mission at risk, for he might be apprehended by parties not privy to the whole scheme, which, of course, is exactly what happened.
According to the standard narrative of the Hess flight that was rather abruptly decided upon by both the British and German authorities, Hess was a madman with mad intentions, and such a notion of a significant "peace faction" in Britain was almost entirely fanciful. But was it?
For certain high-ranking elements of the British establishment, the financial district and the anti-war peers, the fundamental problem was that they feared Britain would further indebt itself to the United States, leading to an eventual breakup of the Empire.
At the same time, these individuals also--rightly--saw the Soviet Union as the other major threat to Britain's Empire and hence, caught between the "bi-polar" world that would actually emerge after the war.
They advocated for an entente with Germany, and perhaps an eventual alliance, for only Germany could challenge the Soviet Union and offer counter-balancing weight to growing American influence.
Many Hess researchers also believe that the real reasons for parliamentary pressure on Edward VIII to abdicate was precisely his pro-German stance, rather than his stated intentions to marry the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson.
In the case of Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, after his abdication and marriage, he and his wife did dine with the Hess's at their home in Munich. Not only did Hess's contacts reach directly into the Royal Family itself, but this shows that at least some elements of the Royal Family were indeed favorable to the "peace faction."
This sentiment was far more popular than is often acknowledged by historians:
We have the King, the Queen, the mother of the King, a former Prime Minister and two potential Premiers, a large part of the aristocracy and many of the country's leading industrialists and financiers all sharing the same desire to make peace with Germany.
Although they had their different variants on the same theme, together they formed one great organic whole, a large and powerful body of opinion highly receptive to offers of negotiations.
As already stated, one of Germany's concerns at the time was an alliance, or even fusion, between the US and the UK, which was "always the stated goal of Cecil Rhodes, and his Rhodes scholarships were established as one of the mechanisms to effect this goal."
There is evidence that such a union was being seriously contemplated at that time--and its timing was directly related to Hess's flight. According to a White House spokesmen, President Roosevelt was to make a speech to the Pan-American Conference on 14 May 1941 of a "historic" nature. The White House leaks left the media buzzing with speculation.
The respected Washington-based journalist Leonard Engel wrote: "I have strong reason to believe Roosevelt will come out in favour of a union of the United States and Britain. He will probably specify the end of the war as the occasion for such a merger of the two great English-speaking nations, but I believe he will suggest an earlier date."
Because virtually no one seems to know about this proposal, it is tempting to deny that such a thing was even a possibility. Two days before Roosevelt was scheduled to give his momentous speech--and two days after Hess's arrival--he cancelled it.
According to the research of Carroll Quigley, there were in fact "pro Atlanticist-unionists" within the US and the UK who sought an actual union of the two countries.
In the hands of Cecil Rhodes and his secret society, this was to be based on a reincorporation of the United States into the British Commonwealth. There was thus, within British aristocracy at that time, not only a widespread "pro-Germany" peace movement, but also another movement ideologically at loggerheads with this goal, represented by Rhodes and his own deep contacts within the aristocracy that wished for Britain, not to cast its lot with Germany, but with the USA.
One may speculate that the tug-of-war within Britain was between a "treasonous" pro-Germany peace group represened by the Dukes of Hamilton, Westminster, Gloucester, Windsow and Kent, and thus implication significant swaths of the Royal Family, and a "treasonous" pro-America-unionist Atlanticist group represented by Churchill and his associations to Rhodes.
Clearly, numerous influential people in the British establishment opposed Hitler, but not necessarily Germany.
For example, in 1939, shortly after Germany's invasion of Poland, the future Duke of Hamilton submitted the following to the London Times:
There is no doubt that this country had no choice but to accept the challenge of Hitler's aggression against one country in Europe after another. But I believe that the moment the menace of aggression and bad faith has been removed, war against Germany becomes wrong and meaningless.
This generation is conscious that injustices were done to the German people in the era after the last war. There must be no repetition of that.
We do not grudge Germany Lebensraum, provided that Lebensraum is not made the grave of other nations. We should be ready to search for and find a colonial settlement, just to all people concerned, as soon as there exist effective guarantees that no race will be exposed to being treated as Hitler treated the Jews on [Kristallnacht].
Not only does the letter refer to Hitler's aggression and not to Germany's, but it also recognizes the principle of Lebensraum and mentions the post-WWI injustices suffered by Germany.
When these statements are read together, what it appears to be saying is that German territorial claims in central Europe would be acceptable to the British if it did not result in secondary status for non-Germans in those territories of the Reich.
Then a curious statement appears regarding "colonial settlements," a strange phrase, especially when following so closely on the reference to Lebensraum. The British peace faction could hardly have been ignorant of General Haushofer's understanding of the term, since it had been in open contact with him and his son Albrecht before the outbreak of the war.
Haushofer's concept was a rejection of the imperial policies of the German Empire prior to WWI, namely the acquisition of overseas colonies and a large navy. For Haushofer, the Lebensraum concept meant eastward expansion of the borders of the Reich to incorporate the resource-rich regions of Eastern Europe and European Russia, not the acquisition of overseas colonies.
Thus, while Hitler from time to time had made reacquisition of Germany's lost African and Pacific colonies and bases a matter of public discussion, it was not high on his list of priorities.
Why, then, the reference to colonies? The direct reference to the infamous Kristallnacht may give us a clue:
A clear though not explicitly stated signal is being sent: we are willing to negotiate with anyone we consider honorable, but that cannot be Hitler. This means that Hess was willing to negotiate on the "Jewish Question," and implies that the failure of his mission sealed their fate.
Hess, while a firm believer in international Jewish-Zionist plots, did offer protection to the Haushofers, as Frau Haushofer was half Jewish.
More importantly, it appears that Hess had been appalled by the Kristallnacht, and sought to mitigate its harsher measures as leader of the Party. Hess's friends had observed him in despair because of the pogrom, urging Hitler to "stop the outrages, without success."
The future Duke of Hamilton may therefore have been appealing directly to parties in Germany that were uncomfortable with the direction Hitler's Reich was taking.
The same day that the future Duke of Hamilton's "peace message" was published in the Times, the German BBC service broadcast the letter.
The implication is that they were only willing to discuss peace it he was replaced as leader. The letter also makes clear that a settlement must take account of the plight of Germany's Jews, but the most important message being sent is that [the Duke] is to be the contact within the peace group. Should anyone in Germany be willing to discuss these terms they should talk to him.
This letter may ultimately be one of the most crucial elements of the entire Hess Mess, as it becomes clear that either Hess "undertook his mission with the intention of dissembling to the British, concluding a peace, and keeping Hitler in power; or he undertook his mission with the intention of participating in the overthrow of Hitler's government, in order to procure a peace with Britain."
Despite Hess's loyalty towards Hitler, this possibility is strengthened by the curious actions of Göring on the night of Hess's flight, as well as Göring's own history of conducting peace negotiations with the British. Göring was Hitler's successor in offices of state, while Hess was his designated representative and successor in the party.
There never was a potential "colonels' coup" with more powerful colonels, for between them, Hess and Göring had the power and connections to pull it off.
An attempt had even been made in 1941 via contacts between the Duke of Hamilton and the Haushofers for the Duke and Hess to meet on neutral territory, specifically Lisbon. Lord Halifax was aware of these plans, and notably did not share them with Churchill, who had been chosen prime minister over Halifax just a few months previously.
The Haushofer response letter was copied and forwarded not only to the Duke of Hamilton, but also, because Hamilton was an RAF officer, the Haushofer reply was forwarded to counter-intelligence, that is, to MI-5, which unlike MI-6, was not infested with pro-peace party advocates, but, on the contrary, with pro-war "Atlanticist" and "Churchill" elements. When confronted by MI-5 with this letter, the Duke and his powerful backers had to shelve the Lisbon meeting until actual authorization came from Churchill's war cabinet.
Regardless, it was clear that preparations for a meeting continued on the German side, and this fact alone invalidates the nation that Hess decided to undertake such an absurd mission on some "crazy lark."
In addition, at Hess's express bidding, Albrect Haushofer had been negotiations with the British ambassador in Madrid, Sir Samuel Hoare. As a result of these negotiations, it was agreed that peace could not be reached without the removal of both Hitler and Churchill.
In other words, like it or not, Hoare and the men and factions behind him, and Hess and the men and factions behind him, are now both involved in defacto and de jure treason; the peace plot is now also an international bilateral coup d'etat plot.
It has even been claimed that Haushofer, Hess, Halifax and Hoare had planned a secret meeting somewhere in Portugal or Spain in early 1941. The French press even reported that Hess was in Spain in 1941, compelling the German press to issue a denial of the French story.
The British Foreign Office contacted King Carol of Romania--then exiled in Seville--for details. He confirmed that Hess had visited Madrid. Puzzled by Hoare's silence on the presence of such a high-ranking Nazi, the Foreign Office demanded to know if this was true: Sir Samuel's reply is a masterpiece of diplomatic--but curiously transparent--evasion. He said that if Hess were in Spain 'his arrival has been kept remarkably secret and his presence in town is not even rumoured yet."
Although the files of correspondence between the Madrid Embassy and the Foreign Office were routinely released to the Public Record Office after fifty years, all the documents relating to the weekend of 20-22 April 1941 have been held back until 2017.
It should be noted that three of the men who allegedly met in early 1941, Hess, Haushofer, and Halifax, were all deeply disturbed by the policies of the Nazis toward the Jews. In 1938, Lord Halifax himself had attempted to initiate discussions in the War Cabinet about providing a Jewish homeland in Western Australia or British Guiana.
Could Hess really bring himself to lead a coup d'etat against Hitler himself? An essay from his university days may give us a clue, namely that although Germany needed a "severe and ruthless" leader, notably, once he had succeeded in restoring Germany's standing in the world, "he would have to stand aside and allow a more moderate government to assume power."
To add further credence to this theory, in his initial contacts with the British after his capture, Hess indicated that he was not speaking for Hitler, but for Germany.
The German press, in the weeks and even days immediately prior to Hess's flight, the Deputy was being given even more attention than usual by the Nazi-controlled German media, stressing his importance to the regime and to Germany. The implication is clear: Hess not only was capable of being involved in such a scheme, but there may have been a quiet, concerted propaganda campaign to prepare the German people for his assumption of power with a more moderate coalition government, perhaps one including Göring.
Why then did Hess undertake such a flight at great personal risk to Great Britain itself?
Hess had to go to Britain, because his British counterpart, for whatever reason, was unable to meet Hess on "neutral territory."
When Hess was forced to parachute and land in a Scottish farmer's field, he was therefore "up for grabs" between two potentially opposing factions within the British government/intelligence apparatus. Conflicting narratives in the official account of what occurred after Hess's capture strongly support this scenario.
One version of events has Hess apprehended by a farmer armed with a pitchfork and then held captive in a cottage. At this point Hess insisted he was "Captain Alfred Horn" and that he had come to Scotland to meet the Duke of Hamilton. After getting taken into custody by the Home Guard, he was moved several times until finally ending up in the Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow.
According to the farmer's own account, Hess's first words were "Am I on the estate of the Duke of Hamilton?" Another early account indicated that Hess additionally stated to the police that his original intention had been to land at the small landing strip at the Duke's residence at Dungavel. Since Hess almost certainly would've known the strip would be too small for his plane, it's possible that by claiming this "he was protecting someone, or something, or both."
After he was taken to the cottage, the farmer's wife offered "Captain Horn" some tea, which Hess declined in good English. Strangely enough, two soldiers seem to suddenly "appear" in the cottage by the farmer's own account, with no explanation as to when they arrived...there are just suddenly there.
At this point, the two soldiers in the cottage responded that beer was what they drank in Britain, to which Hess replied that they drank it in Munich, where he came from. Even more interestingly, these two soldiers, Emyr Morris and Daniel McBride, were from a nearby top secret anti-aircraft signals unit.
After the war, McBride gave his own version of events, with the extraordinary claim that "high-ranking Government officials were aware of his coming." To support this assertion, McBride noted that "no air-raid warning were sounded, nor were the anti-aircraft gunnery control rooms plotting the course of Hess's plane alerted."
To make matters even more confusing, McBride claims that it was he and not the farmer who first apprehended Hess. This discrepancy is not the only example of a possible coverup at play. Again according to McBride himself:
[Horn/Hess] asked me to take him to the Duke's home, which, he said, was not far away. To this I could only reply that I had no power to do so but my superiors would probably do so later on. Shortly afterwards there was a commotion outside. The door was flung open and a Home Guard officer rushed in, followed by a number of his men.
The pilot said to the officer: "I wish to see the Duke of Hamilton. Will you take me to him?'
"You can save all that for the people concerned," said the officer. "At present you are coming with me." I resented this attitude and protested to the officer that the prisoner was in my charge awaiting an escort form my HQ. "Are you questioning my authority?" demanded the officer truculently.
"I cannot leave my prisoner, sir," I said. "If you take him I must go with you."
This commotion can be explained by possibility of the conflicting "factions" at play here.
Two factions were looking for Hess in western Scotland that night: the pro-peace party, which was expecting him, and another faction representing Churchill and his government which had got wind of the plot. It so, then at this moment, neither faction has complete or secure control over Hess.
To add to the air of intrigue surrounding Hess's capture, after McBride's death, a letter was discovered from his former commander W.B. Howieson that had advised McBride to "drop this Hess business" lest he "stir up a hornets' nest" with respect to the British Official Secrets Act. Perhaps even more remarkably, this letter was dated May 8, 1974.
How could this story "stir up a hornets' nest" in 1974? Howieson's letter implies that if the seemingly minor point of who captured Hess is admitted, other--much more damaging--information will somehow naturally flow from it, which is presumably why McBride's official report is still withheld. It seems that Howieson knew that something passed between McBride and Hess that night that is not even mentioned in the signaller's papers, which he seems to have been about to make public.
Presumably Howieson's words of caution persuaded McBride not to do so. But something significant must have passed between the two, because Rudolf Hess gave McBride his Iron Cross that night.
Regardless of how he was captured, Hess eventually was taken to Giffnock scout hall and he was searched and an inventory was made of his belongings.
Although this inventory has never been disclosed, an unsubstantiated theory claims Hess had brought an ancient Celtic text called the Lebor Fesa Runda which had once been given as a gift from John Dee to the German Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Allegedly, Hess acquired the text through his connections to the Thule society and was bringing the rare manuscript as a sort of symbolic diplomatic gift.
At Giffnock we encounter another important player in the Hess Mess, one Major Graham Donald, an officer in the Royal Observer Corps. Major Donald claims he was alerted to the crash and ordered to the scene, and he subsequently accompanied Hess and the entourage to Giffnock where he personally questioned Hess.
It should be noted that the official narrative leaves out a curious, and perhaps not so insignificant, detail: Did nobody recognize Hess? Hess was perhaps one of the most recognizable faces in the Nazi regime, and yet none of his British captors had openly acknowledged recognizing him. Perhaps even more curiously, Major Donald claims to have "determined" Hess's identity by almost ridiculous means.
Donald turned the conversation to Munich and its good beer (beer again!), and Donald then goes on to assert that Hess reacted very disapprovingly at the mention of beer. Donald concluded that he was a teetotaler, and since there were only two teetotalers in the upper echelons of the Reich--Hitler and Hess--and since the man in front of him obviously was not Hitler, he had to be Hess!
This is a long way to go to explain an obvious thing by unobvious and completely absurd deductive processes, for Hess was a familiar face in the newsreels of the period; one had only to look at him and see that it was Hess, or at least, a close facsimile thereof. One did not need absurd explanation about "teetotalers in the Nazi regime."
Another "anomaly" in the aftermath of capture was the British authority's lack of effort to search for any other individuals, since Hess's plane was a two-seater!
Of the many characters in the Hess Mess, none are are as mysterious and perhaps as crucial to the plot as Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, 14th Duke of Hamilton. The Duke appears to be tantalizingly tough to track down in the days following Hess's arrival.
According to the standard narrative that was eventually to evolve, Hamilton received a call about the mysterious visitor in the middle of the night in his capacity as an RAF operational commander, and promptly went back to sleep.
But not so according to a story from the Glasgow Herald of May 16, 1941, a story that appeared prior to the finalizing of the standard narrative, for according to it, the Duke of Hamilton did meet Hess, along with members of the Foreign Office and unspecified intelligence services while the latter was being transferred to a hospital to treat the sprain in his ankle that he had sustained after parachuting into Scotland. Hamilton's wife confirmed that after receiving the phone call, the Duke departed, and did not return home until the afternoon of Sunday.
Another strange event concerning a Polish officer named Roman Battaglia adds to the secrecy and absurdity of the Hess affair. Battaglia was an intelligence officer in General Sikorski's Polish government-in-exile, and for some reason he was allowed to interrogate Hess at Glasgow Police Headquarters for two hours, while speaking in German, and almost entirely unsupervised. In addition, none of the other British officers present spoke German.
The reactions of the RAF in breaking its standard protocols for the interrogation of German pilots, the strange two hour session with Battaglia, the Glasgow Herald article, all point to the conclusion that Hess--or someone--was expected that night. The daughter of one observer corps officer was told by her father that the pilot was none other than the Deputy Führer himself.
This comedy of errors has cemented its way into the standard narrative, and indeed the series of events seems so farcical that a coverup on some level was almost certainly at play.
The story of Hess's arrival and capture looks like one of the most serious indictments of British military--and intelligence--incompetence ever recorded. It is littered with bungling, indifference and blatant dereliction of duty, often by top men, and in a crisis--a matter of national security.
It that is a fair summary, then perhaps it is understandable why the authorities should try to bury the whole thing and forget it ever happened. But if it isn't a case of wide-ranging ineptitude, we can only understand all the anomalies in terms of quite another scenario.
Was the Duke of Hamilton planning to meet Hess as a representative of the British peace faction? Did a series of unfortunate navigational errors cause Hess to miss his intended target?
Hess, in making landfall at the wrong point and behind schedule, set into motion a cascading series of errors that meant that he was apprehended by the Home Guard, in other words, by "outsiders" who were not part of the plot.
This explains Hess's repeated insistence upon being taken to the Duke of Hamilton, as well as a possible contingency plan set in motion in case the flight went awry.
The idea of a contingency rationalizes Hess's response to his initial situation in the UK, for he would have been viewing each new arrival on the scene as a potential ally, but how was he to tell a friend from a foe? Presumably some form of password would have been pre-arranged, which would account for the surreal rerun of the conversation about Germany beer..."
This may also explain the appearance of the Polish officer, who was contacting Hess on behalf the Duke of Hamilton and the peace party. But why the obfuscation from the Duke himself? Why didn't he just use his rank and take charge of Hess?
The British component of the conspiracy was not acting under orders or sanctions of the government...Hess had already fallen into the hands of those not involved in the scheme. The British side of the plot was now engaged in a damage-limitation exercise: too many people were now aware of the mystery airman who kept asking for the Duke of Hamilton.
According to the Duke's version of events, he didn't contact London until the afternoon of May 11, after he had seen Hess and after he had visited the crash site. And here the official narrative becomes even more muddled, as the Duke's version of this contact differs slightly from the version of Jock Colville, Churchill's private secretary.
The Duke maintained that he had contacted the Foreign Office in the afternoon, and the official who answered the phone refused to connect him to a superior without a stated reason, which frustrated the Duke. Fortunately, Colville seems to have just "shown up" at the right time. According to the Duke, Colville claimed that he was ordered to the Foreign Office by Churchill because the Duke "had some interesting information" to convey.
However, according to Colville's version of events, the phone call took place in the morning, and his first words to the Duke were "Has somebody arrived?," a statement that suggests that "he, at least, was expecting a certain 'somebody.'" Regardless, contact was made:
The Duke immediately flew south to meet Churchill personally at Ditchley Hall--Churchill's secret wartime country residence--and apprise him of the development. The next day, Churchill ordered Ivone Kirkpatrick to Scotland in order to identify the prisoner. Kirkpatrick served in the Foreign Office and personally knew Hess.
After the Duke had briefed Churchill, the Prime Minister offered one of his many legendary quips: 'Well, Hess or no Hess, I'm going to see the Marx Brothers.'
This is usually taken to show his true bulldog spirit at its best. However, as with much else in this story, Churchill's words might not have meant quite what they seemed.
Who were the "Marx brothers"? This was not a reference to a film, but rather a code that Churchill used to refer to the Royal Family, and in particular, the brother-princes of King George VI.
Hess eventually spent some time in the Tower of London, where a curious incident occurred that has fueled much speculation. Charles Fraser-Smith, the inspiration for the gadget wizard "Q" from James Bond lore, was called in by MI5 to measure Hess's Luftwaffe captain's uniform.
Informed that Hess has been drugged in the tower and that they would have to measure him quickly, Fraser-Smith and his team took all the measurements. Besides being proof of the fact that Hess was drugged on more than one occasion, the question inevitably arises as to why British intelligence would need an exact copy of Hess's Luftwaffe uniform.
While it has been speculated that the copy was for the potential use of a double to send back to Germany, others have claimed that both MI5 and MI6 had begun considering substituting a double for Hess shortly after his arrival.
In later life Fraser-Smith went further, maintaining that high level doubts always existed in MI6 about whether or not the prisoner in British custody was, in fact, Hess. A double would also explain why the British prohibition of photographs of their infamous prisoner was so rigorously enforced.
At this point, the Hess mess truly starts to accelerate its descent into the surreal as "Hess" himself begins to lose his senses. While being held at Mytchett Place under very tight security, "Hess's mental and emotional behavior appeared to deteriorate dramatically" and he attempted suicide more than once.
Hess claimed he was suffering from amnesia and that he was unable to recall the circumstances of how he had come to be captive, and even at times unable to recall prominent features of his life and family.
And here we reach what is perhaps a pivotal juncture in this saga. On June 25, 1942, Hess was moved to Maindiff Court in Wales, a move that occurred with no military escort. The reason given for this secrecy was to foil an alleged plot to kidnap Hess, however that was rendered irrelevant after details of the move were leaked to the Daily Mail, a national tabloid.
As for actual plots to kidnap Hess, there was reason for concern, as illustrated by an important incident revealed in 1979 by a British major from the 11th Fighter Group:
He was summoned by the group commander who informed him the group had received "a message from Germany" alerting them to an immanent raid by SS commandos. He was ordered to move an anti-aircraft gun unit ot the area to intercept the raid, as its intended mission was to assassinate Hess!
The would-be SS assassins were apprehended by the British, with maps to Dungavel, and promptly executed without trial, the only two spies allegedly executed without any surviving record of a trial or of their execution.
What this story highlights is just how much internecine intrigue there was even among the intelligence apparatuses of countries like Great Britain and Germany.
In any case, intelligence was circulating in Germany that placed Hess in Scotland during the time when he was supposed to be at Mytchett Place. According to this information, which may or may not have been spread as part of an intelligence deception campaign: "Hess had been housed in a villa in Scotland, had his personal servants and wanted for nothing. Churchill had expressly decreed that Hess, on account of his rank, should be accommodated as a general."
In this report, it should be noted that Hess is specifically mentioned as being in complete possession of his mental faculties, and even was witnessed driving around London under escort!
If the basic premise that Hess was in Scotland was true, then "what was going on at Maindiff Court? If he was not there in the period between June 1942 and October 1945, what about the carefully stage-managed 'public appearances': the drives in the country, the picnics and the walks?
Was a double substituted for Hess? If so, when?
The Hess "double" theory not only explains the need to duplicate his uniform, but it also explains the two reports of Hess in two different places at once. In this scenario, the "Hess" at Maindiff was a double, and the multiple drugging sessions "Hess" underwent after his arrival at Maindiff were in fact mind-control sessions. Similarly, this would explain the decision of the British to build an entire "suite" at their military hospital in Berlin for Hess.
In addition, RAF military police did confirm that meetings took place between Hess and Churchill, and a Scots Guards member asserted that Hess was "in the Tower of London and had been taken to secret meetings with Churchill in late June 1941." However, at the time of these alleged meetings, by official accounts "Hess" was at Mytchett Place.
Politically, there could be any number of reasons for the creation of a double, from the need to protect the real Hess from assassination or rescue attempts, to the need of the Churchill government to present a facade that "Hess was cooperating" with the sitting British government and not trying to topple it.
After all, it was well known that shortly after his capture Hess claimed that he was under "the King's personal protection" and that he insisted that messages be taken directly to George VI.
While often dismissed as fanciful, support for this claim was uncovered by Hess Mess researchers who were anonymously contacted by someone at the Foreign Office. With regards to Hess's claim, the contact replied that a British colonel name "Pilcher" has been ordered to be held incommunicado at Balmoral Palace from 1941 until his death in 1970 for "signing a letter of safe conduct in the King's name."
One man threatened to leak the facts--Colonel W.S. Pilcher. He was dealt with, relieved of his command and thereafter ordered to Scotland. He lived the rest of his lift a virtual recluse until he died in 1970. His exit from a former social life was remarkable.
A letter would explain the apparent confusion on the night of Hess's capture, for it would certainly cause all manners of confusion. Was the letter fake? Was it real?
The fourth son of King George V and Queen Mary, Prince George became the Duke of Kent in 1934 and held the title until his untimely death in 1942.
The Duke of Kent was sophisticated, multi-lingual, and most importantly, functioned as a kind of personal intelligence officer to his brother the King, and had personally met and dined with Hess before the war.
In addition, according to researchers of the Hess Mess, the Duke of Kent was a member of a "reception committee" that had congregated to receive Hess. Allegedly, this "committee" consisted of members of the British "peace" faction, as well as representatives of the Polish government in exile and the international Red Cross.
In this scenario, "the head of the Polish government in exile had offered the throne of Poland--long vacant--to the Duke of Kent."
The reception of the Poles in the reception committee thus is logical from two points of view: (1) the Poles would have to have been involved in any general peace settlement between Britain and Germany, because of the former's guarantee and the latter's military occupation of the country, and (2) because the offer of the Polish throne to the Duke of Kent may have been a component of the peace plan previously negotiated between Hess and his British counterparts; for the Germans, the Duke would have represented an acceptable head of state for any reestablished Polish rump state.
This rationalizes why a Polish officer was allowed to speak to Hess for two hours in German without supervision. Hess had come not to continue negotiations, but rather, to finalize the deal.
The Hess peace plan may explain a curiously timed decline in intensity of the bombing campaigns of both Britain and Germany:
This near cessation of intense combing suggests that not only was there coordination between the British and German sides surrounding Hess's peace mission, but that Hess and Göring were both involved in the plot. This idea was confirmed by Hess himself in his statements to Churchill's representative, Ivone Kirkpatrick, for he stated that "he and Göring were working to the same agenda."
Curiously, one of the places the "bi-locating" Hess was sighted in 1942 was at the home of an "equerry to the Duke of Kent, a point that indicates that the "peace party" had regained control of the real Hess."
The real Hess was then apparently returned to Scotland, where he was seen in 1942 by Robin Sinclair, while "Hess" stayed in Maindiff Court. According to Sinclair, Hess was quartered in Braemore Lodge.
And at long last we arrive at the tragedy that not only took the life of the Duke of Kent, but may offer a vital clue in solving the mystery of what happened to the real Rudolf Hess.
On the 25th of August, 1942, the Duke of Kent took off in a Short-Sunderland flying boat, allegedly on a good-will flight to visit British troops stationed in Iceland. Tragically his aircraft crashed on a rocky crag in Scotland known as Eagle's Rock. The Duke was killed, becoming the first member of the Royal Family to die in military service in five centuries.
However, the "flight to Iceland" may have been a cover story. The Duke's flying boat was painted white, the color for aircraft flying to and from neutral Sweden, suggesting that Sweden, not Iceland, was the destination. And that's not all:
There appears to have been an unaccounted-for body on the Duke of Kent's aircraft, a body, moreover, that it appears that King George VI himself personally made inquiries about when he visited his younger brother's crash site.
Additionally, the flight plan itself has disappeared, and the weather service personnel on the east coast of Scotland were sworn to secrecy and forced to sign Britain's Official Secrets Act. Why the weather personnel on the east coast of Scotland? Because the Duke of Kent's aircraft had taken off from the east coast and not, as one would expect for a flight to Iceland, the west coast.
Göring had already conducted peace discussions with Sweden, so it's entirely possible that the Duke of Kent was attempting to return Hess to Germany to remove him from danger and/or complete final arrangements in the "deal."
In addition, a cable from the German Ambassador in Portugal to the German Foreign Ministry was uncovered that states:
As the Embassy has learned, confidentially, the death of the duke of Kent has been discussed recently in the innermost circles of the British club here. The gist of the talk being that an act of sabotage was involved.
It is said that the Duke, like the Duke of Windsor, was sympathetic towards an understanding with Germany and so gradually had become a problem for the government clique. The people who were accompanying him were supposed to have expressed themselves along similar lines, so that getting them out of the way would also have been an advantage.
To make matters even more suspicious, General Sikorski, the head of the Polish government in exile that had allegedly offered the Polish crown to the Duke of Kent, perished less than a year later in an air crash off Gibraltar.
Two principal players had been eliminated, Hess himself and the Duke of Kent, and with them were removed key components of the possible peace plan--the Duke of Kent as proposed Polish monarch, and Hess as acceptable replacement for Hitler--had been removed from the equation.
Additionally, a very serious message had been sent to the King and Royal family, one indicating that further interference would not be acceptable. And finally, the head of the Polish government in exile might also have been "taken out." Everyone who could talk about the "details" of the plan was eliminated.
After the war, suspicions as to the identity of "Hess" would soon start to spread, including among members of the US intelligence community.
Many of those who encountered "Hess" at the Nuremberg Trials noticed that something was "off" or wrong with the prisoner, including his former colleagues and even Göring himself.
In what has been described as "the most telling episode at Nuremberg," none other than Allen Dulles had doubts about the prisoner's identity.
If Dulles's presence in this opera seems almost comically predictable, the entrance of Dr. Ewen Cameron is equally as sinister, as well as profoundly suggestive.
Dr. Cameron is notorious for his role in the CIA's "mind control" program, MK-Ultra, having developed the technique of "psychic driving," whereby he hoped to erase one personality from an individual, and substitute another. Cameron was one of the "pioneers" working in the field of mind control.
According to Gordon Thomas, in his study of the military and intelligence uses of psychiatry and psychology, Journey into Madness:
Dulles had reason to believe that the man Dr. Cameron was to examine was not Rudolf Hess but an impostor; that the real Hess had been secretly executed on Churchill's orders. Dulles had explained that Dr. Cameron could prove the point by a simple physical examination of the man's torso. If he was the genuine Hess, there should be scar tissue over his left lung, a legacy from the day the young Hess had been wounded in the First World War.
Cameron was never to make that examination. The next day, when Hess was brought to him, he was handcuffed to a British Military Police sergeant, who refused point blank to remove the handcuffs so that Cameron could take the prisoner's shirt off--or even unbutton it--to look at his chest.
Although the infamous mind control expert was unable to examine "Hess" during the Nuremberg Trials, many years later a British physician did. His name was W. Hugh Thomas, and in 1979 he published a controversial book called The Murder of Rudolf Hess that was inspired after he personally had the opportunity to extensively examine the prisoner at a British Military Hospital.
According to the shocked physician, Hess showed no scars of the war wounds he had suffered in WW1.
Neither chest nor arms carried any wound-scars whatsoever. This man had not been shot in the chest during the First World War, or at any other time. Nor had he been wounded in the arm. For 32 years the world had believed he was Rudolf Hess. Yet now I knew that unless the historical records were wrong, he could not be.
After seeing "Hess" again on a follow up visit, Dr. Thomas politely asked the prisoner what had happened to his war wounds.
The question had a startling effect. The patient's manner changed instantly. From being in a sunny, cheerful mood, he turned chalk-white and began to shake.
For an instant he stared at me in what appeared bewilderment or even utter disbelief. Then he looked down and avoided my eyes. After what felt like ages he muttered [in German], "Too late, too late."
After sharing his suspicions with the Hess family, Frau Hess maintained that although she believed "Hess" was indeed her husband, she also confirmed that he had suffered severe wounds during WWI that left significant scarring.
In hopes of putting the various conspiracy theories to rest, "Hess's" body was exhumed after his suspicious death, and the Foreign Office announced that they did indeed discover a "fibrous, irregular roughly circular old scar typical of an exit wound in a posterior position on the left side of the chest." But this "proof" raises even more questions:
As this was over a year after Prisoner Number Seven's death and burial, the 'finding' seems a trifle suspicious. Why hadn't this information been provided when they had the body? And if this description is correct, why had no previous examination noticed the scar?
Clearly, Hess's medical records at the British Military Hospital where he had been treated for over twenty years did not record either the front or back scar. Either they were astonishingly inefficient, or the scars simply did not exist.
To make matters even more confusing, "Hess" managed to read a newspaper article about Thomas' book in spite of strict regulations at Spandau. When a visiting French pastor asked the prisoner about his "wounds" or lack thereof, he was informed that "a bullet had passed right through his chest, brushing the heart and exiting under the left shoulder blade."
However, the exact details of his war wounds weren't actually known at the time, and only when the Bavarian archives were released in 1989 did the public finally get access to Hess's military record.
According to the Bavarian archival discovery in 1989, the path of the bullet was not through the chest, but through the armpit, and did not graze the heart.
Another potentially significant anomaly worth mentioning is the curious case of his British dental charts, the first taken in September 1941 during his stay at Mytchett place and then again from 1943 and Maindiff Court. According to the Doppelgänger Hess theory, the 1941 "Hess" was genuine and the 1943 "Hess" was a substitute.
While the filling and bridgework are similar, though not identical, a glaring problem emerges with the fact that the 1941 chart records a crown and a gold tooth which are missing from the 1943 chart. Such a discrepancy could be the result of mere sloppy record keeping, or it could be result of very accurate recording-keeping, and hence, also be an oversight on the part of British intelligence which forgot to "scrub" this incriminating fact from the records.
A few more "discrepancies" are worth mentioning, despite potentially being mere insignificant details. Specifically, the "real" Hess was a committed anti-smoker, a vegetarian, and had impeccable table manners, yet prisoner "Hess" craved cigarettes, ate meat, and displayed markedly poor table manners while in captivity.
In addition, according to Frau Hess, her husband "played tennis well and with enthusiasm," and yet the British captive allegedly knew nothing about the sport. His wife also noted that upon finally seeing him in 1969, he "had a deeper voice." This last point is potentially more significant than it might seem, as "a normal man's voice rises with age, rather than deepens.*
Inspired by these disturbing discoveries, Dr. Thomas began to notice something "off" about the admittedly detailed letters "Hess" had written to his family while in captivity:
At first sight the numerous references to family affairs and friends seem to constitute obvious proof that the writer of the letters was Hess himself. Yet if the correspondence is studied in chronological order, a striking pattern soon emerges.
A very high proportion of the events and people mentioned occur first in earlier letters which the prisoner had received from Germany: almost everything he says about his former life is an echo of something already written by another correspondent.
Thomas's account would seem to vindicate the suspicions of Allen Dulles, and as a result, the presence of Dr. Cameron becomes pregnant with implications.
Dr. Cameron was by no means the first in this field, as "British psychiatrists L.G.M. Page and R.J. Russell first published a paper about similar techniques in 1948, a paper summarizing many years of intensive experimentation."
In Cameron's hands, the techniques pioneered by the British psychiatrists would be taken to new levels, one implications of which was that an amnesiac, quasi-somnambulistic state could be induced by cocktails of drugs, and prolonged sleep, during which patients--or rather, victims--were highly susceptible to suggestion, including the inducement of false memories.
These considerations raise yet a further possibility: was "Hess" possibly used as a "mind control" experiment subject for the express purpose of sending a Manchurian candidate back to Nazi Germany, to assassinate top Nazi leaders? A meeting occurred in Great Britain in 1944 where this possibility was proposed.
The implications of this meeting are profound, for it suggests (1) that "Hess" was already the deliberate subject of such mind-control techniques, and (2) that those techniques were being used to create the "Manchurian Candidate," the perfect, mind-controlled assassin and spy.
And here we reach what perhaps is the deepest philosophical question in the "Hess" double scenario: could they actually convince a double that he was Rudolf Hess?
The human mind is far too complex for that to be a safe and reliable option, and there could have been no guarantee that any apparent success would be lasting. It is, however, possible through the use of drugs and hypnosis to reinforce suggestions that bypass the brain's critical faculties.
The need for constant "reinforcement" of these induced memories and patterns of behavior might explain why the British government constructed an entire "Hess suite" in its military hospital in Berlin.
To reinforce this theory, the "Hess" at the Nuremberg trials was often confused and expressed difficulty at remembering details of key events. In addition, he also claimed that the British were drugging him:
The suffering was indescribable. If they had shot me or killed me with gas or even let me starve, it would have been humane in comparison. They began to add acids to the food as well. After meals I could often only sit, or walk bent with pain.
Even before the end of the war, "Hess" began to report that he was having difficulty with his memory, describing "looming amnesia" to his doctors:
He was having difficulty remembering things, even things that had happened only a short time previously. He informed his British doctors his memory had failed completely, and he was to remain in this state "for almost two years."
In his own statement for the Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, "Hess" elaborated:
My memory failed quite a lot. I was constantly asked strange questions about my past. If I answered them correctly, they were disappointed. If I was not able to answer them, they were obviously pleased. So I proceeded to increasingly feign a lack of memory.
At one point, "Hess" admitted that he was feigning insanity "because he was hoping to be sent home." However, one of Hess's physicians dissented, writing "I cannot accept his own statement that the memory loss never existed. There was at that time a true partial dissociation of the personality, which permitted the patient to 'take in' what was going on around him but caused difficult of recall." At Nuremberg, "Hess" elaborated:
Slowly my memory returned fully, even though the brain poison was given to me for at least two years. The latter was the reason that I continued to pretend to have a loss of memory. Since I have been given a brain poison on each possible occasion in Nuremberg I again took to "feigning a lack of memory" in an increasing manner. Only at the moment I began to make my closing statement did I let my memory "return."
At one point, Hess replied to an officer who called his name: "There is no Rudolf Hess here. But if you are looking for Convict Number 125, then I'm your man!"
In addition, Göring reported pressed "Hess" to divulge some "great secret" on numerous occasions. Even more notably, Hess reportedly failed to recognize Göring and Haushofer at Nuremberg.
In his final statement to the Tribunal, "Hess" made his last public statement ever, talking of the "predictions" he said he had made before the start of the trial:
Predictions that people would make false statement on oath; that some of the defendants would act strangely. *He spoke of former political trials where the defendants actually clapped in frenzied approval when their death sentences were passed.
It all pointed to the same ever influence; the secret force that made men act and speak "according to the orders given them."
Hess suggested that the German concentration camp guards, and the scientists who experimented on the inmates, were under a similar form of control as the Moscow defendants, and even that Hitler's reported mental abnormalities in the final years were due to an external cause.
"Some of them were changed from time to time. Some of the new ones who came in place of those who had been changed had strange eyes. They were glassy and like eyes in a dream. This symptom, however, lasted only a few days and then they made a completey normal impression."
Note that "Hess" is alleging some sort of "mind control" experiment is taking place, one of truly international extent, for it is, by his confused lights, occurring not just in the Soviet Union, and not just in Nazi Germany, but in Great Britain as well, with his own doctors and guards apparently subject to some sort of "procedure" prior to becoming involved with him.
While most dismiss these ramblings as an attempt to deflect responsibility away from Hitler and the Nazis, researchers of the Hess Mess have suggested that "his real goal is not justification of Nazi atrocities, but rather, simply to persuade the Tribunal that such things are possible because he was building up to some revelation concerning himself."
In fact, during Hess's closing remarks, this revelation was perhaps to be forthcoming, as right when he stated "In the spring of 1942..." he was interrupted by the president of the tribunal and informed that he was at the end of his allotted speaking time.
The Tribunal would understandably not want Hess to make too many statements about "mind control" on the record and in such a public venue, at the very least to prevent it from being used as an "insanity" defense.
One physician in particular tried to prevent "Hess" from even standing trial:
The only physician urging that "Hess" was not fit to stand trial was Lord Moran, personal physician of Winston Churchill, who had literally pushed himself into the three-man British team of physicians at Nuremberg and who omitted all reference to his diagnosis of "Hess's" unfitness for trial from his memoirs."
Indeed, if "Hess" had not stood trial, he would not have gone free. "Instead, he would have been incarcerated in a top-security mental institution somewhere in Britain."
It may never have been the intention for "Hess" to stand trial, but "Hess" thwarted this by giving a speech insisting that he was indeed mentally fit.
Here's an image of "Hess" at Nuremberg, with Göring at his side. Here is another: note that Göring appears to be covering his mouth while laughing while on the front right Joachim von Ribbentrop seems almost perplexed. In the back row, former Grand Admiral Dönitz appears to be glaring at "Hess."
This picture and the odd "seating" arrangement may have some synchronous symbolic significance, since all four men are implicated in the Nazi Antarctic Expedition.
While the mention of Antarctica in this context may seem straight out of left field, the Hess Mess has still more surprises in store...
Does all of this honestly explain the massive amount of secrecy surrounding Hess that has lasted for the better part of a century?
Does a secret peace plan and coup-plot between elements of the British peerage and Royal Family on the one hand, and powerful elements of the Nazi hierarchy really explain that secrecy to this day? The biggest question in the whole Hess Mess of doubles, covert operations, planned coups-d'etat against Churchill or Hitler or both, is what is the Big Secret?
With all of this in mind, "Rudolf Hess" becomes the most extraordinary figures of World War II and the Cold War.
Through all the vicissitudes of the Cold War, the four powers, even as they were on the brink of nuclear war with each other, remained oddly united about the matter of Rudolf Hess: Hess--or hid double--had to remain imprisoned at Spandau.
Prisoner Number Seven transcended the momentary Cold War confrontations and geopolitics, and this fact alone suggest the immensity of whatever secret lies buried in the all the debris of the Hess Mess.
What did these four powers know? Researchers into the Hess Mess have suggested that one of these "secrets" might have to do with the curious nature of Germany's "surrender" at the end of WWII, which notably did not include an official surrender of the Nazi Party.
Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the actual legal head of state and government at the end of WWII had been in Allied custody since its end. Yet, they had taken no steps to ensure that he personally signed any document of the surrender of the German state itself, nor any document outlawing the Nazi Party. After his death, this left only Speer--released the same day as Dönitz--and "Hess" as the last remaining individuals who could have any legal claim to any offices of the Reich.
Yet, no effort was undertaken to tidy up the legal niceties, and that indeed may have been the point: so long as "Hess" was alive, those niceties remained to connect the modern German state to the previous one in an unbroken chain of legal ties dating--if one wanted to assemble the mountain of documentation to sustain the argument--all the way back to the holy Roman Empire. Perhaps, for whatever reason, the Four Allied Powers wished to break that link entirely.
The peculiarities of the surrender of the Nazi Party (or lack thereof) notwithstanding, the uneasy fact is that "Hess" remained a point of odd and anomalous unanimity among the Four Powers even at other moments of heightened tension during the Cold War, long after the other Spandau Nazis were dead.
In order to address the criticism for the seemingly absurd maintenance of an entire facility for one frail inmate, the Allies claimed they were continually pressing for the release of "Hess" on humanitarian grounds, and that it "was the Soviets who continually played the bad guy and vetoed any such notion, conveniently enabling the western Allies to blame Russia."
But then something happened, and that something was Mikhail Gorbachev, the new "liberal-minded" General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was seriously considering a complete reversal of prior Soviet policy regarding Hess, and dropping its veto on his release for humanitarian reasons. It was even rumored that this would be announced when the Soviets took their next monthly turn at guarding Hess.
Perhaps very significantly, there were no Soviet officers on duty at the time of "Hess's" death.
Hess's male nurse, Abdallah Melaouhi, shared the good news of this potential release with his patient:
But Hess failed to react at all. After about five minutes I asked him if he wasn't happy about the news. After taking a deep breath, he answered, "You fool!" Shocked, I asked him what he meant. He answered, slightly irritated, "Do you have to know everything? If the Russians release me that would be my death."
Melaouhi, who eventually would have firsthand experience with the extremely suspicious circumstances surrounding the eventual death of "Hess," would become convinced that his patient was murdered, and would later write a book on the event called Rudolf Hess: His Murder and Betrayal. Dr. Hugh Thomas, one of the most vocal proponents of the "double" hypothesis, shared Melaouhi's suspicions.
Taken in the context of the extremely turbulent political climate at the time, the incarceration and alleged murder of Prisoner Number Seven becomes astonishingly significant.
His death itself, and its timing, also forms party of the mystery, for it is as if "Hess's" death was the agreed-upon signal to flip a switch, for within half of a decade of his death, the leaders of three of the countries that had stood guard over him.
Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher were gone; Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, whose father had his own odd connections to the Nazis, was president; Germany was reunified, and within months, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were broken up; Margaret Thatcher was ousted from her premiership and from the Conservative Party leadership, fulminating against the growing signs of a European Union from the back benches, warning of the dangers of a common currency and the loss of British sovereignty.
If the connection to the fall of Thatcher seems a stretch, it has been alleged that the personal secretary of Prime Minister, Ian Gow, "had told Hugh Thomas that in return for the latter's dropping of his allegations that Hess was murdered, the government would be prepared to admit that there was doubt about the identity of the prisoner."
Dr. Thomas refused to drop his allegations, and Mr. Gow was murdered himself by a car bomb soon after, supposedly from an attack by the IRA, though his murder remains unsolved to this day.
While here is not the place for an exhaustive overview of the death of Prisoner Number Seven, his nurse Melaouhi sums it up nicely: "The question was no longer whether or not Hess had been murdered, but rather who had committed the crime and why."
When I finally reached the small building I immediately noticed that a struggle had taken place. Rudolf Hess was lying lifeless on the floor, his arms and legs stretched out on the ground.
Two men dressed in American uniforms were standing alongside him--the men's uniforms were much too small, with the uniform of the larger man almost bursting at the seams. Although I knew everyone who had access to "Prisoner No. 7," I had never seen these two men before.
But were they really Americans? Guards wearing the uniforms of the four custodial Allied governments were not allowed to enter the inner area of the prison. Soldiers were even categorically forbidden to approach the prisoner.
Melaouhi's account is essential, as his firsthand experience is extremely important in getting a clearer picture of "Hess's" final days:
I realized that Hess couldn't have hanged himself even if he had tried. Toward the end of his life, my patient was so weak that he needed a special chair with an electric lifting device to even get up. It was impossible for Hess to have killed himself in the manner described by the Allies by placing a cable around his neck and tying it into a knot and then either handing or strangling himself to death.
He was even unable to pick up a spoon when he ate; I had to put it into his hand. He would therefore have been unable to tie a knot in a cord or cable--he couldn't even tie his shoelaces. He also couldn't lift his arms above his shoulders so that he never would have been able to tie a cord to the handle of the window from he allegedly hanged himself.
After visiting his patient's body at the British Military Hospital, he observed British officials "cheerfully drinking champagne and apparently celebrating something." Upon his return to the scene later that day, "almost everything had been moved including all the traces of what had happened." Melaouhi also noticed "several strange men" milling about the area.
On the way out of Spandau, he inquired of the prison secretary who the strange people were, and was informed that they were "all officers form the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation."
Within 48 hours of the death of Prisoner Number Seven, the facility began to be demolished to make room for a new shopping center. While this was ostensibly done to prevent Spandau from becoming a "Neo-Nazi" shrine (shades of the "death" of Osama bin Laden), one can't help but recall other incidents where the "evidence" was disposed of under curious circumstances, namely in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing and the attack on the World Trade Center complex on 9/11.
Prisoner Number Seven was not to leave Spandau alive.
Wolf Hess, the only child of the enigmatic Nazi, could never accept that the prisoner he had grown to love might not be his real father. However, he was extremely vocal about his suspicions of the medical treatments "Hess" was receiving.
Wolf noted that his father's death certificate "was signed only by British personnel" but that his father's death "occurred in the month of August, during the American guard rotation." After arriving on the scene with his lawyer, they "were neither allowed inside the prison complex nor were they allowed to view Wolf Hess's father, and no further information was forthcoming."
Eventually, after much confusion, they were given three separate accounts of "Hess's" death, with one version placing the death in Spandau and another in the British Military Hospital.
Wolf and his family had his own suspicions about the British Hospital, claiming that attempts had already been made on his "Hess's" life on two separate occasions. In one instance he refers to a "coup-like transfer" of the prisoner to the hospital, and that a well-timed "peculiar" letter that Wolf received that prompted a visit may have "forestalled a murder-by-medical-emergency."
Despite assurances that Hess would be returned to Spandau within 24 hours, Wolf was eventually told that "his father did not want to see him until the end of the month." Undeterred, Wolf and his lawyer traveled to Spandau to confront the authorities directly.
After being met with further resistance, they were denied their written application for a visit, but they were told that "he could go to the door of his father's hospital room with the four Allied governors, and look at his father from the door!" According to Wolf:
Through an open door, I could see my father, about 10 feet away. The attendants had pushed two chairs together, sat him down on them like a string puppet and covered him with a blanket. He looked frightening: pale, hollow-cheeked, eyes sunk deep into their sockets, flickering and looking unsteadily into a void. He was obviously not in full possession of his faculties. What had they done to him? I don't know for how long I stared at my father like that.
The French Governor went to my father and spoke to him, insistently, like one might speak to a child, or to someone who is not all there. He had a surprise for him, he said, his son was here and wanted to speak to him. My father interrupted the Frenchman, his voice sounded hollow and alien. No, he said, he didn't want to speak to his son now, not until month's end. He repeated this in the exact same words he had scribbled down on that paper. It was eerie. Was he drugged?
I couldn't take it anymore. I took a step forward and said loud and clear: "Father, I am your son and am here to talk to you. Can you recognize me?"
What would happen? Would the commandants drag me out of the room? Nothing happened, they stood behind me as if in silent fascination. My father showed no sign of recognition, his face was unchanged.
He just repeated, as though memorized or forced, the one senseless sentence he had already expressed in writing. I repeated my question twice, a little louder each time. Then I gave up. we left. There was deathly silence, none of the Governors even said a word.
14 days later, I found my father in almost splendid health--quite "his own self" again, one could say..But for me, it was the ultimate proof that something was very wrong on March 12, 1987. My father's condition at that time cannot have had any natural causes, it must have been artificially induced.
Although Wolf speculates that he had prevented his father's murder, it seems reasonable to surmise that he had interrupted a "very different procedure, one designed to reinforce prior imprinted patterns of behavior. Had Wolf interrupted a mind control procedure?"
After the death of Prisoner Number Seven, Wolf and his lawyer procured testimony from a South African lawyer "with contacts to Western secret services" which was presented to a judge in the form of an affidavit, reading:
Reich Minister Rudolf Hess was killed on the orders of the British Home Office. The murder was carried out by two members of the British SAS. The planning of the murder was well as its direction was carried out by MI-5. The secret service action whose aim was the murder of Reich Minister Rudolf Hess was so hastily planned that it was not even given a code name, which is absolutely not customary.
Other secret services which had been privy to the plan were the American, the French and the Israeli. The murder of Hess had become necessary because the government of the USSR intended to release the prisoner in July 1987 (in connection with Federal President von Weizsäcker's visit to Moscow), in which respect President von Weizsäcker was, however, able to negotiate an extension with the head of the Soviet government, Gorbachev, until November 1987, the next Soviet period in the guard cycle.
The two SAS-men had been in Spandau prison since the night of Saturday-Sunday (August 15-16, 1987). The American CIA gave its consent to the murder on Monday (August 17, 1987).
The implications of this affidavit, if true, are staggering: Hess was the target of a political assassination, and was not simply the victim of an ordinary murder.
Once viewed as a political assassination, one must search not only for those with the means, motive, and opportunity for the crime, but also for those sanctioning it; according to the alleged affidavit, these were: The British, in the form of the Home Office; the American CIA, which may be shorthand for the entire military-intelligence-national security complex; the French secret services; and the Israeli secret service, the Mossad.
Whatever Hess knew, or that Britain, France, the USA, and Israel suspected he knew, that secret was of major international implication, and not confined simply to Great Britain alone.
However, since Hess himself had expressed to Melaouhi that a Russian reversal on its policy of non-release doomed him to death, this means it is likely that the Soviets knew that the Western Allies would likely murder him, and thus their release overtures may have been made cynically, forcing the West to do the dirty work. This implies that they either knew, or strongly suspected, the nature of this secret.
Wolf also astutely notes that the issue of German reunification may be an important aspect of the Hess Mess, as his "father" was the last of the major Nazis alive, and the last to have possessed the title Reichminister. In Wolf's own words:
The Russian attitude to the Hess case had always been mixed. I knew that in 1952, Stalin had offered Adenauer the reunification of Germany, with certain conditions, but the latter--as we know--did not even respond to the offer.
Perhaps my father was to play a special role in the reunification. He refused--like Adenauer, but certainly for vastly different reasons.
Although the reunification of Germany was indeed proposed at the time, "nowhere does one encounter with respect to those proposals any mention of Rudolf Hess in their connection," so the possibility that "Hess" was involved to the point of refusing is potentially extremely significant.
A potentially vital aspect of the Hess Mess discussed by Wolf Hess and others is the "Jewish Question," which may be one of the most significant facets of this entire opera. It's worth mentioning that the government of Israel "made numerous requests to Great Britain to be able to interview 'Spandau Hess' about his peace proposals. These requests were always refused."
Wolf alleges that during the Camp David accord meetings in 1978, Israeli Prime Minster Menachem Begin privately warned Carter that "Hess" must not leave Spandau alive. Wolf offers the following speculation:
My father presented Churchill with the plan for a world peace conference. Perhaps the European Jewish Question was to be solved at this meeting as well. For years, Germany had had an interest in the emigration of as many Jews as possible. Due to the Haavara Agreement, which enabled Jewish emigrants to transfer their entire fortune--albeit only to Palestine--emigration was no problem.
In 1939, however, the British had imposed strict quotas on the immigration of Jews into Palestine--a country which did not even belong to the British--and restricted such immigration to wealthy Jews only. So the Haavara Agreement saw to it that Jews with insufficient wealth could get a loan large enough for them to meet the immigration criteria so that they could leave Germany nevertheless. And in fact, Jews left Germany for Palestine as late as 1941.
Despite that, the stubborn anti-Jewish attitude of the British hampered Germany's plans and incidentally does not shine a very positive light on British policies with respect to Jews. It it not impossible that my father was to negotiate with the British on this issue.
While Wolf is clearly defensive of his father in this respect, and it's unfair to blame Great Britain for Germany's mistakes, what is clear is that if Hess was concerned about the direction Germany was going with respect to the Jewish Question, and Churchill's government refused to negotiate on this issue, that could be interpreted as enabling the future deaths of millions of people.
Churchill's connection to and defense of the Zionist movement in this regard is perhaps very relevant:
With war looming, the Chamberlain government published a White Paper on the Jewish Question in May 1939. In the paper, the Chamberlain government outlined a proposal for Palestine to become an independent state in ten years with the population ratio of Arabs to Jews to be carefully regulated as a ratio of two to one, with initial Jewish immigration to be limited to 75,000 people for the first five years, and after that, no further immigration without Arab consent.
Churchill, appealing to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, "denounced this blatant propitation of the Arabs as a repudiation of Balfour's pledge to the Zionists, which it was."
Despite Churchill's claim of "appeasing" the Arabs, Parliament nonetheless approved the plan.
The Balfour Declaration, perhaps one of the shortest and most explosive political documents in history, was a pledge given by the British Government to Lord Rothschild, the leader of the Jewish community in Britain, announcing support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine.
The Zionist movement cast a wide net of influence prior to and during WWI and this network of influence continued up to WWII, and included prominent Nazis in its network. None other than Adolf Eichmann visited Palestine in November 1937, with the express purpose of visiting Zionist leaders there, four months after the Peel Commission had published its recommendations.
This commission was a British government study on Palestine that recommended dividing the region into two states for Jews and Arabs.
The Zionist leaders in Palestine told Eichmann that if the English showed an inclination to postpone partition, the Jewish defense organization would open hostilities against them. They further said they were delighted by the 'radical' German Jewish policy which would drive more Jews to emigrate to Palestine and give them a majority over the Arabs within foreseeable time.
As a result of his visit, an arrangement was made between the SS and the Zionists, and the SS actually began providing funds to the Zionist guerilla-terrorist organization Haganah in return for "intelligence on British activities in Palestine."
The Zionists were prepared to deal with anyone, even the sworn enemies of their own people, if it served to advance their cause. What emerges from this is a pattern, both on the Zionist side of the equation, and on the Great Powers side of the equation, of a concerted interest in having an established Zionist-Jewish state.
At this point it's worth mentioning the claims of Colonal Pilcher, who has been already mentioned as being the potential person who signed the cover letter for Hess granting Royal protection. According to Pilcher, Hess came over with goal of toppling Hitler:
Hess had become alarmed about the war and coming Nazi excesses. He believed a total reversal of strategy and policy to be essential. He had heard stories that Queen Mary, the Duke of Windsor, the Dukes of Westminster and Cucclech, the Marquis of Londonderry, Lords Halifax and Rushcliffe, Basil Liddell Hart and R.A. Butler thought so too.
His idea was the evacuation of France, Belgium, Holland, Norway and Denmark, peace with England and placement of the Jews to Palestine...War with Russia would however be prosecuted. It was that factor which aroused the profound anxieties of the Pro-Russian Party in Britain which brought vast pressure upon Churchill to stifle the whole project.
Why were such desperate measures being considering by the coup plotters in both Germany and Britain?
The coup plotters were attempting to provide a Jewish-Zionist homeland, whereas the government they were trying to overthrow in London was opposed to this measure, and the government in Berlin that they were trying to overthrow was prepared to pursue extermination of Jews in the absence of a peace with Britain and a Jewish-Zionist homeland.
Churchill himself believed that the influential American-Jewish lobby was highly successful in mobilizing support for America's entry into WWI, and thus could be influential in doing the same in WWII. To pursue a peace with Germany at the expense of throwing the Soviet Union to the Nazi wolf would only activate those influential lobbies against his government, for those lobbies were very pro-Soviet.
After Hess's fateful flight, the Reich's policy towards Jewish emigration changed, leading some to suggest that the events were related:
On May 20, 1941, ten days after Hess had taken off on his flight for peace, the Reich Central Office of Emigration issued instructions banning further emigration of Jews from the Reich. If these orders are indeed linked to the apparent failure of Hess's mission they add credibility to the claim that the peace proposals Hess brought included the resettlement of European Jews in Palestine.
And here an uncomfortable question must be asked: If the details of Hess's peace plan were known, it implies that someone on the British side wanted the genocide to proceed. It's not hard to see why these proposals had to be buried.
Churchill had already acted contrary to the desires of the Chamberlain government and Peel Commission for a Jewish homeland, and in any case Hess had not come to negotiate with Churchill, but with other parties altogether, and under Royal protection--as he claimed--to boot. His aim was to replace Churchill's government with one more amenable to peace, and ultimately to replace Hitler's government. With both new governments in favor of a Jewish-Zionist homeland, a peace could be concluded.
All of these considerations suggest that somewhere within the bowels of the deep states of Britain, the USA, and Nazi Germany itself, a decision either had been taken--or had been manipulated--for genocide. And that implies a transnational network to manipulate that decision, with an agenda of its own.
At this point, the implications of this aspect of the Hess Mess become all the more disturbing.
Much has been written about the alleged "significance" of the number 6 million with respect to the Holocaust. It's often noted that an unusual amount of newspaper articles and other writings from the pre-WWII era happen to mention the imminent plight or destruction of "6 million" Jews.
For example, the Zionist leader Mad Nordau, stated the following in 1911:
Here they hold jubilant Peace Conferences, talk against war. But these same righteous government who are so noble are preparing the complete annihilation of six million Jews and there is nobody, except the doomed themselves, to raise his voice in protest.
Although some translations have Nordau saying "six million creatures," the number is glaringly the same. Taking Nordau's claims at face value leads to the following set of assertions:
A mass human sacrifice of Jews was being pre-planned.
The European powers knew about and were to some extent involved in the plan.
Nordau implies that the Zionist leaders also somehow knew about the plan, and this implies their own potential involvement in it at some level, if only that of knowing about it.
This in turn implies some international network of vast proportions, capable of pulling all this off.
Antarctica is a final consideration in the Hess Mess that must be mentioned, as its importance may ultimately prove far more significant than it at first may seem. For those immersed in the realm of conspiracy theory, its inclusion should come as no surprise.
Hess Mess researchers have noted the connections between individuals involved in the Nazi's Antarctic expedition and the prewar "peace ambassadors" sent to negotiate with London in 1939. In any peace negotiation with Britain, "Antarctica would inevitably be included."
Although the German expedition was ostensibly for "scientific research" purposes (shades of the even more bizarre Operation Highjump!), it's entirely possible that Germany was in actuality staking a claim in Antarctica, a theory supported by the fact that the Norwegian government, which believed that it had claim to that region, immediately declared that the "intention of the German Antarctic Expedition" was illegal. In response, the German government declared:
The Norwegian government had not mounted nor sustained any recent exploration of the region and therefore had forfeited claim to the territory, and it had no claim in any case to Neu-Schwabenland, because it had never explored that far inland.
The bottom line was that Germany was staking a sovereign claim, and that Norway recognized that fact and was rejecting it. The matter, in so far as Norway and Germany were concerned, was settled with the German invasion and occupation of the country in 1940. But the matter was not settled, so far as the Norwegian government in exile, nor Great Britain were concerned.
Therefore, some have suggested that Antarctica itself was a component of the Hess peace plan, as Hess himself certainly was privy to whatever may have been accomplished or "discovered" in Antarctica. Hess's connection with the Thule Society is worth mentioning in this context as well, and with our return to the occult we've at last come full circle.
Here's a tldr of this messiest of messes and quagmiriest of quagmires:
The mysterious flight of Rudolf Hess was both a peace mission and an international coup-d'etat. Hitler had knowledge of the flight, but this knowledge was limited because the ultimate goal was for Hitler to be deposed and replaced by Hess. High level Nazis were involved in the planning of this coup. A "peace party" in Britain had similar goals to replace the Churchill government, and involved members of the Royal family.
Due to possible miscalculations during the flight, Hess bailed out and was unable to meet up with his reception committee, which allegedly included the Dukes of Hamilton and Kent, members of the Red Cross, and personnel from a nearby Royal Air Force Base.
Initially, Hess was apprehended by those not involved in the scheme, but eventually the "pro-peace faction" was able to regain control.
Shortly after his capture, Hess was drugged and measured for a duplicate Luftwaffe captain's uniform. This was the first in a series of suspicious events that have led many to speculate that a double of the Deputy may have been prepared almost immediately.
At some point, the real Hess either escaped or was transferred to a new location in Scotland. Meanwhile, the "double" remained at Maindiff and underwent further drugging and other tests to implant false memories.
The real Hess was then killed in an air crash while on a secret mission with the Duke of Kent, a mission that was potentially meant to return Hess to Germany and initiate the next step in the coup.
The double took the real Hess's place at Nuremberg and exhibited erratic behavior. Allen Dulles suspected that "Hess" was a double and brought in MK-Ultra-linked Dr. Ewen Cameron to examine the prisoner.
Hess was forced to spend the rest of his life in captivity, and for many years an entire facility was dedicated to housing the prisoner, despite all of the other Nazis being released. In the 1970's, a British doctor examined Hess and was stunned to find no scarring from the devastating war wounds he had allegedly suffered as a youth. As a result, significant doubts continue to be raised as to the identity of Prisoner Number Seven.
Hess, as the last surviving "Reich Minister," never signed any official document outlawing the Nazi Party, which he had at least some status to do as Hitler's Deputy to the Party. A double, of course, would have no legitimate authority to do so. Adding to the legal complications, "Spandau Hess" may have also refused an offer from Stalin for German reunification.
The real Hess appears to have been negotiating for a Jewish-Zionist homeland in Palestine. The fact that the plan fell through suggests that someone wanted the genocide to proceed.
Though the researchers of the Mess Hess differ on the details, one inescapable conclusion emerges: The murder of "Rudolf Hess" was a political assassination and an international conspiracy of the highest order.
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axolotl__peyotl ago
I. The Hess Mess
II. Hess the Hermetic
III. Putschin' on the Ritz
IV. A Scottish Excursion
V. A Plea for Peace
VI. The Lore of the Lure
VII. Cooperating Coops
VIII. Capturing a Captain
IX. Conspiracies and Contingencies
X. Prisoner 007
XI. The Forgotten Flight
XII. Deputy Dopplegänger
XIII. To Make a Man
XIV: An Astonishing Assassination
XV: A Secret So Sinister
XVI: An Antarctic Epilogue
axolotl__peyotl ago
The Hess Mess
The choice of the word "mess" to describe this opera is much more than just a clever rhyme. What the Hess Mess represents is undoubtedly akin to the proverbial Rabbit Hole; the Chapel Perilous of Robert Anton Wilson.
The mess is riddled with so many twists, turns and contradictions that what ultimately emerges is the grandest conspiracy at not only the highest levels of the British government, but one that includes multiple superpowers and their various intelligence agencies.
In addition, something about the secret at the heart of the Hess Mess is so significant that it still warrants concealing from the public after more than three quarters of a century.
The best place to start the Hess Mess is at the end, and a messy end for Hess it was.
On August 17, 1987, Rudolf Walter Richard Hess, once Adolf Hitler's Deputy Führer, was pronounced dead at a British Military Hospital in Berlin.
Having spent the last 41 years of his life in prison, the 93-year-old inmate had reportedly chosen to end his own life, hanging himself from a window latch with an electrical cord.
Only Hess among all the Nazis incarcerated after World War II was made to serve out his entire life sentence, and this includes other individuals of comparable rank, such as the Reich's Armaments Minister Albert Speer, the two chiefs of the German Kriegsmarine, Grand Admirals Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz, Reichsbank President Walther Funk, diplomat Konstantin von Neurath, and Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach.
All of these men were released, including Raeder and Funk, even though both had received life sentences. Although their premature release was for "health and humanitarian" reasons, no explanation was ever offered for why Hess remained for another 21 years, despite suffering considerable health problems, which began in earnest after a perforated ulcer in 1969.
To make matters even more strange, an entire prison facility, known as Spandau Prison, was maintained just to house Hess! Built in 1876, Spandau Prison had a single occupant from the years 1966-1987: Rudolf Hess.
Why did Hess have to be guarded at all costs and have his access to the outside world strictly, and even cruelly, controlled?
Or did Hess not know anything at all?
Was the man they were guarding even really Rudolf Hess?
axolotl__peyotl ago
Hess the Hermetic
Of the myriad legendary characters that populate the lore of the two World Wars, countless biographies have been written. But there is a curious absence of writings concerning the life of times of one Rudolf Walter Richard Hess.
Born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1894, Hess was the son of a moderately well-to-do German merchant. After enlisting in World War I, he sustained numerous wounds on both the Eastern and Western fronts, for which he earned the Iron Cross, 2nd class.
While several of his earlier wounds required months of recovery, his worst injury occurred in August of 1917, in which Hess was pierced by a bullet "that entered the upper chest near the armpit and exited near his spinal column" and collapsed his lung. While convalescing, Hess decided to train as a pilot in the air corps, and soon became very skilled.
After the war, Hess began networking extensively and started getting involved with certain paramilitary organizations in Germany and Bavaria.
Later that year Hess enrolled in the University of Munich and joined the infamous Thulegesellschaft, the Thule Society. Having been introduced to the quasi-occult lodge in Munich by a Freikorps friend, Hess was very taken with the society and thus began his well-known fascination with the occult.
While there has been much unfounded speculation regarding Hitler's connection to the Thule Society, including the theory that Hess and Hitler met at a meeting in 1919, there is no evidence that Hitler was even involved with the Thulegesellschaft, and in fact he had the head of the society arrested after his rise to power.
These doctrines proved to be highly influential, as they could "justifiably be regarded as a predecessor of the National Socialist German Workers' Party."
With this in mind, it's very curious indeed that the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutors forbade any mention of the occult during the trials, ostensibly for fear of Hess pursuing an "insanity" defense. This may have been a convenient cover story:
How influential were these occult societies and their doctrines on the Nazi power structure? Did there exist a faction within the Nazi government itself that opposed the policies of Hitler?
Hess drew considerable inspiration from his geopolitics mentor Professor General Karl Haushofer and his son Albrecht.
The influence of the Haushofers on Hess, and therefore Hitler, cannot be understated, despite Albrecht eventually being executed for his alleged involvement in the 1944 bomb plot against Hitler.
General Haushofer envisioned a complete revamping of German imperial policy, which included the belief that confronting Great Britain was completely unnecessary. He also saw no reason for a substantial German navy. In this vision:
The Haushofers happened to have numerous contacts in British Society, including the Duke of Hamilton, and these strange bedfellows had a mutual concern:
How much did the ideologies of the Haushofers affect the vision of Hess, and therefore Hitler, as well as the formation of the Nazi Party?
Was Rudolf Hess's "quixotic flight to Britain the last attempt of the old Thule Society--long dissolved, or driven underground--to affect world politics in the face of a Führer who had escaped their clutches and completely deformed their visions?"
axolotl__peyotl ago
Putschin' on the Ritz
In the aftermath of World War I, a veritable crucible of tensions began to emerge between the radical left and right in Germany, often in the form of street battles, with Bavaria in particular being a hotbed of this unrest.
The socialist-communist revolutionaries, known as the Spartacists, attacked and raided the Thule Society, stole documents and murdered some of its members.
The Thule Society soon struck back and retrieved the documents, and eventually the conservative element in Bavaria, "fed up with the growing slide of the Reich government to the left, attempted to seize power in Bavaria via Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who was made a councilor of Bavaria and given dictatorial powers."
On November 8, 1923, Hitler and 2,000 Nazis attempted to seize power in Bavaria in the Beer Hall Putsch. Hermann Göring was in charge of the "wet works" to be performed during the counter-coup, and Hess was entrusted with "secret orders to round up the ministers of the Bavarian state itself, which Hess was successful in doing."
During their time together in Landsberg Prison, Hess and Hitler began to forge an even stronger relationship, and they were also regularly visited by General Karl Haushofer. The experience established Hess as Hitler's "confidant, muse, and mentor."
It's well known that Hitler dictated much of Mein Kampf to Hess during this period of incarceration, and Hess's contributions shouldn't be understated, "particularly in those few lucid passages in the work, which were not the ravings of Hitler the thwarted artist, but of Hess, the multi-lingual university student of Haushofer."
During the Nuremberg trials, General Haushofer himself stated that it "was actually Hess, not Hitler, who had dictated some passages of the work."
After their short stint in prison, Haushofer and Hitler would soon serve as groomsmen for Hess's wedding, and a decade later, as godfathers for his son, Wolf Hess, who we will meet again near the end of the mess.
Before his fateful flight in 1941, Hess's power within the Nazi State apparatus could hardly be understated. Hess orchestrated the inception of the "Führer cult" by transforming "Herr Hitler" into der Führer.
Hess facilitated the incorporation of Thule Society imagery, like the Swastika, into Nazism, and even acted as the "sophisticated face" to Nazism when attempting to woo German industrialists and bankers to support the 1932 political campaign.
Hess became the Stellvertreter, which is usually translated as "Deputy", but is actually:
At the time, CFR-influenced American journal Foreign Affairs wondered if "Hess was not the ultimate intellectual creator of Adolf Hitler to the extent that a piano creates music."
In other words, nothing could happen in Germany without Hess's knowledge or approval. Prior to 1941, Hess was really the "brains of the operation."
Despite his role as the "conscience" of the party, and although he objected to the actions taken during the infamous Kristallnacht, Hess's signature was indeed on the infamous Nuremberg Race Laws. In addition, Hess reportedly disagreed with Hitler's halt order issued to the Wehrmacht at Dunkirk, an order which ultimately saved many British lives.
Hess also spotted the talent of Martin Bormann, making him his right hand man, "particularly of the party's own intelligence services." Together they urged action to take out the leadership of the Brownshirts during the Night of the Long Knives.
Although this particular foray into the Hess Mess gives Bormann no further mention, his role in the entire affair, and everything that followed (even after Bormann's "death"!), should not be discounted.
axolotl__peyotl ago
A Scottish Excursion
On May 10, 1941, a supremely enigmatic event occurred that is given remarkably scant mention in most of the standard histories of World War II.
One of the 20th century's greatest mysteries began when Rudolf Hess took off from Germany in a Messerschmitt 110 and flew to England. The general consensus is that he was attempting to bring about peace between Germany and England by a personal intervention, the implication being that "Hess's flight was a more-or-less a spontaneous affair, ill-thought-out and sloppily planned."
Hess was one of the only major Nazi leaders who had misgivings about Operation Barbarossa, the code name for the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. To Hess, this was far too risky with Great Britain still in the war, as well as the looming possibility of an American entry.
Luftwaffe General Adolf Galland also had misgivings about Barbarossa, and his first impression was that Hess's flight was a "desperate attempt to prevent the two-front war that would follow."
This chain of events raises several questions: When did Göring learn about the flight? What did he know about Hess's motivations? Why did he order a shootdown, especially a futile one? Göring, too, had his own concerns about Barbarossa:
Despite the narrative of the "official" version of events, Hess's flight wasn't "spontaneous" at all, as secret meetings did take place between Hess, General Haushofer and the General's son Albrecht to discuss the feasibility of peace overtures to Great Britain.
This interpretation of the Hess Mess suggests that "Hitler himself gave tacit approval for the idea, and that Albrecht Haushofer then utilized his prewar contacts and friendship with the Duke of Hamilton to contact the Duke to propose a meeting between him and Hess."
Hitler's pilot provided Hess with maps! As for Baur, he was rumored to have been involved in a plot to "kidnap" Hitler and fly him to Great Britain to surrender, but these allegations have never been verified. Coups aside, Baur did help Hess in some capacity.
Let us start by examining the "standard" narrative of Hess's flight:
After bailing out, "he was found by a farmer, marched off to the Home Guard and brought to a barracks in Glasgow. Insisting that he was one Oberleutnant Alfred Horn, he asked to see the Duke of Hamilton."
Meanwhile, in Germany, one of Hess's aides delivered a message to Hitler, who was in a conference at the time. Allegedly, upon receiving the letter, Hitler shouted "Oh my God, my God! He has flown to England!" In the letter, Hess wrote:
Hitler then ordered his aids to contact Göring, Bormann and Joachim von Ribbentrop, and he immediately placed Hess's adjutant under arrest.
An announcement was soon made that Hess had commandeered an aircraft against orders and that he may have been "a victim of hallucination."
The British followed with their own statement a few hours later, merely stating that Hess had come to Great Britain. In response, the German's updated their statement, making things look even worse:
The damage control had begun.
axolotl__peyotl ago
A Plea for Peace
To summarize the mess so far:
Even in this standard narrative, Hitler's foreknowledge of the plan is still up for considerable debate, suggesting that his "rage and fulminations on learning of the mission from Hess's letter was a bit of very convincing theater."
Hitler later would state that "I am deprived of the only two human beings among all those around me to whom I have been truly and inwardly attached: Dr. Todt (builder of the Westwall and Autobahn) is dead and Hess has flown away from me!"
Further indication of a wider plot can be found in the strange actions of Göring, who not only issued an impossible shootdown order, potentially to cover his own tracks, but he proceeded to deny any knowledge of the event the following day.
The more this event is scrutinized, the less likely that the Hess flight was the spontaneous blunder of a lone madman, rather it was "an international conspiracy of the highest order, involving powerful elements within both the United Kingdom and Nazi Germany."
And neither was Hess a "martyr for peace" as some revisionist works portray him--after all, he was still a Nazi.
It's important to consider the strategic position Great Britain and Germany found themselves in during the early months of 1941. Everything looked good for Germany, "yet, as preparations for Operation Barbarossa moved forward, the Churchill government continued to woo America to enter the war. Time was on Britain's, and not Germany's, side."
The Royal family was merely "the tip of the iceberg of a pro-peace party in Britain, a party that had some representation in the British peerage, and the various organs of government."
Many researchers believe that this "peace faction" emboldened Hess to make his fateful flight.
Another speculative scenario adds a fascinating new dimension to the Hess flight: the atomic bomb.
While the standard narrative of WWII depicts the Nazi atomic bomb project as fruitless, considerable evidence suggests otherwise, and the case has been made that actual tests of atomic bombs were performed by the Germans in October of 1944 and then again in March of 1945.
This possibility aside, "an actual existing atomic bomb project does rationalize Hitler's confidence in his invasion plans for Russia, and also rationalizes his inexplicable decision to declare war on the USA as his armies were freezing before the gates of Moscow."
axolotl__peyotl ago
The Lore of the Lure
For Churchill, Hess's sudden arrival was surely unwelcome, as it put the Prime Minister and his government in a very awkward position:
Two contemporary magazine articles written about the event both propagated the so-called "lure" hypothesis, namely that Hess was lured by British intelligence, "the implication being that there was no 'peace party' nor realistic hope that a negotiated peace with the Churchill government was possible."
Although certainly feasible, the lure hypothesis could itself be a "spinning" of the event, a "legend created to reassure America that Britain was not double-dealing and to extricate the Churchill government from the diplomatic difficulty caused by the Hess flight."
In 1942, soon after the USA entered the war, Churchill finally publicly addressed the Hess matter in an oft-overlooked exchange on the floor of the House of Commons:
To some observers, this speech is the "beginning of the conundrum" and clearly states the motivation of the Hess flight was to "gain access to the certain circles that could remove Churchill and his government from power."
In a further blow to the "spontaneous event" explanation for the Hess flight, "by the time of his flight to Scotland, several contacts had already been made between the German and British peace parties." In addition, discussions had already taken place in Sweden, Switzerland and Spain.
The reason Scotland was chosen as the destination was because of the German "peace party" and its connection to the Duke of Hamilton, Scotland's highest ranking peer, who had access to the Royal Family. Hess had been doing his homework as well, even brushing up on the British Constitution itself:
The British sovereign has certain "reserve powers" that can be used in times of constitutional crisis.
In other words, Hess wasn't merely petitioning the Duke of Hamilton, rather he was using the Duke to petition King George VI himself.
Hess's infamous flight is beginning to seem less fanciful after all.
axolotl__peyotl ago
Cooperating Coups
As one plunges deeper into the Hess Mess, a tangled web of covert connections is uncovered. Various correspondence from the time reveals a Haushofer-Hess peace faction in Germany that was carrying on secretive discussions with the British peace faction. In addition, they often attempted to avoid both the official channels of Great Britain and Germany for much of this correspondence. In one of these letters, Albrect Haushofer stated:
In addition, the "only genuine solution to European peace and security was a European federation, and a "fusion" between Germany and Britain, a fusion that the English are now about to conclude with the United States."
However, according to Albrecht Haushofer, there seemed to be very little possibility of a negotiated peace with Hitler.
Which brings us to a key question: What did Hitler know about the flight?
It seems much more likely, given what appear to be the coup plotters' eventual goals, that Hitler was kept in the loop to a certain extent, but not entirely.
Despite these attempts at negotiation, the response from Britain was unwavering: their distrust of Hitler was a "fatal obstacle" to any peace. Notably absent is any reference to peace with Germany. The Germans had similar demands regarding the future of the Churchill government.
To get a better understanding of the scope of collusion involved with such a scheme, it's important to consider the extraordinary details of the flight itself.
Hess's plane itself, a Me 110E-2/N series aircraft, had undergone significant modification, including custom drop tanks and enhancements to his radio system.
Modifications aside, a glaringly inconvenient detail emerges when one considers the oil consumption required for such a lengthy flight. Some researchers have noted that it's unlikely the aircraft would have had made the trip without running out of oil and crashing into the sea.
After considering the possible routes and options, the city of Göttingen becomes a strong possibility.
There is similar evidence of collusion on the British side, as the response has long been acknowledged to have been lackluster, including testimony from a Royal Air Force radar operator that "he was given orders to relay to aircraft that the incoming German airplane was not to be attacked."
Some have even accused the RAF of "pulling its punches" that May evening, stating that "at least some in the Royal Air Force command structure in Scotland were well aware of where Hess intended to land."
According to the "official" narrative, Hess's destination was Dungavel House, but its small airstrip has led some to suggest that a nearby RAF base was Hess's real target.
However, clearly, something went wrong on that fateful night, and Hess was forced to parachute:
axolotl__peyotl ago
According to the standard narrative of the Hess flight that was rather abruptly decided upon by both the British and German authorities, Hess was a madman with mad intentions, and such a notion of a significant "peace faction" in Britain was almost entirely fanciful. But was it?
They advocated for an entente with Germany, and perhaps an eventual alliance, for only Germany could challenge the Soviet Union and offer counter-balancing weight to growing American influence.
This sentiment was far more popular than is often acknowledged by historians:
As already stated, one of Germany's concerns at the time was an alliance, or even fusion, between the US and the UK, which was "always the stated goal of Cecil Rhodes, and his Rhodes scholarships were established as one of the mechanisms to effect this goal."
According to the research of Carroll Quigley, there were in fact "pro Atlanticist-unionists" within the US and the UK who sought an actual union of the two countries.
Clearly, numerous influential people in the British establishment opposed Hitler, but not necessarily Germany.
For example, in 1939, shortly after Germany's invasion of Poland, the future Duke of Hamilton submitted the following to the London Times:
Not only does the letter refer to Hitler's aggression and not to Germany's, but it also recognizes the principle of Lebensraum and mentions the post-WWI injustices suffered by Germany.
axolotl__peyotl ago
Why, then, the reference to colonies? The direct reference to the infamous Kristallnacht may give us a clue:
Hess, while a firm believer in international Jewish-Zionist plots, did offer protection to the Haushofers, as Frau Haushofer was half Jewish.
The future Duke of Hamilton may therefore have been appealing directly to parties in Germany that were uncomfortable with the direction Hitler's Reich was taking.
The same day that the future Duke of Hamilton's "peace message" was published in the Times, the German BBC service broadcast the letter.
This letter may ultimately be one of the most crucial elements of the entire Hess Mess, as it becomes clear that either Hess "undertook his mission with the intention of dissembling to the British, concluding a peace, and keeping Hitler in power; or he undertook his mission with the intention of participating in the overthrow of Hitler's government, in order to procure a peace with Britain."
Despite Hess's loyalty towards Hitler, this possibility is strengthened by the curious actions of Göring on the night of Hess's flight, as well as Göring's own history of conducting peace negotiations with the British. Göring was Hitler's successor in offices of state, while Hess was his designated representative and successor in the party.
An attempt had even been made in 1941 via contacts between the Duke of Hamilton and the Haushofers for the Duke and Hess to meet on neutral territory, specifically Lisbon. Lord Halifax was aware of these plans, and notably did not share them with Churchill, who had been chosen prime minister over Halifax just a few months previously.
Regardless, it was clear that preparations for a meeting continued on the German side, and this fact alone invalidates the nation that Hess decided to undertake such an absurd mission on some "crazy lark."
In addition, at Hess's express bidding, Albrect Haushofer had been negotiations with the British ambassador in Madrid, Sir Samuel Hoare. As a result of these negotiations, it was agreed that peace could not be reached without the removal of both Hitler and Churchill.
It has even been claimed that Haushofer, Hess, Halifax and Hoare had planned a secret meeting somewhere in Portugal or Spain in early 1941. The French press even reported that Hess was in Spain in 1941, compelling the German press to issue a denial of the French story.
It should be noted that three of the men who allegedly met in early 1941, Hess, Haushofer, and Halifax, were all deeply disturbed by the policies of the Nazis toward the Jews. In 1938, Lord Halifax himself had attempted to initiate discussions in the War Cabinet about providing a Jewish homeland in Western Australia or British Guiana.
Could Hess really bring himself to lead a coup d'etat against Hitler himself? An essay from his university days may give us a clue, namely that although Germany needed a "severe and ruthless" leader, notably, once he had succeeded in restoring Germany's standing in the world, "he would have to stand aside and allow a more moderate government to assume power."
To add further credence to this theory, in his initial contacts with the British after his capture, Hess indicated that he was not speaking for Hitler, but for Germany.
Why then did Hess undertake such a flight at great personal risk to Great Britain itself?
When Hess was forced to parachute and land in a Scottish farmer's field, he was therefore "up for grabs" between two potentially opposing factions within the British government/intelligence apparatus. Conflicting narratives in the official account of what occurred after Hess's capture strongly support this scenario.
axolotl__peyotl ago
Capturing a Captain
One version of events has Hess apprehended by a farmer armed with a pitchfork and then held captive in a cottage. At this point Hess insisted he was "Captain Alfred Horn" and that he had come to Scotland to meet the Duke of Hamilton. After getting taken into custody by the Home Guard, he was moved several times until finally ending up in the Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow.
According to the farmer's own account, Hess's first words were "Am I on the estate of the Duke of Hamilton?" Another early account indicated that Hess additionally stated to the police that his original intention had been to land at the small landing strip at the Duke's residence at Dungavel. Since Hess almost certainly would've known the strip would be too small for his plane, it's possible that by claiming this "he was protecting someone, or something, or both."
After he was taken to the cottage, the farmer's wife offered "Captain Horn" some tea, which Hess declined in good English. Strangely enough, two soldiers seem to suddenly "appear" in the cottage by the farmer's own account, with no explanation as to when they arrived...there are just suddenly there.
After the war, McBride gave his own version of events, with the extraordinary claim that "high-ranking Government officials were aware of his coming." To support this assertion, McBride noted that "no air-raid warning were sounded, nor were the anti-aircraft gunnery control rooms plotting the course of Hess's plane alerted."
To make matters even more confusing, McBride claims that it was he and not the farmer who first apprehended Hess. This discrepancy is not the only example of a possible coverup at play. Again according to McBride himself:
This commotion can be explained by possibility of the conflicting "factions" at play here.
To add to the air of intrigue surrounding Hess's capture, after McBride's death, a letter was discovered from his former commander W.B. Howieson that had advised McBride to "drop this Hess business" lest he "stir up a hornets' nest" with respect to the British Official Secrets Act. Perhaps even more remarkably, this letter was dated May 8, 1974.
Regardless of how he was captured, Hess eventually was taken to Giffnock scout hall and he was searched and an inventory was made of his belongings.
Although this inventory has never been disclosed, an unsubstantiated theory claims Hess had brought an ancient Celtic text called the Lebor Fesa Runda which had once been given as a gift from John Dee to the German Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Allegedly, Hess acquired the text through his connections to the Thule society and was bringing the rare manuscript as a sort of symbolic diplomatic gift.
At Giffnock we encounter another important player in the Hess Mess, one Major Graham Donald, an officer in the Royal Observer Corps. Major Donald claims he was alerted to the crash and ordered to the scene, and he subsequently accompanied Hess and the entourage to Giffnock where he personally questioned Hess.
It should be noted that the official narrative leaves out a curious, and perhaps not so insignificant, detail: Did nobody recognize Hess? Hess was perhaps one of the most recognizable faces in the Nazi regime, and yet none of his British captors had openly acknowledged recognizing him. Perhaps even more curiously, Major Donald claims to have "determined" Hess's identity by almost ridiculous means.
Another "anomaly" in the aftermath of capture was the British authority's lack of effort to search for any other individuals, since Hess's plane was a two-seater!
axolotl__peyotl ago
Conspiracies and Contingencies
Of the many characters in the Hess Mess, none are are as mysterious and perhaps as crucial to the plot as Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, 14th Duke of Hamilton. The Duke appears to be tantalizingly tough to track down in the days following Hess's arrival.
Another strange event concerning a Polish officer named Roman Battaglia adds to the secrecy and absurdity of the Hess affair. Battaglia was an intelligence officer in General Sikorski's Polish government-in-exile, and for some reason he was allowed to interrogate Hess at Glasgow Police Headquarters for two hours, while speaking in German, and almost entirely unsupervised. In addition, none of the other British officers present spoke German.
This comedy of errors has cemented its way into the standard narrative, and indeed the series of events seems so farcical that a coverup on some level was almost certainly at play.
Was the Duke of Hamilton planning to meet Hess as a representative of the British peace faction? Did a series of unfortunate navigational errors cause Hess to miss his intended target?
This explains Hess's repeated insistence upon being taken to the Duke of Hamilton, as well as a possible contingency plan set in motion in case the flight went awry.
This may also explain the appearance of the Polish officer, who was contacting Hess on behalf the Duke of Hamilton and the peace party. But why the obfuscation from the Duke himself? Why didn't he just use his rank and take charge of Hess?
According to the Duke's version of events, he didn't contact London until the afternoon of May 11, after he had seen Hess and after he had visited the crash site. And here the official narrative becomes even more muddled, as the Duke's version of this contact differs slightly from the version of Jock Colville, Churchill's private secretary.
The Duke maintained that he had contacted the Foreign Office in the afternoon, and the official who answered the phone refused to connect him to a superior without a stated reason, which frustrated the Duke. Fortunately, Colville seems to have just "shown up" at the right time. According to the Duke, Colville claimed that he was ordered to the Foreign Office by Churchill because the Duke "had some interesting information" to convey.
However, according to Colville's version of events, the phone call took place in the morning, and his first words to the Duke were "Has somebody arrived?," a statement that suggests that "he, at least, was expecting a certain 'somebody.'" Regardless, contact was made:
After the Duke had briefed Churchill, the Prime Minister offered one of his many legendary quips: 'Well, Hess or no Hess, I'm going to see the Marx Brothers.'
axolotl__peyotl ago
Prisoner 007
Hess eventually spent some time in the Tower of London, where a curious incident occurred that has fueled much speculation. Charles Fraser-Smith, the inspiration for the gadget wizard "Q" from James Bond lore, was called in by MI5 to measure Hess's Luftwaffe captain's uniform.
While it has been speculated that the copy was for the potential use of a double to send back to Germany, others have claimed that both MI5 and MI6 had begun considering substituting a double for Hess shortly after his arrival.
At this point, the Hess mess truly starts to accelerate its descent into the surreal as "Hess" himself begins to lose his senses. While being held at Mytchett Place under very tight security, "Hess's mental and emotional behavior appeared to deteriorate dramatically" and he attempted suicide more than once.
And here we reach what is perhaps a pivotal juncture in this saga. On June 25, 1942, Hess was moved to Maindiff Court in Wales, a move that occurred with no military escort. The reason given for this secrecy was to foil an alleged plot to kidnap Hess, however that was rendered irrelevant after details of the move were leaked to the Daily Mail, a national tabloid.
As for actual plots to kidnap Hess, there was reason for concern, as illustrated by an important incident revealed in 1979 by a British major from the 11th Fighter Group:
What this story highlights is just how much internecine intrigue there was even among the intelligence apparatuses of countries like Great Britain and Germany.
In any case, intelligence was circulating in Germany that placed Hess in Scotland during the time when he was supposed to be at Mytchett Place. According to this information, which may or may not have been spread as part of an intelligence deception campaign: "Hess had been housed in a villa in Scotland, had his personal servants and wanted for nothing. Churchill had expressly decreed that Hess, on account of his rank, should be accommodated as a general."
In this report, it should be noted that Hess is specifically mentioned as being in complete possession of his mental faculties, and even was witnessed driving around London under escort!
Was a double substituted for Hess? If so, when?
The Hess "double" theory not only explains the need to duplicate his uniform, but it also explains the two reports of Hess in two different places at once. In this scenario, the "Hess" at Maindiff was a double, and the multiple drugging sessions "Hess" underwent after his arrival at Maindiff were in fact mind-control sessions. Similarly, this would explain the decision of the British to build an entire "suite" at their military hospital in Berlin for Hess.
In addition, RAF military police did confirm that meetings took place between Hess and Churchill, and a Scots Guards member asserted that Hess was "in the Tower of London and had been taken to secret meetings with Churchill in late June 1941." However, at the time of these alleged meetings, by official accounts "Hess" was at Mytchett Place.
After all, it was well known that shortly after his capture Hess claimed that he was under "the King's personal protection" and that he insisted that messages be taken directly to George VI.
While often dismissed as fanciful, support for this claim was uncovered by Hess Mess researchers who were anonymously contacted by someone at the Foreign Office. With regards to Hess's claim, the contact replied that a British colonel name "Pilcher" has been ordered to be held incommunicado at Balmoral Palace from 1941 until his death in 1970 for "signing a letter of safe conduct in the King's name."
A letter would explain the apparent confusion on the night of Hess's capture, for it would certainly cause all manners of confusion. Was the letter fake? Was it real?
axolotl__peyotl ago
The Forgotten Flight
This begs the question: was the Crown itself involved? Enter Prince George, the Duke of Kent.
The fourth son of King George V and Queen Mary, Prince George became the Duke of Kent in 1934 and held the title until his untimely death in 1942.
In addition, according to researchers of the Hess Mess, the Duke of Kent was a member of a "reception committee" that had congregated to receive Hess. Allegedly, this "committee" consisted of members of the British "peace" faction, as well as representatives of the Polish government in exile and the international Red Cross.
In this scenario, "the head of the Polish government in exile had offered the throne of Poland--long vacant--to the Duke of Kent."
The Hess peace plan may explain a curiously timed decline in intensity of the bombing campaigns of both Britain and Germany:
Curiously, one of the places the "bi-locating" Hess was sighted in 1942 was at the home of an "equerry to the Duke of Kent, a point that indicates that the "peace party" had regained control of the real Hess."
And at long last we arrive at the tragedy that not only took the life of the Duke of Kent, but may offer a vital clue in solving the mystery of what happened to the real Rudolf Hess.
However, the "flight to Iceland" may have been a cover story. The Duke's flying boat was painted white, the color for aircraft flying to and from neutral Sweden, suggesting that Sweden, not Iceland, was the destination. And that's not all:
Göring had already conducted peace discussions with Sweden, so it's entirely possible that the Duke of Kent was attempting to return Hess to Germany to remove him from danger and/or complete final arrangements in the "deal."
In addition, a cable from the German Ambassador in Portugal to the German Foreign Ministry was uncovered that states:
To make matters even more suspicious, General Sikorski, the head of the Polish government in exile that had allegedly offered the Polish crown to the Duke of Kent, perished less than a year later in an air crash off Gibraltar.
axolotl__peyotl ago
Deputy Dopplegänger
After the war, suspicions as to the identity of "Hess" would soon start to spread, including among members of the US intelligence community.
Many of those who encountered "Hess" at the Nuremberg Trials noticed that something was "off" or wrong with the prisoner, including his former colleagues and even Göring himself.
In what has been described as "the most telling episode at Nuremberg," none other than Allen Dulles had doubts about the prisoner's identity.
If Dulles's presence in this opera seems almost comically predictable, the entrance of Dr. Ewen Cameron is equally as sinister, as well as profoundly suggestive.
According to Gordon Thomas, in his study of the military and intelligence uses of psychiatry and psychology, Journey into Madness:
Although the infamous mind control expert was unable to examine "Hess" during the Nuremberg Trials, many years later a British physician did. His name was W. Hugh Thomas, and in 1979 he published a controversial book called The Murder of Rudolf Hess that was inspired after he personally had the opportunity to extensively examine the prisoner at a British Military Hospital.
According to the shocked physician, Hess showed no scars of the war wounds he had suffered in WW1.
After seeing "Hess" again on a follow up visit, Dr. Thomas politely asked the prisoner what had happened to his war wounds.
After sharing his suspicions with the Hess family, Frau Hess maintained that although she believed "Hess" was indeed her husband, she also confirmed that he had suffered severe wounds during WWI that left significant scarring.
In hopes of putting the various conspiracy theories to rest, "Hess's" body was exhumed after his suspicious death, and the Foreign Office announced that they did indeed discover a "fibrous, irregular roughly circular old scar typical of an exit wound in a posterior position on the left side of the chest." But this "proof" raises even more questions:
To make matters even more confusing, "Hess" managed to read a newspaper article about Thomas' book in spite of strict regulations at Spandau. When a visiting French pastor asked the prisoner about his "wounds" or lack thereof, he was informed that "a bullet had passed right through his chest, brushing the heart and exiting under the left shoulder blade."
However, the exact details of his war wounds weren't actually known at the time, and only when the Bavarian archives were released in 1989 did the public finally get access to Hess's military record.
Another potentially significant anomaly worth mentioning is the curious case of his British dental charts, the first taken in September 1941 during his stay at Mytchett place and then again from 1943 and Maindiff Court. According to the Doppelgänger Hess theory, the 1941 "Hess" was genuine and the 1943 "Hess" was a substitute.
A few more "discrepancies" are worth mentioning, despite potentially being mere insignificant details. Specifically, the "real" Hess was a committed anti-smoker, a vegetarian, and had impeccable table manners, yet prisoner "Hess" craved cigarettes, ate meat, and displayed markedly poor table manners while in captivity.
In addition, according to Frau Hess, her husband "played tennis well and with enthusiasm," and yet the British captive allegedly knew nothing about the sport. His wife also noted that upon finally seeing him in 1969, he "had a deeper voice." This last point is potentially more significant than it might seem, as "a normal man's voice rises with age, rather than deepens.*
Inspired by these disturbing discoveries, Dr. Thomas began to notice something "off" about the admittedly detailed letters "Hess" had written to his family while in captivity:
Thomas's account would seem to vindicate the suspicions of Allen Dulles, and as a result, the presence of Dr. Cameron becomes pregnant with implications.
axolotl__peyotl ago
To Make a Man
Dr. Cameron was by no means the first in this field, as "British psychiatrists L.G.M. Page and R.J. Russell first published a paper about similar techniques in 1948, a paper summarizing many years of intensive experimentation."
And here we reach what perhaps is the deepest philosophical question in the "Hess" double scenario: could they actually convince a double that he was Rudolf Hess?
To reinforce this theory, the "Hess" at the Nuremberg trials was often confused and expressed difficulty at remembering details of key events. In addition, he also claimed that the British were drugging him:
Even before the end of the war, "Hess" began to report that he was having difficulty with his memory, describing "looming amnesia" to his doctors:
In his own statement for the Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, "Hess" elaborated:
At one point, "Hess" admitted that he was feigning insanity "because he was hoping to be sent home." However, one of Hess's physicians dissented, writing "I cannot accept his own statement that the memory loss never existed. There was at that time a true partial dissociation of the personality, which permitted the patient to 'take in' what was going on around him but caused difficult of recall." At Nuremberg, "Hess" elaborated:
At one point, Hess replied to an officer who called his name: "There is no Rudolf Hess here. But if you are looking for Convict Number 125, then I'm your man!"
In addition, Göring reported pressed "Hess" to divulge some "great secret" on numerous occasions. Even more notably, Hess reportedly failed to recognize Göring and Haushofer at Nuremberg.
In his final statement to the Tribunal, "Hess" made his last public statement ever, talking of the "predictions" he said he had made before the start of the trial:
While most dismiss these ramblings as an attempt to deflect responsibility away from Hitler and the Nazis, researchers of the Hess Mess have suggested that "his real goal is not justification of Nazi atrocities, but rather, simply to persuade the Tribunal that such things are possible because he was building up to some revelation concerning himself."
In fact, during Hess's closing remarks, this revelation was perhaps to be forthcoming, as right when he stated "In the spring of 1942..." he was interrupted by the president of the tribunal and informed that he was at the end of his allotted speaking time.
The Tribunal would understandably not want Hess to make too many statements about "mind control" on the record and in such a public venue, at the very least to prevent it from being used as an "insanity" defense.
One physician in particular tried to prevent "Hess" from even standing trial:
Indeed, if "Hess" had not stood trial, he would not have gone free. "Instead, he would have been incarcerated in a top-security mental institution somewhere in Britain."
It may never have been the intention for "Hess" to stand trial, but "Hess" thwarted this by giving a speech insisting that he was indeed mentally fit.
Here's an image of "Hess" at Nuremberg, with Göring at his side. Here is another: note that Göring appears to be covering his mouth while laughing while on the front right Joachim von Ribbentrop seems almost perplexed. In the back row, former Grand Admiral Dönitz appears to be glaring at "Hess."
While the mention of Antarctica in this context may seem straight out of left field, the Hess Mess has still more surprises in store...
axolotl__peyotl ago
An Astonishing Assassination
Does all of this honestly explain the massive amount of secrecy surrounding Hess that has lasted for the better part of a century?
With all of this in mind, "Rudolf Hess" becomes the most extraordinary figures of World War II and the Cold War.
What did these four powers know? Researchers into the Hess Mess have suggested that one of these "secrets" might have to do with the curious nature of Germany's "surrender" at the end of WWII, which notably did not include an official surrender of the Nazi Party.
In order to address the criticism for the seemingly absurd maintenance of an entire facility for one frail inmate, the Allies claimed they were continually pressing for the release of "Hess" on humanitarian grounds, and that it "was the Soviets who continually played the bad guy and vetoed any such notion, conveniently enabling the western Allies to blame Russia."
Perhaps very significantly, there were no Soviet officers on duty at the time of "Hess's" death.
Hess's male nurse, Abdallah Melaouhi, shared the good news of this potential release with his patient:
Melaouhi, who eventually would have firsthand experience with the extremely suspicious circumstances surrounding the eventual death of "Hess," would become convinced that his patient was murdered, and would later write a book on the event called Rudolf Hess: His Murder and Betrayal. Dr. Hugh Thomas, one of the most vocal proponents of the "double" hypothesis, shared Melaouhi's suspicions.
Taken in the context of the extremely turbulent political climate at the time, the incarceration and alleged murder of Prisoner Number Seven becomes astonishingly significant.
If the connection to the fall of Thatcher seems a stretch, it has been alleged that the personal secretary of Prime Minister, Ian Gow, "had told Hugh Thomas that in return for the latter's dropping of his allegations that Hess was murdered, the government would be prepared to admit that there was doubt about the identity of the prisoner."
Dr. Thomas refused to drop his allegations, and Mr. Gow was murdered himself by a car bomb soon after, supposedly from an attack by the IRA, though his murder remains unsolved to this day.
While here is not the place for an exhaustive overview of the death of Prisoner Number Seven, his nurse Melaouhi sums it up nicely: "The question was no longer whether or not Hess had been murdered, but rather who had committed the crime and why."
Melaouhi's account is essential, as his firsthand experience is extremely important in getting a clearer picture of "Hess's" final days:
After visiting his patient's body at the British Military Hospital, he observed British officials "cheerfully drinking champagne and apparently celebrating something." Upon his return to the scene later that day, "almost everything had been moved including all the traces of what had happened." Melaouhi also noticed "several strange men" milling about the area.
Within 48 hours of the death of Prisoner Number Seven, the facility began to be demolished to make room for a new shopping center. While this was ostensibly done to prevent Spandau from becoming a "Neo-Nazi" shrine (shades of the "death" of Osama bin Laden), one can't help but recall other incidents where the "evidence" was disposed of under curious circumstances, namely in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing and the attack on the World Trade Center complex on 9/11.
Prisoner Number Seven was not to leave Spandau alive.
axolotl__peyotl ago
Wolf Hess, the only child of the enigmatic Nazi, could never accept that the prisoner he had grown to love might not be his real father. However, he was extremely vocal about his suspicions of the medical treatments "Hess" was receiving.
Wolf noted that his father's death certificate "was signed only by British personnel" but that his father's death "occurred in the month of August, during the American guard rotation." After arriving on the scene with his lawyer, they "were neither allowed inside the prison complex nor were they allowed to view Wolf Hess's father, and no further information was forthcoming."
Eventually, after much confusion, they were given three separate accounts of "Hess's" death, with one version placing the death in Spandau and another in the British Military Hospital.
Wolf and his family had his own suspicions about the British Hospital, claiming that attempts had already been made on his "Hess's" life on two separate occasions. In one instance he refers to a "coup-like transfer" of the prisoner to the hospital, and that a well-timed "peculiar" letter that Wolf received that prompted a visit may have "forestalled a murder-by-medical-emergency."
Despite assurances that Hess would be returned to Spandau within 24 hours, Wolf was eventually told that "his father did not want to see him until the end of the month." Undeterred, Wolf and his lawyer traveled to Spandau to confront the authorities directly.
After being met with further resistance, they were denied their written application for a visit, but they were told that "he could go to the door of his father's hospital room with the four Allied governors, and look at his father from the door!" According to Wolf:
Although Wolf speculates that he had prevented his father's murder, it seems reasonable to surmise that he had interrupted a "very different procedure, one designed to reinforce prior imprinted patterns of behavior. Had Wolf interrupted a mind control procedure?"
After the death of Prisoner Number Seven, Wolf and his lawyer procured testimony from a South African lawyer "with contacts to Western secret services" which was presented to a judge in the form of an affidavit, reading:
The implications of this affidavit, if true, are staggering: Hess was the target of a political assassination, and was not simply the victim of an ordinary murder.
Wolf also astutely notes that the issue of German reunification may be an important aspect of the Hess Mess, as his "father" was the last of the major Nazis alive, and the last to have possessed the title Reichminister. In Wolf's own words:
Although the reunification of Germany was indeed proposed at the time, "nowhere does one encounter with respect to those proposals any mention of Rudolf Hess in their connection," so the possibility that "Hess" was involved to the point of refusing is potentially extremely significant.
axolotl__peyotl ago
A Secret So Sinister
A potentially vital aspect of the Hess Mess discussed by Wolf Hess and others is the "Jewish Question," which may be one of the most significant facets of this entire opera. It's worth mentioning that the government of Israel "made numerous requests to Great Britain to be able to interview 'Spandau Hess' about his peace proposals. These requests were always refused."
Wolf alleges that during the Camp David accord meetings in 1978, Israeli Prime Minster Menachem Begin privately warned Carter that "Hess" must not leave Spandau alive. Wolf offers the following speculation:
While Wolf is clearly defensive of his father in this respect, and it's unfair to blame Great Britain for Germany's mistakes, what is clear is that if Hess was concerned about the direction Germany was going with respect to the Jewish Question, and Churchill's government refused to negotiate on this issue, that could be interpreted as enabling the future deaths of millions of people.
Churchill's connection to and defense of the Zionist movement in this regard is perhaps very relevant:
Despite Churchill's claim of "appeasing" the Arabs, Parliament nonetheless approved the plan.
The Balfour Declaration, perhaps one of the shortest and most explosive political documents in history, was a pledge given by the British Government to Lord Rothschild, the leader of the Jewish community in Britain, announcing support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine.
This commission was a British government study on Palestine that recommended dividing the region into two states for Jews and Arabs.
As a result of his visit, an arrangement was made between the SS and the Zionists, and the SS actually began providing funds to the Zionist guerilla-terrorist organization Haganah in return for "intelligence on British activities in Palestine."
At this point it's worth mentioning the claims of Colonal Pilcher, who has been already mentioned as being the potential person who signed the cover letter for Hess granting Royal protection. According to Pilcher, Hess came over with goal of toppling Hitler:
Why were such desperate measures being considering by the coup plotters in both Germany and Britain?
After Hess's fateful flight, the Reich's policy towards Jewish emigration changed, leading some to suggest that the events were related:
And here an uncomfortable question must be asked: If the details of Hess's peace plan were known, it implies that someone on the British side wanted the genocide to proceed. It's not hard to see why these proposals had to be buried.
At this point, the implications of this aspect of the Hess Mess become all the more disturbing.
Much has been written about the alleged "significance" of the number 6 million with respect to the Holocaust. It's often noted that an unusual amount of newspaper articles and other writings from the pre-WWII era happen to mention the imminent plight or destruction of "6 million" Jews.
For example, the Zionist leader Mad Nordau, stated the following in 1911:
Although some translations have Nordau saying "six million creatures," the number is glaringly the same. Taking Nordau's claims at face value leads to the following set of assertions:
A mass human sacrifice of Jews was being pre-planned.
The European powers knew about and were to some extent involved in the plan.
Nordau implies that the Zionist leaders also somehow knew about the plan, and this implies their own potential involvement in it at some level, if only that of knowing about it.
This in turn implies some international network of vast proportions, capable of pulling all this off.
axolotl__peyotl ago
An Antarctic Epilogue
Antarctica is a final consideration in the Hess Mess that must be mentioned, as its importance may ultimately prove far more significant than it at first may seem. For those immersed in the realm of conspiracy theory, its inclusion should come as no surprise.
Hess Mess researchers have noted the connections between individuals involved in the Nazi's Antarctic expedition and the prewar "peace ambassadors" sent to negotiate with London in 1939. In any peace negotiation with Britain, "Antarctica would inevitably be included."
Although the German expedition was ostensibly for "scientific research" purposes (shades of the even more bizarre Operation Highjump!), it's entirely possible that Germany was in actuality staking a claim in Antarctica, a theory supported by the fact that the Norwegian government, which believed that it had claim to that region, immediately declared that the "intention of the German Antarctic Expedition" was illegal. In response, the German government declared:
Therefore, some have suggested that Antarctica itself was a component of the Hess peace plan, as Hess himself certainly was privy to whatever may have been accomplished or "discovered" in Antarctica. Hess's connection with the Thule Society is worth mentioning in this context as well, and with our return to the occult we've at last come full circle.
Here's a tldr of this messiest of messes and quagmiriest of quagmires:
The mysterious flight of Rudolf Hess was both a peace mission and an international coup-d'etat. Hitler had knowledge of the flight, but this knowledge was limited because the ultimate goal was for Hitler to be deposed and replaced by Hess. High level Nazis were involved in the planning of this coup. A "peace party" in Britain had similar goals to replace the Churchill government, and involved members of the Royal family.
Due to possible miscalculations during the flight, Hess bailed out and was unable to meet up with his reception committee, which allegedly included the Dukes of Hamilton and Kent, members of the Red Cross, and personnel from a nearby Royal Air Force Base.
Initially, Hess was apprehended by those not involved in the scheme, but eventually the "pro-peace faction" was able to regain control.
Shortly after his capture, Hess was drugged and measured for a duplicate Luftwaffe captain's uniform. This was the first in a series of suspicious events that have led many to speculate that a double of the Deputy may have been prepared almost immediately.
At some point, the real Hess either escaped or was transferred to a new location in Scotland. Meanwhile, the "double" remained at Maindiff and underwent further drugging and other tests to implant false memories.
The real Hess was then killed in an air crash while on a secret mission with the Duke of Kent, a mission that was potentially meant to return Hess to Germany and initiate the next step in the coup.
The double took the real Hess's place at Nuremberg and exhibited erratic behavior. Allen Dulles suspected that "Hess" was a double and brought in MK-Ultra-linked Dr. Ewen Cameron to examine the prisoner.
Hess was forced to spend the rest of his life in captivity, and for many years an entire facility was dedicated to housing the prisoner, despite all of the other Nazis being released. In the 1970's, a British doctor examined Hess and was stunned to find no scarring from the devastating war wounds he had allegedly suffered as a youth. As a result, significant doubts continue to be raised as to the identity of Prisoner Number Seven.
Hess, as the last surviving "Reich Minister," never signed any official document outlawing the Nazi Party, which he had at least some status to do as Hitler's Deputy to the Party. A double, of course, would have no legitimate authority to do so. Adding to the legal complications, "Spandau Hess" may have also refused an offer from Stalin for German reunification.
The real Hess appears to have been negotiating for a Jewish-Zionist homeland in Palestine. The fact that the plan fell through suggests that someone wanted the genocide to proceed.
Though the researchers of the Mess Hess differ on the details, one inescapable conclusion emerges: The murder of "Rudolf Hess" was a political assassination and an international conspiracy of the highest order.
Rudolf Hess dances his Spandau ballet all alone.
axolotl__peyotl ago
Sources
Double Standards: The Rudolf Hess Cover-Up - Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince and Stephen Prior
Hess and the Penguins: The Holocaust, Antarctica and the Strange Case of Rudolf Hess - Joseph Farrell
Night Flight to Dungavel: Rudolf Hess, Winston Churchill, and the Real Turning Point of WWII - Peter Padfield
Rudolf Hess: His Betrayal and Murder - Abdallah Melaouhi
The Murder of Rudolf Hess - Hugh Thomas
Who Murdered My Father, Rudolf Hess? My Father's Mysterious Death in Spandau - Wolf Hess