The most famous escape of the Second World War was the result of a work of disinformation by the British secret services. And what we have always believed to have been the personal initiative of a troubled Nazi was actually a successful trap, which resulted in a major tactical success for Britain and also had practical consequences on the course of the conflict. On the evening of May 10, 1941, a Bf 110 fighter-bomber, with a reserve tank also full of fuel, took off from the test runway of the Messerschmitt AG aircraft factory in Haunstetten, Bavaria, in a northwest direction. At the helm of the Luftwaffe aircraft was Rudolf Hess, number two of the Nazi regime and Hitler’s designated dolphin.
Around 11pm local timewhile in the sky over Scotland, Hess operated the ejection seat and was thrown into the void. It was the first and last parachute jump of his life. Half an hour later, the British Home Guard arrested him, taking him over from a couple of Scottish farmers who had discovered and captured him in their own backyard.
In Berlin, it took twenty-four hours to figure out what had happened and double to make up an official truth. Finally, on May 12, the regime radio read a communiqué from Hitler’s headquarters, according to which Hess had flown to England and had probably fallen victim to an accident. The text spoke of mental breakdown, the deputy of the Fhrer would have been the victim of a delusion of grandeur. The next day, however, the BBC had taken care to set the record straight: Hess had not crashed, he was alive and well and was in the custody of the British authorities. The announcement teased the biting irony of Berliners, fueling jokes and jokes, clandestine of course, because they risked jail: According to Radio London, there are no other flights of German ministers tonight.
Hitler had received the news on the morning of May 11 in the Eagle’s Nest, his residence on the Berghof, in the Bavarian Alps: two aides of Hess, officers Karlheinz Pintsch and Alfred Leitgen, had personally handed him a sealed envelope with an autographed letter from their boss. When he read it, the Fhrer had a fit of rage. He ordered the two unfortunates to be arrested and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they would remain until 1944. Then, together with Martin Bormann, Hitler had spent hours and hours formulating a plausible reason for Hess’s flight to England, as he told in his memoirs Christa Schrder, his secretary.
But what had happened? And what did Hess say to his Fhrer in the letter? Rudolf Hess was not just a Nazi hierarch. He was the most devoted of the early comrades in arms, a true fanatic of the cult of Hitler, who had dictated to him the My fight in Landsberg prison, after the failed Munich putsch in November 1923. Having risen to power, Hitler had entrusted him with the management of the party.
But the start of the war had estranged him from the leader. More and more Hess became convinced (rightly) that Hitler’s idea of opening a second front against the Soviet Union would be a fatal mistake with the first still open. The Third Reich would not have had sufficient resources to withstand the simultaneous impact of two wars. Thus, he became increasingly obsessed with the idea that he might be the one to negotiate a separate peace with London and give it to the Fhrer. And when in the spring of 1941 he realized that the start of Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the USSR, was near, he broke the delay. Hess thought he had also identified the right man with whom to negotiate a peace agreement: not Churchill, of course, but the Scottish duke Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, one of the leaders of the British peace movement and opponent of the premier. She had met him in 1936 during the Berlin Olympic Games.
To the Home Guard agents who arrested him, Hess declared a false name and asked to see Douglas-Hamilton, claiming to be his friend. But when on 11 May the duke appales and the hierarch presented himself with his real name, he did not remember the meeting. Indeed, as soon as he learned his true identity, Douglas-Hamilton, a true patriot, immediately informed the Prime Minister’s cabinet. It is said that Churchill had decided that evening to see himself a movie in the bunker under Downing Street where he lived. And when they told him that Hess, Hitler’s deputy, had been captured in Scotland, he replied: Hess or not Hess, I now want to see the Marx brothers.
The question that has always hovered whether Hess flew on his own initiative or on a secret mandate from Hitler. None of this, according to the historian Rainer F. Schmidt, who was able to consult the Hess file, finally freed from secrecy in the British State Archives. In fact, as Die Welt reveals, Rudolf Hess fell into a trap set for him by the British intelligence. In fact, already since 1940, pretending to be Douglas-Hamilton, who knew nothing about it, the British agents had established an epistolary correspondence with the number two of the Nazis, with the aim of spreading disinformation at the top of the regime to sow discord and suspicion. That Hess took the letters seriously, to the point of answering and even deciding to go to Scotland personally, Her Majesty’s intelligence had never imagined or hoped for. His escape was a totally unexpected stroke of luck.
The capture of Hess produced at least three advantages for Britain. First, it improves the morale of the population. More importantly, it reinforced concern in the United States that London might be tempted to strike a separate peace with Hitler, facilitating Congress’ decision to increase Lend-Lease military and food aid to the United Kingdom. Finally, Churchill fed Stalin’s fear that Britain and Germany might unite against the Soviet Union.
Rudolf Hess would remain in British hands throughout the war. Tried in Nuremberg with the other Nazi hierarchs, his escape saved him from being sentenced to death. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and served his sentence in the special prison of Spandau in Berlin, where from 1981 he was the only inmate of the facility. Hess always remained a staunch Nazi and anti-Semite and this was the argument against the many who over time asked for his release for health reasons. By now very ill, on 17 August 1987, at the age of 93, Hess was found hanged in the Berlin prison, officially committing suicide. The family and his lawyer never believed this version. A few weeks earlier Mikhail Gorbachev had lifted the Soviet veto on his release from prison. Probably, he would be freed shortly thereafter.
May 12, 2021 (change May 13, 2021 | 14:13)
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