Rudolf Hess, the unbalanced and paranoid Nazi leader who committed suicide

Almost 21 years Rudolf Hess survived as the sole tenant of the huge Spandau prison. After being sentenced to life imprisonment in the Nuremberg trial in 1946, the Nazi leader and friend of Hitler was held in that Berlin prison until his death in 1987. He wandered through its corridors, its cells and its empty facilities until he decided to commit suicide with the cable of a lamp at 93 years. Shortly after, Spandau was demolished to build a shopping center. Hess was a minister without portfolio, an SS general and number three in the socialist regime when on May 10, 1941, he took off from Augsburg on a foolhardy mission to negotiate a peace agreement with the British government. Piloting a twin-engined Messerschmitt, he managed to cross the ocean at low altitude and reach south of Glasgow, from where he parachuted. Neither Hitler nor any other National Socialist leader was aware of the initiative of Hess, who thought that he could convince Churchill to accept an armistice. The chancellor was furious to learn that his henchman was being held in Scotland. At that time, he issued the order that, if he returned to Germany, he would be executed immediately. In his cockpit he carried maps, a compass, a flashlight, and a wad of bills to contact the Duke of Hamilton, an officer in the Royal Air Force, whom he believed was favorable to an understanding with Berlin. After running into a peasant who informed the authorities, Hess was taken to a barracks. They questioned him, gave him a medical examination, and allowed Hamilton to interview him to assess his intentions. They soon understood that he had acted on his behalf and that he was unbalanced with paranoid traits. He was led away and then interned in a prison camp. Churchill ordered that he be held incommunicado, but treated fairly. But Hess was convinced that they wanted to poison him and tried to commit suicide on a couple of occasions. In one of them, he broke his femur. During interrogations, he feigned amnesia to avoid collaborating with his captors. After the defeat of the Third Reich, he was taken to Nuremberg to be tried along with the rest of the Nazi leaders. Many of them were sentenced to death, but the court went easy on Hess. He was acquitted of war crimes, but was convicted of his involvement in Hitler’s plans to dominate the continent. He was one of the founders of the National Socialist party and responsible for anti-Jewish legislation. He shared a cell with Hitler, where he dictated his ‘Mein Kampf’ Hess was one of the founders of the National Socialist Party, which he had joined in 1920 with card number 16. He was a fanatical and violent anti-Semite who had joined the coup Hitler against the Bavarian Government. He shared a cell with his leader in Landsberg prison, where Hitler dictated his ‘Mein Kampf’ to him. Until the beginning of the war in 1939, Hess was his confidante, his secretary, the head of the Nazi organization and the person in charge of legislation against the Jews. He was a man of strange customs, with a marked fondness for esotericism and astrology, and he practiced spiritualism. He followed a vegetarian diet and suffered from anxiety attacks, but Hitler appreciated him and valued his fidelity and his past as a war hero. At the end of the process, Hess was taken to Spandau together with Speer, Dönitz, Raeder and Schirach, guarded by soldiers from the four victorious powers. In 1966 Speer was released and Hess was left alone in a prison designed for 600 inmates. The British and Americans were in favor of releasing him on humanitarian grounds, but the Soviet Union vetoed it. Hess did not want his son to visit him and avoided any outside contact, while he indulged in his fantasies, convinced that they wanted to kill him. In recent years, he had absolute freedom of movement in the empty prison, through whose corridors he wandered like a ghost. He had a television, access to a library, and worked hours in the garden. On August 17, 1987, he committed suicide by hanging himself from a window, leaving a farewell note. He was buried in a secret place and the prison demolished. Nothing remains to remember his passage through this world.