The US president who secretly tried to free Rudolf Hess after World War II

2024-03-03 03:36:39
ABC already told you about the strange and inexplicable journey that led Rudolf Hess to spend the rest of his life behind bars, in a maximum security prison that the Nazi leader occupied alone, under the close surveillance of more than fifty soldiers of four nationalities. What almost no one knows is that he was able to get out of prison, secretly helped by none other than the president of the United States, his greatest enemy. The story of what happened on May 10, 1941 is well known. Hess called his chief aide, Captain Karlheinz Pintsch, and asked her to pick him up in the afternoon. He didn’t give him much more information, just that the weather service was announcing good weather and he wanted to take advantage of it to make a flight. Before, the Nazi leader played for a while with his son and had a quick lunch with his friend Alfred Rosenberg. “You’re going to be gone a lot longer, I know,” his wife commented, surprised. Less than an hour later, he took off from the Augsburg base with his twin-engine Messerschmitt Bf 110 and began a 1.30 kilometer journey that constituted one of the few mysteries of Nazi Germany that has not been completely clarified. He flew to Dungavel Castle, property of the Duke of Hamilton, on the west coast of Scotland, just to the limit of the device’s flight range. Hess carried with him a peace plan for the British, with the aim of ending the most devastating conflict in history. He wanted to achieve it, moreover, when the Führer was about to begin the invasion of the Soviet Union in the famous ‘Operation Barbarossa’. Related News standard No An anonymous letter, a bullet and a sulfur pit: the mystery of the Civil War, revealed 90 years later Israel Viana Written from Lorca prison in November 1936, ABC and the General Archive of Murcia reveal the identity of a martyr beatified by Benedict XVI, author of a farewell letter to his family days before being executed by the CNT. The news of that unexpected and secret takeoff caused a gigantic earthquake in Germany and the rest of Europe, as proven by the diplomatic dispatches of the time, since its protagonist was not just any soldier, but Hitler’s closest collaborator, the only man with whom the all-powerful Nazi leader, responsible for the death of six million Jews, allowed himself displays of affection in public. Churchill himself did not believe the news at first. He thought it was a joke, but it was true. Arrest When he arrived at Hamilton Castle, at that time Lord Chancellor of Churchill’s government, he delivered a document with four conditions on behalf of the Third Reich to sign peace and achieve union between the British and Germans to crush the USSR, but he had dreamed too tall. Upon setting foot on the property, he was arrested, branded a war criminal and imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he remained until 1945. He was never free again, although he had a chance. Hitler, very irritated, considered it a betrayal on the part of his most trusted person and chose to call him crazy. “A letter left by him shows characteristic signs of mental disorder and it is feared that she was the victim of his hallucinations,” stated the official statement published a few hours after the news was known. The British and the BBC, for their part, wanted to make a political profit and defended the thesis that Rudolf Hess had undertaken that desperate flight to “escape from the Gestapo and the Nazi regime.” The list of questions about the ‘Hess case’ remains infinite and is expanded by those that arise at the Nuremberg trial and as a result of his life in the Spandau prison in Berlin, where he was held. How can it be conceived that, after being declared innocent of the accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, while Albert Speer, guilty of the slavery of millions of people during the war, was sentenced to only twenty years in prison ? Why was he kept isolated until his death in a 696-cell prison where he was the only occupant and which cost hundreds of millions a year to maintain? Why was he so guarded? Freedom Although not many people know it, the truth is that Hess had a chance to get out of prison in 1974, when he turned 80. The promoter of this possible pardon was none other than Richard Nixon, although the news was not known until three decades later, when the British National Archives declassified a series of secret documents. The president of the United States justified his support for this release for humanitarian reasons, since Hitler’s lieutenant had already been behind bars for almost thirty years, specifically, since the famous Nuremberg trials. When Nixon took pity on Hess and made the decision to support his release, he may have known some of the answers to those questions that not even the most prestigious historians have been able to answer. According to the secret documents, the American president proposed, to convince all the parties involved, that this release could be subject to some type of home confinement, but in Moscow the Kremlin quickly showed itself inflexible. The Soviet newspaper ‘Pravda’ wrote: “Popular conscience dictates that Hitler’s lieutenant must drink his retribution to the dregs of the chalice.” The popular campaign against this decision, which was initially launched by the Government of Great Britain and immediately supported by the United States and France, was brutal throughout the Soviet Union. The confidential document made public in 2007 was titled ‘The Death of Hess’ and consisted of five points. The reasons The first point warned of “Hess’s probable death in custody.” And he later explained: «Hess is currently serving his sentence in the Allied prison at Spandau under four-party Allied administration and it is likely that he will die there or in the British Military Hospital which is also located in the British Sector of Berlin. When he dies, the prison administration will have to consider disposing of his body. If we do not act, the responsibility will fall on the authorities of the sector where the body is located. The most difficult aspects of the document were set out below. At first he points out: «According to the general law of Berlin, the relatives have the right and the duty to dispose of the body. In that case, the closest relative would be Frau Hess, the widow […]. If you remove the body, there is a possibility of unwanted demonstrations at the funeral. Also, that the tomb becomes a place of pilgrimage. If in an attempt to prevent this the body were buried within the Spandau prison, it might be necessary to keep a watch on the grave for some years. «The remains of some of the main war criminals [nazis] They were destroyed by cremation and scattering. “This option could be considered unduly ruthless so long after the end of World War II,” the fourth point explained. And the sixth stressed: «In any case, whatever action we wish to take after Hess’s death, we will have to pay attention to international agreements on the subject. On April 29, 1954, the four Allied High Commissioners in Germany signed an agreement which provided: ‘In the event of his death, the body of the deceased must be buried on the territory of the Spandau prison. The burial will be carried out in accordance with the normal religious procedures of the deceased prisoner’s faith and in the presence of his close relatives if they wish to be present.’ A “farce” In the same document, Britain considered Hess’s forty-year imprisonment a “farce,” but knew it could never convince the Soviet Union to release him. And so it was, because when that possibility was put on the table, the Kremlin immediately blocked it. For the communist authorities, humanitarian reasons were not enough when talking about one of the main leaders of the Nazi regime, who finally appeared dead in his cell on August 18, 1987. According to the first news, Hess died strangled with an electric cable, but if we stick to the official version of the first autopsy, it was impossible not to question other details. How could a 93-year-old man, arthritic and half-blind, commit suicide in a garden shed without any of the 500 guards seeing him? The first to doubt the official thesis was his own family, who commissioned a second autopsy. This determined that his death had occurred due to asphyxiation and not due to suspension. Since then, mystery has also surrounded the last days of his life, pointing to the possibility of murder. His son, Wolf Rüdiger Hess, publicly declared on many occasions that his father was in good psychological condition and that the type of suicide accused of being committed was physically impossible for him. Working against him was the fact that Hitler’s lieutenant had tried it on several occasions throughout his life, which always oscillated between lucidity and periods of depression.
#president #secretly #free #Rudolf #Hess #World #War