Rudolf Hess may have been released from Spandau prison in 1974, just after his 80th birthday. The most surprising thing about this fact is that one of the promoters of it 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 on humanitarian grounds, since Hitler’s lieutenant had been behind bars after being sentenced to life imprisonment at the famous Nuremberg trials held.
Hess’s story begins on Saturday, May 10, 1941, when the Nazi leader called his top aide, Captain Karlheinz Pintsch, and asked him to pick him up, without fail, in the afternoon. He didn’t give her much more information, just that the weather service had announced favorable weather and he was going to take the opportunity to make a flight. His subordinate obviously didn’t ask any questions. What he did not imagine is that this would be one of the strangest and most incomprehensible episodes of World War II.
In the morning, Hess spent a good time playing with his son Wolf and had a quick lunch with his friend Alfred Rosenberg. The guest did not know that he would not see his fellow Nazi youth member again until the Nuremberg trial. Before leaving the house, his wife told him: “You’re going to be gone a lot longer, I know it.” So it was. Less than an hour later, he was taking off from the Augsburg base with his twin engine Messerschmitt Bf 110 (Me 110). The darkest journey of the war began, the only enigma of the Third Reich that has never been fully clarified and that continues to be shrouded in shadows.
Hess was going to travel 1,370 kilometers away, just up to the limit of the device’s flight range. Specifically, to Dungavel Castle, owned by the Duke of Hamilton, on the west coast of Scotland. He brought her a peace plan for the British, with the aim of putting an end to the most devastating conflict in history. And he wanted to achieve it, moreover, just when the Führer was about to begin the invasion of the Soviet Union in the famous ‘Operation Barbarossa’.
The surprise in Europe
The news of that unexpected and secret departure caused a gigantic earthquake in Germany and the rest of Europe, as the diplomatic dispatches of the time prove, since its protagonist was not just any soldier, but Hitler’s closest collaborator, the The only man with whom the all-powerful Nazi leader, responsible for the death of six million Jews, allowed himself public displays of affection. Churchill himself did not believe the news at first. He thought it was a joke… but. It was true.
When he arrived at Hamilton castle, at that time Lord Chancellor of the Churchill 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 later crush the Soviet Union, but there was dreamed too high Upon setting foot on the property, they arrested him, branded him a war criminal, and imprisoned him in the Tower of London, where he remained until 1945. He was never free again, despite the aforementioned attempts by Nixon for three decades. after.
Hitler, very irritated by what he considered a betrayal by his most trusted person, chose to brand him as crazy. “A letter left by him shows characteristic signs of mental disorder and it is feared that he may have been the victim of his hallucinations,” said the official statement that was published a few hours after the news was released. 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.”
Ruldolf Hess (right), with Hitler, during World War II
‘The death of Hess’
The list of questions about the ‘Hess case’ continues to be endless and is extended by those that arise from Nuremberg and his life in Spandau, in Berlin. 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 enslaving millions of people during the war, only twenty years in prison? ? Why was he kept until his death in isolation in a 696-cell prison where he was the sole occupant and cost hundreds of millions a year to maintain? Why was he watched over by a gigantic army with soldiers of four nationalities, in a prison with security measures unthinkable for his time?
When Nixon took pity on Hess and made the decision to support his release in 1974, he may have known some of the answers to those questions that even the most prestigious historians have not been able to answer for sure. According to secret documents from the British National Archives, the President of the United States Nixon raised, to convince all parties involved, that this release could be subject to some kind of home confinement, but in Moscow the Kremlin was quickly inflexible.
The Soviet daily ‘Pravda’ wrote: “Popular conscience dictates that Hitler’s lieutenant must drink his retribution to the dregs of the chalice.” The popular campaign against that decision, which was initially launched by the British government and immediately supported by the United States and France, was brutal throughout the Soviet Union. The confidential document made public in 2007 was entitled ‘The death of Hess’ and consisted of five points.
Nixon, announcing his resignation in August 1974
Liberation Points
The first bullet point warned of “the probable death of Hess in custody.” And he explained later: “Hess is currently serving his sentence in the Allied prison at Spandau under allied quadripartite administration and it is likely that he will die there or in the British Military Hospital which is also in the British Sector of Berlin. When he dies, the prison administration will have to consider disposing of his body. If they do not act, the responsibility will fall on the authorities of the sector where the body is located.
The most tricky 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 corpse. In that case, the next of kin would be Frau Hessthe widow […]. If you remove the body, there is a possibility of unwanted manifestations at the funeral. Also, that the grave becomes a place of pilgrimage. If in an attempt to prevent this the body were to be buried inside Spandau Prison, it might be necessary to keep watch over the grave for some years.”
“The remains of some of the major 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 that provided: ‘In the event of his death, the body of the deceased must be buried on the territory of the Spandau prison. Burial will take place in accordance with the normal religious procedures of the deceased prisoner’s faith and in the presence of his or her next of kin if they wish to be present.’
Rudolf Hess, right, during the Nuremberg trial in 1945
Hess’s death
In the same document, Britain considered Hess’ forty-year imprisonment a “sham” but knew that it could never convince the Soviet Union to release him. That’s how 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 speaking of one of the main leaders of the Nazi regime, who was finally found dead in his cell on August 18, 1987.
According to the first news, Hess was strangled to death 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 half-blind, arthritic 93-year-old man 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 ordered a second autopsy. This determined that his death had been caused by suffocation and not by suspension. Since then, mystery has also surrounded the last days of his life, pointing to the possibility of a 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 he was accused of was physically impossible for him. Playing 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. But why did Rudolf Hess wait until 1987 to commit suicide if the Nazi leaders had done it immediately after the end of World War II or after being sentenced in Nuremberg?
As they had considered in the confidential 1974 document, Hess’s grave in Wunsiedel, Bavaria, became a place of pilgrimage for sympathizers of the Third Reich. To avoid this, in 2011, the tomb was dismantled at dawn, without prior notice, and its remains burned and scattered on the high seas.