The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (32 page)

Shortly before eleven o’clock on the night of Saturday, May 10, 1941, David MaClean, the head plowman at Floor’s Farm, outside Eaglesham
near Glasgow, was startled by a tremendous roar that shook the whole cottage. Rushing outside, he saw that an aircraft had crashed in a nearby field; he also saw a lone parachute descending in the moonlight. Unarmed, MaClean ran across the field and found the parachutist disentangling himself from his harness – hampered somewhat by a twisted ankle. MaClean, keeping his distance, called, “Who are you? Are you German”? The pilot, a big man, pulled himself upright with some difficulty and replied, “Yes, I am German. My name is Hauptmann Alfred Horn. I want to go to Dungavel House. I have an important message for the Duke of Hamilton”.

The “Hauptmann” gave no trouble and waited quietly until a constable arrived and took him into custody. He was held at the local home guard headquarters for a few hours, then was transferred to the Mayhill Barracks in Glasgow. When questioned, he simply repeated his name and insisted that he must see the Duke of Hamilton on a matter of urgency.

The next morning this information was passed on to the Duke, who was then a wing-commander with the city of Glasgow (bomber) squadron. Together with an RAF intelligence officer, he hurried immediately to interview the captured pilot – who was by then laid up in bed with a painfully swollen ankle. After the introductions the prisoner insisted on speaking to the Duke alone. The intelligence officer obligingly went outside; as soon as they were alone, the prisoner greeted the Duke of Hamilton as an acquaintance. He explained that they had met in Germany during the 1936 Olympics and that the Duke had even attended a luncheon party at his house. When Hamilton continued to look puzzled, the “Hauptmann” said, “I do not know if you recognize me, but I am Rudolf Hess”.

Hamilton was staggered. If the man before him was indeed Hess – and the resemblance was striking – it meant that they had captured the deputy Führer of the Nazi Party – one of the top men in the Nazi high command and third in line to Hitler himself. Yet why would one of the most powerful men in Europe risk his life by flying into an enemy country at night and then hand himself over as if he were a common criminal hoping for amnesty?

Hess went on to explain that he was on a “mission of humanity”; a diplomatic errand of the highest importance, carrying a message that could save thousands, perhaps millions of lives. He was here, he told the astonished duke, to try to negotiate peace between Britain and Germany.

Rudolf Hess had the reputation of being the most intellectual member
of Hitler’s inner circle. Born in 1894 in Egypt, he had been schooled in Germany and had immediately volunteered for active service at the outbreak of war in 1914. Shot through the left lung on the Rumanian front in 1917, he was given a medical discharge from the army, but after a six-month recovery period he joined the Imperial Flying Corps. He successfully completed pilot training in time to serve only ten days before the armistice.

The National Socialist Workers Party, led by a spellbinding orator named Adolf Hitler, consisted mainly of ex-servicemen who felt that the peace had betrayed them. Hess joined in 1920, the year Hitler took over the leadership. He quickly achieved prominence and in 1923 helped Hitler plan the attempted overthrow of the Bavarian government – later known as the “Beerhall Putsch”. When this failed, and Hitler was arrested, Hess fled the country. After a spectacular self-defense that was virtually a condemnation of his judges, Hitler was sentenced by a sympathetic court to five years’ imprisonment but was offered a considerably reduced sentence if he remained on good behavior. When he heard the news, Hess returned of his own free will and gave himself up. He was sentenced to an eighteen-month term and sent to serve his time with Hitler in the Landsberg fortress.

During their imprisonment Hitler and Hess kept busy, Hitler writing a book and Hess acting as his secretary. It is certain that Hess had an important influence on the development of ideas in
Mein Kampf
; he had a better intellectual and academic training than Hitler and had already developed his own strong views on German racial purity and the need for territorial expansion. The two worked well together, and the foundations of Hess’s future influence in the Nazi Party were laid.

When Hitler won an election and became Reichschancellor in 1933, Hess was appointed his deputy, and during the establishment of the totalitarian dictatorship he was never far from Hitler’s side. But when Hess announced plans to make the first east-west trans-Atlantic flight, Hitler turned down the scheme, insisting that Hess was too valuable to the Reich to risk his life.

In February 1938 Hess was appointed head of a department whose purpose was to make secret plans for the war of German expansion, which broke out a year later. Hess is known to have advocated expansion eastward, into Poland and then into the Soviet Union, but he was strongly against war on two fronts. And when France capitulated in 1940, he seems to have decided that Germany’s new western frontier was reasonably secure and that therefore the war with Great Britain was dangerous and unnecessary. The question was, would Hess have felt
strongly enough about the subject to risk his own life to make peace, and would such a madcap scheme have had Hitler’s backing?

Although stating that he was acting on his own initiative, the man who claimed to be Hess insisted to Hamilton that he was speaking for Hitler in all but name. The Führer had never wanted to go to war with the British Empire, he said. Britain’s impending total defeat – and in 1941 many people thought this increasingly likely – was something Hitler truly wished to avoid. There was a chance now for the nations to come to peace and perhaps even to join forces to smash the threat from Communist Russia. He was there to try to put an immediate stop to the war.

Hamilton asked him why he had specifically asked to see him, and the prisoner replied that a mutual friend, Dr Albrecht Haushofer, had recommended the duke as a man who would support his peace initiative. To back this he pointed out that among his confiscated belongings were the visiting cards of Haushofer and his father, Professor Karl Haushofer. He also mentioned a letter that Albrecht Haushofer had sent to the Duke, inviting him to a secret diplomatic meeting in neutral Portugal.

The Duke had indeed received this letter, after it had been intercepted and investigated by M15, but he was still dubious about the identity of the prisoner. For one thing, he was carrying no identification other than the visiting cards and some photographs of Rudolf Hess as a small child – a very odd choice of material to back such an incredible story.

It all seemed beyond belief. Capturing Rudolf Hess – under any circumstances – was almost too good to be true, and it occurred to Hamilton that it might be a trick using a look-alike, in order to sound out the British government’s willingness to continue fighting. Even so, he found himself more than half believing that the prisoner was indeed Hess, but he was careful not to give this away during the interview.

The Duke, wary of using the telephone system, flew to inform Churchill in person. Ushered in to see the Prime Minister a few hours later, he told his strange story. Churchill exclaimed, “Do you mean to tell me that the Deputy Führer of Germany is in our hands? . . . Well, Hess or no Hess, I’m going to see the Marx Brothers”! Which in fact he did –
The Marx Brothers Go West
– at a local cinema.

On his return he interrogated Hamilton more thoroughly. The Duke said that the more he thought about the secret letter from Dr Haushofer, the more certain he was that only the real Hess could have known about it. Hess was known to be a close associate of Haushofer, and it was quite possible that the letter had been sent on his orders. If this was the case,
or even if Hess had simply condoned the letter, it was highly unlikely that he would broadcast the fact to his colleagues, many of whom would have argued that it was treason. After a three-hour session, Churchill sat deep in thought and was heard to mutter, “The worm is in the bud”.

The next day Hamilton, who admitted that his memory of meeting Hess in 1936 was a dim one, was sent back to Glasgow with Ivone Kirkpatrick, a man who had served as First Secretary to the embassy in Berlin from 1933 to 1938 and had met Hess on many occasions. When they landed they were greeted by a call from the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. The following broadcast had just been sent out on German public radio:

Hamilton and Kirkpatrick were told that the Ministry of Information was shortly going to release a statement headed “Rudolf Hess in England”. The British government was committing itself.

If this was indeed some cunning Nazi trick, then Hitler was playing for high stakes. The real Hess might have dropped out of sight for a while to give an impostor a chance to convince the British, but Hess’s public credibility would be destroyed in Germany if the “mission” came to nothing. And if this were to happen, the Nazi high command would have to admit that they had been attempting a confidence trick on the highest diplomatic level; the loss of face to the party as a whole would be enormous. Since nobody could imagine what such a plot might achieve that would be worth such a risk, it seemed logical that the simple explanation – that Hess had flown to England without Hitler’s knowledge – was the only possible one.

The prisoner did not recognize Kirkpatrick when they were first introduced, but as they talked he seemed to remember him and mentioned several incidents they had witnessed together in Germany. This convinced Kirkpatrick and Hamilton that they were talking to Hess. Then, just as the interview was becoming more relaxed, the prisoner drew out a large packet of manuscript notes and launched into a four-hour diatribe on the subject of Anglo-German historical relations and the unfairness of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany.

The exhausted Kirkpatrick later telephoned the Foreign Office, to be told that Churchill had definitely ruled out any possibility of negotiating with the Deputy Führer. To do so might be interpreted, by friend and foe alike, as unwillingness to fight – perhaps just the result the Nazis were hoping for. Hess, said Churchill, was to be treated as a prisoner of war and nothing else. He was to be told that if, after the war, he was found guilty of war crimes, his repentance would stand in his favour; other than that the British government had no interest in him.

After eighteen months of imprisonment, Hess began to show signs of mental illness; he complained that his food was being poisoned and made a number of suicide attempts. He was moved to a mental hospital and held there for the rest of the war.

It was now generally accepted that the prisoner was Rudolf Hess – even his mental illness seemed to support the Nazi statement that he had been suffering from a breakdown at the time of his flight. Yet an observant doctor might have noted reasons for doubt. To begin with, Hess insisted that he was suffering from periodic bouts of amnesia, which made it impossible for him to answer questions about himself. But he also seemed to have undergone a personality change. The Deputy Führer had been known to be obsessed with his health. Like Hitler, he had been a strict vegetarian, who refused even to eat eggs, fried foods, or any products grown with artificial fertilizer, considering them “impure”. He was known to have eaten with fastidious care and to have been punctiliously neat and tidy. In confinement in England, he ate anything set before him voraciously and messily and seemed to have lost all interest in his appearance.

While held in Britain he was allowed to write to his wife, Ilsa Hess, via neutral Switzerland. She later said that the handwriting seemed to be that of her husband and that she never had any doubts that that was who he was. What did bother her occasionally was that her husband seemed to be desperately trying to prove to her that he
was
Rudolf Hess.

The war ended; in October 1945 the prisoner was transferred to Nuremberg, Germany, to face the War Crimes Tribunal. On his arrival he seemed to suffer a total memory breakdown and was judged incapable of standing trial. The doctors tried to jog his memory by introducing him to old colleagues; but although he showed some sign of recognition when confronted by his two secretaries, he failed to recognize Hermann Göring or Karl Haushofer, the father of the man who had recommended that he seek out the Duke of Hamilton.

Perhaps understandably, the prisoner was also in poor physical shape. Hess had once been a large, well-built man in excellent health. He was
now gaunt and sickly; although in defense of his jailers it should be noted that he had already been in poor physical condition when captured.

As the authorities wrangled over his mental competence, the prisoner suddenly issued the following statement;

He subsequently stood trial, and though clearly tired and less than fully alert, gave a reasonable account of himself. On September 2, 1946, he was found guilty of conspiracy and crimes against peace. Since it could not be proved that he had known about the death camps, he was acquitted of the charge of war crimes. Together with Walter Funk, Admiral Donitz, Admiral Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Constantin von Naurath, and Albert Speer, Rudolf Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau Prison in West Berlin. There he was simply referred to as Prisoner Number 7.