The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (33 page)

Throughout the trial and for the next twenty-three years, the prisoner declined to see his wife or his only son. When he finally agreed to allow Ilsa Hess to visit him, she expressed surprise that his voice had deepened – it might have been expected to become higher with increasing age.

Spandau Prison was an oddly anomalous product of the cold war. Situated in the British-occupied section of West Berlin, it was administered by the four major victorious powers: the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Under a special convention drawn up for the prison, control of the prison alternated between these four nations every month; this included a total change of guard.

In the course of time the other six prisoners were released, the last two being von Schirach and Speer in 1966. But Prisoner Number 7 was offered no hope of release. The Soviets made it clear that they would block any such move and that Hess was to remain imprisoned until he died.

There were two reasons for this. First, the Soviet people felt particularly bitter toward Hess, who had collabourated with Hitler on the plan to conquer and enslave them. But the main reason was undoubtedly
that Hess’s release would involve the Soviets losing their foothold in West Berlin, and with it, presumably, all kinds of opportunities for spying.

And so, on 17 August 1987, the last Spandau prisoner committed suicide by hanging at the age of ninety-three. But for at least fourteen years before that, there were very real doubts about his identity. In 1972 Dr Hugh Thomas was appointed consultant in general surgery at the British Military Hospital in Berlin. Three years earlier, in 1969, Hess had almost died when a duodenal ulcer perforated, and his Russian captors allowed several days to pass before sending for a doctor; now Thomas insisted on giving him a complete medical checkup – although it was not until the following year, 1973, that he was finally allowed to examine Hess in the presence of representatives of all four powers. Thomas was revolted by the inhumanity toward Hess shown by Voitov, the Soviet commandant; any attempt to show sympathy was immediately met by a command of “Stop that! It is contrary to the Nuremberg convention”.

What Thomas now discovered puzzled him deeply. Hess had been wounded in the chest in the First World War, and the resultant lung injury had caused him much bronchial trouble in the days when he was Hitler’s deputy. Now there was no sign of a war wound and no bronchial trouble. Examination of Hess’s medical records made it clear that there should have been many scars from war wounds, none of which was visible on the body of the Spandau prisoner. When, at a second examination, Thomas asked him, “What happened to your war wounds”?, Hess blanched, began to tremble, then muttered, “Too late, too late”. What did that mean? That there would now be no point in admitting that he was not Rudolf Hess?

Thomas concluded that it was impossible that this prisoner – who had been code-named “Jonathan” when in England – could be Hess. X-rays should at least have shown signs of tissue scarring, but there were none.

Thomas went on to study the documents concerning Hess’s flight to Scotland and concluded that it should have been impossible for a Messerschmitt 110D to carry enough fuel to make the 850-mile journey if it had included as many detours as Hess claimed. The range of the aircraft – on full tanks – was only a little more than 850 miles. It could possibly have been carrying spare tanks under the wings, but Hess’s adjutant, Pintsch, had taken a photograph of the plane as it took off, and it showed no spare fuel tanks.

In his book
The Murder of Rudolf Hess
, Dr Thomas suggests that Hess never left Germany; rather, he died there and was replaced by a
double. The commander of fighter squadrons along the Dutch coast, Adolf Galland, tells in his book
The First and Last
how, on the night of Hess’s flight, Hermann Göring – who loathed Hess – rang him and ordered him to intercept an aircraft flying out of Germany, claiming, “The Deputy Führer has gone mad and is flying to England . . . He must be brought down”. But Galland’s planes were unable to locate Hess’s Messerschmitt.

What do we know to support the notion that Hess flew to Britain on a peace mission? To begin with, it is clear that Hitler wanted peace. He was known to admire the British and would have preferred them as allies rather than enemies; Russia was his real target. On 25 June 1940, Hitler made a speech in which he appealed to England from a position of strength (“since I am not the vanquished”) for peace “in the name of reason”. Churchill rejected this offer.

But Hess is known to have favoured a direct appeal to the British. One of his closest friends was the aforementioned Albrecht Haushofer, whose father, Karl, had been Hess’s personal adviser in the mid-1930s and was sent on a number of diplomatic missions. It seems certain that he knew about Hess’s plans to appeal directly to the British. On the day after Hess’s adjutant Pintsch delivered Hess’s “farewell” letter to Hitler at Berchtesgaden, describing his peace mission, Albrecht Haushofer was summoned to write an account of his own attempts to make contact with the British to make peace. Unfortunately, Albrecht was murdered by the S.S. in the last days of the war, so the one witness who might have been able to tell the truth about the prisoner in Spandau was silenced.

But if we know that Hess wanted to make peace, and even that he went to talk to the Duke of Windsor in Lisbon in July 1940, why should we doubt that it was Hess who landed in Scotland on 10 May 1941? Because, as we have seen, the medical evidence suggests that the prisoner code-named “Jonathan” was not the man who received so many wounds in World War I. If “Hauptmann” Horn was Hess, why was he carrying so little documentation, so few papers to establish his identity? Why did he refuse to see his wife and son for twenty-three years after being incarcerated in Spandau?

Thomas’s theory, briefly, is this: Göring detested Hess and would have been glad to see him dead. And Heinrich Himmler, head of the S.S., is known to have nurtured plans to replace Hitler. For either of them, Hess’s death would have been a bonus. But if Hess was murdered on his peace flight – or intercepted and shot down – Hitler would have been unforgiving. It was important that “Hess” should arrive. So when
Hess’s planned flight became known to Göring, a double was found and carefully schooled. And when Hess had been eliminated – sometime on that night of 9–10 May 1941 – the double was hastily sent off, probably from a Danish airfield. This is why the Duke of Hamilton did not recognize him. This is why he began feigning loss of memory at the earliest opportunity.

But British intelligence must have found out very soon that he was not Rudolf Hess. This could explain why the British made no attempts to use their prisoner for propaganda purposes.

Then, why did Hess’s double not reveal his secret after the war? Thomas speaks of Himmler’s known habit of eliminating whole families of “traitors” to the Reich. This would have explained the double’s silence before Himmler’s death – before the Nuremberg trials began. And after that, he may either have continued to believe his family to be in danger from ex-Nazis or simply have assumed that he stood no chance of being believed. If, in fact, he had been virtually brainwashed during a series of breakdowns and suicide attempts, and mental exhaustion, he may simply have settled into the state of blank indifference that is sometimes seen in the very old.

Whatever the reason, it seems clear that Prisoner Number 7 recognized that it was “too late, too late” when Dr Thomas finally began asking the right questions.

22

The Holy Shroud of Turin

The notion that a fourteen-foot oblong of cloth preserved in the Cathedral of Turin could be the shroud in which the founder of Christianity was laid in the tomb seems on the face of it an obvious absurdity, particularly since the Turin shroud had forty-odd rivals in other parts of Europe. Yet if the “Holy Shroud” is a fake, then the mystery is in a sense greater than ever; for we are then left with the problem of trying to explain away a great many pieces of remarkably convincing evidence.

The known history of the shroud begins in 1353, when Geoffroy de Charny, Lord of Savoisie and Lirey, built a church at Lirey and put on show “the true burial sheet of Christ”. This was a strip of linen, just over fourteen feet long and three and a half feet wide. On this linen there was the dim brown image of a man – or rather, two images, one of his front and one of his back. Apparently the body had been laid out on the bottom half of the sheet, which had then been folded down over the top of the head. And, in some strange way the image of the man had been imprinted on the shroud like a very poor photographic image.

A “relic” like this was worth far more than its weight in gold, as pilgrims poured into the church to see it and dropped their coins into the collection box. In 1389 the bishop of Troyes, Peter D’Arcis, declared the shroud to be a fake, painted by an artist, and tried to seize it; but he was unsuccessful. In 1532 the shroud was almost destroyed in a fire in the Sainte Chapelle at Chambéry, France, and when it was recovered it had been badly damaged – many holes had been burnt in it by molten silver. Fortunately, these completely missed the central part which contained the image, and when the nearby nuns of St Clair had patched it it looked almost as good as new.

As far as the modern reader is concerned, the real history of the shroud begins on 28 May 1898. The shroud had been in Turin cathedral
since 1578 – it was now the property of the Duke of Savoy – and on 25 May 1898 it was again put on public display. A Turin photographer, Secondo Pia, was commissioned to photograph it. And it was in his apartment, towards midnight, that the photographer removed the first of two large plates from the developing fluid. What he saw almost made him drop the plate. Instead of the dim, blurred image he was looking at a real face, quite plainly recognizable. Yet he was looking at a photographic negative, not the final product. This could only mean one thing: that the image on the shroud was itself a photographic negative, so by “reversing” it Pia had turned it into a positive – a real photograph. If the relic was genuine, Pia was looking at a photograph of Christ.

The Duke of Savoy – now King Umberto I (he would be assassinated two years later) – was told the news; a procession of distinguished visitors began to arrive at the photographer’s house. Most of them, understandably, were convinced that this must be the true Holy Shroud, since no painter would have thought of forging a photographic negative. The only other possibility was that the effect had been achieved accidentally by a forger, but this seemed unlikely. Two weeks later a journalist broke the story, and it spread round the world.

But the shroud’s fame was not to last for long. Two years later a detailed report on it by a medieval scholar, Fr. Ulysse Chevalier, defused the excitement. Chevalier studied all the documents he could find, including Peter D’Arcis’s assertion that it was a fake (D’Arcis claimed that the artist had confessed), and declared firmly that the image on the shroud was a painting; he quoted a well-known photographer to the effect that the “negative” aspect of the picture was merely a technical accident. Scholars were convinced; the Holy Shroud was just another false relic, like the thousands of pieces of the “true cross” in churches all over the world.

But a new defender had already appeared on the scene. Paul Vignon, a painter with an interest in biology, had become the assistant of Professor Yves Delage of the Sorbonne. Vignon was a Catholic, Delage an agnostic. But it was Delage who in 1900 showed Vignon photographs of the shroud, and aroused his interest in the problem. Surely, Vignon reasoned, close examination should prove once and for all if the shroud had been painted by hand? He went to Turin and obtained copies of Secondo Pia’s photographs, as well as two snapshots of the shroud taken at the same time by other men.

The first question Vignon asked himself was how the brown stains could have been made. If it
had
been painted by an artist, could he have produced such an impressive negative? It would mean painting without
really seeing what he was doing, and as an artist, Vignon knew this was virtually impossible. And since photography did not exist in 1353, the artist would have had no means of checking his work. And why should he have wanted to produce a negative if the intention was to deceive pilgrims? They would prefer a recognizable face . . .

Vignon tried coating his face in red chalk-dust, then lying down and covering his face with a cloth, which was then pressed gently against his face. The result was not a negative; it was just blotches.

So if the image had been produced by “contact”, it could not have been this kind of crude, direct contact. But in that case, what kind of contact? One mystery was that even the hollows of the face had been “imprinted”; the image showed the bridge of the nose, yet a cloth laid over someone’s face would not touch the bridge of the nose.

Suppose the image had been produced by sweat? The commonest burial ointments were myrrh and aloes at the time of the Crucifixion. Vignon and Delage tried impregnating a cloth with myrrh and aloes, then seeing what effect sweat had on it. Sweat contains a substance called urea, which turns into ammonia (hence the disagreeable smell of people with BO). They found that sweat would produce brown stains on their impregnated cloth.

Oddly enough, the agnostic Delage finally became convinced that the shroud was genuine – although he stopped short of becoming converted to Christianity. This man’s “photograph” showed signs of scourging, and of being pierced in one side with a spear; the forehead had marks that would correspond to a crown of thorns. There were nail-marks in the wrists and the feet. Most paintings of the Crucifixion show nails driven through the hands, but Vignon established that the hands would not support a man on the cross – they would tear. In fact, historical research has shown that crucifixion involved nailing the wrists, not the hands.