I. The Hess Mess
II. Hess the Hermetic
III. Putschin' on the Ritz
IV. A Scottish Excursion
V. A Plea for Peace
VI. The Lore of the Lure
VII. Cooperating Coops
VIII. Capturing a Captain
IX. Conspiracies and Contingencies
X. Prisoner 007
XI. The Forgotten Flight
XII. Deputy Dopplegänger
XIII. To Make a Man
XIV: An Astonishing Assassination
XV: A Secret So Sinister
XVI: An Antarctic Epilogue
The Hess Mess
The choice of the word "mess" to describe this opera is much more than just a clever rhyme. What the Hess Mess represents is undoubtedly akin to the proverbial Rabbit Hole; the Chapel Perilous of Robert Anton Wilson.
The mess is riddled with so many twists, turns and contradictions that what ultimately emerges is the grandest conspiracy at not only the highest levels of the British government, but one that includes multiple superpowers and their various intelligence agencies.
In addition, something about the secret at the heart of the Hess Mess is so significant that it still warrants concealing from the public after more than three quarters of a century.
What could be so unacceptable to Britain, or the Allies, in the early 21st century? What does the Rudolf Hess story conceal that would in some way shock even today's cynical world?
The best place to start the Hess Mess is at the end, and a messy end for Hess it was.
On August 17, 1987, Rudolf Walter Richard Hess, once Adolf Hitler's Deputy Führer, was pronounced dead at a British Military Hospital in Berlin.
Having spent the last 41 years of his life in prison, the 93-year-old inmate had reportedly chosen to end his own life, hanging himself from a window latch with an electrical cord.
Only Hess among all the Nazis incarcerated after World War II was made to serve out his entire life sentence, and this includes other individuals of comparable rank, such as the Reich's Armaments Minister Albert Speer, the two chiefs of the German Kriegsmarine, Grand Admirals Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz, Reichsbank President Walther Funk, diplomat Konstantin von Neurath, and Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach.
These were some of the men that kept the gigantic war machine of the Third Reich smoothly running and functioning as a military power right up to the end of the war, and in Dönitz's case, had nearly brought Britain to its knees in the unrelenting U-boat warfare.
Indeed, of all the "designated successors" to Hitler, it was Dönitz that finally succeeded Hitler as the legal head of state and government after the latter's problematical "suicide" in the Berlin Führerbunker.
All of these men were released, including Raeder and Funk, even though both had received life sentences. Although their premature release was for "health and humanitarian" reasons, no explanation was ever offered for why Hess remained for another 21 years, despite suffering considerable health problems, which began in earnest after a perforated ulcer in 1969.
To make matters even more strange, an entire prison facility, known as Spandau Prison, was maintained just to house Hess! Built in 1876, Spandau Prison had a single occupant from the years 1966-1987: Rudolf Hess.
It's an absurd picture: the Allied powers--France, Great Britain, the USA, and the Soviet Union--all contributed to the maintenance and upkeep of the entire Spandau Prison, changing their military guards at regular monthly intervals, just to guard this one man.
The guard rotation shifted on a monthly basis, with the French guards during the months of February, June, and October; British guards in January, May, and September; American guards in April, August, and December; and Soviet guards in March, July, and November.
Why did Hess have to be guarded at all costs and have his access to the outside world strictly, and even cruelly, controlled?
Why was it necessary to maintain an entire prison, and the military guards and medical staffs of four world powers, just to keep watch over one individual who, by the end of his life, was a frail old man, and a threat to no one?
What secrets did he know that the Four Powers wanted to prevent others from knowing? Did they themselves even know what those secrets were, or did they only suspect? Or were they trying to break him and learn those secrets?
Or did Hess not know anything at all?
Was the man they were guarding even really Rudolf Hess?
Was "Spandau Hess" someone else, a double, substituted at some point in the drama? Was that the real reason for the Spandau Ballet of elaborate changings of the guard and maintaining an entire prison for just one man, and refusing to let him out, lest the substitution--the real secret--be discovered?
A Scottish Excursion
On May 10, 1941, a supremely enigmatic event occurred that is given remarkably scant mention in most of the standard histories of World War II.
One of the 20th century's greatest mysteries began when Rudolf Hess took off from Germany in a Messerschmitt 110 and flew to England. The general consensus is that he was attempting to bring about peace between Germany and England by a personal intervention, the implication being that "Hess's flight was a more-or-less a spontaneous affair, ill-thought-out and sloppily planned."
Hess was one of the only major Nazi leaders who had misgivings about Operation Barbarossa, the code name for the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. To Hess, this was far too risky with Great Britain still in the war, as well as the looming possibility of an American entry.
Luftwaffe General Adolf Galland also had misgivings about Barbarossa, and his first impression was that Hess's flight was a "desperate attempt to prevent the two-front war that would follow."
This chain of events raises several questions: When did Göring learn about the flight? What did he know about Hess's motivations? Why did he order a shootdown, especially a futile one? Göring, too, had his own concerns about Barbarossa:
Despite the narrative of the "official" version of events, Hess's flight wasn't "spontaneous" at all, as secret meetings did take place between Hess, General Haushofer and the General's son Albrecht to discuss the feasibility of peace overtures to Great Britain.
This interpretation of the Hess Mess suggests that "Hitler himself gave tacit approval for the idea, and that Albrecht Haushofer then utilized his prewar contacts and friendship with the Duke of Hamilton to contact the Duke to propose a meeting between him and Hess."
Hitler's pilot provided Hess with maps! As for Baur, he was rumored to have been involved in a plot to "kidnap" Hitler and fly him to Great Britain to surrender, but these allegations have never been verified. Coups aside, Baur did help Hess in some capacity.
Let us start by examining the "standard" narrative of Hess's flight:
After bailing out, "he was found by a farmer, marched off to the Home Guard and brought to a barracks in Glasgow. Insisting that he was one Oberleutnant Alfred Horn, he asked to see the Duke of Hamilton."
Meanwhile, in Germany, one of Hess's aides delivered a message to Hitler, who was in a conference at the time. Allegedly, upon receiving the letter, Hitler shouted "Oh my God, my God! He has flown to England!" In the letter, Hess wrote:
Hitler then ordered his aids to contact Göring, Bormann and Joachim von Ribbentrop, and he immediately placed Hess's adjutant under arrest.
An announcement was soon made that Hess had commandeered an aircraft against orders and that he may have been "a victim of hallucination."
The British followed with their own statement a few hours later, merely stating that Hess had come to Great Britain. In response, the German's updated their statement, making things look even worse:
The damage control had begun.
A Plea for Peace
To summarize the mess so far:
Even in this standard narrative, Hitler's foreknowledge of the plan is still up for considerable debate, suggesting that his "rage and fulminations on learning of the mission from Hess's letter was a bit of very convincing theater."
Hitler later would state that "I am deprived of the only two human beings among all those around me to whom I have been truly and inwardly attached: Dr. Todt (builder of the Westwall and Autobahn) is dead and Hess has flown away from me!"
Further indication of a wider plot can be found in the strange actions of Göring, who not only issued an impossible shootdown order, potentially to cover his own tracks, but he proceeded to deny any knowledge of the event the following day.
The more this event is scrutinized, the less likely that the Hess flight was the spontaneous blunder of a lone madman, rather it was "an international conspiracy of the highest order, involving powerful elements within both the United Kingdom and Nazi Germany."
And neither was Hess a "martyr for peace" as some revisionist works portray him--after all, he was still a Nazi.
It's important to consider the strategic position Great Britain and Germany found themselves in during the early months of 1941. Everything looked good for Germany, "yet, as preparations for Operation Barbarossa moved forward, the Churchill government continued to woo America to enter the war. Time was on Britain's, and not Germany's, side."
The Royal family was merely "the tip of the iceberg of a pro-peace party in Britain, a party that had some representation in the British peerage, and the various organs of government."
Many researchers believe that this "peace faction" emboldened Hess to make his fateful flight.
Another speculative scenario adds a fascinating new dimension to the Hess flight: the atomic bomb.
While the standard narrative of WWII depicts the Nazi atomic bomb project as fruitless, considerable evidence suggests otherwise, and the case has been made that actual tests of atomic bombs were performed by the Germans in October of 1944 and then again in March of 1945.
This possibility aside, "an actual existing atomic bomb project does rationalize Hitler's confidence in his invasion plans for Russia, and also rationalizes his inexplicable decision to declare war on the USA as his armies were freezing before the gates of Moscow."
The Lore of the Lure
For Churchill, Hess's sudden arrival was surely unwelcome, as it put the Prime Minister and his government in a very awkward position:
Two contemporary magazine articles written about the event both propagated the so-called "lure" hypothesis, namely that Hess was lured by British intelligence, "the implication being that there was no 'peace party' nor realistic hope that a negotiated peace with the Churchill government was possible."
Although certainly feasible, the lure hypothesis could itself be a "spinning" of the event, a "legend created to reassure America that Britain was not double-dealing and to extricate the Churchill government from the diplomatic difficulty caused by the Hess flight."
In 1942, soon after the USA entered the war, Churchill finally publicly addressed the Hess matter in an oft-overlooked exchange on the floor of the House of Commons:
To some observers, this speech is the "beginning of the conundrum" and clearly states the motivation of the Hess flight was to "gain access to the certain circles that could remove Churchill and his government from power."
In a further blow to the "spontaneous event" explanation for the Hess flight, "by the time of his flight to Scotland, several contacts had already been made between the German and British peace parties." In addition, discussions had already taken place in Sweden, Switzerland and Spain.
The reason Scotland was chosen as the destination was because of the German "peace party" and its connection to the Duke of Hamilton, Scotland's highest ranking peer, who had access to the Royal Family. Hess had been doing his homework as well, even brushing up on the British Constitution itself:
The British sovereign has certain "reserve powers" that can be used in times of constitutional crisis.
In other words, Hess wasn't merely petitioning the Duke of Hamilton, rather he was using the Duke to petition King George VI himself.
Hess's infamous flight is beginning to seem less fanciful after all.
Cooperating Coups
As one plunges deeper into the Hess Mess, a tangled web of covert connections is uncovered. Various correspondence from the time reveals a Haushofer-Hess peace faction in Germany that was carrying on secretive discussions with the British peace faction. In addition, they often attempted to avoid both the official channels of Great Britain and Germany for much of this correspondence. In one of these letters, Albrect Haushofer stated:
In addition, the "only genuine solution to European peace and security was a European federation, and a "fusion" between Germany and Britain, a fusion that the English are now about to conclude with the United States."
However, according to Albrecht Haushofer, there seemed to be very little possibility of a negotiated peace with Hitler.
Which brings us to a key question: What did Hitler know about the flight?
It seems much more likely, given what appear to be the coup plotters' eventual goals, that Hitler was kept in the loop to a certain extent, but not entirely.
Despite these attempts at negotiation, the response from Britain was unwavering: their distrust of Hitler was a "fatal obstacle" to any peace. Notably absent is any reference to peace with Germany. The Germans had similar demands regarding the future of the Churchill government.
To get a better understanding of the scope of collusion involved with such a scheme, it's important to consider the extraordinary details of the flight itself.
Hess's plane itself, a Me 110E-2/N series aircraft, had undergone significant modification, including custom drop tanks and enhancements to his radio system.
Modifications aside, a glaringly inconvenient detail emerges when one considers the oil consumption required for such a lengthy flight. Some researchers have noted that it's unlikely the aircraft would have had made the trip without running out of oil and crashing into the sea.
After considering the possible routes and options, the city of Göttingen becomes a strong possibility.
There is similar evidence of collusion on the British side, as the response has long been acknowledged to have been lackluster, including testimony from a Royal Air Force radar operator that "he was given orders to relay to aircraft that the incoming German airplane was not to be attacked."
Some have even accused the RAF of "pulling its punches" that May evening, stating that "at least some in the Royal Air Force command structure in Scotland were well aware of where Hess intended to land."
According to the "official" narrative, Hess's destination was Dungavel House, but its small airstrip has led some to suggest that a nearby RAF base was Hess's real target.
However, clearly, something went wrong on that fateful night, and Hess was forced to parachute:
According to the standard narrative of the Hess flight that was rather abruptly decided upon by both the British and German authorities, Hess was a madman with mad intentions, and such a notion of a significant "peace faction" in Britain was almost entirely fanciful. But was it?
They advocated for an entente with Germany, and perhaps an eventual alliance, for only Germany could challenge the Soviet Union and offer counter-balancing weight to growing American influence.
This sentiment was far more popular than is often acknowledged by historians:
As already stated, one of Germany's concerns at the time was an alliance, or even fusion, between the US and the UK, which was "always the stated goal of Cecil Rhodes, and his Rhodes scholarships were established as one of the mechanisms to effect this goal."
According to the research of Carroll Quigley, there were in fact "pro Atlanticist-unionists" within the US and the UK who sought an actual union of the two countries.
Clearly, numerous influential people in the British establishment opposed Hitler, but not necessarily Germany.
For example, in 1939, shortly after Germany's invasion of Poland, the future Duke of Hamilton submitted the following to the London Times:
Not only does the letter refer to Hitler's aggression and not to Germany's, but it also recognizes the principle of Lebensraum and mentions the post-WWI injustices suffered by Germany.