The Hess Mess: Fanciful Flights, Peculiar Prisoners, and the Crime of the Century

posted 4 years ago by axolotl_peyotl 4 years ago by axolotl_peyotl +10 / -2

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?

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– axolotl_peyotl [S] 2 points 4 years ago +2 / -0

Capturing a Captain

One version of events has Hess apprehended by a farmer armed with a pitchfork and then held captive in a cottage. At this point Hess insisted he was "Captain Alfred Horn" and that he had come to Scotland to meet the Duke of Hamilton. After getting taken into custody by the Home Guard, he was moved several times until finally ending up in the Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow.

According to the farmer's own account, Hess's first words were "Am I on the estate of the Duke of Hamilton?" Another early account indicated that Hess additionally stated to the police that his original intention had been to land at the small landing strip at the Duke's residence at Dungavel. Since Hess almost certainly would've known the strip would be too small for his plane, it's possible that by claiming this "he was protecting someone, or something, or both."

After he was taken to the cottage, the farmer's wife offered "Captain Horn" some tea, which Hess declined in good English. Strangely enough, two soldiers seem to suddenly "appear" in the cottage by the farmer's own account, with no explanation as to when they arrived...there are just suddenly there.

At this point, the two soldiers in the cottage responded that beer was what they drank in Britain, to which Hess replied that they drank it in Munich, where he came from. Even more interestingly, these two soldiers, Emyr Morris and Daniel McBride, were from a nearby top secret anti-aircraft signals unit.

After the war, McBride gave his own version of events, with the extraordinary claim that "high-ranking Government officials were aware of his coming." To support this assertion, McBride noted that "no air-raid warning were sounded, nor were the anti-aircraft gunnery control rooms plotting the course of Hess's plane alerted."

To make matters even more confusing, McBride claims that it was he and not the farmer who first apprehended Hess. This discrepancy is not the only example of a possible coverup at play. Again according to McBride himself:

[Horn/Hess] asked me to take him to the Duke's home, which, he said, was not far away. To this I could only reply that I had no power to do so but my superiors would probably do so later on. Shortly afterwards there was a commotion outside. The door was flung open and a Home Guard officer rushed in, followed by a number of his men.

The pilot said to the officer: "I wish to see the Duke of Hamilton. Will you take me to him?'

"You can save all that for the people concerned," said the officer. "At present you are coming with me." I resented this attitude and protested to the officer that the prisoner was in my charge awaiting an escort form my HQ. "Are you questioning my authority?" demanded the officer truculently.

"I cannot leave my prisoner, sir," I said. "If you take him I must go with you."

This commotion can be explained by possibility of the conflicting "factions" at play here.

Two factions were looking for Hess in western Scotland that night: the pro-peace party, which was expecting him, and another faction representing Churchill and his government which had got wind of the plot. It so, then at this moment, neither faction has complete or secure control over Hess.

To add to the air of intrigue surrounding Hess's capture, after McBride's death, a letter was discovered from his former commander W.B. Howieson that had advised McBride to "drop this Hess business" lest he "stir up a hornets' nest" with respect to the British Official Secrets Act. Perhaps even more remarkably, this letter was dated May 8, 1974.

How could this story "stir up a hornets' nest" in 1974? Howieson's letter implies that if the seemingly minor point of who captured Hess is admitted, other--much more damaging--information will somehow naturally flow from it, which is presumably why McBride's official report is still withheld. It seems that Howieson knew that something passed between McBride and Hess that night that is not even mentioned in the signaller's papers, which he seems to have been about to make public.

Presumably Howieson's words of caution persuaded McBride not to do so. But something significant must have passed between the two, because Rudolf Hess gave McBride his Iron Cross that night.

Regardless of how he was captured, Hess eventually was taken to Giffnock scout hall and he was searched and an inventory was made of his belongings.

Although this inventory has never been disclosed, an unsubstantiated theory claims Hess had brought an ancient Celtic text called the Lebor Fesa Runda which had once been given as a gift from John Dee to the German Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Allegedly, Hess acquired the text through his connections to the Thule society and was bringing the rare manuscript as a sort of symbolic diplomatic gift.

At Giffnock we encounter another important player in the Hess Mess, one Major Graham Donald, an officer in the Royal Observer Corps. Major Donald claims he was alerted to the crash and ordered to the scene, and he subsequently accompanied Hess and the entourage to Giffnock where he personally questioned Hess.

It should be noted that the official narrative leaves out a curious, and perhaps not so insignificant, detail: Did nobody recognize Hess? Hess was perhaps one of the most recognizable faces in the Nazi regime, and yet none of his British captors had openly acknowledged recognizing him. Perhaps even more curiously, Major Donald claims to have "determined" Hess's identity by almost ridiculous means.

Donald turned the conversation to Munich and its good beer (beer again!), and Donald then goes on to assert that Hess reacted very disapprovingly at the mention of beer. Donald concluded that he was a teetotaler, and since there were only two teetotalers in the upper echelons of the Reich--Hitler and Hess--and since the man in front of him obviously was not Hitler, he had to be Hess!

This is a long way to go to explain an obvious thing by unobvious and completely absurd deductive processes, for Hess was a familiar face in the newsreels of the period; one had only to look at him and see that it was Hess, or at least, a close facsimile thereof. One did not need absurd explanation about "teetotalers in the Nazi regime."

Another "anomaly" in the aftermath of capture was the British authority's lack of effort to search for any other individuals, since Hess's plane was a two-seater!

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– axolotl_peyotl [S] 1 point 4 years ago +1 / -0

Conspiracies and Contingencies

Of the many characters in the Hess Mess, none are are as mysterious and perhaps as crucial to the plot as Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, 14th Duke of Hamilton. The Duke appears to be tantalizingly tough to track down in the days following Hess's arrival.

According to the standard narrative that was eventually to evolve, Hamilton received a call about the mysterious visitor in the middle of the night in his capacity as an RAF operational commander, and promptly went back to sleep.

But not so according to a story from the Glasgow Herald of May 16, 1941, a story that appeared prior to the finalizing of the standard narrative, for according to it, the Duke of Hamilton did meet Hess, along with members of the Foreign Office and unspecified intelligence services while the latter was being transferred to a hospital to treat the sprain in his ankle that he had sustained after parachuting into Scotland. Hamilton's wife confirmed that after receiving the phone call, the Duke departed, and did not return home until the afternoon of Sunday.

Another strange event concerning a Polish officer named Roman Battaglia adds to the secrecy and absurdity of the Hess affair. Battaglia was an intelligence officer in General Sikorski's Polish government-in-exile, and for some reason he was allowed to interrogate Hess at Glasgow Police Headquarters for two hours, while speaking in German, and almost entirely unsupervised. In addition, none of the other British officers present spoke German.

The reactions of the RAF in breaking its standard protocols for the interrogation of German pilots, the strange two hour session with Battaglia, the Glasgow Herald article, all point to the conclusion that Hess--or someone--was expected that night. The daughter of one observer corps officer was told by her father that the pilot was none other than the Deputy Führer himself.

This comedy of errors has cemented its way into the standard narrative, and indeed the series of events seems so farcical that a coverup on some level was almost certainly at play.

The story of Hess's arrival and capture looks like one of the most serious indictments of British military--and intelligence--incompetence ever recorded. It is littered with bungling, indifference and blatant dereliction of duty, often by top men, and in a crisis--a matter of national security.

It that is a fair summary, then perhaps it is understandable why the authorities should try to bury the whole thing and forget it ever happened. But if it isn't a case of wide-ranging ineptitude, we can only understand all the anomalies in terms of quite another scenario.

Was the Duke of Hamilton planning to meet Hess as a representative of the British peace faction? Did a series of unfortunate navigational errors cause Hess to miss his intended target?

Hess, in making landfall at the wrong point and behind schedule, set into motion a cascading series of errors that meant that he was apprehended by the Home Guard, in other words, by "outsiders" who were not part of the plot.

This explains Hess's repeated insistence upon being taken to the Duke of Hamilton, as well as a possible contingency plan set in motion in case the flight went awry.

The idea of a contingency rationalizes Hess's response to his initial situation in the UK, for he would have been viewing each new arrival on the scene as a potential ally, but how was he to tell a friend from a foe? Presumably some form of password would have been pre-arranged, which would account for the surreal rerun of the conversation about Germany beer..."

This may also explain the appearance of the Polish officer, who was contacting Hess on behalf the Duke of Hamilton and the peace party. But why the obfuscation from the Duke himself? Why didn't he just use his rank and take charge of Hess?

The British component of the conspiracy was not acting under orders or sanctions of the government...Hess had already fallen into the hands of those not involved in the scheme. The British side of the plot was now engaged in a damage-limitation exercise: too many people were now aware of the mystery airman who kept asking for the Duke of Hamilton.

According to the Duke's version of events, he didn't contact London until the afternoon of May 11, after he had seen Hess and after he had visited the crash site. And here the official narrative becomes even more muddled, as the Duke's version of this contact differs slightly from the version of Jock Colville, Churchill's private secretary.

The Duke maintained that he had contacted the Foreign Office in the afternoon, and the official who answered the phone refused to connect him to a superior without a stated reason, which frustrated the Duke. Fortunately, Colville seems to have just "shown up" at the right time. According to the Duke, Colville claimed that he was ordered to the Foreign Office by Churchill because the Duke "had some interesting information" to convey.

However, according to Colville's version of events, the phone call took place in the morning, and his first words to the Duke were "Has somebody arrived?," a statement that suggests that "he, at least, was expecting a certain 'somebody.'" Regardless, contact was made:

The Duke immediately flew south to meet Churchill personally at Ditchley Hall--Churchill's secret wartime country residence--and apprise him of the development. The next day, Churchill ordered Ivone Kirkpatrick to Scotland in order to identify the prisoner. Kirkpatrick served in the Foreign Office and personally knew Hess.

After the Duke had briefed Churchill, the Prime Minister offered one of his many legendary quips: 'Well, Hess or no Hess, I'm going to see the Marx Brothers.'

This is usually taken to show his true bulldog spirit at its best. However, as with much else in this story, Churchill's words might not have meant quite what they seemed.

Who were the "Marx brothers"? This was not a reference to a film, but rather a code that Churchill used to refer to the Royal Family, and in particular, the brother-princes of King George VI.

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– axolotl_peyotl [S] 1 point 4 years ago +1 / -0

Prisoner 007

Hess eventually spent some time in the Tower of London, where a curious incident occurred that has fueled much speculation. Charles Fraser-Smith, the inspiration for the gadget wizard "Q" from James Bond lore, was called in by MI5 to measure Hess's Luftwaffe captain's uniform.

Informed that Hess has been drugged in the tower and that they would have to measure him quickly, Fraser-Smith and his team took all the measurements. Besides being proof of the fact that Hess was drugged on more than one occasion, the question inevitably arises as to why British intelligence would need an exact copy of Hess's Luftwaffe uniform.

While it has been speculated that the copy was for the potential use of a double to send back to Germany, others have claimed that both MI5 and MI6 had begun considering substituting a double for Hess shortly after his arrival.

In later life Fraser-Smith went further, maintaining that high level doubts always existed in MI6 about whether or not the prisoner in British custody was, in fact, Hess. A double would also explain why the British prohibition of photographs of their infamous prisoner was so rigorously enforced.

At this point, the Hess mess truly starts to accelerate its descent into the surreal as "Hess" himself begins to lose his senses. While being held at Mytchett Place under very tight security, "Hess's mental and emotional behavior appeared to deteriorate dramatically" and he attempted suicide more than once.

Hess claimed he was suffering from amnesia and that he was unable to recall the circumstances of how he had come to be captive, and even at times unable to recall prominent features of his life and family.

And here we reach what is perhaps a pivotal juncture in this saga. On June 25, 1942, Hess was moved to Maindiff Court in Wales, a move that occurred with no military escort. The reason given for this secrecy was to foil an alleged plot to kidnap Hess, however that was rendered irrelevant after details of the move were leaked to the Daily Mail, a national tabloid.

As for actual plots to kidnap Hess, there was reason for concern, as illustrated by an important incident revealed in 1979 by a British major from the 11th Fighter Group:

He was summoned by the group commander who informed him the group had received "a message from Germany" alerting them to an immanent raid by SS commandos. He was ordered to move an anti-aircraft gun unit ot the area to intercept the raid, as its intended mission was to assassinate Hess!

The would-be SS assassins were apprehended by the British, with maps to Dungavel, and promptly executed without trial, the only two spies allegedly executed without any surviving record of a trial or of their execution.

What this story highlights is just how much internecine intrigue there was even among the intelligence apparatuses of countries like Great Britain and Germany.

In any case, intelligence was circulating in Germany that placed Hess in Scotland during the time when he was supposed to be at Mytchett Place. According to this information, which may or may not have been spread as part of an intelligence deception campaign: "Hess had been housed in a villa in Scotland, had his personal servants and wanted for nothing. Churchill had expressly decreed that Hess, on account of his rank, should be accommodated as a general."

In this report, it should be noted that Hess is specifically mentioned as being in complete possession of his mental faculties, and even was witnessed driving around London under escort!

If the basic premise that Hess was in Scotland was true, then "what was going on at Maindiff Court? If he was not there in the period between June 1942 and October 1945, what about the carefully stage-managed 'public appearances': the drives in the country, the picnics and the walks?

Was a double substituted for Hess? If so, when?

The Hess "double" theory not only explains the need to duplicate his uniform, but it also explains the two reports of Hess in two different places at once. In this scenario, the "Hess" at Maindiff was a double, and the multiple drugging sessions "Hess" underwent after his arrival at Maindiff were in fact mind-control sessions. Similarly, this would explain the decision of the British to build an entire "suite" at their military hospital in Berlin for Hess.

In addition, RAF military police did confirm that meetings took place between Hess and Churchill, and a Scots Guards member asserted that Hess was "in the Tower of London and had been taken to secret meetings with Churchill in late June 1941." However, at the time of these alleged meetings, by official accounts "Hess" was at Mytchett Place.

Politically, there could be any number of reasons for the creation of a double, from the need to protect the real Hess from assassination or rescue attempts, to the need of the Churchill government to present a facade that "Hess was cooperating" with the sitting British government and not trying to topple it.

After all, it was well known that shortly after his capture Hess claimed that he was under "the King's personal protection" and that he insisted that messages be taken directly to George VI.

While often dismissed as fanciful, support for this claim was uncovered by Hess Mess researchers who were anonymously contacted by someone at the Foreign Office. With regards to Hess's claim, the contact replied that a British colonel name "Pilcher" has been ordered to be held incommunicado at Balmoral Palace from 1941 until his death in 1970 for "signing a letter of safe conduct in the King's name."

One man threatened to leak the facts--Colonel W.S. Pilcher. He was dealt with, relieved of his command and thereafter ordered to Scotland. He lived the rest of his lift a virtual recluse until he died in 1970. His exit from a former social life was remarkable.

A letter would explain the apparent confusion on the night of Hess's capture, for it would certainly cause all manners of confusion. Was the letter fake? Was it real?

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– axolotl_peyotl [S] 2 points 4 years ago +2 / -0

The Forgotten Flight

This begs the question: was the Crown itself involved? Enter Prince George, the Duke of Kent.

The fourth son of King George V and Queen Mary, Prince George became the Duke of Kent in 1934 and held the title until his untimely death in 1942.

The Duke of Kent was sophisticated, multi-lingual, and most importantly, functioned as a kind of personal intelligence officer to his brother the King, and had personally met and dined with Hess before the war.

In addition, according to researchers of the Hess Mess, the Duke of Kent was a member of a "reception committee" that had congregated to receive Hess. Allegedly, this "committee" consisted of members of the British "peace" faction, as well as representatives of the Polish government in exile and the international Red Cross.

In this scenario, "the head of the Polish government in exile had offered the throne of Poland--long vacant--to the Duke of Kent."

The reception of the Poles in the reception committee thus is logical from two points of view: (1) the Poles would have to have been involved in any general peace settlement between Britain and Germany, because of the former's guarantee and the latter's military occupation of the country, and (2) because the offer of the Polish throne to the Duke of Kent may have been a component of the peace plan previously negotiated between Hess and his British counterparts; for the Germans, the Duke would have represented an acceptable head of state for any reestablished Polish rump state.

This rationalizes why a Polish officer was allowed to speak to Hess for two hours in German without supervision. Hess had come not to continue negotiations, but rather, to finalize the deal.

The Hess peace plan may explain a curiously timed decline in intensity of the bombing campaigns of both Britain and Germany:

This near cessation of intense combing suggests that not only was there coordination between the British and German sides surrounding Hess's peace mission, but that Hess and Göring were both involved in the plot. This idea was confirmed by Hess himself in his statements to Churchill's representative, Ivone Kirkpatrick, for he stated that "he and Göring were working to the same agenda."

Curiously, one of the places the "bi-locating" Hess was sighted in 1942 was at the home of an "equerry to the Duke of Kent, a point that indicates that the "peace party" had regained control of the real Hess."

The real Hess was then apparently returned to Scotland, where he was seen in 1942 by Robin Sinclair, while "Hess" stayed in Maindiff Court. According to Sinclair, Hess was quartered in Braemore Lodge.

And at long last we arrive at the tragedy that not only took the life of the Duke of Kent, but may offer a vital clue in solving the mystery of what happened to the real Rudolf Hess.

On the 25th of August, 1942, the Duke of Kent took off in a Short-Sunderland flying boat, allegedly on a good-will flight to visit British troops stationed in Iceland. Tragically his aircraft crashed on a rocky crag in Scotland known as Eagle's Rock. The Duke was killed, becoming the first member of the Royal Family to die in military service in five centuries.

However, the "flight to Iceland" may have been a cover story. The Duke's flying boat was painted white, the color for aircraft flying to and from neutral Sweden, suggesting that Sweden, not Iceland, was the destination. And that's not all:

There appears to have been an unaccounted-for body on the Duke of Kent's aircraft, a body, moreover, that it appears that King George VI himself personally made inquiries about when he visited his younger brother's crash site.

Additionally, the flight plan itself has disappeared, and the weather service personnel on the east coast of Scotland were sworn to secrecy and forced to sign Britain's Official Secrets Act. Why the weather personnel on the east coast of Scotland? Because the Duke of Kent's aircraft had taken off from the east coast and not, as one would expect for a flight to Iceland, the west coast.

Göring had already conducted peace discussions with Sweden, so it's entirely possible that the Duke of Kent was attempting to return Hess to Germany to remove him from danger and/or complete final arrangements in the "deal."

In addition, a cable from the German Ambassador in Portugal to the German Foreign Ministry was uncovered that states:

As the Embassy has learned, confidentially, the death of the duke of Kent has been discussed recently in the innermost circles of the British club here. The gist of the talk being that an act of sabotage was involved.

It is said that the Duke, like the Duke of Windsor, was sympathetic towards an understanding with Germany and so gradually had become a problem for the government clique. The people who were accompanying him were supposed to have expressed themselves along similar lines, so that getting them out of the way would also have been an advantage.

To make matters even more suspicious, General Sikorski, the head of the Polish government in exile that had allegedly offered the Polish crown to the Duke of Kent, perished less than a year later in an air crash off Gibraltar.

Two principal players had been eliminated, Hess himself and the Duke of Kent, and with them were removed key components of the possible peace plan--the Duke of Kent as proposed Polish monarch, and Hess as acceptable replacement for Hitler--had been removed from the equation.

Additionally, a very serious message had been sent to the King and Royal family, one indicating that further interference would not be acceptable. And finally, the head of the Polish government in exile might also have been "taken out." Everyone who could talk about the "details" of the plan was eliminated.

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– axolotl_peyotl [S] 1 point 4 years ago +1 / -0

Deputy Dopplegänger

After the war, suspicions as to the identity of "Hess" would soon start to spread, including among members of the US intelligence community.

Many of those who encountered "Hess" at the Nuremberg Trials noticed that something was "off" or wrong with the prisoner, including his former colleagues and even Göring himself.

In what has been described as "the most telling episode at Nuremberg," none other than Allen Dulles had doubts about the prisoner's identity.

If Dulles's presence in this opera seems almost comically predictable, the entrance of Dr. Ewen Cameron is equally as sinister, as well as profoundly suggestive.

Dr. Cameron is notorious for his role in the CIA's "mind control" program, MK-Ultra, having developed the technique of "psychic driving," whereby he hoped to erase one personality from an individual, and substitute another. Cameron was one of the "pioneers" working in the field of mind control.

According to Gordon Thomas, in his study of the military and intelligence uses of psychiatry and psychology, Journey into Madness:

Dulles had reason to believe that the man Dr. Cameron was to examine was not Rudolf Hess but an impostor; that the real Hess had been secretly executed on Churchill's orders. Dulles had explained that Dr. Cameron could prove the point by a simple physical examination of the man's torso. If he was the genuine Hess, there should be scar tissue over his left lung, a legacy from the day the young Hess had been wounded in the First World War.

Cameron was never to make that examination. The next day, when Hess was brought to him, he was handcuffed to a British Military Police sergeant, who refused point blank to remove the handcuffs so that Cameron could take the prisoner's shirt off--or even unbutton it--to look at his chest.

Although the infamous mind control expert was unable to examine "Hess" during the Nuremberg Trials, many years later a British physician did. His name was W. Hugh Thomas, and in 1979 he published a controversial book called The Murder of Rudolf Hess that was inspired after he personally had the opportunity to extensively examine the prisoner at a British Military Hospital.

According to the shocked physician, Hess showed no scars of the war wounds he had suffered in WW1.

Neither chest nor arms carried any wound-scars whatsoever. This man had not been shot in the chest during the First World War, or at any other time. Nor had he been wounded in the arm. For 32 years the world had believed he was Rudolf Hess. Yet now I knew that unless the historical records were wrong, he could not be.

After seeing "Hess" again on a follow up visit, Dr. Thomas politely asked the prisoner what had happened to his war wounds.

The question had a startling effect. The patient's manner changed instantly. From being in a sunny, cheerful mood, he turned chalk-white and began to shake.

For an instant he stared at me in what appeared bewilderment or even utter disbelief. Then he looked down and avoided my eyes. After what felt like ages he muttered [in German], "Too late, too late."

After sharing his suspicions with the Hess family, Frau Hess maintained that although she believed "Hess" was indeed her husband, she also confirmed that he had suffered severe wounds during WWI that left significant scarring.

In hopes of putting the various conspiracy theories to rest, "Hess's" body was exhumed after his suspicious death, and the Foreign Office announced that they did indeed discover a "fibrous, irregular roughly circular old scar typical of an exit wound in a posterior position on the left side of the chest." But this "proof" raises even more questions:

As this was over a year after Prisoner Number Seven's death and burial, the 'finding' seems a trifle suspicious. Why hadn't this information been provided when they had the body? And if this description is correct, why had no previous examination noticed the scar?

Clearly, Hess's medical records at the British Military Hospital where he had been treated for over twenty years did not record either the front or back scar. Either they were astonishingly inefficient, or the scars simply did not exist.

To make matters even more confusing, "Hess" managed to read a newspaper article about Thomas' book in spite of strict regulations at Spandau. When a visiting French pastor asked the prisoner about his "wounds" or lack thereof, he was informed that "a bullet had passed right through his chest, brushing the heart and exiting under the left shoulder blade."

However, the exact details of his war wounds weren't actually known at the time, and only when the Bavarian archives were released in 1989 did the public finally get access to Hess's military record.

According to the Bavarian archival discovery in 1989, the path of the bullet was not through the chest, but through the armpit, and did not graze the heart.

Another potentially significant anomaly worth mentioning is the curious case of his British dental charts, the first taken in September 1941 during his stay at Mytchett place and then again from 1943 and Maindiff Court. According to the Doppelgänger Hess theory, the 1941 "Hess" was genuine and the 1943 "Hess" was a substitute.

While the filling and bridgework are similar, though not identical, a glaring problem emerges with the fact that the 1941 chart records a crown and a gold tooth which are missing from the 1943 chart. Such a discrepancy could be the result of mere sloppy record keeping, or it could be result of very accurate recording-keeping, and hence, also be an oversight on the part of British intelligence which forgot to "scrub" this incriminating fact from the records.

A few more "discrepancies" are worth mentioning, despite potentially being mere insignificant details. Specifically, the "real" Hess was a committed anti-smoker, a vegetarian, and had impeccable table manners, yet prisoner "Hess" craved cigarettes, ate meat, and displayed markedly poor table manners while in captivity.

In addition, according to Frau Hess, her husband "played tennis well and with enthusiasm," and yet the British captive allegedly knew nothing about the sport. His wife also noted that upon finally seeing him in 1969, he "had a deeper voice." This last point is potentially more significant than it might seem, as "a normal man's voice rises with age, rather than deepens.*

Inspired by these disturbing discoveries, Dr. Thomas began to notice something "off" about the admittedly detailed letters "Hess" had written to his family while in captivity:

At first sight the numerous references to family affairs and friends seem to constitute obvious proof that the writer of the letters was Hess himself. Yet if the correspondence is studied in chronological order, a striking pattern soon emerges.

A very high proportion of the events and people mentioned occur first in earlier letters which the prisoner had received from Germany: almost everything he says about his former life is an echo of something already written by another correspondent.

Thomas's account would seem to vindicate the suspicions of Allen Dulles, and as a result, the presence of Dr. Cameron becomes pregnant with implications.

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