For sale...fireman’s note of day Hitler’s deputy fell from sky
A FIRE brigade logbook recording Nazi leader Rudolf Hess’s plane crash in Scotland in 1941 is to go under the hammer.
Adolf Hitler’s deputy secretly flew in to broker a peace deal without the Fuhrer’s knowledge.
He piloted a Messerschmitt 110 plane and wanted to ask the Duke of Hamilton to approach British prime minister Winston Churchill.
But the plane ran out of fuel when Hess failed to locate the Duke’s stately home in Lanarkshire.
He baled out before the plane crashed on a farm at Eaglesham, south of Glasgow. Hess suffered a broken ankle and was arrested.
The record of Darnley Fire Station, destined to be burnt, was salvaged from a skip in the 1960s by an eagle-eyed fireman who noticed it covered the war years.
The incident was among mundane callouts but attendant James Whitelawe wrote: “Motor pump... deployed to extinguish fire caused by crash landing. Messerschmidt (sic) 110. Twin engine monoplane fighter. Aircraft partly destroyed by fire and effect of crash landing.
Bizarre
“The pilot Deputy Fuerher [sic] Rudolph Hess who was the sole occupant of the machine baled out just before the aircraft crashed. He was taken to floors farm house suffering from a broken ankle and was detained pending the arrival of a detachment of the Home Guard when he was removed to Maryhill Military Barracks.”
The logbook is being sold this month by London-based auctioneers Bonhams for £1,200. Matthew Haley, head of books and manuscripts, said: “The Hess affair was so improbable and bizarre it was almost Monty Python-esque. To have the record of the incident from the fire station that put out the flames of his plane when it crashed into the Scottish countryside is truly fascinating.
“At first glance the logbook seems utterly unremarkable but going through it you find this remarkable entry which reminds us of this perhaps somewhat forgotten episode of the war.”
He added: “It is ironic that it too would have been burnt and incinerated had it not been for the intervention of the vendor’s father.”
Hess was held as a prisoner of war at Mytchett Place, a mansion in Surrey, then at Maindiff Court Hospital in Monmouthshire. He was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and killed himself in Spandau Prison, Berlin, aged 93 in 1987.