Minister recounts his brush with Rudolf Hess
Looking into the room where senior Nazi Rudolf Hess had killed himself the day before was “the closest I have ever felt to real evil”, a Church of Scotland minister has said.
Rev Peter Sutton was a young officer in the Black Watch and responsible for guarding Spandau Prison in Berlin, where Adolf Hitler’s deputy was being held in 1987.
He was on duty the day after Hess, who was captured near Eaglesham in East Renfrewshire in 1941 after his Messerschmitt crash landed, committed suicide aged 93.
Mr Sutton, 52, the new minister at St Cuthbert’s Parish Church in Edinburgh, said he would never forget the “eerie and chilling” experience.
He said: “There was a rock- ing chair, books, an oxygen cylinder on a trolley and I could see the noose that he used to hang himself.
“My fellow officer and I just stopped talking and for some reason we just had to get out of there as fast as we could. I will never forget it.”
Hess was deputy Fuhrer of Nazi Germany from 1933.