Was Rudolf Hess crazy?
It certainly suited Churchill and Hitler to portray him that way
In May 1941 a Messerschmitt flew from Germany to Scotland and crashed in a field near my school. The pilot landed by parachute and demanded to be taken to the nearby residence of the Duke of Hamilton with whose help he wanted to bring a vital message to the British government.
He was soon identified as Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, bringing an offer to halt hostilities and end the war between Germany and Britain.
This sensational news reached us in our schoolroom through the next morning’s newspapers.
But instead of being escorted to meet the British Cabinet, Hess was whisked away to a secret and secure prison, and was to remain locked up for the next 46 years in various jails in both Britain and Germany.
Peter Padfield recounts this dramatic story to challenge the official view, in both Britain and Germany, that Hess was a deranged loner seeking to recoup his waning fortunes in the Nazi hierarchy.
But Padfield suggests not only that Hitler encouraged this adventurous endeavour, but also that Hess had been lured to Britain by contacts with the British secret service.
Allegedly they held out hope that Hess could contact members of the so- called “peace party,” such as those men who had supported former prime minister Neville Chamberlain in appeasing Hitler in 1938. With their help, a possible political coup would overthrow Churchill and then create new opportunities for a “reasonable” peace settlement between the two countries.
But, in fact, the whole project collapsed within hours. Churchill was delighted to learn of the defection of such a leading Nazi but would not hear of peace talks.
He ordered Hess to be isolated and heavily guarded. Apart from a brief communiqué, a complete silence about Hess was to be maintained. In Germany, it was three days before the news broke. This gave Hitler time to disavow his deputy’s flight, while other leading Nazis accused Hess of treachery, idiocy and disloyalty. Meanwhile the German people experienced deep- seated bewilderment and consternation.
Officially Hess was treated as a prisoner of war, but also as a war criminal to be brought to justice once victory was obtained. Meanwhile, however, efforts were made to try to get him to talk about his secret contacts.
The failure of his mission, however, led to a predictable collapse of Hess’s nerves, so that some of his watchers declared him insane. This suited the British authorities, and even more so the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin. A month later, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. It was clear that Hitler had more important concerns than pursuing an illusory peace offer to Britain.
When the war ended, Hess was brought to Nuremberg and placed on trial with the other major war criminals. He pretended that he did not know them and refused to acknowledge his Nazi past, thus reinforcing the impression of insanity.
But since he had not been in Germany when the worst of the wartime excesses were committed, he was not sentenced to be hanged, but instead to a lifelong imprisonment, mainly spent in the Spandau jail in Berlin.
His captivity there lasted for more than 40 years until he allegedly committed suicide in 1987.
Padfield rightly states that many questions remain unanswered about Hess, his mission and his motives. Many British government files dealing with his case are still not open to the public. Many of those which are open to scrutiny have been carefully weeded.
Numerous overlapping and contradictory theories still hold the field, and the literature about Hess continues to grow.
In fact, this book recapitulates, often word for word, the account which Padfield himself wrote over 20 years ago in a full biography of Hess’s career. This fact, however, receives not a mention.
Is it perhaps because Padfield’s hypothetical suggestions about the intrigues, especially on the British side, were dismissed by reviewers as fanciful and misleading assertions? Or does the British establishment still have secrets it wants to suppress?
Padfield’s unproven speculations constitute much of the new material not found in his earlier account. The average reader will find it difficult to disentangle the web of disinformation, cover- ups, espionage, and hidden political conspiracies behind the scenes. But his claim that this was a real turning point in the Second World War is farfetched. Hess’s flight to Scotland was a sensational but irrelevant episode. Nothing more.