Rudolf Hess

• 1. Introduction

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  Rudolf Hess spent the last two decades of his life as the only prisoner in Spandau, a Berlin prison with 600 cells. The Allied powers kept the whole building in service for him alone, at an estimated cost of DM 800,000 a year. Hess had once held the title of Deputy to the Führer in Nazi Germany. Yet he was born to a wealthy merchant family on the edge of Alexandria, not in Germany at all. How did that childhood lead him into the Nazi Party? Why did the Deputy to the Führer slip away and fly alone to Scotland? What did Britain, Hitler and the Soviet Union each make of that journey afterwards? And why did the Soviet Union block his release for so long? The answers begin in Egypt, long before any of this.

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• 2. Egypt and the Trenches

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  Al-Ibrahimiyya, a suburb of Alexandria, was the birthplace of Rudolf Hess on the 26th of April 1894. Egypt was then British-controlled, though it was formally a vassal of the Ottoman Empire. Hess was the eldest of three children in a wealthy German family. The family came originally from Bohemia and had settled in Wunsiedel, in Upper Franconia, in the 1760s. His grandfather, Johann Christian Hess, founded the import company Hess & Co. in Alexandria. His father, Johann Fritz Hess, took it over in 1888. His mother, Klara, was the daughter of Rudolf Münch, a textile industrialist from Hof. A brother, Alfred, followed in 1897 and a sister, Margarete, in 1908. The family lived in a villa on the Egyptian coast. From 1900 they visited Germany often, staying at a summer home in Reicholdsgrün, in the Fichtel Mountains.

  Sir Evelyn Baring presided over what was known as the Veiled Protectorate, and Hess grew up beneath it. That made him unique among the Nazi leaders, because none of the others had grown up under British rule. Hess saw that rule in very positive terms and kept a strong admiration for the British Empire. From 1900 to 1908 he attended a German-language Protestant school in Alexandria. He was then sent to a boarding school in Bad Godesberg, where he showed an aptitude for science and mathematics. His father wanted him in the family firm, so in 1911 he sent him to the École supérieure de commerce in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. After a year there, Hess took an apprenticeship at a trading company in Hamburg.

  Within weeks of the outbreak of the First World War, Hess enlisted in the 7th Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment. His first posting faced the British on the Somme, and he was present at the First Battle of Ypres. On the 9th of November 1914 he transferred to the 1st Infantry Regiment, stationed near Arras. In April 1915 he won the Iron Cross, second class, and was promoted to Gefreiter, the rank of corporal. After more training he became a Vizefeldwebel and received the Bavarian Military Merit Cross. He fought at Neuville-Saint-Vaast in Artois and then at Verdun. There, on the 12th of June 1916, shrapnel struck his left hand and arm near the village of Thiaumont.

  In Romania, Hess served as a platoon leader in the 18th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment and was wounded twice. On the 23rd of July 1917 a shell splinter hit his left arm. On the 8th of August a bullet entered his upper chest near the armpit and exited near his spinal column. The entry wound was the size of a pea, and the exit wound the size of a cherry stone. He recovered in hospital in Meissen and was promoted to Leutnant der Reserve in October. He was recommended for the Iron Cross, first class, but never received it.

  While still convalescing, Hess asked to train as a pilot. After Christmas leave he reported to Munich, and from March to June 1918 he received basic flight training at Oberschleissheim and Lechfeld. Advanced training followed in October at Valenciennes, in occupied France. On the 14th of October he was assigned to Jagdstaffel 35b, a Bavarian fighter squadron flying Fokker D.VII biplanes. The war ended on the 11th of November 1918, before he saw any action. He was discharged in December. By then the family fortunes had taken a serious downturn, because the British had expropriated their business interests in Egypt.

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• 3. Munich and Hitler

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  The Thule Society, an antisemitic right-wing Völkisch group, was one of two organisations Hess joined after leaving the army. The other was the Freikorps of Colonel Ritter von Epp, one of many volunteer paramilitary bands of the period. Bavaria at the time saw frequent and often bloody fighting between right-wing groups and left-wing forces. Hess took part in street battles in early 1919. He also led a group that handed out thousands of antisemitic pamphlets in Munich. He later summed up his path by saying that Egypt made him a nationalist, the war made him a socialist, and Munich made him an antisemite.

  In 1919 Hess enrolled at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München to study history and economics. His geopolitics professor was Karl Haushofer, a former general in the German Army. Haushofer championed Lebensraum, meaning "living space". He cited it to argue that Germany should forcibly seize more territory in Eastern Europe. He later introduced the idea to Adolf Hitler, and it became one of the pillars of Nazi ideology. Hess became friends with Haushofer and with his son Albrecht, a social theorist and lecturer.

  Ilse Pröhl, a fellow student, met Hess in April 1920 when they happened to rent rooms in the same boarding house. They married on the 20th of December 1927. Their only child, Wolf Rüdiger Hess, was born on the 18th of November 1937. The name partly honoured Hitler, who often used "Wolf" as a code name. Hess nicknamed the boy "Buz".

  Hess first heard Hitler speak at a Munich rally in 1920, and he became completely devoted to him. The two men shared a belief in the stab-in-the-back myth. This was the notion that Germany lost the First World War through a conspiracy of Jews and Bolsheviks rather than through military defeat. Hess joined the Nazi Party on the 1st of July as member number 16. He concentrated on fundraising and organisation as the party filled ever larger beer halls in Munich. On the 4th of November 1921 he was injured protecting Hitler when a bomb planted by a Marxist group exploded at the Hofbräuhaus. By 1922 he had joined the Sturmabteilung, or SA, and helped to organise and recruit its early members.

  Hyperinflation had made many personal fortunes worthless by January 1923, when French troops occupied the industrial Ruhr. Hitler judged the moment ripe for a coup modelled on Mussolini's 1922 March on Rome. On the night of the 8th of November 1923, Hess was beside him when the SA stormed a public meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller, a huge Munich beer hall. The meeting had been organised by Gustav von Kahr, the de facto ruler of Bavaria. Brandishing a pistol, Hitler interrupted Kahr's speech and declared that the national revolution had begun. He announced a new government with the World War I general Erich Ludendorff. The next day Hitler and several thousand supporters tried to march to the Ministry of War in the city centre. Gunfire broke out with the police, and sixteen marchers and four police officers were killed. Hitler was arrested on the 11th of November.

  On the night of the 8th, Hess and some SA men had taken several dignitaries hostage and driven them to a house about 50 km from Munich. The next day Hess left briefly to make a phone call, and the hostages persuaded the driver to help them escape. Stranded, Hess phoned Ilse Pröhl, who brought him a bicycle so he could ride back to Munich. He stayed with the Haushofers, then fled to Austria, but they convinced him to return. He was arrested and sentenced to 18 months of Festungshaft, or fortress confinement. Hitler received five years. The Nazi Party and the SA were both outlawed.

  Landsberg Prison held both men, and there Hitler began his memoir, Mein Kampf, meaning "My Struggle". He dictated it to fellow prisoners Hess and Emil Maurice. The publisher Max Amann, Hess and others edited the text. It appeared in two parts in 1925 and 1926 and became a best-seller after 1930. Its message of violent antisemitism became the foundation of the Nazi Party's political platform.

  Hitler was released on parole on the 20th of December 1924, and Hess followed ten days later. The ban on the party and the SA was lifted in February 1925. The party grew to 100,000 members in 1928 and 150,000 in 1929, though it won only 2.6 per cent of the vote in 1928. In April 1925 Hitler named Hess his private secretary at a salary of 500 Reichsmarks per month. On the 20th of July 1929 he became Hitler's personal adjutant. Hess travelled with Hitler to speaking engagements across the country, and he was one of the few people who could see Hitler at any time without an appointment. On the 15th of December 1932 he was named head of the Party Liaison Staff and Chairman of the Party Central Political Commission.

  Hess also kept up his interest in flying. He obtained his private pilot's licence on the 4th of April 1929, with the First World War flying ace Theodor Croneiss as his instructor. In 1930 he became the owner of a BFW M.23b monoplane, sponsored by the party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. He acquired two more Messerschmitt aircraft in the early 1930s, logging many flying hours and growing proficient with light single-engine planes.

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• 4. Deputy Führer

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  On the 21st of April 1933, Hess was named Deputy Führer of the Nazi Party, less than three months after Hitler became Reich Chancellor on the 30th of January. On the 2nd of June he became one of 16 Reichsleiters in the party hierarchy. On the 1st of July he was raised to the rank of Obergruppenführer in the SS. By the 20th of September, Hitler had told him to drop both titles and use only "Deputy Führer". That decree acknowledged his standing as first among equals in the party. On the 1st of December he entered the cabinet as a Reichsminister without portfolio.

  Offices in the Brown House in Munich and in Berlin gave Hess responsibility for departments covering foreign affairs, finance, health, education and law. All legislation passed through his office for approval, except measures on the army, the police and foreign policy. He wrote and co-signed many of Hitler's decrees. He also helped organise the annual Nuremberg Rallies, usually giving the opening speech and introducing Hitler. He spoke so often on the radio and at rallies that his speeches were collected into a book in 1938.

  Because Hess had been born abroad, Hitler had him oversee Nazi groups such as the NSDAP/AO, which handled party members living in other countries. Hitler also told him to review every court decision involving people deemed enemies of the party. Hess could lengthen any sentence he felt was too lenient, and he was empowered to take "merciless action". That often meant sending the person to a concentration camp or ordering the person killed.

  The Volksdeutscher Rat, or Council of Ethnic Germans, was founded by Hess in 1933. It managed party relations with ethnic German minorities around the world, especially in Eastern Europe. Its purpose was to shield the party from criticism that it was extending Gleichschaltung, the Nazi drive to bring every institution into line, to German communities abroad. Despite Hess's claims, its eight members were loyal mainly to Germany. Only one of them belonged to the Nazi Party, and all answered only to Hess. Its most notable impact came in the Sudetenland. There, in 1933, it promoted Konrad Henlein as the politician best placed to build a Nazi-friendly party that Czechoslovakia would not ban.

  The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were drafted partly in Hess's office. They banned marriage between non-Jewish and Jewish Germans and stripped non-Aryans of their German citizenship. Karl Haushofer had married a half-Jewish woman, so the laws applied to his family. Hess issued documents exempting them.

  Hess viewed many issues through the lens of an alleged Jewish conspiracy against Germany. In a 1937 speech he blamed the Spanish Civil War on "international Jewry". In the same speech he attacked the Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov with an antisemitic insult. He also claimed that without Hitler or Mussolini, "Jewish Asiatic Bolshevism would dominate European culture". His antisemitism sharpened once the war began. On the 20th of April 1940, Hitler's 51st birthday, he accused Jews and their fellow travellers of causing Germany's capitulation in November 1918.

  On the 30th of August 1939, Hitler appointed Hess to the six-person Council of Ministers for Defense of the Reich, set up as a war cabinet. After the invasion of Poland on the 1st of September, Hitler named Hess second in line to succeed him, behind Hermann Göring. Around the same time Hitler made Hess's chief of staff, Martin Bormann, his personal secretary, a post Hess had held. On the 8th of October, Hess co-signed the law annexing Danzig, the Polish Corridor and part of Upper Silesia. That day he and Heinrich Himmler also ordered a racial registry in those areas. They declared that Poles and Jews were not to be treated as equals of Germans. A separate legal code with draconian punishments followed. Hess argued it was needed because "the Pole is less susceptible to the infliction of ordinary punishment". He also decreed that no building destroyed in Warsaw during the siege be rebuilt, as a reminder of Polish "war guilt".

  Hess built no power base and gathered no circle of followers. Loyalty to Hitler and a wish to be useful drove him, rather than a hunger for power or wealth. He lived in a modest house in Munich. His health was a fixation bordering on hypochondria, and he consulted many doctors and other practitioners. He was a vegetarian who neither smoked nor drank. He brought his own food, which he called biologically dynamic, to Hitler's Berghof. Hitler disapproved, so Hess stopped taking meals with him.

  Music, reading, and hiking and climbing in the mountains with Ilse filled his free time. With Albrecht Haushofer he shared an interest in astrology, and he was keen on clairvoyance and the occult. In 1934 he won an air race, flying a BFW M.35 around the Zugspitze mountain and back to Munich in 29 minutes. The following year he placed sixth of 29 in a similar race. When war broke out he asked Hitler to let him join the Luftwaffe as a pilot. Hitler forbade it and ordered him to stop flying for the duration, though Hess talked him down to a ban of one year.

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• 5. Flight to Scotland

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  Martin Bormann supplanted Hess in many of his duties as the war went on and took his place at Hitler's side. Hess was excluded from most important decisions, and many in Hitler's inner circle thought his eccentricities showed madness. Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, was scheduled for 1941. Hess feared a war on two fronts. He decided to bring Britain to the negotiating table by travelling there himself.

  On the 31st of August 1940, Hess met Karl Haushofer, who believed King George VI opposed Churchill and would dismiss him and send him to Canada at the first chance. Haushofer thought the king could be reached through either General Ian Hamilton or the Duke of Hamilton. Hess chose the duke, a fellow aviator. The two had never spoken. Both attended a banquet at the 1936 Summer Olympics, but they sat at different tables. Hess chose him in the mistaken belief that he led a party opposed to war with Germany, and because he was a friend of Haushofer. On Hess's instructions, Haushofer wrote to Hamilton in September 1940. MI5 intercepted the letter, and Hamilton did not see it until March 1941.

  A letter to his wife dated the 4th of November 1940 shows that Hess meant to proceed despite getting no reply from Hamilton. In October 1940 he had begun training on the Messerschmitt Bf 110, a two-seater twin-engine aircraft. His instructor was Wilhelm Stör, the chief test pilot at Messerschmitt. Hess settled on one Bf 110E-1/N that handled well, and it was held in reserve for his personal use. He asked for a radio compass, changes to the oxygen system and large long-range fuel tanks. By March 1941 all of those requests had been granted.

  At 17:45 on the 10th of May 1941, Hess took off from the airfield at Augsburg-Haunstetten, after a last check of the weather reports. Earlier attempts had been called off because of mechanical problems or poor weather. He wore a leather flying suit marked with the rank of captain. He carried money, toiletries, a torch, a camera, maps and charts, and 28 different medicines. He also packed dextrose tablets against fatigue and an assortment of homoeopathic remedies.

  Setting a course toward Bonn, Hess steered by landmarks on the ground. At the coast near the Frisian Islands he turned east for twenty minutes to stay out of British radar range. He then took a heading of 335 degrees across the North Sea, flying mostly at 5000 ft. At 20:58 he changed his heading to 245 degrees, aiming for the coast near Bamburgh, Northumberland. The sun had not yet set, so he zigzagged for 40 minutes until dark. Around then his auxiliary fuel tanks ran dry, and he released them into the sea.

  At 22:08 the Chain Home radar station at Ottercops Moss, near Newcastle upon Tyne, detected the aircraft and alerted the Filter Room at Bentley Priory. Other stations soon picked it up, and it was designated "Raid 42". Two Spitfires of No. 72 Squadron failed to intercept it, and so did a third that left Acklington at 22:20. By then it was dark, and Hess was flying so low that a volunteer at the Royal Observer Corps station at Chatton identified a Bf 110 at 50 ft. He pressed on into Scotland but could not find Dungavel House, his destination. A Boulton Paul Defiant of No. 141 Squadron, based at Ayr, began pursuit at 22:35.

  Nearly out of fuel, Hess climbed to 6000 ft and parachuted out at 23:06. He injured his foot, either leaving the aircraft or hitting the ground. The plane crashed at 23:09, about 12 mi west of Dungavel House. Trouble getting out of the cockpit meant he landed farther away than he otherwise would have. His biographers Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel called the flight "the proudest technical achievement of Hess's life."

  Floors Farm, by Waterfoot, south of Glasgow, was where Hess came down shortly before midnight. The ploughman David McLean found him still struggling with his parachute. Hess gave his name as "Hauptmann Alfred Horn" and said he had an important message for the Duke of Hamilton. McLean helped him to a nearby cottage and called the local Home Guard. They escorted Hess to their headquarters in Busby, and then to the police station at Giffnock. There, through an interpreter, Major Graham Donald of the Royal Observer Corps questioned him. Hess repeatedly asked to see the duke. He was then taken to Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow, where his injuries were treated. Some captors suspected who he was, but he kept insisting his name was Horn.

  Wing Commander Hamilton had been on duty at RAF Turnhouse, near Edinburgh, when Hess arrived. He reached Maryhill Barracks the next morning and met the prisoner alone. Hess admitted his identity at once and said he was on a "mission of humanity". He told Hamilton that Hitler "wished to stop the fighting" with England. Hess spoke English well but had trouble understanding Hamilton, so an interpreter was needed. Hamilton then arranged through the Foreign Office to see Churchill, who was spending the weekend at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. The next day Churchill sent Hamilton and Ivone Kirkpatrick, a foreign affairs expert who had met Hess before, to identify the prisoner at Buchanan Castle. Working from extensive notes, Hess spoke at length about Hitler's expansionary plans. Britain, he said, should let the Nazis have free rein in Europe in exchange for keeping its overseas possessions. Kirkpatrick would meet him twice more over the following days.

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• 6. Reactions and Theories

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  Karlheinz Pintsch, Hess's adjutant, had been handed a letter for Hitler before Hess left Germany. It laid out the plan to open peace negotiations with the United Kingdom through the Duke of Hamilton, on terms Hitler could accept. Pintsch delivered it to Hitler at the Berghof around noon on the 11th of May. After reading it, Hitler let out a cry heard throughout the building and summoned his inner circle, fearing that a putsch might be underway.

  Munich Radio announced the flight on the evening of the 12th of May, without saying where Hess had gone or what had happened to him. The next day Hitler sent Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to give the news to Mussolini in person. The British press was allowed to release full information on that same day. Ilse Hess learned that her husband had survived only on the 14th of May, when German radio broadcast news of his fate.

  Hitler worried that Italy and Japan would suspect him of secretly seeking peace with Britain. He contacted Mussolini to reassure him, and he ordered the German press to portray Hess as a madman who had acted alone. Newspapers called him "deluded, deranged" and blamed injuries from the First World War. Göring and Joseph Goebbels thought this only made matters worse, because a mentally ill man should never have held high office. Goebbels noted in his diary that the public was wondering how "such a fool" could be second to Hitler.

  Hitler stripped Hess of all his party and state offices and secretly ordered him shot on sight if he ever returned to Germany. He abolished the post of Deputy Führer and gave its duties to Bormann, with the title of Head of the Party Chancellery. Bormann used the opportunity to secure significant power for himself. Around the 9th of June, Hitler launched Aktion Hess, a flurry of hundreds of arrests of astrologers, faith healers and occultists. Goebbels and others used the campaign as propaganda to denigrate Hess and to make scapegoats of occult practitioners.

  David McLean hid two sections of the fuselage, which were later retrieved. Other wreckage was salvaged by 63 Maintenance Unit between the 11th and the 16th of May 1941 and stored in Oxford. The Bf 110 carried four machine guns in the nose but no ammunition. One of its engines is on display at the RAF Museum, and the Imperial War Museum shows another engine and part of the fuselage.

  Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker, a US journalist who had met both Hitler and Hess, speculated that Hitler sent Hess to warn Churchill of the coming invasion of the Soviet Union. In his view the message might have come with an offer of a negotiated peace or an anti-Bolshevik partnership. Joseph Stalin believed the British had engineered the flight. He still thought so in 1944, when he raised it with Churchill, who insisted that Britain had no advance knowledge. In his book The Grand Alliance, Churchill wrote that the mission had not been authorised. "He came to us of his own free will, and, though without authority, had something of the quality of an envoy", he wrote. He called Hess's plan one of "lunatic benevolence". Speculation that Hitler sanctioned the flight has persisted. Other conspiracy theories include one in which British Intelligence duped Hess.

  After the war, Albert Speer asked Hess about his reasons. Hess told him that "the idea had been inspired in him in a dream by supernatural forces. We will guarantee England her empire; in return she will give us a free hand in Europe." In Spandau, Hess told the journalist Desmond Zwar that "Hitler had great respect for the English people". He said that although he had no permission from the Führer, he knew his message would have won approval. Hess wrote that the flight was meant to begin "the fastest way to win the war."

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• 7. Prisoner and Defendant

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  From Buchanan Castle, Hess went briefly to the Tower of London and then to Mytchett Place in Surrey, a fortified mansion designated "Camp Z". He stayed there for 13 months. Churchill ordered that he be treated well, though he was not allowed newspapers or the radio. Three intelligence officers were stationed on site, along with 150 soldiers on guard. By early June he was allowed to write to his family. A letter he prepared for the Duke of Hamilton was never delivered, and his requests for further meetings were refused. Major Frank Foley of MI6 led a year-long debriefing that came to nothing.

  The psychiatrists Henry V. Dicks and John Rawlings Rees treated Hess during this period. They noted that he was not insane but was mentally unstable, with tendencies toward hypochondria and paranoia. On the 9th of June 1942, Hess repeated his peace proposal to the Lord Chancellor, John Simon, 1st Viscount Simon, who judged his mental state poor. Hess claimed he was being poisoned and kept from sleeping. He insisted on swapping his dinner with a guard's and tried to have food samples sent out for analysis. At this time he resumed eating meat, and he kept it in his diet through Spandau. He also claimed to have discovered a "secret force" controlling the minds of Churchill and other British leaders. He said it filled them with an irrational hatred of Germany and acted on Hitler's mind too.

  In the early hours of the 16th of June 1942, Hess rushed his guards and tried to kill himself by jumping over the staircase railing at Mytchett Place. He fell onto the stone floor and fractured the femur of his left leg. The leg was kept in traction for 12 weeks, followed by six more weeks of bed rest before he could walk on crutches. Captain Munro Johnson of the Royal Army Medical Corps warned that another attempt was likely. Around then Hess began to complain of amnesia. It may partly have been a ruse, because a man declared mentally ill could be repatriated under the Geneva Conventions.

  Maindiff Court Hospital received Hess on the 26th of June 1942, and he remained there for three years. It had been chosen for its added security and the need for fewer guards. He took walks on the grounds, made car trips into the countryside, read newspapers, and wrote letters and journals. On the 4th of February 1945 he made a second suicide attempt, stabbing himself with a bread knife. The wound needed two stitches. Despondent that Germany was losing the war, he refused food for a week and resumed eating only when threatened with force-feeding. Germany surrendered unconditionally on the 8th of May 1945, and Hess was taken to Nuremberg on the 10th of October.

  The first Nuremberg trial of major war criminals ran from November 1945 to October 1946. Hess stood with 23 defendants in all, charged under counts that included conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. On arrival he was reluctant to surrender samples of food that he said the British had poisoned. He wanted to use them in his defence. Colonel Burton C. Andrus of the United States Army, the commandant, told him there would be no special treatment, and the samples were sealed and confiscated. Hess weighed 65 kg and had a poor appetite but was judged healthy. Another defendant, Robert Ley, hanged himself in his cell on the 24th of October, so the prisoners were watched around the clock. Because of his earlier suicide attempts, Hess was handcuffed to a guard whenever he left his cell.

  Almost at once, Hess began to show amnesia, which may have been feigned to avoid a death sentence. Douglas Kelley, the chief psychiatrist at Nuremberg, described "a true psychoneurosis, primarily of the hysterical type, engrafted on a basic paranoid and schizoid personality, with amnesia, partly genuine and partly feigned". He still found Hess fit for trial. Officials brought in his former secretaries and showed him old newsreels, but he showed no response. The tribunal's chief medical officer, Lieutenant Colonel Rene Juchli, declared the amnesia intentional. When Hess addressed the tribunal on the 30th of November, he admitted that he had faked memory loss as a tactic. At the end of February 1946, partway through the prosecution's case, he resumed showing symptoms anyway.

  When asked for a plea at the opening of the trial, Hess answered "nein", and the court recorded it as not guilty. Mervyn Griffith-Jones presented the prosecution case from the 7th of February 1946. He quoted Hess's speeches to show that Hess knew of Hitler's plans for a war of aggression and agreed with them. Hess had signed decrees on mandatory military service, the Nuremberg racial laws and the incorporation of conquered Polish territories. Griffith-Jones argued that this made him share responsibility. He added that a trip to Scotland six weeks before the invasion of the Soviet Union could only be seen as an attempt to stop the British interfering.

  Hess's lawyer, Dr Alfred Seidl, presented the defence from the 22nd to the 26th of March 1946. He said Hess accepted responsibility for the many decrees he had signed but called them internal matters of a sovereign state. Witnesses included Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, former head of the NSDAP/AO, who said any espionage had happened without his knowledge. Karl Strölin, a former mayor of Stuttgart, and Hess's brother Alfred also denied that the organisation had spied. In his summation on the 25th of July, Seidl argued that Hitler alone made all important decisions. He added that Hess could not answer for anything after leaving Germany in May 1941. Hess himself detached from the proceedings, refusing family visits and newspapers. He spoke to the tribunal again on the 31st of August 1946, the last day of closing statements.

  Judgement came on the 30th of September 1946 after nearly two months of deliberation, and individual sentences followed the next day. Hess was found guilty of crimes against peace and of conspiracy with other German leaders to commit crimes. He was found not guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He received a life sentence, one of seven Nazis given prison terms. The Soviet member of the tribunal, Major-General Iona Nikitchenko, filed a dissent recording that he felt the death sentence was warranted. On the 18th of July 1947, the seven were flown to the Allied military prison at Spandau in Berlin.

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• 8. Last Prisoner of Spandau

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  The Allied Control Council, made up of representatives of the UK, France, the United States and the Soviet Union, governed Spandau. Each country supplied guards for a month at a time on a rotating basis. Hess refused his body search and had to be held down. Inmates then received prison garb and numbers, and Hess was Number 7. There was a small library, and each inmate was allowed four sheets of paper per month for letters. They could not speak to one another without permission, and they worked at cleaning and gardening. Their daily outdoor hour had them walking about 10 yd apart.

  Visits were allowed for half an hour per month, but Hess forbade his family to come until December 1969. A perforated ulcer had put him in the British Military Hospital in West Berlin. His son, Wolf Rüdiger, was now 32 and Ilse was 69, and neither had seen him since 1941. After that illness he allowed regular visits. His daughter-in-law Andrea became a particularly welcome guest, bringing photos and films of his grandchildren. He still cried out at night with stomach pains, suspected poison and complained of amnesia. A psychiatrist who examined him in 1957 judged him not ill enough for a mental hospital. He attempted suicide again in 1977.

  Konstantin von Neurath, Walther Funk and Erich Raeder were released because of poor health in the 1950s. Karl Dönitz served his time and left in 1956. Baldur von Schirach and Albert Speer followed in 1966. By the 1980s conditions were far more pleasant than in the early years. Hess set his own routine, with television, films, reading and gardening. A lift was installed to carry him to the garden, and from 1982 he had a medical orderly.

  Alfred Seidl launched appeals for Hess's release as early as 1947, and the Soviets repeatedly vetoed them. Spandau stood in West Berlin, and its existence gave the Soviets a foothold in that sector of the city. Soviet officials also believed Hess must have known in 1941 that an attack on their country was imminent. In 1967 Wolf Rüdiger Hess began a campaign for his father's freedom. Politicians such as Geoffrey Lawrence in the UK and Willy Brandt in West Germany lent support, but it failed. A society he founded had collected 700 signatures by that September, and 350,000 people had signed by 1974. The historian Norman Goda wrote that campaigners routinely exaggerated the harshness of the imprisonment. He argued that Wolf's efforts backfired by blurring the question of humanitarian release with the question of guilt. Wolf claimed his father was unjustly jailed to hide Britain's "war guilt". In 1973 the Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban said Hess was not treated as badly as his champions claimed.

  Tests in September 1979 showed that Hess had potentially fatal prostate cancer. In a letter dated the 8th of September 1979, he said he would refuse treatment unless released. He called himself an "unjustly convicted man" and said his death would weigh on the consciences of the leaders of the four powers. US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance saw this as an attempt to "force" his release. Britain's Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, appealed for release, but the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, refused. Gromyko said Hess had never "shown even a shadow of repentance". Gromyko also said that many people would read a release as confirmation of a wrongful conviction. Hess's appeal to neo-Nazi groups in West Germany made the Soviets even less willing.

  Hess remained an unapologetic Nazi and antisemite, which those campaigning for him usually ignored while portraying him as a harmless old man. He promised to make no statements to the media if freed, yet he kept writing drafts of statements. On the 25th of June 1986, a Soviet guard caught Charles Gabel, the chaplain at Spandau, trying to smuggle out one of them. Gabel was fired. Hess had originally written it as his opening address for Nuremberg in 1946, which the judges cut short. The statement claimed that Germany's attack on the Soviet Union was preemptive. It also claimed that he flew to Scotland without telling Hitler, to warn Britain of the Soviet danger to "European civilization".

  Hess was found dead on the 17th of August 1987, aged 93, in a summer house set up in the prison garden as a reading room. He had hanged himself with an extension cable strung over a window latch. A short note to his family, thanking them for all they had done, was in his pocket. On the 17th of September the Four-Powers Authority ruled the death a suicide. Spandau was demolished shortly afterwards to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.

  A secret location received Hess's body at first, to avoid media attention and demonstrations by Nazi sympathisers. On the 17th of March 1988 it was re-interred in a family plot at Wunsiedel, and Ilse was buried beside him in 1995. The grave became a destination for neo-Nazi pilgrimage and for demonstrations each August on the anniversary of his death. In 2011 the parish council did not extend the grave's lease. With the eventual consent of the family, the grave was reopened on the 20th of July 2011. The remains were cremated, and family members scattered the ashes at sea. The gravestone bore the epitaph "Ich habs gewagt", meaning "I dared to do it", and it was destroyed.

  A persistent myth held that the Spandau prisoner was not really Hess. DNA testing disproved it in 2019. Sherman McCall, formerly of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and Jan Cemper-Kiesslich of the University of Salzburg compared the prisoner's Y chromosome markers with those of a living male Hess relative. They found a 99.99 per cent match.

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