Rudolf Hess: Nazi Germany’s Greatest Lunatic?
The nutcase who dared to fly high
On August 17th, 1987, at 93 years old, the last prisoner of Spandau prison hung himself. The prison closed after his death. Rudolf Hess tried to commit suicide many times, all thwarted. This time, the senile Nazi succeeded in ending his life in Berlin, 43 years after the end of World War II.
Hess was the first high-ranking Nazi official to be captured, yet he was the last to die. He spent nearly half of his life behind bars, but his capture was not a blistering seizure, rather, it was one of the strangest events of World War II. This is the story of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess and his bizarre arrest.
A Unique Upbringing
Rudolf Hess grew up in a wealthy German mercantile family in Alexandria, Egypt, under the British Empire’s “veiled protectorate.” The veiled protectorate was a puppet regime in which British officers and officials ran the supposedly independent Egyptian government.
He spent most of his childhood there and grew to admire the British Empire’s presence. When Hess was 14 he was enrolled in a boarding school in Germany.
Having lived all of his life prior in Egypt, Hess had a unique and distinct upbringing compared to most Germans. Upon graduating, under pressure from his father, Hess enrolled in business school and briefly worked in a trading company until World War I broke out. He immediately enlisted in the army.
He would see battle many times and earn wounds to show for it. In 1918 as the war was beginning to end, Hess trained to become an aviator. He would never see action in that role, but it would remain a proclivity that he would keep throughout his life.
The Lost Yogi
When World War I ended, Hess was devastated. Not only had his country lost the war, but his family's businesses in Egypt had been expropriated by the British.
In the wake of the war, Hess joined right-wing political factions that proliferated anti-Semitic and anti-Communist rhetoric. The “stab in the back” myth, that Germany had only lost the war due to nefarious betrayals on the Homeland, fermented by communists, anarchists, and predominantly Jews, was a theory that Hess vehemently supported.
During this time, Hess was also actively involved in occultist organizations such as the Thule Society, which purported mystical underpinnings to the Aryan race. Hess’s fascination with the esoteric was much broader than a mythical ethnonationalism, he developed an attraction to astrology and various forms of alternative medicine.
This affinity would last throughout his life, and in later years his Nazi colleagues would refer to him in jest as “Yogi from Egypt.” Yogi was a slang term for Hindu mystics.
In 1919 Hess enrolled in the University of Munich where he studied under Karl Hausholer, a professor of political geography whose theory of Lebensraum (Living space) would greatly impact Hess and subsequently Adolf Hitler. Lebensraum was the concept that Germany needed more territory to support ethnic Germans in Germany and other countries.
As a result, during World War Two, whole populations of non-ethnic Germans in surrounding countries faced extreme measures of deportation, extermination, and subjugation by the conquering Nazi forces. This philosophy was used to justify the Nazi invasions of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Poland.
A Friend of the Führer
Hess attended a speech by young Adolph Hitler in 1920 and became enthralled with him, immediately enrolling as a member of the Nazi party. He was its 16th member.
Hess would remain staunchly devoted to Hitler and the party, becoming imprisoned with Hitler during the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. During this imprisonment, Hitler wrote his infamous manifesto Mein Kampf with the aid of Hess, to whom he partially dedicated the book. Upon their release, the Nazi party quickly solidified their hold on German politics, and Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and Hess was made his deputy.
As the years progressed, the regime re-militarized and encroached into nearby lands, joining World War II in 1939. During the beginning stages of the war, Germany steamrolled into France, surprising the unprepared and internally conflicted French.
During this time the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of non-aggression between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was active, but within both Nazi and Soviet circles, it became apparent that this truce would soon break. Operation Barbarossa, the plan for the German invasion of the Soviet Union, was being prepared and Rudolf Hess, an increasingly sidelined and detached member of Hitler’s cabinet, felt he needed to do something to prevent this.
The Flight of Peace or the Flight of Insanity?
After consulting his former professor, Karl Hausholer, Hess became convinced that there was a possibility of negotiating peace with the United Kingdom.
Hess assumed that the Duke of Hamilton, with whom he was acquainted with, was sympathetic to a truce with Germany. Hess believed that the Duke, who had a degree of influence in the British Parliament, could lobby for a truce and sent a letter inquiring on the matter in 1940. The letter was intercepted by MI6 and Hess never got a response, so he decided to take matters into his own hands.
He would fly alone to the Duke’s estate in Scotland to negotiate peace. He trained for the flight in secret for months and in the early evening of May 10th, 1941, Rudolf Hess put his love for flying to use and underwent took his peace mission.
Hess’s mission did not go to plan. He struggled to locate the Duke’s estate and his plane ran out of fuel, forcing him to parachute out of his plane. He was found by a local farmer 20 kilometers away from Hamilton’s estate and was shortly apprehended by the authorities and held in custody.
Eventually, Hamilton visited Hess but was so baffled by the bizarre nature of the mission, believing it to be a ruse of some sort. Prime Minister S. Churchill was immediately informed of the situation, and the then 47-year-old Rudolf Hess commenced his life-long imprisonment.
The Reason for the Mission
Various theories have emerged to explain Hess’s mission. The most prominent being that British intelligence infiltrated Hess’s circle of occultists and managed to persuade him to make the mission, by providing him with false horoscopes spurring him to undergo the “peace mission.”
The astrologer Waltraud Weckerlein claimed that a fellow astrologer, Maria Nagengast told Hess that “In May [he] could fly without endangering [his] life.” Whether Nagengast was paid or manipulated by British intelligence remains unconfirmed.
Another theory posits that Hitler was aware of Hess’s plan and actively tried to encourage it in anticipation of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The theory was that the anti-Communist British Conservative Party could support a Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. This theory was nonsense because Churchill, a Conservative and Britain’s most famous anti-Communist, aggressively backed the Soviet war effort after Operation Barbarossa.
This is much less likely, as a British alliance could jeopardize the alliances between the Axis powers. In particular with Italian leader Benito Mussolini who was trying to conquer Egypt. A third theory simply asserts that Hess’s plan was truly just a deluded scheme on his part.
The Shadows of Hess’s Flight
Hess’s adjunct provided Hitler with a note of Hess’s plan a day after it had been enacted.
Upon hearing the news, Hitler screamed in fury, concerned that a coup was occurring. Hitler was understandably also worried that this action would be perceived by the Axis nations as an attempt to negotiate peace with Britain, which would jeopardize the truces formed between them. Hess was immediately stripped of all titles and offices and ordered shot if he ever returned to Germany.
How the Nazi regime would rationalize Hess’s behavior became an issue on its own. How could a regime as proper and morally exalted as the Nazi regime have such an insane lunatic as such a significant official? So Hess’s occultist proclivities were put under the microscope.
It was the occultists of the Nazi regime that poisoned Hess’s mind, enticing him to believe in all kinds of ridiculous things. So the Nazi government initiated Aktion Hess an operation that ordered the arrest and imprisonment of occultists and faith healers of the Nazi Regime.
However, this did not completely end all esoteric activities, many of these occultist practitioners continued their fashioning of horoscopes and divinations discretely even in concentration camps for German officials. Occult and mystical underpinnings were deeply entrenched in Nazi Ideology to many members of the party.
The Nazis began using many of these occultists who they believed to be useful in clandestine programs such as the Sidereal Pendulum Department. A program that attempted to locate enemy ships and submarines through unconscious intuition as uncovered by pendulums and diagrams.
The Nazis were struggling to control the seas as they had earlier in the War, the reason for this was that British intelligence had managed to successfully decrypt the Enigma machines that the Nazis employed. As a result, the British became aware of many messages sent amongst the Nazis, preventing many casualties and attacks on Allied ships.
During the Nuremberg trials, Hess feigned amnesia and psychosis, occasionally claiming to have forgotten his name, details regarding his secret mission and complicity in the Nazi regime. He was still fit to stand trial, and unlike most senior Nazi officers, he evaded the death sentence for a life sentence which he would spend in Spandau prison until he hung himself in 1987.
The prison was demolished after Hess’s death. His body was buried in a parish cemetary in Wunsiedel Bavaria with the epitaph “I have dared.” Hesse’s grave attracted Neo-Nazi pilgrims until it was destroyed in 2011, after his body was exhumed, cremated, and his ashes were scattered at sea by his family.
The Nazi Regime was one of the most infamously depraved and demented regimes in modern memory. The shadows of their destruction and suffering still paint our times. So much so that many rightfully label the regime as pathological and mentally insane.
Even if his mission was ostensibly one of peace, Rudolf Hess seemed to take the cake for enacting one of the most bizarre acts of World War II. The rest is living history.