• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

David Irving HESS The Missing Years 1941-1945 Copyright © by David Irving Electronic version copyright © by Parforce U.K. Ltd. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. Copies may be downloaded from our website for research purposes only. No part of this publication may be commercially reproduced, copied, or transmitted save with written permission in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be li- able to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. is the son of a Royal Navy commander. Imperfectly educated at Lon- don’s Imperial College of Science & Technol- ogy and at University College, he subsequently spent a year in Germany working in a steel mill and perfecting his fluency in the lan- guage. In he published The Destruction of Dresden. This became a best-seller in many countries. Among his thirty books (including several in German), the best-known include Hitler’s War; The Trail of the Fox: The Life of Field Marshal Rommel; Accident, the Death of General Sikorski; The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe; and Nuremberg, the Last Battle. The second volume of his Churchill's War appeared in and he is now completing the third vol- ume. Many of his works are available as free downloads at www.fpp.co.uk/books. CONTENTS GERMANY A Prisoner of Mankind.............................................. The Private Secretary................................................ The Wailing Wall..................................................... The Bystander.......................................................... The Little Thunderstorm......................................... BRITAIN Fool’s Errand........................................................... The Tower............................................................... Camp Z.................................................................... The Negotiator Comes............................................ Conversations in an Asylum................................... A Second Cabinet Visitor........................................ On Strike ................................................................. First Loss of Memory .............................................. Lies to Stalin and Roosevelt .................................... Red Earth ................................................................ Laughter Line.......................................................... The Eight-Inch Blade ............................................. NUREMBERG Return to Germany ............................................... “Do You Remember ‘Heil Hitler’?”....................... Triumph of the Will............................................... Will the True Rudolf Hess Please Stand Up.......... Epilogue: A Lifetime to Repent............................. Acknowledgements ................................................ Abbreviations Used in Notes................................... Endnotes.................................................................. Archival Sources...................................................... Select Bibliography................................................. Index........................................................................ A Prisoner of Mankind Semi-blind, his memory gone, he languished for forty-six years in prison, and spent over half of that time in solitary confinement. At first he was detained in cells with blackened windows, sentinels flashing torches on his face all night at half-hour intervals; and later in conditions only marginally more humane. Occasionally, mankind remembered that he was there: at a time when “political prisoners” were being released as a token of humanity, the world knew that he was still in Spandau, and timid souls felt somehow the safer for it. In the news emerged that somebody had recently stolen the prisoner’s s flying helmet, goggles and fur-lined boots and fevered minds imagined that these, his hallowed relics of , might be used in some way to power a Nazi revival. The prisoner himself had long forgotten what those relics had ever meant to him. The dark-red brick of Spandau prison in West Berlin was crumbling and decaying around him, and the windows were cracked or falling out of mouldering frames. He was the only prisoner left alone, outliving all his fellows, his brain perhaps a last uncertain repository of names and promises and places, grim secrets that the victorious Four Powers might have expected him to take to the grave long before. The prisoner was Rudolf Hess, the last of the “war crimi- nals.” In May he had flown single-handedly to Scotland on a reckless parachute mission to end the bloodshed and bombing. Put on trial by the victors, he had been condemned to imprison- ment in perpetuity for “Crimes against the Peace.” The Four Powers had expected him to die and thus seal off the wells of speculation about him, but this stubborn old man with the haunting eyes had by his very longevity thwarted them. Few questions remained about the other Nazis. Hitler’s jaw- bone was preserved in a Soviet glass jar; Ley’s brain was in Massa- chusetts; Bormann’s skeleton was found beneath the Berlin cob- blestones; Mengele’s mortal remains were disinterred and rein- terred; Speer had joined the Greatest Architect. Dead too were Hess’s judges and prosecutors. Hess himself was the last living Nazi giant, the last enigma, unable to communicate with the out- side world, forbidden to talk with his son about political events, his diary taken away from him each day to be destroyed, his let- ters censored and scissored to excise illicit content. The macabre Four Powers statute ignored, in the event ordained that upon his death the body was to be reduced to ashes in the cre- matorium at Dachau concentration camp. The bulldozers were already standing by to wreck Spandau jail within hours of his de- cease, so that no place of Nazi pilgrimage remained. For forty years this Berlin charade was the sole remaining joint activity of the wartime Allied powers, a wordless political ballet performed by the Western democracies and high-stepping Red Army guards. Every thirty days the guard was rotated. Each time that the British or the Americans or the French came to hold the key they could in theory have turned it and set this old man free. But they did not, because the ghosts of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt were themselves the jailers. In the name of a Four Power agreement that had long since been dishonoured, these ghosts kept Hess behind bars; and so Hitler’s deputy lived on in Span- dau, mocking history and making a mockery of justice itself. Despite everything, he became a martyr to a cause. Mankind dared not turn the key to set him free: and man- kind did not know why. In Hitler appointed Rudolf Hess deputy Führer. By , alone and facing over twenty years of solitary confinement in Spandau prison, Hess was a spectral shadow of his former self. Like Hitler himself, the subject of this narrative had been beyond the frontiers of Germany. Walter Rudolf Richard Hess opened his eyes to the light of Egypt on April . He found himself in the wealthy family of a young German merchant, Johann Fritz Hess, in Ibrahimieh (Ibrâhî-mîya), a suburb of Alexandria. Fritz Hess was thirty; he had inherited an import business founded by his father, Christian, and was a respected member of the German colony in Egypt. Thus the boy Rudolf spent his first fourteen years amid the silks and ceramics and servants of a pala- tial villa. Every two years the family left these patrician sur- roundings for a six-month stay at the family’s hunting estate at Reicholdsgrün in the Fichtelgebirge mountains of central Ger- many. His mother was Klara Münch, daughter of a textile manu- facturer in Thuringia. Rudolf was fond of both parents, but it was she who taught him to pray, and his first memory, at the age of three, was when she bore her husband another son, Alfred. Rudolf was given a toy gun drawn by two horses as a present: the gift interested him more than the new arrival. Eleven years after that, he gained a baby sister, Grete. The East Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant had written, “I shall never forget my mother. She implanted in me and nur- tured the first seed of good; she opened my soul to the lessons of Nature; she aroused my interest and enlarged my ideas. What she taught me has had an everlasting and blessed influence upon my life.” Chancing upon these words in , Rudolf Hess would reflect, “This holds true not just for the mother of Kant.” He never forgot his mother. With her he would set forth into the Egyptian desert before dawn to watch nature awakening in the darkened palm groves: his young nostrils caught the puzzling odour of burned gunpowder, his infant’s eyes made out the shape of Arabs holding ancient muzzle-loading muskets. Some- times his mother took them westwards into the Libyan desert, into the midst of an ocean of flowers which flooded the desert during the few weeks that it could boast of a spring, before the sun’s furnace scorched off the last raindrops and the ghibli en- tombed the anemones and narcissi beneath its hot and drifting sands. Fifty years later, when his horizons were encompassed by the confines of his cell at Spandau and an outer prison wall, he would still remember Egypt: he would write to his aged mother about how he was tending a hundred tomato plants or more: I have arranged their irrigation

Load more

  567

Copy Link