by Daniil Pelymov
[REGNUM] On May 17, 1941, Rudolf Hess, former Deputy Führer of the Nazi Party and official "number three" in the Third Reich, was incarcerated in the Tower of London.
The event, extraordinary in itself, was one episode in a strange story that points to the dark side of the Second World War.
A week before his incarceration in a British prison, on May 10, Hess piloted a Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter jet alone and parachuted over British territory, landing near the town of Kilmanrock in western Scotland.
In the world's capitals, and Moscow in particular, there was initially a clear lack of belief in the reality of what had happened. Thus, a TASS report published in the newspaper Pravda on May 11 stated the following: "On May 10, 1941, a plane crashed in Scotland. The pilot survived. He identified himself as Rudolf Hess."
But the British authorities presented to the world precisely Rudolf Walter Richard Hess, the Reich Minister of the German Empire.
It became clear what happened, but why and, most importantly, for what purpose, remained a mystery.
Decades later, the case remains one of the greatest and most closely guarded mysteries of the 20th century. The British Crown still keeps key documents related to the case classified.
An attempt to understand what this flight was—the madness of a lone wolf, a Hitler- sanctioned mission, or a British intelligence operation—reveals an inconvenient truth for the West about the behind-the-scenes games on the eve of the attack on the USSR.
To understand the logic of Hess's actions, it is necessary to reconstruct the geopolitical picture of May 1941.
Just over a month remained until the start of Operation Barbarossa. Germany de facto controlled continental Europe, but a protracted war of attrition with Great Britain tied Adolf Hitler's hands.
The prospect of a war on two fronts, which the German General Staff had feared, was becoming an inevitable reality.
Under these circumstances, Berlin desperately needed a compromise with London. The idea of an "Anglo-German alliance" and a division of the world (Germany the land, Britain the sea) never left the Reich's leadership.
Hess, as one of the "old party fighters" and leading ideologists of Nazism, considered it his sacred mission to realize this concept by taking Great Britain out of the war before German tanks moved to the East.
Historiography and fragments of documents declassified by the intelligence services offer three main versions of what happened.
VERSION ONE: THE ACTION OF A MADMAN ALONE
According to the official version, put forward both by Berlin immediately after the incident and by post-war London, Rudolf Hess acted in a state of mental disorder and at his own risk.
Such statements are supported by official statements from the Nazi leadership on May 12, 1941, where Hess was declared a victim of “hallucinations” and “mental disorder.”
However, this version falls apart upon detailed analysis of the technical aspects of the flight.
Hess, despite being an experienced World War I pilot, piloted a heavy twin-engine fighter through several air defense zones, executed a complex navigational maneuver without a navigator, and flew precisely to his target. Only a person with an absolutely clear mind and iron concentration could accomplish such a feat.
The allegations that the Führer's deputy in the party, the number three Nazi (after Hitler and Hermann Goering ), turned out to be mentally ill, did not have the best effect on the regime's reputation.
After all, on April 20th, Hess delivered his traditional speech on Reich Radio to mark Hitler's birthday. And on May 1st, at the Messerschmitt factory in Augsburg, he urged workers to increase productivity. How could such a mentally unstable adventurer be entrusted with such a task?
Besides insanity, the backup theory “for internal use” was that Hess had fallen victim to ambition and jealousy.
Realizing that his influence in the Reich leadership was declining ( Martin Bormann, who became both the Fuhrer's personal assistant in the party and the chief of the NSDAP chancery, had crossed Hess's path), Hitler's semi-official successor Hess allegedly decided to perform a miracle and regain the Fuhrer's favor by personally negotiating peace with the British aristocracy.
VERSION TWO: HITLER'S SECRET MISSION
The second hypothesis states that Hess's flight was sanctioned by Adolf Hitler. If successful, the Reich would gain peace in the West and a free hand in the East. If unsuccessful, Hess would be declared insane, which is precisely what was done.
The Führer could not enter into formal peace negotiations with Winston Churchill , as this would have demonstrated Germany's weakness in the face of an imminent war with the Soviet Union. Hess acted as an unofficial emissary.
This was supported by the fact that the Führer's deputy had landed somewhere. Near the town of Kilmanrock, where paratrooper Hess landed, is the estate of Dungavel House, the estate of the Duke of Hamilton, Douglas, a relative of the Windsor dynasty.
Farm worker David Maclean, who met Hess, reported that the German, in passable English, claimed to have arrived to meet Sir Douglas and asked to be taken to him. However, instead of the Duke, it was the Renfrewshire Civil Defence Force who arrived and arrested the "guest."
These circumstances gave rise to the theory that Hess was flying as Berlin's envoy for separate negotiations with the royal family (over the head of Prime Minister Churchill). In this case, the choice of the Duke of Hamilton as the conduit is perfectly understandable.
Hess's teacher was Dr. Karl Haushofer, a prominent geopolitician and major general of the General Staff in the Kaiser's army. He was not a Nazi and despised Hitler's party for trivializing the concept of "living space," borrowed from his books. But Haushofer, a professor at the University of Munich, never lost sight of his student Hess. Haushofer's sons were friends with Hamilton, whom they met at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
And – according to an already unconfirmed version – Hess was exploring the possibility of meeting with a relative of the British monarchs in neutral Lisbon.
The question remains: did Hitler's deputy act entirely on his own initiative? The Soviet leadership believed no.
"In Moscow, Hess's flight was perceived as a very alarming signal. It was seen as an attempt by certain circles in the Nazi leadership to achieve reconciliation with England and thereby secure Germany's rear for the war against the USSR," according to the memoirs of Soviet translator Valentin Berezhkov, who worked at the highest diplomatic level.
Testimonies from Hitler's entourage, recorded by historians, demonstrate the Fuhrer's strange behavior on the day when Hess's farewell letter was delivered to him.
This version explains why Hess flew with specific, detailed points of the peace agreement, which completely coincided with Hitler’s strategic goals: the preservation of the British Empire in exchange for recognition of German hegemony in Europe and freedom of action in the “Eastern space”.
VERSION THREE: A TRAP SET BY MI6
The most convenient version for London is that Hess's flight was the result of a brilliant operational game by the British secret services.
MI6, through proxies (in particular, the Duke of Hamilton), convinced the Nazi leadership that there was a powerful "peace party" in Great Britain, ready to overthrow Winston Churchill and enter into an alliance with Germany.
London's goal was obvious: to stall for time, to provoke Hitler into an immediate attack on the USSR, and thereby save Great Britain itself from inevitable defeat.
By capturing Hess, the British acquired a valuable hostage and a source of strategic information. Supporters of this theory point out that Hess believed in the seriousness of his "negotiations" until the very end.
The defendant himself at the Nuremberg Trials finally destroyed the myth of his "madness," which both Berlin and London had insisted upon. On November 30, 1945, Rudolf Hess personally read a sensational statement before the tribunal, which was recorded in the transcript:
“In order to prevent the possible opinion that I am not able to participate in this trial, despite the fact that I want to participate in the further conduct of the trial and want to sit in the dock with my comrades, which I already stated at the time, I want to make the following statement to the court, which I originally wanted to make later.
"I want to say that from this moment on, my memory is completely at the court's disposal. The reasons for feigning memory loss were purely tactical…"
This step showed that the “conscience of the Nazi Party,” as the defendant was called by German propaganda before the adventure, had acted throughout in a calculating, cold-blooded manner and had been playing a political game, the rules of which were determined far beyond the confines of his cell.
WHY THE TOWER?
Hess's incarceration in the Tower of London on May 17, 1941, had not only practical but also profound symbolic significance. For centuries, the royal fortress had been used to house high-ranking state criminals and individuals posing an existential threat to the British Crown.
Britain deliberately created a vacuum around Hess. He was not recognized as a prisoner of war in the standard sense, the press was not allowed to see him, and his testimony was carefully filtered.
Churchill's fears were understandable: if the Soviet leadership had learned that behind Moscow's back, London was pursuing, or at least listening to, proposals for a separate peace from one of the leading figures of the NSDAP, the trust between the future allies of the anti-Hitler coalition would have been completely destroyed.
This is precisely why Stalin remained deeply suspicious of Hess's "English captivity" throughout the war, fearing that the British were keeping this contact as a backup airfield in case the situation changed.
STRANGE DEATH IN SPANDAU
At the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, Rudolf Hess cut a strange figure: he feigned amnesia and made incoherent statements, but at the very last moment, he abandoned his madman persona, declaring his complete allegiance to Nazi ideals. The court sentenced him to life imprisonment.
Hess spent the next 40 years in Berlin's Spandau Prison, the final decades of which he spent as the sole inmate of this vast fortress, guarded in turn by the four victorious powers, including the USSR. The Soviet Union consistently blocked any attempts by Western countries to pardon the aging Nazi on humanitarian grounds. For Moscow, Hess remained a living symbol of the Anglo-Nazi conspiracy that never happened.
Hess's death in August 1987 at the age of 93 raised new questions. The official version was suicide by hanging from an electrical cable in the prison's garden shed. However, his son, Wolf Rudiger Hess, and several independent experts have proven that the elderly prisoner, due to severe arthritis, was unable to even raise his arms above his head, let alone construct a noose.
Immediately after Hess's death, the Spandau prison building was completely destroyed, and the construction debris was ground into powder and dumped into the North Sea to prevent the creation of a memorial.
This incident became a classic example of cynical “realpolitik” (the term Realpolitik was, incidentally, coined by the Germans), when the fates of states and millions of people are determined behind the closed doors of diplomatic residences.
The Hess case effectively laid the foundation for the post-war rift and deep mistrust between the West and the USSR.
Britain's persistent reluctance to open its archives and the regular extension of the secrecy regime for documents on the Hess case clearly indicate that the true story of this flight contains facts capable of completely refuting the official Western version of the beginning of World War II.
The mission failed as a diplomatic move, but it clearly exposed the hidden forces of geopolitics that are still at work today.