Rudolf Hess
Rudolf Walter Richard Hess was a German politician, convicted war criminal and a leading member of the Nazi Party in Germany. Appointed Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler in 1933, Hess held that position until 1941, when he flew solo to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate the United Kingdom's exit from the Second World War. He was taken prisoner and eventually convicted of crimes against peace. He was still serving his life sentence at the time of his suicide in 1987.
Hess enlisted as an infantryman in the Imperial German Army at the outbreak of World War I. He was wounded several times during the war and was awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd Class, in 1915. Shortly before the war ended, he enrolled to train as an aviator, but he saw no action in that role. He left the armed forces in December 1918 with the rank of Leutnant der Reserve. In 1919, he enrolled in the University of Munich, where he studied geopolitics under Karl Haushofer, a proponent of the concept of Lebensraum, which became one of the pillars of Nazi ideology. He joined the Nazi Party on 1 July 1920 and was at Hitler's side on 8 November 1923 for the Beer Hall Putsch, a failed Nazi attempt to seize control of the government of Bavaria. While serving a prison sentence for this attempted coup, he assisted Hitler with Mein Kampf, which became a foundation of the political platform of the Nazi Party.
After Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, Hess was appointed Deputy Führer of the Nazi Party in April. He was elected to the Reichstag in the March elections, was made a Reichsleiter of the Nazi Party in June, and in December 1933, he became Minister without Portfolio in Hitler's cabinet. He was also appointed in 1938 to the Cabinet Council and to the Council of Ministers for Defence of the Reich in August 1939. Hitler decreed on the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939 that Hermann Göring was his official successor, and named Hess as next in line. In addition to appearing on Hitler's behalf at speaking engagements and rallies, Hess signed into law much of the government's legislation, including the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped the Jews of Germany of their rights in the lead-up to the Holocaust.
By the start of the war, Hess was sidelined from most important decisions, and many in Hitler's inner circle thought him to be mad. On 10 May 1941, Hess made a solo flight to Scotland, where he hoped to arrange peace talks with the Duke of Hamilton, whom he believed to be a prominent opponent of the British government's war policy. The British authorities arrested Hess immediately on his arrival and held him in custody until the end of the war, when he was returned to Germany to stand trial at the 1946 Nuremberg trials of major war criminals. During much of his trial, he claimed to be suffering from amnesia, but he later admitted to the tribunal that this had been a ruse. The tribunal convicted him of crimes against peace and of conspiracy with other German leaders to commit crimes. He served a life sentence in Spandau Prison; the Soviet Union blocked repeated attempts by family members and prominent politicians to procure his early release. While still in custody as the only prisoner in Spandau, he hanged himself in 1987 at the age of 93.
After his death, the prison was demolished to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine. His grave, bearing the inscription Ich hab's gewagt, became a site of regular pilgrimage and demonstrations by neo-Nazis. In 2011, authorities refused to renew the lease on the gravesite, and his remains were exhumed and cremated and the gravestone was destroyed.
Early life and family
Hess, the eldest of three children, was born on 26 April 1894 in al-Ibrahimiyya, a suburb of Alexandria, Egypt, into a wealthy German family. Originally from Bohemia, the family settled in Wunsiedel, Upper Franconia, in the 1760s. His grandfather, Johann Christian Hess, married Margaretha Bühler, the daughter of a Swiss consul, in 1861 in Trieste. After the birth of his father, Johann Fritz Hess, the family moved to Alexandria, where Johann Christian Hess founded the import company Hess & Co. which his son, Johann Fritz Hess, took over in 1888. Hess's mother, Klara, was the daughter of Rudolf Münch, a textile industrialist and councillor of commerce from Hof, Upper Franconia. His brother, Alfred, was born in 1897 and his sister, Margarete, was born in 1908. The family lived in a villa on the Egyptian coast near Alexandria, and visited Germany often from 1900, staying at their summer home in Reicholdsgrün in the Fichtel Mountains.Hess' youth in Egypt left him with a strong admiration for the British Empire. His youth growing up under the "Veiled Protectorate" of Sir Evelyn Baring made him unique among the Nazi leaders in that he grew up under British rule, which he saw in very positive terms.
Hess attended a German-language Protestant school in Alexandria from 1900 to 1908, when he was sent back to Germany to study at a boarding school in Bad Godesberg. He demonstrated aptitudes for science and mathematics, but his father wished him to join the family business, Hess & Co., so he sent Hess in 1911 to study at the École supérieure de commerce in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. After a year there, he took an apprenticeship at a trading company in Hamburg.
World War I
Within weeks of the outbreak of World War I, Hess enlisted in the 7th Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment, part of the 1st Royal Bavarian Division. His initial posting was against the British on the Somme. He was present at the First Battle of Ypres. On 9 November 1914, he transferred to the 1st Infantry Regiment, stationed near Arras. He was awarded the Iron Cross, second class, and promoted to Gefreiter in April 1915. After additional training at the Munster Training Area, he was promoted to Vizefeldwebel and received the Bavarian Military Merit Cross. Returning to the front lines in November, Hess fought in Artois, participating in the battle for the town of Neuville-Saint-Vaast. After two months out of action with a throat infection, he served in the Battle of Verdun in May, and was hit by shrapnel in the left hand and arm on 12 June 1916 while fighting near the village of Thiaumont. After a month off to recover, he was sent back to the Verdun area, where he remained until December.Hess was promoted to platoon leader of the 10th Company of the 18th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, which was serving in Romania. He was wounded on 23 July and again on 8 August 1917; the first injury was a shell splinter to the left arm, which was dressed in the field, but the second was a bullet wound that entered the upper chest near the armpit and exited near his spinal column, leaving a pea-sized entry wound and a cherry stone-sized exit wound on his back.
By 20 August, Hess was well enough to travel; he was thus sent to a hospital in Hungary and eventually back to Germany, where he recovered in hospital in Meissen. In October, he was promoted to Leutnant der Reserve and was recommended for, but did not receive, the Iron Cross, first class. At his father's request, Hess was transferred to a hospital closer to home, arriving at Alexandersbad on 25 October.
While still convalescing, Hess had requested that he be allowed to enrol to train as a pilot, so after Christmas leave with his family, he reported to Munich. He received basic flight training at Oberschleissheim and Lechfeld Air Base from March to June 1918, and advanced training at Valenciennes in France in October. On 14 October, he was assigned to Jagdstaffel 35b, a Bavarian fighter squadron equipped with Fokker D.VII biplanes. He saw no action with Jagdstaffel 35b, as the war ended on 11 November 1918, before he had the opportunity.
Hess was discharged from the armed forces in December 1918. The family fortunes had taken a serious downturn, as their business interests in Egypt had been expropriated by the British. He joined the Thule Society, an antisemitic right-wing Völkisch group, and the Freikorps of Colonel Ritter von Epp, one of many such volunteer paramilitary organisations active in Germany at the time.
Bavaria witnessed frequent and often bloody conflicts between right-wing groups, the Freikorps, and left-wing forces as they fought for control of the state during this period. Hess was a participant in street battles in early 1919 and led a group that distributed thousands of antisemitic pamphlets in Munich. He later said that Egypt made him a nationalist, the war made him a socialist, and Munich made him an antisemite.
In 1919, Hess enrolled in the University of Munich, where he studied history and economics. His geopolitics professor was Karl Haushofer, a former general in the German Army who was a proponent of the concept of Lebensraum, which Haushofer cited to justify the proposal that Germany should forcefully conquer additional territory in Eastern Europe. He later introduced this concept to Adolf Hitler, and it became one of the pillars of Nazi Party ideology. Hess became friends with Haushofer and his son Albrecht, a social theorist and lecturer.
Ilse Pröhl, a fellow student at the university, met Hess in April 1920 when they by chance rented rooms in the same boarding house. They married on 20 December 1927 and their only child, Wolf Rüdiger Hess, was born 10 years later, on 18 November 1937. His name was, at least in part, to honour Hitler, who often used "Wolf" as a code name. Hess nicknamed the boy "Buz".
Relationship with Hitler
After hearing the Nazi Party leader Hitler speak for the first time in 1920 at a Munich rally, Hess became completely devoted to him. They held a shared belief in the stab-in-the-back myth, the notion that Germany's loss in World War I was caused by a conspiracy of Jews and Bolsheviks rather than a military defeat. He joined the Nazi Party on 1 July as member number 16. As the party continued to grow, holding rallies and meetings in ever larger beer halls in Munich, he focused his attention on fundraising and organisational activities. On 4 November 1921, he was injured while protecting Hitler when a bomb planted by a Marxist group exploded at the Hofbräuhaus during a party event. Hess joined the Sturmabteilung by 1922 and helped organise and recruit its early membership.Meanwhile, problems continued with the economy; hyperinflation rendered many personal fortunes worthless. When the German government failed to meet its reparations payments and French troops marched in to occupy the industrial areas along the Ruhr in January 1923, widespread civil unrest was the result. Hitler decided the time was ripe to attempt to seize control of the government with a coup d'état modelled on Benito Mussolini's 1922 March on Rome. Hess was with Hitler on the night of 8 November 1923 when he and the SA stormed a public meeting organised by Bavaria's de facto ruler, Staatskommissar Gustav von Kahr, in the Bürgerbräukeller, a large beer hall in Munich. Brandishing a pistol, Hitler interrupted Kahr's speech and announced that the national revolution had begun, declaring the formation of a new government with World War I General Erich Ludendorff. The next day, Hitler and several thousand supporters attempted to march to the Ministry of War in the city centre. Gunfire broke out between the Nazis and the police; sixteen marchers and four police officers were killed. Hitler was arrested on 11 November.
Hess and some SA men had taken a few of the dignitaries hostage on the night of the 8th, driving them to a house about from Munich. When Hess left briefly to make a phone call the next day, the hostages convinced the driver to help them escape. Hess, stranded, called Ilse Pröhl, who brought him a bicycle so he could return to Munich. He went to stay with the Haushofers and then fled to Austria, but they convinced him to return. He was arrested and sentenced to 18 months of Festungshaft for his role in the attempted coup, which later became known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler was sentenced to five years of fortress confinement, and the Nazi Party and SA were both outlawed.
Both men were incarcerated in Landsberg Prison, where Hitler soon began work on his memoir, Mein Kampf, which he dictated to fellow prisoners Hess and Emil Maurice. Edited by publisher Max Amann, Hess and others, the work was published in two parts in 1925 and 1926. It was later released in a single volume, which became a best-seller after 1930. This book, with its message of violent antisemitism, became the foundation of the political platform of the Nazi Party.
Hitler was released on parole on 20 December 1924 and Hess was released ten days later. The ban on the Nazi Party and SA was lifted in February 1925, and the party grew to 100,000 members in 1928 and 150,000 in 1929. They received only 2.6 per cent of the vote in the 1928 election, but support increased steadily up until the seizure of power in 1933.
Hitler named Hess his private secretary in April 1925 at a salary of 500 Reichsmarks per month, and named him as personal adjutant on 20 July 1929. Hess accompanied Hitler to speaking engagements around the country and became his friend and confidante. Hess was one of the few people who could meet with Hitler at any time without an appointment. His influence in the Party continued to grow. On 15 December 1932, Hess was named head of the Party Liaison Staff and Chairman of the Party Central Political Commission.
Retaining his interest in flying after the end of his active military career, Hess obtained his private pilot's licence on 4 April 1929. His instructor was World War I flying ace Theodor Croneiss. In 1930, Hess 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 becoming proficient in the operation of light single-engine aircraft.