The Mystery of Prisoner 7: Was he Rudolf Hess?
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 28 August 2006
Abstract
The Capture of Rudolf Hess
Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s confident and number two in the Nazi party until Goering was appointed into that post at the start of the Second World War. Hess seemed not to be envious or bitter about this minor demotion, yet on 10 May 1941, he left Augsberg where the Messerschmidtt factory was in southern Germany and, on the pretext of a training flight, flew to Scotland where his Messerschmidtt 110 crashed, and the pilot parachuted to safety. The plane crashed at nine minutes past eleven at night, having set off at 5:45 that afternoon from Bavaria. The aeroplane was smashed into bits and partly burnt, so not much remained other than a chunk of fuselage with the letters VJ on one side of the German Cross and OQ on the other. In fact the V was really an N, with the initial upright burnt off, so the designation was NJ + OQ. NJ signified a night fighter squadron. The Q was unusual because it was not normally used, being too easily confused with O and G. The plane was fitted with underwing drop tanks, with fuel for an extended flight, but they had been dropped! One was recovered in the river Clyde to the west of the crash.
The pilot landed near the village of Eaglesham and was quickly arrested by a local farmer, David McLean. He was in no state to try to escape because, his immediate medical inspection showed he had broken an ankle in the parachute drop and had chipped a vertebra, and so was hobbling with difficulty. He gave his name as Hauptmann Alfred Horn, and said he had an urgent message to give to the Duke of Hamilton, whose home was Dungavel House, about twenty miles off. The pilot had no official papers but did have a Leica camera and several old photographs of himself as a child, two visiting cards, one for Albrecht Haushofer and one for Karl Haushofer, in different pockets, an assortment of largely homeopathic medicines, including an elixir from a Tibetan lamasery for gall-bladder trouble, and a sheaf of handwritten notes. Finally, he had an envelope addressed to Hauptmann Alfred Horn, München 9, and stamped with a Munich post mark. He had none of the papers that Hess should have had, no identity disc or card, no driving license, no party membership card. Nothing. He wore a Luftwaffe uniform and over it a leather flying suit.
He did not retain any pretence of being Alfred Horn for long, quickly admitting that he was Rudolf Hess come to negotiate a peace with Britain through the auspices of the Duke of Hamilton who was related to the British royal family, and had contacts with the government. Hamilton was, in fact, serving in the RAF. The pilot of the Messerschmidtt was held for four years by the British then produced at Nuremberg to stand trial as Rudolf Hess for his crimes. Found guilty, he ended up in Spandau prison in Berlin where he was Prisoner 7.
Was Prisoner 7 Rudolf Hess?
So it was that Prisoner 7 of Spandau gaol came into the hands of the British. The question is “Was Prisoner 7 Rudolf Hess as he claimed?”
Several books have been written about Prisoner 7, the first one to question his identity seriously being that by Dr Hugh Thomas, The Murder of Rudolf Hess, (1979). In summary, the evidence that Thomas found as a doctor who was allocated while in the Army Medical Corps to look after Prisoner 7 is this.
- Hess was seriously wounded in the chest in the First World War fighting in Romania, a bullet entering his side, passing through his body including his lung, and exiting higher up and to the rear near his spine. Such a wound must have left obvious scarring on his skin, both the entry and exit wounds, and, internally, on X-rays and such, a pronounced track of fibrous tissue that would have formed where the bullet passed. The wound was serious enough to keep Hess hospitalized for four months, suggesting it had possibly become infected at a time before there were any antibiotics, and had left him unable to walk uphill without getting short of breath, at least in the beginning of any such climb. There is no doubt about this. It is fact not opinion. Frau Hess confirmed that her husband had pronounced scars on his upper body. Prisoner 7 had no such wounds, and did not get out of breath.
- Hess was an educated upper middle class German, born in 1894 and well brought up until he was 14, both in good schools and by his businessman father, in Alexandria in Egypt. His manners were impeccable and he was a vegetarian. Prisoner seven had no refined manners, finishing off his soup by drinking it directly from the bowl, and wolfing down solids from a plate lifted to his mouth and shovelled in at a great rate, in a Chinese fashion. He was not a vegetarian, and would eat anything with apparent gusto, so long as he was satisfied it was not poisoned.
- This same Alexandrian upbringing led Hess to be an accomplished and enthusiatic tennis player. Prisoner 7 did not play tennis.
- Hess was clever at school and as an adult was urbane, unpretensious and confident, being for twenty years Hitler’s right hand man, an important element in the growth of Naziism being his negotiating and organizational abilities. Prisoner 7 seemed clever enough but otherwise was the opposite of all this, being childish at negotiations, often nervous but at other times cocksure, and feigning amnesia, as he admitted at his Nuremberg trial when doctors thought it might have been genuine. It is true that the Nazis claimed Hess had gone mad when he apparently defected to Britain, but no one doubts that was propaganda to explain away the event. He had shown no symptoms of any such madness.
- Prisoner 7, several times failed to remember people whom Hess knew well, such as his two loyal secretaries, and some of his erstwhile colleagues at the Nuremberg trial. The suspicion is that he feigned amnesia because he did not know these people, and it was a useful explanation.
- Prisoner 7 curiously offered no defence at the Nuremberg trials, and other Nazi prisoners condemned to gaol at Nuremberg, such as Speer, wrote their memoirs, but not Prisoner 7. The reason might have been that he could do neither because he did not know what Hess had actually done.
- Prisoner 7 refused to see his wife for almost thirty years, and when he died, his son refused to allow him to be DNA tested.
- Prisoner 7 certainly was the model of Hess in appearance, albeit much thinner, but his refusal to see his wife for so long, suggests he was not confident she would not recognize he was a fake. In the event of actually meeting her, after 28 years apart, when Hess would have been 76, Frau Hess commented that her husband had a much deeper voice than he used to. Prisoner 7 had the presence of mind to make a joke of it, saying “more manly”. But Thomas points out that voices get higher pitched as people age, only deepening through illness of the vocal chords or presumably through deliberate training. Prisoner 7 had nothing wrong with his vocal chords, and it is hard to understand why he should have trained his voice to be deeper.
- The aeroplane that left Augsberg on 10 May 1941, had no extension tanks under its wings, and, without them, could not have reached Scotland. Indeed, even with them, Thomas says, the prisoner could never have reached Scotland by the route he claims he took, including wasting time flying backwards and forwards in the North Sea for an hour. The plane which crashed in Scotland did have the extension tanks and they had been jettisoned.
- The man picked up by the British in Scotland had no ID, yet surely Hess on a mission would have taken his ID with him to prove it was really him, and the intent was serious. If Hess had been murdered by being shot out of the sky, then his ID went with him, and so the replacement could not have had any. But some photographs and visiting cards could have been procured as the best that could be done. Similarly the Leica camera, which belonged to Frau Hess.
- The leather flying jacket that Hess wore was not his own and had the name of the assistant airfield manager at Augsberg, Helmut Kaden, written in it. It was not Kaden’s jacket that Prisoner 7 wore when he was arrested in Scotland.
- Hess did have gall-bladder trouble, and was faddish about using homeopathic medicines. Prisoner 7 did not seem faddy for homoeopathy, and never was reported as having trouble with his gall bladder, though he constantly complained of stomach ache and being poisoned, and eventually was diagnosed with a perforated ulcer, from which he almost died. Thomas notes with some disdain that the medics had not diagnosed Prisoner 7’s duodenal ulcer in twenty years!
- Hess and Goering had disliked each other, but Prisoner 7 and Goering got on well together at the Nuremberg trials, as Eugene Bird, the US commandant of Spandau prison confirmed, but Goering patronized the supposed Hess, often actually laughing at him. G M Gilbert, psychiatrist to the prisoners in the Nurmberg trials, said that Goering taunted Prisoner 7 with, “By the way, Hess, when are you going to let us into your big secret. How about it Hess?” Hess had indeed hinted that he had a big secret to tell the court, but he never did.
- When held in prison along with other German war criminals for the Nuremberg trials, his prison number was 125. On one occasion, shortly after the verdicts had been given, the prisoner was sweeping with a broom when an officer called out his name, “Hess!”. The prisoner shot to attention saying, “Sir, there is no such person as Hess here, but, if you are looking for convict number 125, then I am your man”.
Whose Plot Was It?
If Prisoner 7 at Spandau was not Hess, who had made the substitution, the Germans or the British? Thomas thinks it was Himmler, or less possibly Goering, who arranged for Hess to be shot down and made the substitution. They had been able to get the few false identity items that Prisoner 7 had with him. Others suggest that the substitute was made by the British, when Hess died with the Duke of Kent in 1942, the two of them being active in the efforts to bring a peace between Germany and Britain that others realized would be disastrous for Britain’s standing in Europe and would allow Hitler to attack the USSR with no concerns for his rear. Churchill was no friend of the Bolsheviks, but knew that once Hitler subdued them then Britain would follow, or would have to succumb to German might.
Moreover, why did Prisoner 7 maintain the pretence for the rest of his life? While interned, especially in the initial years, he was paranoid, claiming he was being poisoned, and hypnotized. Maybe he was! Where did the ideas for the film Total Recall begin?
Moses and Exodus
