by Daniel Wyatt
The remaining German ringleaders were rounded up. At Nuremberg, Germany, November 20, 1945, the world witnessed what would be the most newsworthy trial in history. Twenty-two Nazi leaders, including Hermann Goering and the man known as Rudolf Hess, faced an international tribunal on charges of war crimes. Fourteen months later, three defendants were acquitted, seven were sentenced to life imprisonment, and the others were sentenced to death.
ADOLF HITLER...
Many leading German generals and industrialists questioned his leadership, and tried to assassinate him in a bomb blast in July, 1944, a month after the successful Allied D-Day landings. He survived. His revenge was brutal and swift, resulting in a purge of hundreds of officers and civilians.
Recent Russian KGB files indicate that the Fuehrer and his long-time mistress Eva Braun committed suicide in Hitler’s Chancellery bunker days before the war ended, and their bodies were taken away by the Red Army.
HERMANN GOERING...
was found guilty of war crimes in Nuremberg for his knowledge of the concentration camps and his association with the secret police. But he beat the hangman by taking poison before he was scheduled to be put to death.
MARTIN BORMANN...
Hess’s Chief of Staff moved up a notch in the German High Command after Hess’s strange departure. Bormann was appointed Head of the Nazi Party Chancellery. Between 1941 and 1945, he was responsible for ordering millions of “undesirables” (Jews, Russian prisoners of war, Poles, and Czechs) to their deaths.
He disappeared at the end of the war. Huge rewards were offered by post-war German governments and Jewish organizations for any information leading to his capture. The West German government officially declared him dead in 1973.
KARL HAUSHOFER...
Arrested soon after the July bomb plot on Hitler’s life and imprisoned at Dachau concentration camp. He survived the war and was brought to Hess’s cell in Nuremberg, where Hess did not recognize him. Depressed that his Geopolitical vision had fallen apart, among other things, he and his wife committed suicide together in March, 1946.
His son, Albrecht, who was only mentioned by name in the novel, was also interrogated after Hess’s flight. Arrested by the Gestapo and flown to Berchtesgaden, he was ordered by Hitler to list his peace connections in Britain, people who had contact with Hess. At the top of the twelve-page list was Albrecht’s friend, the Duke of Hamilton. Albrecht was released within days, then was later investigated for a series of alleged homosexual affairs and was arrested again as a conspirator in the Hitler bomb plot of 1944. Sent to a prison in Berlin, he was murdered by Himmler’s SS on April 23, 1945. He missed the end of the war by two weeks.
KARLHEINZ PINTSCH...
Was sent to prison, then let out and banished to the Russian Front, where he was captured and suffered terrible treatment at the hands of the Russians once they discovered he had been Hess’s adjutant. He was released after the war and died some years later in Munich.
HEINRICH HIMMLER...
While still maintaining his iron-fisted control over the Gestapo and the SS, he also became the Minister of the Interior in 1943, and the Minister of Home Defense in 1944. In addition, he carried out Hitler’s orders to exterminate the Jews, by organizing the Final Solution death camps that will forever remain a dark stain in the annals of human history.
During the war, he sent out several peace feelers to the Americans through Switzerland. One of the plans was to kidnap Hitler and hand him to the Allies. In 1944, he had infiltrated the German conspirator movement prior to the Hitler bombing and waited to see if the group of discontented generals and industrialists were successful. When Hitler lived through the blast, Himmler moved swiftly to carry out his Fuehrer’s revenge and to cover his own tracks.
Unable to kidnap Hitler and sue the Allies for peace, Himmler committed suicide when American troops captured him in May 1945.
RUDOLF HESS...
Whether the man who had crashed his airplane near Eaglesham, Scotland was the real Hess is debatable to this day. Rumours have persisted for years that the British had an impostor on their hands.
Claiming amnesia while in British custody, the prisoner later announced at the Nuremberg Trials that he faked the condition to fool the British. But few fell for it, especially when he couldn’t recognize Karl Haushofer during a cell visit. Furthermore, the prisoner refused to see any family members. Four days before the trial was to commence, Hildegard Fath, one of Hess’s secretaries prior to the flight, confronted Prisoner Number 125 — the prisoner’s Nuremberg designation — in an interview. The prisoner told her he had lost his memory and that he did not recall her. Fath shoved a picture of Hess’s family in front of him, saying, “Here, maybe this will help you remember.” The prisoner waved his hand at her and replied, “I do not want any help.”
One day, an Allied officer came to the prisoner’s cell to ask some questions to which the prisoner answered, “Sir, there is no such person as Hess here. But if you are looking for Convict Number 125, then I’m your man.”
Prisoner Number 125 was sentenced on October 1, 1946. He was found “Not Guilty of War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity,” but “Guilty of Conspiracy and Crimes against Peace.” Despite constant demands for the death penalty from the Russians, the prisoner received life imprisonment. A few months later, he was led through the doors of Spandau Prison in West Berlin. He was now Prisoner Number 7. His companions in custody were Erich Raeder, Walter Funk, Baldur von Schirach, Baron Constanin von Neurath, Karl Doenitz, and Albert Speer. By 1965 all had been released, except for Prisoner Number 7.
For twenty-eight years the prisoner refused to see any family members. Then, near death while suffering from a perforated ulcer in 1969, he finally allowed wife, Ilse, and son, Wolf-Rudiger to visit him. Once he had recovered, he urged more visits. Since 1967, Wolf-Rudiger had been trying desperately to free the prisoner, believing he was his father. But he was told by British and American sources that the Russians were the ones blocking the prisoner’s freedom because to them Rudolf Hess was the last surviving symbol of the dreaded Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s attack on Russia. Now there is reason to believe it was the British blocking the prisoner’s release.
Prisoner Number 7, believed to be in his nineties, died on August 17, 1987, an apparent suicide by hanging. However, he was too old and too feeble to stand and could barely tie a piece of string or his own shoelaces. Was he murdered? Was he finally talking after forty-six years? Did he finally admit to not being the real Hess? And was he silenced for it by either British intelligence or an underground German group, remnants of either the SS or Gestapo?
THE HESS FLIGHT...
A remarkable thing happened following the flight. The progress of the war slowly turned in favour of the British. Talk of peace with the Germans came to an abrupt end. Suddenly, England pulled together and fell into step with Churchill.
Today, parts of a two-tone green Messerschmitt BF-110 D model are kept on display at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, England. The Daimler-Benz engines and the fuselage sporting the letters NJ-OQ are all that remain of the fighter aircraft that crashed mysteriously near Eaglesham, Scotland on the night of May 10, 1941.
Who really flew it and why? Where did the flight originate? Did he fly non-stop from Augsburg, Germany, as the pilot claimed? And why do we have to comply with the official One-Hundred-Year Secrets Stamp placed on the affair by the Churchill government?
ENIGMA...
The meticulous code-breaking process kept the Allies informed of enemy concentrations during the Battle of the Atlantic; General Irwin Rommel’s movements in Africa; Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa; and Operation Overload, the invasion of Europe and what followed until Germany was defeated.
Enigma was instrumental in winning the European war. The Germans never suspected a thing.
DUKE OF HAMILTON...
Kept a low profile after the Rudolf Hess flight, pleading innocence and shying away from interviews until his
death in 1972.
IVONE KIRKPATRICK...
Later wrote a book called The Inner Circle in which he gave rise to Hess’s sanity after three meetings with the German in 1941, stating that the German’s peace mission seemed “out of character.”
WINSTON CHURCHILL...
Despite his strong leadership through the war, the British voted him out of office in 1945, with the idea he was great in war but would be lousy in peace time. Six years later, 1951, the voters had a change of heart by voting him back in at age 76. He was knighted in 1953. To his dying day in 1965, he always carefully avoided discussing the Rudolf Hess incident.
“I never attached any serious importance to the escapade,” he once wrote.
Daniel Wyatt
Historical fiction author Daniel Wyatt is Canadian, born and raised on the prairies of Saskatchewan. He now resides with his wife and two children in Burlington, Ontario, thirty miles outside Toronto.
His first published work was a set of first-person stories from World War II allied air force veterans called Two Wings and a Prayer by Boston Mills Press, Erin, Ontario, Canada in 1984. This was followed up in 1986 by Maximum Effort with the same publisher. In 1990, Wyatt made the switch to historical fiction with The Last Flight of the Arrow, a techno-thriller set during the Cold War years of the late 1950s. Originally published by Random House of Canada, it sold 20,000 copies in paperback. The Mary Jane Mission came out two years later, also by Random House. “The Falcon File” series, consisting of The Fuehrermaster, The Filberg Consortium and Foo Fighters was published as an eBook original by Mushroom eBooks, and in paperback as The Falcon File by Bladud Books in 2007. Wyatt’s other published works include aviation magazine articles in Canada and the United States.
A big baseball fan, Wyatt enjoys collecting Detroit Tigers memorabilia.
Books by Daniel Wyatt
Two Wings and a Prayer
Maximum Effort
The Last Flight of the Arrow
The Mary Jane Mission
The Cotton Run
Pennant Man
Route 66
“The Falcon File” series:
The Fuehrermaster
The Filberg Consortium
Foo Fighters
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