A close associate of Goebbels remembered “Goebbels spoke of Hess’s mental illness and then described the comedy of Hess and his wife, who had been trying for years to produce an heir. No one knew for sure whether the child was really his. Hess was alleged to have gone with his wife to astrologers, cartomancers, and other workers of magic and to have drunk all kinds of mixtures and potions before they were successful in begetting a child.”6 Felix Kersten, Himmler’s masseur, also remembered finding Hess lying in bed with magnets suspended over and under his mattress; Hess had explained that he was following a magnetism treatment to eliminate “harmful substances” from his body.7
Ilse was unhappy with the physical changes of pregnancy, especially when she had to meet the Duchess of Windsor, whom she idealized as the most elegant woman of the century. She was uncomfortable in her body and in public. She hoped the child would be a boy, but objected to the possibility that he might follow his father into politics, believing that the father always overshadowed the son in such situations.8
When Wolf Rüdiger, the long-awaited son, was finally born, November 18, 1937, Rudolf was forty-three. Childbirth was long and difficult for Ilse, but the important thing was that the long-awaited child was finally there. Hess was with Hitler at his mountain lodge, the Berghof in Berchtesgaden. News of the birth filled Hess with joy and he beamed one of his characteristic smiles, looking half blissful, half crazy, as only he could. Hess had a rather unusual physiognomy, in fact, coupled with the air of a fanatic, with deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, and thick eyebrows.
The couple’s choice of name for the child combined the nickname Hitler had taken for himself after years of political battles, “Wolf,” and the name of a hero from the Nibelungenlied, the Nazis’ favorite saga, “Rüdiger.” The new parents were strong believers in astrology, and Ilse was convinced her son was born on an auspicious day, when the stars had aligned. The night before his birth, the moon had been full, and the child was born under the influence of Jupiter, Mars, and Venus.9
A naming ceremony was held, inspired by pagan ritual, since baptisms were outlawed under the Nazis. Two godfathers were designated: Hitler and Karl Haushofer. The latter was Hess’s professor of geopolitics at university, as well as his mentor and a close friend.10 Gifts were sent from all over Germany, and the order had been given to all of the Nazi Party’s regional leaders, the Gauleiters, to send a small bag of earth from their regions. Hess placed the dirt under the infant’s crib, believing it symbolized the beginning of his son’s life on German soil. Ilse had always been careful to preserve the couple’s privacy and she was more determined than ever to keep her son safe from the world outside. She insisted that Rudolf curtail his absences, fearing that the child would fail to create a bond with him and would have to readjust to his presence at each homecoming. Hess obliged, spending as much time at home as he could. He was immensely proud of his son and convinced he was destined for greatness; even the shape of the boy’s ears was interpreted as a sign of his potential “musical genius.” His parents put the child to bed at night with classical melodies and woke him in the morning to jazz, but he never showed any musical talent.11
Wolf Rüdiger was only three and a half when his father shocked everyone by flying solo to Great Britain in the hope of signing a “separate peace” treaty. This failed endeavor, which spawned speculation of all kind, remains one of the mysteries of the twentieth century. Certain British documents about the flight on May 10, 1941, remain classified; many unanswered questions linger. No one in Hess’s entourage was aware of his plan. Ilse had seen his weather bulletins and maps and suspected that something was afoot, but ignored what it could be. She thought it might be a mission to France for a meeting with Marshal Pétain, but England? Never.12 She was equally surprised that evening to find him dressed in the blue shirt and dark tie of the Luftwaffe uniform and his pilot boots, an outfit that inspired her respect but which he never wore anymore. Hess had been a skilled pilot, but a reckless one too, leading Hitler to ground him. When she inquired when he would be home again, he responded he would return the following Monday, but his answer did not convince her. Did the Führer know about Hess’s plans? Did he approve? These questions remain unanswered. However, for Wolf Rüdiger, there was never any doubt in his mind: Hitler was aware of the mission. He spent his life trying to establish his conviction as truth.
The truth, however, is not so simple. It seems that Hess devised his plan in the belief that it was what the Führer wanted. Hess had helped Hitler write Mein Kampf when they were imprisoned together at Landsberg, and he was convinced that Hitler would have wanted to maintain an entente with England. Some evidence for this argument can be found in the fourteen-page letter that Hess wrote Hitler and had delivered to him after he left, in which he explained his reasons for the flight and for attempting to meet the Duke of Hamilton. Hamilton also loved aviation and Hess believed him to be an enthusiastic Germanophile. Hess himself always denied Hitler’s involvement in the plan, and Göring agreed under testimony: “Hess is insane. He’s been insane for a long time. We knew it when he flew to England. Do you think Hitler would have sent the third man in the Reich on such a lone mission to England without the slightest preparation? Hitler really blew up when he found out…. If he had really wanted to deal with the British … my own connections with England were such that I could have arranged it within forty-eight hours. No, Hess took off without a word, without papers, without anything. Just left a crazy note behind.”13
Following his arrest in England, all of Hess’s direct collaborators were jailed, and the Nazi press reported he was afflicted with a mental condition. Hitler declared that if Hess ever returned to Germany, he would send him either to a psychiatric hospital or before a firing squad. There were rumors he suffered from an illness that had attacked his brain. The governor-general of occupied Poland, Hans Frank said, “According to the Führer, it is evident now that Hess was entirely under the sway of astrologists, iridologists, and healers.”14 Claiming amnesia, whether real or feigned, Hess remained imprisoned in England until October 1945, when he was transferred to Nuremberg. Acute paranoia and increasing madness was the diagnosis delivered by the psychiatrists who examined him. He preserved samples of his meals in prison in the hope that tests would one day prove the Allies had attempted to poison him, and several times he discreetly switched meal trays with a superior officer on the belief that his food contained some dangerous substance. During his imprisonment at Nuremberg, Hermann Göring commented on Hess’s behavior in prison. “If the coffee is too hot, he thinks he is being targeted by an attempt to burn him. If it’s too cold, he thinks it’s a ploy to anger him. He doesn’t say that exactly, but that’s the gist of everything he says.”15
Rudolf Hess’s fall from grace forced his wife and son to leave their home in Munich where Wolf was born and to retreat to their summer house, the Bürgle in Bad Oberdorf. Wolf Rüdiger would claim later that Martin Bormann, who replaced Hess as the Führer’s secretary, was the cause of their troubles. Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, rather agreed and supported the family, encouraging them in a letter: “Don’t hesitate to let me know if there is anything you need, I’ll speak to Hitler when Bormann is absent.”16 Wolf Rüdiger understood her comment as proof of Bormann’s nefarious influence on Hitler. Before long, Hess’s name was no longer spoken in Germany, and his photo was removed from walls and schools. Streets bearing his name were renamed. The little boy was too young to understand the extent of the scorn heaped on his father, although some of his friends distanced themselves and his parentage sometimes came back to haunt him.
Rudolf Hess was happy his son was becoming a “mountain boy.” Bad Oberdorf lies at an altitude of 2,750 feet at the top of the Iller Valley in the Allgäu Alps, a beautiful alpine region famous for its picturesque mountain landscapes. On October 21, 1941, Rudolf received his first letter from Wolf Rüdiger, who was four years old, an experience that saddened him deeply; reading the boy’s words and seeing his childish manus
cript led him to wonder if he would ever see his adored son again. News from his wife and son, whom he nicknamed “Buz,” was the source of his only happiness in prison. He was relieved to learn that his beloved child had not forgotten him and he took a special interest in the boy’s education. He sent the boy advice, encouraged him to speak well, and taught him chess. When his son announced he wanted to drive a municipal garbage truck in Munich when he grew up, his father asked him to consider driving trains or planes instead. Nonetheless, the difficulties posed by this long-distance education frustrated him, and father and son both suffered from their forced separation. So began Wolf Rüdiger’s life in the shadow of his loving, absent father of whom he retained only a few memories such as his father’s comforting voice the day a bat flew into their house, and his father playing with him in the yard of the house in Munich.17
As the years passed, however, the memories faded and the photos yellowed; the image he kept of his father in his mind’s eye blurred. He held him in the highest respect and defended a man who, unlike Hermann Göring and his boundless greed, never used his power to enrich himself. Hess wrote from prison in 1945, “One thing only I wish for my son: that he becomes possessed by something! I don’t care what it is: inventing machines, a new discovery in medicine, or the drama—even if nobody ever makes the machines, the play is never acted or even read, or the doctors of all opinions, united for once, fall upon him to tear his notions to bits.”18 He also deplored the fact that the Allies censored all of his correspondence, which he considered a violation of the family’s privacy.
Hess was not found guilty of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg but he was given a life sentence for crimes against peace. After the trial, one of Wolf Rüdiger’s classmates told him he was lucky. “Be happy, your father won’t hang.”19 Wolf Rüdiger was only eight at the time, and the sentence came as an enormous shock; he would never understand it and could never accept it.
His punishment was simply unwarranted in the eyes of a son who believed his father was a martyr for peace, not a criminal. He concluded the trial was a travesty of justice. Hess’s final statement at the trial, before the verdict was delivered, made a lasting impression on the boy. “I regret nothing. Were I to live my life again I should act once more as I have acted now, even though I knew at the end that a funeral pyre was already flickering for my immolation.”20
Hess would never renounce his fanaticism or his anti-Semitism. For Rabbi Abraham Cooper, assistant dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles: “A life sentence for this unrepentant Nazi is an act of compassion in comparison with the fate suffered by the millions who were redefined as subhuman by a stroke of Hess’s pen.”21 After nine months at Nuremberg, Hess was transferred to Spandau Prison with six other detainees. Spandau was a red-brick fortress with capacity for six hundred prisoners, but it would house only these seven Nazi defendants. The conditions were difficult, prisoners were often kept in solitary confinement, and Hess refused to see his family for twenty-four years.
Fortunately for Wolf Rüdiger, or Buz as he was called, his father’s identity and crimes were of no concern to the other children living in Bad Oberdorf. Once however, another child taunted him, “Your father was a Nazi!” Not grasping the meaning of the insult, Wolf Rüdiger shot back, “So was yours!” To which the other replied, ending the argument, “Yours was a bigger one!”
The fact that mother and son lived alone did not arouse any suspicion in postwar Germany. Many children did not have fathers at home. On June 3, 1947, however, Ilse was arrested and detained with the wives of other Nazi officials, including Emmy Göring, Brigitte Frank, Henriette von Schirach, and Grete Frick, at Augsburg-Göggingen. Ilse Hess was assigned to Barack V, cell 5. On June 7, 1947, she wrote to her husband, “I have good luck, since I seem to have been placed in the most friendly room that has been known here for a long time…. We are commanded by the oldest inhabitant … with a deep masculine voice … [and who] smokes like a chimney.”22 In another letter, she described the bravery of little Wolf, who was nine, during her arrest. As soon as he saw the police, he hid himself in the pantry to cry. Ilse was released on March 24, 1948, and, following her denazification trial, was stripped of all of her property.
Wolf Rüdiger, who was in the care of his aunt Inge following Ilse’s arrest, was allowed to join her in prison four weeks later. There, he was reunited with the children of other Nazi criminals, such as Edda Göring. He liked to steal away to the men’s prison to listen to their stories and imagine he was a soldier like them. It was during this postwar period that he gradually discovered the role his father played in the rise of the Third Reich and of its crimes.
In 1950, Wolf was sent to a boarding school near Berchtesgaden but was brought home again after a scandal broke out concerning homosexual relations at the school. Ilse wanted to enroll him at the famous Schule Schloss Salem but the Margrave of Baden refused to have the son of the Führer’s former deputy at this educational institution for Europe’s elite. The only option left was to bring him back to Berchtesgaden where he attended the “Christophorus” parochial school. In September 1950, Hess wrote his son, “You can believe me when I say that to swallow an injustice silently, without flinching, although fully conscious that your conduct was completely right, can impart (to a man more especially) an inner freedom that cannot be shaken by anything.”23 In Rudolf Hess: Prisoner of Peace, published in 1950, Ilse published the entirety of their abundant correspondence after Rudolf’s arrest. The couple used a kind of personal code in their letters; for example, a wavy line indicated the word “laugh.” The British army at first believed this to be a secret code.
In 1955, Ilse opened a boarding house, The Bergherberg in Gailenberg in the Allgäu Alps. She would remain close to other National Socialism sympathizers as well as the organization in which Gudrun Himmler played an active role. She corresponded regularly with Winifred Wagner, the daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner, who maintained close ties to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Wolf Rüdiger was raised in an environment where the Nazi ideology was never renounced: quite the contrary.
His school years passed unremarkably. After his graduation in 1956, he traveled in South Africa with a school friend. There, he discovered quite a different reality than what he had read about; he thought that racial segregation was intrinsically good, and white leadership a foregone conclusion.24 While there, he contracted a tropical disease whose treatment, he would become convinced, was the cause of the serious kidney problems he developed a few years later.
It was at this time that he began to challenge the revelations in the media about the Third Reich, and particularly what was reported about his father, whom he still considered unjustly condemned. For Wolf Rüdiger, Rudolf’s peace mission could only have been planned with the consent of Hitler, and he based his claim on both the close relationship between the two men and the four-hour meeting they had had just days before the flight. Moreover, after Hess was imprisoned in England, Hitler had arranged for Ilse to receive a pension. Wolf Rüdiger dismissed outright the theory advanced by some historians, that Hess had planned the mission himself in order to reassert his power over Hitler.
In 1959, he refused to be called for compulsory service in the Bundeswehr, arguing that his father was sent to prison as a cosignatory on the March 16, 1935, law creating a military draft, which was deemed a crime against peace at Nuremberg. He appeared before an examining commission on two occasions and, in response to a military physician who asked him which branch of the military he preferred, he answered that, if forced, he would rather serve in the mountain infantry. He wrote to the commission: “You will surely understand that my conscience forbids me from completing my military service to satisfy the same people who sentenced my father.”25 If they insisted with their order, he let it be known, they would have to arrest him. His requests were refused on insufficient legal grounds, but in 1964, he won his case as a conscientious objector. He enrolled at the Munich Technical University and bec
ame a civil engineer.26
His campaign to vindicate his father began in earnest in the 1960s. He used the media to portray his father as an ambassador of peace, a myth that his father and his father’s lawyer, Alfred Seidl, began to circulate during the Nuremberg trials. Faced with the reigning “victor’s justice,” in Hess’s opinion, this was his best angle of defense. Wolf Rüdiger created the Committee to Free Rudolf Hess and launched a petition that was signed by more than 350,000 people, including two former presidents of West Germany; Gustav Heinemann and Richard von Weizsäcker; two Nobel Prize winners, Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg; and the writer Ernst Jünger. Thomas Mann’s son, Golo Mann, prefaced one of Wolf Rüdiger’s books, arguing that Rudolf Hess was not a man of war. The easiest person of all to convince was, of course, his mother, Ilse.
On November 20, 1967, Ilse Hess granted an interview to the German newspaper, Der Spiegel. Twenty-six years had passed since she had seen her husband, the day he left home to fly to England. He had refused visits from his family during his imprisonment at Spandau, wishing to spare them the ordeal of seeing him in his reduced state. Ilse believed that his failure to carry out his plan had sent him into a depression but she refused to accept that he was mentally ill.
The medical community has never been in agreement as to his condition: depression, schizophrenia, and any number of other pathologies have been considered. “A typical schizophrenic,” was the first impression of the psychiatrist who examined him immediately after his arrest in England, Major Henry Victor Dicks of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Dicks diagnosed a serious depressive state and paranoid schizophrenia. He also noted hypochondriac tendencies, observing that Hess had brought with him on his flight aspirin, laxatives, caffeine pills, barbiturates, antiseptics, methamphetamines, opiates, homeopathic medicines, and pills for motion sickness.27 His suicide attempt was considered proof of his depressive state. Winston Churchill declared him to be utterly sane, however—Germany could have demanded his repatriation in the case of a mental illness—and he insured that the clinical reports were not released to the public. The American psychologist Douglas M. Kelley confirmed that Hess was “on the verge of a serious nervous depression”28 during the Nuremberg trials and determined that Hess had developed a father complex on Hitler, after first seeking a father figure in his former professor and mentor, Karl Haushofer. Ilse thought that diagnosis was absurd, even false, and politically motivated. Hess also presented signs of amnesia that had to be proven real or faked. Colonel Amen, the chief interrogator at the trials, arranged a meeting between Hess and Haushofer on October 10, 1945, to prod his memory. The professor used the occasion to deliver news of Hess’s wife and son. “Your son is very well. I saw him. He is a fine boy, and I said goodbye to him under the oak, the one that bears your name.”29
Children of Nazis Page 7
