In his prison cell in Great Britain, Hess kept three portraits above his bed: his wife’s, his son’s, and the Führer’s. He took only the first two with him when he was transferred to Nuremberg. He would receive additional news of them from two of his former secretaries, who were also sent to jog his memory. Yet none of these meetings proved decisive for the psychiatrists tasked with determining whether Hess’s amnesia was genuine or an act. Questioned about his wife and son, Hess claimed he had forgotten everything about them, even their names.30 Only the photographs he kept of them seemed to have any effect on him. Nevertheless, he wrote them letters in which he addressed them by name, which would disprove his claims. Göring was convinced Hess had pulled a fast one on the court and his psychiatrists, and shared his delight with Hess. “Any doubts I had left me when you failed to recognize Haushofer at that confrontation.”31 There is one thing on which everyone can agree, however: he remained under the sway of his stubborn fanaticism until the very end.
In his letters to Ilse, Hess showed a close interest in his son’s progress at school, devising veritable correspondence classes for him and encouraging his wife to teach Greek to the boy. He hoped Wolf Rüdiger had time for leisure activities that would distract him from the dull monotony of everyday life in Germany and expressed concern that he not grow up too fast. No photographs had been taken of Hess for years, and his face eventually became no more than a blur for his son, although it was captured once by a single photographer through the barbed wire at Spandau.
Unlike some of his fellow prisoners at Spandau, Hess never used his mental illness as grounds for requesting parole. He never allowed his lawyers to do so either, under the logic that such a defense revealed a weakness that was unbefitting of the Deputy Führer. In November 1969, suffering terribly from a duodenal ulcer, he finally asked the prison director if his wife and son could be allowed to visit him. The request was granted but any reference to or mention of politics or National Socialism was forbidden.
Wolf Rüdiger was thirty-one when he saw his father again in 1969. Hess was seventy-five. They were not allowed to touch each other in any way; father and son would embrace each other again only in 1982. They were never authorized to be alone together, either; one of the prison directors was always present. Finally, no gifts could be exchanged, even at Christmas. The first meeting took place on December 24, when Wolf Rüdiger was accompanied by his mother. He had a thousand questions for his father, but they would never be answered. Wolf Rüdiger dedicated his life to his father, writing three books: My Father, Rudolf Hess (1986), Who Murdered My Father, Rudolf Hess? (1989), and Rudolf Hess: No Regrets (1994).32 Questioned about his own life, he would respond invariably, “I never had time for myself: I spent all my free time on my father.”33
In My Father, Rudolf Hess, Wolf Rüdiger describes the conditions at Spandau and references the experiences of the French prison chaplain, Georges Casalis, regarding the inhumane treatment of the prisoners there.34 For Wolf Rüdiger, Rudolf Hess was the loneliest prisoner the world has ever known; his monthly mail allotment consisted of one letter of less than thirteen hundred words, and the family carefully saved every one of them.35 Rudolf and Ilse were even required to refrain from drawing a wavy line in their letters to designate a smile, as was their custom. Many other letters were found in violation of those rules and never arrived, leaving gaps of several months in their correspondence. Rudolf Hess received many photographs of his son, but complained to Ilse that he could not get a good look at him because of the angle or the lighting.36
In 1966, Hess became the only remaining Nazi prisoner at Spandau: Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and the Reich Minister of Armaments, and Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth, were released in that year, whereas the four other prisoners, of the seven initially imprisoned with Hess, had been freed in the 1950s. As the only prisoner keeping Spandau open, Hess was the most expensive criminal in the world. His incarceration cost the German state 2.5 million deutschemarks annually.37
Throughout his father’s imprisonment, Wolf Rüdiger worked tirelessly to secure his father’s release and improve conditions for him. A ray of hope appeared in January 1987, when the Soviet embassy responded to his request. Until then, the Soviets had fiercely opposed any motion to free Hess on humanitarian grounds, since they would have been the principal victims of an Anglo-German peace agreement. However, the warming of East–West relations led to a softening of their position. A meeting was arranged for March 31, 1987, at 2:00 p.m. When Wolf Rüdiger went to see his father to discuss it with him, he found him considerably weaker and unable to walk on his own. Hess informed his son that he had finally submitted a request for parole, after forty-six years in prison, forty-two of which were spent at Spandau.
On April 13, 1987, the German newspaper Der Spiegel published an article entitled “Will Gorbachev release Hess?” Wolf Rüdiger was convinced that Hess’s liberation was imminent. On August 17, 1987, however, a journalist telephoned him at his office to inform him his father was dying. He received another call late in the day from Harold W. Keane, the American director of Spandau, confirming his death. The official announcement was made in English. “I am authorized to inform you that your father expired today at 4:10 p.m. I am not authorized to give you any further details.”38
When Wolf Rüdiger arrived at Spandau the next day with his father’s lawyer, Alfred Seidl, a crowd was blocking the entrance. Wolf Rüdiger was convinced his father had been assassinated. He was met by a nervous Keane, who refused to let him view the body. The autopsy determined that Hess had committed suicide by hanging himself with an electric cord in the shed where he often went in the prison courtyard. After an unsuccessful attempt to resuscitate him, he was declared dead at 4:10 in the afternoon. He was ninety-three. The Allies’ official report on the circumstances of his death was published a month later on September 17.
Wolf Rüdiger visited his father 102 times during his detention at Spandau. Despite the years of separation, he insisted that the emotional bond he had with his father remained as strong as ever. Following the death of the man who cast a long shadow over his entire life and for whom he spent his life fighting to defend, Wolf Rüdiger suffered a stroke and was hospitalized in Munich at the age of forty-nine.39
Spandau was demolished immediately after Hess’s death to avoid its possible use as a Nazi heritage site. Following an agreement between the Allies and the Hess family, the body was not cremated but transferred instead to the family, who buried it privately in the family mausoleum in Bavaria.
Convinced that his father was assassinated, Wolf Rüdiger had a second autopsy performed in Munich when the body was returned to the family. The report, prepared by Wolfgang Spann, agreed that death had been caused by asphyxiation but also revealed the presence of bruises on the neck indicating strangulation. Two prison guards at Spandau also asserted that agents of the British Secret Service were at Spandau that day, with the consent of the CIA and under orders to kill Hess. Wolf Rüdiger also challenged the authenticity of an apparent suicide note found in Hess’s pocket by the Allies; its closing statement, “written a few minutes before my death,” sounded nothing like his father’s style and its contents were out of date in 1987. Wolf Rüdiger concluded that the note was in reality a farewell letter his father had written twenty years earlier that was never delivered to him and his mother. He concluded beyond a shadow of a doubt that his father’s death was the result of a British plot whose ultimate goal was to prevent Hess from setting the historical record straight upon his release from prison, a theory confirmed, in his eyes, by the fact that documents concerning Hess’s detention in England remained classified until 2017. For Wolf Rüdiger, his father risked his life in the goal of peace and was a victim, not a criminal. Were he to become a martyr, he asserted, the Allies would only have themselves to blame; if they had freed him twenty years earlier along with Albert Speer, the world would have forgotten about him.
Wolf Rüdiger Hess never overcame
his resentment about the imprisonment of his father, the messenger of peace whom he spent his life idealizing. He argued that the Nuremberg laws, of which his father was a principal cosigner, were only the German translation of the desire of Orthodox Jews to live separate from other religions. The laws were not racist in and of themselves, he claimed; the problem lay with their interpretation and implementation by a few Nazis. Wolf Rüdiger could not accept that his father participated in the mass extermination of Europe’s Jews. He found support for his theories in the fact that his father’s professor and mentor, Karl Haushofer, was married to a Jew and that Hess provided Haushofer with a letter of safe passage to protect him from the laws that he had himself created.
Finally, for Wolf Rüdiger, the invasion of Poland in September 1939 was a strategy to protect the German minority there, which the Poles were massacring by the thousands; Hitler had no choice but to attack Poland to avoid being encircled. Wolf Rüdiger swore on his father’s writings as if they were Bible truth and could never rest until his theory regarding his father’s assassination was accepted as fact. He was a bitter and hateful man who readily denied the reality of the Final Solution. He has been called a revisionist, a term he embraced, defining the role of a revisionist as “unmasking the falsehoods of what we Germans have been taught about our history.”40
According to his line of thinking, Germany’s one mistake was to sign the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler was neither a madman nor a monster. As was the case for the Third Reich generally, he was grossly caricatured, the victim of a senseless propaganda campaign that spread far-fetched myths about the number of victims of the war and their extermination. He dismissed the firsthand accounts of survivors, arguing that if anyone survived at all, the stories about the Nazis’ atrocities could not be true. He also argued that the gas chambers were a technically impossible feat.41
Proud of his father to the end, Wolf Rüdiger also never considered his name a curse; quite the contrary was true. He shared Edda Göring’s experience in this regard, believing that people loved and would continue to love his father: Rudolf Hess was the conscience of the Nazi Party, and his long prison sentence could only move his fellow Germans to feel greater sympathy for him.
Wolf Rüdiger’s son, Wolf Andreas, was born on April 20, Hitler’s birthday, a coincidence that pleased Wolf Rüdiger immensely. He gave the child the Führer’s nickname from his early political years. The boy learned to admire his grandfather Rudolf, and his father boasted that little Wolf was very eager to learn more about this man whose significance he “grasped entirely.”42
Wolf Rüdiger had two more children whom he raised in the same cult of Rudolf Hess, but little is known about them. Wolf Rüdiger died in 2001, after ten years of dialysis.
Right up until his death, he led the Rudolf-Hess-Gesellschaft e. V.,43 an organization he founded in 1988 to rehabilitate his father’s reputation, notably by lending credence to the theory that Hess was assassinated, an idea disseminated by a number of websites created for this express purpose. One of these websites was designed as a source of “unbiased” information about Hess’s life and death, but has since been taken down.
Wolf Andreas is a computer programmer today. He had planned to create a website in honor of his grandfather but was fined in 2002 for having refuted on the Internet the existence of the gas chambers at Dachau, which he insisted were installed by the American army after the war to frighten tourists.44
In 2011, twenty-four years after the death of Rudolf Hess, his grave in the village of Wunsiedel in Bavaria, was secretly opened by the family, under orders by the mayor of Wunsiedel who wanted the body exhumed in order to put a stop to neo-Nazi commemorations, especially those marking the anniversary of his death. His ashes were scattered in the sea, but a silent march in his memory is held every year by Reich nostalgia seekers.
Just as Gudrun Himmler and Edda Göring did, Wolf Rüdiger Hess dedicated his life to writing his father’s place in history as a martyr. Other Nazi children, however, were consumed by hatred when they learned the truth about their fathers’ actions during the war. Niklas Frank was one of these. His father, Hans Frank, was the governor-general of occupied Poland and was sentenced to death.
Wolf Rüdiger Hess believed that Frank’s son was mentally ill and declared his hatred for his father indecent. Niklas Frank pitied Wolf Rüdiger in return, believing that his life was irredeemably altered by the burden of Rudolf Hess’s life sentence; “[F]rom that point of view things were harder for Hess’s son than for me,”45 he has said.
GUDRUN HIMMLER
Nazism’s “Poppet”
Heinrich Himmler, his daughter Gudrun (front, middle), his adopted son, and a friend, 1935
Gudrun and Margaret Himmler, daughter and wife of the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler
Gudrun Himmler and Adolf Hitler
Gudrun and her father, Heinrich Himmler, at Dachau concentration camp, 1941
EDDA GÖRING
The Little Princess of “The Nero of Nazi Germany”
Edda and Hermann Göring, 1940
Baptism of Edda Göring. The wife of Hermann Göring with Adolf Hitler, the child’s godfather
A letter written by Edda Göring to her father in Nuremburg
A page from Hermann Göring’s personal photo album
Edda and her mother arriving at Nuremberg to visit Hermann Göring, September 1946
WOLF R. HESS
A Life in the Shadow of the Last of the War Criminals
Rudolf Hess and Wolf Rüdiger Hess
NIKLAS FRANK
A Hunger for Truth
Family photos
Niklas, his mother, and his sister arriving at Nuremberg to visit Hans Frank, September 1946
MARTIN ADOLF BORMANN JR.
“The Crown Prince”
Martin Adolf Bormann Jr. in his school uniform at Feldafing, 1943
Martin Adolf Bormann Jr. in his cassock after becoming a Catholic priest, 1958
The Bormann children
THE HÖSS CHILDREN
The Family of the Kommandant of Auschwitz
The Höss family
The Höss children playing in their garden at Auschwitz
THE SPEER CHILDREN
The Offspring of “The Devil’s Architect”
Albert Speer with his five children
Adolf Hitler with three of the Speer children at the Berghof
ROLF MENGELE
The Son of “The Angel of Death”
Josef Mengele and his son Rolf in the mountains, 1956
Josef Mengele, hiding from the Allies in southern Germany, with his son Rolf, 1947
NIKLAS FRANK
A Hunger for the Truth
“There, that’s the corner, driver. Pull over! Such beautiful corsets they have! But no, first I’m going to look at the furs. Wait for me here. You too, Niklas. I won’t be long.”
By standing on the back seat of the black Mercedes sedan and angling his nose up to the rear window, four-year-old Niklas can just spy the three-foot-high barbed-wire walls of what in Kraków is sometimes called the Forbidden City. The tramway does not stop here, in the ghetto where the Jews have been contained. A grim scene meets his gaze, rattling his naive confidence in the world. He is pleased that his usually distant mother brought him along on her shopping excursion but he cannot understand the sinister picture before him. Death seems to be lurking everywhere; there are even corpses lying on the sidewalk.
His mother had told him once that the best place to buy a corset is in this sordid place. “No one makes better corsets than the Jews in the ghetto,” were her exact words. He imagines that corsets must be very important; why else would anyone come here? He is not afraid, however; the driver and an adjutant are there to protect him and his mother. Anyone who dared to so much as even approach the car would be beaten to death or summarily shot. But who are these people? Are they even human? The Führer called them “vermin” and said they must be wiped out. Niklas shakes his head in confusion. The same
“vermin” make the beautiful corsets that his mother will come to this desolate place to buy, dirtying her shoes in this quarter she reviles as “so schumtzig” (so dirty). Fifteen to twenty thousand Jews are trying to survive here, confined in such close quarters that lice and typhoid and all kinds of illness are rife.
How do these people live, he wonders? Even he can see that the poverty is shocking and the filth is horrifying. There are children outside the car window; some look as if they could be his age. Why are they here? They look afraid, and their clothes are ripped and soiled, when they have clothes. Some are half-naked and so skinny he can see their bones! There is snow on the ground, and they don’t even have shoes! What have they done to be in such a broken-down place? Have they been punished? And their eyes: so big! Bigger than their faces! Don’t they have anything to eat? He thinks about all the nice things he has at home to eat, even chocolate!
Children of Nazis Page 8
