Hess, Hitler and Churchill

by Peter Padfield

  ‘How do you know that any kind of trial is coming up, as you say?’

  ‘This trial has been talked about all the time. I have seen it in the newspapers …’39

  He had been putting on the act so long in Britain it must have become second nature. After stonewalling for one and a half hours he was taken back to his cell. Later he was led out again to the Colonel’s office; this time Göring was present. Hess affected not to notice him, and when Amen pointed him out pretended not to know who he was.

  ‘Don’t you know me?’ Göring asked.

  ‘Who are you?’40

  Göring reminded him of events in which they had both taken part, but Hess claimed he could remember nothing, not even going to England to bring about peace. Eventually Göring gave up. Colonel Amen motioned him aside and called in Karl Haushofer. Hess repeated his act. Haushofer told him they had been friends for 22 years, assured him his wife and son were well on the farm at Hartschimmelhof, and like Göring, reminded him of times they had shared before the war, then of the letters Hess had written during his captivity in Britain, to all of which Hess insisted he had no knowledge.

  ‘Don’t you remember Albrecht, who served you very faithfully? He is dead now.’

  In the final days of the war Albrecht had been taken from prison and shot by a special commando, no doubt to Himmler’s orders. Haushofer did not tell him this.

  ‘I am terribly sorry,’ Hess said, ‘but at the moment all this doesn’t mean a thing to me.’41

  After Haushofer, von Papen was brought in and Hess repeated his act, then Ernst Bohle. Göring told Bohle to remind Hess that he had translated his letter.

  ‘Don’t you remember,’ Bohle said, ‘that I translated your letter to the Duke of Hamilton?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you remember that you took this letter to the Duke of Hamilton, and that it was I who translated it?’

  ‘I don’t remember that. I just don’t have the least recollection of that.’

  Bohle broke into English, ‘This is flabbergasting.’42

  Despite the emotional turmoil Hess must have experienced at meeting his old colleagues and intimates, he managed to preserve an expressionless, detached manner, and certainly convinced Haushofer, who was devastated. It was the last time Haushofer spoke to his disciple, friend and protector. He was a spiritually broken man. Five months later he would leave instructions to his surviving son, Heinz, that no identification should ever be placed on or near his grave, then set out with his ‘non-Aryan’ wife, Martha, to a favourite stream near their house to take poison together.43

  Hess continued his charade of amnesia through October and November. An extension of the strategy he had employed to resist questioning in Britain, it was no doubt also a way of striking back at fate and his jailors in the ruins of his world. Since it carried profound implications for his ability to defend himself, an international panel of psychiatrists was convened to examine him. They failed to agree a unanimous report, but all accepted that Hess was not insane. One report from a French, a British-Canadian and two American psychiatrists postulated:

  Rudolf Hess is suffering from hysteria characterised in part by loss of memory … In addition there is a conscious exaggeration of his loss of memory and a tendency to exploit it to protect himself against examination. We consider that the hysterical behaviour … was initiated as a defence against the circumstances in which he found himself in England; that it has now become in part habitual and that it will continue for as long as he remains under the threat of imminent punishment.44

  * * *

  The trial opened on 20 November 1945. Twenty-two of Hitler’s former ministers and leaders of the armed forces were led into the courtroom to seats on two straight-backed benches, one behind the other near the wall opposite the judges’ dais, separated from it by ranks of counsel and officials in the body of the chamber. Göring, senior surviving member of the Nazi regime, occupied the premier position at the right-hand end of the front bench; Hess sat next to him with Ribbentrop on his left, two grand admirals of Hitler’s navy behind.

  For those who had seen them strutting beside the Führer in their days of glory, the transformation was astonishing. ‘How little and mean and mediocre they look,’ William Shirer, formerly a US correspondent in Berlin, thought. Göring, in a faded Luftwaffe uniform, without his galaxy of medals, reminded him of a genial ship’s radio operator; and he wondered how Hess could have been at the pinnacle of a great nation – seemingly a broken man with a gaunt face like a skeleton, his mouth twitched and his eyes stared ‘vacantly and stupidly around the courtroom’.45 Hess had adopted a pose of complete indifference as an expression of his conviction that the court was invalid – and, of course, he could not remember what he was being tried for.

  The entry of the judges of the victorious Allied powers and the opening speeches for the prosecution outlining the scale of horror visited on the world and Germany itself by Nazism, and appealing to visions of a new world order in which such things could not occur, left the principal defendants unmoved, Göring cockily defiant, Hess exaggerating his air of detachment.

  His affectation slipped briefly on the third day. One of the American prosecution team outlining the structure of the German government referred to Hess as Hitler’s successor-designate, and Göring as next after Hess. This reversed the actual order, and Göring started waving his arms and pointing to himself, saying repeatedly, ‘Ich war der Zweiter!’ (‘I was the second’ – or successor-designate). Hess turned to look at him and burst out laughing. Telford Taylor, assistant to the chief US Counsel, studying the two men from his seat barely twenty feet away, ‘inferred from this occurrence that Hess’s amnesia was not as complete as he had given out’.46

  On the afternoon of the tenth day the defendants were shocked abruptly out of their attitudes. The main courtroom lights were extinguished for the projection of a film taken as US troops entered German concentration camps in the closing stages of the war; only fluorescent lights built into the ledges of the dock cast an eerie glow on the faces of the defendants. Two US psychiatrists stationed themselves with notebooks and pencils at either end of the dock to observe the defendants’ reactions.

  The film began with scenes of victims burned alive in a barn. Hess’s attention was caught at once. The observers noted him glaring at the screen ‘looking like a ghoul with sunken eyes over the footlamp’. Others bowed their heads, covered their eyes or looked away as the film ran. Göring leant on the ledge before him, eyes cast down, ‘looking droopy’. Hess kept looking bewildered, the observers noted, as piles of dead were shown in a slave labour camp.47 Walther Funk, formerly head of the Reichsbank, cried openly. Crematorium ovens appeared on the screen, then a lampshade made from human skin, which drew audible gasps from the body of the court.

  The end of the film was followed by a stunned silence as the lights went on again. Hess, who had shown sustained interest throughout, said, ‘I don’t believe it.’48 Göring, whose former insouciance had vanished, whispered to him to keep quiet. The judges rose, forgetting even to adjourn the session, and strode out without a word.

  The two American psychiatrists visited Hess afterwards in his cell. He seemed confused and kept mumbling, ‘I don’t understand –’49

  The next day, 30 November, General Erwin Lahousen, who had been one of Canaris’s confidants in the Abwehr, testified for the prosecution. He gave an account of his former chief’s reaction to the massacres of the intelligentsia, nobility, clergy and Jews in the Polish campaign, and quoted his words: ‘One day the world will also hold the Wehrmacht, under whose eyes these events occurred, responsible for such methods.’50 During the afternoon session he described the mass murders committed by Heydrich’s Einsatzkommandos in the Russian campaign.

  When he stood down a recess was announced, during which the judges were to consider a submission from Hess’s counsel, Dr Günther von Rohr
scheidt, that his client was unfit to stand trial. The dock was cleared, apart from Hess himself. Von Rohrscheidt had had an impossible task preparing a defence since Hess had continued to maintain to him that he had lost all memory. As he was about to rise Hess told him he had decided to say his memory had returned. Von Rohrscheidt got up anyway and began his prepared statement to the effect that his client’s amnesia made it impossible for him to defend himself adequately.51

  It is not clear why Hess decided to drop his pretence. The prison commandant, Colonel Andrus, had told him to his face that he was feigning, and it was not a very manly thing to do.52 The US psychiatrist, Dr Gustave Gilbert, had suggested that he might be excluded from the proceedings on the grounds of incompetence.53 Perhaps the fear that he would be disqualified and have to suffer the reproach of evading his responsibilities, thus denying his Führer, caused him to change tactics. At all events, after von Rohrscheidt and the prosecution had exchanged arguments for about an hour Hess was given an opportunity to speak.

  ‘Mr President!’ He clicked heels and bowed his head towards the presiding judge, ‘In order to forestall the possibility of my being pronounced incapable of pleading in spite of my willingness to take part in the proceedings and to hear the verdict alongside my comrades, I would like to make the following declaration before the Tribunal, although originally I intended to make it during a later stage of the trial. Henceforth my memory will again respond to the outside world. The reasons for simulating loss of memory were of a tactical nature …’54

  He went on to say that he bore full responsibility for everything he had done, signed or co-signed, but his statement did not affect his fundamental attitude that the tribunal was not competent.

  As he finished speaking a buzz of talk and laughter rose from the Press benches, and reporters dashed for the door.

  The following morning the presiding judge announced that, having heard Hess’s statement, the tribunal was of opinion that he was capable of standing his trial; the motion of the counsel for the defence was therefore denied.

  * * *

  Recovering his memory did not affect Hess’s attitude to the trial. He continued to feign indifference, not bothering to wear the headphones provided for translation, reading books during sessions, holding whispered conversations with Göring and others around him, grinning toothily, even laughing out loud. Beneath the act, to judge by letters he smuggled out to Ilse under the guise of notes for his counsel, he was quite aware of the proceedings. Thus the following January he described the trial as in part frightful, in part boring, but at times interesting.55

  By this time he had replaced von Rohrscheidt with Dr Alfred Seidl, who was representing one of his co-defendants and had impressed him with his sharpness and aggression. Seidl advised him to continue his attitude of indifference to the proceedings.

  The prosecution opened the case against him on 7 February. He was indicted under the four counts of conspiracy against peace and humanity; planning and initiating wars of aggression; war crimes including murder and ill treatment of civilian populations; crimes against humanity including deliberate and systematic genocide. Since few documents had been found connecting him with specific decisions, the prosecution insisted that he must have been involved because of his position and offices. However, in view of the race policies pursued in Poland and later in the whole of the occupied east, one document was particularly damaging: an order he had signed demanding support from the party for recruiting members of the Waffen-SS – the SS military units: ‘The units of the Waffen-SS are more suitable than other armed units for the specific tasks to be solved in the occupied eastern territories due to their intensive National-Socialist training in regard to questions of race and nationality.’56 He was not called to account for this order since Seidl did not put him on the witness stand, no doubt for the same reason he had advised him to continue his guise of indifference to the proceedings. In any case, by this time Hess’s memory had begun to slip again. To the psychiatrists it appeared genuine; one believed it was a result of Hess’s exposure to the mounting evidence of the crimes and cruelties perpetrated by Nazism: ‘he took flight into amnesia to escape the dreadful reality presented [in Court].’57

  The descriptions of hideous tortures, mass sadism, slave labour in unimaginably degrading conditions, the reduction of human beings to so-called Muselmänner with vacant eyes, lacking the will to live, horrific medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, mass shootings, gassing in mobile vans and purpose-built gas chamber-incinerator plants run as production lines of death day after day, week after week built up a totality of horror numbing the strongest nerves. For a man as sensitive as Hess who was regarded by his colleagues as ‘soft’ and who knew at one level of his mind that his Führer had been ultimately responsible and that this was the necessary end of the creed to which he himself adhered, it can be imagined that he did indeed take flight into unreality. One defence he raised, as he had in Britain, was that it was all the work of the Jews; another, again as in Britain, was to pretend he had lost his memory – although this hardly squares with the rationality of his letters home. In August his memory duly returned: he wrote to Ilse that the ‘miracle has occurred again … vvvvv [Hess family laugh sign].’58

  Meanwhile, conducting his defence, Seidl had ambushed the tribunal, particularly the Soviet component, by presenting the hitherto secret protocol attached to the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939; this had divided Poland and other east European countries between Germany and Russia.59 Despite this proof of their own complicity in ‘conspiracy against peace and humanity’, the Soviet contingent – which had argued vigorously against its admission to the proceedings – felt no compulsion to withdraw, and the trial continued.

  On 31 August, after counsel had made their final speeches, the defendants were each permitted a brief statement, Göring first, and after him Hess, who was allowed to remain seated because of his state of health.

  At the start of the trials, he began, he had predicted certain things, as some of his comrades here could confirm: witnesses would appear and make untrue statements while creating an absolutely reliable impression; some defendants would act rather strangely, make shameless utterances about the Führer and would incriminate their own people and each other. These predictions had come true, he said, then referred the court to the Moscow show trials of 1936–38 when some ‘mysterious means’ had been used to make defendants accuse themselves in an extraordinary way.60

  After some twenty minutes’ rambling discourse he was cut short and reminded that the tribunal could not allow speeches of great length. In that case, he replied, he would forego the statement he had wanted to make; instead, he said, he would not defend himself against accusers whom he denied the right to charge him and his fellow countrymen, and would not discuss accusations on purely German matters. ‘I was permitted to work for many years of my life under the greatest son my Volk has brought forth in its thousand year history,’ he continued, reprising the sentiments in his earlier letter to Ilse. ‘Even if I could, I would not want to erase this period of time from my existence. I am happy to know that I have done my duty to my Volk, my duty as a German, as a National-Socialist, as a loyal follower of the Führer. I regret nothing.’

  He went on, invoking the omnipotent Creator in whom he believed, ‘If I were to begin again, I would act as I have acted, even if I knew that in the end I should meet a fiery death on the pyre. No matter what humans do, some day I shall stand before the judgement of the Eternal. I shall answer to Him, and I know He will judge me innocent.’

  Verdicts were announced on 1 October. Hess, who had prepared himself for a death sentence, continued to play his role of indifference and did not put his headphones on. He was adjudged to have participated fully and willingly in all the German aggressions which had led to the war. There was evidence showing the participation of his office in the distribution of orders connected with war crimes, but this was not suffici
ently connected with the crimes themselves to sustain a finding of guilt. He was, therefore, judged guilty on the first two counts, conspiracy and crimes against peace, but not guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity.61

  Sentences were handed down that afternoon. Again Hess did not bother to put on the headphones.

  ‘Defendant Hermann Wilhelm Göring, on the counts of the indictment on which you have been convicted, the International Military Tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.’62

  ‘Defendant Rudolf Hess, on the counts of the indictment on which you have been convicted, the Tribunal sentences you to imprisonment for life.’63

  The US psychiatrist, Gilbert, was waiting by the cells as the prisoners were led down one by one after hearing their sentences. Göring’s face was pale, his eyes moist and he was evidently fighting back an emotional breakdown as he asked Gilbert in an unsteady voice to leave him alone for a while. He was later to cheat the hangman by taking poison smuggled in to him. By contrast Hess ‘strutted in, laughing nervously’, and told Gilbert he had not been listening; he didn’t know what his sentence was.64

  The Russian team had wanted the death penalty. In addition to his flight to Britain in the hope of ‘facilitating the realization of aggression against the Soviet Union by temporarily restraining England from fighting’, it was argued that Hess, as the third most significant Nazi, had played a decisive role in the crimes of the regime. That his counsel had exposed the hypocrisy of the Soviet presence on the tribunal was, perhaps, a further consideration.65

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Spandau

  SEVEN OF THE DEFENDANTS at Nuremberg were sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment: the one-time Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath; Hitler’s architect and Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer; the former Minister of Economics and President of the Reichsbank, Walter Funk; the Reich Youth Leader and Gauleiter of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach; the two Grand Admirals, Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz; and the former Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess.