Hess and the Cold War

This is an interesting story, from The Independent:

Rudolf Hess, the one-time deputy of Adolf Hitler who spent 42 years in prison as a Nazi criminal, was the subject of an extraordinary Cold War tussle over a sustained campaign of "mental cruelty" by his Soviet guards.

Secret British documents about the maverick Nazi's conditions in Berlin's Spandau Prison during the 1970s show how an octogenarian Hess was at the heart of a bizarre tug-of-war between the four victorious Allied powers who shared responsibility for guarding him after he was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Nuremberg Trials.

The life and death of Hess, who secretly flew solo to Scotland in 1941 claiming he had Hitler's permission to negotiate a peace deal with Britain before then faking a mental breakdown, has been the subject of enduring fascination after he spent 21 years as the sole inmate of Spandau. He was found hanging in a summer house in the prison garden in 1987, aged 93.

But the details of the austerity of the regime imposed on Hess, one of the leading lights of Nazism in the 1930s, remained unknown until the release of papers yesterday at the National Archives in Kew, west London, showing how the British felt obliged to protect him from Moscow's desire that he "drink his retribution to the bottom of the cup".

There have been many theories about Hess's bizarre mission in 1941, ranging from unsubstantiated speculations about Hitler's knowledge of the mission to crank conspiracy theories that the man in Spandau was not the real Hess. The simplest explanation is the most plausible. Hess, having lost his status in the Nazi hierarchy, sought to ingratiate himself once more with Hitler. We know that Hitler was furious after Hess's capture, stripped Hess of his party offices and gave orders for his execution on his repatriation to Germany. Hess's was a pathetic venture. It embarrassed the British government too, and had no bearing on the conduct or outcome of the war. As Lord Bullock put it in his magisterial biography Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, 1992, p. 780: "Resentful and frustrated, Hess cast around for some spectacular act of devotion which would recapture the favour of the Leader whom he still regarded with dog-like devotion."

The details of Hess's incarceration are in keeping with this. He was a Nazi and a virulent antisemite - and a misfit who was, on any objective standards, cruelly treated by his Soviet captors. According to today's report:

A series of strictures imposed on Hess by Spandau's Russian representatives, including the forced removal of his reading glasses and a decision to deprive him of a notebook to write down his thoughts, led the British governor of the prison to conclude that his Soviet colleagues were determined to break Hess amid calls for his release as he reached his 80th birthday in 1974....

The documents state that Hess was also refused access to books, had letters over-zealously censored and delayed, and was barred from seeing a lawyer because of Russian objections.

I felt while he was still alive, and am still more of the view now, that there was an overwhelming case for releasing Hess after two decades' imprisonment (which had been the sentence served by Albert Speer). That case was not aided by the mendacious claims of Hess's late son, Wolf Rüdiger Hess, a disgusting man whose motivation was as much admiration for Nazism as it was filial concern. There was no argument from justice for Rudolf Hess's release; the only proper argument was from clemency.

A secondary thought that occurred to me on reading today's reports concerns one of my readers, the Holocaust denier David Irving. I won't link to Mr Irving's site, but you can take my word for it that I'm citing correctly his comments on the death of Wolf Rüdiger Hess in 2001:

Generations of spineless western prime ministers preferred to allow Rudolf Hess, a latent schizophrene, to rot in jail, hoping that he would die soon; after twenty-five years he eventually allowed Wolf Rüdiger, now a grown man and a successful architect, to come and see him. While the Russian guards generally turned a blind eye, the western guards were pitiless in application of rules set by judges and commissions long since deceased.

The files released yesterday make clear that it was not Western but Soviet administration of Spandau that inflicted mental cruelties on Hess. Which of Irving or the late Wolf Rüdiger Hess is responsible for the myth hereby exploded is not especially important, as the term "racist faker" fits them equally well. It's a small point worth noting, nonetheless.