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Rudolf Hess,
by Colin Wilson.
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This one, about and titled Rudolf Hess, begins with his suicide at the age of ninety three, and goes on to question his identity, discussing relevant history of Hess.
"Ignoring complaints by human-rights groups, the Soviet Union insisted that Hess be held in prison until he died – the real motive being to maintain that nation’s access to West Berlin, where Spandau Prison was situated.
"For more than ten years before his suicide, there had been odd rumors that Prisoner Number 7 was not Hess at all but a double, planted on the British for reasons unknown.. ... "
The chief reason to doubt his identity, after various people initially not recognising him or being not recognised by him, despite previous acquaintance, and the strange fact of his refusal to see either the wife or the son of Rudolph Hess, was medical.
"What Thomas now discovered puzzled him deeply. Hess had been wounded in the chest in the First World War, and the resultant lung injury had caused him much bronchial trouble in the days when he was Hitler’s deputy. Now there was no sign of a war wound and no bronchial trouble. Examination of Hess’s medical records made it clear that there should have been many scars from war wounds, none of which was visible on the body of the Spandau prisoner. When, at a second examination, Thomas asked him, “What happened to your war wounds”?, Hess blanched, began to tremble, then muttered, “Too late, too late”. What did that mean? That there would now be no point in admitting that he was not Rudolf Hess?"
But throughout, Wilson holds on to the view that if the said prisoner wasn't Hess, then Hess never arrived in England with that flight in 1941, when he took off from Augsburg and flew himself.
Another possibility, discussed somewhere that one read during last couple of decades or so, seems not to occur to the author, namely, that Hess did arrive in U.K. , and the person brought to Nuremberg by British authorities was a different one.
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November 17, 2020 - November 18, 2020 -
December 24, 2020 .
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