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On the 10th May 1941, Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer of the German Reich flew from Augsburg in an unarmed Messerschmidt to Dungavel House, the home of the Duke of Hamilton, in Scotland, to present peace terms to members of the Peace Group in England.
It was the last time in his life he would be a free man. For the next 46 years he was to remain a prisoner.
Britain is supposed to have declared war to protect Poland. If this was the true reason why did Britain only declare war on Germany? Poland was in fact invaded by two aggressors, Germany from the west and, seventeen days later, the Soviet Union from the east.
Far from achieving the supposed reason for the conflict, after six years of death and destruction Britain (via Winston Churchill) agreed at the Yalta Conference to accept the Soviet Union's occupation of Poland. So what was it all about?
During the 1930s many in England were attracted to the strength and success of German National Socialism and impressed by the way Hitler had swept away unemployment, economic ruin and communism. Hitler was widely seen as a worker of an economic and social miracle, an example for others to follow.
This was not a situation that the International Financiers could countenance. Another long and costly war was what they wanted, not only for the financial benefit it would bring but also to complete their plans for the annexation of Palestine, which required the "Holocaust".
Neville Chamberlain complained to Forrestal that he was being pressurised by the Jews to declare war. He had also to contend with the recently created "War Party" consisting of Winston Churchill, Duff Cooper and Anthony Eden a group that got together through secret meetings at the Savoy Hotel with Israel Moses Sieff.
Up to that time, Winston Churchill, himself half-Jewish through his mother, Jenny Jerome, (whose father had changed his name from Jacobson to Jerome), had had a chequered and not too successful career. In 1895 he was a war correspondent in Cuba. In 1900 when a prisoner of the Boers during the Boer War, he broke his parole and escaped. In 1915 as First Sea Lord, he was the architect of the Dardenelles disaster, when he was forced to resign. In 1920, apparently an ardent opponent of bolshevism, he denounced in the House of Commons the "International Jew" and "the world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation". He switched parties from the Conservative to the Liberal Party and then back again. He changed his tune to support the foundation of Israel. He was regarded as self seeking, unreliable and an opportunist.
The downfall of Neville Chamberlain came as a result of another disaster caused by Winston Churchill, once more First Sea Lord.
In April 1940 he conceived the plan to attack Narvik, despite the fact that Norway was a neutral country. The operation was a terrible blunder.
On the night of 7th/8th May 1940 Chamberlain faced attacks from all sides of the House of Commons. There were only two possible candidates to replace him, Lord Halifax and Winston Churchill.
Winston Churchill won. His whole policy from then on was to pursue the war with an almost fanatical urgency to destroy Germany, although he must have been well aware, his actions effectively placed Britain, its government and its economics in the hands of the United States that is to say in the hands of international Jewish finance. In his role as "British bulldog" he reduced Great Britain from being top dog to minor poodle. Perhaps that was his aim.
On the day that brought Churchill into power, the Germans launched their attack on Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg.
The British Expeditionary Force together with the French army was beaten back by the advancing German forces and retreated to Dunkirk.
By the 22nd May 1940 some 250 German Panzers were advancing towards Dunkirk when Hitler personally ordered all German forces to hold their positions for three days.
The escape from Dunkirk was hailed as a miracle but the real miracle lay in the fact that Hitler by his action had saved the British army. Without the halt order there would have been either a massacre or an ignominious mass surrender.
Up to that time there had been no less than fourteen attempts to come to a peace agreement with Britain. None of these peace offers were made known to the general public.
Hitler's peace terms were as follows: (1) The empire remains with all the colonies and mandates. (2) The continental supremacy of Germany will not be called into question. (3) All questions concerning the French, Belgium and Dutch colonies are open to discussion. (4) Poland will be a Polish state. (5)Czechoslovakia must belong to Germany.
By no means an insubstantial offer in the context of the period. By the summer of 1940 Germany had conquered Poland, Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg , Holland and France. The British Army had been defeated and had only just escaped from Dunkirk.
Yet Sir Robert Vansittart, the Foreign Secretary's Chief Diplomatic adviser, when writing to Lord Halifax, then Ambassador in Washington, dismissed the peace offers and spoke only of the destruction of Germany. In fact Vansittart's letter makes it clear that the mandarins of Whitehall had a totally different perception of what Britain was fighting for than the majority of politicians or the population at large. Whose agenda were they really following?
It appears that the Deputy Fuhrer himself travelled to Spain to meet members of the British Pro-Peace Party around the 20th to 22nd April 1941 just three weeks before his flight.
When the files of correspondence between the Madrid Embassy and the Foreign Office were routinely released to the Public Record Office after fifty years. All the documents relating to the weekend of 20th/22nd April were held back until 2017. Clearly something highly sensitive happened at that time.
By May 1941 after a year as Prime Minister, Churchill was in serious trouble. Britain was losing the war. Greece had been lost to the Germans, Rommel was winning in North Africa. Air raids were having a devastating effect on British cities. The empire shipping was being sunk by U-boats. Matters came to a head on the 7th May just three days before Hess's arrival, Churchill faced a rebellious Commons and a savage attack on his leadership.
Significantly the central figure in this campaign was David Lloyd George who attacked Churchill's competence. In a heated debate Churchill contrived to counter Lloyd George's accusations by insinuating that they amounted to British defeatism and called for a vote of confidence, which he won.
The House of Lords was also in revolt with a steady build up of pressure not only against Churchill's leadership but for a negotiated peace. On the 10th May the pro-peace Duke of Bedford stated that Lloyd George should make a statement of the peace terms that would be acceptable to Britain.
It is highly probably that this mounting pressure on Churchill was no coincidence but was an orchestrated campaign which was tied into the Hess mission and was aimed at forcing the Prime Minister from office.
Hitler's plan had been expansion to the east, an attack on Bolshevick Russia and the deportation of the Jews who were seen as the cause of the Russian Revolution and the prime movers behind Germany's defeat in the 1914-18 war.
His invasion of the Low Countries was necessitated by Britain and France's declaration of war. With the invasion of Poland he had in fact completed the creation of Greater Germany and he could now turn his attention to the matter of the expansion of Germany to the east and the attack on the Bolsheviks.
Operation Barbarossa was an awe-inspiring objective. With hindsight it may seem that Barbarossa was an act of lunacy and Hess's view, expressed forcibly to Hitler, was that it would be folly to launch an attack on the USSR without first at least concluding an armistice with Britain.
Contrary to the German statement later that Hess had acted on his own whilst under some form of mental delusion, Hitler was undoubtedly well aware of the mission. The original date set for Barbarossa was the 15th May 1941 and 11 days before the flight Hitler set the new date as the 22nd May 1941.
Churchill's whole game plan depended on greater commitment to Britain's cause by the USA.
From the outset Britain had been dependent on a supply of military hardware and other wartime essentials from America. So the moment that Britain declared war on Germany the supply of American armaments ceased. The feeling in America was strongly isolationist and Congress had passed a series of restrictive measures for neutrality forbidding any form of trade whatever with a nation that engaged in war.
In 1937, however, on the initiative of Roosevelt,( descendant of a Jewish Dutch family) this was amended to a ban on the supply of munitions only.
Fortunately for the British war effort Roosevelt again managed to push through a few changes and this enabled America to supply munitions. Matters came to a head in October 1940 when the Treasury reported to Churchill that within three months the country would have no more money to buy from America.
In response Roosevelt then pushed through the Lend-Lease Bill which was made law on the 11th March 1941. This ensured that the USA would provide munitions and other supplies on credit - at a price. Britain had to agree to hand over $50,000,000 dollars of gold from South Africa and sell one of its most successful American based companies - American Viscose, a subsidiary of Courtaulds, to a consortium of bankers, who wasted no time in selling for a handsome profit.
Many politicians were suspicious about the Americans' motives. Lord Beaverbrook in a memo to Churchill on the 24th February 1941 said ...."the Americans are relentless creditors."
By May 1941 Britain was floundering in her darkest hour with her resources running dangerously low. Churchill sent a desparate pleading cable to Roosevelt on 3rd May 1941 just a week before Hess's arrival.
The reaction of the American industrial and financial circles to Hess's arrival was blank dismay.
Roosevelt realised that Hess offered a chance between an end to the war or a struggle that could go on for several years more. Of course the latter would be the preferred option of American industry.
The only answer that makes sense is that Hess had to meet someone who could not leave Britain and since the mysterious British principal was unable to leave the country Hess had go to him.
Even so the flight was a courageous venture and an enormous risk.
Hess's destination, Dungavel House near Glasgow, was listed as an emergency landing ground for RAF planes unable to return to their home bases and was equipped with temporary lights that could be switched on for landings at dusk.
Ivone Kirkpatrick (who features in the story later) stated that Dungavel was a hospital at the time. According to the Duke of Hamilton this is incorrect. The house was also occupied by certain other organisations, the Women's Land Army, the WRAF and the Red Cross. The fact that there was an office of the International Red Cross also means that effectively it was a small area of neutral territory, which made Dungavel the ideal place for a peace conference.
The flying fraternity was significantly involved in the movement to foster Anglo/German relations after the Nazis came into power . The relationship between the British monarchy and Hitler's regime went much deeper than has been suspected.
George, the Duke of Kent, and the Deputy Fuhrer had much more than aviation in common. From the early 1930s the Duke of Kent was definitely involved in fostering closer relations between Britain and Germany and as war loomed he was a participant in moves to avert hostility. That much is irrefutable.
Flying over land without navigational aids, Hess was in trouble. He overflew Dungavel but did not land then went over the coast, jettisoned his drop tanks, before turning back towards his destination. However on his second approach he failed to find Dungavel and eventually had to bail out. What went wrong?
On the night of the 10th May the landing lights of the airstrip had been turned on as the result of a phone call from the home of the Duke of Buccleuch, but were switched off a few minutes later a few minutes later by a group of strangers who had entered the house. Soon afterwards the aircraft flew over low again and observers half expected the lights to go on but they remained off.
Who turned off the landing lights thereby skuppering the plan? Were there in fact two warring factions at play that night?
Hess bailed out over Bonnington Moor at 11.09 p.m. It was his first parachute jump, nerve-wracking at any time but for a 47 year-old at the end of a long, arduous and dangerous flight, jumping into the unknown into enemy territory, it was a considerable achievement .
There were claims that the Duke of Kent was at Dungavel on the 10th May 1941, but these are unsubstantiated because his papers have never been released. However on the morning of Sunday, 11th May, the Duke of Kent with the Duke of Buccleuch as a passenger, while driving along the road away from the entrance to Dungavel House, was involved in a collision with a coal lorry on the Douglas to Lanark road.
On Monday, the 12th May. the following memorandum was despatched by a Mr. Voigt at Dungavel : "I can confirm that neither the Duke or his passenger Buccleuch were injured and in view of Lanark's close proximity to the events of last weekend, steps have been taken to ensure the accident remains unreported by the press."
Without doubt Churchill knew of the existence in England of a peace group. How much the government knew about the planned arrival on the night of the 11th is not certain, but events seem to indicate that two opposing sides were present on that night. There is of course the possibility that someone active in the plan was playing a double game.
A possible suspect is Rudolph Hess's friend, Albrecht Haushofer, the son of Professor Haushofer whose geopolitical ideas influenced much of Hitler's thinking. Albrecht was half Jewish through his mother Martha Mayer Doss .
Albrecht Haushofer as Secretary of the German Geographical Society was able to make a number of trips to many countries.
He was despatched to London to make preparations for Lloyd George's extremely positive meeting with Hitler. He was deemed sufficiently important in Britain to receive an invitation to the coronation of King George VI. Naturally Haushofer was under surveillance. A report by British Intelligence in 1937 stated : "He is not a man of means and it is believed that his frequent visits to this country were paid for by some government department.
But for whom was he working? Not only was he acting as Hess's intermediary for the peace plans, but he was simultaneously an agent for Himmler's peace initiatives, then again he was also involved in the Conservative German opposition to Hitler, undertaking missions on their behalf. He was even known to have been in contact with members of the Soviet spy ring in Nazi Germany. Inevitably Albrecht Haushofer's subversive activities caught up with him. He was eventually imprisoned after the bomb plot against Hitler of July 1944 and executed in 1945.
The failure of the Hess mission did not just devastate the conspiracy to remove the Prime Minister from office but Churchill managed to turn the situation and ensure his own political survival by downplaying Hess's flight. The British public were never made aware of the terms of the peace offers. In fact it was seven months before Churchill made any public announcement regarding Hess's arrival. The papers that Hess brought with him simply disappeared.
Hess was imprisoned at Mytchett Place and the commanding officer was a Major Frank Foley. The involvement of Major Frank Foley in Hess's confinement is significant. He recently achieved fame as Britain's Oscar Schindler and received the "Righteous Gentile Award" at a ceremony in Jerusalem in 1999 for helping Jews.
The idea of Hess as a madman has come to taint all subsequent investigations into his story. Yet immediately after his arrival in Scotland nobody seemed to find anything odd about his behavior. Churchill seized gratefully on the German explanation of the flight that Hess suffered from delusions and questioned those who had seen Hess in Scotland for their impressions of his mental state. Yet four days after Hess's arrival Churchill reported to Roosevelt that Hess was perfectly sane.
Hess of course could have arrived sane and then rapidly deteriorated. But that would raise disturbing questions about whether his treatment at the hands of the British contravened the terms of the Geneva Convention.
It was conveniently considered necessary for the prisoner to be monitored by a psychiatrist. The appointment of the Jewish Major Henry Dicks to this post seems deliberate and Hess's claims of being drugged increased when Dicks took charge.
At Nuremberg Hess's behavior was bizarre in the extreme. Either he was drugged or was deliberately putting on an act.
In 1945 British Intelligence attempted to locate the private papers of both Albrecht Haushofer and his father, Professor Karl Haushofer. A set of six of Albrecht Haushofer's diaries were located covering the period of 1940 to 1941 which had culminated in Rudolph Hess's flight to Britain in 1941. Within a few days of the diaries arriving in Britain on the 7th June 1945, they vanished and have never been seen since.
On the 10th March 1946 Professor Haushofer was briefly visited by two British Intelligence officers. Two days later on the 12th March, Hans Haushofer, their other son, unable to contact his parents, went to the house. He found it deserted although the lights were still burning. He searched the grounds and the surrounding forest. An hour later deep in the woods in a hollow beside a stream Hans found his parents. Karl Haushofer was lying in a hunched position in a hollow and his wife Martha was hanging from a nearby tree. It was later established that Professor Haushofer's death had been caused by cyanide poisoning.
Nobody mentioned the presence of the two British Intelligence Agents one of whom was Ivone Kirkpatrick, who had been involved with the arrival of Hess since the beginning and later became Britain's High Commissioner in Germany.
In the 41 years of Rudolf Hess's incarceration that followed the Nuremberg trials many theories have been explored in an attempt to uncover the truth behind his flight to Britain.
Rudolf Hess the very apex of this intrigue was the only one who never talked and was to outlive every other participant.
In the late 1960s after twenty years imprisonment, Hess began to hope that the four powers might relent and release him along with the last political prisoners still remaining in Spandau prison. He was to be bitterly disappointed.
By the 1980s many people began to regard it as an outrage that such a frail old man should remain a lone prisoner in the vast confines of Spandau. But it was not in the British government's interest ever to see Rudolf Hess released.
A free Hess at liberty to give press conferences and perhaps to write his memoirs would have much locked away within his mind that could cause Britain extreme embarassment. Despite Hess's frailty in extreme age he was still a man whose knowledge of the true events of 1941 was incredibly dangerous. The fact that four years of death and devastation could have been and should have been avoided would have caused much bitterness in Germany and much distrust throughout Europe of the British government.
To quote from the video tape by Wolf Rudiger Hess, the son of Rudolf Hess:
....."In January 1987 I wrote a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Bonn. For the first time in twenty years I received a reply.....That morning I visited my father in Spandau prison for the very last time. I found him to be mentally alert..... He had sent a new application to the heads of State of the occupation powers requesting a release from his 46 years imprisonment........"after our meeting I drove from Spandau directly to the Soviet Consulate .....three events: my reception in the Soviet Consulate in West Berlin on March 31st 1987....the magazine report on April 13 1987 and the reply from Radio Moscow of June 21 1987 show unequivocally that the Soviet Union under the leadership of Gorbachov intended to release Rudolf Hess.
...."This undoubtedly set off alarm bells in Britain and the United States since this new Soviet move would remove the last remaining legal obstacle to my father's release. For many years the British, American and French governments had said they were ready to agree to Hess's release but it was only the Soviet veto that prevented it ....
...."On Monday August 17th 1987 a journalist informed me in my office that my father was dying .....Later at home I received a telephone call from the American Director of the Spandau prison to inform me officially that my father had died.
...." Mr. Keane, the American Director of the Spandau prison said: " I will read the report that we will release immediately to the Press. It reads: Initial examination indicated that Rudolf Hess attempted to take his own life. The guard looked into the summer house and saw Hess with an electric cord around his neck. Attempts were made at resucitation and he was declared dead in the afternoon."
We had to wait a full month for the final official statement about the circumstances the death. It was published by the allies on September 19th 1987.
....However the official report was not the truth. A Tunisian medical orderly, Abdullah Melaouhi, was a civilian employee of the Spandau prison administration at the time of my father's death. He was not a citizen of one of the four allied occupation powers, as a result he could not be silenced or transferred to some remote corner of the world. After the death of my father Melaouhi got in touch with our family. The core of his account which he set down in an affidavit is as follows:
"When I arrived at the summerhouse I found the scene looking as though a wrestling match had taken place. The ground was churned up and the chair on which Hess had usually sat lay on the ground a considerable distance from its usual location. Hess himself lay lifeless on the ground. He reacted to nothing. His respiration, pulse and heart beat were no longer measurable. Jordan, an American guard, stood near Hess's feet. Melaouhi noticed to his surprise that besides Anthony Jordan, the black American guard, two strangers in US military uniform were present. This was unusual since no soldier had access to this part of the prison and above all because any contact with Rudolf Hess was most strictly forbidden....In addition to the Tunisian orderly's account there is a further affidavit regarding the event in Spandau on August 17th 1987. My wife brought it back from South Africa where she had met a South African lawyer. I was able to persuade this man to phrase his testimony in the form of an affidavit prepared for a judge, dated February 22nd 1988. It reads as follows:
"Reich Minister Rudolf Hess was killed on the orders of the British Home Office. The murder was committed by two members of the British SAS (22nd SAS Regiment, Bradbury Lines, Hereford, England). The military unit of the SAS is subordinated to the British Home Office, not to the Ministry of Defence. The planning of the murder as well as its direction was carried out by MI5. A secret service action whose aim was the murder of Reich Minister Rudolf Hess was so hastily planned that it was not even given a code name.Other Secret Services who had been privy to the plan were the American, the French and the Israeli.
Any mention of the Hess story would be incomplete without mention of the "doppelganger" theory and its possible connection with the air accident in which the Duke of Kent lost his life.
After the drama and confusion of Hess's arrival his British captors had to find the best way to deal with their VIP prisoner. The Deputy Fuhrer was taken to London by train and then to the Tower of London. He was imprisoned in the Tower until his intended place of confinement, Mytchett Place, a victorian country house just outside Aldershot, was prepared and specially equipped, on Churchill's orders, with state of the art security features.
Within weeks of Hess's arrival in Mytchett Place the first reports of his mental deterioration began to circulate resulting in his being placed under a team of army psychiatrists led by Colonel, later Brigadier, John Rawlings-Rees, and Major Henry Dicks.
One of the earliest puzzles about the period of Hess's captivity in England was what happened whilst he was in the Tower of London. Charles Fraser Smith who was responsible for supplying special equipment and uniforms to the intelligence services states in his autobiography that he was summoned to London by MI5 who asked him to organise the making of a copy of Hess's Luftwaffe uniform while the Deputy Fuhrer was lying drugged in his room. Obviously this shows that Hess was, at least on one occasion, deliberately drugged by his captors.
Apart from one episode in early l945 when he was given a truth drug supposedly a treatment for amnesia, Hess's allegations that he was being drugged have always been denied.
Why should the British Security Services want an exact copy of his uniform?
What happened to the detailed peace proposal that Hess was purported to have with him? And why is the inventory of Hess's belongings still withheld?
On the 25th June 1942 Hess was moved again. This time his home was Maindiff Court just outside Abergavenny in Wales where, officially at least, he was to remain until taken back to Germany to stand trial at Nuremberg in October 1945.
News of the celebrity prisoner's new location was leaked to the Press. A major story appeared in the Daily Mail on the lst September 1943, headlined the "Daily Life of Hess in prison".
Incredible though it may seem it looks as though the British Government wanted the public and the Germans to know or believe that Hess was at Maindiff Court.
On the 4th May 1942 Reinhard Heydrich sent von Ribbentrop a report from one of his agents in Britain which stated that Hess was being held in a villa in Scotland and there were other stories of Hess being kept in a house near Fort William in the Western Highlands. If Hess was in Scotland who was at Maindiff Court?
If he was not there in the period between l942 and l945, what were the carefully stage-managed public appearances in the country, the picnics and the walks all about?
The military surgeon, Dr. Hugh Thomas, based his theory that the prisoner in Spandau was not Rudolf Hess on the observation in 1973 that he did not bear the scars from Hess's First World War gunshot wound on either his chest or his back, nor were there any signs of scars on his left hand and arm caused by shrapnel in June 1916.
He claims that, of the 58 doctors who examined the prisoner after 1941, not one reported his gunshot wounds.
The extremely detailed description given by the US Army medic, Captain Ben Hurewitz, gives no mention either of the bullet wound or the 1916 shrapnel wounds. The doctor had also reported that the scalp was essentially normal, whereas Hess had a scar on the back of his head, together with a small bald patch from one of the beer-hall skirmishes in the 1920s.
After Hess's death in 1987, although there were two post mortem examinations, the official one conducted by Professor J. Malcolm Cameron and the independent autopsy arranged by Hess's family, neither report mentioned bullet scars. Yet both described the scars on the chest, which were the result of a so-called suicide attempt in 1945, when Hess skewered a fold of skin with a bread knife. At least these scars prove that the man who died in Spandau was the same man who was in Maindiff Court in 1945.
Strangely although it should have been easy enough to debunk Thomas's theory, the British Government failed to do so. The fact is that until the discovery of his medical files in Munich in 1989 nobody knew where the scars were.
In an interview Wolf Rudiger Hess said that after Thomas's book came out, he asked the Spandau prisoner about the bullet wounds and he replied, "I can't see the scars on my back, but I see the ones on my chest every day."
According to the medical report of Hess's World War injuries, the scar in question was not on the chest, but just above the arm pit where the bullet entered and came out at the back. It seems that Hess himself didn't know where the scar was supposed to be.
When faced with Thomas's doppelganger hypothesis in his latter days Hess brought up the subject of the scars himself because two doctors had examined him and he explained that a bullet had passed right through his chest, brushed the heart and exited under the left shoulder blade. This however was incorrect, thanks to the medical file it is known that the bullet went in above the left armpit coming out between the shoulder blade and the spine and not brushing the heart. Surely the real Rudolf Hess would have known this?
An equally bizarre episode occurred in Maindiff Court in early 1944 when Hess was given a sodium pentathol injection as a treatment for his amnesia. According to the official records this was the only time. While under the influence of the drug the patient was asked a series of questions about his past in order to stimulate his memory. Major Dicks took the lead. Hess apparently failed to recognise the names Haushofer, Messerschmitt, even Adolf Hitler.
The pitiable exhibition by Hess at Nuremberg when he claimed to be suffering from amnesia and could not recognise any of his former colleagues, even senior Nazis like Goering.
Apparently on several occasions Hess gave a wrong year for his birth - 1899 instead of 1894 - although he got the day and the month right, and refused to see his much-loved wife and son for an astonishing twenty-four years.
Thomas claims that he has a letter which he is prevented from publishing because of the Official Secrets Act from Lord Willingdon to the Canadian Prime Minister, William Mackenzie King, discussing Hess and referring to "the trouble we have with the double."
The publicly available records on Hess, two dental charts from the war years, one from Mytchett Place dated 30th September 1941 and the second from Maindiff Court dated 23rd April, 1943 should prove that it was the same man, but they are inconclusive. The fillings and bridge work are similar although not identical but two prominent features of the earlier chart are missing in 1943. A crown and a gold tooth.
In 1987 David Irving attempted to check the 1941 chart against the Spandau prisoner's dental records but was refused permission by the British Military Government in Berlin.
Given all the facts it seems that the most obvious time for a look-alike to take over would have been at the time of the transfer to Maindiff Court.
Interestingly the International Red Cross was permitted to see Hess when he was in Mytchett Place but not when he was in Abergavenny.
It seems that there were two Hesses at the same time, one in Wales and one in Scotland and according to Thomas's theory it was the decoy who ended his days in Spandau. What happened therefore to the real Hess?
Confirmation that the substitution was made at the time of the transfer to Abergavenny comes from testimony of somebody who remembered seeing a man who her father told her later was Hess going into the house which belonged to the Earls of Pembroke, whose son was the equerry to the Duke of Kent.
As the family who were sheltering him were so closely connected to the Duke of Kent could this mean that the "Peace Party " had managed to gain control of the Deputy Fuhrer?
In May 1993 Lord Thurso made the statement that as a wartime teenager he remembered Hess being kept in a hunting lodge called Braemore Lodge on the adjoining estate of the Duke of Portland. He also remembered his mother telling him that Hess had been kept at Lochmore Cottage on his father's estate on the shore of Loch More. This would have been in 1942.
If Hess was at Braemore Lodge, what was he doing there? Who was responsible for him? And what happened to him?
To-day a stone cross marks the spot where the Sunderland Flying boat that carried the Duke of Kent and fourteen - or was it fifteen? - others crashed into a remote hill top on the 25th August 1942. This cross raised by the Duchess is the only memorial to the Duke despite the fact that he was the only member of the royal family to be killed on active service for 500 years.
The Short Sunderland flying boat carrying the Duke of Kent and three members of his staff left Invergordon on the east coast of Scotland at 1.10 p.m. and set off on a north-easterly course along the coastline. Being a flying boat its standard orders were to fly over water, only crossing land when absolutely unavoidable. For this reason it was usual to follow the coastline to Duncansby Head the northenmost tip of Scotland near John o' Groats and then turn north-west over the Pentland Firth towards Iceland. The whole journey should have taken about seven hours.
Later that afternoon, the exact time is a matter of dispute, the Sunderland crashed into a hill known as Eagle's Rock overlooking the valley carved by Berriedale Water on the Duke of Portland's estate - about sixty miles from the starting point of Invergordon.
All those on board, except one, were killed.
Robert Brydon in the 1980s was one of the first to realise that there was a mystery. How did the plane flown by the cream of RAF pilots crash in a hillside and what was this flying boat doing over land anyway?
The Short S-25 Sunderland MK3 was one of the most successful flying boats ever produced but its major disadvantage was that it was very heavy and sluggish when climbing, especially when heavily ladened as it was on the Duke of Kent's flight.
It was normal practice for a Sunderland to have three pilots on board. On this particular flight there were no fewer than four pilots and four navigators.
The Sunderland crashed into the hill behind the peak of Eagle's Rock where the crest is a little over 660 feet. Travelling in a northerly direction it struck the rising hillside at a shallow angle somersaulting on its nose to land on its back, disintregating on impact and scattering the wreckage over a wide area. Its 2500 gallons of fuel exploded. Most of the wreckage was scattered on the rise in the direction of travel. As the plane crashed down on its back the tail section broke free and was thrown over the brow of the hill coming to rest in the peat bog on the other side. Because of this the only survivor, Andy Jack, escaped with relatively minor burns.
The search party found the still burning wreckage about an hour later.
The first news stories reported that everyone on board the Sunderland had been killed but early next day Andy Jack turned up at a cottage at Ramscraigs about two miles from the crash site.
The full dossier of the Court of Enquiry has disappeared. The statement of Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Secretary of State for Air, in the House of Commons states that the cause of the disaster was not mechanical failure but a serious mistake in airmanship by the Captain.
Most commentators have reconstructed the following sequence of events:
It is known that W4026 took off from Invergordon at 13.10. Shortly afterwards the Sunderland entered low cloud obscuring the navigator's view of their position therefore the pilot took the plane down in order to regain visual contact with the coastline, but failed to realise that they had drifted off course and were no longer over the sea but over ground that was swiftly rising to meet them.
There are problems with this interpretation:
(a) Vital documents have vanished including the flight plan filed by Goyen before take off.
(b) The timing of the crash - Since it is known that the Sunderland took off at 13.10, with the crash time noted as "approximately 14.00",it means that the duration of the flight had been 50 minutes, but the crash site is only sixty miles away and would have been reached in twenty minutes.
(c)Why was the only survivor, Andy Jack, not called to give evidence?
(d)The responsibilities of pilot and navigator were sharply defined. The navigator was responsible for the plane staying on course and for keeping the pilot informed of any corrections necessary. Therefore it would have been the navigator who would have asked the pilot to descend through cloud and not an independent decision by the pilot.
(e)In order to have crashed where it did the plane would have had to drift a huge 15 degrees off course.
(f)Why was a flying boat used when Liberators routinely flew from Prestwick to Reykjavik and why did it leave from Invergordon when Oban was the logical choice?
There are also problems with the position of the crash. Opposite the valley to Eagle's Rock immediately to the south is a peak known as Donald's Mount which at a height of about 1300 ft is considerably higher and marks the end of the Scaraben which rises to over 2000 ft. at its highest point. It seems very strange to have successfully cleared such a height before crashing into lower land. The aerial photographs show that the wreckage was scattered in a north northeast direction. The impact marks still remain on the hillside and show that the plane hit the hillside with a glancing blow skipping along the ground before somersaulting and crashing on its back.
The direction the Sunderland was taking can be worked out relatively easily. The port float and wing hit the ground slightly before the starboard float and wing, suggesting either that the plane was not quite level, although the ground at the point of impact was, or that it was banking to port at the time.
It is also clear that the Sunderland was flying on a north-easterly course at the time of the impact because the wreckage lies in a north north-east path and as the port wing hit the ground first and the engines were on full power the plane would have been pulled round several degrees to port before the main body of the aircraft crashed into the ground.
Therefore the wreckage would have been scattered along a path in a slightly more northerly direction than the track of the aircraft.
The plane therefore did not approach the hill directly from the south but was turning into Eagle's Rock from a more westerly direction. But, if the pilot had come up the valley he would have had to turn to port to end up where he did. In which case the plane would have been travelling in a north-westerly direction, not northeast and it would mean he had turned towards higher ground whereas continuing would have enabled the plane to pass safely over the lower end of Eagle's Rock.
On the other hand if the Sunderland had approached from the south there is a problem with the angle at which it hit the ground and the pitch of the propellers.
Directly south of the crash point on the other side of the valley is the much higher Donald's Mount, 650 ft. higher than the crash site. In order to have cleared Donald's Mount but hit Eagle's ROck the plane would have had to come at a very steep angle but in that case it would have ploughed into the hillside leaving an impact crater and not skipped off it, added to which the pitch of the propellers showed that it was climbing not descending.
The same problem applies if the plane was banking as the evidence of the port wing suggests. It is impossible to gauge how steeply the plane banked or how tightly it turned. It must have been turning to port meaning it was approaching from somewhere west of south which would have brought it over the even higher ridge of the Scaraben. The evidence makes no sense but the data does give an alternative explanation which radically changes the picture and raises new questions about Kent's special mission.
On the Friday after the crash the weekly John o' Groats Journal carried an interview with the elder of the two farmers who heard the crash and raised the alarm, and he said that the crash occurred at 2.30 p.m. Therefore the plane was taken somewhere to do something specific in the intervening time.
There is a further anomaly. It is clear that there was one body too many in the wreckage. When W4026 took off there was 15 people on board: ten crew, their commanding officer, the Duke of Kent and three members of his entourage. The next morning the newspaper reports said everybody had been killed, fifteen in all. However, the next day, when Andy Jack turned up, they hastily adjusted the total to fourteen dead with one survivor.
All in all despite considerable variance in reporting there is no room for doubt there was one more person on the plane when it crashed than when it took off.
The three basic questions therefore are: (a) Why was the flying boat overland? (b) Where had it been in the missing hour and (c) Why was there an extra body on board?
From the map could the plane have landed on an inland body of water? There were three possible landing sites. Only one of them was on the land of Sir Archibald Sinclair, whose son had said that during the war his father regularly travelled back from London to his Caithness estate at weekends by flying boat.
When Lord Thurso mentioned that Hess had been at Braemore Lodge, there was the possibility that the Duke of Kent's Sunderland had put down on Loch More in order to pick up Rudolf Hess. Loch More lies about eight miles to the north of the crash site where the hills give way to flat moorland. There is a private road that runs from Braemore to Loch More. The two cottages mentioned by Lord Thurso, Braemore Lodge and Loch More cottage, are on the same road.
It is possible to reconstruct the course that would have taken the aircraft to Loch More and how it travelled to the crash site at Eagle's Rock.
Of necessity the Sundlerland had to take off heading south and would have headed directly for the hills specifically the wall of Scaraben some 9 miles away. A fully laden Sunderland is a sluggish climber with a full load, taking about six minutes to reach the Scaraben and would have climbed to 1200 feet. Loch More itself is a little over 400 feet above sea level and the highest points of the Scaraben are around 2000, so there is a question as to whether the Sunderland could have gained height in time. Even if it could, the pilot was unlikely to risk it in low cloud since heading into the hills with limited visibility and such a small safety margin would be tantamount to suicide. The pilot would, as soon as possible into the flight, turn to port towards the coast before reaching the hills, but even this would have taken them into significantly higher ground, varying between 600 and 850 feet before they managed to gain much height.
The aerial photograph seems to provide confirmation of this reconstruction. From the way the wreckage lies it appears that the plane was indeed flying in the opposite direction to the official version. The tail section is in the north and the engines lie with the propellers facing towards the south. Perhaps the official line which has the plane flipping on to its back on impact was an invention to cover up this fact.
On the aerial shot the marks on the ground caused by the various parts of the plane were to the south west of the field of debris. Meaning that the plane came in from that direction, hit the hillside and did a somersault on its back. Therefore the plane had been travelling in a north easterly direction when it crashed and yet, if the reconstruction that the plane had taken off from Loch More is correct, it should have been heading south.
There is another possible explanation. Heading south from Loch More with the wall of the Scaraben looming ahead, the logical thing to do was to turn into the valley of Berriedale Water. This would have taken the plane over the hamlet of Braemore and make an excellent landmark for the pilot. The Sunderland would then fly south east making the relatively easy turn into the valley. Ahead the pilot would have seen the impassable ridge of the Scaraben to starboard while to port there was a series of lower hills with valleys and Eagle's Rock.
Once past Eagle's Rock the steep side of Donald's Mount suddenly rears up into view, faced with this abrupt and insurmountable obstacle the pilot would immediately turn to port banking sharply and therefore losing height. At this point the valley turns a little more than ninety degrees. To avoid hitting the side of Donald's Mount the pilot would have had to make the tightest possible circle. There was only way out - over the lower ground over Eagle's Rock, which would require an almost impossible manoeuvre going into a vertical U-turn before immediately straightening up again. The pilot, probably Wing Commander Moseley almost made it, failing to clear the ridge by just some thirty feet.
Either Moseley failed to take the plane any higher or he deliberately chose to take that route. Perhaps he planned to make a turn between the peaks of Cnocnaseadiage and Eagle's Rock at 850 feet, the valley would take the plane directly to the coast in safety. On the other hand he could simply have missed his turning. Or perhaps the plane simply failed to gain sufficient height. Was this due to mechanical failure or deliberate sabotage? In other words was the Kent crash engineered?
Any direct evidence of sabotage would have been scrupulously cleared from the site with the rest of the wreckage almost immediately. COnveniently the report of the investigation into the crash promptly disappeared.
There are tried and tested methods of sabotaging aircraft which are very difficult to spot especially on a total wreck.
Just ten days after the Kent tragedy there was another crash. In this case another flying boat also from 228 Squadron crashed off Tiree on the 4th September 1942 killing the respected Glasgow journalist Fred Nancarrow. The official verdict was that the plane ran out of fuel.
Nancarrow was the only reporter to cover both Hess's arrival and the Kent crash. Had he stumbled on something connected with the Hess affair and was this why he had to die?
There are striking parallels between the Kent crash and that of Kent's great friend, General Sikorski, on the 4th July 1943. Returning in a Liberator from a visit to Polish Forces in Egypt he stopped to refuel in Gibraltar. Within minutes of taking off, the plane crashed into the sea, landing upside down in 30ft of water.
Although the court concluded that it was an accident and not sabotage, many had their doubts. Sumner Welles, the US Under Secretary of State, specificially called Sikorski's death sabotage.
The suspicion of sabotage is compounded by the fact that eight months before in November 1942, Sikorski had been involved in a similar incident, which was declared sabotage by both the US and British governments.
If Sikorski was assassinated, who was responsible? He was regarded as something of an obstacle by Winston Churchill, who had agreed to allow the SOviet Union after the war to keep Polish territory.
For more information on subversive control try: www.pgorg.com or www.postremus.com