Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland

At about six in the evening on 10 May 1941 a twin-engined Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter took off from the Messerschmitt works airfield at Haunstetten, near Augsburg. At the controls, alone, without an observer and without the knowledge of anyone in the leadership of the Reich, sat Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s deputy in the leadership of the Nazi Party, a Reich minister and, after Hermann Göring, the Führer’s designated successor. After more than five hours in the air over the North Sea and Scotland, a few minutes after eleven at night, he bailed out over Floors Farm near the village of Eaglesham, south of Glasgow. The aircraft crashed on the nearby moor. He was detained by a local ploughman, David McLean, and soon afterwards taken over by men of the Home Guard. He introduced himself as Captain Alfred Horn of the Luftwaffe and demanded to be taken to the Duke of Hamilton.

The popular version of the affair is accurate: Hess was captured in Scotland after a parachute jump, and his mission to make peace with Britain was his own idea. That is how the great majority of historians see it today, although ever since 1941 there has been speculation that Hitler knew about it, or that British intelligence lured Hess to Scotland. The flight led to no negotiations, but it became one of the great sensations of the war: six weeks before Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, one of Hitler’s closest associates had delivered himself into enemy hands, and his arrival weighed on relations between London and Moscow for years to come.

A deputy with nothing to do

In 1941 Hess still held the title of “Deputy Führer”, but his importance had long been declining. Since the outbreak of war decisions had been taken at headquarters, in Hitler’s discussions with his generals and with the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, while Hess, who had no part in either foreign policy or the conduct of the war, dealt with party affairs and ceremonial duties. The day-to-day work of his office was being taken over ever more effectively by his chief of staff, Martin Bormann, who accompanied Hitler almost everywhere. In the Führer’s circle Hess was regarded as an eccentric: he was a hypochondriac and believed in astrology, clairvoyance and natural medicine. When war broke out he asked to be allowed to fly with the Luftwaffe. Hitler refused and forbade him to fly at all, and Hess only with difficulty persuaded him to limit the ban to a year.

At the same time Hess was the man who had absorbed most faithfully one of the premises of Hitler’s policy: the conviction that Britain was Germany’s natural partner and that war between the “Germanic” nations was a misunderstanding. Hitler had said many times in private that he wanted to leave the British their empire in exchange for a free hand on the Continent. That was also the burden of his public “appeal to reason” delivered in the Reichstag on 19 July 1940, which Winston Churchill’s government first met with silence and then rejected. Hess knew that Hitler had decided on war with the Soviet Union and had signed the Barbarossa directive in December 1940. He also knew how much the leaders of the Reich feared a repeat of the First World War – a war on two fronts. Peace with England before the blow in the east would be an enormous gain for Germany, and for Hess himself a chance to become someone important at Hitler’s side once more.

The idea had been maturing since the summer of 1940 in conversations with two men to whom Hess had been close since the 1920s: the professor of geopolitics Karl Haushofer and his son Albrecht, an expert on British affairs who knew many people in the British elite. On 31 August 1940 Karl Haushofer tried to persuade Hess that King George VI was an opponent of Churchill and would get rid of him at the first opportunity, and that the court could be reached through Albrecht’s British acquaintances. The choice fell on Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, the Duke of Hamilton, an airman who had been a guest at the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936. Hess mistakenly regarded him as one of the leaders of a British peace party. Whether the two had met in Berlin is not known: Hess claimed to have seen the Duke during the Games, the Duke insisted he had never met him, and later research suggests that they attended the same banquet but sat at different tables. In September 1940 Albrecht Haushofer, on Hess’s instructions, wrote to Hamilton proposing a meeting in neutral Lisbon. The letter was intercepted by British censors, and the Duke himself learned of it only in March 1941. No reply ever came. In the spring of 1941 Albrecht Haushofer was still trying to sound out the British through intermediaries in Switzerland, without success. According to his biographers he regarded Hess’s solo escapade, of which he knew, as madness.

Preparations

So Hess decided to fly himself. From the autumn of 1940, making use of his long acquaintance with Willy Messerschmitt, he practised flying the Bf 110 at the works airfield at Haunstetten, at first under the eye of the company’s chief test pilot, Wilhelm Stör. He picked out one aircraft, an E-1/N version with the works number 3869, which from then on was kept for him alone. He had it fitted with a radio direction finder, extra drop tanks under the wings and a modified oxygen system. Through his secretary he obtained secret weather forecasts for the North Sea and the British Isles from the Luftwaffe’s central meteorological service. He logged dozens of practice flights. According to some accounts, he abandoned at least three earlier attempts, from December 1940 onwards, because of technical faults or bad weather. One of his associates brought him a horoscope that pointed to 10 May as a favourable day for a journey in the cause of peace.

On 4 May 1941 Hitler made a speech in the Reichstag on the victory in the Balkans. In those days Hess saw him for the last time, and he later told the British that the Führer had assured him once again that he had no designs on the British Empire. A few days later Hess spoke to Albrecht Haushofer for the last time. On Saturday 10 May he said goodbye to his wife Ilse and his three-and-a-half-year-old son, left his adjutant, Karlheinz Pintsch, a sealed letter to Hitler with instructions to deliver it if he himself had not returned within four hours, and drove to Augsburg.

The flight over the North Sea

Hess took off in a leather flying suit bearing the insignia of a Luftwaffe captain. Accounts give the time of take-off as between 5.45 and 6.10 p.m. He took maps, money, glucose tablets and several dozen different medicines. He flew first towards Bonn, navigating by landmarks, and when he reached the coast level with the Frisian Islands he turned east for a while to stay out of range of British radar, and then headed out over the North Sea. At about 9 p.m. he set course for the coast of Northumberland. Since it was still light, he zigzagged over the sea for some forty minutes waiting for dusk, and jettisoned the drop tanks, now empty.

At 10.08 p.m. a radar station near Newcastle picked up a lone aircraft, which was designated “Raid 42”. The Spitfires sent to intercept it could not find it, because Hess had come down very low. Observers of the Royal Observer Corps identified it as a Bf 110 flying at a height of a few dozen feet, but at headquarters this was at first not believed: such an aircraft did not have enough fuel to get back to Germany. Hess flew across southern Scotland, failed to find in the dark Dungavel House, the Duke of Hamilton’s residence with its small landing strip, flew on to the west coast over the Firth of Clyde to get his bearings, and turned back inland. By now he was being chased by a Boulton Paul Defiant night fighter from the airfield at Ayr. With his tanks almost empty, Hess climbed to some 1,800 metres and bailed out. According to British findings he jumped at 11.06 p.m. and the aircraft crashed at 11.09. Landing on the grass strip at Dungavel had been out of the question, because it was too short for the fast Messerschmitt. Hess had covered more than 1,300 kilometres in a straight line, and much more along his winding route – what his biographers Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel called the greatest technical achievement of his life.

That same night, 10–11 May, the Luftwaffe carried out the bloodiest raid on London of the whole night-bombing campaign. As Hess was drifting down by parachute onto a Scottish field, the capital was under a bombardment that killed 1,436 people and turned out to be the last great raid of the Blitz.

The prisoner who wanted to talk to a duke

Hess landed right next to David McLean’s house at Floors Farm, twisting his ankle in the process. The ploughman helped him out of his parachute and took him into his home. The newcomer gave his name as Alfred Horn and declared that he had an important message for the Duke of Hamilton. Home Guard soldiers escorted him to their post at Busby and, after midnight, to the headquarters of the Home Guard battalion at Giffnock, where he was questioned through an interpreter. Major Graham Donald of the Royal Observer Corps began to suspect that the prisoner was rather more than a Captain Horn. Towards morning he was taken to Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow, where his leg was treated.

That night the Duke of Hamilton was on duty as commander of RAF Turnhouse near Edinburgh, and his operations room had been tracking the mysterious aircraft. Late on the morning of 11 May he drove to Maryhill and met the prisoner alone. Hess at once revealed who he was. He said he had come on a “mission of humanity” and that the Führer did not want to defeat England but to end the fighting. Through the Foreign Office the Duke asked to see the Prime Minister. Churchill was spending the weekend at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. According to a well-known anecdote, when told that Hess had landed in Scotland, he replied: “Hess or no Hess, I am going to see the Marx Brothers.” In the evening, however, he received Hamilton, and on 12 May took him to London, where he discussed the affair with members of the War Cabinet.

At the request of the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Alexander Cadogan, Ivone Kirkpatrick, a diplomat who had served at the embassy in Berlin before the war and knew Hess personally, flew to Scotland with Hamilton. The prisoner had meanwhile been moved to the military hospital at Buchanan Castle near Drymen, not far from Loch Lomond. Kirkpatrick had three conversations with him, on 13, 14 and 15 May. The first began soon after midnight and immediately confirmed the prisoner’s identity. Hess first read out a prepared statement that lasted more than two hours: since 1904 England had consistently opposed Germany; Hitler had exhausted every peaceful means; Germany was producing more aircraft than Britain and the United States combined and would soon send huge numbers of U-boats to sea; and there was no point in counting on an upheaval inside the Reich. He insisted that he had come without Hitler’s knowledge, but gave his word of honour that the Führer had never had designs on the British Empire or sought world domination.

The terms he brought contained nothing new. According to Kirkpatrick’s record, Britain was to give Germany a free hand in Europe, and Germany would leave Britain a free hand in its empire, on condition that the former German colonies were returned. When Kirkpatrick asked whether he counted Russia as part of Europe or of Asia, Hess replied Asia, and when pressed admitted that Germany had “certain demands” on Russia, which would be satisfied either by negotiation or by war. He called rumours of an imminent German attack on the Soviet Union unfounded. In the second conversation he added two demands: the British were to withdraw immediately from Iraq, where the war with Rashid Ali’s government had been going on since 2 May, and the two sides were to compensate each other’s citizens for their war losses. He also stipulated that Hitler would not negotiate with Churchill’s government, only with a different one, and hinted that if Britain refused, it faced an ever more destructive war and blockade. Kirkpatrick held the third conversation, on 15 May, at the request of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to find out what Hess knew of German plans regarding the United States and Ireland. It turned out that he knew nothing. Churchill wrote to Roosevelt that this was “the old invitation” to desert all one’s friends in return for temporarily saving the greater part of one’s own skin.

Fury at the Berghof

Around noon on 11 May Pintsch arrived at the Berghof and handed Hitler Hess’s letter. According to witnesses Hitler flew into a rage and immediately summoned Bormann, Göring and Ribbentrop. He asked Ernst Udet whether Hess could even have reached Scotland. What worried him most was what his allies would think: Mussolini and the Japanese might conclude that the Reich was seeking a separate peace with England behind their backs. Pintsch and Hess’s other adjutant were arrested, and Albrecht Haushofer was summoned to the Obersalzberg, detained and interrogated for several weeks by the Gestapo, partly by Reinhard Heydrich in person.

Since it was not known whether Hess had survived, the Germans pre-empted any British announcement. On the evening of 12 May Munich radio announced that party comrade Hess, who had for years been suffering from a progressive illness, had taken off in an aircraft against the Führer’s orders and had not returned. The letter he had left behind showed, it was claimed, traces of a mental disorder that gave grounds for fearing that Hess had fallen victim to delusions, and the aircraft had probably crashed. A few hours later the British government announced that Hess was in Scotland. On 13 May a further German communiqué admitted that Hess had landed in Britain, under the delusion that he could bring about an understanding between England and Germany. That same day Hitler explained the affair to party leaders and Gauleiters summoned to the Berghof, and Ribbentrop went to Rome to reassure Mussolini.

The madness story was awkward for the regime. Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that people were asking how such a fool could have been second only to the Führer, and jokes about it circulated in Germany. Hitler stripped Hess of all his offices and abolished the post of Deputy Führer. According to accounts from his entourage, he ordered that Hess be shot if he ever returned. His office, renamed the Party Chancellery, was taken over on 12 May by Bormann, who on 29 May also received the powers of a Reich minister. Hess’s flight opened the way for Bormann to become one of the most powerful men in the Reich, the gatekeeper of access to Hitler. People with no connection to Hess at all also paid the price: in June the police and the SD carried out an operation against astrologers, clairvoyants and occultists, who were blamed for his “madness”.

London’s silence and Moscow’s suspicions

The British soon satisfied themselves that Hess had no authority to negotiate, knew nothing of military plans and represented no opposition within the Reich. Even so, the government decided not to reveal what he had said. On 13 May Churchill told the House of Commons that for the time being he had nothing to add to the statement issued overnight, remarking that in this case imagination was outstripped by the facts. He dropped the statement he had announced, and the minister Lord Beaverbrook explained to newspaper editors that it would be best if as much speculation and gossip as possible grew up around Hess. On 17 May Hess was taken to London and held for four days in the Tower, and on 20 May he was installed in a guarded country house, Mytchett Place in Surrey, designated “Camp Z”, where intelligence officers eavesdropped on his conversations and analysed them.

The silence had its costs. In Britain itself it raised questions about the role of the Duke of Hamilton, who on 22 May had to be defended in Parliament by the Air Minister, Archibald Sinclair, and above all it aroused distrust in Moscow. The Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, asked the Foreign Office what the arrival of the man regarded as the most anti-Soviet of the Nazi leaders meant, and was fobbed off with evasive answers. The historian Rainer F. Schmidt, who studied the British files on the case declassified in 1992, argues that the Foreign Office deliberately fed rumours of a possible understanding with Germany in order to frighten Stalin and draw him away from cooperation with Hitler. Other scholars see this more as improvisation than as a calculated game. What is certain is that Joseph Stalin, who for months had dismissed warnings of a German attack as British provocations, read Hess’s flight as proof that London and Berlin might come to terms at his expense. He did not change his mind even as Britain’s ally. In October 1942 Pravda demanded that Hess be put on trial immediately, and in October 1944, in the Kremlin, in Churchill’s presence, Stalin raised a toast to British intelligence, which had supposedly lured Hess to Scotland.

Significance

Hess’s flight did not change the course of the war. The British government entered into no negotiations, and on 22 June 1941, six weeks later, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Churchill then announced that Britain would give the USSR all the help it could, and on 12 July the two countries undertook not to conclude a separate peace with Germany. The episode nevertheless showed how deeply the leaders of the Reich believed that England could be induced to hand the Continent over to Germany, and how close the war in the east already was. For Hitler it was a humiliation, for Bormann a springboard, and for relations between London and Moscow a source of suspicion that lasted the whole war.

Hess spent the rest of the war as a British prisoner. On 9 June 1941 he was visited by the Lord Chancellor, John Simon, to whom he repeated his proposals, and a few days later he tried to kill himself by jumping from a stairwell gallery. Psychiatrists judged him unbalanced, though not insane. In 1945 he stood trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, and on 1 October 1946 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in preparing a war of aggression. From 1947 he was held in Spandau prison in Berlin, from 1966 as its only inmate, and there, on 17 August 1987, at the age of 93, he took his own life.