By Mark Weber
On the
evening of May 10, 1941, the Deputy Führer of the Third Reich set out on a
secret mission that was to be his last and most important. Under cover of
darkness, Rudolf Hess took off in an unarmed Messerschmidt 110 fighter-bomber
from an Augsburg airfield and headed across the North Sea toward Britain. His
plan was to negotiate peace between Germany and Britain.
Four hours later, after
successfully evading British anti-aircraft fire and a pursuing Spitfire, Hess
parachuted, for the first time in his life, and sprained his ankle landing in a
Scottish farm field. An astonished farmer found the injured pilot and turned
him over to the local Home Guard unit. [1]
Winston Churchill promptly
rejected Hess' peace offer and jailed him as a prisoner of war, even though he
had arrived unarmed and of his own free will. Rudolf Hess, ambassador of peace,
was to remain a prisoner until his death in August 1987 at the age of 93.
For many, the passing of the
one-time Deputy Führer and last surviving member of Hitler's inner circle
simply marked the welcome end of a terrible era. But his true legacy is something
far different. He spent 46 years -- half his life -- behind bars, a victim of a
cruel victor's justice. More than any other man, Rudolf Hess symbolizes the
vindictiveness and hypocrisy of the Nuremberg Tribunal.
The Mission
Hess was deeply shaken by
Britain's declaration of war against Germany in September 1939. With Hitler's
approval, he began a secret effort a few months later to negotiate a peace
agreement between the two "fraternal Germanic nations" through
British officials in neutral Portugal and Switzerland. [2] When the endeavor
failed, Hess began preparations for his flight to Britain, an unquestionably
sincere if perhaps naive effort to end war between his beloved homeland and a
nation he greatly admired.
"My coming to England in
this way is, as I realize, so unusual that nobody will easily understand
it," Hess told a British official a few weeks after the flight. "I
was confronted by a very hard decision. I do not think I could have arrived at
my final choice [to fly to Britain] unless I had continually kept before my
eyes the vision of an endless line of children's coffins with weeping mothers
behind them, both English and German, and another line of coffins of mothers
with mourning children." [3]
Though there was little chance
that Hess' mission could have succeeded, some aspects of his flight and its
aftermath remain unclear. The British government took the extraordinary step of
sealing dozens of Hess documents for release only in the year 2017. Sefton
Delmer, the wartime head of Britain's propaganda broadcasts to Germany, has
speculated that the British government might have had good reasons for the
secrecy: [4]
At the time, Churchill
published nothing about the Hess case; he was passed over in silence. There was
a large peace party in Britain, and Churchill probably feared that this party
would throw him from his Ministerial seat because he had not agreed to Hess'
peace proposals.
Victor's Justice
At the end of the war, Hess
was taken to Nuremberg to be tried, along with other German leaders, by the
United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and France as one of the "major
war criminals."
Although Hess was perhaps
treated more unjustly than any other man on trial at Nuremberg, the Tribunal
itself was of doubtful legal and moral standing. Many prominent men in America
and Europe pointed out that the process violated two cardinal principles.
First, it was a trial of the
victors against the vanquished. The former were their own law maker,
prosecutor, judge, alleged victim and, in part, accomplice (in the case of the
Soviets, in the division of Poland).
Second, the charges were
invented for the occasion and defined after the fact ("ex post
facto").
US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Harlan Fiske Stone called the trials a fraud. "[Chief US prosecutor]
Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg," he
wrote. "I don't mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the
pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law.
This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned
ideas." [5]
Associate Supreme Court
Justice William O. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of
"substituting power for principle" at Nuremberg. [6] He later also
wrote: "I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials
were unprincipled. Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor
of the time." [7]
Soviet participation in the
"International Military Tribunal" lent it the aura of a political
show trial. Judge I. T. Nikitchenko, who presided at the solemn opening
session, had been a judge at the infamous Moscow show trial of Zinoviev and
Kamenev in 1936. Before the Tribunal convened, Nikitchenko explained the Soviet
view of the enterprise: [8]
We are dealing here with the
chief war criminals who have already been convicted and whose conviction has
been already announced by both the Moscow and Crimea [Yalta] declarations by
the heads of the [Allied] governments ... The whole idea is to secure quick and
just punishment for the crime.
Besides the Tribunal's dubious
legal standing, it held Hess and the other German leaders to a standard to
which the Allies were never held. In sharp contrast to his public utterances,
the chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, Robert Jackson, privately acknowledged in
a letter to President Truman that the Allies [9]
have done or are doing some of
the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating
the Geneva Convention in the treatment of [German] prisoners of war that our
command is taking back prisoners sent to them [for forced labor in France]. We
are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war
is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States
based on no title except conquest.
Nothing better points up the
essential injustice of the Nuremberg process than the court's treatment of
Rudolf Hess.
He was in the dock primarily
because of his important-sounding but somewhat hollow title of Deputy Führer.
His duties as Hitler's stand-in were almost entirely ceremonial: He delivered
the annual Christmas address to the nation, welcomed delegations of ethnic
Germans from abroad, appeared at charitable functions, and presented the Führer
at the annual Nuremberg party congress. It is this image of the wide-eyed and
ecstatic Hess that much of the world remembers best, most of all from a brief
clip of him from the Leni Riefenstahl film of the 1934 Congress, "Triumph
of the Will."
Known as the "conscience
of the party," he often used what power and influence he had to intervene
on behalf of victims of persecution by extremists in the National Socialist
party. In his detailed study, Justice at Nuremberg, which is generally very
critical of the German defendants, historian Robert E. Conot called Hess a
"decent and honest" man and "a pacifist at heart." [10]
In their Nuremberg indictment
of the Deputy Führer, the four Allied powers predictably portrayed him in the
most sinister way possible. [11] "Hess began his conspiratorial activities
immediately upon termination of World War I by joining militaristic and
nationalistic organizations," it charged. It went on to absurdly claim
that "Hess was one of the members of the [Nazi] conspiracy who professed
as early as 1933 the aim of complete world domination." The joint Allied
indictment concluded with the almost ludicrous words:
All through the years from
1920 to 1941 Hess remained the most faithful and relentless executor of
Hitler's aims and designs. This complete devotion to the success of the
conspiracy was climaxed by his flight in Scotland in an attempt to end the war
with England [!] and to receive English support for Germany's demands against
Russia, which he had helped to prepare.
The share of Hess'
participation in the Nazi conspiracy is as great as that of the Party which he
directed. The Party's crimes are his.
In fact, the Allied case
against Hess was weak. The Führer had kept his deputy in the dark about his
foreign policy and military decisions. It was clearly established at Nuremberg
that Hess had not been present at any of the meetings at which Hitler discussed
his military plans. [12] And, of course, he could not be held responsible for
German actions that took place after his flight to Britain, including those
carried out during the campaign against the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, the Tribunal
declared Hess guilty of "crimes against peace" ("planning and
preparation of aggressive war") and of "conspiracy" with other
German leaders to commit the alleged crimes, but innocent of "war
crimes" and "crimes against humanity."
No reputable historian today
believes the Nuremberg charge that Hess was guilty of "crimes against
peace." Almost all of the criticism of Hess in recent years has focused
instead on his signature on the 1935 Nuremberg laws that stripped German Jews
of their rights as full citizens and banned marriage and sexual relations
between Jews and non-Jews. These laws allegedly "paved the way" for
the extermination of the Jews several years later. [13] Whatever the merits of
this argument, Hess had nothing to do with the drafting or promulgation of
these laws, and his signature on them was completely pro forma. And even so,
the laws were domestic statutes that have had counterparts in numerous other
countries, including the United States.
Unlike fellow defendant Albert
Speer, the wartime armaments minister who did far more than the Deputy Führer
to keep Germany's war machine going but who received only a 20 year sentence,
Hess refused to ingratiate himself with the Tribunal. He expressed no remorse
for his loyal support of Hitler and the National Socialist regime.
In his final statement to the
court on August 31, 1946, he declared:
I had the privilege of working
for many years of my life under the greatest son my nation has brought forth in
its thousand-year history. Even if I could, I would not wish to expunge this
time from my life.
I am happy to know that I have
done my duty toward my people, my duty as a German, as a National Socialist, as
a loyal follower of my Führer. I regret nothing.
No matter what people may do,
one day I shall stand before the judgment seat of God Eternal. I will answer to
Him, and I know that He will absolve me.
When it came time to decide
his sentence, the judges were not inclined to deal leniently with such an
unrepentant defendant. The Soviet judge and his alternate thought he should be
executed. The British and American judges and the American and French
alternates voted for life imprisonment, while the French judge suggested a
sentence of twenty years. The British alternate abstained. They settled on life
imprisonment. [14]
The eminent British historian
Professor A. J. P. Taylor summed up the injustice of the Hess case in a 1969
statement: [15]
Hess came to this country in
1941 as an ambassador of peace. He came with the ... intention of restoring
peace between Great Britain and Germany.
He acted in good faith. He
fell into our hands and was quite unjustly treated as a prisoner of war. After
the war, we could have released him.
No crime has ever been proven
against Hess ... As far as the records show, he was never at even one of the
secret discussions at which Hitler explained his war plans.
He was of course a leading
member of the Nazi Party. But he was no more guilty than any other Nazi or, if
you wish, any other German. All the Nazis, all the Germans, were carrying on
the war. But they were not all condemned because of this.
That Rudolf Hess -- the only
one at Nuremberg who had risked his life for peace -- was found guilty of
"crimes against peace" was certainly the Tribunal's most ironic
perversion of justice.
Spandau
From 1947 until his death,
Hess was held in West Berlin's Spandau prison, which was run by the four Allied
powers. Regulations stipulated that "imprisonment will be in the form of
solitary confinement" and forbad prison officials to ever call Hess by
name. He was addressed only as "prisoner No. 7."
Conditions were so bad that
French chaplain Pastor Casalis protested to the prison Directorate in 1950:
"It can safely be said that Spandau has become a place of mental torture
to an extent that does not permit the Christian conscience to remain silent
..." [16]
For 20 years, Hess at least
had the limited company of a few other Nuremberg defendants, but from October
1966 until his death 21 years later, he was the only inmate in the
fortress-like prison originally built for 600. He was, in the words of
Spandau's American Director, Lt. Col. Eugene Bird, "the loneliest man in
the world."
Keeping this one man in
Spandau cost the West German government about 850,000 marks a year. In
addition, each of the four Allied powers had to provide an officer and 37
soldiers during their respective shifts, as well as a director and team of
warders throughout the entire year. The permanent maintenance staff of 22
included cooks, waitresses and cleaners.
In the final years of his
life, Hess was a weak and frail old man, blind in one eye, who walked stooped
forward with a cane. He lived in virtually total isolation according to a
strictly regulated daily routine. During his rare meetings with his wife and
son, he was not allowed to embrace or even touch them. [17]
Long before his death, Hess'
imprisonment had become a grotesque and absurd spectacle.
Even Winston Churchill
expressed regret over his treatment. In 1950 he wrote: [18]
Reflecting upon the whole of
the story, I am glad not to be responsible for the way in which Hess has been
and is being treated. Whatever may be the moral guilt of a German who stood
near to Hitler, Hess had, in my view, atoned for this by his completely devoted
and frantic deed of lunatic benevolence. He came to us of his own free will,
and, though without authority, had something of the quality of an envoy. He was
a medical and not a criminal case, and should be so regarded.
In a 1977 interview, Sir
Hartley Shawcross, who was Britain's chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, called the
continued imprisonment of Hess a "scandal." [19]
The injustice against Hess was
not something that happened once and was quickly over. It was, rather, a wrong
that went on, day after day, for 46 years. Rudolf Hess was a prisoner of peace
and a victim of a vindictive age.
Notes
1. Ilse Hess, Rudolf Hess:
Prisoner of Peace (Torrance, Calif.: IHR, 1982), pp. 31-38, 25-27; Wolf R.
Hess, My Father Rudolf Hess (London: W.H. Allen, 1986), pp. 17-24; Eugene K.
Bird, Prisoner # 7: Rudolf Hess, (New York: Viking Press, 1974), pp. 184, 200,
209-210.
2. W. R. Hess, My Father
Rudolf Hess, pp. 50, 66-67; Ilse Hess, Rudolf Hess: Prisoner of Peace, pp. 15,
24.
3. Hess statement to Sir John
Simon, June 10, 1941. Quoted in: Ilse Hess, Rudolf Hess: Prisoner of Peace, p.
14.
4. Quoted in: W. R. Hess, My
Father Rudolf Hess, pp. 391-392.
5. Alpheus T. Mason, Harlan
Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (New York: Viking, 1956), p. 716.
6. William O. Douglas, An
Almanac of Liberty (1954), p. 96. Quoted in: William J. Bosch, Judgment on
Nuremberg (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina, 1970), pp. 132-133.
7. Quoted in: H. K. Thompson,
Jr. and Henry Strutz, eds., Dönitz at Nuremberg: A Reappraisal, (Torrance,
Calif.: 1983), p. 196.
8. Report of Robert Jackson,
United States Representative to the International Conference on Military
Trials, London, 1945 (Washington, DC: US State Dept., 1949), pp. 104-106, 303.;
Whitney R. Harris, Tyranny on Trial: The Evidence at Nuremberg (Dallas: S.M.U.
Press, 1954), pp. 16-17.
9. Jackson letter to Truman,
Oct. 12, 1945. Quoted in: Robert E. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg (New York:
Harper & Row, 1983), p. 68.
10. R. Conot, Justice at
Nuremberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 44.
11. Office of the United
States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi
Conspiracy and Aggression (11 vols.), Washington, DC: US Gov't., 1946-1948.
(The "red series."), Volume 2, pp. 466, 469, 477-478.
12. R. Conot, Justice at
Nuremberg, pp. 347-348, 501; W. R. Hess, My Father Rudolf Hess, p. 229.
13. See, for example:
"Rudolf Hess," Washington Post (editorial), August 19, 1987; Letter
by Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, The New York Times, May 1, 1984.
14. R. Conot, Justice at
Nuremberg, p. 487; W. R. Hess, My Father Rudolf Hess, pp. 235-236.
15. Sunday Express, London,
April 27, 1969. Quoted in: W. R. Hess, My Father Rudolf Hess, pp. 392-393.
16. W. R. Hess, My Father
Rudolf Hess, pp. 265-266.
17. Eugene K. Bird, Prisoner #
7: Rudolf Hess, p. 152 and passim.
18. Winston S. Churchill, The
Grand Alliance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), p. 55.
19.
Interview with Bild am Sonntag, April 10, 1977. Quoted in: Wolf R. Hess,
My Father Rudolf Hess, p. 402.
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