Rudolf Hess – Writer-insighter

It’s happening again

Once upon a time, I thought I knew things. Now I think I never will. And that quite often, actually knowing things isn’t what’s wanted at all.

It happened writing Hereward. Charles Kingsley, the Victorian author of the Water Babies (a hundred plus years before Martin Amis wrote Dead Babies, but Kingsley could usefully have borrowed the title save for the fact that nobody then would have bought it, most families being knee-deep in them) wrote Hereward’s story up as The Last Englishman. You can see the tabloid headlines:

Plucky Brit Brexit Rebel Defies Normans

Except Hereward wasn’t the fantastic Pure Brit of racist fiction. Because there’s no such thing. He was a Saxon, whose people came from Denmark, Holland and Germany, which is why it’s called Saxony, which is near where the Queen’s family come from too.The Normans came from Normandy, but not even a hundred years before that, they came from Denmark too.

Chin up, fantasists. I’m sorry if this is news to some of you. Big boys don’t cry.

Hereward’s cousin was the King of Denmark, one of the Sweynes. One of the more confusing thing about writing about those times was the appalling shortage of names they seemed to have. If you weren’t called Leofric then Sweyne was pretty much compulsory, unless you went down the Aelf-suffix route. From the Other World, the land of faery. Yes, as in Aelf Garnett. Satire doesn’t change.

Hitler's left-hand man. — Hitler’s left-hand man.

On Sunday I started writing Double Vision, based on the tale of Rudolf Hess.

How about this for a fiction plot?

It’s 1941. The British Army has been hammered at Dunkirk, the year before. Get your flags out, because plucky Britain Stands Alone. America’s not in the war yet because it didn’t suit it. Russia’s still best mates with Germany, or thinks it is. Hitler’s deputy steals an airplane. He flies a rectangular course over the North Sea for no clear reason and seems quite proud of this in his interrogations.

He eventually parachutes out to land a little south of Glasgow in Scotland. He announces he’s called Captain Albert Horn and he wants to see the Duke of Hamilton. He has the idea that the Duke (serving in the RAF quite nearby) will talk to people like Lord Halifax who will lever Churchill and the King into peace negotiations.

He’s bundled off to Trent Park interrogation centre, then the Tower of London and finds himself in the dock at Nuremberg with something of an uncertain future.

For reasons unclear, a spitting-furious Hitler doesn’t hunt down and kill Hess’s family, which he could have done in half a breath. As he threatened to do to Goering’s family, when Goering asked if it was ok to carry out the order Hitler had given him previously.

Hess refuses to speak in his own defence. The Allies hang most of the people in the dock. But not Rudolf Hess, architect of the final solution. He didn’t recognise someone he worked with daily. He refuses to see anyone in his family for 20 years.

He claims he has stomach aches. Herman Goerring (head of the Luftwaffe, sentenced to death) falls about laughing at Hess in court. His wife notes that his voice has got deeper in 20 years, when the opposite is normally what happens. Everyone else in Spandau Prison is let out in 1966. Not Hess. He’s the only inmate there for another 22 years.

During this time a British army doctor treating him claims the patient’s medical records don’t match the historical record of what happened to the Rudolf Hess who was shot through the lung in 1916.

It’s not the first time that someone has said that the Rudolf Hess at the Nuremberg trial isn’t the same Rudolf Hess who sat next to Hitler. Goerring sat next to him and said it first, in court:

“Hess? Which Hess? The Hess you have here? Our Hess? Your Hess?”

Clearly one of the lighter moments at the Nuremberg Trails. — Clearly one of the lighter moments at Nuremberg.

Eventually a 93 year old man who couldn’t move his arms higher than level with his shoulders ties a noose with electric cord and hangs himself from a window catch 1.4 metres above the ground.

A British nurse who arrived to find the body said that she wasn’t the first person there. She gave that honour to two people she was very specific in saying were dressed like American soldiers. She did not say that they were.

Except it’s not a fiction plot. We’re told that’s exactly what happened, with no logical inconsistencies whatsoever.

I don’t know what happened, or who he was, or whether he went insane, or whether it wasn’t him at all. But I’m finding out I don’t know. I think it’s important.

Double Vision

In 1941 Hitler’s deputy, the man second in rank only to the Fuhrer himself, did quite a strange thing. He flew right to the end of the fuel in the tanks of a twin-engined plane he’d been flying, right over Germany, the North Sea and most of Scotland and parachuted out to land in a field near Hamilton.

He announced himself to the farmer who held him at bay with a pitchfork as Captain Albert Horn and said he’d come to talk to the king. The farmer’s exact words are not recorded.

In 1945 Hitler was so annoyed with Goering asking if he should act on the order Hitler had given him that he ordered that he should be rounded-up and shot, along with his whole family. So it was a little surprising that Hitler’s reprisals against the Hess family were nothing at all.

Sitting in the dock at the Nuremberg Trials, Goering fell about laughing at Hess sitting next to him. Hess, for his part, totally failed to recognise someone who had worked with him daily. His wife had trouble recognising him although his handwriting matched pre-war Hess papers. This was the man who designed the final solution. Goering was sentenced to death and killed himself with cyanide. Hess was imprisoned for life. Over forty years later and although crippled with arthritis, he officially hanged himself with a piece of electric flex suspended 1.4 metres off the ground. Not high, but high enough for a man who couldn’t raise his arms above shoulder height.

Fourteen years before this suicide a British Army doctor made a quite astonishing assertion. He claimed that in his professional opinion, as someone who had seen more than enough bullet wounds in a medical career in Northern Ireland, whoever was the last prisoner in Spandau jail definitely was not the same person who had been shot through the chest in 1917, the way the records said Hess was.

If he didn’t believe it to be true then it was an odd thing to say, given it would finish his career in the Army and any future one in medicine.

I don’t know what is true and what isn’t in this story. Captain Horn, who didn’t seem to exist, made great play on his flight plan, flying rectangles in the North Sea, but seemed vague on why he had. What was more certain was that Horn asked to see the Duke of Hamilton, who he seemed to think had access to a network of British aristocrats who would one way or another side with Hitler and bring the war to a close.

Not entirely surprisingly, Hess/Horn found himself bundled off first to Warwick Castle en route to Trent Park interrogation centre, then to the tower of London, then to Spandau for the rest of his life. The very few people who ever saw him again had mixed reactions to him. His wife was surprised that his voice had got deeper. Not least that as men age their voices get higher. His interrogators worried that the prisoner was so unstable that he might well kill himself, which wouldn’t look good on their watch.

What was un-arguable was that there was a network of sympathisers with Hitler, which it didn’t suit anybody in England to be reminded of at the time. The Earl of Halifax, tipped for the Prime Minister’s job was a major figure arguing for an agreement with Mussolini. Prime Minister Chamberlain was instrumental in the annexation of Czechoslovakia. When Unity Mitford had a crush on Hitler and shot herself in Munich she magically and inexplicably to many turned up for treatment in hospital in England. Her sister Diana was more successful, marrying Sir Oswald Mosely, leader of the British Union of Fascists.

Reading about Unity Mitford today, I found some odd similarities with what her family said about her after the shooting and what Hess’ family said about him, when eventually, after years, they were allowed to see him: “Not only was her appearance shocking, she was a stranger, someone we did not know.”

Her sister continued “We brought her back to England in an ambulance coach attached to a train.” As one does, in the middle of WW11. It happened all the time, obviously. If they’d just stuck an Enigma machine on the train as well then it would all have been over by Christmas.

Every word of that is true. Hardly any word of that is remembered in a world where every plucky Tommy had the backing of the whole country behind him.

Every time I read it I think of Johnny Rotten kneeling at the edge of the stage, somewhere in America on a tour he hated, sneering “Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?” I do. So it seems do the Pathe News archivists, who have put inverted commas around Hess name on their website.

In another, rare colour recording, Hess disconcertingly talks of what he would have wished if he had known he would meet ‘ a fiery death.’ The kind you might meet in an airplane for example. Which is odd, given he was never in the airforce at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PO6Zk5qkYcA&feature=youtu.be

Hess’s story stuck in my mind for years. It’s just so odd, with so many loose ends, or apparently loose ends. Yesterday I decided, out of the blue, to write a version of it. The first two scenes are done, in a single afternoon’s work, even if that did turn out to be an eight-hour stretch.

It was and will be worth it. Writing it feels right. It’s about the only thing about the story that does.

Rabbit Ears and Rudolf Hess

Once upon a time I knew Trent Park quite well. In one of the periodic disaster periods of my life I took up running. I was living in Harringey, where although people ran to catch a bus or if they’d stolen someone’s purse, it wasn’t really the thing to do, back then.

Trent Park was pretty much the nearest big green place that wasn’t Finsbury Park and after saving some random girl from a flasher there (no, really. One morning on the way to work, since you ask) I didn’t much want to run there. Ditto Oak Hill Park where they dumped the body in Antonionionioni – I give up. Italian film-maker. Blow Up. Or so people said at the time.

trent-park

It meant going all the way out past Cockfosters, up Cat Hill where John Betjeman once taught at a school on the top, up out into the open fields of Middlesex. Just before the boundless promise of the M25 you turned right into parkland. Which was. Hidden behind the screen of trees and picnic areas was an old house that was something to do with the University of Middlesex. It’s now going to be sold off as what used to be called Yuppie flats. But before that, like the equally unlikely Warwick Castle, Trent Park was briefly home to Rudolf Hess. Debate-ably.

Radio 4 seemed surprised to broadcast, along with Helen Lederer, that as I’d found out twenty years previously, during WW11 important German officers and Rudolf Hess were taken after capture to Trent Park, not for a walk or a run but for a chat. Obviously, they didn’t give much away. Until they were back in their cells, when they did, unaware that it was now possible to listen-in on conversations using this new-fangled microphonic technology.

Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s deputy. To say he was important was something of an understatement. According to the official record, one day he decided to steal an airplane and fly to Scotland to have a chat with the Duke of Hamilton, who he thought might have a chat with Lord Halifax, who might have a chat with Churchill, who might call the war off. Nothing implausible there, obviously. Nor in the fact that this act of unarguable treachery wasn’t repaid by the liquidation of the entire Hess family, which was pretty much standard practice in Germany at the time. Nothing personal.

The debate over Rudolf Hess was always whether or not it was him at all, not least that the British Army surgeon detailed to look after him in Spandau Prison where he spent the last half of his life was adamant that the man he was looking after simply didn’t have the injuries that Rudolf Hess had received in France in 1917. Notwithstanding too that the old man’s voice had deepened with age, according to his wife, who didn’t initially recognise the man she visited, an odd exception to the rule that old men’s voices generally get higher as they age. If, of course, it was the same man.

There was nothing at Trent Park to tell the visitor any of this. Nothing to tell the students there that some of the people who’d stayed there were if not the architects of the Final Solution, had at least helped it on its way.

None of that was visible at all when I ran there. I remember the dew on the grass. The pink of rabbits ears on a hill with the sun behind them. The long drag back down to Green Lanes. The headline about Steve Marriot burning to death the year before. The church hall where a friend once saw The Who, before they were famous. According to Wikipedia today, Blow Up wasn’t filmed in north London at all. History changes. Trent Park too.

Behave, baby!