The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

The Hess «doppelgänger» theory was given credence in 1979 in The Murder of Rudolf Hess by Dr Hugh Thomas, a military surgeon who had examined Hess in Spandau prison six years before. To Thomas’s befuddlement, his examination of Prisoner Number Seven failed to detect the First World War bullet wound that Hess was known to have received. Thomas’s book prompted other researches, many of which ostensibly confirmed the doppelgänger thesis. Under influence of the truth drug sodium pentothal in 1944 at Maindiff Court, «Hess» apparently refused to recognize the names of intimates, including Karl Haushofer and Willy Messerschmitt. Then there was his bizarre inability at Nuremberg to remember former colleagues. Amnesia might account for these mental lapses; less easy to explain is the fact that the dental records of the Hess held in 1941 seem to belong to someone other than the person held at Maindiff in 1943. And why did Hess the prisoner at Spandau refuse to see his wife and son for 26 years?

Thomas hypothesizes that the real Hess was shot down (on Goring’s instructions) and that it was the doppelgänger Hess who arrived in Scotland in 1941. Aviation records, including testimony by Hess’s aircrew, refute this: Hess’s Me110 bore the identification code VJ OQ and the Messerschmitt which crashed in Scotland bore this marking. (A section of fuselage is on display in the Imperial War Museum, London.) A more plausible explanation is suggested by Peter Allen in The Crown and the Swastika (1983): the doppelgänger was substituted while Hess was in British custody. Allen cites in evidence the recollections of Charles Fraser-Smith, the intelligence service gadget-maker who was the inspiration for Q in the Bond movies. In the immediate aftermath of Hess’s arrest, Fraser-Smith was asked to make an identical copy of Hess’s uniform. Fraser-Smith could think of no reason for the request unless the uniform was to be worn by a double. According to him, MI6 held a top-level meeting in 1975 to discuss the identity of «Hess».

If the Hess incarcerated in Spandau was the doppelgänger, where was the real one? Intriguingly, Picknett, Prince and Prior suggest that the fate of the real Hess was tied into the mysterious plane crash which killed George, Duke of Kent, on 25 August 1942. On that day the Duke’s RAF Sunderland flying boat crashed into Eagle’s Rock, Caithness, Scotland, an event an MOD inquiry found to be caused by: «A/C [AIRCRAFT] BEING ON WRONG TRACK AT TO [SIC] LOW ALTITUDE TO CLEAR RISING GROUND … CAPT OF A/C CHANGED FLIGHT-PLAN FOR REASONS UNKNOWN & DESCENDED THROUGH CLOUD WITHOUT MAKING SURE HE WAS OVER WATER.»

The Duke’s flying boat was piloted by some of the RAF’s most experienced crew. By operational rules it should not have been flown over land. Immediately after the crash, the MOD announced that all 15 crew had been killed and their bodies recovered. A day later a survivor, Andy Jack, wandered dazed into a crofter’s cottage. That made 16 men aboard the doomed Sunderland, one more than the take-off complement. The extra man was, Picknett, Prince and Prior suggest, Hess himself, who had been picked up from a nearby loch by Kent, the king’s brother and a known softliner on Germany, with the intention of taking the Deputy Fuhrer to neutral Sweden. Kent’s Sunderland, it later transpired, had been painted white — the colour for flights to neutral countries. Numerous records relating to the Duke’s crash are missing from the Public Record Office.

A frequent objection to the doppelgänger theory is that the false Hess would never have admitted to war crimes at Nuremberg and accepted life in prison. He would have shouted his innocence to the court ceiling. Unless, that is, the false Hess had been brainwashed. This seems fanciful … until the success of the Russians in the 1930s Show Trials and the CIA with its MK-ULTRA programme is recalled.

Almost fittingly, the death of «Hess» in Spandau on 17 August 1987 was as much a mystery as his life had been. During a walk in the prison garden, Hess’s guard was called away to take a telephone call. When he returned he found Hess lying in the garden hut with electrical cable wound around his neck. Two days later a post-mortem by the British army concluded that that the cause of death was suspension (hanging).