Murder at Spandau
by Colin Jordan (1989)
Rudolf Hess, the Prisoner of Peace, was finally laid to rest in the family grave at Wunsiedel on the 17th March 1988. At a time then and now when a War Crimes Inquiry is being conducted in Britain, we specify as a war crime the retention of this peace envoy in custody in Britain from 1941-1945, and, derivatively so, his wrongful conviction by a tribunal of victors’ vengeance at Nuremberg in 1945-1946, and his consequent imprisonment in Spandau Prison in West Berlin from then till 1987; and, finally, his ultimate murder there in that year. For all this war criminality we principally accuse the deceitful and dishonourable government of the United Kingdom in its various composition throughout this time.
Prior to his flight to Britain, Rudolf Hess had been energetically engaged with Hitler’s knowledge and approval in seeking to end the conflict between Britain and Germany which both of them heartily deplored. Peter Allen, in The Crown and the Swastika (Robert Hale, London, 1983), claims that Rudolf Hess secretly met the Duke of Windsor in Portugal on the 28th July 1940, immediately after the fall of France, and that the latter approved German peace proposals presented by Hess as Hitler’s official representative.
The Duke was then tricked by the British government of warmonger Winston Churchill whose Minister of Information, Walter Monckton, flew to Lisbon, pretended that the British government was going to give serious consideration to the proposals, and on the strength of this persuaded the Duke to depart for a post in the Bahamas.
Manoeuvred out of the way in this mariner, the Duke had been manoeuvred off the British throne several years earlier, not only because of Mrs. Simpson, but because he was pro-Hitler wanted Anglo-German unity.
Hess’s son, Wolf Rudiger Hess, in My Father Rudolf Hess (W.H. Allen, London, 1986; p. 158), records that Albrecht Haushofer, assigned to do so by Hitler and Hess, met representatives of influential British circles in Geneva in August 1940, indicated that Britain was willing to make peace, if Germany cancelled the 1939 pact with Russia.
Hitler was in principle prepared to do this, but wished to wait until the complicated situation in the Balkans was clearer. However, the Churchill government was merely concerned to isolate Germany and her into conflict with Russia so that Churchill could achieve his long-standing aim of an alliance with Stalin against Hitler, something he had proposed to the Russian ambassador in London back in July 1934 (I.M. Maisky, Who Helped Hiller?; p. 55), and, according to J.F.C. Fuller in The Second World War, put forward on four occasions: March 1938, September 1938, 4th and May 19th 1939.
Hess’s son relates that in the winter 1940/1941, Albrecht Haushofer had discussions in Madrid with the British ambassador, Sir Samuel Hoare, through the medium of the Swedish Legation in Madrid (p. 80).
In January 1941 the Vice-President of the International Red Cross, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, received unofficial information from London that Britain was prepared to make peace, and on the 28th April 1941 Albrecht Haushofer went to Geneva to see Burckhardt on the orders of Hitler and Hess (p. 70).
It was during this period that Rudolf Hess, having conceived the desperate measure of a personal flight to Britain, had on the 10th January and the 30th April 1941 – prepared but been prevented from setting off, before finally doing the 10th May 1941. Also, Albrecht Haushofer had in September 1940 written to the Duke of Hamilton (with whom he had been in touch since 1936), at the suggestion of Rudolf to explore the way for negotiations.
This letter fell into the hands of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. Says David Irving in Churchill s War, Veritas, Australia, 1987; p. 650), according to Dr. Eduard Benes, ex-President of Czechoslovakia, the SIS saw the Haushofer approach as “an excellent opportunity”, sent a reply purporting to be from Hamilton, and further letters arranged for Hess to fly to the Duke’s estate.
As to Hitler’s prior knowledge of Hess’s flight on the 10th May 1941, according to Wulf Schwarzwäller (Rudolf Hess, Quartet, London, 1988; p. 156), Hess’s former adjutant, Alfred Leitgen, remembers overhearing snatches of a conversation between Hitler and Hess in which there was mention of Albrecht Haushofer and Hamilton, no problems with the aeroplane, and (from Hess) of declaring him insane.
The first German radio communiqué concerning Hess’s flight was not until the evening (20:00 hrs.) of the 12th May, suggesting that Hitler held his hand to see if Britain responded favourably to Hess’s mission.
Thereafter, as could be the pre-arranged protection, when it was seen that the mission was unsuccessful, the German authorities stated that Hess had become unbalanced.
Hess’s flight significantly occurred at a time when – contrary to the Allied picture of an unprovoked attack on Russia by Germany in late June of 1941 – Russia was preparing to make a surprise attack on Germany.
Ernst Topitsch, in Stalin’s War (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1987), assembles evidence that by late summer, 1941, preparations for a mass offensive against Germany would have been concluded. On page 106, Major General Grigorenko is quoted as saying, “More than half the troops of our Western Military Region were in the area round Bialystok to the West of that, that is in an area which projected into enemy territory. There could only be one reason for such a distribution, namely that these troops were intended for a surprise offensive.”
In Truth for Germany (Verlag für Volkstum und seitgeschichtsforschung, Viotho, West Germany; p. 411) Udo Walendy quotes H.A. Jacobsen & H. Dollinger, The Second World War in Pictures and Documents (Vol. 1, p. 372) as stating that Russia concentrated in her western territories up to June 1941 13 armies with more than 131 infantry divisions, 23 cavalry divisions, 36 motorised brigades and about 40 tank divisions with almost 4.7 million soldiers. Walendy (p. 416) also cites H.G. Seraphim’s The German-Russian Relations 1939-1941 (p. 85) that Russian General Vlassov stated in 1942 in Berlin after his capture, “The attack was intended for August/September 1941.”
Victor Suvorov, a former member of the Soviet General Staff, in an article in The Journal of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies (London; June 1985), assembled very detailed information to show that beginning in March, 1941, and assuming a huge scale in May and June, Soviet troops were being moved to and concentrated on the German border in preparation for a Soviet attack on Germany.
“If Hitler had not attacked first, Stalin would have had 23 armies and more than 20 independent corps facing him. This took place before general mobilisation.” Suvorov shows that the measures were clearly offensive, not defensive.
“It seems certain that the Soviet concentration on the frontier was due to be completed by 10 July. Thus the German blow which fell just 19 days earlier found the Red Army in a most unfavourable situation – in railway wagons.”
German intelligence certainly learned what was going on, this causing Hitler to consider a pre-emptive strike a necessity, and he set in motion preparations for this at the end of April, 1941, just before Hess’s flight. However, he only confirmed the final forward movement a month in advance, that is to say, after it had become clear that Hess’s mission had been unsuccessful; and both events shortly followed a Kremlin banquet on the 5th May at which Stalin announced in a supposedly secret speech – which German agents are said to have reported to Hitler almost at once – “Our war plan is ready… It follows that over the next two months we can begin the fight with Germany.” (Hitler’s War, David Irving, Viking Press, U.S.A.; 1977; pp. 238 & 239.)
Attempting to put together and interpret the items of information here presented so as to form a full picture of Hess’s flight, it seems evident that the flight was no self-contained impulse of purely personal initiative as is the common conception. It came after a long period of attempted negotiation to which Hitler was fully a party, and was most likely made with his approval. It came, furthermore, almost certainly in response to encouraging intimations from the British authorities, in part at least making use of the Duke of Hamilton, and amounting to giving the go-ahead green light; but all this on their part as merely a ruse to lure Hess to Britain, and this as part of Churchill’s design to bring Stalin into the war in alliance with Britain against Germany.
In this design Hess was conceived as the catalyst. Stalin for his part had made a pact with Hitler to encourage Hitler to confront the West. Now, in the ensuing war, hopes by Germany of an arrangement with Britain could both encourage Hitler to feel it opportune to fight Russia and, in turn, encourage Russia to feel it had to forestall such an attack, even though it would be far more to her advantage to attack a Germany still at war with the West. This assuredly is the key to the mystery.
Hess is likely to have brought over extensive peace proposals which have been hidden from the British public along with other aspects of his flight just discussed. His proposals were of course ignored, and he was kept in close custody ever afterwards in order to prevent his disclosure of the full background to his flight, his peace proposals, and his treatment in custody.
This happened despite the fact that Hess appears to have been in a position of a bearer of a Flag of Truce under Article 32 of the Hague Convention. This piece of international law protects such a person from being held as a prisoner of war, or put under any other form of confinement after negotiations. Churchill, it is to be noted in this connection, put Hess under the responsibility of the War Ministry as if in the category of a prisoner of war, instead of the Home Office, as would befit the bearer of a Flag of Truce.
Repeated reference has been made to the part played by Albrecht Haushofer. David Irving, in Rudolf Hess: The Missing Years 1941 – 45 (Macmillan, London, 1987; p. 57), states that he had prewar contact in London with the Special Intelligence Service.
Early in 1940 he was introduced into the Wednesday Society, a centre of German resistance to Hitler, says Hess’s son on p. 72 of his book. He was arrested in 1944 on suspicion of being involved in the July plot to murder Hitler and seize power; and he was shot just before the end of the war.
Much has been made of Hess’s alleged “abnormality” and “instability” during his imprisonment in Britain from the time of his arrival till, four years later, his transfer to Germany for trial. This portrayal was undoubtedly deceitfully done by the British authorities in order to discredit Hess and thereby his peace flight at a time when Churchill was fearful of the potential response in the country menacing his position. It stopped just short of declaring him positively insane, since this condition would have entitled him as a prisoner of war to repatriation under the Geneva Convention.
The “abnormality” and “instability”, where they were not a matter of a mere loss of memory which Hess feigned in order to protect his knowledge of confidential German matters under intensive questioning, was due to the wrongful and oppressive conditions to which he was subjected.
Although the Geneva Convention prohibited electronic eavesdropping on prisoners of war, apparatus was installed at Mytchett Place at Aldershot before he arrived (D. Irving, Rudolf Hess; p. 101). Military Intelligence 6 provided “companions” for Hess, including Zionist sympathiser, Major Frank E. Foley (p. 103), with the job of penetrating Hess’s mind, and seemingly drugs were used to this end (p. 107). Hence Hess’s repeated protests and recurrent fear that he was being “poisoned” which his captors paraded as proof of his unsoundness of mind.
Hess was put in the hands of a Jewish psychiatrist, RAMC Major R.V. Dicks who worked with MI6 (SIS), and who posed as a regular doctor, and who progressed to portraying Hess as of unsound mind. Dicks was by then the author of a new textbook, Analysis under Hypnotics, and he is known to have eventually injected Hess with the narcotic Evipan. (For these preceding facts, see Irving on Hess.) It has elsewhere been reported that documents in the U.S.A. indicated that behavioural peculiarities in Hess were caused by the administration of “truth drugs”. The British Foreign Office significantly refused a request by Hess’s wife that the International Red Cross be allowed to examine her husband.
Moved to Nuremberg in 1945, one of the panel appointed to pronounce on his fitness to stand trial there was a Prof. Ewen Cameron. This worthy was sponsored by the American Central Intelligence Agency to research brainwashing when he ran the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal from 1943 to 1967. While doing so it was alleged that, for one example, one patient was injected with LSD, put to sleep for up to 50 days at a time, given repeated electric shocks, made to wear a helmet with speakers through which instructions were endlessly conveyed to him; and ended up a physical and mental wreck. (Daily Telegraph, London, 12th September 1988.) Just imagine this had been a German in Hitler’s days, and what the Simon Wiesenthal Centre would have made of it now – and all the British media!
Hess’s continued incarceration from then till his death in 1987 – 41 years of his total caging for a monstrous 46 years – was arranged in order to exact the utmost in victors’ vengeance while, fully as importantly, gagging him from making known the truth about his flight which would have been most damaging to the British government.
The means to this end was the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, a creation of, by and for the victors regardless of real justice which it most flagrantly disregarded. For instance, Article 3 of its Charter disallowed objections that the judges, being nominated by the victors, were prejudiced. Article 6 allowed accusations only against representatives of the Axis Powers. Article 19 laid down that the Tribunal should not be bound by the technical rules of evidence.
Article 21 provided that proof was not required for what the prosecutors regarded as facts generally known. Britain’s Judge G. Lawrence refused to allow Hess’s counsel to discuss the Treaty of Versailles, even though the Prosecution had introduced the subject by arguing that the struggle for its revision had been a long-planned conspiracy against peace.
One of the American judges at Nuremberg, Francis Biddle, later revealed in the American Heritage journal, Vol. XIII, No. 5, August 1962, that the U.S. judges knowingly permitted the Soviet prosecutor to admit false evidence against the defendants. Hess was convicted – with the rich irony of a Russian judge reading out the findings against him – of “Crimes Against Peace” encompassing the following: – He had urged the importance of armaments, given support to military preparations, and signed the decree introducing conscription. He had been in Vienna when the German troops entered the city, and had signed the law for the union of Germany and Austria, having earlier made speeches in favour of this.
He had co-operated with the Sudeten National Socialists and after the incorporation of the Sudetenland in the Reich he had carried out the fusion of their party with the NSDAP.
In June, 1939, he had been authorised to participate in the administration of both Austria and the Sudetenland, and in August, 1939, he had given public approval to Hitler’s policy concerning Poland, and was a party to taking over Danzig and certain areas in Poland. As Hitler’s close confidant he must have known of and thus be responsible for Hitler’s “plans of aggression”. (See Irving on Hess.)
For this – comparable to what Western politicians have regularly done, and never been charged or punished for – the man who tried to make peace was convicted of violating peace, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Sent to Spandau Prison in West Berlin, conditions there were so bad that Pastor Casalis, a chaplain at the prison, said in November, 1948, that the prisoners were dying slowly of starvation. “Spandau,” he said, “has become a place of mental torture…” He spoke of “an atmosphere of refined sadism.”
Even when conditions later improved, Hess continued to be subjected to such harshly punitive restrictions as never to be allowed to touch his wife or son or grandchildren, and for over half of his total of 46 years behind bars he suffered the additional hardship of solitary confinement. Nevertheless, despite nearly half a century of such veritable torture, and despite the unsuccessful efforts of a French chaplain to get him to sign a declaration of remorse this Pastor Gabel had himself composed, he remained steadfast in his National Socialist beliefs and in his loyalty to and esteem for his friend and leader, Adolf Hitler. His martyred life ended on the afternoon of August 17th, 1987.
A succession of conflicting announcements as to where and how he died followed from the Allied authorities, exciting profound suspicion. Although the Americans were at the time in rotational charge of Spandau, the British insisted that the death be investigated solely by the Special Investigation Branch of the British Military Police, and that the post mortem be conducted by a British Army pathologist. This autopsy, performed two days later by Prof. James Cameron, indicated that death was due to suicide by hanging, but the Russians refused to countersign the verdict. At it, and not before and during the investigations by the Military Police, an alleged suicide note was discovered in the clothing of the corpse which, when he eventually obtained it, Hess’s son saw to be highly suspect, being scrawled on the back of an old letter from the son’s wife which lacked the usual prison stamp, and being without signs of having been in the pocket of a body very roughly handled in ostensible efforts at resuscitation which caused nine ribs and the breastbone to be broken, and the stomach to be blown up like a balloon because a tube for oxygen was wrongly inserted in the oesophagus instead of the windpipe. The piece of electric flex with which he was supposed to have hanged himself had been wiped clean with acetone by the time the Military Police investigating team arrived, and the British Military Governor of Spandau, Lt.-Col. A.H. Le Tissier later told the son’s wife that he had destroyed it.
A second autopsy, arranged by Hess’s family and conducted by Prof. W. Spann of Munich University found marks around Hess’s neck and throat which indicated he was throttled not hanged, while his hands showed he had not wound the flex round a hand to exert the necessary pressure on his neck for self-strangulation; the inescapable implication being that he had been murdered.
In support of this conclusion this second autopsy showed that the victim suffered from disabilities which virtually rendered him incapable of hanging himself – or, for that matter, strangling himself. According to various sources, including this second autopsy, Rudolf Hess so suffered from advanced arthritis and curvature of the spine – his left arm being of little use because of a frozen shoulder which prevented it being lifted above the horizontal in front and not even as high as that out to the side, his head being incapable of raising backwards to enable him to look up or of turning more than a few degrees to the left and halfway to the right – that he could never have reached above his head to tie a noose.
Furthermore, the muscles of the hands of this 93-year-old man were so weak that he had trouble gripping anything, and thus it was impossible for him to tie a knot to hang himself, or to apply the pressure necessary for self-strangulation (when in any event unconsciousness and consequent relaxation of the grip precedes and prevents death). Some other person or persons therefore killed him: that must be our verdict.
Whom could they be acting for? Was it the Russians whom Britain has always blamed for Hess’s continued imprisonment? The Russians, despite their fulminations against Hess on occasions, were on other occasions prepared to make use of him.
The German historian, Dr. Werner Maser, has asserted that back in 1952, on the night of March 17th, when the Russians were in charge of the prison, they took Hess to East Germany to a meeting with Kremlin officials at which Otto Grotewohl, the East German Prime Minister and Maser’s source of information, was present. There Hess was offered immediate freedom, if he would head a new party to reconcile former National Socialists to communist rule. Hess refused, and was returned to prison for 35 more years.
In April 1987, four months before his father’s murder, Wolf Rudiger Hess was amazed to find that his approaches to the Russians suddenly had a favourable response. He was summoned to the Soviet Consulate in West Berlin where officials hinted that his father’s imprisonment might soon end.
Also, on June 21st, 1987, in a reply to a listener in Germany, Radio Moscow (Department of German language broadcasts) wrote: “Recent remarks by the head of our government, Mikhail Gorbachev, permit the expression of hope that your long-time efforts in behalf of the release of war criminal Rudolf Hess may soon be crowned by success.”
It seems that Gorbachev did intend to release Hess unilaterally during a Soviet turn of administration at Spandau as a powerful propaganda stroke to exhibit to a nicety the kind tendencies of a reformed Soviet regime, even towards a notorious old enemy it had formerly fiercely denounced.
the Russians let the West German President know of their intention. He tipped of the British who expressed through him a resolute refusal to accept this.
The possibility of Hess’s release now put the British in a panic. Hitherto they had been able to rely on the Russian refusal to agree to Hess’s release as the means of keeping him and his secrets locked up forever, while they, in characteristically hypocritical style, posed as the forgiving ones favouring his release. What then is said to have happened according to information from American personnel at Spandau reaching German friends of theirs is as follows.
In an operation carried out in great haste to proceed even any advance announcement of Gorbachev’s intention, let alone its implementation, and thus accounting for flaws, two British Special Air Service men were put into the prison to kill Hess, and the American, French and Israeli secret services were acquainted beforehand, but not the Russian and West German.
These two assassins were spotted beforehand on the afternoon in question in the vicinity of the garden shed where Hess met his death.
In the region of 3:15 to 3:30, the American warder on duty to accompany Hess on his daily visit to the garden and there to the garden shed, was by a curious coincidence called away to answer a telephone call in the main cell block, leaving Hess in the garden shed.
During his absence the SAS men evidently attacked the old man who, despite his great age and great disabilities, put up a fight and these fiends tried to throttle him with flex, and then make it look like suicide. However, although rendered unconscious, the old man was still alive when the warder returned and summoned help. The U.S. officer in charge of the guard, seemingly a party to the assassination, called a British military ambulance which took Hess away, accompanied by the two SAS men who were seen getting into it. Hess then “died” on the way to the hospital. (Probably with further assistance from the assassins – our note.)
The guilty ones were well-protected from justice by the provisions of their masters. No public inquest, as normal under British law, was held because Hess, although in custody in the British sector of Berlin, was a prisoner of the four Allies, and any process concerning them on German soil requires the express permission of the Allied power or powers involved.
The West Berlin state prosecutor, “following information received from numerous sources,” initiated an enquiry into Hess’s death in February 1988, but it was suspended the following month (Independent, London, 18th March, 1988).
The Chairman of the British Bar’s European group commented at the time of Hess’s death that Rudolf Hess was incarcerated under a sentence imposed by an ad hoc tribunal with no legal status under any national law (Daily Telegraph, London, 20th August 1987).
Thus his custody – and all that followed from it, including his death – became a matter beyond and thus above the normal law by virtue of the inter-governmental pact of the victors setting up the tribunal. Murder at Spandau was thus by higher decree permissible.
To complete the shrouding of the case of the corpse, already so well-attended to, the British government’s Hess papers are placed beyond reach till 2017, and by then you can be sure that anything revealing will have conveniently disappeared.
Hugh Thomas, a former British Army surgeon assigned to Spandau, believes the prisoner was murdered, but also believes that he was not Rudolf Hess but a double sent by Himmler who had the real man murdered in 1941.
Thomas’s case principally rests on his claim that the prisoner did not have the scars he should have had due to a wound in the First World War. As against this, it is a fact that scar tissue in such an old man could be difficult to detect.
Also, for what it is worth, Mrs. Lynda Chalker, Minister of State at the Foreign Office, was reported in The Scotsman (26th February 1988) as stating that the British government had concluded on the basis of various studies and the British post mortem that the man was indeed Hess.
Additionally, the Sunday Times (12th June 1988) reported that Charles A. Gabel, the French chaplain at Spandau, had, in a book of his published in Paris in 1988, revealed that after Thomas first published his theory in 1979, two allied doctors visited Hess and did with difficulty find the wound scars. If Thomas is to be believed – and if thus it is to be believed that Hess’s wife and son have been deceived for decades as to the prisoner’s identity – we are still left with the conundrum which Thomas never really comes to grips with: why would such an imposter as the prisoner still hide the truth decades after the war, and thus acquiesce in his imprisonment till death – when the insertion of deliberate anomalies in his letters to relatives of Hess could easily be made the means of communicating his imposture? The absence of any satisfactory answer to this must discredit Mr. Thomas’s theory completely.
As the most recent important development in the case of Rudolf Hess’s death, a witness who was at Spandau at the time has come forward to testify that it was murder. Tunisian-born Abdallah Melaouhi was the victim’s nurse at Spandau for the last four years of his life, and thereby the closest person to him.
Interviewed on the Newsnight program of Britain’s BBC Television Channel 2 on the 28th February 1989, Melaouhi had this to say, according to an official transcript in our possession:– When shortly before his death, there were reports that the Russians were relenting and Hess would be freed, “Hess wasn’t very happy about it. Hess said, ‘Now something is going to happen to me.’… He told me ‘Mr. Melaouhi, now they are going to kill me’.”
On the 17th August 1987, Melaouhi was at lunch in the canteen adjoining the prison when a telephone call from the French warder summoned him back urgently. He returned immediately to the prison and rang the bell. Usually he was admitted right away, but on that day he had to wait for 15 minutes. When he was let in he found his way to the garden hut was blocked. Eventually he managed to get to it by a long way round, taking 40 minutes instead of four minutes the normal way.
He saw no cable around or anywhere near Hess’s neck and the extension cable with which the authorities say Hess hanged himself was still in his normal place, one end connected to the lamp and the other in the wall socket.
“His body was quite a distance away from the window where the TV claimed he hanged himself and the chair was in a totally different place from usual… I know the garden hut very well. The floor was covered with a straw mat but on that day everything was upside down as if a wrestling match had taken place. The armchair where Mr. Hess always sat had flown about three-and-a-half meters across the room, the lamp had fallen over. It was as if someone had tried to kill him and he’d tried to save himself.”
Melaouhi continued, “There were three people there, a warder who has been working in Spandau for eight years and two American soldiers, well they were dressed in American uniforms… (Our note: it would be hardly surprising if, in the circumstances of the American turn of duty, the SAS men had donned American uniforms with the connivance of the American authorities.)… I’d never seen soldiers near Hess before, and precisely on that day they were there.”
He explained that soldiers were in Spandau to guard the prison, not the prisoner, which was strictly the job of the civilian warders. Said Melaouhi: “Rudolf Hess was so weak he needed a special chair to help him to stand up. He walked bent over with a cane and was almost blind. If he ever fell to the ground, he couldn’t get up again. His hands were crippled with arthritis. He couldn’t tie his shoe laces, let alone lift his hands high enough to kill himself.”
Newsnight stated that Scotland Yard had been looking into the case for a month, following a visit by Hess’s son with evidence including a signed statement from Abdallah Melaouhi and the second autopsy report of Prof. Spann; but that so far there had been no attempt by the Metropolitan Police to contact either of these witnesses, and official sources close to the enquiry had said that “it is unlikely the case will be pursued.” (For readers wishing to tackle the Metropolitan Police on this, the address is New Scotland Yard, Broadway, London, SW1.)
Rudolf Hess Gesellschaft, Postfach 1122, D-8033 Planegg, West Germany, has now replaced the former society for the release of Rudolf Hess, and incorporates its former French counterpart.
It is an international association – President: Wolf Rudiger Hess – existing as a memorial to Rudolf Hess, and as such concerned with his work in Germany prior to his flight to Britain, the flight itself, his subsequent captivity, and the manner of his death. Two publications are in course of preparation.
Gothic Ripples, whose editor has campaigned for Rudolf Hess for 40 years, proposed that henceforth May 10th each year be observed worldwide as RUDOLF HESS DAY in honour of this truly great and greatly harmed idealist.
It was late on this day in 1941 that he landed in a field near to Floors Farm Cottage, itself near to Floors Farm near to Eaglesham House, the exact spot being marked by a stone. The area is a little south of Glasgow in Scotland. The Ordnance Survey Landranger Map 64 shows the spot as grid reference OS 561 540. Visitors to the spot should secure permission from the Farm or its Cottage before going on to the ground, taking care not to spoil things for others by in any way unnecessarily antagonizing the owner or occupant of the ground or other local people.
[This article first appeared in Gothic Ripples, April 1989. It later features on pages 40-53 in Liberty Bell, April 1990 (vol. 17, no. 8) a PDF of which can be downloaded here. It also featured in National Socialism: Vanguard of the Future (Selected Writings of Colin Jordan), Nordland Forlag, Aalborg, 1993. A PDF of the Colin Jordan Memorial Project edition can be downloaded here.]