Death of Rudolf Hess
End of the Third Reich and the Nazi Leaders
What happened to the leading figures of the Third Reich? How and when their stories come to an end? And what kind of an end it was?
Rudolf Hess
Adolf Hitler's deputy in the Nazi Party, minister without portfolio.Date of death: 1987-08-17, age 93.
Cause of death: Suicide - By self-asphyxiation, accomplished by tying the cord to a window latch in the prison summer house.
On the eve of war with the Soviet Union, he flew to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate peace. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Attempted suicide at least twice before, in 1941 by flinging himself from a balcony and in 1977 by cutting his wrists with a table knife.
MI5 foiled Polish plot to kill Hess -- The arrival of Hess (flight to Britain) near the Duke of Hamilton’s Lanarkshire estate in 1941 raised the question of whether British intelligence or members of the aristocracy were trying to broker a secret peace deal with the Nazis. Although such theories subsequently proved unfounded, some British-based Polish soldiers feared Hess’s arrival showed their country was being sold. A group of Polish conspirators from Fort William were determined to prevent a deal between Britain and Germany over their homeland, according to the personal diaries of Guy Liddell, the director of MI5 counter-espionage. In the summer of 1941, 17 Polish officers and two British accomplices planned to travel south to Aldershot, where Hess was being held at a secret base. They made it only as far as the railway station before they were intercepted by MI5.
U.S. Army colonel Eugene K. Bird was a director of Spandau Prison from 1964 to 1972, and he felt he had known Hess better than any living person since 1941. Years later, he seriously questioned allied accounts of how Hess had hanged himself in a prison garden hut. "I was suspicious for several reasons. After all, Hess who had been held in Spandau for almost 30 years was by then 93-years-old and fragile. I doubted he had the strength to kill himself with a cord which was not attached at both ends to anything." Bird shocked Allied authorities during the Cold War era by writing a book clandestinely about Rudolf Hess, then the sole inmate of Spandau Prison. Bird freely admitted he had consulted Hess secretly in his prison cell while working on the text. Bird wrote that Hess remained unrepentant about his Nazi era actions to the end. Hess told: "I would travel the same route and end up here in Spandau. My sincere desire from the beginning was to bring Germany back to the old heights which it had attained before the First World War - before the Versailles Diktat, which was wrong. I wanted to give Germany back its old pride and its old fame."
Music group "Prussian Blue", 13-year-old twin girls Lamb and Lynx Gaede, tributed their song "Sacrifice" to Rudolf Hess. The lyrics praise Hess as a "man of peace who wouldn't give up."