On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. Within months, Nazi Party leaders began dismantling German democracy, eliminating political opposition, and turning the country into a dictatorship. Jews and other groups the regime deemed enemies faced exclusion and persecution, subjected to increasingly state-sponsored violence. At the same time, the new Chancellor rewarded the men who had followed him through his long struggle for power.
Among Hitler’s closest men was Rudolf Hess, one of his earliest and most devoted followers. In April 1933, Hess was appointed Deputy Führer of the Nazi Party, elevating him to the highest ranks of the dictatorship that now controlled Germany. But Rudolf Hess was not alone in his fanatical loyalty. At home stood a woman whose commitment to National Socialism had begun long before her husband reached the pinnacle of power.
She had joined the Nazi Party more than a decade before Hitler came to power, belonged to his close social circle, and had married Rudolf with the future dictator present as a witness. Even when the Third Reich lay in ruins, millions were dead, and her husband was imprisoned as a convicted war criminal, she refused to abandon the beliefs that had shaped both their lives. Her name was Ilse Hess. Born Ilse Pröhl on 22 June 1900 in Hanover, then part of the German Empire, she grew up as one of three daughters in a wealthy, conservative, and patriotic family.
Her father, Friedrich Pröhl, was a doctor. In March 1920, he was killed during the Kapp Putsch, a failed attempt by right-wing forces to overthrow the Weimar Republic, which had emerged after the fall of the German Empire in 1918. Her mother, Elsa, later married the portrait painter Karl Horn, who was director of the art academy in the city of Bremen. Ilse studied German literature and library science at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, belonging to the first generation of women allowed to study at university.
In April 1920, while living in a boarding house in Munich, the nineteen-year-old Ilse met another student who would change the course of her life. His name was Rudolf Hess. With his tall stature and striking appearance, Hess was a reserved young man, unusually introverted. Over the following years, other peculiarities emerged, including an obsession with his health, unconventional treatments such as homeopathy and herbal remedies, and a growing fascination with astrology.
Ilse was immediately drawn to Rudolf Hess, but he repeatedly avoided entering into an intimate relationship with her. For years, he kept her waiting, and their relationship remained largely platonic. Ilse’s social connections also played an important role in Hess’s political development. Through her acquaintances in Munich, she helped introduce him to Adolf Hitler, who frequently frequented the social circles of wealthy women.
Hess soon became fascinated with Hitler and joined the Nazi Party in July 1920. Ilse’s personal commitment to the movement quickly became unmistakable. In early 1921, she openly declared her extreme antisemitism in a letter. She described the Nazi Party as firmly rooted in German nationalism, adding: “We are antisemitic and constantly, without allowing any exceptions.
” That same year, Ilse also joined the Nazi Party. While their personal relationship remained unusually distant, their shared devotion to Hitler and National Socialism increasingly bound Ilse and Rudolf together. In November 1923, Adolf Hitler and his followers attempted to seize power in Munich in what became known as the Beer Hall Putsch. After the failed uprising, the Nazi Party was banned later that month.
Rudolf Hess participated in the failed uprising and was subsequently imprisoned with Hitler at Landsberg Prison, about sixty kilometers west of Munich. During their imprisonment, Ilse remained closely involved. She traveled by bicycle between Munich and Landsberg to collect handwritten materials related to the manuscript that became Hitler’s political manifesto, Mein Kampf. Upon returning to Munich, she typed the materials on a typewriter, helping prepare the book that would become one of the central texts of National Socialism.
After the Nazi Party was refounded in February 1925, Ilse formally joined it in December of that year. Still, her relationship with Rudolf remained unconventional. Despite having known each other for years, the two remained unmarried. Adolf Hitler encouraged them to formalize their relationship.
On 20 December 1927, Ilse and Rudolf married in Munich. Hitler and Rudolf’s former university professor, Karl Haushofer, attended the wedding as witnesses. Even marriage did little to change the unusual nature of their relationship. The marriage largely lacked physical intimacy, and the couple waited nearly another decade before having their only child.
After Hitler came to power in 1933, the couple’s status changed dramatically. Rudolf’s appointment as Deputy Führer placed him among the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party, while Ilse became part of the privileged social world surrounding the regime’s leadership. In 1935, Rudolf acquired a large estate in Harlaching, an affluent residential district in southern Munich. The existing villa was significantly expanded, providing the Hess family an increasingly distinguished lifestyle.
Their comfortable life stood in stark contrast to the persecution unfolding across Germany, where Jews, homosexuals, political opponents, and other targeted groups were stripped of their rights, arrested, and sent to concentration camps. On 18 November 1937, nearly ten years after their marriage, Ilse gave birth to their only child, a son named Wolf Rüdiger Hess. Hitler became the boy’s godfather, a connection reflected even in his name. “Wolf” was a nickname Hitler had used since the early years of the Nazi movement.
The birth was treated as more than a private family event. Regional Nazi leaders were instructed to send soil from their areas to the Hess family. The earth was scattered under the child’s cradle, allowing him symbolically to begin his life on soil collected from all over Germany. World War II broke out on 1 September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland.
Less than two years later, Rudolf Hess made a decision that would abruptly end his political career and permanently separate him from his wife. On 10 May 1941, without Hitler’s authorization, Hess flew alone from Augsburg in a Messerschmitt Bf 110, a twin-engine German military aircraft, across the North Sea toward Scotland. He hoped to contact the Duke of Hamilton, whom he believed could help arrange peace negotiations between Germany and Britain. After reaching Scotland that night, Hess abandoned his aircraft and parachuted south of Glasgow, where he was quickly taken into British custody.
The flight stunned the Nazi leadership. Hitler publicly distanced himself from his former deputy, and German propaganda portrayed Hess as mentally disturbed. Ilse did not even know whether her husband had survived. Only on 14 May did German radio confirm that he was alive and held in Britain.
Despite Hitler’s fury over Rudolf’s actions, Ilse and her son were not punished. She remained under the Führer’s protection, and arrangements were made to ensure the family continued receiving financial support. In 1943, a Royal Air Force air raid destroyed the Hess family home in Munich. Ilse and her son moved to a summer house in the village of Bad Oberdorf in southern Germany.
She continued to receive financial support, including a fixed pension of 1,500 Reichsmark, roughly equivalent to 11,500 dollars in today’s money. Even during the final weeks of the Third Reich, Ilse continued to benefit directly from the regime she had supported. On 20 March 1945, a small subcamp of Dachau concentration camp was established on the property where she was living. It held only one prisoner, Friedrich Georg Frey, a Jehovah’s Witness whom the Nazi regime had imprisoned since 1937.
Frey was transferred there for forced labor at Ilse’s house, remaining until 29 April 1945. He later made no statements about how Ilse treated him personally. During her interrogation, Ilse claimed that Frey slept inside the house, did not have to wear prisoner clothing, and shared the family’s evening meals. By that time, the regime to which Ilse had devoted herself for more than two decades was collapsing around her.
Rudolf remained a prisoner in Britain. Their Munich home was lost, and Allied forces were advancing into Germany. But the defeat of National Socialism did not end Ilse Hess’s loyalty to its ideas. World War II in Europe ended on 8 May 1945.
After Germany’s defeat, Rudolf Hess was transferred from Britain to stand trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. In October 1946, he was convicted of conspiracy and crimes against peace and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was transferred to Spandau Prison in West Berlin the following year. Ilse also faced arrest.
On 3 June 1947, she was taken into custody and transferred to a camp in Augsburg. She was released on 24 March 1948 and settled in the Allgäu region of southern Germany, where she opened a guesthouse in 1955. Nevertheless, her political convictions remained steadfast, and Ilse stayed loyal to Hitler and National Socialism. She supported Stille Hilfe, an organization that aided imprisoned and convicted Nazis, and published books about her husband through the far-right Druffel publishing house.
She also corresponded with Winifred Wagner, the daughter-in-law of the composer Richard Wagner, another longtime admirer of Hitler. Meanwhile, Rudolf remained imprisoned at Spandau, where for more than two decades he refused to receive visits from his family. When former armaments minister Albert Speer and former Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach were released in October 1966, Hess became the prison’s only remaining inmate. Still, Ilse continued to defend her husband publicly.
In a 1967 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, she rejected claims that Rudolf was mentally ill and offered her own explanation for his behavior and imprisonment. She even claimed that Winston Churchill had ordered her husband to be drugged after his arrival in Britain to extract state secrets from him. Only in 1969 did Rudolf finally agree to see his family after becoming seriously ill and being transferred to the British military hospital in West Berlin. On Christmas Eve, 24 December, Ilse and their thirty-two-year-old son visited him there.
It was the first time Ilse had seen her husband since his flight to Scotland more than twenty-eight years earlier, and the first time their son had seen his father since he was three and a half years old. Afterward, Rudolf allowed regular family visits under Spandau Prison rules, which permitted thirty minutes once a month. Rudolf Hess remained imprisoned for the rest of his life. On 17 August 1987, the ninety-three-year-old was found dead in Spandau Prison.
The official investigation concluded that he had committed suicide by hanging. Although his family disputed this conclusion, Spandau Prison was demolished shortly afterward to prevent it from becoming a shrine for neo-Nazis. Ilse survived her husband by eight years. By then, she had come to be described as the “eternal Nazi widow,” a title reflecting the extraordinary steadfastness of her political loyalties.
She never publicly abandoned the ideology she had embraced in her youth. From the beginning of the Nazi movement in Munich to the decades spent defending her imprisoned husband, her convictions remained strikingly consistent. Ilse Hess died on 7 September 1995 in the town of Lilienthal, Germany.
She was ninety-five years old.