On May 10th, 1941, Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer of Nazi Germany, climbed into a fighter plane and flew alone to Scotland. He was captured within hours and never free again. His wife, Ilse, and their three-year-old son, Wolf Rüdiger, had no idea he was going.
Ilse was in Munich that evening when she learned her husband had flown to Scotland. Within 48 hours, Berlin denounced Hess as mentally ill and erased his position as Deputy Führer. The marriage, in every sense the state understood, was over.
Ilse packed what she could and moved with her son to the family’s country house at Bad Oberdorf in the Allgäu Alps. Munich was exposed to Allied bombing, and with her husband publicly disowned, the Hess name no longer offered protection. She lived quietly there for the remainder of the war while Rudolf was held in British custody.
When Germany surrendered in May 1945, Hess was transferred for trial before the International Military Tribunal. On October 1st, 1946, he was convicted on counts of crimes against peace and conspiracy. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
On July 18th, 1947, Hess was transferred with six other convicted men to Spandau Prison in West Berlin. Ilse’s own situation had already collapsed. On June 3rd, 1947, she was arrested with the wives of the other Nuremberg defendants and sent to an internment camp.
Wolf Rüdiger, now nine, was sent to live with an aunt. The boy whose godfather had been Adolf Hitler was now the son of a Nuremberg prisoner. A denazification tribunal classified Ilse as a follower, and she was released on March 24th, 1948. Mother and son were reunited.
Rudolf Hess made it clear he did not want his family to visit him in prison. He said Spandau’s conditions were not fit for his wife to see. For 28 years, he held to that position. Ilse made the best of what she had.
In 1952, she published a book compiling her correspondence with her husband. It presented Hess as a loving husband wrongly imprisoned for a peace mission. An English edition, titled Prisoner of Peace, was published in 1954.
In 1955, Ilse opened a pension in Bad Hindelang in the Allgäu. She ran the guesthouse for years, receiving guests who ranged from ordinary holiday makers to far-right sympathizers. Among her long-term correspondents was Winifred Wagner, a close friend of Hitler who never renounced that loyalty.
Wolf Rüdiger grew up against this backdrop. He enrolled at the Technical University of Munich in the mid-1950s and qualified as an architect in 1961. He built a private practice and started a family with his wife Andrea.
On October 1st, 1966, Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach were released from Spandau. Rudolf Hess was left alone. The 600-cell prison continued to operate for its single inmate at an annual cost of 800,000 Deutschmarks.
In 1967, Wolf Rüdiger began a formal public campaign for his father’s release. He gave interviews, lobbied politicians, and argued that a 73-year-old man in solitary confinement had served his sentence several times over. The British, French, and American governments gave signs of sympathy. The Soviet Union blocked every proposal.
In December 1969, Hess was admitted to a British Military Hospital with a perforated ulcer. He was 75 years old, in severe pain, and for the first time since May 1941, he agreed to let his family come. Ilse, now 69, walked into the hospital room with Wolf Rüdiger, who was 32.
After he recovered, Hess permitted regular visits for the first time. Family members were allowed 30 minutes per month, separated from the prisoner by a chest-high partition. No physical contact was permitted. A guard stood throughout, and topics were monitored.
Andrea Hess, Wolf Rüdiger’s wife, became a welcome addition to the visiting roster. She brought photographs and small films of the couple’s three children. The grandchildren themselves were not permitted to visit together.
Wolf Rüdiger turned the campaign into a second profession. He gave press conferences, wrote to heads of state, and used every anniversary to press for his father’s release. Every attempt ran into the same wall. The Soviet Union refused, and because Spandau was administered by all four powers, one veto was enough.
On April 26th, 1984, Hess celebrated his 90th birthday inside Spandau. Wolf Rüdiger visited for an hour and told reporters his father was in good humor. West German and Allied diplomats discussed release again. Moscow said no, again.
On August 17th, 1987, Hess was found dead in a summer house in the prison garden. He was 93 years old. An electrical extension cable had been strung over a window latch, and a short note addressed to his family was found in his pocket. He was pronounced dead at the British Military Hospital at 4:10 p.m.
Within days of the death, Wolf Rüdiger rejected the official account. He and family lawyer Alfred Seidl argued that a 93-year-old man, too frail to tie his own shoes, could not have hanged himself with an extension cable. A second autopsy found injuries consistent with strangulation, though the examiner stopped short of saying a third party had been involved.
The Four Powers Authority ruled the death a suicide on September 17th, 1987. Spandau Prison was demolished within weeks. The rubble was crushed and scattered in the North Sea to prevent the site from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.
Hess was initially buried at an undisclosed location. On March 17th, 1988, his body was reinterred at the family plot in Wunsiedel. The gravestone carried the family motto, “Ich hab’s gewagt,” meaning “I have dared.”
Wolf Rüdiger spent the rest of his life arguing that his father had been murdered by British intelligence. He wrote three books advancing the theory and headed the Rudolf Hess Gesellschaft, a memorial society that operated at the edge of Germany’s organized far right.
In 2007, six years after his death, declassified British files showed the opposite of everything he had campaigned on. London had been pushing for Hess’s release for years. The Soviets had blocked it. The murder plot had no documentary foundation at all.
Ilse Hess died in Munich on September 7th, 1995 at the age of 95. She was buried beside her husband at Wunsiedel. Wolf Rüdiger died of a stroke in a Munich hospital on October 24th, 2001, aged 63, survived by Andrea and their three children.
By then, the Wunsiedel grave had become Germany’s most visited neo-Nazi pilgrimage site. In 2005, the Bundestag amended the incitement law specifically to ban the annual marches. The Wunsiedel parish council refused to renew the grave’s lease when it expired in 2011.
After a legal challenge by Hess’s granddaughter, the family eventually agreed. On July 20th, 2011, the grave was opened at dawn. The remains were cremated and the ashes scattered at sea by family members. The gravestone was destroyed.
In 2019, DNA testing by researchers at the University of Salzburg confirmed with 99.99% certainty that the Spandau prisoner had been Rudolf Hess. The body double theory had been the one conspiracy his son never wrote a book about. By 2019, science had closed that door, too.