On the afternoon of August 17, 1987, a 93-year-old man was found collapsed in a garden summerhouse within Spandow Prison in West Berlin. An electrical extension cord was wrapped around his neck. The official conclusion was suicide. The prisoner was Rudolph Hess, once the deputy of Adolf Hitler, and for the previous twenty-one years the sole inmate of a prison complex maintained by four occupying powers at enormous expense.
His death should have closed the family’s long ordeal. Instead, it opened a new one that would not end until his ashes were scattered at sea. Rudolph Hess was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1894, the eldest son of a prosperous German merchant family. He served in the First World War, first as an infantryman and later as a fighter pilot, and was left by Germany’s defeat humiliated and searching for someone to blame.
In 1920, he heard Hitler speak and became, by his own account, something close to a religious convert. He joined the Nazi Party within weeks, becoming member number sixteen, and remained devoted to Hitler with an intensity that unsettled even his fellow Nazis. Around the same time, Hess met Ilse Pröhl, a fellow student in Munich, in the spring of 1920. Ilse was intelligent and independent, one of the first women to study at the University of Munich, and the daughter of a physician killed in the First World War.
She was drawn to Hess, but he was a reluctant suitor, consumed by politics. It was Ilse who introduced Hess more deeply into Hitler’s social circle, and Hitler eventually pushed the couple toward marriage. They wed on December 20, 1927, with Hitler as a witness. Their only child, a son named Wolf Rüdiger, was born ten years later, on November 18, 1937.
The name Wolf was one of Hitler’s private code names, and Hitler agreed to serve as the boy’s godfather. By the time his son was born, Hess had risen to become one of the most powerful men in Germany. As Deputy Führer, he held enormous authority over party affairs and legislation. He was, by most accounts, a devoted family man in private, affectionate toward his wife and besotted with his young son, whom he nicknamed Buz.
But the war Hitler unleashed would tear the family apart in a way nobody could have predicted. On May 10, 1941, without informing Hitler or anyone else, Hess climbed into a Messerschmitt Bf 110 and flew solo toward Scotland, intending to parachute in and negotiate a peace settlement with the British through the Duke of Hamilton, a man he had never met. The mission was a catastrophic failure. Hess crash-landed, was quickly captured by a Scottish farmer, and spent the rest of the war as a British prisoner.
Hitler, enraged and humiliated, denounced his once-favored deputy as mentally unstable and stripped him of every title. For Ilse and her three-year-old son, the consequences were immediate. They left Munich and retreated to the family’s house in the countryside at Bad Oberdorf, where Wolf Rüdiger spent most of his childhood, gaining the nickname that would follow him for the rest of his life. When the war ended in 1945, Hess was transferred to face trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, charged alongside Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, and the rest of the surviving Nazi leadership.
The trial exposed just how strange his detention had become. He suffered from bouts of genuine or feigned amnesia, paranoid delusions that his food was being poisoned, and periods of psychological collapse so severe that some questioned whether he was fit to stand trial. In the end, the tribunal convicted him on two of four counts, crimes against peace and conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, but acquitted him of war crimes and crimes against humanity, largely because his solo flight had removed him from any direct role in the Holocaust. On October 1, 1946, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
For his wife and son, this meant an indefinite limbo. Ilse herself was arrested in June 1947 as part of the Allied denazification process. Wolf Rüdiger, not yet ten, was sent to live with an aunt. Ilse was released in March 1948, and the two were reunited, though the family’s finances and social standing had been devastated.
Hess forbade his wife and son from visiting him for years. They would not lay eyes on him again until December 1969, when he was hospitalized for a perforated ulcer. Wolf Rüdiger was thirty-two. Ilse was sixty-nine.
Twenty-eight years had passed since they had seen him. That hospital reunion changed things. Once visits resumed, Ilse and Wolf Rüdiger became regular presences in his life, though the visits were tightly supervised and limited to thirty minutes per month. It was also around this time that Wolf Rüdiger’s campaign to win his father’s freedom began in earnest.
In 1967, he founded an organization dedicated to the cause, and by 1974, a petition he had launched carried some 350,000 signatures. None of it worked. The obstacle was the Soviet Union, which repeatedly vetoed any proposal to release Hess, regardless of his advanced age. Moscow had a permanent institutional foothold in a city it did not otherwise control, and Soviet leadership believed Hess had known in advance about the coming German invasion of the USSR.
No length of time could fully repay that betrayal in their eyes. Hess’s fellow inmates were released one by one over the years. By 1966, he was the sole remaining prisoner, the most expensive prisoner in the world on a per-inmate basis. His mental and physical health continued to deteriorate, and in 1969, the perforated ulcer finally reopened contact with his family.
After his death in 1987, Wolf Rüdiger refused to accept the official explanation. The family’s lawyer argued that a man of ninety-three with severely limited mobility in his hands due to arthritis would have been physically incapable of tying an electrical cord to a window latch and strangling himself. Wolf Rüdiger built an entire alternative narrative around this claim, insisting his father had been murdered by the British Secret Intelligence Service. The independent autopsy he arranged never produced definitive evidence, and successive official inquiries concluded the existing evidence did not support the murder theory.
Wolf Rüdiger never abandoned his belief. Ilse Hess, meanwhile, had transformed herself from a wife waiting anxiously for news into one of the most determined and controversial authors in postwar Germany. In 1954, she published Prisoner of Peace, framing her husband not as a war criminal but as a tragic peacemaker who had sacrificed his freedom in a doomed attempt to end the war early. She never remarried and never wavered in her devotion to his memory.
She died on September 7, 1995, at the age of ninety-five, and was buried beside her husband in the family plot at Wunsiedel, the small Bavarian town his ancestors had called home since the eighteenth century. Almost from the moment Hess’s remains arrived there, the grave began attracting attention of a very unwelcome kind. Neo-Nazi groups organized annual marches to the town every August, treating the grave less as a family memorial and more as a shrine. At their peak, the marches brought as many as two and a half thousand participants into a town of barely nine thousand residents.
German authorities eventually restricted and then effectively banned the annual marches by the mid-2000s, but the grave itself retained its symbolic pull. In 2011, when the lease on the family burial plot came up for renewal, the local Evangelical Lutheran Parish Council declined to renew it. The decision required consent from surviving members of the Hess family, and it was one of Wolf Rüdiger’s grandchildren who ultimately gave her consent, reportedly stating that she wanted nothing more to do with the grave or the controversy surrounding it. In the early hours of July 20, 2011, before dawn, cemetery workers quietly exhumed the remains of Rudolph Hess.
His gravestone was removed and destroyed. His remains were cremated, and his ashes were scattered at sea at a location deliberately not disclosed to the public. Ilse Hess’s remains were also removed and handled in a similarly discreet and permanent fashion, ending the physical presence of both husband and wife in German soil entirely.
The family that had spent three generations either defending or being defined by the Hess name had chosen, in the end, to let go of the physical remnant of a legacy that had brought them nothing but decades of struggle and public scorn.