In 1987, the last prisoner in a West Berlin prison designed for over six hundred inmates was a 93-year-old man. He had been inside for forty years, and for the last two decades he had been completely alone within its walls. At a glance, he might have appeared as a pitiable relic. But he was the last Nazi in prison: Rudolf Hess, once the deputy führer of the Third Reich, the man who for years stood as Adolf Hitler’s closest administrative ally.
Hess’s road to that solitary cell began far from Berlin, in 1894, when he was born to a wealthy German family in Alexandria, Egypt. When World War I broke out in 1914, the twenty-year-old Hess joined the German army and served in the same division as Hitler, though the two did not meet during the conflict. He fought in major engagements including Verdun, was wounded at least three times, and was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. Like many Germans of his generation, he was shattered by the surrender of 1918.
He refused to accept the defeat as military failure, instead blaming a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy, a belief that would drive his political radicalization. In the years after the war, Hess joined right-wing anti-Semitic groups, including the Thule Society and the Freikorps. At Munich University he studied under geopolitics professor Karl Haushofer, who introduced him to the concept of Lebensraum, the idea that Germany should conquer territory in the east for the betterment of the German people. Hess would become the key bridge between Haushofer’s ideas and Hitler, and Lebensraum soon became a pillar of Nazi ideology.
In 1920, Hess joined the Nazi Party after hearing Hitler speak at a Munich rally. He was the sixteenth member, and he quickly became a devoted follower and eventually a friend of Hitler. Their bond strengthened during the months both spent in Landsberg prison after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Hess was present while Hitler dictated his political manifesto, and although the exact extent of his contribution is debated, he certainly shared and discussed geopolitical ideas with Hitler during that time.
When Hitler became chancellor in 1933 and then führer in 1934, he named Hess deputy führer, a position that answered only to Hitler himself. Hess became the administrative right-hand man, overseeing party education, finance, and foreign affairs, opening speeches for Hitler, organizing propaganda events, and drafting and signing key Nazi laws. He was most notably involved with the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped German Jews of their rights and prohibited marriage between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. In a strange irony, Hess’s old professor Karl Haushofer was married to a half-Jewish woman, and Hess drafted a document exempting him from the ban.
But Hess’s influence did not last. His eccentric beliefs in astrology, telepathy, and mesmerism led many within the party to view him as mentally unstable, and by the outbreak of World War II he had been pushed to the fringes. Hitler officially named Hermann Göring as his successor in 1939. Martin Bormann, Hess’s own chief of staff, took over many of his responsibilities.
While the rest of the Nazi leadership focused on the war, Hess was reduced to a symbolic figure, still technically third in command but increasingly irrelevant. By 1941, Hess could not accept this decline. He quietly questioned Germany’s prospects of fighting a war on two fronts. The Battle of Britain had failed, and Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, was about to begin.
Hess felt he had to do something drastic, both to win back Hitler’s favor and to save Germany from disaster. He convinced himself that Britain had to be neutralized before Germany pushed east, and he began planning what became one of the strangest episodes of World War II: a secret solo peace mission to Britain. On May 10, 1941, Hess boarded a modified Messerschmitt Bf-110 and flew for Scotland. His target was Dungavel House, the residence of the Duke of Hamilton.
Haushofer had told Hess that King George VI was opposed to Churchill and that the Duke, who knew Haushofer’s son, might serve as a channel to the King. Hess believed the Duke was against the war with Germany and offered the best chance at peace talks. Hess flew low to avoid British radar but was eventually detected, and RAF aircraft were sent to intercept him. Before they could shoot him down, he jumped and parachuted onto a farm about twelve miles from the Duke’s residence, injuring his foot on landing.
A local farmer discovered him, and he was soon arrested. When questioned, he insisted that he had come to make peace between Britain and Germany. Back in Germany, Hitler was enraged. He did not see the flight as a courageous mission.
He feared how his allies, Italy and Japan, would react, worried they might see it as an attempt to broker a peace behind their backs. Hitler publicly condemned Hess, instructed the press to label him a madman acting alone, stripped him of all titles and party ranks, and secretly ordered that Hess be executed on sight if he ever returned to Germany. The führer had abandoned him completely. Hess had convinced himself that Hitler would support peace talks, perhaps because Hitler had attempted negotiations with Churchill in 1940 after the fall of France, which Churchill had refused.
By mid-1941, though, Hitler had no interest. The war was going well for Germany. The military was at its peak strength, preparing to invade Russia. Most of Europe was under Nazi control, and America was not yet officially involved.
The British, for their part, had no interest in peace either. They were baffled by Hess’s insistence that his mission would prevent more bloodshed, a massive misjudgment of Churchill’s determination. Hess was refused any audience with the King, and any prospect of peace talks was flatly denied. Hess then underwent psychological evaluation.
The verdict was harsh: he was described as psychopathic, schizoid, pathetic, and pitiful. Days after being refused the audience with the King, he tried to kill himself, launching himself over a banister in the building where he was held, likely out of the realization that his efforts had failed. He only broke his leg. In 1942, he was moved to Maindiff Court Military Hospital in Wales, where he remained until the end of the war.
In 1945, Hess was reunited with other surviving Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, where they were put on trial for war crimes. By the time the trials began in November 1945, he was a shadow of his former self, weighing only 65 kilograms, or 143 pounds, on his 5-foot-9 frame. His weight loss was largely attributed to paranoia during his British captivity, during which he repeatedly claimed the British were trying to poison his food. His mental state was worse.
During the trials, he claimed amnesia. The chief psychiatrist at Nuremberg judged that Hess suffered from a true psychoneurosis and a paranoid and schizoid personality, with the amnesia partly genuine and partly feigned. Hess later admitted that he had lied about some of his memory loss as a tactic, likely to gain sympathy and avoid a death sentence. Throughout the trial, he showed no remorse.
He said he was proud that he had fulfilled his duty to party, nation, and führer, and coldly stated that if given his time again, he would change nothing. Despite the theatrics, Hess was found guilty of crimes against peace and conspiracy and was sentenced to life in prison. He was found not guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, which saved him from the death penalty. The fact that he had been in custody since 1941 was used in his defense regarding some of the atrocities committed later in the war.
In a bizarre way, his desperate flight to Britain had saved his life. In July 1947, the fifty-three-year-old Hess arrived at Spandau Prison in West Berlin. Initially, six other prominent Nazis were imprisoned with him. One by one, they were released, either after completing their sentences or due to poor health.
By 1966, Hess was the only one left, the sole prisoner in a facility built for six hundred. Spandau lay in the British sector of West Berlin but, under the four-power agreement of 1945, was jointly controlled by the United States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. Each power took turns running the facility for a month at a time. At any given moment, thirty-seven soldiers and one officer stood guard, along with a doctor, a cook, a chaplain, and nearly fifty cleaners.
By the 1980s, it cost an estimated $700,000 a year, roughly two million dollars by today’s standards, to keep Hess there, a cost borne by West German taxpayers. In the early years, prison life was harsh. Prisoners were never called by name, only by their numbers. Hess was number seven.
Punishments were strict. In 1955, he lost his reading privileges for over a week when he failed to greet a Soviet guard. Food could be reduced to bread and water for infractions, and he was expected to help with chores like cleaning and gardening. By the 1980s, conditions had relaxed.
Guards addressed him by name, he was allowed to move freely about the cell block and garden under supervision, and he enjoyed gardening, reading, and films. Two cooks prepared whatever food he requested. He was living far more comfortably than most believed any Nazi deserved. As he became an old, frail man, the Western allies made twenty appeals for his release from the late 1970s into the 1980s.
The Soviets refused every time, stating that the release of such a prominent Nazi would not be understood or accepted by the Soviet people. Spandau being in West Berlin also meant the Soviets had access to the western side of the Berlin Wall, a strategic presence the KGB was unwilling to surrender. On August 17, 1987, the ninety-three-year-old Hess was found dead inside a summer house in the prison garden, a lamp cord wrapped around his neck and a note in his pocket addressed to his family, thanking them for all they had done. The official verdict was death by hanging.
But speculation persists. Many questioned how a frail man of ninety-three, suffering from severe arthritis, could have summoned the strength to hang himself. There were inconsistencies between the scene and the reports. His former medical attendant said the room was messy, as if someone had frantically moved things around, and that the cord was still plugged into the wall when he was found, contradicting the official hanging report.
A secondary report claimed strangulation was the official cause of death, again contradicting the initial autopsy. Conspiracy theories circulated, including assassination by an Israeli Nazi-hunting group. Hess’s own family claimed British intelligence had silenced him to prevent him from revealing information about British misconduct during the war. Suspiciously, the summer house was demolished less than two days after his death, eliminating any possibility of further investigation.
The exact truth is unknown. The most likely scenario is that this old, unstable man, mentally stuck in the 1930s and 1940s, decided his time had come, unable to bear that the world had moved on from his regime’s ideologies long ago. After his death, Spandau Prison was demolished to prevent it from becoming a site of neo-Nazi pilgrimage. In 2011, his remains were exhumed from his grave in Wunsiedel, Bavaria, as neo-Nazis gathered there every year on the anniversary of his death.
His gravestone, which read “I have dared,” was destroyed, and his family scattered his remains at sea. And so ended the strange tale of Rudolf Hess, as bizarre in death as he was in life. The last Nazi of Spandau was gone.