On the night of May 10, 1941, Rudolf Hess climbed into a Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter plane in Augsburg and flew alone toward Scotland, without Hitler’s knowledge or permission. The deputy führer of the Nazi Party hoped to make contact with the Duke of Hamilton and open peace negotiations between Germany and Britain. After crossing the North Sea, he bailed out near Glasgow and was quickly taken into British custody. The Nazi leadership was stunned.
Hitler publicly distanced himself from his old comrade, and German propaganda dismissed him as mentally disturbed. Back in Germany, Hess’s wife, Ilse, did not even know whether her husband had survived. Only on May 14 did German radio confirm that he was alive and held in Britain. The woman who now waited uncertainly for news of her husband had been devoted to the Nazi cause long before it became the official ideology of a dictatorship.
Born Ilse Pröhl in Hanover on June 22, 1900, she grew up as one of three daughters in a wealthy, conservative, patriotic family. Her father, Friedrich Pröhl, was a doctor killed in March 1920 during the Kapp Putsch, a failed right-wing attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic. Her mother remarried the portrait painter Karl Horn, who directed the art academy in Bremen. Ilse studied German literature and library science at the University of Munich, among the first generation of German women permitted to pursue a university education.
In April 1920, while living in a Munich hostel, the nineteen-year-old Ilse met a fellow student who would transform her life. Rudolf Hess was noticeably tall, striking in appearance, yet reserved and unusually withdrawn. Over the years, other peculiarities surfaced, including a fixation on his health, an attraction to homeopathy and herbal treatments, and a growing interest in astrology. Ilse was drawn to him immediately, but Hess repeatedly avoided entering into an intimate relationship with her.
For years he kept her waiting, and their relationship remained largely platonic. Ilse’s own social connections played a decisive role in Hess’s political development. Through her Munich acquaintances, she helped introduce him to Adolf Hitler, who often moved in the social circles of wealthy women. Hess quickly became captivated by Hitler and joined the Nazi Party in July 1920.
Ilse’s personal commitment to the movement soon proved unmistakable. In early 1921, she openly declared her radical antisemitism in a letter, stating that the party was rooted in German nationalism and adding that they were antisemitic, firmly and without exceptions. That same year she joined the Nazi Party herself. The two remained strangely distant in their personal relationship, but their shared devotion to Hitler bound them ever more tightly.
In November 1923, Hitler and his followers attempted to seize power in Munich in the failed Beer Hall Putsch. The party was banned, and Rudolf Hess was imprisoned with Hitler in Landsberg Prison, about sixty kilometers west of Munich. During their confinement, Ilse remained closely involved. She cycled between Munich and Landsberg to collect handwritten materials connected to the manuscript that would become Hitler’s political manifesto, Mein Kampf.
Back in Munich she typed up the material, helping to prepare the book that would become one of the central texts of National Socialism. After the party was refounded in February 1925, Ilse formally joined it in December of that year. Still, her relationship with Rudolf remained unconventional. Despite knowing each other for years, they stayed unmarried.
Hitler encouraged them to formalize their union. On December 20, 1927, they married in Munich, with Hitler and Hess’s former university professor Karl Haushofer serving as witnesses. Even marriage did little to change the unusual nature of their partnership. The marriage largely lacked physical intimacy, and the couple waited nearly a decade before having their only child.
After Hitler came to power in 1933, the couple’s status changed drastically. Hess’s appointment as deputy führer placed him among the most powerful men 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, a wealthy residential district in southern Munich. The existing villa was substantially expanded, giving the family an increasingly distinguished lifestyle.
Their comfortable existence 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 November 18, 1937, nearly ten years after their wedding, Ilse gave birth to their only child, a son named Wolf Rüdiger Hess. Hitler became the child’s godfather, a connection reflected even in the name itself. 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 matter. Regional Nazi leaders were instructed to send soil from their areas to the Hess family. The earth was scattered beneath the baby’s cradle, symbolically allowing the child to begin his life on soil gathered from all over Germany. World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland.
Less than two years later came the flight that ended Rudolf Hess’s political career and permanently separated him from his family. Despite Hitler’s fury at what Rudolf had done, Ilse and her son were not punished. She remained under the Führer’s protection, and arrangements were made to ensure the family continued to receive financial support. In 1943, a Royal Air Force bombing raid destroyed the Hess home in Munich.
Ilse and her son moved to a summer house in the village of Bad Oberdorf in southern Germany. She continued receiving financial support, including a fixed pension of 1,500 Reichsmark, roughly equivalent to 11,500 dollars by modern standards. Even during the final weeks of the Third Reich, Ilse continued to benefit directly from the regime she had supported. On March 20, 1945, a small subcamp of Dachau concentration camp was established on the property where she was living.
It held only one prisoner, Friedrich Georg Fray, a Jehovah’s Witness who had been imprisoned by the Nazi regime since 1937. Fray was transferred there for forced labor at Ilse’s home and remained until April 29, 1945. He never made any statements about how Ilse treated him personally. During her interrogation, Ilse claimed that Fray slept inside the house, did not have to wear prisoner clothing, and shared the family’s evening meals.
By then the regime to which Ilse had devoted herself for more than two decades was collapsing around her. Rudolf remained imprisoned in Britain. Their Munich home was lost, and Allied forces were advancing inside Germany. But the defeat of National Socialism did not end Ilse Hess’s loyalty to its ideas.
The war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. After Germany’s defeat, Rudolf Hess was transferred from Britain for 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 moved to Spandau Prison in West Berlin the following year.
Ilse also faced detention. Arrested on June 3, 1947, she was held in an internment camp at Augsburg and released on March 24, 1948. She settled in the Allgäu region of southern Germany, where she opened a guesthouse in 1955. Her political convictions never wavered.
She supported Stille Hilfe, an organization that helped imprisoned and convicted Nazis, and published books about her husband through the far-right Druffel publishing house. She also corresponded with Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of composer Richard Wagner and another longtime admirer of Hitler. Meanwhile, Rudolf Hess remained imprisoned at Spandau. For more than two decades he refused to receive family visits.
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. 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 so that German state secrets could be extracted from him.
Only in 1969 did Rudolf finally agree to see his family, after becoming seriously ill and being transferred to a British military hospital in West Berlin. On Christmas Eve, December 24, 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 the age of three and a half. After that, Rudolf allowed regular family visits under Spandau’s rules, permitted thirty minutes once a month.
Rudolf Hess remained imprisoned for the rest of his life. On August 17, 1987, the ninety-three-year-old was found dead in Spandau Prison. The official investigation concluded that he had hanged himself. Although his family disputed that finding, Spandau Prison was demolished soon afterward to prevent it from becoming a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis.
Ilse survived her husband by eight years. By that time she was described as the eternal Nazi widow, a label reflecting the extraordinary constancy of her political loyalties. She never publicly abandoned the ideology she had embraced in her youth. From the early days of the Nazi movement in Munich through the decades spent defending her imprisoned husband, her convictions remained strikingly consistent.
Ilse Hess died on September 7, 1995, in the town of Lilienthal, Germany. She was ninety-five years old.