On the evening of May 10, 1941, Rudolf Hess, the deputy führer of Nazi Germany, climbed into a Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter in Augsburg and flew alone across the North Sea toward Scotland. He left without Hitler’s permission, carrying a desperate hope: to reach the Duke of Hamilton and arrange peace talks between Germany and Britain. The flight ended near Glasgow, where Hess bailed out and was quickly taken into British custody. The Nazi leadership was stunned.
Hitler publicly disowned his old comrade, and German propaganda dismissed him as mentally disturbed. At home in Munich, his wife, Ilse Hess, did not even know whether her husband had survived. German radio only confirmed on May 14 that he was alive and held in Britain. Ilse Hess had dedicated herself to the Nazi movement long before it held power, and she would remain loyal to it long after it lay in ruins.
Born Ilse Pröhl on June 22, 1900, in Hanover, she grew up in a wealthy, conservative, patriotic family as one of three daughters. Her father, Friedrich Pröhl, was a doctor. In March 1920, he was killed during the Kapp Putsch, a failed right-wing attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic. Her mother later remarried the portrait painter Karl Horn, director of the art academy in Bremen.
Ilse studied German literature and library science at the University of Munich, part of the first generation of women admitted to German universities. In April 1920, while living in a Munich boarding house, the nineteen-year-old met another student who would redirect her life. Rudolf Hess was tall and striking but unusually reserved and withdrawn. Over the years, his peculiarities surfaced: an obsession with his health, a faith in homeopathy and herbal treatments, and a growing interest in astrology.
Ilse was immediately drawn to him, but Hess repeatedly avoided a close relationship with her. For years he kept her waiting, and their bond remained largely platonic. Her social connections in Munich, however, proved politically significant. Through her acquaintances she helped introduce Hess to Adolf Hitler, who moved among the social circles of wealthy women in the city.
Hess quickly became captivated by Hitler and joined the Nazi Party in July 1920. Ilse’s own commitment soon became unmistakable. In early 1921 she wrote openly of her extreme antisemitism in a letter. She described the Nazi Party as firmly rooted in German nationalism and added, “We are antisemitic, steadfastly, without allowing any exceptions.
” That same year she joined the party herself. Their personal relationship remained strangely distant, but their shared devotion to Hitler and National Socialism 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 Nazi Party was banned that month, and Rudolf Hess was imprisoned with Hitler in Landsberg Prison, about sixty kilometers west of Munich.
Throughout their imprisonment, Ilse stayed closely involved. She cycled between Munich and Landsberg to gather handwritten materials associated with the manuscript that became Hitler’s political manifesto, Mein Kampf. Returning to Munich, she typed the material, helping prepare a book that would become one of National Socialism’s central texts. After the Nazi Party was reestablished in February 1925, Ilse formally joined in December of that year.
Still, her relationship with Rudolf remained unconventional. They had known each other for years but remained unmarried. Hitler encouraged them to formalize their union, and on December 20, 1927, they married in Munich. Hitler and Rudolf’s former university professor, Karl Haushofer, served as witnesses.
Even marriage did little to change the unusual nature of their relationship. It remained largely without physical intimacy, and the couple waited nearly a decade before having their only child. After Hitler came to power in 1933, the couple’s position changed dramatically. Rudolf’s appointment as deputy führer placed him among the most powerful men in the Nazi Party, while Ilse entered 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 greatly expanded, offering 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 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 boy’s godfather, and the connection was reflected even in the 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 beneath the child’s cradle, symbolically allowing him 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 Hess’s flight to Scotland, the decision that abruptly ended his political career and permanently separated him from his wife. 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 to receive financial support.
In 1943, a Royal Air Force bombing 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 reichsmarks, roughly equivalent to $11,500 today. Even during the final weeks of the Third Reich, Ilse continued to benefit directly from the system 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 Frey, a Jehovah’s Witness whom the Nazi regime had imprisoned since 1937. Frey was brought there for forced labor at Ilse’s home and remained until April 29, 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 then, the regime Ilse had devoted herself to 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. The war in Europe ended on May 8, 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 moved to Spandau Prison in West Berlin the following year. Ilse also faced arrest. On June 3, 1947, she was taken into custody and sent to an internment camp in Augsburg. She was released on March 24, 1948, and settled in the Allgäu region of southern Germany, where she opened a guesthouse in 1955.
Her political convictions never wavered. She remained loyal to Hitler and National Socialism, supported the organization Stille Hilfe, which 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 and another longtime admirer of Hitler. 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. 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 German state secrets.
Only in 1969 did Rudolf finally agree to see his family, after falling seriously ill and being taken to the 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. Afterward, Rudolf allowed regular family visits under Spandau’s rules, which 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 at Spandau Prison. The official investigation concluded that he had committed suicide by hanging. Although his family disputed the finding, Spandau Prison was demolished soon afterward to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.
Ilse survived her husband by eight years. By then she was described as the “eternal Nazi widow,” a title reflecting the extraordinary constancy of her political loyalties. She never publicly renounced the ideology she had embraced in her youth. From the earliest 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, at the age of ninety-five.