Original subtitles

(suspenseful music)

Hitler's right-hand man,

the deputy fuhrer who believed that thoughts

could move objects

and that Britain would make peace with Hitler.

Hess somehow was really a myth.

Rudolf Hess is undoubtedly one of the most interesting

historical figures of the 20th century.

Rudolf Hess was on a ride that ended

in a spectacular fall.

He rubbed shoulders with the Nazi elite

yet abandoned the Reich at the height of its power

on a secret quest to strike a deal with the enemy.

If Hess would have succeeded,

this is absolutely clear,

the whole course of the war would have been different.

Hitler's deputy flew a grueling,

dangerous 1000 mile secret flight to Britain

in the middle of the blitz.

He would spend the rest of his life behind bars,

the last inmate in Spandau prison.

An old man pacing the yard alone,

mystery and intrigue continues to swirl

around his life and death.

How can a man at that age, you know, commit suicide?

Many believe he didn't,

that he was murdered in order to try and stop secrets

that he might have.

He died more than 25 years ago,

and yet his name is still celebrated by a hateful,

racist, and violent minority.

(men shouting and chanting)

(speaks in foreign language)

Rudolf Hess is revered by neo-Nazis

as a martyr, as a so-called peace aviator.

There are rumors that his flight

to Scotland served to end the so called

brother-on-brother war with England.

As such, he is an old time Nazi character who fits perfectly

into today's Neo Nazi ideology.

This footage was secretly recorded

at underground Neo Nazi concerts in Germany and Austria.

(speaks in foreign language)

If I had been discovered with my hidden camera,

I would most likely have been beaten

up by many of the Nazis.

And it's not impossible for you to end up

beaten to death.

It's the kind of intimidation

and violence committed by Nazi thugs in the '20s and '30s,

and Rudolf Hess was one of them.

Hess, of course, played a part.

He, if he didn't organize violence,

he certainly knew about it and tolerated it.

Rudolf Hess was a devotee,

one of the first to join the party.

Anyone who looks at the film of him can see

this glowing fanaticism and total adoration of Hitler

that Hess displays.

It's almost frightening how much one man

can adore another man for political reasons.

(speaks in German)

He was also the man who, who really promoted this idea

that Hitler was more than just a man,

that he was a man brought to Germany

by providence, by fate, to achieve greatness.

Like Hitler, it was in Munich that Hess

became engulfed in the politics of racism and violence,

but it wasn't on the streets,

but in university lectures that a key future

Nazi policy took shape in the mind of Rudolf Hess.

The idea of lebensraum, or living space,

was brought in through Hess from his teacher at university,

Karl Haushofer, who was a geopolitical theorist.

Now lebensraum doesn't mean, or didn't mean,

the idea that the Germans are so squashed up together

and there's just so many of them

that they need more living space.

It's a specific doctrine which Hitler then developed

on the basis of Haushofer's theories that Germany

has to conquer living space in eastern Europe,

Hitler turned it into this aggressive murderous policy

of exterminating the Slavs.

(shouting in German)

Hess was one of the first of millions

enthralled by Hitler's theatrical rants.

Like Hitler, he was born in a foreign land.

From Egypt, the wealthy merchant's son was sent

back to Germany and rode into radical politics.

You find in the early 1920s all kinds

of far right wing groups are emerging in Munich,

holding meetings as a ferment

of ultra right antisemitic politics.

Rudolf Hess followed Hitler everywhere,

including prison, when they were jailed

for attempting to overthrow the government in 1923.

They were undoubtedly very close,

I mean, remember they shared a cell when Hitler

was writing "Mein Kampf," you know,

Hess was effectively his secretary and

by all accounts did a lot of the typing.

Some people argue he did some of the writing too.

He carried out his orders absolutely slavishly.

People in the party mocked Hess and the brown mouse,

you know, because he was so devoted

and would scurry anywhere at Hitler's behest.

But there was another side to the brown mouse.

SS stormtroopers raided the home of his old university

lecturer, Karl Haushofer.

His wife Marta was considered a half Jew.

Their salvation was recorded in the family diary.

Their powerful friend, the deputy fuhrer,

intervened and forbade any more raids on the house.

(speaking in German)

He was a friend of the family

and every time, every time, he was really always helpful.

And yet Hess could be ruthless.

He played a key role in Hitler's bloody crackdown

on Ernst Röhm and his SA brownshirts.

When Hitler had the leaders of the brownshirts,

the storm troopers, shot, arrested,

he arrested the chief of the stormtroopers, Ernst Röhm,

who was getting too big for his own boots,

put him in prison.

Hess offered to shoot him twice.

He said, "It's me, I have to do the shooting."

The first concentration camps

and so-called Jewish ghettos were established

when Hess was deputy.

Segregation and the stripping of property and human rights

would eventually lead to the industrial murder of millions

in the death camps.

(man speaking in German)

Antisemitism, the idea of getting rid of the Jews somehow

by pushing them out of Germany,

by making life unbearable for them there,

eventually during the war, by exterminating them,

was absolutely central to national socialism,

and Hess shared that in full measure.

(speaking in German)

He was undoubtedly antisemitic.

He helped draft the race laws.

The race laws signed by minister Hess

banned Jews from official jobs

and from marrying other Germans.

(speaking in German)

All the leading Nazi figures made exceptions.

Goring, for example, his brother saved Jews,

and Goring knew that.

Hess, for example.

When it involved friends of his, he made exceptions.

Two key friends of his, Karl Haushofer,

and his son Albrecht Haushofer.

Karl Haushofer was married to a woman who was half Jewish.

It made his children quarter Jewish,

which meant that they were subject to the race laws.

He remained close to the part Jewish family

of his old Munich university professor.

Albrecht even worked in the Nazi foreign office.

Hess issued so-called writs of protection for them.

He gave them an exemption effectively

branding them honorary Aryans.

Yet was the same man who urged the Nazi mob to

swear allegiance to Hitler at mass rallies.

The other interesting thing about Hess

was after Kristallnacht when there was so much violence

against Jewish businesses,

Hess issued a statement and issued an order

that there was to be no more looting of Jewish shops.

Rudolf Hess became mired in party politics,

managing regional leaders, issuing orders,

and punishing transgressions.

But keeping in step with the Nazi hierarchy was vital,

even for someone as powerful as the deputy fuhrer.

Maintaining Hitler's favor was a balancing act.

Hess was sidelined.

Other cronies rushed in to take his place.

Hitler was the center of the power.

Once you lost that relationship, the game was over.

There was a rivalry and they always tred to get the access,

the special access to Hitler, to the fuhrer.

Hess was out.

While the keen amateur pilot indulged

his love of flying,

his fuhrer was pursuing a different passion.

Hitler had his sights set on war.

The only flying he was interested in was the kind that would

bomb the rest of Europe into submission.

Himmler and Goring were saying what Hitler wanted to hear,

while faithful party comrade Hess was bothering him

with petty politics.

He had been viewed as Hitler's right-hand man

during the rise of the Nazis.

But when war broke out,

that position had really been taken away.

Hitler famously said that when he spoke to Goring,

he said he felt like he had been bathed in steel,

that he made him feel so good about himself.

And then he said that with Hess

all he brought to him was problems and troubles.

The deputy fuhrer was out of step,

reduced to delivering speeches at political rallies.

There's no doubt that Hess was a rather peculiar man.

Hess became very deeply upset when he began to realize

he was being sidelined in the decision-making process.

By 1939, Hitler had left his deputy behind.

Rudolf Hess developed a range of ailments

like stomach cramps and palpitations.

As war loomed, the deputy fuhrer was in the background.

By 1939, Hess times was definitely over.

I mean he had no influence on military affairs

and foreign affairs, on domestic politics.

The deputy fuhrer became withdrawn.

He was a minister without portfolio and had no specific job.

Rudolf Hess walked a lonely path, immersing himself in

alternative therapies and the paranormal.

(speaking in German)

Rudolf Hess tried to keep

this chair in balance.

And whenever he tried to do that,

he was staring at this chair,

which when he took his hands away,

invariably toppled either forwards or backwards.

Now I thought that was very strange.

And I asked my father about it.

And he said, yes, that really is a little strange.

Herr Hess believes in telekinesis.

He is devoted to bizarre practices.

He is devoted to quasi-medicine, bizarre diets,

and he's not alone.

In some ways that sums up the entire Nazi elite.

They are surrounded by irrational charlatans.

Hitler's washed up deputy

turned to alternative therapy.

He'd welcome delegates to an international conference

on homeopathic medicine.

He believed that electrical currents could revive him.

The Austrian clinic that Hess visited

is still sparking today.

Clients can have the same kind

of high-frequency therapy that seemed

to have fixed the deputy fuhrer.

(speaking in German)

He was exhausted and he was looking

for peace and relaxation, as one would put it today.

A thank you note from Hess

for the "regaining of my health" still survives.

It was around this time that the deputy fuhrer's

bright idea took shape.

He would reach out to Britain, make peace,

and reestablish himself as a bright spark in the Nazi elite.

It's interesting to see,

and when the war started in September '39,

he was still the third person off stage.

So Hitler announced officially,

when I'm going to be killed in this war,

Goring will be my successor, and if Goring will be killed,

Hess will be his successor.

So, so theoretically Hess was quite important.

So was in the inner circle, but in praxis, he was not.

Hess plotted a course that would place him

back at the heart of Hitler's inner circle,

to negotiate a deal with Britain.

But was he working alone?

The British army in France was hopelessly surrounded

at Dunkirk when Hitler suddenly ordered a halt,

allowing it to escape.

Was this part of secret preparations

for an Anglo-German pact?

There's no evidence that there was any deal in preparation

between the British and the Germans at the time of Dunkirk.

The real reason why Hitler stopped the troops

while the British got away was because Goring

had assured him that Luftwaffe, the German air force,

would destroy the British troops on the beaches.

And there were long arguments between the generals

who wanted to regroup.

In fact, Hitler and his generals were planning

an invasion of Britain, but in the mind of Rudolf Hess,

the enemy did not lie across the English channel.

He was very much a man within the Nazi ideology.

So he perceived the world through the glasses of racism,

antisemitism, and so on.

And if you're a racist, then I mean,

Britain and Germany are yeah, somehow together,

somehow a super race.

And no, I mean, you don't fight against your brother.

Like his fuhrer, Rudolf Hess had also served

in the first World War.

He really saw, well, there was a major problem

that German had to fight on on two or even on three fronts.

And that Germany was defeated.

So let's make peace in the west.

Let's have, Britain has its empire.

We are the masters of the continent and we are going,

for Europe, for a better future,

we are going to defeat the arch enemy

of the civilized world.

And we have this crusade against the Bojnicks in the east.

But Hitler had other ideas

to fight and win on two fronts.

The planned invasion of the Soviet Union

was brought forward.

He brought it forward because he saw that

as the best way of bringing Britain to terms.

He had decided already in the summer of 1940

that this is going to happen,

because Britain had refused to make peace.

So if the Soviet Union was conquered,

then Britain will be completely isolated

and will be forced to come to terms.

Hitler had to hope to come to in separate piece

was Britain in summer 1940.

But after that, he realized, no, I mean,

we have to wage a war, possibly not too harsh,

but somehow a war to somehow persuade Britain to make peace.

So yes, we have to bomb Britain.

But the blitz that wore on day after day,

night after night, only hardened British resolve.

Churchill has no interest in peace with Germany at all.

Churchill believes that Britain is going to

win the second World War.

He already has plans about how that's going to happen.

I suppose there are two elements to those plans.

One is an alliance with the United States,

so you have a global coalition of the two most

powerful democratic nations fighting Germany.

And the second is the belief that the British war machine

can in fact generate enough military power

to defeat Germany.

Warned that his official country residents

at Chequers might be bombed,

Churchill held several war cabinet meetings

at Ditchley Park in leafy Oxfordshire.

By that time, the Luftwaffe was losing

the battle of Britain.

Hitler called off his planned invasion,

and time was on Churchill's side.

If you are confident of victory,

why would you be interested in peace feelers?

In particular Churchill and those around him believe

that Germany has to be utterly defeated.

After his revival at the Austrian clinic,

Hitler's deputy was fired up in the belief

that the time was ripe to force Britain to make terms,

by himself in secret.

I think there was a crucial period in end of May 1940

where Churchill's position as the prime minister

was not secured yet.

But once this period was gone and they reached June,

they'd reached July, 1940,

there was absolutely no possibility

of an understanding with Britain.

So all these hopes then in 1941 from Hess

and even before, this was just an illusion.

Rudolf Hess turned to people he could trust.

Albrecht Haushofer, the son of his old friend

and university lecturer,

Albrecht worked in the German foreign office,

and had visited Britain many times.

He tried to find pieces and bits of hope.

So, yeah, that's a clear indication,

yes, that there is a peace movement somewhere

behind the curtain in Britain.

And I'm going to fly to Britain and I am make contact, yes.

Albrecht Haushofer had a possible

contact for Hess, someone he would go on to believe

could have influence in government and high society.

A Scottish aristocrat and fellow aviator,

the Duke of Hamilton.

The Duke's son James wrote a book about the

extraordinary events that unfolded.

Albrecht had explained to Hess that he did not think

the British would respond to any peace overture,

because he said the British regarded Hitler

as Satan's representative on Earth who had to be fought,

and Hess asked him how a personal feeler

could be opened up through a personal approach.

But he said "The closest of my English friends is

the young Duke of Hamilton who has access

to all important persons in London, even

to Churchill and the king."

The Duke of Hamilton had been the head

of the Anglo-German Friendship Society,

and Hess had been misled into thinking

that that was actually an important organization.

We know that even Haushofer's perception

of Britain and Lord Hamilton and all these connections

was not very reliable.

I mean, the whole perception of, of the German,

of some parts of the German elites of Britain,

was naive at this time.

Albrecht Haushofer tried and failed

to set up a secret meeting with Hamilton in Lisbon.

His letter was intercepted

by the British Secret Service.

Yet Hess was still convinced the Scottish peer was his man,

and finalized the plan to fly to his estate.

Hess's view was incredibly naive and very simple.

In his mind, he would fly over to Scotland.

He would meet with the Duke of Hamilton.

Lay out his proposal and the Duke of Hamilton

would round up the great landed gentry of Britain

and together they would go en masse to the king,

explain the situation,

explain the error of Winston Churchill's ways,

and the King would depose of the prime minister,

put a new man in charge who would then

do a peace deal with with Germany.

That was his concept of how this mission would roll out.

The reality of it was so far from what he'd, what he hoped.

The deluded deputy fuhrer didn't have

an influential contact in Britain, but he did have a plane.

The shrewd manufacturer Willy Messerschmitt was more

than willing to do him a favor.

If Hess would have said was, give me a fighter,

yes, of course!

I mean, he's the minister.

Willy Messerschmitt knew, "I have to contact the leading,

some leading figures of the state,

which is important for me because I want to make money."

Hess was the deputy fuhrer.

Very few people would say no to the deputy fuhrer

if he had a request.

Messerschmitt won lucrative military contracts

through close relationships with senior Nazis like Hess.

But there may have been another reason why

the canny aircraft manufacturer was so willing to

accommodate the deputy fuhrer's wishes

at his factory and airfield in Augsburg, Bavaria.

He owed him; he owed Hess a favor, because in the 1930s

the local town council decided that Messerschmitt's factory

would be the perfect place for a tram depot.

The plan was that it would be taken over

and trams would end up there.

And it was Hess who was one of the people who insisted

that it stay in place.

This was the machine

that could get Rudolf Hess to Scotland.

The sleek powerful Messerschmitt BF110 fighter bomber.

Most were destroyed in the war.

This one survives in the Berlin Museum.

(speaking in German)

When he realized during a visit

to Augsburg that the Messerschmitt 110 was equipped

with two additional 900 liter tanks.

He realized "This could be the ideal airplane for me."

He also needed specific radio equipment.

The Messerschmitt 110 had enough room

for this radio equipment.

And he knew that he could reach England in this plane.

(speaking in German)

When you have just one person

flying the plane, a few alterations had to be made.

The radio equipment is very important

for a flight over long distances

and had to be operated from the front seat.

So they had to install a kind of operating frame

to the front so that the equipment

could be controlled from there.

(speaking German)

With Hitler busy preparing

for the invasion of the Soviet Union,

the deputy fuhrer could indulge in his passion for flying,

planning and taking training flights

without raising suspicions.

He researched the route.

He did all he could in order to get information

about the weather reports and weather systems.

Hess made his first attempt

just before Christmas 1940.

Three times he took off for Scotland,

but was forced to turn back to Augsburg.

He had a number of attempts,

but had to turn back through mechanical problems

and issues to do with the weather.

Probably the only other person

in his entourage who knew about his peace flight

was his trusted adjutant, Karlheinz Pintsch.

The deputy fuhrer dictated the deal he believed

would lead to Britain's capitulation.

Hess believed he was offering a very generous deal.

The deal was that that Britain could keep

most of its colonies, but the key point was

that Germany would have total dominance of Europe.

The British government were aware that

any deal with Hitler would basically involve

his boot on your throat.

Misinformed and misdirected about the enemy territory

he was heading for, the deputy fuhrer pushed on regardless.

He made his last speech at the factory

from where he would take off.

In front of the BF110, the same model

Willy Messerschmitt gladly gave him to fly,

unaware that he'd never get it back.

Nine days later, Hess was back at Augsburg

with his trusted adjutant.

In case of capture,

he would fly under the alias of Captain Horn.

Interception by fighter planes from both sides

was a real risk.

Hess had to be aware of the dangers of his flight.

It was an exceptionally difficult flight to pull off.

In fact, afterwards when Hitler was told about it,

he asked them, the Luftwaffe,

"Is this possible, can Hess pull this off?"

And they assured him, no.

Hundreds of German bombers also took off

on the 10th of May, 1941,

but they weren't carrying offers of peace.

London suffered one of the most savage raids of the blitz.

Well, the reality is the bombing makes people

extremely angry, and it couldn't have been a worse time

for any Nazi leader to launch appease initiative.

Hess took off in the afternoon

and didn't turn back.

His fourth attempt would be a marathon feat

of navigation and flying skills.

In some sense it's really a miracle

that he reached Scotland.

I mean, he had no navigator in his plane,

and it was quite a, quite a demanding flight

in terms of navigation at this time of the year.

So, so the real surprise is that he really hits

almost exactly that point he wanted to reach.

It took him five and a half hours

to reach the Scottish coast

and the deadly threat of British air defenses.

It's often reported that Hess got a free pass,

that no fighters were sent up to intercept him,

that people turned away when the plane entered

British airspace, but that's not the case.

We know that it was recognized.

It was tracked.

We know that spitfires were sent up.

According to one account,

Hess saw spitfires on his tail before he bailed out.

He'd almost made it to the Duke of Hamilton's estate

and parachuted out near the rural village of Eaglesham.

Nobody expected it.

Literally Hess drops out of the sky,

and the British are utterly confused about what's going on.

It takes them some time to actually be clear

that it is Rudolf Hess.

A young boy kicking a football with his dad that evening

is one of the few eyewitnesses

still able to tell the compelling tale.

We suddenly heard the sound of a German plane

coming from the east back here.

And it was unmistakably German,

because we knew the sound of the unsynchronized engines.

My father shouted, "It's a Jerry!"

I was mystified.

Anyway, plane passed over this huge tree

which was then here and went exactly in that direction.

So this is the very spot where Rudolf Hess landed,

and his plane crashed only very,

very short distance away from there.

He was seen by plowmen in the cottage which is just here,

and the plowmen, David McLean and his friend

John Tweedy, came out of the house

and helped to release Rudolf Hess

from his harness and helped him into the cottage,

meanwhile shouting to the owner of the farm,

"We've got a German prisoner!"

Hess fell short of the

Duke of Hamilton's country estate.

His Messerschmitt was wrecked,

but he escaped with an injured ankle.

The mystery pilot calling himself Captain Horn was taken

to the local headquarters of the home guard,

now a Masonic hall.

My father went into this room where

the prisoner was in bed and he explained that,

"I don't know whether you recognize me,

but I am Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy.

I'm on a personal unauthorized mission of humanity."

And of course my father was absolutely astonished.

He had not expected the prisoner to be a person

of any great seniority, but it was quite clear now

that this man was probably Rudolf Hess,

because Albrecht Haushofer had described Hess to him

as a man with eyes sunken into his head.

And dark, swarthy complexion, and the prisoner expression,

demeanor, and looks, answer that description.

It was Hitler's deputy,

and he would soon find out how wrong he'd been.

The Duke of Hamilton was not a conduit to some kind

of pro German anti Churchill alliance in Westminster.

The Duke of Hamilton had the shame in many ways

of having the deputy fuhrer believe that you were the man,

the go-to man, to organize peace with Britain.

The deputy fuhrer did not

get the welcome he expected.

Churchill had just visited London streets

bombed to ruins by Nazi raiders.

He was at the Ditchley Park country estate

when the Duke of Hamilton told him

who had dropped out of the sky.

"Do you mean to tell me that the deputy fuhrer

of Germany is in our hands?"

And he looked at my father as though

he was having hallucinations

and the war had been too much for him.

And my father said, "That he is who he said it was."

And Churchill replied, "Well Hess or no Hess,

I'm going to see the Marx brothers."

I think he meant it.

He'd arranged to go and see a funny movie.

And what could he do at that point about Hess?

Was it to be taken seriously?

Clearly not.

It was a way of Churchill actually saying

I'm not going to pay any attention to this.

This is not serious.

We are not going to take this as a way of making peace.

Why would you want to meet a possibly insane deputy fuhrer

who had just dropped out of the sky?

The thing is so bizarre.

British views on peace with Germany.

They don't want it.

In Churchill's view, in the view of his government,

and the view of most of the British people,

there are only two types of good German,

dead or groveling.

The Hess episode was a four-day wonder

in my father's life, but it was a great shock to him,

because he was not the equivalent of Hess in Britain.

He was a wing commander, a station commander,

who was very busy fulfilling his duties

in the second World War.

Hitler had been busy planning

a surprise attack on the Soviet Union.

Surely a deal with Britain would have suited him,

saving him from a war on two fronts.

Perhaps he had known about his deputy's bizarre plan

all along and even sanctioned it.

That's exactly what Rudolf Hess' adjutant told Soviet

interrogators after he was captured on the eastern front,

but his version was recorded under pressure,

possibly torture.

When Karlheinz Pintsch was eventually released,

his hands were so disfigured he could no longer

hold a knife and fork.

He really suffered, clearly, while in Soviet captivity.

So we do not know exactly what happened to him,

but it's very, very likely that they

at least to put it politely put very much pressure on him.

I think it's very unlikely that he really said the truth.

Once he was out of German airspace,

Hess had ordered his adjutant to report

his mission to Hitler.

According to the 28 page report

he wrote for his Soviet interrogators,

Hitler was unsurprised and reacted calmly,

but others at the fuhrer's mountain retreat

at the time had a very different version of events.

Hitler was shocked and reacted with fury and outrage.

People said Hitler was crushed.

They'd never seen him so upset.

But why would the Soviets force Pintsch

to say otherwise?

Historians suggests Stalin wanted evidence

of a possible Anglo-German deal to discredit

and put pressure on the west.

Hess and his unfortunate adjutant became pawns

in a geopolitical game.

It was quite clear that Pintsch delivered what

the intelligence authorities wanted to hear.

Stalin, for his part, wanted to sow doubt

and dissension in the west.

He always had this lingering feeling that

because the British and the Germans are both capitalists,

they somehow would make a separate deal between themselves.

But there was no deal.

And the Nazi propaganda minister had a

PR disaster on his hands.

The fuhrer's deputy had landed on the enemy's lap.

Hitler's loyal party comrade was suddenly branded

a deluded fool.

The idea that they eventually had, pushed my Goebbels,

the propaganda minister, of claiming that Hess had gone mad,

of course, wasn't actually a very favorable comment

on the nature of their regime.

The Germans in Berlin who kept

on inventing these wonderful jokes.

Well, imagine Hess is brought before Churchill

and Churchill says, "So you're the madman."

And Hess says, "No, I'm only his deputy."

The regime did not tolerate being laughed at.

Those associated with the deputy fuhrer paid a heavy price.

(speaking in German)

The unfortunate adjutant Karlheinz Pintsch was arrested

and kept in solitary confinement before being sent

to the eastern front in 1944.

Rudolf Hess' part Jewish friends,

the Haushofers, were exposed.

Their writs of protection now carried

the signature of a traitor.

It was the beginning of the end for Hess'

old university lecturer, Karl Haushofer,

and his son, Albrecht.

Albrecht supported the resistance against Hitler

and was executed in 1945.

His father, Karl and half Jewish mother Martha

committed suicide a year later.

As for Rudolf Hess, there was no meeting

with the king or influential politicians.

He was locked away in the Tower of London.

The Soviet Union was not yet in the war.

Perhaps Hess was silenced in a bid to provoke

Stalin into action.

So it's a way of Churchill just keeping the lid on Hess,

not allow him to say anything, dropping a few hints

that there was a separate piece being negotiated.

And that would prod Stalin into invading Germany

before Britain pulled out.

If you let Hess say something,

you could see that he was bonkers

and the whole plot would be completely unraveled.

From the tower, Hess was incarcerated in

more opulent surroundings,

a country house to the west of London.

He's an interesting freak,

as far as the British are concerned.

They want to prod him.

They want to analyze him.

They want to understand what's going on

which led to this utterly bizarre incident.

Churchill didn't need Hess to stoke

unease in the east.

Six weeks later, Hitler invaded the Soviet union,

and the fuhrer's former deputy was all but forgotten.

That was the best it was ever going to get

for Rudolf Hess, I mean a country house

where he got to walk around the grounds.

It was also the scene

of a first attempt at suicide.

He survived a leap from a first floor with a broken leg.

In his suicide note, he declared his loyalty to Hitler,

even though the regime considered him a deluded traitor.

After his fuhrer's crushing defeat,

the diehard Nazi was hauled before the international

criminal court at Nuremberg.

It seemed that Goebbels was right after all.

Party member Hess seemed to have lost it completely.

At Nuremberg he pretended to be suffering from amnesia,

but when the commandant challenged him

with behaving in a not very manly fashion

and he owed it to his family

and to his country to make a clean best of it,

he, the day he stood up and said

his memory was responding perfectly,

and he wished to stand trial with his colleagues.

He was sentenced to life in prison for his role

in the early crimes of the Nazi regime.

The Holocaust was revealed to the world,

yet Hitler's former deputy still

declared himself a proud Nazi.

(man speaking in German)

Rudolf Hess was sent to Spandau Prison

on the outskirts of Berlin.

Fellow inmates, like Hitler's architect Albert Speer,

and the Hitler youth leader Baldur von Schirach

came and went.

The former deputy fuhrer was there to stay.

Compared to a normal prisoner in a normal prison,

he had considerable freedom of movement,

choice of food and that sort of thing,

which a prisoner in a normal prison would never get.

And so he had quite a free life within those confines.

He was remarkably fit for his age.

He was kept there because that was the sentence.

The sentence was a life sentence.

There was a campaign to free him,

but it was a neo-Nazi campaign.

Had he been released, he would have become the center

of Neo Nazi adulation.

Not to mention, of course the adulation of old Nazis

who still looked him as a deputy fuhrer of the Reich.

In June, 1987, the West German president

made a historic visit to Moscow.

An apparent thaw in relations led to speculation that the

Soviets might agree to release Rudolf Hess.

Yes, I told him,

and he said to me "That's good."

Others refute the idea that Russia

would ever agree to release the unrepentant Nazi,

who was once Hitler's deputy.

Why would Russia not want him released?

I think the answer for that is that look at the death toll

of the second World War.

Look what it inflicted on Russia as a nation.

It was vast.

On the 17th of August 1987,

Hitler's former deputy sought his own final release.

Hess' suicide was a total surprise.

There was no indications lead up to it whatsoever.

Hess was found in the prison's summer house.

Officials claimed the frail, partially blind 93 year old

hanged himself with an electrical cable.

A child could have done it really.

It was just one over knot.

It wasn't anything elaborate,

just a twist in the cable.

There were no witnesses,

but conspiracy theories emerged that Hess

was assassinated to stop him revealing embarrassing secrets.

His carer claimed to have seen two suspicious

people standing over the body.

They were standing there like murderers,

very relaxed, so not like actors,

but really like proper professional killers.

There's no reason why anyone should

want to kill Hess at all.

He was an old, isolated, lonely man.

There was no hint anywhere during all the decades

that he was in Spandau prison

that he was going to reveal any secrets of any sort.

Hess' son Wolf was among those

who suspected foul play.

The family ordered a second autopsy.

The purpose of the second opinion

was to investigate if there really had been

a trauma to the neck, how this had happened,

And the question was, is hanging or strangulation

a viable theory?

An important aspect of this question

is the so-called rope mark.

The report came to the conclusion

that the death corresponds to the compression

of the neck through a rope-like implement.

The report did not voice an opinion

whether this was down to hanging or strangulation.

The second autopsy sparked

more questions than answers.

Some body parts were not available

for the private examination.

The so-called neck entrails,

including the larynx, the wind pipe, or large parts of it,

the thyroid gland and the carotid artery,

they were all missing.

The body parts weren't missing.

There was a logical explanation.

Those parts wouldn't have been given to the family

at that stage, because they still hadn't

been finished being examined.

That type of examination takes days.

And we certainly wanted to get rid of the body.

So we handed it back.

Rumor and speculation followed Rudolf Hess

in life and death.

The second unofficial autopsy was inconclusive.

Conspiracy theories of murder were very much alive.

The family believes that this was

a death resulting from strangulation by a third party.

But we had to say that that is one possible scenario,

but not necessarily the correct one.

For prison authorities,

there was no mystery surrounding the death of Rudolf Hess.

I think that these other theories, et cetera,

are absolute rubbish.

Anything else is just pure speculation.

Hitler's former deputy died knowing

he would never be pardoned.

He realized from the rejection note

coming back from authorities

that there was no chance of him being released.

He was there for life and that was it.

And he realized that and accepted it this last moment.

And thought, well, I'll do something about it and did it.

His ill-fated flight

led to a life in captivity.

Death was the only release.

He is still celebrated by an extreme minority,

ignorant of the terror he once represented.

There are two points which should never be forgotten

about Rudolf Hess.

The first is he signed all the antisemitic legislation.

So he helped provide a framework in which those of

Jewish origin could be openly discriminated against.

And the second point about him is that he supported

Hitler in word, thought, and deed,

and that he did not want peace.

He wanted war against Russia, but what he did want

in order to make that war successful

was Britain to be removed from the conflict

before the onslaught on Russia began.

And in that he failed.

His deluded flight to Britain was not made

to serve peace, but Hitler's ambitions for total war.

Both were a spectacular failure.

(suspenseful music)