The House of Rumour (50 page)

Manic episodes punctuated his growing depression. The success of the Africa Korps in the Western Desert; the Sixth Army sweeping through the Caucasus; fanfares on the radio as Berlin announced another U-boat victory. But all the time he was struggling to outwit those around him.

When all the good news from the outside world began to peter out he retreated into a mental oblivion. He told the doctors who examined him that a fog had descended, obliterating past events, people, ideas. He claimed to have forgotten his childhood in Egypt, his schooldays in Germany, his service in the Great War, the leading role he had played in the early years of the party. He could no longer recall the names of visitors or sometimes even the orderlies and officers who guarded him.

He reluctantly agreed to drug therapy, feeling that this might prepare him for greater tests that lay ahead. They were desperate to prove whether or not his amnesia was real. They injected him with a truth serum and conducted an interrogation. It took all his will to remain conscious while miming unconsciousness, to maintain his antic disposition. But as he passed this stage of inquisition he knew that one day a greater trial would come. There was already much talk about war crimes and tribunals. In the meantime he prepared his own judgement on a mad world.

One morning in February 1945 he woke early and called for a doctor, announcing to him that his memory had been restored and that he had something important to tell the world. He had composed a list of all the people who had been hypnotised by the Jews and he wanted it forwarded to Churchill. Churchill, of course, was named: hypnotism had changed him from anti-Bolshevik to pro-Soviet. The Jews, Hess explained, had a secret drug that could put people in a trance during which they would act in an abnormal way. The king of Italy, von Stauffenberg and the others who had plotted to kill the Führer, General von Paulus, Anthony Eden, the Bulgarian government – the catalogue went on. The doctor remarked that even the name Rudolf Hess appeared on the list. Oh yes, Hess replied; once at a state banquet in Italy he had been very rude to his hosts and the only explanation he had for his behaviour was that he must have been under the influence of this Jewish drug.

That night he took a bread-knife from the kitchen. He dressed in his Luftwaffe uniform, leaving the tunic open. He stabbed himself in the chest. He thought that he had aimed for the heart but when they came for him they found the wound to be quite shallow and wide of the mark.

The Russians had swept through Poland and were now inside Germany. The British and the Americans were ready to cross the Rhine. And the bombing of the cities became ever more intense: now Dresden had been incinerated in a firestorm. The air war he had dreaded. He had flown for peace, to end this battle in the heavens.

Newspapers carried haunting photographs, terrible accounts of atrocities as the advancing Allies entered the concentration camps. Fearful apparitions of a horror he refused to face. This was the dementia of history, he decided. He would wilfully forget such things. So instead he concentrated on composing an account of his own captivity, noting that for four years he had been guarded by people with a mental condition caused by a secret chemical hitherto unknown to the world.

When out walking in the grounds he found a small key, for a desk drawer or a cabinet perhaps. He kept it as a talisman. Berlin was besieged; he was surrounded on all sides now. He retreated further within.

He developed a ritual: dropping the key on a book or his pile of papers and watching where it landed. Divination of some obscure miracle that might save him. He had to divert his mind from the constant reports of an impending German surrender. He must not give in. He continued to write his statement.

He was adamant that he must not allow them to see his true grief and despair. He said nothing when he heard that Hitler had killed himself. The man he had loved with such mystical fervour. He dropped the little key and watched where it landed.

He was flown back to Germany to stand trial. His plane circled the ruins of Nuremberg; parts of the city were a flattened moonscape but the Palace of Justice was still standing. They took him there and put him in a small stone cell. The Americans had their own ideas about how to provoke his memory. They showed him ancient newsreels and documentaries of all the old party rallies. Of course he didn’t recognise himself. He had been a different man then. Then they brought in people he had known. Goering hated being forgotten: such an affront to his monstrous ego.

‘Listen, Hess,’ he boomed indignantly. ‘I was the Supreme Commander of the Luftwaffe and you flew to England in one of my planes! Don’t you remember? First I was a field marshal and later a Reichsmarchall, don’t you remember?’

Hess looked at him blankly.

‘No.’

The old bully looked so crestfallen, it was hard not to laugh. But when they confronted him with Professor Haushofer he had to restrain all his emotions.

‘Rudolf, don’t you recognise me any more?’ his old teacher pleaded.

Hess maintained his performance of incomprehension with a cold precision even as his friend and mentor gave Hess news of his wife and son.

‘I can only assure you that the doctors tell me my memory will come back and then I will recognise you again. I am terribly sorry.’

‘Your son is very well,’ Haushofer whispered. ‘I saw him. He is a fine boy, and I said goodbye to him under the oak, the one that bears your name, the one you chose at Hartschimmelhof, where you were so many times.’

Hess shook his head. The professor’s eyes brimmed with tears.

‘Don’t you remember Albrecht, who served you so faithfully? My eldest son. He is dead now.’

‘It doesn’t mean anything to me.’

It was even harder with Hildegard Fath, his former secretary. She was so loyal, so innocent. She had a photograph of his son. She burst into tears when he turned his face away.

An American psychologist tried the Rorschach Technique, a projective test using ten inkblot cards where the subject is encouraged to interpret a series of ambiguous designs and then assessed in terms of personality and emotional functioning.

‘This one.’ Hess pointed at the second card. ‘I see a monster, yes, a human monster. There’s its mouth and this is its eyes, these red parts. It could be a negro with a big mouth, red lips and red eyes.’

‘Two men are talking about a crime,’ he deduced from another image. ‘Blood is on their minds.’

The Nuremberg Trials had already begun and there was still argument among the prosecutors as to whether Hess was fit to stand. Four commissions of international experts had submitted reports: psychology professors from Moscow, neurologists from London, psychoanalysts from Paris, neuro-psychiatrists from Chicago. Evidence was given of hysterical amnesia, paranoid delusions, schizoid personality with obsessive components, culturally conditioned paranoia, auto-suggestion, pseudo-dementia, neurotic manifestations, habitual behaviour patterns, psychopathic tendencies, psychotic episodes. There was no agreement over the status of his sanity but a consensus was forming, despite strong Soviet objections, that his competence was impaired, his amnesia manifest enough that he would neither be able to follow proceedings nor challenge witnesses. The court was on the verge of deciding that he would be tried
in absentia
.

It was then that he made his spectacular announcement. Once more conjuring a miraculous anamnesis, this time on a very public stage. To the astonished court he ceremonially relinquished his forgetfulness and admitted his deception. His performance was a triumph of absurdity. And it presented a baffling paradox: if he was indeed sound of mind why had he insisted that he remain on trial at the very point that he might have been acquitted? This declaration of sanity was clearly the action of a madman. A wilful lunatic. But the pure fool had fooled the world.

Throughout the rest of the hearings he refused to concentrate. He would read a novel or stare off into space, rock backwards and forwards, double up in feigned stomach cramps. He deliberately ignored the entire tribunal, denied it his consciousness or memory. He was aloof, indifferent, utterly detached from reality. This was his own judgement on the court.

He did not testify in his own defence. Instead he prepared his final statement. He assured his fellow defendants that there was to be a great revelation, that what lay before them was an illusion, an apparition that might at any moment disappear. But when the time came for him to speak he found it hard to explain to the court the nature of the sinister forces that had caused so much bloodshed. He tried to make them see that these were show trials, just like political trials in other countries. The accused here had made false statements and incriminated themselves in astonishing ways because they had been put into an abnormal state of mind. This could explain the atrocities in the camps and elsewhere, and the actions of those who gave the orders. The whole world had been put into an abnormal state of mind. He did not name the culprits because he knew that they were in control here.

He concluded by saying that he was happy to have done his duty, to his people and as a loyal follower of the Führer. He regretted nothing.

‘No matter what other human beings do, some day I shall stand before the judgement of the Eternal. I shall answer to Him, and I know He will judge me innocent.’

He was found guilty of conspiracy and crimes against peace; not guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He dwelt within his theatre of oblivion to the last, neglecting to put his headphones on as they passed sentence, looking away as they passed their verdict. He expected Death.

They gave him Life.

What could that mean?

They hanged Frank, Frick, Jodl, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, von Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Sauckel, Seyss-Inquart and Streicher. Goering took poison on the eve of his execution. Hess learnt that Professor Haushofer and his wife had committed suicide. ‘No form of state or church funeral, no obituary, epitaph or identification on my grave,’ his note demanded, ‘I want to be forgotten and forgotten.’ His son Albrecht had been shot by the SS for his involvement with the German resistance. A collection of poems were found on his body. One called ‘The Father’ ended with the lines:

My father broke the seal

He did not see the rising breath of evil

He let the demon escape into the world.

What Hess thought of this no one knows. He kept himself busy. As he sat in his cell awaiting transfer to Spandau prison, he composed a lengthy document outlining his plans for the time he would be released and appointed as a new leader for Germany. He mourned the loss of his fellow prisoners, adding that their appalling treatment was made all the worse since he was not able to convince them that their captors were insane. He issued bulletins to be published in the press under his direction: specific directives concerning labour, food distribution and liaison with Germany’s occupying powers. If the Jews request to save themselves from the rage of the German people and ask to go into protective camps, he said, their wish should be fulfilled. His tailor was to make a new uniform with flared breeches and adjustable seams since he would probably have put on weight by the time he was released.

He concluded by warning the West that World War III was already being prepared:

The real instrument of power is in the hands of the Jew and the Bolshevist. It is proved by the fact that for years a Jew has been at the head of the research department of the United States Atomic Power Organisation. Is anyone going to believe that this Jew, hitherto completely unknown among scientists, has suddenly been put in this high position where all the secrets relating to the future war must be available? The atom bomb will be the main weapon of the Jewish-Bolshevist war leadership in spite of the fact that it is also in British and American hands.

The Soviet Union will probably use it first and be able to destroy everything in the West. They have the best possible excuse for doing so because they can say that the West used it first. The Anglo-Saxon countries will be the first to go under – I, Rudolf Hess, have warned you!

Forty years later, it is a summer afternoon in the ruins of Speer’s garden. Ready to fly once more. The black American warder circled as he approached the summerhouse. Hess turned and smiled, trying to hide his disdain. He had explained many times to superior officers that he found it demeaning to be guarded by negroes. Another example of how the United States had failed. A precocious child of a nation, spoilt and degenerate, riddled with racial integration, drugs and sexual licence. The space programme had once seemed their only hope of aspiring to higher things. Hess had written to his son about this, quoting Kant’s reply when asked what he considered the greatest miracle: ‘the starry heavens above us, the prickling conscience within us’. But here too the Americans were found wanting. They had got as far as they had only because of German technology. Von Braun had wanted to go further, to Mars. Instead they stayed safely in orbit, firing off unmanned probes into the void.

The atomic war he had predicted never came. They had been spared the great Day of Judgement, but only just. He remembered, during the Missile Crisis, Speer talking up some idea of West Berlin being swapped for Cuba to balance things out. Spandau was in the British sector, a tiny polarity surrounded by opposing forces. The Four Powers divided up their time. After 1966, Hess was their only prisoner.