Flight to Nowhere

Flight to Nowhere

A new book reopens Scotland’s most enduring X File: Rudolph Hess.

by Stephen McGinty
The Sunday Times, 11th April 1999

On May 10 1941, a lone Messerschmitt Bf110 took off from Augsburg airfield, 40 miles north of Munich. The pilot, a tall man in his late forties, wedged in a cramped cockpit and wrapped against the elements, flew northwest over Bonn towards the North Sea and Scotland.

Rudolf Hess had flown the coop on a bizarre mission to broker “peace” between Britain and Germany. Yet as the small Messerschmitt circled Northumberland in thick fog, London received the heaviest pounding of the Blitz, with dawn breaking over the ruins of the House of Commons.

In the dark Hess missed his target, Dungavel House, outside Glasgow, the country home of the Duke of Hamilton, whom he believed would orgamse an audience with the king and help plan peace terms. Instead Hess balled out over Eaglesham Moor, to land in a field near Floors farm, not far from Dungavel. A ploughman, David McLean, helped the injured man to his farmhouse, where he was offered tea.

Almost 60 years after a pair of German jackboots touched down for the first and only time on Scottish soil, the Rudolf Hess affair still has the power to inflame the public and historians. A new investigation into Hess, published last week, alleges that Churchill’s own secret services colluded in Hess’s arrival in Britain, while a Scottish hotel was branded anti-semitic and racist for organising a tour of Hess locations.

As Andrew Roberts, the second world war historian, says: “The Hess affair may not be the most important mystery of the second world war but it is the most enduring and most passionately argued.”

The Templar Lodge Hotel in Gullane, outside Edinburgh, has long been a mecca for disciples of the unexplained such as UFO devotees and crop circle groupies. But the recent controversy stems from its staging of an exhibition on “key characters” of the Scottish millennium that will place Hess in the same company as Robert the Bruce and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Despite the condemnation of the Glasgow Jewish Representative Council and anti-racist campaigners, the exhibition’s coordinator defends his decisions. “Hess remains a great mystery of the second world war and that is a legitimate interest,’’ says Richard Taylor. “Many people believe the truth is in Scotland.”

But John Harris, the co-author of Hess: The British Conspiracy, believes the truth lies in Cambridge with an elderly woman whom he thinks was an unwitting link in a chain that dragged Hess over the North Sea at the behest of the British secret service.

When James Douglas-Hamilton, now Lord Selkirk, the son of the Duke of Hamilton, published his book Motive for a Mission in 1971 he explained that the connection between his father and Hess lay with mutual friends, the Haushofers. Professor Karl Haushofer, the father of geopolitics, was Hess’s teacher and mentor, and his son Albrecht was Hess’s friend. They all shared a view that peace with Britain was desirable, if only so that the German army could focus on defeating Russia.

Haushofer wished to make contact with King George VI though the duke. But when Haushofer was unable to contact the duke, Hess. desperate to regain Hitler’s favour, flew off to secure the peace alone.

“I believe the Duke of Hamilton was wrongly tarred. He was an honourable man,” said Harris. He believes the bait was set by a nephew of Violet Roberts, the widow of a Cambridge professor and a friend of the Haushofers. It is known that Albrecht attempted to contact the duke through a post box number in Lisbon used by Roberts, and Harris believes her nephew, a member of the Political Warfare Executive, composed a series of letters to attract Hess.

“The Political Warfare Executive, based at Woburn, would do anything to buy time for Britain. People forget what a terrible state the country found itself in in 1941. Germany had roared across Europe and there was the serious threat of invasion. So what they did was lure Hess to Britain. They gave the illusion of wanting peace. The British held out an olive branch, but behind that was a sub-machinegun.”

The book’s central thesis - that the British government was aware of Hess’s plan - was given added support this year by the discovery in the Czech republic of the personal log-books of two Polish pilots, Sergeant Vaclav Bauman and Sergeant Leopold Srom, who said they were ordered not to fire on Hess’s Messerschniitt.

Yet that is but one of a number of mysteries surrounding the Hess affair. There are those who believe the “Hess” incarcerated in Spandau for 40 years was an imposter. Dr Peter Waddell, a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at Strathclyde University, has spent decades investigating the case and has concluded that Hess may have been kidnapped by the Special Operations Executive, interrogated in a secret location in the north of Scotland and executed.

The doppelganger theory was given weight by Dr Hugh Thomas, a consultant surgeon in the Royal Army Medical Corps, who was responsible for looking after Hess, or prisoner No 7 as he was known in Spandau. Hess had been shot through the left lung in the first world war, but Thomas found no scar tissue during examinations.

Today Robert Shaw, 78, a professor emeritus in technology at Strathclyde University, is one of the few men alive who was involved in Hess’s detention in Scotland. In 1941 Shaw was a young lieutenant in the Highland Light Infantry who cancelled a night’s dancing at the Glasgow Plaza to guard Hess at the Buchanan Castle Military Hospital. Just 21, he talked to Hess for three hours.

“Hess was articulate and polite,” says Shaw. “He explained that the war had started because the Poles had refused the Germans use of their deep-water port, and said that the atrocities we were beginning to hear about were not typical of the German people. Strangely I remember him trying to convince me that together, Germany and Britain should defeat Russia. I told him we would fight and win.”

Mound midnight, the Duke of Hamilton arrived with Ivone Kirkpatrick, head of BBC European section, who had been a first secretary at the British Embassy in Berlin, to identify Hess and question him in German.

Over breakfast the next morning Shaw asked Hamilton if he had met Hess before. Shaw said the duke confinned Hess’s story that they had met only once at the Munich Olympics in 1936. Yet Douglas-Hamilton denies his father had ever met Hess prior to his inexpected arrival.

Shaw is scathing about the conspiracy theories that surround the case. But until the official records are released and the British government's full role in the Hess affair is unveiled, speculation will continue. The reason is simple. As Shaw said: "The truth is still out there."

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