Hess Claim Shot Down

Hess Claim Shot Down

Report by Susie Kelly
East Kilbride News, 23rd June 1999

A UNIVERSITY lecturer from East Kilbride is writing an explosive book claiming top Nazi Rudolf Hess didn’t crash land near Eaglesham in 1941.

Dr Peter Waddell, from St Leonards, says he has uncovered startling evidence showing the man who died in Spandau prison, Berlin was in fact an imposter He claims Hess, supposedly captured on May 10 1941, was a double put up by British Intelligence while the real Hess was liquidated in the Highlands.

The official version of the famous wartime flight is that the Deputy Fuhrer took off from Augsburg, Germany on a peace mission to Scotland but came down at Floors Farm in Eaglesham. Dr Waddell (62), a senior engineering lecturer at Strathclyde University, is deemed one of Britain’s leading lights on Hess research.

Now the Loch Torridon resident may have fitted the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the World War Two mystery. Evidence shows, says the professor, that Hess was shot through the lung in the Great War and scarred for life on his chest, front and back.

“Yet at Buchanan Castle Military Hospital on May 13, the man from Eaglesham showed no scars whatsoever,” says Dr Waddell. “The real Hess had a large gap between his front teeth. The published 1941 dental plan of the man shows no sign of that gap,” he says. “The man in Spandau on his death in showed no body scars or internal scar tissue on X-ray. He could not possibly be Rudolf Hess!”

Dr Waddell has even examined a map, printed on silk, carried by “Hess” on the flight which came into the possession of the Home Guard. It was a standard issue for SOE agents. Now after years of research, Dr Waddell has concluded the real Hess was captured by Special Operations Executive in Scandinavia and interrogated in a house near Fort William.

“The real Hess was kidnapped by SOE in Sweden,” says the senior lecturer, “and smuggled back into Scotland. To prevent a German massacre of hostages, it was crucial to have the Germans believe Hess had gone mad, flown to Scotland, instead of a peace mission to Sweden with Samuel Hoare, our ambassador in Spain.”

The “doppelganger” or dummy was now trapped, says Dr Waddell.

The liquidation of Hess, says the author, is supported by a letter from Ambassador Archibald Clerk-Kerr to Stalin in November 1942 who told him: “Any enemy leaders caught before the end of the World War Two will be liquidated.”

Dr Waddell stepped up his pursuit of the truth after meeting Britain’s leading authorities on the 50th anniversary of the flight in 1991. He now counts Dr Hugh Thomas, the British military surgeon who examined “Hess” as among his closest friends.

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