Rudolf Hess: Why Hitler's Deputy Flew Alone to Scotland in 1941
- May 10, 2023
- 7 min read
On the evening of 10 May 1941, a Scottish ploughman named David McLean found a burning fighter plane in his field and a parachutist limping toward him. The man introduced himself as Captain Alfred Horn and asked to be taken to see the Duke of Hamilton. He was actually Rudolf Hess, Deputy Führer of Nazi Germany and the third most powerful man in the Third Reich, and he'd just flown himself over a thousand miles from Bavaria without telling Hitler he was going.
Hess believed he was about to broker peace between Britain and Germany single-handedly. Instead he triggered a diplomatic scandal, a furious Hitler, a nationwide crackdown on astrologers, and forty-six years in captivity that ended only with his death in Spandau Prison.
Quick answers
Why did Rudolf Hess fly to Scotland? He believed he could negotiate a peace deal between Britain and Germany through the Duke of Hamilton, without Hitler's knowledge or approval, days before Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
What happened to Rudolf Hess after he landed? He was held as a British prisoner of war for the rest of the war, tried at Nuremberg in 1946, sentenced to life imprisonment, and died in Spandau Prison in 1987.
A deputy losing his footing
Hess had been Hitler's closest early confidant, serving jail time alongside him after the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch and helping him write Mein Kampf from his cell. As Deputy Führer from 1933 onward he signed off on much of the legislation stripping German Jews of their rights, but by 1941 he'd been steadily sidelined as Hitler leaned on generals and diplomats to run an actual war. Hess wanted back in, and a spectacular solo peace mission looked like his way of doing it.
His plan hinged on Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, the Duke of Hamilton, a decorated RAF officer whom Hess's foreign policy adviser Albrecht Haushofer had identified as a sympathetic contact in Britain. Hess believed the two of them had actually met at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Hamilton always denied it. It was Haushofer, not Hamilton, who'd built the relevant relationship in Germany, and most historians now treat the claimed meeting as something Hess either misremembered or invented to give himself a foot in the door.
Britain wasn't entirely blindsided either. Haushofer had actually written to Hamilton back in September 1940 hinting at peace terms, and MI5 intercepted the letter, summoned Hamilton for questioning and briefly considered using him to draw the Germans out for intelligence purposes before deciding the lead wasn't worth pursuing. By the time Hess actually turned up eight months later, the name Haushofer had floated was already sitting in a British intelligence file.
The astrologer's calendar
Hess didn't pick 10 May at random. His astrological adviser, Ernst Schulte-Strathaus, had told him back in the autumn of 1940 that his horoscope pointed to a lucky mission somewhere in north-west Europe, and a Munich astrologer reconfirmed the reading that March. Hess had actually tried and failed to make the flight three times before, turning back each time because of bad weather. The fourth attempt, on a night with clear skies and a favourable moon position, was the one that stuck.
A parachute jump into a Scottish field
Hess piloted a specially modified Messerschmitt Bf 110 alone, taking off from Augsburg at 5:45pm and tracing a route up the Rhine before crossing the North Sea. He dropped low and zigzagged along the English coast for forty minutes waiting for darkness to fall, then flew on at rooftop height to stay under British radar. British Chain Home stations finally picked him up just before 10:10pm, and three Spitfires and a Defiant were scrambled to attack him, not escort him, which quietly rules out one of the more persistent conspiracy theories that Britain deliberately let him through unhindered. All four fighters missed him in the dark.
Running low on fuel near Glasgow, he bailed out at around 6,000 feet, close to Dungavel House, Hamilton's home, using a manoeuvre he'd never actually trained for: flipping the plane upside down and dropping out of the cockpit. He landed hard and hurt his ankle, and his abandoned plane crashed and burned nearby. McLean, the farmer who found him, later said Hess spoke English and asked to be taken to see the Duke by name, giving no hint of who he actually was.
Hess was taken first to a local Home Guard post and then to hospital, where a bemused Hamilton eventually came to see the mystery German officer. Only then did Hess reveal his real identity and lay out his peace terms: Germany would leave the British Empire alone in exchange for a free hand across continental Europe. Hamilton flew south the next day to report the whole encounter to Churchill in person. Churchill's own memoirs describe him watching a Marx Brothers film that night at a friend's country house, and when told the news he simply growled, "Hess or no Hess, I'm going to watch the Marx Brothers."
The Hamilton connection caused Hamilton himself real trouble. Once word got out that Hess had asked for him by name, rumours swirled in Parliament and the press that the Duke might have known about the flight in advance or even helped keep the skies clear for it. Hamilton had to defend himself directly in the House of Commons, and Hansard's official record from 22 May 1941 confirms what he'd said all along: he'd never actually met Hess, only possibly crossed paths with him at a public function during the 1936 Olympics. His name was formally cleared, though the suspicion dogged him for years afterward.
Hitler's fury
Hitler was livid when he found out, not least because the timing was catastrophic. Hess flew just ten days before Hitler's own deadline for launching the invasion of the Soviet Union, and a peace overture toward Britain undercut the entire strategic picture Hitler was trying to manage. Berlin's official response was to declare that Hess had suffered a mental breakdown and acted entirely alone, stripping him of every Nazi Party rank and title he held and secretly ordering him shot if he ever set foot in Germany again.
Hess's staff paid the price too. Several of his closest aides were arrested on suspicion of having known about the flight in advance, and some ended up in concentration camps despite having had no real involvement.
Nazi Germany turns on its own astrologers
The strangest consequence of the flight had nothing to do with diplomacy at all. Convinced that occult influence had somehow caused his deputy's defection, Hitler ordered a nationwide sweep against astrologers, occultists and fringe scientists across Germany that June. Historians call it Sonderaktion Hess, the Hess Special Action. Schulte-Strathaus himself was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo within days, and archives, bookshops and private libraries connected to astrology and the occult were raided and confiscated right across the country. A movement Hess's own circle had quietly relied on for years was effectively driven underground almost overnight.
Four years a prisoner
Britain held Hess as a prisoner of war for the rest of the conflict, moving him between secure locations under the alias Jonathan. He spent thirteen months at Mytchett Place near Aldershot, a bugged country house codenamed Camp Z, where he threw himself over a balcony in a failed suicide attempt in June 1941. From mid-1942 he was held at Maindiff Court near Abergavenny in Wales, where locals nicknamed him the Abergavenny Kaiser and where he was allowed enough freedom to paint and take walks in the surrounding countryside. He turned out to be a committed hypochondriac who travelled with 28 different medicines and grew increasingly convinced his captors were trying to poison him, at one point insisting on having food and wine samples independently tested. He was formally interrogated by Foreign Office official Ivone Kirkpatrick, who came away doubting how much of Hess's claimed amnesia was genuine and how much was theatre.
Maindiff Court later became the setting for the same conspiracy theory that trails Hess right through to his death in Spandau decades later. Former army surgeon Hugh Thomas, who examined Hess in the 1970s, claimed the man in British and later Spandau custody had none of the chest wounds Hess was known to have suffered in the First World War, and argued the real Hess had been replaced by a body double somewhere along the way. The theory has never gained real traction among historians, but the fact that it attaches itself to both his wartime imprisonment and his death at Spandau says something about how much mystery still clings to this story.
Nuremberg and Spandau
Hess was flown to Germany in 1945 to stand trial at Nuremberg alongside the surviving Nazi leadership. The tribunal acquitted him of war crimes and crimes against humanity but convicted him on the conspiracy and crimes against peace counts, largely for his role legitimising Hitler's rearmament and early wars of aggression. In his final address to the court he showed no remorse at all, telling the judges plainly that he regretted nothing and would do it all again. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to Spandau Prison in Berlin along with six other senior Nazis. He never left. As the other six were released or died, Hess became Spandau's sole prisoner for its final twenty-one years, dying there in 1987 in circumstances that are still argued over today.
Sources
The History Press: The Rudolf Hess Flight, 10 Conspiracies: https://thehistorypress.co.uk/article/the-rudolf-hess-flight-10-conspiracies/
British Heritage: One-Way Flight to Scotland: https://britishheritage.com/one-way-flight-to-scotland
Spartacus Educational: Duke of Hamilton, primary account of the Hess meeting: https://spartacus-educational.com/GERhamilton.htm
UK Parliament Hansard: Rudolf Hess, 22 May 1941 debate: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1941-05-22/debates/b1c55b20-0367-4fa9-a523-e3d26bf4de06/RudolfHess
Lammermoor: 10 May 1941, Rudolph Hess and the Duke of Hamilton, flight and interception timeline: https://lammermoor.org/2021/05/10/10-may-1941-rudolph-hess-and-the-duke-of-hamilton/
Liverpool John Moores University: 80 Years On, the Mysterious Flight of Rudolf Hess: https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/news/articles/2021/5/7/80-years-on-the-mysterious-flight-of-rudolf-hess
International Churchill Society: Curiouser and Curiouser: https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-155/curiouser-and-curiouser/
BBC News: Witness Recalls Nazi Rudolf Hess Landing in Scotland: https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-13333536
Secret Scotland: Rudolf Hess Flight, detention timeline: https://www.secretscotland.org.uk/index.php/Secrets/RudolfHessFlight
Monmouthshire Beacon: The Monmouthshire Kaiser? Rudolf Hess or an Elaborate Decoy?: https://www.monmouthshirebeacon.co.uk/news/the-monmouthshire-kaiser-rudolf-hess-or-an-elaborate-decoy-663847
The Sunday Post via PressReader: Into the Dark, How the Life, Death and Secrets of Hitler's Deputy Still Perplex: https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-sunday-post-newcastle/20210502/282183653912324
Institut fur Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene: The National Socialist Action Against Secret Teachings: https://igpp.de/en/research-project/the-national-socialist-action-against-secret-teachings-and-so-called-secret-sciences/
Jewish Virtual Library: Nuremberg Trial Judgement, Rudolf Hess: https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/nuremberg-trial-judgements-rudolf-hess
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For what happened to Hess after Nuremberg, including the four powers who guarded him and the strange plan for what would happen when he finally died, read our full story on Spandau Prison.
